The National Supervision Commission: A “Subaltern History”

This article explores the history of state supervision organs in the People's Republic of China (PRC) from the early attempts to establish supervision organizations in communist revolutionary base areas to the founding of the National Supervision Commission in 2018. In the PRC today, the power to supervise the activity of state organs is not autonomous but is rather part of the disciplinary powers of the Chinese Communist Party. This type of institutional arrangement does not result from any predetermined path of historical and institutional development. While institutions should ideally work as predicted or dictated by distinct political philosophies or by models of institutional design, their development can in practice be shaped by bureaucratic politics and by variables endogenous to both political philosophy and institutional modeling.