its \u201ccore\u201d leader<\/a>last week made him unequivocally its highest authority. Days later, the party has detailed how it will ensure that members obey.<\/p>\nNew directives centralize control over discipline inspectors nationwide and impose greater supervision on regional governments, some of whom have used their local clout to evade Beijing\u2019s scrutiny. Guidelines spell out how cadres should supervise each other at nearly every level of the party hierarchy\u2014except at the very top.<\/p>\n
The regulations entrench Mr. Xi\u2019s growing use of party disciplinarians as political inquisitors, enforcing party loyalty and compliance with his agenda. His targets, political observers say, are rivals and foot-dragging bureaucrats who hamper, or even resist, his policy edicts.<\/p>\n
Tightening party discipline is part of Mr. Xi\u2019s bid to reverse \u201ca creeping usurpation of authority by local party bosses,\u201d said Andrew Wedeman, a professor at Georgia State University who studies governance and corruption issues in China.<\/p>\n
Mr. Xi believes the party will be weakened unless he can effectively fight corrupt local networks, Mr. Wedeman said. \u201cThe struggle to strengthen the party\u2019s internal integrity is a struggle to save the heart of socialism in China.\u201d<\/p>\n
Since becoming party chief in late 2012, Mr. Xi has used a withering anticorruption campaign to shake up the bureaucracy, kick out rivals and amass power. In the process, the party\u2019s disciplinary agencies have acquired significant muscle and expanded their targets to officials who show disloyalty or resistance to the central leadership.<\/p>\n
But Mr. Xi has also faced pushback from parts of the party, the military and state-owned industry. High-level discord over economic policy has compounded the problem, creating bureaucratic paralysis as officials await clarity on policy priorities.<\/p>\n
\u201cMany of the party\u2019s policies can\u2019t get implemented. Some people even run independent kingdoms in their own units, departments and localities,\u201d Deng Maosheng, a director at the party\u2019s Central Policy Research Office, told reporters this week. \u201cThe higher-ups have policy measures, but those below have countermeasures.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe must strengthen centralized and united leadership at the center,\u201d Mr. Deng said at a briefing on the party\u2019s new disciplinary directives. \u201cOtherwise, we can\u2019t solve the problems that we\u2019re confronting.\u201d<\/p>\n
Approved last week at a top-level party conclave, and released late Wednesday, the disciplinary directives update existing rules with stricter standards for officials\u2019 performance and prescribe mechanisms for holding them accountable.<\/p>\n
They also codify Beijing\u2019s top-down authority over regional and local disciplinary agencies, making them more independent from the local governments they are supposed to supervise.<\/p>\n
But for all the additional oversight, some significant gaps remain. The party didn\u2019t impose meaningful checks on the powers of its top leaders. It \u201cwill never get there without fundamental political change,\u201d said Ling Li, a visiting professor of Chinese legal history at the University of Vienna.<\/p>\n
The directives rely on top leaders to regulate themselves in good faith, without effective enforcement mechanisms, according to Ren Jianming, a professor at Beihang University in Beijing who studies governance and anticorruption issues. \u201cThese rules only have an advocacy effect.\u201d<\/p>\n
For instance, while a new clause places the party\u2019s Politburo\u2014its top 25 officials\u2014under the oversight of the larger and lower-ranked Central Committee, this provision already exists in the party constitution.<\/p>\n
The rules retain a clause that requires Central Committee members to use their real names when filing written complaints about Politburo members\u2014a requirement that could discourage whistleblowing.<\/p>\n
Crucially, the rules don\u2019t explicitly impose external supervision over the party\u2019s top decision-making body\u2014the Politburo Standing Committee, whose seven members are led by Mr. Xi.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s still no effective mechanism for supervising the party center,\u201d Mr. Ren said. \u201cIt\u2019s a difficult problem to resolve.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2014Chun Han Wong. Follow him on Twitter @ByChunHan.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Communist Party\u2019s designation of Chinese President Xi Jinping as\u00a0its \u201ccore\u201d leaderlast week made him unequivocally its highest authority. Days later, the party has detailed how it will ensure that members obey.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3119,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"topic":[],"class_list":["post-3120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3120\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3120"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=3120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}