Understanding the dynamics of Chinese politics has always been part science, part art, and part mystery. At the heart of these discussions are the factions around which Chinese politics is conceptualized. A recent paper has challenged many of these assumptions, simultaneously clarifying how power is distributed in China while raising new questions for where Chinese politics are headed.
In “The Trouble With Factions,” Alice Miller, a fellow at the Hoover Institution and lecturer in East Asian Studies at Stanford, argues that much of what passes for analysis of China’s factions is ill-defined, arbitrary, and with little in the way of real predictive or interpretative value for those assessing China’s leaders.
Factions as understood today are based on a complex mix of individuals, shared backgrounds, and institutional support bases. They have placed the princeling and Shanghai factions (personified by Xi Jinping and Jiang Zemin) and Youth League (epitomized by former president Hu Jintao and current premier Li Keqiang) factions at the forefront. But as Miller writes, potential membership in these groups is often overlapping or contradictory and yields little insight into what a faction will do. Then there are the lesser factions, or “gangs” as they are often referred to in the Chinese media. The “secretaries gang,” “petroleum gang,” and “Shanxi gang” have all been targets of Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign.
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