Decentralized Authoritarianism in China: The Communist Party's Control of Local Elites in the Post-Mao Era

摘要

The dominant approach to the study of contemporary Chinese politics seems to be that the Chinese political system can best be understood from the perspective of authoritarianism. Important early works within this paradigm by Kenneth Lieberthal and Michel Oksenberg (Policy Making in China, 1988) and Kenneth Lieberthal and David Lampton (Bureaucracy, Politics, and Decision Making in Post-Mao China, 1992) stressed the fragmented nature of Chinese authoritarianism. Andrew Nathan coined the concept "resilient authoritarianism" in his article of that title (Journal of Democracy, Vol. 14, No. 1, 2003), stressing that not only was China an authoritarian political system, but it was also resilient and not about to wither away. In a forthcoming article in The China Quarterly I argue that the Chinese system is characterized by "integrated fragmentation.