By Ningjie Zhu
In our daily lives, there’s an app for almost everything—ordering food, tracking fitness, managing work. But what if there was an app for political loyalty? For the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), this isn’t a hypothetical question. It’s a core part of its strategy for governing in the 21st century. Through a massive initiative known as “Intelligent Party Building” (智慧党建), the CCP is rolling out digital platforms to manage, educate, and discipline its 95 million members.
My research explores how this digital push is reshaping the very nature of power within the Party. It is not just about efficiency; it is about deepening control. The Party aims to achieve two seemingly contradictory goals at once: build a more modern, responsive bureaucracy while simultaneously reinforcing absolute top-down authority. This creates a new, powerful dynamic of internal governance in the digital age.
The Two Faces of State Power: An Iron Fist and a Nervous System
Despotic Power: This is the “iron fist”—the state’s ability to make decisions and issue commands without negotiation. It’s top-down, coercive, and absolute. Think of it as power over society.
Infrastructural Power: This is the state’s “nervous system”—its actual capacity to penetrate society and carry out its plans. It relies on logistics, institutions, and technology to get things done. It is power through society.
Historically, regimes were often strong in one of the types of power but weak in the other. For example, an ancient empire might have immense despotic power (the emperor’s word is law) but weak infrastructural power (it is hard to actually collect taxes in a remote province). Modern democracies often have strong infrastructural power (efficient services) but weak despotic power (leaders are constrained by law and public opinion).
The CCP under Xi Jinping, however, is trying to maximize both. “Intelligent Party Building” is a prime example of this ambition, using digital tools to build a highly efficient administrative nervous system that also serves a powerful iron fist.
Inside the “Party-Building Cloud Platforms”
So, what do these apps and platforms actually do? While they vary locally, they generally focus on four areas:
Digital Dossiers and Performance Tracking: The traditional paper dossier (dossier), a lifelong file tracking a person’s political behavior, is going digital. These platforms create a permanent, tamper-proof record of a member’s participation in Party activities. Poor performance can trigger warnings, public criticism, or even negative entries in their file that could impact their career.
Ideological Education on Demand: The platforms deliver a constant stream of ideological content. This includes live-streamed lectures, articles from state media, and materials from official education campaigns. To ensure engagement, members are often tested with gamified quizzes where they can earn points and compete on leaderboards.
Gamifying Loyalty: The platforms borrow heavily from popular apps to keep users engaged. For instance, the famous “Study the Great Nation” (学习强国) app rewards users with points for reading articles about Xi Jinping or watching videos of his speeches. This subtly transforms political indoctrination into a daily habit, much like checking social media.
Digitizing Bureaucracy: Beyond ideology, these platforms are also practical office tools. They handle routine tasks like paying Party fees, managing announcements, and approving leave requests. By integrating with daily work, they ensure the Party’s presence is not just a separate political activity but is embedded into the fabric of everyday professional life.
A Double-Edged Sword of Digital Control
The true innovation here is not the technology itself—many of these features mimic existing corporate collaboration tools like Ding Talk or WeChat Work. The innovation lies in its dual-use application for political control.
The very same feature that enhances infrastructural power (e.g., efficiently collecting data to provide personalized educational content) is used to wield despotic power (e.g., using that same data to monitor and punish members for insufficient engagement). A tool designed for convenience also becomes a tool for surveillance. A gamified quiz that makes learning “fun” is also a mechanism for ideological enforcement.
Ultimately, the CCP’s push for “Intelligent Party Building” reveals a fundamental tension. While it seeks to modernize its internal management to become more efficient and responsive, it remains unwilling to give up the coercive, top-down control that defines its Leninist roots. The result is a system where the iron fist is now wearing a digital glove, able to reach further and grip tighter than ever before.
Ningjie Zhu is a researcher at the Center for Advanced Security, Strategic and Integration Studies (CASSIS) at the University of Bonn. You can reach him at nzhu[at]uni-bonn.de.