Leadership and Authority in the Chinese Communist Party: Perspectives from the 1950s
Author(s)
Sullivan, Lawrence R.
Abstract
This work uses recently published party history materials in China and the press from the 1950s, to examine elite conflicts over the role of the leader in Chinese Communist Party decision-making. Whereas Chinese historiography and much Western scholarship believes that Mao’s assertion of personal power did not become an issue until the 1959 Lushan Plenum, this most fundamental conflict over political authority and policy-making procedure in the CCP’s top councils began much earlier in the post-1949 period. This early conflict, which was played out in the press and major party debates and decisions, is then interpreted in terms of the current post-Mao leadership’s effort to establish institutional controls on the single leader’s authority to prevent yet another degeneration into a Mao-like despotism.
