The police in China derive their authority from the state through a centralized system. Applying a PESTEL analysis provides insight into the historical and contemporary considerations that have established police authority and legitimacy in the country and also provides context for China's policing system in the transnational landscape. The political, economic, social, technological, environmental, and legal factors that have directly impacted the legitimacy of China's police are described below. Political The People's Republic of China (PRC) is a one-party communist state. After World War II, China went through a period of civil war, which led communist leader Mao Zedong to establish mainland China as a communist country in 1949. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was rooted in a theory of class struggle and in the dictatorship of the proletariat. In Marxist political thought, this refers to a state in which the working class controls the government; however, China's government is modeled after the Stalinist model, where other political parties are prohibited from engaging in the governing process. In effect, this means that the CCP is the government, and the party leaders are the leaders of the country, with most people absent from any active participation in politics. The authority of the individual parts of the bureaucracy comes from the central government. This top-down power structure is the same for the police. (CIA World Factbook) With China's adoption of the USSR's communist model of government came Soviet assistance in creating police forces. The first police forces in the PRC largely resembled the Soviet Militsiya police systems. In the early years of the PRC, the police not only ... middle of paper ... evidence is collected and how suspects are interrogated. While in theory these reflect many of the protections found in Western countries, the results are different. For example, China's justice system has a conviction rate of 98%. Additional meso-level legitimacy considerations that fall outside the framework of a PESTEL analysis focus on transnational relations between China and other countries. China faces pressure from other developed countries (e.g. Western Europe and the United States) to address human rights issues in its country. While these countries have taken few punitive actions against China due to the interdependencies of their economies, such as China's. China is a permanent member of the UN Security Council and participates in INTERPOL; however, China has not submitted a declaration of jurisdiction to the International Court of Justice.