Chapter 7 concludes by summarizing what a leadership approach contributes to the analysis of China’s politics and economy. It introduces the concept of the “intra-organizational politics of reform”: the daily dynamics of cooperation and conflict between leaders and their subordinates inside public-sector organizations. While elite politics and bargaining among different parts and levels of the Chinese bureaucracy have received much attention, the internal world of public-sector organizations is also a crucial arena for reform politics. Such intra-organizational politics both constitute the everyday substance of reform and shape its ultimate course. Next, the chapter discusses the increasingly global context and effects of leadership in Chinese SOEs. It explains why leadership continues to matter despite the ongoing centralization of political authority under Xi Jinping. Finally, it outlines several directions for future research on leadership in China’s public sector during the Xi era.

This chapter examines major events in US–China–North Korea triangular relations before and during the Trump years and considers Trump’s legacy and the outlook for the Biden administration. It concludes that the US under Trump failed to decouple US–China relations from US–North Korea relations in its policymaking and considers US–China relations on its own terms.

This chapter first retraces the origins and evolution of the community of shared future for mankind (CSFM) terminology up to its incorporation in the preamble to the Chinese Constitution, while highlighting its centrality in XI Jinping’s ‘Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era’. The chapter then examines the main tenets of the CSFM, which is portrayed as a symbol of China’s commitment to fostering a ‘new development paradigm and pursuing mutual benefit and win–win cooperation’ on a global scale, on the basis of XI Jinping’s writings. In doing this, it pays particular attention to how the CSFM builds on some of the fundamental principles of international law and how it is furthermore being fleshed out through various international legal initiatives. To better illustrate this analysis, the chapter conceptually analyzes the nine core elements of the CSFM with the visual aid of the metaphoric architectural form of a ‘paifang’. The chapter concludes by pointing to some factors weighing in favour of China’s further deepening its legalist approach to international relations as the most fitting companion to its grand strategy of ‘peaceful/development rise’.

This chapter probes the politics of pro-regime propaganda. Using a series of statistical techniques, we show that propaganda apparatuses in constrained autocracies cover the regime much like Fox News covers Republicans. Where autocrats are totally unconstrained, pro-regime propaganda is roughly four times more positive than Fox News is pro-Republican. To rule out the possibility of reverse causality and omitted variable bias, we focus on two countries for which our data extend back decades: Gabon and China. When the Berlin Wall fell and the Third Wave of Democracy forced President Omar Bongo to concede democratic reforms, his propaganda strategy changed as our theory predicts. We observe no such change in China, where the Third Wave of Democracy occasioned no such reforms. Chinese propaganda, we show, is driven by politics, not socio-economic change. With Xi Jinping poised to rule indefinitely, CCP propaganda is now more effusive than at any point since the Cultural Revolution. Using list experiments to mitigate preference falsification, we confirm that Chinese citizens view CCP pro-regime propaganda as threatening, not persuasive.

Pacific Asia, comprised of Northeast Asia, Greater China, and Southeast Asia, has surpassed the combined production of the United States and Europe, and its intraregional economic cohesiveness exceeds that of either the EU or North America. Pacific Asia has emerged gradually and without major conflict, but it should be taken seriously as a region. China is primarily a regional power, but in a prosperous region deeply interconnected to the rest of the world. The United States tends to view China as a lone global competitor, but its global presence and strength rest on its centrality to Pacific Asia. Understanding China in its region is the first task of this book, followed by the challenge of rethinking the global order in terms of a multinodal matrix rather than a bipolar competition of great powers. This requires background on the evolution of the Pacific Asian configuration, including China’s premodern centrality as well as the splintering of the region by European colonialism. Rethinking is aided by commentaries from four of Asia’s leading thinkers about international relationships.

Scientists had a distinctive part to play in the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign relations prior to it coming to power as well as during the early decades of the People’s Republic. The Conclusion considers the significance of this sustained party and party-state interest in scientists’ international activities for subsequent developments from the 1970s through China’s rise as a science and technology power by the early twenty-first century. These relations did not just spring out of nowhere, fully formed, and ready to go with the onset of rapprochement. Nor were they simply a product of long-term Americanisation. Consequently, the Conclusion explores notable areas of continuity and others of revived relevance when it comes to the party-state and the spectrum of international activities undertaken by scientists.

The chapter introduces strategic opportunity as the analytical approach guiding the book. China’s strategic opportunity is defined by the national goals and ambitions as set by the Chinese leadership, the opportunities and risks presented in the international environment, and the policy instruments and resources at the nation’s disposal. The chapter first shows how the concept is anchored in the reformist Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s assessment that peace and development were the predominant trends in the world. It then explains why the concept provides an appropriate and innovative approach to the study of Chinese foreign policy. Finally, the chapter investigates how Chinese leadership under Xi Jinping has launched a major-power diplomacy seeking to effectively deploy its newfound resources to reshape its international environment. It also lays out the salient causal beliefs and policy patterns behind the assertive Chinese foreign policy and concludes with a summary of the contents of the book.

