The Sinthome - Part II

Authority in Contemporary China

Genealogy from Revolutionary Party to the Current Day

This episode aims at tracing the historical development of Chinese political authority. It takes a dual approach: it details the theoreticians that characterise and are revolutionised by the CCP whilst investigating key leadership figures and their contribution to the progression of power dynamics. It takes Hegel as the arbitrary origin through which the Marxist and Soviet-Leninist dynamics of Communism can be continuously revised. Following this it observes the development from Maoist metaphysics to Dengist pragmatism and Xi Jinping’s marriage of these developments with technocratic modes of authority. This progression embodies a noticeable movement towards the sinthome, where the interwoven elements of all three forms of power constitute the ontological substrate upon which even the notion of China is constructed.

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

Hegelian Origins

To comprehend the historical development which leads to modern China one must understand its social orders, and their passage through different forms of institution, authority and meaning within specific historical formations. Through the language and interpretative mechanism of the Phenomenology of Spirit, this process is clarified. Truth, for Hegel, is not immediate; it is the outcome of experience (Erfahrung), the dialectical movement through which consciousness confronts its own limits, negates them, and is transformed. This process of self-differentiation and partial reconciliation allows for the interplay of forces.

This framework already anticipates the structure of supra-authority: if meaning arises through mediation, then any social order requires an underlying horizon that processes contradiction rather than eliminating it. In this sense, the problem is how contradiction is organised and stabilised within a determinate horizon.

In the Hegelian framework, Reason emerges as the logic inherent in social institutions. Freedom becomes actual when mediated through objective structures – family, civil society, and the state. These are the moments of ethical life (Sittlichkeit). For Hegel, the state is “the actuality of the ethical Idea – the ethical Spirit as the visible, self-conscious, substantial will.” Freedom is hence the realised freedom of subjects embedded in rational institutions rather than the form of atomistic individualism. That said, the universality of the state does not obliterate difference. Ethical life depends upon differentiated spheres mediated by institutions capable of reconciling particular interests with universal aims.

Late imperial China, particularly under the Ming and early Qing dynasties, exhibited a dense and highly developed structure of mediation: a vast bureaucratic apparatus, a Confucian moral order, and a system of examinations that integrated individuals into the state through shared intellectual forms. By the late sixteenth century, this system governed a population of roughly 120 million. The examination system – based on mastery of the Confucian classics – served as a unifying epistemic framework, binding elites across the empire into a common language of governance and moral order.

This bureaucratic order was highly stratified, extending from the imperial court in Beijing through provincial governors, prefects, and county magistrates, forming a continuous administrative chain that linked local society to the imperial centre. The state's authority was reinforced through ritual, law, and education, producing a material realisation of ethical life in which the individual encountered the universal not abstractly, but through institutional participation.

Yet precisely because this order was mediated it was vulnerable to internal contradiction. By the late Ming, fiscal breakdown, bureaucratic corruption, and social unrest revealed the fragility of this ethical totality. Peasant uprisings, labour unrest, and the erosion of administrative capacity signalled a deeper failure of mediation between state, economy, and society. It is important to clarify what Hegelian negation means here. The state, for Hegel, is indeed a synthesis, a reconciliation of the particular and universal within ethical life, but it is not a final synthesis. Like every moment in the dialectic, it contains within itself the seeds of its own negation: because it mediates rather than embodying ethical substance, it can become estranged from the life it was meant to express.

What appears as the late Ming's political disintegration is this estrangement in a historical register: the state's synthetic form persists while the actual coherence of social life has dissolved. The inability of the state to sustain itself as the intelligible whole of social life is the exposure of its conditions, preparing the ground for a new form of mediation to emerge. However, the impetus for this logic is the movement into self-consciousness which begins with desire. Consciousness seeks to affirm itself by negating external objects and yet desire alone fails because the object disappears once consumed. Recognition must come from another self-consciousness. Thus arises the life-and-death struggle whose outcome is the famous lord–bondsman dialectic.

Far from a simple domination narrative, the dialectic ends in mutual dependency: the lord requires the bondsman’s recognition, while the bondsman gains transformative power through labour. The relevance to China’s modern formation is direct: the ‘century of humiliation’ from the first Opium War (1839) to the founding of the PRC (1949) constituted precisely a crisis of recognition at the interstate level. China’s rulers could no longer secure recognition as sovereign equals from the international order they were being compelled to enter. In this condition, the Hegelian problem of the bondsman – working under another’s terms, yet accumulating transformative capacity through that very labour – became engrained in Chinese political imagination.

Hegel’s account of labour in the Philosophy of Right extends the insight first articulated in the bondsman’s transformative work. Labour is the process through which the individual externalises freedom. Hegel writes, “A person must translate his freedom into an external sphere in order to exist as Idea.” This objectification connects personal agency to shared institutions, binding the individual into the ethical substance of the community. Labour mediates property, the first moment of objective freedom, in which the will becomes embodied and recognised. Thus, property is the means by which the individual enters the universal order; it forms the bridge between private action and public recognition.

