ABSTRACT
Like all communist parties in power, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has developed a system to manage the selection of leaders of public organizations. The system is based on Leninist principles of party organization and state-society relations, the most important of which is that the party holds a monopoly of power.1 The system, developed in the context of a centrally planned economy and disabled or non-existent civil society, is arguably the defining characteristic of the party. The principal function of the system is to maintain the CCP in power. Because the party continues to exercise monopoly power in China, arguably the nomenklatura system has performed very well. For the past 50 years or more the CCP has been able to select China’s top leaders more or less unchallenged.
