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This thesis is to study the political role of the People's Liberation Army from the approach of structure and function. The framework of the thesis consists of three major parts, first, the influence of Chinese traditional political culture on, and the formation of, the political role of the PL A; second, the influence of domestic political struggles and external military conflicts on the development of the political role of the PLA; and the third, the analysis of the transition of the PLA's political role from the structure and personnel arrangements of the CCPCC Within the above-mentioned three scopes, this thesis make a thorough discussion on the following: (1) The relationship between the structure of the PRC and the formation of the PLA's political role; (2) How has ideology influenced the army's political role; (3) What is Mao's viewpoint and his influence on the development of the army's political role; (4) What is the link between the army and the party, and how has this developed; (6) What accounts for the expansion of the PLA's political functions; (7) What is the influence of political factional struggles on the PLA's political role; (8) Is it political institution or military institution that controls the recruitment of the military elite; (9) What are the disparities between the military elite in handling international conflicts and what are their political considerations; (10) What is the Party's position in the army; (11) How have the Party’s important meetings and personnel arrangements influenced the rise and fall of the PLA's political role?

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What is the role of political leadership in the mechanisms that bind general masses and political elites behind a certain policy program? And what factors account for the changes in political leadership? The mechanisms connecting citizens and elites are crucial for regime stability. The malfunction of such mechanisms, for instance, the absence of citizen-elite agreement on policy issues, or low levels of public trust in elites, undermines political support and legitimacy of the existing regime. Focusing on rural communities in China, this dissertation attempts to examine how leader-follower relations in the grassroots communities influence mass-elite interactions, and how the community contextual factors shape those leader-follower relations. Existing studies tend to focus on the patron-client connections between peasant villagers and local officials, but largely to the neglect of other kinds of social relations. Based on fieldwork interviews and panel survey data from China, I show that informal social relations, like leadership, have a significant impact on mass-elite opinion connections and public trust in local elites. By leadership or leadership relations, I refer to the mutuality of leader-follower connection that is based on either authoritative or non-authoritative, but largely non-coercive influence by both sides. An element of non-authoritative quality that binds a group of people (i.e. followers) behind a leader is especially important. For this reason, leadership tends to be significant in a local community setting, such as in a village, that is thick with interpersonal relations. My study finds how formal elections and leadership relations in local communities co-determine the direction of opinion influence between the local elite and ordinary citizens, and how leadership facilitates citizens’ belief that their local leaders are trustworthy. Further, my analysis shows that as market activities and state control penetrate into village communities, leadership relations themselves undergo changes in that the contextual factors of the rural community have tremendous predictive power on human networks within the community. These changes imply that the political and economic reforms in the Chinese countryside have important consequences regarding local political leadership as well as mechanisms that bind masses and elites together.

What is the role of political leadership in the mechanisms that bind general masses and political elites behind a certain policy program? And what factors account for the changes in political leadership? The mechanisms connecting citizens and elites are crucial for regime stability. The malfunction of such mechanisms, for instance, the absence of citizen-elite agreement on policy issues, or low levels of public trust in elites, undermines political support and legitimacy of the existing regime. Focusing on rural communities in China, this dissertation attempts to examine how leader-follower relations in the grassroots communities influence mass-elite interactions, and how the community contextual factors shape those leader-follower relations. Existing studies tend to focus on the patron-client connections between peasant villagers and local officials, but largely to the neglect of other kinds of social relations. Based on fieldwork interviews and panel survey data from China, I show that informal social relations, like leadership, have a significant impact on mass-elite opinion connections and public trust in local elites. By leadership or leadership relations, I refer to the mutuality of leader-follower connection that is based on either authoritative or non-authoritative, but largely non-coercive influence by both sides. An element of non-authoritative quality that binds a group of people (i.e. followers) behind a leader is especially important. For this reason, leadership tends to be significant in a local community setting, such as in a village, that is thick with interpersonal relations. My study finds how formal elections and leadership relations in local communities co-determine the direction of opinion influence between the local elite and ordinary citizens, and how leadership facilitates citizens’ belief that their local leaders are trustworthy. Further, my analysis shows that as market activities and state control penetrate into village communities, leadership relations themselves undergo changes in that the contextual factors of the rural community have tremendous predictive power on human networks within the community. These changes imply that the political and economic reforms in the Chinese countryside have important consequences regarding local political leadership as well as mechanisms that bind masses and elites together.

