Patterns of Elite Strife and Succession in Chinese Politics

Elite strife is the Achilles’ heel of the Chinese political system, the event most apt to inspire elite-mass cleavages and other crises threatening the stability of the regime-nay, its very existence. All the major crises to have shaken the regime seem to have been instigated by or coincided with bouts of relatively severe elite conflict. Yet at the same time such strife offers one of the few opportunities for political innovations taking a fundamental departure from an elite consensus which otherwise tends to rigidify. Thus we find that many of the classics of the Chinese variant of Marxism-Leninism, from Mao's “On Contradiction” to Liu Shaoqi's “On Inner-Party Struggle,” display ambivalence, on the one hand lauding the self-validating, revitalizing functions of “struggle,” while at the same time warning that it must be handled “correctly.”