ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how the state institutions of the People's Republic of China were established. The first part is mainly about the formal divisions of power in China's constitution. In the second part, the issue of power and the political organization are discussed thoroughly. In Chinese politics this gap between formal structures of governance and the real distribution of political power is of dynamic importance. The new Chinese political constitution embodied the principles of New Democracy, which Mao had first formulated in 1940. The new masters of the country were not just the Chinese Communist Party, but a coalition of progressive forces, who had pledged themselves to fight feudalism, imperialism and bureaucratic capitalism. The form of government was described as the 'people's democratic dictatorship led by the working class, based on the alliance of workers and peasants, and uniting all democratic classes and all nationalities in China'. The Common Programme also instituted democratic centralism.