This problem of recognition becomes historically acute when extended beyond the individual to the level of states. If recognition is the condition of freedom, then the encounter between political entities is ontological. In the nineteenth century, China's confrontation with Western powers can be read as a moment of failed or asymmetrical recognition. The First Opium War (1839–1842), culminating in the Treaty of Nanjing, forced China into a global system structured by coercive integration. The opening of treaty ports such as Shanghai, Canton, and Ningbo, the imposition of fixed tariffs, and the granting of extraterritorial rights to foreign powers institutionalised a form of juridical universality that masked material inequality.

The Treaty of Nanjing (1842) further ceded Hong Kong to Britain and inaugurated a series of unequal treaties that progressively eroded Chinese sovereignty, embedding foreign legal and commercial privileges within Chinese territory itself. China was compelled to recognise a global order that did not recognise it as equal. The result was a fracture within China’s own ethical life, as external pressures exposed the limits of its internal mediation. This rupture, beyond weakening the Qing state, transformed the conditions under which political authority could claim legitimacy, forcing subsequent regimes to confront the dual problem of internal coherence and external asymmetry.

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit culminates in Absolute Spirit, designating the movement of Spirit coming to know itself through its own history: it is an open, self-relating negativity. The circle of Spirit closes by recognising contradiction as the very engine of its own development. Each determinate form of Spirit – religion, art, philosophy – is a moment in which Spirit confronts its own incompleteness and is propelled forward. The Absolute “contains” negativity rather than overcoming it. This has an implication for the question of political authority: any regime that presents itself as the final resolution of contradiction has, in Hegelian terms, misunderstood the structure of Spirit. Absolute Spirit reveals that the task of institutions is to make contradiction productive, maintaining the movement of social life through its internal tensions. It is this logic that the CCP appropriates. Where Hegel’s Absolute Spirit remains open to further determination, the CCP claims to be the permanent arbiter of contradictions, converting the Hegelian insight into an instrument of political permanence.

Hegel's philosophy provides the conceptual backbone for understanding the CCP's political ontology. The Party positions itself as the mediating horizon within which contradictions are harmonised without being resolved. Like Hegel's state, the CCP presents itself as the ethical medium through which individual and collective wills are reconciled. What distinguishes the CCP from other modern states that invoke similar Hegelian grammar is threefold. First, liberal-democratic states institutionalise the plurality of mediating agencies through which contradiction is processed; the CCP collapses this. Second, most modern states permit civil society to generate challenges to state authority through electoral competition or judicial review; the CCP subsumes civil society within its own regulatory framework, making it an organ of the Party-state rather than an independent sphere. Third, the CCP deploys the Hegelian language of reconciliation as a continuous performance of legitimacy: an authority that presents itself as constituting the very conditions under which that society becomes intelligible to itself.

What persists from the historical trajectory outlined above is the persistence of the problem of mediation itself. The collapse of late imperial order and the asymmetrical incorporation into the global system created a condition in which authority could no longer rely on inherited ethical structures alone. The CCP's supra-authority emerges in taking up the Hegelian task under altered conditions: to organise contradiction within a unified political horizon capable of sustaining coherence in the face of internal fragmentation and external pressure.

Marxist Inversion

When Marx, in the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, argued that Hegel’s “ethical state” is not the actualisation of Reason but its formal appearance he could not have anticipated that his critique would become, within a century, the official ideology of a government in which state authority was more encompassing than anything Hegel had described. Marx’s core method was an inversion: he did not deny the Hegelian insight that social life requires mediation, but insisted that the form of that mediation was not the expression of universal Reason. The state appears universal precisely because it displaces its own partiality into forms that seem natural or inevitable. Marx famously wrote, “Man makes religion, religion does not make man”. The same logic governs the state: it is a human product that returns to dominate its creators as though it were an independent power.

In the German Ideology (1845–46), Marx radicalised this critique through his historical materialism. The premises of critique must “ascend from earth to heaven” rather than descend from speculative Reason. Alienation – the condition in which human beings are dominated by the products of their own activity – is thus a socio-historical effect of the division of labour, private property, and class domination. Where Hegel found reconciliation within ethical life, Marx insisted that no genuine reconciliation is possible while the material conditions that produce alienation remain intact.

This materialist critique arrived in China at a moment of acute civilisational crisis. As the philosopher Yuk Hui has argued in The Question Concerning Technology in China, the Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century did not merely weaken the Qing state militarily; they constituted a cosmotechnical rupture – a break in the coherence between the moral order (Dao) and the material practices (Qi) through which Chinese civilisation had constituted itself. The reformers of the Self-Strengthening Movement (1861–1895) attempted to separate Chinese thought from Western technology, as if one could import the technical ‘figure’ while leaving the cultural ‘ground’ intact. This proved impossible: technology is not a neutral instrument but the expression of a relation between humanity and the cosmos, and its importation transformed that relation from within. Marxism was received, from the May Fourth Movement (1919) onwards as a framework for understanding and overcoming this rupture – a way of accounting for China’s subjugation by Western powers in terms of material conditions rather than cultural inferiority, and of projecting a path through which those conditions could be transformed.

