ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) provisional institutions in the making of modern Chinese bureaucracy from the late 1920s to 1966. The CCP mastered two types of extraconstitutional organizations: (1) leading small groups and (2) work teams. These organizations still survive and have become routinized in today's Chinese politics. Based on previously unexamined official documents, this chapter shows that the context of protracted warfare between the 1920s and 1940s shaped the peculiarities of the CCP's military operation and its army's relationship with local society. It was the military peculiarities that compelled the CCP to establish work teams and leading small groups and used them to replace formal Party and government organs’ functions. As the CCP's top leaders restructured the Party and government's organs in response to the international strain of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s, such provisional institutions started having the characteristics of their formal counterparts. These institutions thus came in some regards to outrank the earlier inherited organs and also adopted some of their practices and culture. Between the 1920s and 1966, the junctures and disjunctures between the CCP's formal and provisional institutions were important in how it implemented political campaigns to achieve its goals. This chapter argues that in the context of the Civil War, the Sino-Japanese War, and the Cold War, military threats and anxieties drove the war-habituated CCP to militarize and routinize provisional institutions in its attempt to make policy implementation effective.
