Governance Challenges under Zero-COVID China: How the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Keep Its Rule and Sustain Resilience in the Pandemic Era?
Open AccessThis thesis examines how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) maintained its rule and sustained its resilience in the pandemic era. This research first starts with scholarly CCP's authoritarian resilience debate and generalizes the Party's evolving survival strategies to sustain its rule in the post-1989 with extensive takeaways from the Tiananmen Incident and the collapse of the Soviet Union. And then, by briefly laying out the context of the Zero-COVID Policy in China, this thesis lays out the existential and new challenges that the CCP encountered manifested by its Zero-COVID Policy, particularly its sustainability due heavy socioeconomic burden, the politicization of the Zero-COVID model, and massive societal public discontent.As the new challenges deriving from the Zero-COVID, CCP turned to seek new sources of legitimacy and survival strategies relied on Party organization throughout the pandemic period. By pointing out the persistent and new challenges when combating the COVID-19 pandemic, the research identifies new dynamics with specific domains on contemporary societal crises in China throughout the three-year Zero-COVID Policy, including grid management and anti-lockdown protests, and re-examines the CCP's strategies of sustaining its resilience, particularly in the pandemic era: 1) Strengthen the coherence of the Party through a revival of dominant consolidation of the Party apparatus in Chinese society; 2) Enhance governance capacity by selectively responding to the demands of the people; 3) Wide range of digital suppressive surveillance throughout the citizenry. Overall, this thesis concludes that the CCP shows relatively fragile resilience in the pandemic era dominantly depends on a rigorous and organizational network of Party apparatuses penetrated at the local level, selective and tactic responsiveness to Chinese people's demands, and the “sharper” digital surveillance framework among most of the Chinese people.
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