The Sinthome - Part I

Authority in Contemporary China

Introduction: The Sinthome

To describe the new landscape of Party authority in China, a new term is required beyond economic descriptivism: that concept is the sinthome. Despite reference to China’s slowdown – a growth rate below 5%, deflationary pressures, collapsing development, and record youth unemployment – the system has withstood fragmentation. The reason is structural: the CCP operates as China’s sinthome, the stabilising knot that allows incompatible logics such as capitalist markets, socialist sovereignty, nationalist identity, and global integration to coexist. This grants the Party a unique form of supra-authority beyond law or ideology.

This essay is the first movement in a three-part series examining the emergence, structure, and future trajectory of China’s political ontology. The series is organised into three conceptual terrains: The Dynamics of Authority, The Genealogy of Contradiction, and The Cybernetic Evolution.

The first, establishes the theory necessary to understand supra-authority. It situates China’s Party-state within broader logics of power, antagonism, and social coherence. The second traces the genealogy of contradiction across China’s modern philosophical and political economy - moving from Hegelian mediation to Marxist inversion, Maoist revolution, Dengist pragmatism, and Xi-era centralisation.

The final part turns toward the cybernetic horizon, analysing how metaphysics gives way to algorithmic modulation, how freedom is reconfigured within technologically mediated environments, and how subjectivity evolves under conditions of infrastructural authority. Together, these movements articulate a comprehensive theory of the sinthome as a political ontology capable of explaining China’s present stability, emerging from its metaphysical and cybernetic architectures.

In Jacques Lacan’s late works, the sinthome is the irreducible element that holds a subject together despite ordinary identification with symbols failing. As he writes, “The sinthome is an artifice by which the subject makes himself a being.” It is this stabilising knot through which the subject sustains coherence amid internal contradiction. Applied politically, the CCP acts as the body through which the nation makes itself a being, stitching together economic, ideological, and geopolitical forces perceived as incompatible and which might otherwise cause a rupture.

In this sense, the Party resembles a Hegelian subject – both the product and producer of its world. Hence, it is the architect of meaning and the effect of the conditions it shapes. This dual role gives the CCP a quasi-metaphysical and cybernetic (governed by feedback loop mechanisms) status as the guarantor of order. This adaptive, self-regulating system integrates feedback from society, markets, and technology to preserve coherence. It is this fusion of symbolic, material, and algorithmic authority that elevates the Party into a universal whole which is seemingly greater than its parts.

This work seeks to diagnose how China is able to traverse antagonisms and preserve metastability (a local energy minimum that can be pushed to a lower minimum by a phase shift), both domestically and internationally. Understanding supra-authority and the philosophical-political genealogy which characterises the nation at present, this paper attempts to understand how the sinthome constitutes a political ontology (the condition of being) for all regimes.

The CCP’s Authority

There are a few terms which echo through our political landscape: neoliberalism, democracy, individualism, socialism, democratic socialism, capitalism, the free market, fascism, communism…the list is almost endless and each word’s meaning is an endless deferral of determination. The CCP’s discourse is neither horizontal nor veridical, it is diagonal and cuts across the aforementioned signifiers, combining aspects of all systems in the aim to harmonise their antagonisms. The symbiosis it maintains between economic liberalism and state control represents a gordian knot, tying together the varying concepts of freedom. Although this internal tension has been supported by economic stability and modest improvements in prosperity, the financial transition, regime shift and economic slowdown are calling into question whether this contradiction can sustain itself or is destined to collapse or evolve.

Traditional Chinese decorative knot, a symbol of good fortune, harmony, and prosperity - Credits: Zhang Ruying / Pinterest

This overarching struggle might be described as a shift from its previous export and property driven economy to a system led by domestic consumption and technological progress. GDP growth sits at 4.8%, yet inflation is uncharacteristically low at 0.2%; interest rates sit at 3%. Similarly, from 2014 onwards the CCP significantly increased its government budget deficit to GDP ratio from -1.8% to -6.5%. This may appear to indicate greater state involvement in the economic landscape, but has a dual aim. Initiatives such as the “Dual Circulation” policy and industrial plans (e.g. Made in China 2025 and aims for high domestic content in core tech) push for self-reliance in semiconductors, renewables, and advanced manufacturing. Moreover, it seeks to consolidate and modernise supply chains by directing capital and policy to support emerging industries and enhance resilience against external and geopolitical pressure

Another criticism of China’s governance is the tendency towards “digital authoritarianism”. This label obscures a more fundamental point: every political system, including democracies, restricts the knowledge a person is taught and possesses in order for coherent, often sociocultural or politically aligned meaning to emerge.. Political order requires drawing boundaries around what can be perceived, said, or understood – a temporary but necessary limitation through which freedom acquires its coordinates. To condemn China’s model as uniquely coercive is itself an ideological gesture that forgets how the United States, the European Union, and other regimes likewise define what counts within public discourse, what is expressible, and what is excluded.

