Current Challenges And Reconstruction Of The Communist Party Of China’s Political Legitimacy Basis

Legitimacy plays a critical role in political operation and all of the analytical studies aiming at describing and explaining the operational system of political life pay much attention on it. Thus, Legitimacy has always been the pivot and focus of political science research, in particular since the party government sprang up when the party’s political legitimacy came to a central issue of political studies. The Communist Party of China (CPC) has come into power for over60years and its power legitimacy has been changed for several times. After reformation and opening, while the legitimacy basis construction strategy, that is, performance-based legitimacy had achieved a good effect, its limitation also showed up. In addition, China is right at a crucial juncture of social transition. Therefore, the reconstruction of legitimacy basis becomes an unavoidable and urgent problem to be solved for CPC in order to consolidate its power. The reality demands theoretical researchers to courageously face it. Therefore, The further study of CPC’s legitimacy basis can not only enrich the present theoretical research fruits and deepen the understanding of legitimacy issues and ruling principles, but also help us analyze the challenges faced by our party during the construction of ruling legitimacy basis from a reality perspective so that we can resort some countermeasures in a more active and more sensible way to solve the legitimacy crisis.Any leader who wants to keep a long-term domination needs to think carefully about the legitimacy issue, and thus the legitimacy becomes a prevalent topic that both the Chinese and foreign scholars always pay much attention to. Due to different ages, research purposes and perspectives, different scholars have different understandings about the legitimacy and political legitimacy bases. But in the contemporary era, it is the basic principle of political legitimacy that the ruler can win recognition and the support form the ruled by processing the law or policy. We named the resources political legitimacy base which the rulers need to get the legitimacy. Although political legitimacy bases are not simplex but composite, there is always a main base in different countries or different ages of one country. Such political theories as institution, ideology and governing performance are the main bases of political legitimacy in many countries today and have been the consensus in the political science research.As the party in power of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), CPC needs the political legitimacy base of its own, and should continuously adjust and reconstruct its political legitimacy base as the historical conditions change. Although performance-based legitimacy plays different roles in different periods, it is always an important base of CPC political legitimacy in power throughout the history of PRC. On the whole, both the governing performance and ideological are crucial factors to keep CPC in power at the early stage of PRC. The governing performance began to fade away since the late1950’s under the domination of the ideological and leaders glamour. Performance-based legitimacy has become the strategic choice of CPC to reconstruct its legitimacy basis since reform and opening-up. The performance-based legitimacy has brought huge economic success and social support, but at the same, its limitations become more and more obvious, which turns to be challenges and difficulties for the Party’s governing position. Years of political practice have proved that the construction of legitimacy basis is not once for all. CPC must reconstruct political legitimacy bases according to the changes of the situation so that it can effectively deal with the realistic challenges.