The Communist Party-Dominated Governance Model of China: Legitimacy, Accountability, and Meritocracy

As the single ruling party, the Communist Party plays an essential role in public administration and policy making in China. Under general secretary Xi Jinping’s program of “modernizing the governance system and governing capability” of the party since November 2013, administrative power is migrating from the government to the party. The party bureaucracy is interlaced with the state bureaucracy to produce a rare model of governance, which in turn has created many conceptual and theoretical issues for the study of good governance. This article analyzes China’s party-dominated governance model. Key issues of legitimacy, accountability, and meritocracy are discussed in an effort to delineate the advantages and problems of this model, analyze how it helps to shape the Chinese polity, and shed some light on good governance in general.