Democracy, socialism, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism differ in how they shape the horizon of possibility and how individuals are permitted to push against its limits. In this sense, China is not an anomaly but a particular configuration of a universal political logic: every system creates the conditions of its own visibility by delimiting the field in which thought, dissent, and freedom can appear.

There are a number of theses which aim to describe the tension arising from China’s party state. The position of this article is that the CCP has moved away from its Leninist base towards embodying a supra-authority.

The predominant question remains: Is this a moment of greater synthesis between ideology and materialist conditions or does China still retain fidelity to its original Marxist-Leninist tradition which will culminate in the ‘withering away” of the state? Will the state lose its political character and become a bureaucratic mechanism, becoming extinct as the individual and social come to mirror each other? Can China sustain the contradictions within its own historical development, from Marxism to pragmatism and socialism to capitalism? Will the sinthome offer a satisfactory explanation of this phenomenon?

What is Supra-Authority?

Authoritarian systems centralise power and typically act through more direct means of violence, leaving aspects of society relatively autonomous. Totalitarianism expands the state’s function to occupy an ideological role, slowly saturating the social field. Supra-authority, by contrast, occupies a position beyond both law and ideology although it still functions in those domains. It acts as the condition of possibility for social, political, and economic life – a transcendental frame within which all activity is made intelligible. At its most simple, it is the lens through which all interpretation of the world is observed.

The notion of supra-authority has existed previously in political philosophy, whether discussed in relation to Caesarism or modern totalitarianism where power exceeds ordinary institutional control. Carl Schmitt defined the sovereign as “he who decides on the exception”: this describes he who can suspend the law and determine its form but is not subject to its content, instead creating the conditions under which societal norms operate.

Giorgio Agamben expanded this insight, arguing that the state of exception is no longer triggered by crisis in modernity, but is regularly evoked, becoming a technique of governance rather than of survival. A contemporary Western example can be seen in Donald Trump’s extensive use of emergency powers and executive orders, usually justified through reference to the economic, migrant or existential threat the nation supposedly faces. A parallel in China is the CCP’s pandemic governance during COVID-19, where Party-led emergency command structures overrode standard bureaucratic procedures to impose lockdowns, surveillance regimes, and mobility controls, demonstrating how supra-authority can reorganise institutional order and political life.

This constant exercising of extra-legal or extra-normal power is witnessed in selective recognition. This is where ‘a people’ represents one demographic to the exclusion of others or a hierarchy imposes both internal order and a difference between belonging and non-belonging to a given group. From this phenomenon Agamben forms two categories, that of the “bare life”, where life is exposed to power without mediation, and the politically qualified life, where one is within the sphere of legal protection.

It is supra-authority which locates power on an ontological level, and allows for these incommensurable identities to be bound together by the sinthome. To understand who exceeds a power dynamic, one must also acknowledge who is represented within it and who remains unspoken of. Agamben’s recognition shapes our ability to conceive of the institutional, linguistic and internal power dynamics within a sinthomatic structure. In each case, authority is sustained, despite subjugation, exclusion and inequality through this knot which makes meaning, legitimacy, and social coherence become possible.

Psychoanalytic theory offers another reading of authority. Lacan’s notion of the “Big Other” describes the symbolic order – the invisible system of norms, language, and expectations – which indicates what counts as meaningful or true. This symbolic order is the background against which communication and identity become intelligible. Slavoj Žižek develops this further by showing that every social order relies on a kind of “master-signifier”:this is a central, symbolic point that anchors meaning and stabilises ideological contradictions.

