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Reprinted in part from For a Lasting Peace, for a People's Democracy, Feb. 17, 1956.

In a contribution to the political analysis of contemporary Vietnam - a single-party state often wrongly assumed to be an author of reform and deploying considerable and varied powers - this paper seeks to provide an understanding of the Vietnamese term 'authority' (uy) and its relationship to power. Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan serves as a reference to the notion of authority in Vietnam and is compared to data: what the Vietnamese thought their word best translated as authority meant. The paper concludes that in the 'two-way street' of social contracts, the ruling Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) actually has little authority. This helps to explain the chronic problems the VCP has faced in securing state capacity and generalised ability to implement policy. It high-lights gaps between the current anachronistic use of Soviet-style power in Vietnam and what could be done if the regime deployed new powers based on authority. The authors conclude that, given the identified lack of authority, the VCP is no real Leviathan. Although more research is needed, this conclusion implies that proactive political tactics in Vietnam may move towards a search for acquiring authority in a 'two-way street' relationship within the Vietnamese political community. Enhanced state capacity and Party authority could follow. (JCSA/GIGA)

This article analyzes the reasons for the remarkable adaptability and electoral success of Communist successor parties in post-1990 Romania. The first part develops a three-dimensional classification scheme to identify Communist successor parties on the basis of their institutional, personnel and ideological continuity with the defunct Communist Party. The second section traces the political evolution of Communist successor parties, and argues that their remarkably strong and consistent electoral performance is primarily due to their ability to appeal to voters beyond the traditional base of East European ex-Communist parties on the left of the ideological spectrum. The final section uses survey data to suggest that the continued electoral appeal of Communist successor parties in Romania is due neither to Communist nostalgia or lack of democracy but to the complicated legacy of the Ceauşescu regime and the 1989 revolution.

Economic reforms during the past 20 years have brought high growth rates and modest prosperity to Vietnam. However, the limitations of those reforms are becoming more and more apparent. The 10th National Congress of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV), held in Hanoi from April 18 to 25, was therefore expected to deliver strategies and perspectives which could be used to overcome the challenges of the reform process. Whilst the Party Congress did produce some changes to a few key leadership positions, programmatically it fell back on old positions which fall short of answering the country's present societal and economic dynamics. (SWP Comments / SWP)

How does the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) secure the loyalty of its coercive leaders, and its public security chiefs in particular, in the face of numerous domestic protests every year? This article presents the first quantitative analysis of contemporary China's coercive leaders using an original data set of provincial public security chiefs and public security funding during the reform era. I demonstrate that the CCP, owing to its concern for regime stability, has empowered the public security chiefs by incorporating them into the leadership team. Empowered public security chiefs then have stronger bargaining power over budgetary issues. I rely on fieldwork, qualitative interviews and an analysis of Party documents to complement my statistical analysis. The findings of this analysis shed light on the understanding of regime durability, contentious politics and the bureaucracy in China. (China Q/GIGA)

This paper examines changes in the membership structure of the Communist Party of China during the 1990s. It concentrates on urban China to investigate the relationship between socioeconomic characteristics of the region (city) and the age, educational, and occupational structures of the regional party. The major findings are as follows. First, the development of marketization has widened opportunities for the younger generation to achieve socioeconomic success outside party membership. Second, the younger generation's incentives for joining the party have consequently been increasingly important determinants of the party's membership structure. Third, the subsequent technocratic reorganization of the urban party seems to have progressed through the conventional bureaucratic-elite path in the government and publicly owned sectors rather than through the newly emerging qualified professional-elite path. (J Contemp China/GIGA)

In its comprehensive analysis of a wide range of primary and secondary sources in both Chinese and Western languages, this authoritative work stands as the definitive study of the theory, implementation and legacy of the Chinese Communist Party's thought-remolding campaign. This decades-long campaign involved the extraction of confessions from millions of Chinese citizens suspected of heterodoxy or disobedience to party dictates, along with their subjection to various forms of "re-education" and indoctrination. Hu Ping's carefully structured overview provides a valuable insider's perspective, and supersedes the previous landmark study on this vastly interesting topic. - Deze studie gaat in op de theorie, uitvoering en nalatenschap van de propagandacampagne van de Chinese Communistische Partij. Deze decennialange campagne bestond onder andere uit het ondervragen van miljoenen burgers die verdacht werden van andersdenkendheid of ongehoorzaamheid. Deze zorgvuldig gestructureerde verhandeling overstijgt de klassieke studie Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (1969) van Robert jay Lifton. In tegenstelling tot het werk van Lifton, hanteert Hu Pings studie een eigentijds postcommunistisch perspectief en is het verrijkt met ervaringen van Chinezen die direct gevolgen hebben ondervonden van de maoïstische propagandacampagne.

Abstract
While it is widely accepted that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) occupies a dominant position in the Chinese political system, few studies have demonstrated CCP's dominant position based on rigorous statistical analysis. Our paper presents the first such analysis using an innovative measure of regulatory transparency in the food industry across nearly 300 prefectures in China over 10 years. We show that actions by the CCP, while broadly scoped and not targeting the food industry, significantly improved regulatory transparency in the industry. In sharp contrast, food-industry-specific interventions by the State Council, which exercises direct regulatory supervision of the industry, had no impact on regulatory transparency. These results hold in various specifications and robustness checks. Our research contributes to research in China's political system by empirically and explicitly demonstrating the dominating power of the CCP.

Much has been written about what makes political parties form, persist, change and die. One factor often brought into this discussion is the availability of resources in general and of state financing of political parties in particular. However, an empirical link at the aggregate level is difficult to establish because of various issues of conceptualization, operationalization and measurement. Working at the party level and taking into consideration that state funding provides important resources that make running in elections and achieving a party's electoral target more likely, this article provides empirical support for the claim that parties who (anticipate to be or) are being funded by the state have a higher chance of forming and surviving in an independent format in the party system. Based on a comparison of 14 post-communist party systems, the main conclusion of the article is that the survival rate for such parties exceeds the survival rate for the non-publicly funded ones in almost all cases. A second, novel and more particular, finding is that parties who find themselves outside parliament, but above the payout threshold, display higher survival rates than parties who are below it.