Crucially, what was adopted in China was a specific interpretation of Marx’s thought: the version mediated by Engels’s Dialectics of Nature, which from its translation in 1935 became, as Hui notes, effectively a discipline equivalent to Science and Technology Studies in the West. Engels sought to demonstrate that materialist dialectics should become the method of natural science, and this framework became the philosophical foundation of Maoist technological mobilisation. Marx’s critique of alienation was thus received as a warrant for the intensification of productive forces under Party direction. The CCP inherited Marx as a theorist of material transformation and it was this selective inheritance that allowed Marxism to become, paradoxically, the ideology of one of the most centralised state apparatuses in modern history.

This is where Marx’s position diverges sharply from both Hegel and the CCP. Where Hegel finds reconciliation within ethical life, and Marx imagines reconciliation after the abolition of class – the state withering away as the material conditions of domination are overcome – the CCP navigates contradiction through political and economic management within the continuity of the state itself. It retains fidelity to Marx’s early aim of reducing alienation through the reorganisation of material life while refusing his conclusion that the state must become superfluous. Instead, the state becomes the permanent vehicle of emancipation, the mediating horizon that is never to be overcome but endlessly refined. Communism, in the CCP’s framework, is a developmental telos perpetually deferred, always approaching but never arriving. This deferral is a structural feature of supra-authority: the Party derives its legitimacy from the ongoing promise of resolution, and that promise requires the resolution never to be achieved.

Marx’s anthropology rests on the idea that human beings are historical creatures whose self-understanding is shaped by praxis rather than contemplation. Alienation is a failing to recognise one’s own activity in the world. The abolition of alienation therefore requires a reappropriation of time itself: a shift from reproducing inherited conditions to collectively shaping new ones. In the CCP’s hands, this temporal logic is transformed: the reorganisation of social time becomes the management of developmental tempo, the calibration of expectations and outcomes by a Party whose own continuity provides the temporal framework within which progress is measured. The Marxist critique of alienated time is absorbed into a system that administers time as a political resource.

Marx’s vision of a society in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” was read by Mao as a methodological injunction. For Marx, communism is the name for a specific historical process whose direction is determined by the contradiction between forces and relations of production; the Party serves the proletariat as its vanguard, not its perpetual governor. For Mao, by contrast, contradiction itself became the generative force of collective agency. Mao adopted Marx’s dialectics as a technique of political composition: a permanent method for identifying and mobilising the principal contradiction of each conjuncture. When Mao declares that “without class struggle there is no progress,” he is not reiterating Marx’s class ontology but repurposing it into a principle of organisational renewal. The practical consequence is decisive: where Marx envisions the Party as the instrument of its own supersession, Mao makes it the permanent subject of contradiction, the organ through which history is perpetually extended.

Maoism

Mao’s theoretical contribution to Marxism begins with his reinterpretation of dialectical materialism as an epistemological practice, rather than a deterministic historical law. In On Practice, Mao rejects the idea that knowledge can arise from rational deduction alone, emphasising that understanding must be grounded in lived struggle. In On Contradiction, he extends this logic: “the fundamental cause of the development of a thing is not external but internal; it lies in the contradictoriness within the thing.” The dialectic becomes ontological rather than a mechanical unfolding. This epistemological turn is expressed concretely in Mao’s famous passage:“If you want to know a certain thing or a certain class of things directly, you must personally participate in the practical struggle to change reality, to change that thing or class of things, for only thus can you come into contact with them as phenomena; only through personal participation in the practical struggle to change reality can you uncover the essence of that thing or class of things and comprehend them.”

This emphasis on immanence, experience, and contradiction marks Mao’s departure from both orthodox Marxism and Leninism. For Mao, contradiction is not confined to class. It permeates every domain of life – social, cultural, epistemic, even psychological. Each historical period is defined by a principal contradiction, and politics consists in identifying and transforming it. In this framework, revolution becomes an ongoing practice rather than a historical event, and the Party becomes the organ through which contradictions are interpreted, classified, and mobilised.

This epistemological stance shaped Mao’s political practice. The United Front against Japan (1937–1945) revealed that contradictions could be temporarily re-categorised – enemies could become allies when the principal contradiction shifted. Following the end of the Second World War, the Civil War resumed and the CCP emerged victorious in October 1949, founding the People’s Republic of China. Similarly, the Hundred Flowers Movement of 1956 attempted to harness contradiction as a productive force by inviting criticism of the bureaucracy. However, when negative feedback spiralled into instability, the Anti-Rightist Campaign (1957) reclassified critical intellectuals as antagonistic elements. To reintroduce control between four-hundred and seven-hundred thousand people were sent to labour camps or silenced.