Within contemporary China, the figure of Xi Jinping operates as the paradigmatic master-signifier: the symbolic point that sutures the Party’s political ontology by gathering disparate political trajectories into a single locus of meaning. As Elizabeth Economy shows, Xi’s elevation to the “core” of the Communist Party consecrates him as the interpretive horizon - a leader who has “amassed significant authority over virtually all policy,” establishing himself as “simply first” rather than merely first among equals.

This symbolic role is concretised through a series of institutional interventions: Xi chaired all major leading small groups, including those overseeing economic reform, cybersecurity, and national security, effectively centralising decision-making under his personal command; he used the anticorruption campaign to eliminate rival power networks and recast Party discipline around loyalty to himself; and he restructured the PLA into a force oriented around the Central Military Commission, tightening personal control over the military.

His ideological initiatives, including the promotion of the Chinese Dream, the reassertion of Party committees across universities and private firms, and the expansive tightening of internet governance further crystallise Xi as the point at which competing logics (market development vs. Party dominance, global integration vs. ideological purification, technological modernisation vs. political control) are stabilised into a coherent narrative. Through this symbolic condensation, Xi becomes the quilting point that halts ideological drift, the embodied signifier through which the Party understands itself and demands to be understood by society.

However, as Lacanian theory insists, the master-signifier is secured not only by what it affirms but also by what it excludes. Here Xi’s symbolic centrality is inseparable from the regime’s construction of an ideological outside. Nowhere is this clearer than in Document 9, issued internally in 2013. It enumerates seven ideological “perils” that must be suppressed: (1) Western constitutional democracy, (2) universal values, (3) civil society, (4) neoliberal economic ideas, (5) press freedom, (6) historical ‘nihilism’ that challenges the Party’s narratives, and (7) judicial independence. These categories are not incidental; they form the negative space within which Xi Jinping Thought acquires its consistency.

The text warns officials that Western political ideas and “hostile foreign forces” are infiltrating Chinese universities, media, and online spaces, positioning these as existential threats to Party rule. In doing so, Document 9 delineates what must not appear in public discourse, constructing the boundaries of permissible political reality. When Economy describes Xi’s era as one in which “there was no room for alternative voices and perspectives, particularly those that reflected Western ideals”, she is describing the operationalisation of Document 9’s exclusions. The master-signifier is thus the site through which antagonism is displaced onto clearly demarcated Others: liberal constitutionalism, independent media, and universalist ethics. Through this logic of negation, supra-authority becomes possible: the Party’s ideological universe appears both limitless within certain interstices but bounded around a single interpretive center by naming, making ambiguous and expelling those elements which are antagonistic contradictions.

Concurrently, our ability to observe the world around us is not purely actual but increasingly mediated and technology has become the mechanism of this modern condition: systems exercise authority through feedback loops, predictive mechanisms, and algorithmic governance, quietly shaping behaviour by modulating the environment in which choices occur. The movement from metaphysics to cybernetics which is later discussed, reveals that the supra-authority is not simply mythology or a vague belief, but a technology organising what can appear, what can be said, and what can be imagined as possible.

Louis Althusser’s contributions clearly model the dual nature of supra-authority, speaking to the fact that ideology is not purely ethereal, but material in the way we engage with the world. He characterises a doctrine, not as an interpretive layer, but as that which interpellates individuals as subjects; a person is ‘ready-made’ before they possess any self-understanding, already imbued with certain qualities given their circumstance. The Repressive and Ideological State Apparatuses function together, not simply by dictating what people do, but by shaping what is perceived. Where a political system operates through recognition and non-recognition of people or needs and demands, supra-authority encourages individuals to internalise this same perspective so as to believe their identifications are intuitive.

In this sense, Althusser provides the closest structural anticipation of supra-authority: a power that does not merely enforce rules but generates the very field in which rules, identities, and actions exist, acknowledging that this requires a combination of disciplinary and hidden coercive measures. The CCP exemplifies this logic: its authority is not confined to law or policy but extends into the affective dimensions of everyday life, producing subjects whose sense of reality is organised by the Party. Whilst this supra-authority is never homogenous and should not be equated with a method for producing human automatons, it is an implicit architecture through which power relations are encoded and made intuitive.

