China's Ethical Revolution and Regaining Legitimacy: Reforming the Communist Party through Its Public Servants

by Shaoying Zhang, Derek McGhee

Overview

This book examines the many ways in which the Communist Party in China is still revolutionary by focusing on how, in recent years, it has attempted to mobilize Party members to become ethical subjects. In the context of the Party’s history of the military revolution, Cultural Revolution and Economic Reform (or economic revolution), the authors argue that under President Xi Jinping the Party has launched an ethical revolution within the Party for the sake of sustaining its legitimacy. This book examines the various combined components of this ethical revolution, including anti-corruption, anti-four undesirable working styles and Mass-Line Education programme from the perspective of the fifty current Communist Party officials.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783319514956
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	05/13/2017
Series:	Politics and Development of Contemporary China
Edition description:	1st ed. 2017
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Shaoying Zhang is Associate Professor of Shanghai University of Political Science and Law and a Shanghai Young Eastern Scholar.

Derek McGhee is Professor and Head of Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology at the University of Southampton, UK. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction .- 2. The China Dream, History, Religion and Modernization .- 3. Comparisons, Paradigms and the Remnant of Division: Our Approach .- 4. Discourses of Corruption: The Contest between Different Authorities .- 5. State of Exception: The Examination of Anti-Corruption Practices .- 6. The Discourse of Formalism and Bureaucraticism: The Contest of Order within the Party .- 7. Discourse of Hedonism and Extravagance: Tension between the Agency and the Actor .- 8. The Mass Line Education Programme .- 9. Technologies of the Self .- 10. Remnant and Hybridization: The Effects of Governing.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“This is a timely project and Zhang and McGhee are well-suited to be doing it. A particularly compelling aspect of their argument is that legitimacy in China is being constructed by re-socializing, and re-making the ethical subjectivity of officials. Rather than identifying illegal activity per se, anti-corruption campaigns aim to induce a particular kind of discipline and morality into the officials. Their focus on subject formation and an ‘ethical revolution’ within the Party offers an excellent intervention into the legitimacy literature.” (Lisa Hoffman, Professor of Urban Studies, University of Washington Tacoma, USA)