Political Discourse, Debate, and Decisionmaking in the Chinese Communist Party

Excerpt:  “The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) employs a system of coded speech to communicate policy directives to its implementing bureaucracy. This coded speech is governed by rules and exists in a specific cultural context, potentially confounding those unfamiliar with that context. CCP leaders deploy these codes through the party propaganda system to issue policy directives, and the codes take the form of slogans, linguistic formulations, or key phrases, collectively called tifa. In this report, the author analyzes tifa by providing an overview of the role and relative authority of the information systems the CCP uses to develop, build consensus around, and promulgate tifa.”