ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the human rights circumstances surrounding political factions in Communist China. It describes the human rights policies that have influenced the fate of members of various factions. In the case of single-party systems like the People’s Republic of China, factionalism is especially endemic. The first type of Chinese faction, the dyadic or vertical faction, is more commonly understood as the faction of patron-clientelism. This is a faction based on personalism and centered around a single leader. A second type of Chinese Communist party (CCP) faction is the structural opposite of the dyadic faction. This is the faction of horizontal linkages. The fact that the CCP probably will continue to victimize its factional opponents has significance for Westerners only insofar as the violence that inevitably attends such strife threatens not only the continuity of the Communist Chinese state, but its foreign policy and its domestic reforms as well.
