Watching the Number Ones: The Centre’s ‘Opinion’ on Overseeing the Party’s Powerful

By Holly Snape

On June 1 Xinhua publicly released the “中共中央关于加强对"一把手"和领导班子监督的意见Central Committee Opinion on Strengthening Oversight of ‘Number Ones’ and Leadership Groups” that were promulgated on March 27, 2021.

I wanted to do a deeper dive and so I reached out to Holly Snape. She is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Glasgow. Before moving to Scotland, she was a fellow at the Research Centre for Chinese Politics at Peking University’s School of Government where she studied Chinese domestic politics and political discourse under Prof. Yu Keping. Her current research focuses on the relationship between the Communist Party and its state, and you can follow her on Twitter here. In January 2021 she wrote Analysis of the revised Regulations on the Rights of Party Members: New-Era Obligations in the Name of Rights? for Sinocism.

What follows is her detailed analysis of the Opinion and what it means for the Party and its cadres going forward. This is another in what I want to make a …