ABSTRACT
Political elites of the Chinese Communist Party carried out factional model-making to contest the party line in public from the late Mao Zedong era in the 1960s until Xi Jinping came to power in 2012. Party elites groomed factional models that embodied, respectively, left- and right-leaning visions for socialist transformation and political reform. By suppressing factional model-making, Xi has strengthened party discipline. This has come at a cost: the Party can no longer benefit from the positive effects that factional model-making contributes to regime resilience. However, this is not an issue to Xi, who believes that regime resilience rests fundamentally on his strongman rule, rather than collective leadership
