China’s Purges Are Working as Designed

ANDREW MERTHA is George and Sadie Hyman Professor of China Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

A Unique Discipline System Has Helped the Party Endure

For two decades, scholars believed that the main reason Chinese communist rule endured into the twenty-first century—whereas every communist regime in Europe collapsed—was that it had built sturdy, long-lasting institutions. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had moved away from the unpredictable personalist dictatorship of the Mao Zedong era and established the foundations of a modern state. It set term limits on its leaders, embraced collective leadership, and increasingly promoted officials based on merit, which made it resilient enough to bounce back from the external and internal shocks that had felled other socialist systems.