Paradoxically, however, any step towards building a bureaucratic “state apparatus” ( guogjia jiqi 国家机器) can yield unintended consequences for a party desirous of maintaining both political control and popular legitimacy. Such fusion of political powers can in part be seen in the riot of terms used interchangeably to describe central authorities in China in both popular and academic discourses, including “the Chinese government,” “the Chinese Communist Party (CCP),” “the Party,” “the state” and “the party-state.” The Party's ongoing critiques of bureaucratism and formalism unfold in parallel fashion with its efforts to standardize, regularize and institutionalize the state.Īn enduring feature of Leninist regimes is the fusion of the ruling political party and the bureaucratic state. Yet the substance of the Party's concern evolved from commandism and revisionism under Mao, to corruption and formalism during reform. We show that bureaucratism is an umbrella term that expresses the revolutionary Party's anxiety about losing its popular legitimacy. We find striking endurance as well as subtle shifts in the substance of the CCP's anti-bureaucratic ideology. Second, we trace both the continuity and evolution in the Party's anti-bureaucratic rhetoric, taking an interactive approach that combines close reading with computational analysis of the entire corpus of the People's Daily (1947–2020). First, we perform a historical analysis of the Party's anti-bureaucratic ideology, teasing out its substance and emphasizing its roots in and departures from European Marxism and Leninism. We analyse the CCP's anti-bureaucratism through two steps.

An anti-bureaucratic ghost thus dwells in the machinery of China's bureaucratic state. Yet while the revolutionary Party has blasted bureaucratism, its revolutionary regime has had to find a way to coexist with bureaucracy, which is a requisite for effective governance. The Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) ideology, rooted in its foundational struggles, explicitly denounces “bureaucratism” ( guanliaozhuyi) as an intrinsic ailment of bureaucracy.

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