Qiu's second focus was combating corruption and mistrust between the population and the government. In the late 1990s, he instituted two unprecedented measures to make the selection of officials more open and competitive. One was to post upcoming official appointments in advance of the final decisions to allow for a public comment period. The other was the introduction of a two-tier voting system that enabled villagers to vote among party members for their preferred candidates for certain positions. The local party committee then picked between the top two vote getters.

Qiu initially met tremendous resistance from the local bureaucracy and population. But today, he is credited with turning one of the country's most backward regions into a vibrant urban center of commerce and manufacturing. Other poor regions have adopted many of his economic policy experiments. Moreover, the public commenting period has been widely adopted across China. Competitive voting is finding its way into ever-higher levels of the party hierarchy. Qiu has been personally rewarded, too, moving rapidly up the ladder: to vice governor of Jiangsu Province, mayor of Kunmin, vice party secretary of Yunnan Province, and now an alternate member of the Central Committee.

Even if critics accept that the Chinese government is adaptable and meritocratic, they still question its legitimacy. Westerners assume that multiparty elections are the only source of political legitimacy. Because China does not hold such elections, they argue, the CCP's rule rests on inherently shaky ground. Following this logic, critics have predicted the party's collapse for decades, but no collapse has come. The most recent version of the argument is that the CCP has maintained its hold on power only because it has delivered economic growth -- so-called performance legitimacy.

No doubt, performance is a major source of the party's popularity. In a poll of Chinese attitudes published by the Pew Research Center in 2011, 87 percent of respondents noted satisfaction with the general direction of the country, 66 percent reported significant progress in their lives in the past five years, and a whopping 74 percent said they expected the future to be even better. Performance legitimacy, however, is only one source of the party's popular support. Much more significant is the role of Chinese nationalism and moral legitimacy.

When the CCP built the Monument to the People's Heroes at the center of Tiananmen Square in 1949, it included a frieze depicting the struggles of the Chinese to establish the People's Republic. One would expect the CCP, a Marxist-Leninist party, to have its most symbolic political narrative begin with communism -- the writing of The Communist Manifesto, for example, or perhaps the birth of the CCP in 1921. Instead, the first carving of the frieze depicts an event from 1839: the public burning of imported opium by the Qing dynasty's imperial minister, Lin Zexu, which triggered the first Opium War. China's subsequent loss to the British inaugurated the so-called century of humiliation. In the following hundred years, China suffered countless invasions, wars, and famines -- all, in the popular telling, to reach 1949. And today, the Monument to the People's Heroes remains a sacred public site and the most significant symbol of the CCP's national moral authority.

The CCP's role in saving and modernizing China is a far more durable source of its legitimacy than the country's economic performance. It explains why, even at the worst times of the party's rule in the past 63 years, including the disastrous Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, the CCP was able to keep the support of mainstream Chinese long enough for it to correct its mistakes. China's recent achievements, from economic growth to space exploration, are only strengthening nationalist sentiments in the country, especially among the youth. The party can count on their support for decades to come.

A final type of staying power comes from repression, which China watchers in the West claim is the real force behind the CCP. They point to censorship and the regime's harsh treatment of dissidents, which undoubtedly exist. Still, the party knows very well that general repression is not sustainable. Instead, it seeks to employ smart containment. The strategy is to give the vast majority of people the widest range possible of personal liberties. And today, Chinese people are freer than at any other period in recent memory; most of them can live where they want and work as they choose, go into business without hindrance, travel within and out of the country, and openly criticize the government online without retaliation. Meanwhile, state power focuses on containing a small number of individuals who have political agendas and want to topple the one-party system. As any casual observer would know, over the last ten years, the quantity of criticism against the government online and in print has increased exponentially -- without any reprisals. Every year, there are tens of thousands of local protests against specific policies. Most of the disputes are resolved peacefully. But the government deals forcefully with the very few who aim to subvert China's political system, such as Liu Xiaobo, an activist who calls for the end of single-party rule and who is currently in jail.