Ideological Change and Regime Legitimacy in China

Against the backdrop of the increasing emphasis that the CCP has put on ideological adaptation and innovation in recent years, this project analyses the changes in official party ideology and their implications for regime legitimacy. Based on discourse analytical methods and interviews with political and intellectual elites in China, the project explores (a) how ideological change is organised in institutional, personnel and financial terms; (b) which ideological innovations have been made since the 1990s; (c) which positive and negative lessons have been drawn from international experiences; (d) which impacts on regime legitimacy and stability can be detected; and (e) which implications these factors have for future institutional change and political reform in China. Based on interviews among the populace, the second project phase (2015-2016) focuses on the question to which extent the ideological discourses produced by China’s political elites find resonance among the populace and hence contribute to a legitimisation of the party regime.

The explanation of the resilience of non-democratic systems in general and authoritarian China in particular has become one of the major challenges confronting political scientists. In recent years, a growing number of scholars have studied the importance of institutional factors such as elections for the stability of authoritarian regimes. However, since these researchers’ work has to a significant degree been shaped by expectations of democratisation, the political adaptability of authoritarian regimes has so far been neglected in scholarly work. This project thus draws attention to the normative dimension of authoritarian regimes’ legitimacy by examining the role that innovations in official party ideology play in the reproduction of regime legitimacy in China.