Mao introduced a foundational distinction: non-antagonistic contradictions, which can be resolved through debate and reform, and antagonistic contradictions, which require coercion or direct violence. This move – first articulated in On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People – constituted a decisive expansion of Marx’s logic. The domain of ‘the people’ became a shifting set defined by the Party’s identification of goals; the Party was not merely the vanguard but the arbiter of intelligibility. Those who were unaligned with the regime (class enemies) were considered irreconcilable antagonisms, requiring either suppression or elimination. This is a point of bifurcation where the regime began to explicitly define the social and political domain on which antagonism is legitimised. The Party is not the domain, but the bracketing of the set itself: the condition of possibility and action.

Mao’s attempt to resolve the perceived gap between China’s political will and its material backwardness - that kept the new People’s Republic from achieving the “advanced socialist” stage - reached its most ambitious expression in the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962). The campaign attempted to collapse the distance between economic necessity and political will. Communes of 20,000 to 30,000 people were organised under the principle that the correctness of the political line decides everything. In this framework, ideological fervour superseded material constraints. The Party attempted to transform agriculture and industry through sheer mobilisation, resulting in catastrophic famine with an estimated 30–40 million deaths. The Party’s metaphysical confidence in the power of consciousness over matter was revealed to have destructive consequences: Mao’s claim that “man’s consciousness can transform material reality” proved to be a misrecognition of the dialectic’s limits.

The Cultural Revolution (1966–1969) represented Mao’s final attempt to reassert revolutionary negativity as the engine of history. After the Great Leap’s failure, the fall of Mao’s prestige and recovery measures of pragmatic officials like Deng Xiaoping were feared as being revisionist. Calling on youth to “bombard the headquarters,” Mao authorised Red Guards to attack teachers, officials, Confucian symbols, and any perceived remnants of bourgeois culture. This unleashed a pure, unmediated negativity – destruction of temples, books, artworks – and a rejection of all stabilising forms of ethical life. Red Guard factions eventually turned on each other; by 1967 Mao feared civil war and called in the People’s Liberation Army to restore order. At least 1.5 to 2 million deaths occurred, with tens of millions persecuted or displaced. Mao was not simply a political leader but the sinthome through which China constituted itself – the point that stabilised the symbolic, material, and ideological field, even as he unleashed forces that threatened to destroy it.

Philosophically, Mao’s legacy marks a return to Hegelian idealism through Marxist praxis. Class struggle was no longer a teleological path to communism but the continuous reorganisation of contradictions. Mao’s doctrine of “one divides into two” reasserted contradiction as the intrinsic driver of development. This allowed Mao to escape rigid Marxist determinism but left the system vulnerable to chaotic oscillations. Mao transformed the Party into both the interpreter and generator of contradictions – a role that would persist in modified form under later leadership.

Finally, Mao’s significance for the CCP’s contemporary supra-authority lies not in the catastrophic episodes of the Great Leap or Cultural Revolution themselves but in the conceptual infrastructure he built:

1. contradiction as permanent, not transitional

2. the Party as the subject of contradiction

3. ideology as lived practice

4. knowledge as experiential

5. the state as the manager of antagonism

6. revolution as method, not destination

Thus, Mao’s true legacy is methodological, not teleological. He made contradiction the political material of modern China, setting the foundation for a system in which the Party no longer aims at the abolition of the state but at the perpetual modulation of antagonism – the essential precondition of supra-authority.

Deng Xiaoping

Deng Xiaoping emerged from the wreckage of the Cultural Revolution as the pragmatic continuation of Mao’s legacy. Twice purged and twice rehabilitated, Deng understood that the Party could not abandon its role as the horizon of intelligibility for Chinese society. What he suspended was the CCP’s metaphysical burden – the claim that consciousness alone could transform material reality. His famous dictum, “seek truth from facts,” signalled this shift: truth was no longer grounded in revolutionary enthusiasm but in measurable outcomes. In one line, Deng encapsulated the philosophical transformation of the CCP: “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice, it is a good cat.”

Deng’s two purges and two rehabilitations reveal the deeper structural demands of the Party-state. His first purge in 1966 was the result of targeting the technocratic pragmatists – himself and Liu Shaoqi – whose administrative rationality threatened the Cultural Revolution’s ideological absolutism. Yet by 1973, the collapse of China’s administrative machinery produced a contradictory ideology that could no longer be metabolised. Zhou Enlai, the first premier of the PRC, was terminally ill, bureaucratic paralysis spread, and Mao required the very pragmatism he had denounced. Deng’s reinstatement was thus a recognition that the Party needed a figure capable of integrating ideological legitimacy with institutional competence.

His second purge in 1976 followed the Tiananmen Incident, when mass public mourning for Zhou became a spontaneous critique of the Cultural Revolution. The Gang of Four again denounced Deng, but Mao refrained from destroying him completely. Deng’s revolutionary credentials, deep military ties, and support among Party elders meant he embodied a residual legitimacy that could not be extinguished. Even in exile, Deng remained a structural possibility – the stabilising alternative the CCP could reactivate when revolutionary excess reached breaking point.

