Partito ed Esercito nella Cina di Xi Jinping. La comparazione con il precedente sovietico e le implicazioni per l’evoluzione del sistema politico cinese

The study of civil-military relations in the People’s Republic of China underwent a major shift in the 1990s. Before then, scholars tended to look at China as a case within the broader universe of party-army relations in socialist states. Since the 1990s, however, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the study of China’s civil-military relations has moved away from comparison with other Socialist states and the Soviet Union in particular. Contrary to this consolidated trend, the argument advanced in this article is that comparison with the Soviet case remains crucial for understanding civil-military relations in Xi Jinping’s China. This argument is presented by reintroducing the “party-in-uniform” model devel- oped in the 1980s for the comparative study of party-army relations in socialist states. It suggests that China’s transition from “symbiotic” to “coalitional” relations over the past three decades is in fact coherent with the historical trajectory of the Soviet case. From this point of view, interpreting civil-military relations in Xi Jinping’s China as a sheer return to the past – as often assumed in the metaphor of Xi as a new Mao – may be misleading. This has broader implications for the study of China’s political system, as the article concludes by formulating two general hypotheses on the relationship between institutionalization, power centralization and political conflict in Xi’s China.