For foreign observers, China is often perceived as a closed political system, marked by opacity in decision-making and one-party rule, which creates clearly demarcated boundaries between those included and excluded from power. Upon closer inspection, however, there are designated spaces for the political engagement of Chinese elites outside the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), such as the so-called ‘democratic parties and groups’ (DPGs). Closely supervised by the CCP’s United Front Work Department, they operate in what Dr Rudolph calls the peripheries of power, bridging the divide between the party-state and non-party elites. This talk examines the symbolic and practical functions of these peripheral organizations in China’s political system and presents a brief history of China’s DPGs, from their institutionalization in the 1940s to their current reevaluation under Xi Jinping. Drawing on theories of the spatial and relational dimensions of power, the talk sheds light on understudied political structures and their role in stabilizing the political regime. It thus contributes to the existing research on space in authoritarian contexts, which often neglects coopting mechanisms and focuses either on the spatiality of anti-hegemonic contentious politics or on the state’s repressive ordering of space. Understanding China’s DPGs as networked structures grounded in spatial realities and imaginaries contributes to a clearer understanding of their current reconfiguration within new Chinese policies of ‘whole-process people’s democracy’.

Henrike Rudolph is a lecturer at the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Göttingen. Trained in Sinology and Political Science, she completed her PhD at Hamburg University and Fudan University, Shanghai, in 2017. Rudolph worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Chair of Contemporary Chinese Studies at Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen-Nuremberg. Before coming to Göttingen, she held an interim professorship at the University of Heidelberg. Rudolph’s research interests include the transcultural exchange of knowledge and skills, educational thought, and network approaches to social and political history, with a focus on twentieth-century China. Her current book project examines the history and current political function of the Jiusan Society, one of China’s so-called ‘democratic parties and groups’.