- 期刊
What Analyses of Factional Politics of China Might Miss When the Market Becomes a Political Battlefield: The Telecommunication Sector as a Case in Point
摘要
The end of the Deng Xiaoping 鄧小平 era in 1997 prompted the Chinese party-state to proceed toward more oligarchic politics. To date, scholars have generally adopted factional politics as a key to understanding the intraparty competition among top leaders who are categorized into different factional groups, such as the princelings, the Shanghai gang, the tuanpai 團派, the mishu party 秘書黨, and the Tsinghua clique 清華幫. One dimension that attracts scant attention, however, is how the emergent bureaucratic market has penetrated and intervened in contemporary factional politics. In question is a small circle of powerful bureaucratic bourgeois who are children, close relatives, or proteges of top political leaders. Using the telecommunication sector as a case in point, the present article explores the facade of the vibrant market of family conglomerates and patron-client networks that are also actively involved in jostling for political power.