This chapter follows on from the previous one, evaluating the Chinese Communist Party's recent attempts to transition toward an ecocivilization and to address China's ecological and public health crisis through a new approach toward balanced economic growth. The chapter finds that while the intentions and accompanying legal reforms are admirable, implementation will likely fail due to continuing misalignment between official/corporate incentives (especially at the local level) and central policies, compounded by the fragmented political structure and subversive elements within the corporate-political system that we identified in Chapters 4–7. The chapter also critically analyzes the recent introduction of public interest environmental lawsuits brought by procurators, which, while filling a major gap in legal enforcement against polluters, too often appear to result in opaque settlements with local governments rather than strong penalties against offenders.

Despite the consolidation of Communist power and the encouragement of President Xi Jinping’s cult of personality, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has also surprisingly moved to expand judicial autonomy during Xi’s term in office. This chapter discusses that the years leading up to sweeping reforms to enhance the autonomy of China’s judges, local promotion systems for mid-ranking judges in some case study localities featured enhanced transparency, competition, and the routinization of judicial promotion procedures that departed from previous systems of direct nomination and appointment by local Party leaders. Based on nearly two years of in-country fieldwork, I present the broad contours that the expansion of the legal profession pressured judicial leadership to enact these and similar changes, a theory and approach that both challenges and contributes to the extant literature on comparative court politics and Chinese judicial politics.

Although much of this book concerns political dynamics in the Mao Era, the tumults of the Cultural Revolution and the coalition rule that resulted from late-Mao politics indirectly led to an important political outcome by the 2010s, the survival of Xi Jinping as one of the few princelings among political leaders on the civilian side of the CCP. This created one of the preconditions for Xi to dominate the party soon after taking office as the head of the party in late 2012 – the relative absence of competition and oversight from other highly networked princelings. In the 1980s, two forces drove the selection of future leaders in the party. First, founding leaders such as Chen Yun and Deng Xiaoping had a genuine desire to promote a new generation of well-educated, loyal potential successors as their health began to fail them. Second, as the rest of the book has argued, the top leadership and even mid-level officials at the ministerial level did not want serious competitors to their power bases, and each pursued a coalition of the weak strategy within his own jurisdiction. Thus, besides a few senior veterans who had placed their children on accelerated paths for promotion, the vast majority of revolutionary veterans resisted the promotion of princelings due to their Red Guard activism during the Cultural Revolution and to fear of interference by well-networked princelings.

Authoritarian regimes must grapple with a fundamental source of instability that a significant redistribution of power, often unseen or only partially observed, can radically alter the incentives of regime insiders and overturn initially stable equilibria (Acemoglu et al. 2008). Although institutional features such as authoritarian legislatures and a ruling party can alleviate the incentives to usurp the incumbent leader to some extent, especially among lower-level officials (Gandhi 2008; Svolik 2012), they cannot fundamentally remove the incentives to grab power forcefully in the top echelon of these regimes. For one, one-party states by design entrust enormous power in the hands of the top few officials or even in the hands of one person. For ambitious officials just one layer below the very top facing a low probability of ordinary promotion, the reward for achieving an extra step upward can be enormous and can justify a risky gamble, especially if an external shock leads to a significant redistribution of power. Even for those who are already in the top echelon of the ruling party, a gamble to break the existing power-sharing equilibrium can reap enormous rewards as the power and resources of authoritarian colleagues are consolidated into one’s hands. Knowing the dangers of these possibilities, authoritarian leaders also have the incentives to preempt potentially threatening colleagues by removing them from power with coercive measures. In the absence of credible constitutional frameworks or electoral pressure to stop the actions of the top leadership, the stable façade of authoritarian politics can quickly descend into coups, purges, and assassinations.

Chapter 6 presents a case study of Xi Jinping’s wide-ranging anti-corruption campaign. By all accounts, corruption continued to grow in China throughout the 1990s and 2000s and became among the public’s largest governance concerns. Xi and other party leaders believed that the combination under the Hu Jintao administration of policy failings like the spread of corruption, risky political liberalization, and general party weakness was precipitating a crisis in the CCP’s ability to govern. Since 2012, Xi has pursued anti-corruption campaign as part of his broader mission to restore party discipline and reassert party leadership over China’s state and society. I argue that his administration’s campaign, though not yet finished, has already been successful in curbing corruption. Furthermore, corruption was curbed under Xi using decidedly authoritarian methods. Benefiting Xi was the fact that he has faced far fewer constraints on his leadership than Hu Jintao or Jiang Zemin did early in their administrations. The larger political implication of my findings in this chapter is that Xi is succeeding in strengthening CCP organization and discipline, which likely helps prolong one-party rule.