Parallel structure

Despite its size, the People’s Republic of China is organized along unitary rather than federal principles. Both the government and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP; Pinyin: Zhongguo Gongchan Dang; Wade-Giles romanization: Chung-kuo Kung-ch’an Tang), moreover, operate “from the top down,” arrogating to the “Center” all powers that are not explicitly delegated to lower levels. To run the country, the government and the CCP have established roughly parallel national bureaucracies extending from Beijing down to local levels. These bureaucracies are assisted by various “mass organizations”—e.g., trade unions, a youth league, women’s associations, and writers’ and other professional associations—that encompass key sectors of the population. These organizations, with their extremely large memberships, have generally served as transmission lines for communicating and uniformly implementing policies affecting their members. No voluntary associations are permitted to function that are wholly independent of CCP and government leadership.

The CCP and government bureaucracies themselves are organized along territorial and functional lines. The territorial organization is based on a number of administrative divisions, with both a CCP committee and a “people’s government” in charge of each. These territorial divisions include the national level in Beijing (the Center), 33 provincial-level units (4 directly administered cities, 5 autonomous regions, the Hong Kong and Macau special administrative regions, and 22 provinces, excluding Taiwan), some 330 prefectural bodies, more than 2,850 county-level entities, and numerous cities, towns, and townships. Some larger cities are themselves divided into urban wards and counties. This territorial basis of organization is intended to coordinate and lend coherence to the myriad policies from the Center that may affect any given locale.

The functionally based political organization is led on the government side by ministries and commissions under the State Council and on the CCP side by Central Committee departments. These central-level functional bodies sit atop hierarchies of subordinate units that have responsibility for the sector or issue area under concern. Subordinate functional units typically are attached to each of the territorial bodies.

This complex structure is designed to coordinate national policy (such as that toward the metallurgical industry), assure some coordination of policy on a territorial basis, and enable the CCP to keep control over the government at all levels of the national hierarchy. One unintended result of this organizational approach is that China employs more than 10 million officials—a number that exceeds the populations of many of the world’s countries.

There are tensions among these different goals, and thus a great deal of shifting has occurred since 1949. During the early and mid-1950s the government’s functional ministries and commissions at the Center were especially powerful. The Great Leap Forward, starting in 1958, shifted authority toward the provincial- and lower-level territorial CCP bodies. During the Cultural Revolution, starting in 1966, much of the political system became so disrupted that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was called in and assumed control. When the PLA fell under a political cloud, the situation became remarkably fluid and confused for much of the 1970s.

Since then the general thrust has been toward less-detailed CCP supervision of the government and greater decentralization of government authority where possible. But the division of authority between CCP and government and between territorial and functional bodies has remained in a state of flux, as demonstrated by a trend again toward centralization at the end of the 1980s and subsequent efforts toward decentralization since the late 1990s. The Chinese communist political system still has not become institutionalized enough for the distribution of power among important bodies to be fixed and predictable.