China's Party Congress Power, Legitimacy, and Institutional Manipulation Wu

China's Party CongressPower, Legitimacy, and Institutional Manipulation\nAuthor(s): Guoguang Wu\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom\nImprint: Cambridge University Press\nISBN-13: 9781107082021, 978-1107082021\nSynopsis\nNominally the highest decision-making body in the Chinese Communist Party, the Party Congress is responsible for determining party policy and the selection of China's leaders. Guoguang Wu provides the first analysis of how the Party Congress operates to elect Party leadership and decide Party policy, and explores why such a formal performance of congress meetings, delegate discussions, and non-democratic elections is significant for authoritarian politics more broadly. Taking institutional inconsistency as the central research question, this study presents a new theory of 'mutual contextualization' to reveal how informal politics and formal institutions interact with each other. Wu argues that despite the prevalence of informal pol.