Quick questions on Leadership transitions and succession explained: H2 China Studies

Under Mao Zedong, succession was a source of chronic instability. Power was personal and unlimited, designated successors were purged or died in mysterious circumstances, and Mao's own death in 1976 was followed by an immediate power struggle and the arrest of the "Gang of Four." The lesson the post-Mao leadership drew was that the absence of rules around tenure and succession had made the regime dangerously fragile and prone to convulsions. Institutionalising succession became a central project of the reform era.

From 1978 the Party built a set of norms to constrain any single leader. Deng Xiaoping promoted collective leadership exercised through the Politburo Standing Committee, so that no individual could again dominate as Mao had. The leadership introduced retirement ages for senior officials and, in 1982, a two-term limit on the state presidency was written into the state constitution. Over time an informal but powerful norm emerged that the top leader would serve two five-year terms and then hand over.

The system's success was demonstrated by a sequence of relatively orderly transitions. Deng arranged the rise of Jiang Zemin, and the handover from Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao in 2002 to 2003, of the Party general secretaryship, the state presidency, and eventually the chairmanship of the Central Military Commission, was the first genuinely routine, peaceful, rule-based succession in the history of the People's Republic. The further handover from Hu Jintao to Xi Jinping in 2012 to 2013 confirmed the pattern. Political scientists treated these transitions as the strongest single piece of evidence for "authoritarian resilience": a one-party state that had learned to renew its leadership without crisis.

Under Xi Jinping, several of these norms have been weakened. Power has been re-concentrated in the top leader: Xi was designated the "core" of the leadership, and "Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era" was written into the Party constitution in 2017, an ideological status no living leader had held since Mao. Most significantly, in 2018 the National People's Congress amended the state constitution to remove the two-term limit on the state presidency, the single clearest institutional constraint on indefinite tenure. The absence of a clearly designated successor in the conventional pattern compounded the change, reopening the question the reforms had been designed to settle.

Identify two institutional devices the Party used to regularise succession after Mao. [4 marks]

Explain why the orderly handovers of the 1990s and 2000s were seen as evidence of authoritarian resilience. [12 marks]

"The personalisation of power under Xi Jinping has undone the political reforms of the post-Mao era." How far do you agree? [20 marks]