Upon Mao’s death, those same qualities made Deng’s return inevitable. The Party, PLA, and technocratic elite recognised him as a figure capable of reconstructing a governable state after a decade of ideological chaos. Deng’s politics involved reframing radical economic reform as the continuation of Maoist politics rather than its betrayal. By insisting that the CCP, rather than market forces, remained the centre of authority and meaning, he transformed the Party from the engine of ideological mobilisation into the custodian of national development. In doing so, Deng ensured that the Party would remain the horizon of legitimacy and the structuring locus of Chinese modernity, even as he radically reconfigured its economic foundations.

Under Mao, contradiction was the engine of history – the generative force that the Party mobilised, even at catastrophic cost, in pursuit of revolutionary transformation. Under Deng, contradiction became something to be managed: identified, contained, and channelled toward the practical goal of economic development. To manage contradiction for developmental ends means, concretely, that the Party no longer sought to intensify class conflict or accelerate rupture, but to navigate the tensions between competing interests such as state enterprises and private capital, coastal regions and the interior, ideological fidelity and market efficiency; this was in a bid to maximise aggregate growth while preserving political stability. Between 1978 and 1992, China shifted from a command economy to a hybrid socialist-market system. The Household Responsibility System decentralised agricultural production; Special Economic Zones such as Shenzhen opened the economy to foreign capital; private enterprise re-emerged under the banner of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics.’ Deng did not abandon socialism — he reinterpreted it as a developmental project where the liberation and expansion of productive forces became the benchmark for political legitimacy.

Under Deng, China’s GDP grew at an average of 9.5% per year, agricultural output surged by 50% after the introduction of the Household Responsibility System, and foreign direct investment rose from negligible levels to over $4 billion by 1992. This material transformation anchored the Party’s supra-authority in developmental performance. Politically, however, Deng retained absolute control. Although between 1979 and 1981 the CCP sought to rehabilitate hundreds of thousands persecuted under Mao, the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989 revealed Deng’s unwavering conviction: market reform did not imply political pluralism. What Western observers characterised as authoritarian regression was, for Deng, the preservation of the Party’s role as supra-authority. His refusal to permit political pluralism was not simply a totalitarian reflex but a fidelity to a philosophical commitment that stretches from Hegel through Mao: stability is the precondition for development, and development is the precondition for the reduction of alienation.

Deng’s pragmatism also reshaped China’s geopolitical orientation. His 1979 visit to the United States and the formal normalisation of Sino–US relations marked a decisive shift from ideological antagonism to strategic integration. Global capitalism became a field to be utilised rather than resisted. China joined the World Bank and IMF in 1980 and the Asian Development Bank in 1986, embedding itself within the architecture of international finance. The creation of Special Economic Zones – Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shantou, and Xiamen in 1980, and Pudong in 1990 – served as experimental spaces where the Party could test capitalist mechanisms under controlled conditions. Deng articulated this shift in the doctrine of “Peace and Development,” arguing that the principal contradiction of the global era was no longer war between imperial powers but the uneven capacity of nations to modernise.

This geopolitical reframing was strategically decisive for three interconnected reasons. First, it allowed China to participate in global markets and technology transfer without framing its engagement as ideological capitulation; development could be presented as consistent with, rather than in tension with, socialist construction. Second, by defining the era’s central challenge as developmental rather than military, it enabled Beijing to reduce defence expenditure and redirect resources toward economic modernisation without appearing strategically weak. Third, it preserved the CCP’s narrative of sovereignty: China was not submitting to Western-led globalisation but strategically appropriating its mechanisms – a logic that echoes, at the interstate level, Hegel’s bondsman who gains transformative power precisely through constrained labour within another’s system.

Domestically, Deng institutionalised this pragmatism through legislative and structural reforms that reconfigured China’s political economy without relaxing Party supremacy. The Third Plenum of 1978 shifted the Party’s central task from class struggle to economic construction, launching a long-term experimental mode of governance summarised in the phrase “crossing the river by feeling the stones.” The 1982 Constitution reinforced this shift; it rebuilt state institutions, restored the President and Vice President roles, restabilised the State Council and courts, and reaffirmed the National People’s Congress. It reasserted that the state must “rule the country by law” and formally reinstated civil rights including speech, press, assembly, association and religious freedom — though increasingly subject to ‘the law.’ The document also set two five-year term limits for the President and Vice President. Economic reforms followed in waves: the dual-track pricing system allowed state quotas and market prices to coexist; State-Owned Enterprise reforms in 1984 introduced contract responsibility systems; and the 1986 Enterprise Bankruptcy Law became the first socialist legal mechanism permitting firm failure. These reforms collectively produced a political economy in which decentralised experimentation coexisted with centralised authority – a structural metastability that constitutes the material foundation of contemporary China.

