Chinese Communist Party Endeavors to Institutionalize Armed Power: Civilian Control of China’s Central Military Commission

The Central Military Commission (CMC) is a unique institution of power in China’s political system. Time and again it has represented the ultimate authority of national leadership, as seen in the cases of Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin, who had a strong say in state affairs simply by retaining CMC chairmanship without other Party portfolios. The CMC is unique in that it is both a formal instrument of power and an unparalleled mechanism of informal politics that facilitates strongman politics. Such a dualistic mixture informs the complex dialectic between the Party’s organizational imperatives of collective leadership and its persistent call to enhance the CMC chairman’s personalized “core authority” in national politics. This article offers a scholarly analysis of how this mixture has played out in power consolidation and exercise by the three post-Deng commanders-in-chief—Jiang, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping—and helps explain the Chinese Communist Party’s post-Deng rise-and-fall pattern of power institutionalization.