Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Complicated lines of power

According to this analysis from The Economist, the power relationships within the political elite in China are at least as complicated as the organization of sub-national units of government in Russia.

There's a chart that accompanies this article, but I'm not sure it helps. If your students can explain it to you, you can be pretty sure they know their stuff.

Vertical meets horizontal: Who really holds the power in China?

IN THIS year of drama, intrigue and scandal at the highest levels, the opaque machinery of China’s political system has received unusual scrutiny. The outcome of intra-party manoeuvring among China’s ruling Communist Party officials was finally revealed in November, at the 18th Party Congress. Now, as Xi Jinping and other party leaders get their feet under their new desks, the focus turns to the reshuffling of senior government posts due in March.

Part of the Economist's chart

But even when that is done, there will still be plenty of mystery. China’s power grid is a tangle of interlocking entities, overlapping vertical and horizontal lines of authority, and complex interplay between government, party and military bureaucracies…

For foreigners, the first challenge is determining whether the officials they meet actually have the authority implied by their titles… Positions that foreigners expect to be powerful, such as foreign minister, defence minister and finance minister, are not even members of the Politburo, let alone its standing committee…

This is one consequence of all those jumbled horizontal and vertical lines. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) enjoys the same rank as China’s State Council, or cabinet, meaning the executive branch of the government can issue no orders to the PLA. Even the Ministry of Defence lacks command authority over China’s armed forces…

In China more power is held by “leading small groups”, informal bodies that report directly to party leaders, than by ministers, who control portfolios in most systems of government…

Internal affairs also have tangled webs of power. Central ministries rank equal to provincial governments. So do many large state-owned enterprises (SOEs), a fact which, according to a study by America’s Congressional Research Service, leads to vast regulatory difficulties. SOEs, it said, sometimes outrank party and state leaders in their locales, and so are not bound by their orders…

Jean-Pierre Cabestan of Hong Kong Baptist University says the same problem plagues sectors like oil, gas and heavy industry, where SOE leaders enjoy the rank of minister-level officials. Some, he says, also serve on the powerful party Central Committee. “These SOE leaders belong to the nomenklatura. They are aristocrats, or promoted through connections,” he says…