ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the contemporary Chinese government is no longer imperially bureaucratic, and especially that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is a Leninist political party. It introduces regional governance in China as related to the issues raised and analyzed by the study, and describes contemporary Chinese regional leaders, their leaderships, their roles in Chinese politics, and the meaningfulness of the case selection. A significant characteristic of Chinese politics is that the Communist Party is central to all governmental organizations. China's government is a one-party system with minimal popular participation; success therefore depends on the energy and ideas of its leaders. Studies show that certain social contexts and institutional causes can generate a new group of political elites who tend to have more unified interests as a result of such elite integration. In Chinese politics, such a social context was the Communist Revolution in which CCP revolutionaries defeated the Nationalists and became the new group of political elites in China.
