Towards a Command Civil Society?

To understand and explain the tectonic shifts in the institutional terrain for civil society under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its top leader, Xi Jinping, we may need to disrupt the current common analytical paradigm—one that has us see the world in terms of the relationship between state and society. [...]the party may guide the formulation of state and societal rules, formulate rules jointly with its state, and use its own rule formulation and implementation capacity to create rules that interact with state laws and regulations and social norms or customs. Striking real-world changes in the institutional environment over the past decade have inspired a new round of studies, which, though deeply insightful, typically still fit loosely under a ‘state–society relationship’ paradigm. In the study that underpins this article, we set out with a general Party–state–society framework—a ‘disruptive’ analytical project that has gradually gained ground in relation to the Chinese single-party system (Lin 2002; Thornton 2013; Shen et al. 2020; Snape and Wang 2020).