Giri Deshingkar Memorial Lectures are instituted in the memory of Professor Giri Deshingkar, former Director of the CSDS and founder member of the Institute of Chinese Studies. Earlier speakers in the series include Professors Prasenjit Duara, Wang Gungwu, Tan Chung, Hamashita Takeshi, Ashwani Saith, Richard Appelbaum, Elizabeth Perry, Wang Hui, Shu-mei Shih, Andrew J. Nathan and David Shambaug.

The Communist Party of China (CPC) is not withering away as predicted by some Western scholars. On the contrary, in recent years, the Party has centralized and strengthened its rule over China.  At the same time Party membership has changed. Today workers and peasants only account for only 1/3 of total Party membership compared to 2/3 when the PRC was established.  Instead, new strata and groups such as technical and management personnel have evolved.  The lecture focused on how the CPC has evolved from a mass to an elite Party and in the process it has taken over the state resulting in a merger and overlap of Party and government positions and functions, thereby abandoning Deng Xiaoping’s ambidextrous policy goals of separating the Party and government.

Kjeld Erik Brødsgaard is Professor at the Department of International Economics and Management and Director of the China Studies programme at the Copenhagen Business School.  He has held visiting research appointments in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and the USA.

He is the author or editor of 30 books, most recently Chinese Politics as Fragmented Authoritarianism: Earthquakes, Energy and Environment (2016), From Accelerated Accumulation to Socialist Market Economy in China: Economic Discourse and Development From 1953 to the Present (2017) and Critical Readings on the Chinese Communist Party (2017).

Thursday, 22 March 2018
5.30-7.30 pm, Multipurpose Hall
India International Centre, New Delhi