This book provides the most comprehensive analysis of one of the most important issues in contemporary China: the tensions between the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese state institutions. Taking the "neo-institutionalist" approach, Zheng suggests that the Party faces an institutional dilemma: it cannot live with the state, and it cannot live without the state. It is not only conceptually constructive, but analytically imperative to distinguish the Chinese state from the Communist Party. Zheng makes efforts to overcome the tendency toward specialized scholarship at the expense of comparative and systemic understanding.