The significance of domestic politics can never be underestimated because if there is one dimension that could potentially threaten the current phase of China's rise it is this. Conversely, the rise of China is equally dependent, if not more, on the smooth functioning of the political system. These two processes are interrelated and in turn dependent on the current political leadership as well as people. Since the stability of Chinese political system is critical to its rise, there is an imperative to gauge the contemporary domestic politics as accurately as possible eschewing any kind of ideological or any other lenses. The enormity of the complex nature of Chinese political system is captured best by Michel Oksenberg when he posited that it “defies encapsulation in a single short phrase. Such previous depictions as “totalitarianism”, a “Leninist party state”, “fragmented authoritarianism”, “sot authoritarianism”, or “bureaucratic capitalism”, miss the complexity of Chinese state structure today.”

Given this complexity, this chapter focuses primarily on three central themes of ideas, institutionalisation and issues that have been determining the dynamics of Chinese polity in the last three decades. It also offers some concluding remarks highlighting the problems and future of domestic politics in China and their implications for India. What is distinctly common to these three is the continual change that has been taking place in a gradualist manner. Equally interesting is that they have been changing both well beyond, for some, and below for others, of any conceivable imagination of several shades of sinologists, thus making the existing analytical tools inadequate thereby requiring us to be flexible as Tony Saich quite aptly compares the Chinese political system to a moving target.