Stability maintenance ( zh, , p=Wéiwěn, s=维稳) is a term used by the

Chinese Communist Party The Communist Party of China (CPC), also translated into English as Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is the founding and One-party state, sole ruling party of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Founded in 1921, the CCP emerged victorious in the ...

(CCP) to refer to all-round control by the authorities to maintain the established ruling order and prevent protest and dissent that may challenge its legitimacy or rule in the

People's Republic of China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

History

The term ''weiwen'' was first used in ''

People's Daily The ''People's Daily'' ( zh, s=人民日报, p=Rénmín Rìbào) is the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It provides direct information on the policies and viewpoints of the CCP in multiple lan ...

'', the official newspaper of the

Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party The Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, officially the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, is the Central committee, highest organ when the National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, national congress is not ...

, in 2002 in the explanation accompanying a photograph of the

People's Armed Police ) , abbreviation = PAP ("People's Armed Police") CAPF ("Chinese Armed Police Force"), formerly abbreviated''Wujing'' ( zh , s = 武警 , p = Wǔjǐng , l = Armed Police , labels = no ), or WJ as on vehicle license plates , patch ...

. It was driven by the CCP's reaction to the

Revolutions of 1989 The revolutions of 1989, also known as the Fall of Communism, were a revolutionary wave of liberal democracy movements that resulted in the collapse of most Communist state, Marxist–Leninist governments in the Eastern Bloc and other parts ...

and the increase in " mass incidents" in the 1990s. Following the

1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre The Tiananmen Square protests, known within China as the June Fourth Incident, were student-led demonstrations held in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, lasting from 15 April to 4 June 1989. After weeks of unsuccessful attempts between t ...

Deng Xiaoping Deng Xiaoping also Romanization of Chinese, romanised as Teng Hsiao-p'ing; born Xiansheng (). (22 August 190419 February 1997) was a Chinese statesman, revolutionary, and political theorist who served as the paramount leader of the People's R ...

famously stated, "stability overrides everything." During the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the Chinese state began to emphasize stability maintenance, and the term reached new heights of popularity in Chinese media. Under the general secretaryship of Xi Jinping, stability maintenance became a key rationale for the state's

mass surveillance Mass surveillance is the intricate surveillance of an entire or a substantial fraction of a population in order to monitor that group of citizens. The surveillance is often carried out by Local government, local and federal governments or intell ...

system. In the 2020s,

large language model A large language model (LLM) is a language model trained with self-supervised machine learning on a vast amount of text, designed for natural language processing tasks, especially language generation. The largest and most capable LLMs are g ...

s, such as those produced by DeepSeek, have increased in usage for the CCP's stated goal of stability maintenance and " public opinion guidance."

Definition

According to the definition of the ''People's Daily'', the fundamental purpose of stability maintenance is to safeguard the fundamental interests of the masses. When law enforcement officers maintain public order, they must first ensure that they have good order; when they defend social justice, they must first demonstrate that they can handle matters fairly; when they crack down on illegal activities, they must first strictly abide by the law. Only by maintaining stability in this way can the rights and interests of the masses be safeguarded to the greatest extent possible. Maintaining stability is an important indicator of the performance of party and government officials in mainland China.{{cite news , author=王方杰 , date=2009-05-27 , title=河北"维稳"纳入政绩考核影响地方稳定一票否决 , url=http://news.163.com/09/0527/04/5A9U2V0I0001124K.html , url-status=dead , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090602135136/http://news.163.com/09/0527/04/5A9U2V0I0001124K.html , archive-date=2009-06-02 , access-date=2012-01-19 , work=

, language=zh

References

Chinese political catchphrases Human rights in China

History

Definition

See also

References