A distinct feature of contemporary politics is the involvement of international forces in a state's domestic politics, and vice versa. Despite the plethora of literature on the international system and comparative state politics, relatively little addresses the interpenetration of international and domestic systems in intermestic issues. This thesis explores intermestic processes. It argues that states' domestic policies are increasingly formed in an intermestic context and such intermesticity has brought states a dilemma between maintaining effective domestic control and achieving integration into the global economy. This thesis examines China's SARS policy formation in 2003 as a case study. How did the internal health problem come to be addressed in an intermestic context in a country noted for its tight domestic control and long-term aversion to foreign intervention? The question is approached through a textual analysis of the story of China's SARS policy development. This study also identifies the patterns of international influence on China's domestic politics, particularly in the SARS crisis. I interpret the intermestic dynamic as a learning process through which China has chosen to embrace international institutions in its pursuit of national interests in a globalized world. / Master of Arts

The growing global presence of China’s state-owned enterprise (SOEs) has captured much of the world’s attention. Continuous waves of SOEs’ overseas ventures, a result of government-led transnationalization officially dubbed the “Going Out” strategy, have generated great uneasiness in international relations. This dissertation, The Politics of China’s “Going Out” Strategy: Overseas Expansion of Central State-owned Enterprises, seeks to answer the following question: how the Chinese central state and central SOEs interact with one another as the “Going Out” strategy has evolved. This dissertation finds that the transnationalization of SOEs is by no means a coherent policy but rather is fraught with power struggle, with various bureaucratic agencies setting different goals for SOEs on the one hand and with SOEs managers defending corporate interests without incurring political setbacks on the other. The state’s advocacy of the overseas expansion of SOEs was aimed at achieving national economic and security goals, but SOEs, with their expanded autonomy gained from the new state-market relationship, have been able to ignore state directives that were detrimental to firms’ financial performance. This dissertation also finds that negotiation and bargaining between China’s fragmented bureaucracy and SOE managers over the terms of firms’ “going out” grow more intense as corporate autonomy become increasingly institutionalized with the progress of reform. Over time, SOEs’ overseas expansion reflected more the firms’ corporate strategy than the state’s policy objectives. / text

