“Common prosperity,” or gongtong fuyu (共同富裕), is a phrase that has been used by successive generations of Chinese leaders to express the overall goal of economic policy-making in terms that emphasize broad benefits for the people of China, while at the same time legitimizing the specific political agendas pursued by the top leader — in the process shoring up the legitimacy of their leadership. As such, the content of “common prosperity has changed rather dramatically over the decades, from the push for agricultural breakthroughs in the era of the people’s communes, to Deng Xiaoping’s justification of letting a few get rich first. In the Xi era, the phrase has become synonymous with efforts to curtail excessive wealth, crack down on monopoly behavior, address income inequality, and promote “people-centered development.”

In the context of Chinese political discourse, the word “core,” or hexin (核心), is a term with a history spanning decades that aggrandizes the top leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and emphasizes their singular power and legitimacy. The label is not applied casually by party-state media, and when used in official documents and reports by central-level media, points clearly to claims of power by the top leader and their acolytes. Since 2016 the term has been applied on a regular basis to refer to Xi Jinping.

Broadly speaking, the term “hostile forces” or didui shili (敌对势力), is used by the Chinese Communist Party to describe perceived external threats to political stability and the integrity of the regime. But it can also point to perceived internal threats – and serve to broad-brush these threats, including dissent, as being somehow extrinsic to the system. While the term has a history of being used in political discourse to signal alertness to threats in foreign and domestic affairs, it often involves the exploitation of allegations of foreign threat to justify the political persecution of opponents at home.

The term “discourse power,” or huayuquan (话语权), today encompasses the broader goal of the Chinese Communist Party to achieve greater influence globally in the setting of economic and political agendas, and in the shaping of global public opinion – all seen as closely related to China’s comprehensive national power (CNP). The term draws from international normative notions of “discursive power” as found in media and political studies, understood as the relative ability of actors in political communication spaces to amplify certain topics and frames and influence policies and political processes. In a contemporary Chinese political context, however, the notion of “discourse power” is closely intertwined with the CCP’s historical narrative of power and legitimacy – the idea that China has suffered reputationally at the hands of the West and its dominance of public opinion, and that the Party can lead an historic return of the Chinese people to cultural and political centrality.

Petitioning, or xinfang (信访), which literally translates as “letters and visits,” is a system dating back under the Chinese Communist Party to 1949 that essentially allows Chinese to lodge complaints with the government and seek redress for wrongs, flaws and inefficiencies. The practice has much deeper roots as well within China’s dynastic history, when it took various forms. In early 2022, the government introduced an amended Regulation on Complaints and Letters (信访工作条例) that pledged to “improve the quality and efficiency of handling initial letters and visits,” but also vowed to deal with “cross-level petitioning” (越级上访), raising the question of whether complaints from citizens might become mired in the local jurisdictions that originated their problems.

The Chinese Communist Party’s conception of the rule of law – fazhi (法治) or yifa zhiguo (依法治国), which literally means “law-based governance” or ruling the country in accordance with the law – has very little in common with the liberal democratic concept. In China’s “socialist rule of law system with Chinese characteristics” the legal system is under the Party’s leadership and supervision. The CCP ultimately sees the law as a tool to ensure stability and order, as well as being a means to justify and maintain Party rule. Arguably, fazhi is so different from the international principle of rule of law that it should perhaps not be translated as “rule of law”.