Deng’s reforms also resuscitated older Chinese cosmological motifs. Confucian cosmology, in which Heaven grants legitimacy through harmony and prosperity, subtly returned. Stability became a secularised Mandate of Heaven, and growth the empirical sign that the Party remained aligned with cosmic order. Deng’s statement that “the essence of socialism is the liberation and development of the productive forces” revived Marx’s early humanist concern with alienation but articulated it through the measured rationality of economic improvement rather than revolutionary rupture.

At a deeper level, Deng transformed the Party’s temporal structure in a way that parallels – and diverges from – the transformations wrought by both the Hegelian inheritance and the Maoist episode. Hegel’s “ethical life” is always already mediated, always “working through” its own contradictions; Mao’s China was gripped by a revolutionary eschatology and the perpetual imminence of rupture. Deng introduced a third temporal register: an indefinite unfolding shaped by pragmatic adaptation. History, under Deng, became neither a dialectical progression nor a revolutionary acceleration but a series of controlled experiments whose outcomes constrained future choices. The CCP became the mediator between past trauma and future possibility, orchestrating development, deferring the promise of resolution. This is the philosophical template of what we may call material-cybernetic authority: a supra-authority initially grounded in the demonstrated capacity to manage developmental trajectories. The Party appeared both immanent – embedded in economic institutions – and transcendent – as the arbiter of what developmental outcomes were to count as progress.

Yet Deng’s legitimacy formula contained an intrinsic limit. If the CCP had continued to rely solely on growth-driven legitimacy and technocratic rationality, the regime would have faced an inevitable crisis as China’s economic expansion slowed. Deng’s model assumed that developmental performance could indefinitely substitute for ideological coherence – but this presupposed conditions (abundant labour, export-driven manufacturing, favourable demographics, permissive geopolitics) that could not endure. As China entered a period of structural slowdown, demographic contraction, rising debt, and intensifying geopolitical rivalry, the Party could no longer rest legitimacy on GDP alone. Legitimacy migrated from the economic to the political-ideological sphere, and finally to the cybernetic: a logic in which the Party no longer just oversees economic growth but configures the informational and behavioural environment in which society operates. This marks the philosophical transition from Deng’s developmentalism to Xi Jinping’s supra-authoritarianism – where the Party becomes the architect of national meaning.

Xi Jinping

Xi Jinping assumed leadership in 2012, receiving the mantle of a regime which had passed through two great transformations: Mao’s metaphysical politics of contradiction and Deng’s developmental pragmatism. Xi inherited a Party which was no longer beholden to revolutionary eschatology and yet unable to rely solely on economic performance as its primary source of legitimacy. He responded with a synthesis of Maoist ideological mobilisation and Dengist technocratic management, producing a new horizon of supra-authority in which the political and the technological converge.

At the centre of this synthesis is Xi’s declaration that the defining task of the era is “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” Here, national identity attempts to stitch together the contradictions inherent in post-reform China: uneven development, social fragmentation, recentralisation of power, and China’s ambiguous position between integration into global markets and assertion of geopolitical autonomy.

Technologically, Xi’s governance framework marks a decisive shift from Dengist decentralisation to cybernetic centralisation. The Social Credit System – emerging in the early 2010s and consolidating thereafter – functions as a distributed mechanism of behavioural modulation rather than overt repression. Data from courts, transport networks, online platforms, financial institutions, and local governments is integrated into a panoramic apparatus that renders trustworthiness measurable and actionable. This system embodies what Byung-Chul Han calls psychopolitics: a regime in which subjects internalise norms through self-surveillance, optimisation, and moral calibration, without identifiable coercion. The Party becomes both the invisible observer and the implicit ethical horizon.

That said, China’s Social Credit System is not Orwell’s Big Brother. Rather, it is an ecosystem of heterogeneous databases, blacklists, redlists, and sectoral rating systems. Its ubiquitous quality arises from the types and quantity of data recorded. Court records include ‘dishonest persons subject to enforcement’ if citizens refuse to comply with social judgements, whilst financial data shows loan defaults, fraudulent financial behaviour and tax evasion records. Administrative violations include environmental breaches, food-safety violations, and unsafe manufacturing processes whilst fare dodging and railway misconducts are also noted. Much of this is aimed at businesses rather than citizens. Blacklists can result in mobility restrictions, luxury consumption restrictions, lower visibility on e-commerce sites, being barred from certain posts and exclusion, public shaming and frozen access to bank loans. On the contrary, redlists give one access to preferential and fast-tracked business approval, lower inspection frequency and public commendation. This system amplifies a moral governance which is readily internalised despite not being a single numeric score or omniscient actor.

