Governing the “Constitutional Vacuum” – Federalism, Rule of Law, and Politburo Politics in China

Abstract

By focusing on the underlit corners of authoritarian governance in China, this article challenges the thesis that constitutions matter to authoritarian regimes because they provide solutions for problems of governance. We argue to the contrary: the constitution appeals to the Chinese Communist Party (the Party or the ccp ) because it does not provide solutions to fundamental issues of governance. Instead, such issues are kept out of the constitution so that they can be addressed by the Party through other regulatory mechanisms outside of the constitutional realm. In support of our thesis, we provide a unique review of the most up-to-date authoritative research on three key constitutional issues: central-local relations, party-state relations and power relations in the Politburo. These three issues correspond to three distinctive fields in China studies that were treated only in isolation but here we consider them together under the single framework of authoritarian constitutional governance.