Peter Sandby-Thomas, Legitimating the Chinese Communist Party since Tiananmen: A Critical Analysis of the Stability Discourse

摘要

China's obsession with "stability maintenance" (weiwen) is witnessed in its rapidly increasing budget allocation to internal security in recent years. Vast institutions for maintaining stability, such as the Ministry of State Security, People's Armed Police, public security bureaus, and urban administrative and law enforcement agencies (chengguan), are being constructed or expanded. However, as Gramsci would have put it, securing "cultural hegemony" in a society is more durable than the use of sheer force. In this book, Peter Sanby-Thomas argues that economic performance and nationalism, the two commonly identified sources of legitimacy for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), are inadequate, and suggests an additional ideational source of legitimacy; namely, the use of stability discourse. Drawing from key editorials and commentaries in the People's Daily, Sandby-Thomas examines how the official stability discourse responded to the three large-scale demonstrations in the past 20 years-the Tiananmen protests of 1989, the Falungong protests of 1999, and the "anti-Japan" demonstrations in 2005. In his research, Sandby-Thomas engages in what is called the "discourse-historical approach" of critical discourse analysis, in which he undertakes intensive analysis of selected texts with appropriate analysis of the context of the texts as well.