Translation Category: Governance
In this second installment of a three-part paper on the collapse of the Soviet Union, former Vice President of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Li Shenming highlights the role of the “fifth column”—forces that worked within the USSR and the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) to spread Western values and viewpoints. As a prognosis, Li argues that the CCP must prioritize ideological work, maintain absolute control over the military, and be vigilant of what he terms Western efforts to “infiltrate” China, including through cultural and economic exchange.
Zuo Fengrong, an expert in Soviet history, examines trends in Chinese scholarship on the USSR’s collapse across the past thirty years. Zuo argues that while this literature advanced over time with the availability of newly declassified archival sources, it has stagnated more recently. As a prognosis, Zuo encourages renewed attention to the failure of Soviet socialism and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s (CPSU) loss of power, in order to extract lessons for China.
The CCP Politburo holds “collective study sessions” on a semi-regular basis, in which an outside academic or government expert leads a discussion on a selected topic. Such sessions are important signals as to what issues the senior leadership finds important. The fourth study session of the 20th Central Committee Politburo was held on March 30, 2023 and was presided over by Xi Jinping. At this session, Xi Jinping and other Politburo members urged Party cadres to study and implement “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for the New Era” in all fields of China’s development.
Guo Shengkun, a former State Councilor who led the Ministry of Public Security, identifies steps he believes Beijing should take to ensure national security amidst an environment he characterizes as increasingly unpredictable, uncertain, and filled with security threats. Guo emphasizes the importance of upholding CCP control of national security work, enhancing China’s economic and technological strength and independence, and improving public security governance.
Two political scientists affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences argue that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) lost its governance legitimacy as a culture of privilege-seeking and corruption formed over time, distracting cadres from understanding and serving the needs of the Soviet people. Based on this assessment, the authors suggest the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continue to expand mass supervision and combat corruption through improvements to cadre education and discipline.
This piece summarizes a speech Xi Jinping gave on what he sees as the proper role of journalism when he was the Secretary of the Ningde Prefecture Party Committee in 1989. In the speech, Xi encourages Party organizations at all levels to strengthen their leadership over journalism, since the media can facilitate the Party and socialist cause by “publiciz[ing] achievements confidently” and serving a “supervision function” to expose corruption.
In this 1993 interview with Xi Jinping, then serving as Secretary of the Fuzhou Municipal Party Committee, he argues that a leader capable of leading China to modernization and prosperity should be “courageous and knowledgeable,” adhere to “firm beliefs,” be in touch with the “will of the masses,” and hold a “profound understanding of the…policies of the central and provincial party committees.”
This 2017 speech by Chen Quanguo, then-serving as the Xinjiang Party Secretary, was delivered to senior officials in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region just after the completion of the 19th Party Congress, and contains Chen’s distillation of the meeting’s key outcomes and messages.
This 2019 analysis by Zheng Yongnian, a highly influential political scientist, argues that China is at risk of falling into a “middle-income trap” domestically and a “Thucydides trap” in its relations with the United States. He maintains that, “once a cold war begins, security considerations will dominate the United States’ relationship with China, and the United States will have to abandon the Chinese market for the sake of security.”
This is translation of a section of a Q&A series explaining theories from Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, published in the People’s Daily. This section deals with the concept that political security is inseparable from national security, explaining that “political security is directly connected to the life and death of the Party and country”.