The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) deploys slogans, linguistic formulations, and key phrases called tifa through the party propaganda system to issue policy directives to the CCP’s implementing bureaucracy and its individual members. In this report, the author identifies four essential characteristics of tifa and analyzes their promulgation in CCP information systems and their function in shaping CCP perceptions, debate, and decisionmaking.

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

Howard Wang

ResearchPublished May 12, 2025

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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. He also identifies four essential characteristics of tifa. The author concludes that, although tifa analysis has specific limitations, it can produce authoritative determinations of what the CCP tells itself it is doing and why and could yield valuable insights into CCP leader perceptions.

Key Findings

Key Findings

  • Tifa have four identifying characteristics: (1) They are politically laden and stated verbatim, (2) they extend along a clear line of authority, (3) they are distributed to official party organs, and (4) they characterize or resolve a dialectical contradiction between competing ideas in the CCP.
  • CCP leaders speak in a code of tifa that is distinct from daily speech to announce collective assessments and new policy determinations. Although this coded speech follows rules specific to the CCP’s cultural context and might not be straightforward to outside observers, it is not secret. Tifa are openly announced to an audience of CCP bureaucrats who are responsible for implementing new policies.
  • CCP leaders discuss and debate tifa in the internal-only neibu system, and they publicly present policies that have achieved ostensible consensus, characterized as tifa, in the gongkai public information sphere through the CCP’s propaganda system.
  • CCP bureaucrats and officials demonstrate loyalty to party leaders by publicly repeating tifa verbatim in a practice called biaotai. A party leadership announcement of a new tifa and bureaucrats’ repetition of the tifa become a call-and-response cycle, and foreign analysts can identify disruptions in that cycle to infer the existence of intraparty disputes.

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RAND Style Manual

Wang, Howard, Political Discourse, Debate, and Decisionmaking in the Chinese Communist Party, RAND Corporation, RR-A3821-1, 2025. As of May 13, 2025: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA3821-1.html

Chicago Manual of Style

Wang, Howard, Political Discourse, Debate, and Decisionmaking in the Chinese Communist Party. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2025. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA3821-1.html.
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This research was independently initiated and conducted within the China Research Center using a gift from philanthropist Michael Tang. This work was conducted by the RAND China Research Center within RAND Global and Emerging Risks.

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