I am looking for information on how the government if the PRC and CPC work. I know it is complicated and tangled, but I hope someone has tried to make it comprehensive. I'm particularly interested after the Cultural Revolution.
If this isn't historical enough, please direct me to a more appropriate place. Thank you!
Yes. I actually have a great and easily readable book for you on the topic. Look for a copy of The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers by Richard McGregor. McGregor is not a historian, he is a journalist, but the book is an extremely well-researched piece of longform journalism. He looks at how the Party and the State are intertwined entities, how the Party and businesses are intertwined, the structure of the Party (thus, the structure of government), how the military is also controlled by the CPC, corruption, regional branches, and more. It’s really a fascinating book. Basically it is a book about how the PRC’s government operates, and what politics are like. I think you can also get other understandings of governance in the PRC through books that touch on it tangentially, such as Ezra Vogel’s biography of Deng Xiaoping, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China or Mao’s Last Revolution by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals. These are not really about the Party or government itself but still definitely expose facets of how politics have worked at different points.
Its an older book, so it will only take you up to Jiang Zemin, but Lieberthal's Governing China was the book that Susan Shirk recommended to her graduate students who needed a primer on their Chinese politics. However, this was well over a decade ago however.