With the Australian and Chinese governments arguing in increasingly shrill tones, has Australia really “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people”? In China’s official view of the world, the Party and the people are one. But is that really true? And how is the Party’s role in society changing in the 21st century?
We talked to Prof David Goodman about the role that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) plays in Chinese society — and that society plays in the CCP. Our regular host Salvatore Babones will be asking him about citizen petitioning in China, how “Party committees” work, and what ordinary people think about the CCP.
Just who is the Communist Party? With more than 90 million members, it can hardly be the monolith that many of us imagine outside China. We’re all familiar with big names like Xi Jinping, but what about local cadres, ordinary professionals, or the Party member next door? Join us as we draw on Prof Goodman’s decades of study of (and life in) contemporary China.
David S.G. Goodman is Professor Emeritus of Chinese Politics at the University of Sydney. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and has served as a senior administrator at the University of Sydney, at UTS, and at Xi’an Jiaotong – Liverpool University (XJTLU) in Suzhou, China.