Chinese Law & Politics

 Originally published on March 31, 2022, China Dialogues Blog, LSE IDEAS Speculation about Xi Jinping’s succession thickens as we approach the 20 th National Party Congress this autumn, where a leadership reshuffle is scheduled to take place. Before we can proceed to predict its possible outcomes with any degree of confidence, there are two a priori assumptions that have distracted current discussions and need to be first re-examined. One such issue concerns the term limit of the General Party Secretary (GPS) of the Chinese Communist Party (the Party), and the other concerns the normative quality of the so-called “succession norms” developed under Deng Xiaoping. The myth of term limit As soon as taking the GPS position as the head of the Party, Xi Jinping executed a number of political manoeuvres that dazzled China observers around the world. Among all his political moves, the one that is most shocking and remains a key talking point to this very day is the lifting o...

Written on 1 November 2021 . Posted in Article , Op-eds .  Originally published in Made in China Journal, Issue 2, 2021   Author: Ling Li Earlier this year, two veteran analysts of Chinese politics, Richard McGregor and Jude Blanchette (2021), published a comprehensive report, laying out four possible scenarios for the next leadership succession in China’s new era. In two of these scenarios, Xi Jinping is out of the picture as the result of either a coup or ‘unexpected death or incapacitation’. In the other two, he stays in power either by extending his tenure as the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to a third term or by retiring from that office but continuing to rule behind the scenes. Below I outline a third path Xi could take to stay in power: reactivating the office of the Chairman of the Party Central Committee (hereinafter Party Ch...

Moral Administration and Disciplines - From empires to the party-states May 20 Berlin 16:00 London 14:00 New York 10:00 Language: 中文 and English Open room  Topics: Why were Confucian texts a key ingredient in political communication in Ming court? Why is historiography a necessary conduit for power struggles in the high court of the 17th century as well as the 20th? Is it possible to conduct meaningful comparisons of China's disciplinary regimes at different times of history? Speakers: Patricia THORNTON (University of Oxford) Ying ZHANG (The Ohio State University) Ling LI (University of Vienna) Moderator: Sida LIU ((Toronto University) Discussants: Juan WANG (McGill University) Grace MOU (University of London) Literature under discussion: Disciplining the State: Virtue, Violence and State-making in Modern China  (Harvard, 2007) Confucian Image Politics: Masculine Morality in Seventeenth-Century China (University of Washington Press, 2016) The ‘Organisational Weapon’ of...

           

 First published in Made in China Journal Since coming to power, former US President Donald Trump has attracted and maintained a remarkable following among the Chinese diaspora in and outside the United States. These Trump followers come from different backgrounds and their support has a variety of motivations, which is nothing unusual. What is out of the ordinary, though, is the popularity of Trump among one particular group: the so-called Chinese liberal/prodemocracy intellectuals, dissidents, and activists (hereinafter ‘Clidas’). Members of this cohort include some of the most celebrated Chinese liberal academics and political thinkers, political activists, and human-rights lawyers. The embrace of Trumpism by the Clidas is most unusual and noteworthy because of the glaring incongruity between the illiberal policies and ideology that Trump represents and the liberal ideals these individuals have advocated through their intellectual output and/or political activism....