Intellectual elites have been the collective agents responsible for many democratic transitions worldwide since the early twentieth century. Intellectuals, however, have also been blamed for the evils in modern times. Instead of engaging in abstract debates about who the intellectuals are and what they do, this project studies intellectuals and their ideas within historical contexts. More specifically, it examines the social forces behind the evolving political attitudes of Chinese intellectuals from the late 1970s to the present. Chinese politics has received an enormous amount of attention from social scientists, but intellectuals have been much less explored systematically in social sciences, despite their significant role in China’s political life. Chinese intellectuals have been more fully investigated in the humanities, but existing research either treats different “school of thought” as given, or gives insufficient attention to the division among the intellectuals. It should also be noted that many studies explicitly take sides by engaging in polemics. To date, little work has thoroughly addressed the diversity and evolution, let alone origins, of political ideas in post-Mao China. As a result, scholars unfamiliar with Chinese politics are often confused about the labels in the Chinese intelligentsia, such as the association of nationalism with the Left and human rights with the Right. More important, without considering how the ideas took shape, we would not adequately understand the political trajectory of communist China, where elite politics and local policies have been profoundly shaped by intellectual debates. This dissertation takes a relational approach to the intellectual debates in contemporary China by analyzing the formation of political ideas and crystallization of intellectual positions. It asks two questions: who are the Chinese liberals, and how were their distinctive bundles of political views formed? Drawing on 67 semi-structured interviews with Chinese intellectual elites across the ideological spectrum, as well as detailed historical and textual analyses, this dissertation examines the social forces that have shaped the political attitudes of liberal intellectuals in contemporary China. It argues against the prevailing attempts to define Chinese liberalism as a social category with a coherent ideology comparable to its Western counterpart; rather, as a community of discourse that contains a number of competing and contradictory discourses, it is embedded in China’s social reality as an authoritarian regime governed by a communist party, and contingent on China’s history straddling the Maoist and post-Mao eras. Rather than a monolithic or tight-knit group, Chinese liberals are comprised of an array of social actors, including scholars, journalists, lawyers, activists, and house church leaders. They are liberal not because of what they are for, but because of what they are against; more specifically, Chinese liberals are united by an anti-authoritarian mentality, which is a historical product of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 and the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. In addition to biographical factors, the views of Chinese liberals have been shaped by structural factors represented by the neoliberal reforms and the rise and growth of the intellectual field since the 1990s, as well as interactive factors manifested by the polar opposition between the liberals and the New Leftists. On the one hand, as state-driven capitalism unleashed China’s economic potential, China was well on its way to becoming a major player in the international community toward the end of the 1990s; on the other hand, the fusion of the free market and political power led to rampant corruption and social injustice. How to make sense of China’s crony capitalism became an important dividing line between the New Left and liberalism. As the intellectual debates were increasingly cast as part of global cultural production, how to appropriate Western thinkers and concepts became a site of contestation. While the dramatic expansion of higher education led to the growth of the intellectual field with its own logic and rules, in which both liberals and New Left intellectuals were struggling for symbolic power, the penetration of the political field remained, not only in terms of visible incentives and punishments, but also in terms of its subtle influence on the manner of problem construction and debate. Through combative interactions, the liberals and the New Leftists have defined themselves by reference to each other. In the process of binary opposition, the views of both sides have moved further and further apart with little overlap. This dissertation contributes to political sociology and the sociology of knowledge in three ways. First, departing from the conventional approach that takes political orientations for granted, it takes a relational approach by analyzing the dynamic processes of ideological formation and polarization. Second, it traces the process of ideological alignment and differentiation on three levels: structural, interactive, and biographical. Third, while it has been observed that intellectual elites have been the collective agents responsible for many democratic transitions worldwide since the early twentieth century, the internal division of the intellectuals has received much less attention. My work addresses this issue by analyzing how the Chinese intelligentsia has structuralized into binary opposition since the Tiananmen Square protests. In particular, I treat political ideas as historical contingencies, rather than fixed properties, that are internally shaped by “fractal distinctions.”

Culture and politics are inseparable. How to realize the cultural factors of Chinese traditional politics and its influence and enlightenment on the contemporary era has been one of the most important issues with great concern of the academic community. Starting from Confucianism, this paper uses qualitative analysis and Marxist theory of cultural criticism to provide an in-depth interpretation of traditional Chinese politics. The main content of the paper is divided into three parts. The first part provides a systematic study of the background of the emergence of Confucian political philosophy in the pre-Qin period. Its main content covers the economic, political, and cultural aspects of the Warring States period. The second part analyzes the values of pre-Qin Confucian political philosophy. This part mainly deals with the theories of heavenly and human nature of three Confucian scholars, Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi. The third part interprets traditional Chinese politics in the context of Confucianism by focusing on the blood patriarchal culture, the social-based culture, the ethical culture, and the political culture of the sages, respectively. Through a summary of the characteristics and contradictions of traditional Chinese politics, an objective understanding of the emergence, development,...

Why did China choose certain policy over others that would achieve similar impact? Because China has a significant presence in the modern international community, it is difficult yet critical to understand the policy implications of the Chinese government under its unique political and socioeconomic context. This thesis shows the impact of a specific “price floor” policy China chose to employ in its oil and gasoline market, and identifies the factors concerning the Chinese regime that it took into consideration in the decision making process, through analysing data and official statements released by the government. After different parties affected by this policy are recognized, this thesis investigate how those impacts relate back to the Chinese government’s long-term agenda of energy security and environmental protection.