Supra-authority is most present where the organising principle of society becomes indistinguishable from society’s own self-understanding. Citizens may oppose particular policies, outcomes, or leaders, but they cannot imagine a social order whose coordinates are not shaped by the Party. As Mark Fisher argued in Capitalist Realism, the most pervasive forms of power are those that become “the only realistic mode of governance,” not because they suppress alternatives, but because they render alternatives unthinkable. Fisher notes that “the most successful ideological effects are those which have no need for words, and which work through lived reality itself”. Fisher’s insight that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” applies with equal force here: the condition of possibility is structured so tightly that the existing order becomes the default, and one must, at times, oppose their own inner constitution in an attempt to see the world differently.

Althusser’s Framework

Althusser reframes the State as a composite of repressive and ideological apparatuses which jointly reproduce social relations. The Repressive State Apparatus – police, courts, the military – guarantees “by force…the political conditions for the reproduction of the relations of production”; the Ideological State Apparatuses – schools, media, family, culture – subtly shape perception and habituate individuals into the dominant order where “Ideology exists in institutions and the practices specific to them”. It is not a doctrine one consciously adopts but comprehension through which subjects come to recognise themselves. Interpellation, which is when society ‘calls’ you into a role and you accept it, – his famous claim that “ideology ‘hails’ individuals as subjects” – forms the origin of supra-authority where individuals enter a ready-made symbolic order already structured in advance.

This structure is equally true of repression. As the psychoanalytic inversion suggests, ‘the repression of desire becomes the desire for repression’. Subjects come to identify with the very constraints that limit them. Žižek sharpens this insight by noting that the subject’s desire is sustained by the prohibition that limits it. Boundaries form the horizon within which desire becomes intelligible. In China, these dynamics are visible across both apparatuses. The Social Credit System, for example, functions simultaneously as discipline (Repressive State Apparatus) and behavioural scripting (Ideological State Apparatus), structuring the environment in which individuals form expectations about trust, responsibility, and reciprocity. Educational curricula that embed ‘Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era’ exemplify ideological interpellation: politics is not external content but the grammar through which civic, moral, and economic life is interpreted.

Macroeconomic policies that channel credit to strategic sectors - semiconductors, green energy, and advanced manufacturing - simultaneously promote innovation and reduce external vulnerability by reinforcing supply-chain autonomy. These state-directed capital allocations generate path dependence insofar as early investment priorities structure the feasible trajectory of future economic development.

Anti-corruption campaigns (such as the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection’s ongoing purification of Party cadres) operate as both real repression and symbolic pedagogy, teaching society the moral narrative through which political legitimacy is understood. The Party’s dominance over media, publishing, and entertainment is not solely censorial: it is an attempt to stabilise the master-signifiers that structure social meaning through the mediated language of ‘harmony’, ‘development’, ‘national rejuvenation’, ‘prosperity’, and ‘order’. Through both apparatuses, the CCP internalises its own worldview into its subjects, who then recognise it as the natural horizon of political life.

The result of supra-authority is a power that does not merely enforce rules but constitutes the very domain in which rules, identities, desires, and possibilities emerge. In China, the CCP becomes the sinthome which does not resolve contradictions between market liberalisation, socialist sovereignty, global integration, and technological governance but prevents their becoming so severe that revolt ensues. The Party becomes both the source and beneficiary of this coherence where capitalism is the means of solving issues of necessity, and the state an apparatus of recognition. It is a knot which ensures that neither financial or political conditions dominate each other to effect economic or narrative rupture. The Chinese Communist Party, extricated from its bureaucratic functions, is akin to the Tao,

“A name that can be named is not The Name. Tao is both Named and Nameless. As Nameless it is the origin of all things. As Named, it is the mother of all things.” and, “When opposing forces unite within there comes a power abundant in its giving and unerring in its effect”.

The Tao, originating from classical Chinese philosophy and most famously articulated in the Tao Te Ching, refers to the fundamental, self-generating order of the cosmos and has long shaped Chinese understandings of harmony and governance. It can be introduced as the underlying, self-organising principle of reality which produces an equilibrium through coordinating difference. The first quote captures how both the Tao and the Party’s supra-authority are formless and concrete, an origin that structures the system without being reducible to any single function. The second quote speaks to Taoism’s understanding of stability; it is the dynamic binding of contradictions so as to ensure rupture does not occur. The metaphysical function captured in Taoist philosophy embodies the sinthome and supra-authority where unity emerges not through homogenisation but the binding of opposites.

