Cosmos, Empire, and Changing Technologies of CCP Rule
* Article: Regimes of Resonance: Cosmos, Empire, and Changing Technologies of CCP Rule. By Vivienne Shue.
URL = https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00977004211068055
Description
"This analysis aims to place certain key elements of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule observed under Xi Jinping today into longer and fuller historical perspective.
“Ideology” and “organization” are each indisputably indispensable components of how, and how well, the CCP system functions.
This article, however, will look primarily at another essential component of contemporary political systems, their performance and legitimation: the symbolic, ritual, and aesthetic components of governing, which also count for much in the lived experiences, perceptions, and memories of those being governed.
..
It is important to be clear from the start, however, that the implication meant to be drawn from this tracing to ancient origins is emphatically not that an imagined Chinese cultural/philosophical continuity has somehow counted for more than change; far less that nothing important about the arts of governance in China has been seriously altered since the Han dynasty! On the contrary, over now a century of CCP history, everything in China—political ideas, exigencies, opportunities, technologies—has been morphing more or less continually. The working assumption informing this analysis is, instead, that precisely in response to all the flux and flow perpetually encountered in the larger field of (global and domestic) forces, party leaders have deemed themselves required to be prepared, continually, to rethink their own earlier imagined strategies, patterns, and designs; recalibrate those tools of space/time ordering they held in hand; and revise their political-legitimation messaging if they are to steady the shifting balance of social energies, and so, persist in power. But, to prepare the ground for this reflection on party strategies for projecting authority, power, and legitimacy over the length and breadth of an ever-changing twentieth-to-twenty-first-century China we must first take a long look back, to some very early “beginnings.”