Join us to celebrate the launch of Factional-Ideological Conflicts in Chinese Politics by Olivia Cheung at a number of events across the UK during November.
📙 2nd November: 17-18:30 at Oxford China Centre. Register here
📘13th November: 17:00 at SOAS, University of London. Register here
📕 21st November: 13-14:00 at Muirhead Tower, Birmingham University. More information here.
📗22nd November: 16:30, online from the Scottish Centre for China Research. Register here.
Discussing her new book, Factional-ideological Conflicts in Chinese Politics: To the Left or to the Right?, Dr Olivia Cheung argues that factional model-making plays a unique and important role in reinforcing collective leadership at the upper party echelons. It also ensures the deliberation of opposite viewpoints in the policy process. Furthermore, it provides candid and credible political information otherwise short in supply. Xi’s mutation of factional model-making to party model-making, as seen in Zhejiang, has reinvigorated democratic centralism, possibly at the cost of longer-term regime resilience.
This book reconstructs the factional-ideological conflicts surrounding socialist transformation and political reform in China that were played out through ‘factional model-making’, a norm-bound mechanism for elites of the Chinese Communist Party to contest the party line publicly. Dazhai, Anhui, Nanjie, Shekou, Shenzhen, Guangdong and Chongqing were cultivated into factional models by party elites before Xi Jinping came to power in 2012. Although factional model-making undermined party discipline, it often did not threaten regime security and even contributed to regime resilience through strengthening collective leadership and other means. This follows that the suppression of factional model-making under Xi might undermine longer-term regime resilience. However, Xi believes that regime security rests on his strongman rule, not any benefits that factional model-making may contribute. It is in this spirit that he grooms Zhejiang into a party model for his policy programme of common prosperity, which is designed to legitimize his vision of socialism.
Dr Olivia Cheung is Research Fellow of the China Institute at SOAS University of London. She obtained her DPhil from the University of Oxford where she was a Swire Scholar and a Rhodes Scholar. She previously taught at the University of Warwick, where she was Course Director for the MA in International Politics and East Asia. She is the co-author of The Political Thought of Xi Jinping (2024).
At each event there is the opportunity to pick up a discount code for 20% off the print book.
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