Lenin’s State and Revolution

Lenin warned repeatedly against stripping Marxism of its “revolutionary soul.” Composed between the February and October Revolutions of 1917, State and Revolution attempts to rescue the Marxist theory of the state from reformist dilution. Lenin grounds his argument in Engel’s claim that “the state is a product of society at a certain stage of development; the state is the recognition that this society has become entangled in an irresoluble contradiction with itself.” In this view, the state arises from antagonism, a need to try and resolve the conflicts inherent to social life. This is where the state comes to represent a class rather than the people, in this case the bourgeoisie, disenfranchising the proletariat and barring a person’s ability to identify with politics. Where the state appears as an external force rather than a natural technology, it imposes its own expression, alienating the subject.

Marx, Engels and by inheritance, Lenin, conclude that this situation is not ontological but rather a product of class antagonism and can be overcome through Marxism’s historical determinism. That said, Engels already expresses that society has become entangled in a state which it may be “powerless to escape”. This paradox is made explicit by Adorno who concluded against these theoreticians that “antagonism exists in reality itself, not merely in thought”. This was a remark made pessimistically, given he presumed it meant reconciliation could not be achieved. In contrast, this has become a modern source of productive development where rupture, as described by Zizek, Laclau or Badiou, contributes to the possibility of difference, liberty and the political. Hence, modern philosophy and politics positions the notion of irreconcilability as a limit to be explored, prodded, and violently pushed up against, where Slavoj Zizek writes,

“The fundamental aim of ideological fantasy is to silence social antagonism…it is necessary to place emphasis on the issue of antagonism by showing how ideology conceals the trauma of the impossibility of a society thought of as a closed and homogenous totality.”

For Lenin, the bourgeois state must be violently abolished because it exists to preserve class domination. The proletarian state, by contrast, is conceived as a transitional form: an instrument of suppression which might dissolve in and of itself. Lenin insists that this eventual “wither[ing] away”, will be achieved when “public functions will lose their political character and be turned into the simple administrative functions of supervising social interests.” The ultimate horizon is a form of life in which “there will be nothing left to suppress.” If society were a mirror of the people and people a mirror of society, they would be one and the same. This is a metaphysical wager: that history will culminate in the reconciliation of universality and particularity. As one might note, making life immanent and without mediation between the individual and reality can readily succumb to totalitarian impulse.

Taking the view that antagonism is ontological, class antagonism cannot be solved in such a way that all contradiction is abolished. Lenin presumes that the proletariat can articulate a universal identity capable of dissolving all exclusions. However, as Jacques Rancière argues, “every claim to a unified ‘people’ presupposes someone left out; politics begins when that remainder speaks.” The proletarian universality therefore contains a constitutive incompleteness. The dialectical process that Lenin imagines, from negation through to a negation of that negation and transition, rests on the belief that contradiction is a failure of society and not its structuring feature. It is here that the contrast with contemporary China becomes most pronounced.

The CCP does not seek the abolition of the state and does not inherit Lenin’s teleology of dissolution. Instead, it positions itself as the sinthome where non-antagonistic contradiction must be managed and made productive. Here, this productivity does not operate by reducing desire to a lack or a mere ‘being-without.’ Instead, the CCP seeks mobilisation and circulation, channeling individual drives through a dispersed but coordinated apparatus capable of capturing partial flows, and aspirations. Thus, contradiction can become a resource to be harnessed rather than a symptom to be eliminated, where it functions less as a mechanism of repression than as a modulatory network continually absorbing and recomposing social energies.

Where Lenin imagined the state disappearing into administrative neutrality, the CCP maintains the state as the permanent locus of synthesis. The Party becomes the universal through which contradictions are metabolised: globalisation without dependency, capitalism without bourgeois politics, socialism without the abolition of markets, nationalism without isolation. None of these contradictions are eliminated; instead, the Party’s supra-authority prevents their escalation. The CCP thus does not enact the dictatorship of the proletariat but rather the dictatorship of the structuring horizon – the entity that decides what counts as contradiction and what counts as stability.

Engels had insisted that “the economic base for the complete withering away of the state is such a high development of communism that the antithesis between mental and physical labour disappears,” a condition that remains far from contemporary reality. In his view, as long as this division exists, there will be unequal social roles, differing interests, and therefore a need for some form of coordinating authority such as the state. Only when productive capacity is so high, and social relations so transformed, that all people can participate equally in both intellectual and manual work, would the conditions exist for a self-governing society without a coercive state apparatus.

