Campaigns are an ordinary part of almost everybody’s political lives. They belong to the common instruments of a society’s toolbox for transformation and change. They aim for attraction and for support of a certain goal. If such support is achieved, it provides the actors behind the campaign with a distinct legitimacy, which carries the air of coming straight from the people.

In the first three decades after the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, political campaigns have not just been occasional events to strive for societal change but one of the main tools to reorganize people, politics and society. They were part of people’s everyday lives. But even since the phase of reform and opening up in the 1980s, campaigns have remained an important means of governance, although frequency and style have changed a lot.

I will explore the various ways in which the Communist Party used campaigns to build a new state and consolidate their control. This I will achieve by first looking into the historical and ideological roots of political campaigns which are closely intertwined with the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Mao Zedong in particular. I will identify in a second step how this manifested in the administrative structure of the Chinese state and a certain style of governance which campaigning is an important part of. Last, I aim to look into the effects of “Chinese-style campaigning”, meaning whether “campaigns” succeed in their claims or are effective in other ways such as gaining popular support.