of the crucial minority indicates Xi’s distinctive thoughts on cadre management. In particular, Xi has pushed to hold them directly accountable in policy making, coordination and supervision for policy implementation and has literally asked them personally to perform their duties in these key linkages of policy formation (Xinhua 2017b). Corruption and notorious work styles are the two major concerns that have long existed in China’s state and party bureaucracy and have been the major sources of people’s growing discontent and negative comments on the Chinese government in recent decades. Xi has targeted these two problems to show his determination for stricter party discipline. Xi introduced the well-known Eight-point Regulation of the CPC Central Committee after he came to power and has vigorously pushed its enforcement throughout the whole party system to cut formalism, bureaucracy, hedonism and extravagance and other forms of unwelcome modus operandi to maintain close ties with the masses. Starting from the senior leaders and officials in the Politburo, Xi’s top-down, aggressive campaign to battle against the CPC’s abhorrent manner of working has lasted for years and seemingly improved the performance of the cadres as a whole. An enduring anti-corruption campaign constitutes another significant aspect of Xi’s endeavour to strengthen party discipline and plays the role of “killing two birds with one stone.” Xi’s resolute and ruthless anticorruption measures serve to clean up the party bureaucracy to ease the widespread resentment in Chinese society over the rampant corruption, as well as carrying out a great purge of Xi’s main opponents to consolidate his power in the party. In summary, Xi’s top-level design emphasizes the nature of holism in his grand plan for promoting economic, political, cultural, social and ecological progress and implies his ambition for comprehensive control of every aspect of the state and the society. The core parts of the toplevel design lie in comprehensively deepening reform and comprehensively strengthening party self-discipline. Economic system reform, with its central task of economic structural reform, is the priority of the comprehensive reform, while strengthening party self-discipline acts as the trusty resource he relies on heavily to guarantee the implementation of this strategy. The other goals are simply “new bottles that contain the old wine,” which function as ornaments. For instance, the
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CIGI Papers No. 242 — May 2020 • Alex He
goal of comprehensively advancing the law-based governance of China was criticized as being clichéd because of the inevitable conflict between lawbased governance and the principle of the party’s leading role in every aspect of Chinese society. Following his idea of top-level design, it seemed that President Xi had resorted to both institutional changes in governance and an unparalleled emphasis on the party’s discipline to try to obtain full authority in policy making and greater control over policy implementation. In the next three sections, the paper will discuss Xi’s efforts to forge a model of ruling in which powerful central leading groups act as his trusted party agencies to make decisions and supervise the policy implementation, his endeavours to re-establish the party’s solid leadership over everything, as well as his struggle to strike a balance between the goals of maintaining stability and seeking sustainable economic growth.
Institutional Changes for Top-level Design: The Strengthened Roles of Central Leading Groups The strengthened roles of leading groups5 constitutes one of the most distinguishing characteristics of Xi’s style of governing China. Since the 1980s, the Politburo and its standing committee (the PBSC) have been the top decisionmaking bodies under China’s party-state dualgovernance structure. The State Council has been the highest administrative agency managing economic and other affairs on a daily basis, while a few leading groups coordinated between the party and the state on financial, economic and foreign affairs. But since 2013, Xi has notably strengthened the role of leading groups at the expense of both the PBSC and the State Council (He 2018), which indicated a significant institutional change that would reshuffle the policy-making and enforcement system in China. 5
Xi did not initiate the model of leading groups ruling. Chairman Mao created leading groups to regain the authority over policy making in the 1950s and the 1960s. The Central Leading Group for Cultural Revolution in the 1960s once replaced the Politburo as the paramount policy-making organ.