One might interpret Lenin and the communist regimes that followed him as aiming, at least in a weak sense, to reduce the alienation that arises between individuals and the state apparatus. This is to move toward a society in which the individual and the collective become mutually expressive.

In this respect, the CCP can be seen as remaining faithful to one of Marx and Engels’ a priori aims: the continuous diminishing of alienation through the harmonisation of subjective experience and social organisation. It treats this project as compatible with, and indeed requiring, a persistent political centre capable of managing contradiction. A glimpse of how this operates in practice emerges from several initiatives detailed in Economy’s The Third Revolution. Xi Jinping’s flagship “targeted poverty alleviation” programme, for instance, was framed not merely as economic redistribution but as a project to “synchronise the aspirations of the people with the goals of the nation,” aligning material uplift with political identification. At the same time, the Party’s renewed insistence on embedding Party cells within private firms and universities aims to “integrate the Party’s values into organisational culture,” thereby reducing the experiential distance between individual activity and collective purpose.

In both cases, alienation is mitigated not through the withering of the state but through its deepened immanence in everyday life. Thus, where Lenin anticipated the eventual disappearance of the state as a precondition for the reconciliation of mental and physical labour, the CCP interprets the reduction of alienation as an ongoing developmental task pursued through stability and integration of competing political and economic forces.

China's political structure

Understanding supra-authority requires clarity about the institutional skeleton through which the CCP operates. China’s political system is not a conventional state hierarchy but a layered and interwoven structure in which Party, state, and military form a single, mutually reinforcing apparatus. What follows is not a descriptive taxonomy but a conceptual map – a diagram of how authority is distributed, reproduced, and modulated across organisational forms.

The diagram titled “Fan of Power” (MERICS, 2023) offers a compact visualisation of the interlocking structure of authority within the Chinese Party-state. It illustrates the threefold integration of Party, State, and Military institutions, each represented by a distinct colour:

· Red: CCP Party organs

· Yellow: State institutions

· Orange: Military command structures

At the base of the fan, occupying the three central positions that constitute the apex of supra-authority, is Xi Jinping:

· General Secretary of the CCP (ideological–political centre)

· President of the PRC (state embodiment)

· Chairman of the Central Military Commission (coercive control)

Above this, the Standing Committee forms the core decision-making nexus, integrating Party secretaries, the Premier, and leading officials. Radiating outward are the layers of Party Centre, State Council, NPC, and military leadership, each segment showing portfolios held by Politburo members of the 20th Central Committee. The left side of the fan displays provincial Party secretaries, highlighting the vertical penetration of Party authority into territorial administration. The right side displays state and military roles, demonstrating how executive governance and coercive power remain tightly bound to the CCP through overlapping appointments.

The fan visually reinforces the argument developed in this section: China’s political system is not a dual structure of Party and state, but a fused matrix in which leadership roles interlock across ideological, administrative, and military domains. The image captures supra-authority not as an abstraction but as an organisational reality – where the Party occupies the commanding heights and the state and military act as its coordinated extensions.

The Chinese Communist Party: The Core Locus of Sovereignty

The CCP is the centre of political intelligibility: the state is an extension of its organisational logic. Its structure forms the primary architecture through which supra-authority becomes material.

· National Congress: held every five years, the Congress is formally the highest organ of the Party, though its function is to ratify rather than deliberative. It sets the broad symbolic horizon, endorses revisions to the Party constitution, and confirms leadership transitions already negotiated through internal consensus.

· Central Committee: roughly 200 full members and 150 alternate members. Its significance lies less in its meetings than in its composition: it is the reservoir of elite authority, the pool from which all major leadership bodies are drawn. The Central Committee is the backbone of nomenklatura power.

· Politburo (25 members): the executive core of day-to-day political management. It embodies the selective interiority of the Party: a closed space where socioeconomic signals, security concerns, and ideological directives converge.

· Politburo Standing Committee (PSC): usually 7 members. The PSC is the apex of political authority – a micro-sovereignty inside the larger sovereign. It is here that supra-authority takes a determinate form: a harmonising node capable of synthesising economic, security, ideological, and geopolitical pressures.

