Introduction

Abstract

Since the 1960s until Xi Jinping began to discipline the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, party elites cultivated local areas into models of controversial policies to contest the party line in public. This book conceptualizes this informal practice as ‘factional model-making’. It demonstrates that factional model-making enhances regime resilience by strengthening collective leadership, ensuring the deliberation of opposite viewpoints in the policy process, and supplying useful political information to the regime. This chapter reviews the debates on socialism and political reform that shaped and were shaped by factional model-making. It further traces the origins of this practice and investigates why it was tolerated by the Party before Xi. It concludes with the typology of factional models and the book overview.