China’s Ethical Revolution and Regaining Legitimacy

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-x

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2. Introduction

   • Shaoying Zhang, Derek McGhee

   Pages 1-10

3. The China Dream, History, Religion and Modernization

   • Shaoying Zhang, Derek McGhee

   Pages 11-44

4. Comparisons, Paradigms and the Remnant of Division: Our Approach

   • Shaoying Zhang, Derek McGhee

   Pages 45-64

5. Discourses of Corruption: The Contest Between Different Authorities

   • Shaoying Zhang, Derek McGhee

   Pages 65-108

6. State of Exception: The Examination of Anti-Corruption Practices

   • Shaoying Zhang, Derek McGhee

   Pages 109-133

7. The Discourse of Formalism and Bureaucratism: The Contest of Order Within the Party

   • Shaoying Zhang, Derek McGhee

   Pages 135-172

8. Discourse of Hedonism and Extravagance: Tension Between the Agency and the Actor

   • Shaoying Zhang, Derek McGhee

   Pages 173-208

9. The Mass Line Education Programme

   • Shaoying Zhang, Derek McGhee

   Pages 209-237

10. Technologies of the Self

    • Shaoying Zhang, Derek McGhee

    Pages 239-260

11. Remnant and Hybridization: The Effects of Governing

    • Shaoying Zhang, Derek McGhee

    Pages 261-290

12. Back Matter

    Pages 291-320

    PDF

This book examines the many ways in which the Communist Party in China is still revolutionary by focusing on how, in recent years, it has attempted to mobilize Party members to become ethical subjects. In the context of the Party’s history of the military revolution, Cultural Revolution and Economic Reform (or economic revolution), the authors argue that under President Xi Jinping the Party has launched an ethical revolution within the Party for the sake of sustaining its legitimacy. This book examines the various combined components of this ethical revolution, including anti-corruption, anti-four undesirable working styles and Mass-Line Education programme from the perspective of the fifty current Communist Party officials. 

• China
• Communism
• China Dream
• Xi Jinping
• Ethics
• Economic Reform
• Anti-Corruption
• democracy

    “This is a timely project and Zhang and McGhee are well-suited to be doing it. A particularly compelling aspect of their argument is that legitimacy in China is being constructed by re-socializing, and re-making the ethical subjectivity of officials. Rather than identifying illegal activity per se, anti-corruption campaigns aim to induce a particular kind of discipline and morality into the officials. Their focus on subject formation and an ‘ethical revolution’ within the Party offers an excellent intervention into the legitimacy literature.” (Lisa Hoffman, Professor of Urban Studies, University of Washington Tacoma, USA)

• Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, Shanghai, China

  Shaoying Zhang

• Department of Sociology, Social Policy, Criminology, University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom

  Derek McGhee

Shaoying Zhang is Associate Professor of Shanghai University of Political Science and Law and a Shanghai Young Eastern Scholar.

 
Derek McGhee is Professor and Head of Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology at the University of Southampton, UK. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.  

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