A similar consolidation has occurred in the realm of knowledge production. According to the MERICS study Whispering Advice, Roaring Praises: The Role of Chinese Think Tanks under Xi (MERICS, 2024), China’s think tank ecosystem has been progressively absorbed into the Party’s ideological machinery. Xi Jinping’s initiative to establish think tanks with Chinese characteristics is explicitly designed to create advisory bodies that align epistemic work with Party-state priorities. Xi described their development as “a major and urgent task” in 2014, a directive formalised in the January 2015 document Opinions on Strengthening the Construction of a New Type of Think Tank with Chinese Characteristics, issued jointly by the CCP Central Committee and the State Council. Over 1,900 think tanks now operate within this framework, where rhetorical alignment with Xi Jinping’s thought is increasingly rewarded and analytical deviation penalised. In effect, Xi has extended supra-authority into the epistemic domain itself, reflecting Althusser’s insight that ideology must shape perception even before it shapes action.

Economic governance under Xi conforms to this logic of algorithmic authority. Credit guidance for strategic sectors – semiconductors, green technology, aerospace, AI, 5G, infrastructure – has been tightened and centralised through the People's Bank of China, the National Development and Reform Commission, and newly empowered supervisory commissions. The 2020 crackdown on platform giants such as Alibaba, Tencent, and Didi signalled that capital, no matter its scale or innovation, is subordinate to political objectives. The suspension of Ant Group’s IPO, followed by antitrust investigations and data-security reviews, made explicit that no economic actor could be permitted to become averse to social coordination. Xi reasserted Deng’s principle that markets exist within the Party’s horizon, not alongside or beyond it.

The “Common Prosperity” campaign launched in 2021 marks a decisive shift from Deng-era permissive accumulation toward a model in which capital must actively demonstrate alignment with Party-defined social goals. Tax reforms, wealth redistribution mechanisms, and regulatory interventions against excess capital concentration exemplify this shift. Under Xi, prosperity is no longer a spontaneous effect of the market but a managed equilibrium where capital is continually reabsorbed into the Party’s developmental and ideological objectives.

At the Report on the Work of the Government of the People's Republic of China for 2025, the Party outlined its economic policy aims. These included a growth target of 5%, unemployment of 5.5%, the creation of 12 million new urban jobs and inflation of 2%. This delivery to the National People's Congress continued to outline the CCP’s technological framework where it was stated: “We must…build core technologies such as high-end chips and basic software, and build an independent, controllable…AI basic software and hardware system.” Being a part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the AI age is key, not only for the Party’s economic future, but as a means of perfecting its ideological influence through technology.

Institutionally, Xi dismantled the fragmented governance model inherited from the Deng era. The creation of the National Security Commission in 2013, the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission in 2014, and the powerful National Supervisory Commission in 2018 recentralised authority directly under the Party Centre. State ministries increasingly function as administrative arms of Party working groups. This refracted hierarchy allows the Party to remain everywhere and nowhere at once – immanent in daily governance but transcendent in its interpretive sovereignty. Such re-centralisation exemplifies a mature form of supra-authority where authority is no longer dispersed across bureaucratic organs but orchestrated through the Party’s epistemic core.

Internationally, Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) represents a material expression of this supra-authority. Beyond an infrastructure plan, the BRI is a strategy of geopolitical circulation: capital, commodities, influence, and relationships flow outward while symbolic legitimacy flows inward. The Party positions itself as the architect of a new multipolarity in which China’s model of centralised developmental governance becomes not merely domestically valid but globally exemplary. This is reinforced by the Dual Circulation Strategy, introduced in 2020, which orients China toward internal economic resilience while maintaining external linkages – a dialectic of autarky and integration suited to an era of geopolitical fragmentation.

As Barry Naughton observes, China has shifted from “state-capitalist pragmatism” to “Party-led developmentalism.” Power no longer flows merely through state ministries but through Party networks that permeate corporate boards, regulatory bodies, financial institutions, universities, and local governments. This refracted hierarchy obscures direct command while intensifying the Party’s immanent presence.

The geopolitical landscape further reinforces this orientation toward supra-authority. As Ho-fung Hung argues, the emerging antagonism between China and the United States is driven not primarily by ideology but by inter-capitalist rivalry – competition over surplus capital, market access, strategic resources, and technological command. China’s Belt and Road Initiative, now extending across more than 150 countries and accounting for an estimated $1 trillion of accumulated commitments, acts as a mechanism for exporting surplus industrial capacity in infrastructure, steel, cement, and high-speed rail – echoing late-nineteenth-century British and German outward expansion under conditions of domestic overaccumulation.

Yet China remains structurally entangled in US-led global capitalism: over 60% of China’s foreign exchange reserves are dollar-denominated; China continues to hold roughly $800–900 billion in U.S. Treasury securities; and its manufacturing ecosystem depends on Western-controlled high-end semiconductor equipment, intellectual property regimes, and maritime trade routes underwriting its export economy. This produces what Hung calls a non-antagonistic contradiction: deep functional interdependence coexists with intensifying strategic rivalry, generating a form of global metastability that mirrors the domestic contradictions of “market socialism.”

