Exploring Biographical Ties among Party and State Leaders in China: A Social Network Analysis

ABSTRACT

This article offers a new perspective on Chinese elite politics in the Xi Jinping era by overcoming the drawbacks of the factional approach to the study of the Chinese elite. It analyses professional connections among 71 members of the category of party and state leaders of China based on information drawn from their official biographies and compiled by the authors into a single dataset. Four types of centrality – degree, betweenness, closeness, and eigenvector centralities – as well as the Louvain method for community detection, are applied to weighted and unweighted edge lists deriving from the dataset. The results reveal a positive correlation between the eigenvector centrality (unweighted) and the level of the formal political influence of a member of the Chinese elite. A distinct hierarchy of power is observed, with Politburo members and those coming from important areas, such as Shanghai, Fujian, and Zhejiang, ranking at the top. Louvain clustering (weighted) distributes members of the elite across institutional affiliation, while for the unweighted edge list it identifies both territorial and institutional, as well as mixed, clusters. The model reflects the formal political influence of the members of the elite and visualises the existence of informal groups.

KEY WORDS:

• Social networks
• China
• elites
• factions
• Xi Jinping
• Politburo

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Alexey Voskressenski, Ivan Zuenko, Alexey Tseleshchev, and Igor Denisov for their thoughtful comments as well as Ivan Shchedrov, Andrey Fedotov, and Danil Bochkov for their assistance in assembling the dataset.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. “Pekinology” is derived from the term “Kremlinology,” which was based on the literal observation of subtle changes in the political appearances of Soviet leaders.

2. Compare with the concept of guanxi that can roughly be described as a network of one’s personal acquaintances involving “interpersonal, informal, utilitarian, emotional, and moral elements.” In business matters and politics, Chinese people often use trustworthy intermediaries personally known by both parties to establish relationships. Guanxi is also used in power relations to influence decision making (see Ruan 2017, 40, 50, 88–90).

3. Rather than being a geometrical notion, in SNA, distance is the number “steps” one node has to take in order to reach any node in the network. Irrespective of its visible length in the figure, each direct link to a node is counted as one step.

4. At the outset, the algorithm considers each node as a cluster and then merges them for as long as the density of ties within the clusters remains high. The Louvain algorithm stops expanding the clusters (thus decreasing their overall number) at a point when further merging operations are no longer optimal and tend to reduce the density of the detected clusters.

5. While it is perhaps unfair to call the NPC a “rubber stamp,” its role consists mainly in reviewing decisions agreed on in principle by the Party leaders, while the CPPCC is a consultative body dominated by the CCP. For more see Tanner (1995) and Ross and Bekkevold (2016, 32–65).

6. This can also suggest that it was Hu Jintao, the long-time leader of tuanpai, who patronised the promotion of these cadres rather than their group cohesion allowing them to be an influential factional group.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Russian Science Foundation under Grant Number 19-78-10144. The funding source does not affect the collection, processing and interpretation of data or the drawing of conclusions from the data.