The 1988–89 Nanjing Anti-African protests, exposing a high degree of student discontent towards the Chinese political system four months before the spring 1989 pro-democracy movement, exhibited a complex interaction between Chinese nationalism and efforts to promote political reforms. Nanjing students fused together racist strains in Chinese culture, their perception of themselves as the embodiment of Chinese patriotism and their support for legal and democratic political reforms as they took to the streets to protest against the government's inadequate handling of the alleged murder of a Chinese by an African student.

Expressions of anti-black sentiment by Chinese students have caught the world's attention periodically since the end of the 1970s. Demonstrations against African students in Nanjing and other cities between late 1988 and early 1989 received wide press coverage. Because the African population in China is small and transient, some observers saw these events as a manifestation of a vestigial xenophobia, not as part of a developing trend of thought within a key segment of Chinese society. Placed next to the brutal ethnic conflicts that plague much of the world, the episodic, non-lethal incidents in China seemed evanescent, with only fleeting implications for China's foreign policy.

This article examines the organizational evolution of Communist Party control over lawmaking processes and institutions in post-Mao China. In particular, it charts the erosion and decentralization of Party control which has accompanied the rise of lawmaking since 1978. The unity of Party control over lawmaking has frayed and dissipated dramatically in these years, as more and more important policy issues are resolved outside the arena of the Party's central decision-making organs (such as the Politburo, the Secretariat, and so on). This decentralization has been matched by a corresponding increase in the institutional power, autonomy and assertiveness of the government (executive) lawmaking offices, and other more open policy-making arenas, most notably the National People's Congress, but also including the Supreme People's Court.

In the aftermath of their suppression of the democracy movement in June 1989, China's leaders concluded that the Chinese Communist Party's leadership selection system was in serious trouble. The actions of intellectuals and the media during the May-June crisis, measures proposed by former Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang for cadre reform and the results of an earlier decision to decentralize the nomenklatura convinced authorities in Beijing that Party control of leadership selection had decayed and that decentralization of personnel decisions had gone too far. During the next few years China's post-4 June leadership took steps to rectify these problems. One of these was to revise the central Party's nomenklatura, which they subsequently re-issued in 1990.