Hung’s Clash of Empires: From Chimerica to the New Cold War proposes a meso-level analysis connecting state strategy, corporate behaviour, and financial structures. U.S. firms’ reliance on Chinese production networks collides with Washington’s attempts to secure supply chains for sensitive sectors such as advanced chips, AI, and green technologies; simultaneously, Chinese corporations’ dependence on global dollar liquidity contradicts Beijing’s pursuit of technological “self-reliance” through initiatives like Made in China 2025 and the National Integrated Circuit Strategy. The result is an unstable equilibrium: both sides seek to decouple strategically while remaining locked in patterns of transnational capitalist integration. Xi’s supra-authority, in this configuration, must perform a dual stabilising function – managing the internal contradictions of capital accumulation under a Party-led framework, and the external contradictions of an international system.

Philosophically, Xi’s era represents a pivot from metaphysics to cybernetics. Where Mao mobilised the masses and Deng managed development, Xi governs through feedback loops that adjust social behaviour, calibrate economic flows, and regulate information environments. The Party’s authority operates less as a sovereign command and more so as a modulation of space-time, echoing Deleuze’s insight: “Enclosures are moulds; controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change.” The CCP embraces this shift explicitly. Xi’s remarks on digital governance emphasise that cities should evolve “from digitization to intelligence to smart-ness,” indicating a worldview in which intelligence resides not in subjects but in the environmental infrastructure that shapes subjective activity. In such a frame, contradictions become data anomalies, dissent becomes noise patterns, and governance becomes the cybernetic art of maintaining system-wide coherence.

The 2018 constitutional amendment, abolishing presidential term limits, functioned as the keystone of this restructuring, dissolving the last symbolic barrier between Party rule and lifelong personal leadership. Although the presidency is institutionally weaker than the positions of General Secretary and Chair of the Central Military Commission, the term-limit removal signalled a definitive break with the post-Mao norm of collective leadership, restoring a mode of personalised centralisation previously thought incompatible with China’s technocratic governance model. More importantly, it enabled a cybernetic re-composition of authority: with no temporal horizon constraining succession, Xi’s leadership becomes structurally open-ended, allowing continuous recalibration of policy through long-cycle campaigns such as the Common Prosperity initiative, the Digital China blueprint, and the expansion of social governance through data integration.

The Chinese Constitution – originally adopted in 1982 – is formally structured as the supreme legal document of the state, outlining citizens’ rights, institutional functions, and the socialist orientation of the political system. Yet its authority has always been conditional: unlike liberal-constitutional frameworks, it operates within a Party-led constitutionalism, in which the CCP’s political line supersedes juridical text. Against this backdrop, the 2018 constitutional amendments are revealing. Several additions explicitly strengthened Party primacy, including “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” formally integrating Xi’s ideological framework into the state’s normative foundation; a new clause stated that “the leadership of the Communist Party of China is the defining feature of socialism with Chinese characteristics,” inscribing Party supremacy as a constitutional principle rather than a political assumption. The amendments also established the National Supervisory Commission as a new constitutional organ with jurisdiction over all public-sector personnel, significantly expanding the Party’s disciplinary reach beyond its membership through a unified anti-corruption apparatus.

These reforms reaffirm that the constitution in China functions as a symbolic condensation of the Party’s ideological horizon. By rewriting it to reflect Xi’s political programme, the state constitution is reaffirmed as a representational document. In this sense, the 2018 amendments were not simply legal adjustments but a reassertion of supra-authority at the level of political ontology: they formalised the fusion of governance, ideology, and disciplinary power under a single, cybernetically integrated leadership core.

Who Will Win the Triangle

The genealogy traced in this episode – from Hegelian mediation, through Marxist inversion, Maoist dialectics, Dengist pragmatism, and Xi’s cybernetic synthesis – reveals a consistent structural logic beneath the surface variation of each leadership era. In every phase, the CCP has transformed its inherited theoretical framework by dislocating it: extracting from Hegel the grammar of mediation while abandoning the openness of Absolute Spirit; inheriting from Marx the critique of alienation while refusing the withering away of the state; appropriating from Mao the logic of permanent contradiction while domesticating its destructive force; and extending from Deng the legitimacy of developmental performance while supplementing it with ideological and cybernetic control. What emerges across this genealogy is a political formation that cannot be adequately described either as totalitarianism in the classical sense or as a developmental state of the East Asian type. It is something more specific: a supra-authority that positions itself as the constitutive condition of social intelligibility, the horizon within which all particular interests, identities, and contradictions are recognised, classified, and managed.

This has profound implications for how we understand the Chinese authoritarian system in comparative perspective, and for the dynamics that subsequent episodes in this series will explore. The Party’s claim to supra-authority is ontological: it is the claim to be the medium through which Chinese society knows itself. This is why the epistemic dimensions of Party governance – the management of think tanks, the Social Credit System, the integration of AI governance, the control of historical memory – are central mechanisms. To govern meaning, in the CCP’s system, is to govern power at its deepest level. What the next episode will examine is how this supra-authority is reproduced and contested in the concrete domains of economic policy, civil society, and China’s geopolitical projection.

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