Virtue holds societies together. It obligates individuals to realise their duty to others, akin to a glue for social cohesion. Shared conceptions of virtue also cultivate both conscientious citizens and responsible leaders by establishing foundational guidelines of benevolent conduct. Without virtue, duty towards others quickly deteriorates, alongside the bonds linking political communities together. Philosophical luminaries of the past, like Aristotle and Tocqueville, grasped this reality intimately while observing ancient Greece and Jacksonian America.
Today, many critics – chief among them political theorist Patrick Deneen – have noticed that the binding force of virtue has been eroded by liberal democratic regimes. Specifically, the West’s championing of rights-based individualism seems to actively promote not a unified standard for virtuous behaviour, but a disjointed elevation of the individual’s selfish desires. They observe that such an embrace of a pluralistic definition of virtue has emboldened citizens to shirk their duty towards the larger community. In the eyes of its fiercest critics, liberalism corrodes morally upright communities when it refuses to actively define virtue in its people apart from licentious liberty. To them, such a system abandoned the fundamental purpose of politics–virtuous solidarity.
Maybe so. However, every critic of the Western liberal order must consider what happens when political power seizes the authority to define virtue. For there is a reason that liberalism grew to value personal freedoms over robust virtue instituted by top-down measures. To illuminate this further, it will be fruitful to examine a modern state which explicitly defines and inculcates virtue into its people: the People’s Republic of China.
China’s ruling party, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), has very much been in the business of defining virtue for its people, albeit with fluctuating intensity since the People’s Republic of China’s founding in 1949. As the vanguard of a Marxist-Leninist regime, the Party provides a robust definition of virtue, which at its core, preaches that the good man will remain politically loyal to the Party and its ideology.
China relented briefly on its infatuation with virtue after the death of Mao Zedong – who had led the regime for its first 27 years. Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, viewed with disillusion his predecessor’s obsession with virtue, as he himself was purged multiple times from Party leadership on allegations of moral failures. Naturally, Deng, and subsequent Chinese reformers, downplayed the importance of ideological loyalty and Marxist-Leninist virtues for pragmatic, economic objectives. It seemed that after the economic reform initiatives in the late 1970s, the Chinese citizen could increasingly pursue his own notion of the good life without reprimand from the Party.
Today, pragmatism and its liberalising tendencies have gradually lost their allure to the Chinese leadership, most notably to the current paramount leader, Xi Jinping. Under Xi’s rule, Beijing has returned to its march towards ‘virtuocracy’ – a term scholar Susan Shirk coined as a regime in which the state monopolises moral authority and promotes individuals who embody its centrally defined moral ideals. Even more notably, Xi Jinping and his entourage have weaponised virtue within the political promotion process of the CCP in order to defend their own political rule, specifically through their control of the Party’s Organisation Department.
The Organisation Department is the Party’s personnel organ responsible for recruiting, training, and recommending cadres to prominent positions. Simply stated, it is the CCP’s virtue scouting department. Behind closed doors, it identifies, interviews, researches, and evaluates cadres in accordance with a strict set of state-sanctioned moral guidelines. To truly understand the Department’s dimensionality, envision the Organisation Department as the human resources department of Chinese elite society; it oversees the appointment of the Chinese executive and legislature, provincial officials, top university leaders, prominent business CEOs, influential media tycoons, and so forth.
Powerful Chinese leaders like Hu Yaobang, Deng Xiaoping, and Hu Jintao all staffed the department with loyalists to cement their hold on power. Clearly, the Organisation Department – a central evaluator of political virtue – is one of the most influential branches of the CCP, an assessment echoed by Congress’ Select Committee on the CCP.
If the department is so crucial for political power in China, how exactly does it function? The CCP intentionally obfuscates this answer. The Party shrouds the Department in mystery and hides it deep away from the public eye, exemplified by its nondescript headquarters in Beijing and its bland website.
Western scholars know that the Organisation Department conducts tasks like interviews, background checks, appointments, and recommendations for party members and prospective candidates. Yet, not much else is clear regarding the Department. Even to Party cadres, the Department looms like a ‘ghostly, undocumented presence’ (as Richard McGregor says in The Party), pulling the strings of political power and being all the more effective due to its mysterious persona.
