Shaken Authority: China's Communist Party and the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake

摘要

This book's extensive analysis of how the ideology and discourse of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) determined the official decisions and responses to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake sends a message to China watchers of various denominations. More specifically, their current preoccupation with "performance legitimacy" (p. 60) and other political economic dimensions must take the CCP's political concepts, discourses, and vocabularies seriously, if not accurately, to analyse contemporary Chinese politics and society in terms of the CCP's legitimacy-generating mechanisms and sources. The author is a political scientist who crosses over between comparative politics and political theory to contend that the enduring ideology and discourse from the revolutionary leaders, such as Mao Zedong and Liu Shaoqi, still constitute the soul of the now ruling Party and the most fundamental criteria for its political legitimacy.