Striking the Balance: "Checks and Balances" in the Post-1978 Chinese System
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- For centuries, political theorists have wrestled with the question of how to strike the right balance between granting political leaders authority sufficient to accomplish the functions of government and giving them too much power and thus the capacity to act as unconstrained dictators. This thesis looks at the ways the question was perceived by the American constitutional framers during the Philadelphia Convention in the late 1780s and how they conceived of possible solutions to managing the problem for ideas and illustrations concerning the creation of a viable executive branch. It aims to explore the structural mechanisms that function as the “checks and balances” in the post-Mao Chinese system. Analyzing the writings and statements of Chinese officials, drawn from published Party documents and the scholarly literature, this thesis argues that the political devices implemented by the Chinese leaders in the reform era include the following mechanisms: the system of collective leadership plus division of policy labor with fixed individual responsibilities, institutional norms and disciplinary regulations, and procedures for regulating leadership retirement. The findings of this thesis indicate that attempts to tackle this issue in question in different countries evince a degree of similarity in spite of their different polities. It sheds light on the reason why the United States has relied heavily on structures and divisions of power to constrain the authority of the chief executive while China has focused much more on internal norms and disciplinary rules to regulate the top leader’s behavior. This paper also offers a limited outlook on the expectations of the future development of the Chinese system, which shows how the distribution of power within the top leadership level will evolve based on the political situation at hand.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | May 19, 2021 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Kang, Yingyue | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary advisor | Fingar, Thomas | |
| Degree granting institution | Stanford University, Stanford Global Studies, Center for East Asian Studies |
Subjects
| Subject | Stanford Global Studies |
|---|---|
| Subject | East Asian Studies |
| Subject | Leadership |
| Subject | Politics |
| Subject | Political System |
| Subject | China |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- Use and reproduction
- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Kang, Yingyue. (2021). Striking the Balance: "Checks and Balances" in the Post-1978 Chinese System. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/mr427tz7453
Collection
Stanford Center for East Asian Studies Thesis Collection
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- Contact
- ykang314@stanford.edu
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