Dissertation

The Personalization of Power and its Impact on Law-making in Authoritarian China: from Jiang to Xi

My dissertation examines how a leader’s personalization of power—the process by which a single ruler concentrates authority at the expense of other elites and of the institutions that brought him to power—reshapes the law-making institutions of an authoritarian state and the laws they produce. Personalist rule is spreading around the world, yet existing scholarship has largely traced its consequences for repression, interstate conflict, and the coercive apparatus, leaving its imprint on legislatures and legislation comparatively unexamined. Using China’s transition from the collective leadership of the Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao eras to the personalized rule of Xi Jinping (1989–2024) as an extended case, and drawing on original data that I collected on the reorganization of the central Party apparatus, the legislative process, and the full corpus of national laws between 1989 and 2024, I develop and test a unifying claim: personalization is not a regime-level switch that flips at a single moment, but an uneven and sequential process that spreads across institutions over time. As it spreads, personalization can turn the legislature into an instrument of consolidation rather than a constraint on the ruler.

The first empirical chapter makes a conceptual and measurement contribution. Applying the leading indicators of personalist rule, I show that Xi’s China is best classified as a personalist, or personalist/one-party, regime rather than a conventional one-party regime. Xi scores at the top on “one-man rule” and personalized decision-making, though below Mao’s Cultural-Revolution peak on deinstitutionalization, cult of personality, and dynasticism, and well above every other post-Mao leader, including Deng Xiaoping. More importantly, I document that Xi’s personalization proceeded unevenly across the Party-state. He brought the institutionally weaker legislature under personal control before the far more powerful State Council, and he did so through a distinctive mechanism: converting ad hoc Leading Small Groups into permanent, hierarchical Commissions that he chaired, thereby relocating decisions away from the Politburo, where he was formally only one member among equals. The 2018 creation of the Central Comprehensive Law-based Governance Commission, together with the folding of the State Council’s legislative office into the Ministry of Justice, marks the point at which Xi finally brought the executive’s drafting apparatus under personal control. Because personalization arrives at different institutions at different times, I argue that it must be measured at the level of the drafting institution rather than the country-year.

The second empirical chapter turns to the legislature itself and challenges the influential view that authoritarian legislatures constrain rulers by forcing them to share power. Through theory-testing process tracing, I argue that under Xi’s personalization, the National People’s Congress became an enabling institution that helped him consolidate power rather than a binding one that checked it. Four pieces of evidence support the enabling account over the binding account: as Xi personalized power, the authority to draft laws shifted from State Council ministries to the NPC Standing Committee; the chain of command between Xi and the bodies delegated to draft law shortened; the legislature’s assertiveness declined; and laws increasingly bore Xi’s personal imprint rather than reflecting the collective preferences of the Party. The chapter therefore recovers a temporal dynamic that country-year comparisons necessarily miss: the same legislature can enable or constrain depending on where the ruler stands in the personalization process.

The third empirical chapter asks how personalization changes the substance of the laws the legislature produces. I built a new dataset of the 247 national laws in force through 2024 and hand-coded 5,471 articles across 221 of them, distinguishing each law’s stated basis from its operative content across nine substantive characteristics. Rather than dating personalization to a single calendar year, I code each law by whether the institution that drafted it had already been personalized by Xi at the time of drafting. Laws produced by personalized institutions place markedly and robustly greater weight on national security—both as the stated basis of a law and in its detailed content—and greater emphasis on ideology in their content. These findings survive the most demanding specifications and a battery of robustness and falsification checks. A second tier of characteristics—nationalism and the upholding of the Party’s leadership as a law’s basis, and anti-corruption in its content—is significant once law category and issue area are controlled but attenuates once a linear time trend nearly collinear with personalization is added. I find no evidence that personalized institutions de-emphasize economic development in legislation, and only weak, specification-dependent support for social stability, sovereignty, and environmental protection.

Taken together, the three chapters tell a coherent story about how “rule by law,” rather than the rule of law, operates under personalist rule. An aspiring autocrat first captures the institutions that write law, then bends both the legislative process and the content of legislation toward his securitized and ideological priorities, all while borrowing the vocabulary of legality to claim legitimacy and durability. The dissertation contributes to the literature on authoritarian personalization, authoritarian legislatures, and authoritarian legality by treating personalization as an institution-level, over-time process and by tracing its downstream effects on what laws say and what they require the state to do. The mechanism is not specific to a Leninist party-state: the concluding chapter argues that it should be observable wherever power personalizes around a nominal legislature, with Putin’s Russia and Erdoğan’s Turkey as natural comparison cases. Substantively, the findings illuminate how today’s China is governed differently from the China of two decades ago, and how law has become one of the most potent tools an autocrat can use to make the regime safer for himself.