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Cornell International Law Journal

Keywords

Illiberalism, Chinese Communist Party, Political leadership

Abstract

Can the exercise of political leadership, which is meant to transcend laws, nevertheless, be governed by formal rules? This Article examines the relationship between the illiberal governance project and rule-based governance in the context of the Chinese Communist Party's internal "intraparty" regulations. In the past few years, Chinese Communist Party leaders have sought to strengthen the Party's political leadership by extending its discipline inspection mechanisms further into Chinese state organs. The Party leaders have also sought to regulate Party cadres' uses of power more closely through intraparty regulations. The efforts to strengthen the Party's political leadership through improving intraparty regulations point to a number of puzzling contradictions and even paradoxes in the illiberal governance project. Rules make the Party more governable and at least potentially limit space for corruption and other unsanctioned personal projects; but at the same time, they provide opportunities for resisting Party leadership and divide the Party into organizational departments with conflicting interests. This Article discusses such contradictions and paradoxes within the context of global illiberal political thought and argues that prominent solutions to the tension between illiberal political leadership and rule-based governance mask uncertainty about what illiberal political leadership actually entails.

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