· General Secretary: the symbolic and operational centre. While formally first among equals, the General Secretary functions as the interpretive sovereign – the figure who aligns the Party’s self-understanding with the national horizon. Under Xi, this role has merged institutional command with ideological authorship.

· Central Military Commission (CMC): the Party’s highest military organ. Its structure duplicates the state CMC, but the Party CMC is primary: all officers swear loyalty to the CCP, not the PRC. Through the CMC, the Party maintains absolute control over coercive force, completing the triad of supra-authority: ideological anchoring, administrative coordination, and military command.

· Leading Small Groups (LSGs) and Central Commissions: core coordination mechanisms within the Chinese Communist Party that sit above ministries and cut horizontally across the state apparatus. LSGs are flexible, often temporary bodies that bring together top officials from different agencies to set high-level strategy on issues that span multiple bureaucratic domains. Central Commissions are more formal and permanent versions of these groups, equipped with dedicated staff and clearer authority. Together, they function as political–cybernetic hubs: they gather information from across the system, align policy direction, and ensure that ministries and local governments carry out Party priorities. In practice, much of China’s real decision-making power flows through these supra-institutional bodies rather than through the formal government ministries themselves.

The State: The Administrative Exterior of Party Sovereignty

This is where what the Party decides, the state implements. The state’s legitimacy, capacity, and authority derive from the Party’s interpretive centre.

· President and Vice President: these are formally symbolic roles. The presidency’s significance lies in its convergence with the General Secretaryship under Xi, reflecting the personal consolidation of Party–state authority.

· State Council: the highest administrative organ, corresponding to a cabinet. Headed by the Premier. Under Xi, increasingly subordinate to Party-led decision mechanisms.

· Ministries and Commissions: execute policy across finance, security, education, industry, science and technology, and more. They translate Party directives into administrative action.

· National People’s Congress (NPC): constitutionally the “highest organ of state power,” functionally the legislative validator of Party decisions.

The Military: The Party’s Coercive Horizon

· People’s Liberation Army (PLA): a Party army – not a national one. Subordinate to the CMC.

· People’s Armed Police (PAP): responsible for internal security, border control, and stability; under CMC command since 2018.

· Militia and Reserve Forces: extend Party–military integration into society.

· The United Front System: soft Sovereignty and Social Coordination. The United Front Work Department (UFWD) manages relations with non-Party groups. The CPPCC anchors this system in formal consultation.

The Cadre System: The Invisible Infrastructure of Control

The Central Organization Department controls selection, promotion, evaluation, and rotation of personnel. Nomenklatura ensures that the Party reproduces its authority across all major institutions

At the very top:

· CCP Central Committee

· Politburo & Politburo Standing Committee (PSC)

· Central Organization Department (COD) – the Party’s HR boss.

Below that, each level of the Party (central, provincial, city, county, etc.) has:

· A Party Committee (e.g., Provincial Party Committee).

· An Organization Department at that level.

· A “nomenklatura list” of posts (jobs at that level that the Party controls).

· A “reserve list” of cadres (people groomed for those jobs).

What is on the lists?

Posts list: key positions in

· Government (ministers, governors, mayors, bureau chiefs)

· State-owned enterprises (CEOs, chairs)

· Courts and procuratorates

· Universities and research institutes

· Media, mass organizations, sometimes big social institutions.

Cadres list: vetted officials who can be appointed, promoted, rotated into those posts.

How does it work?

The Organization Department, at each level compiles and updates a list of key posts in its jurisdiction that require Party approval. Higher-level Party bodies control the most important posts (e.g., central level controls ministers and provincial party secretaries).

Every cadre has a personnel file recording education, work history, Party membership, performance, rewards/punishments, and political reliability. These files follow them through their careers and are managed by Organization Departments.

At regular intervals, the Party evaluates cadres using:

· Performance indicators (economic growth, poverty reduction, social stability, policy implementation).

· Political criteria (loyalty to the CCP, adherence to the central line, no factional disloyalty).

· Mass and peer feedback (internal surveys, internal evaluations).

This feeds back into their file and determines whether they are added to the leading cadre reserve.

When a key position opens the relevant Organization Department draws up a shortlist from the cadre pool. Internal consultations happen with higher-level Party leaders (sometimes informally, sometimes via structured processes). The Party decision comes first, then the People’s Congress, government meeting, or board (for SOEs) formally “elects,” “appoints,” or “approves” the person.

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