Nevertheless, one can glean crucial insights into its functioning, and its view of virtue, through an examination of its foundational document. First adopted in 1995, and revised in 2002, 2014, and 2019 by the CCP Central Committee, a document called Regulations on the Selection and Appointment of Party and Government Leading Cadres defines the institutional rules of the game. Within the iterations of the document are hidden the moral guidelines which define the virtuous cadre, and the mechanisms by which the Party-state evaluates virtue for political promotions.
These guidelines reveal one central insight: Xi’s CCP has expanded the definition of political virtue to cover every facet of the Party member’s life. Early guidelines published in 1995 and 2002 sketched the perfect party member as generally adhering to the virtues of Party loyalty, personal integrity, and ideological purity. Yet frequently, such guidelines’ vagueness allowed for flexibility in appealing to economic performance or personal connections for cadre promotion.
Post-Xi guidelines replaced such generalities with a hyperspecific image of the virtuous cadre. The new criteria for the perfect cadre – to be implemented by the Organisation Department – would strike anxiety into the Western, liberal mind. The Department must examine the Party member in all facets of his life, not just his standard exhortations of ideological and political loyalty.
The Department must ensure that individual Party members considered for promotion embody perfection, both publicly and privately. In his vocation, he must have contributed to societal cohesion, cultural flourishing, healthy labour markets, technological innovation, education, public health, and environmental protection. Personally, he must have reasonable spending behaviours, expansive theoretical and philosophic knowledge, ideologically pure relatives, and a stable nuclear family. All this the Organisation Department must determine through an intensive evaluation process. For this process, the Party explicitly directs the Organisation Department to interview spouses, family members, and close friends of the party member in question.
To fulfil its ordained task, the Department must prevail as an omnipresent monitor within the cadre’s life. All of the individual’s contours must be excavated. His individuality must be laid bare, and his family life put on surgical display. His personhood must be outlined by the department’s intensive gaze, in order to evaluate him against the perfect Party cadre. For the department, this is a tall task. Recognising this, the Organisation Department absorbed the Bureau of Civil Service in 2023, a sure sign of its expanding reach.
Little is known about the degree to which the Organisation Department truly adheres to its prescribed criteria of virtue. But, with Xi’s efforts to tighten party control over its cadres, strict adherence can be safely assumed to be the norm.
Furthermore, the expansion of virtue serves as a mechanism to control who enters into the Party’s upper echelon. Specifically, Xi and his entourage wields the Organisation Department as a political tool to minimise the risk of internal rivals emerging from lower Party levels. Selective enforcement easily turns away the unwanted, with the criteria of political virtue being so expansive that it can reasonably bar any party member from power. Thus, for most party members not doted on by the Politburo, promotions to elite positions generally slowed as compared to pre-Xi times – a phenomenon observed by scholars Chien-Wen Kou and Wen-Hsuan Tsai.
The Party’s expansion of political virtue notably stratifies the Communist Party into two groups. Xi and his confidants at the top of the Party guard the levers of power, dismantling previous pipelines funnelling fresh talent into China’s elite ranks like the nation’s Communist Youth League. As such, Xi is actively distancing his own circle from the rest of the Party, even excluding members of already elite ranks through the Organisation Department’s sweeping definition of virtue.
The weaponisation of virtue in the CCP holds insights for the discourse surrounding liberalism: a regime with clear, state-sanctioned definitions of political virtue fundamentally fractures a community, and in this case, the Party. The Chinese State’s articulation of virtue, in theory, should unify cadres in their duty to the Party. In practice, however, elites wield this expansive notion of virtue as a weapon to quash rivals and consolidate power.
This raises a deeper question: who defines and enforces political virtue for a society when virtue seems necessary to political solidarity? Is it the individual, the community, or something in between? Liberalism answers by locating the centre of political virtue in the individual, safeguarding his unalienable rights against encroachment. The CCP, by contrast, subordinates the individual to a collective vision of virtue that is constantly shifting and ultimately controlled by those in power.
As debates regarding liberalism’s relationship to societal cohesion intensify, we must keep the image of China’s Party-state firmly in view. Critical reflection on our own politics is essential, but it cannot be divorced from a sober awareness of the full range of alternatives, and their consequences. In seeking remedies for liberalism’s tendency towards individual atomisation, we must not lurch blindly towards something far worse.
Gabriel Cao graduated from Columbia University and Tel Aviv University in 2025 with a BA in Economics and Psychology. He previously served as a student scholar at the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies and as a research assistant at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, focusing on Chinese foreign policy.