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Keywords Chapter Five: A post-totalitarian regime (Part Five)
A post-totalitarian regime
The party’s official ideology and the reality of China
Towards a consolidated democracy 'China Style'
The conclusion is paradoxical
Chapter Five: Feeling the Stones as You Cross the River (Part One)
Chapter Five: No alternatives to market-democracy (Part Two)
Chapter Five: Why the trend to market-democracy (Part Three)
Chapter Five: Key characteristics of totalitarian regimes (Part Four)
Chapter Five: References (Part Six)
Chapter Five: (Full Printable version)
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Chapter 5 (Part Five) >
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A post-totalitarian regime
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China’s present condition is one of mature post-totalitarian rule, which holds four key features:
- Institutional pluralism within the party-state becomes more evident than it was when the dictator lived. Inter-ministeral battles, differences of opinion within the regime over policy, or centre-province tensions become better known. Oppositional groups outside of the regime try to create new forms of representation.
- There is an ever widening gap between the official utopian ideology and reality. Party cadres grow less ideologically committed, and more criticism becomes audible from non-party members. The party-state comes to rely more on performance as a source of legitimacy.
- Party institutions deployed in the past to mobilise enthusiasm atrophy. Membership generates boredom, and careerists take over. There is at best a minimum of associational life outside these organisations.
- Leadership remains constrained in lose, ill-defined ways, but recruitment to senior positions still runs through party institutions. Bacause non-party-élites are non-existant, or very weakly organised, they cannot be readily co-opted. In general, post-totalitarian regimes experience a lack of flexibility in recruiting new talent. This is one area, and a significant one, where China is diverging quite significantly from the type: non-party elites have grown in a more pluralist China, and the party has gone out of its way to recruit them.
Except for this last, all the above characteristics apply in abundance to contemporary China. The first characteristic, institutional pluralism, is only too visible: take for instance, the sector of telecommunications, where - until the ministerial reforms of 1998 - the list of political players included state commissions, the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications, its provincial and local post and telecommunication administrations (PTAs), the Ministry of Electronics, the PLA, the Ministry of Radio, Film and Televion, the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Co-operation, the Ministry of Railways, of Electrical Power, of Coal, of Water Resources, banks and aerospace organisations with quasi-ministerial status. Reference [24].
Then, central government has had the problem of reconciling the contrasting demands for more market, say in Guandong province, as against more state subsidies, in rust-belt areas such as Jilin province. Cross-regional alliances have been formed - between the Northeast, the Pearl River, the Lower Yangtzi - , weakening the centre. The lesson is that foreign powers and corporations should predicate policy towards China on a recognition of devolution, rather than on an assumption that the centre is the head of a unified superpower. Reference [25].
Even more notable are the signs of institutional pluralism in the regime’s coercive apparatus. Post Tiananmen debates within the regime have helped to develop a reasonably coherent strategy to suppress dissent. This includes measures to prevent link-ups between discontented groups;
- more centralised control over police forces;
- pre-emptive moves against independent labour unions, human rights monitors, underground religious movements, and ethnic separatists;
- isolating the apolitical majority of the population from dissident ideas by offering them prosperity and more personal freedom, short of striking political poses in public; and
- holding key security areas, such as the major cities, Tibet and Xinxiang province.
The problem has been in implementation: China’s security apparatus is relatively small, numbering about 1.2 million in all. This is one of the smallest professional police forces in Asia. Overall, the coercive system includes the Public Security and State organs, the People’s Armed Police, the courts and procurators, the prison and labour reform system, and the PLA. In addition, the system is highly decentralised, and therefore dependent on local party officials and tax sources.
It draws for active support on citizenship defence committees—committees whose members could be sympathetic to local protesters, are often ill-trained, and have to earn their livings in other occupations. Beijing’s orders frequently are lost, while nation-wide responses to common security threats are difficult to achieve. Mao’s inheritance of powerful local administrations may have had its advantages in allowing a variety of economic experiments, but it is far from ideal for a regime facing so many challenges as the CCP.
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The party’s official ideology and the reality of China
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Then there is a gap, nay a gulf, between the party’s official ideology and the reality of China: China has taken the capitalist high road with a vengeance. Three quarters of Chinese workers are in private employment; small and medium-size state firms have been privatised by party managers at a franctic pace; corruption has exploded. Hence, Jiang Zemin’s adaptation of party policy as representing three forces essential for China’s development:
- advanced productive forces;
- advanced cultural forces; and
- the fundamental interests of the largest number of citizens.
This redefinition of the party’s task as opening the regime to the new social forces at work in the country goes with the grain of what reformers and regime critics can agree to, and as long as it continues to do so the regime has a good chance of remaining legitimate among a majority of people. But the regime has to continue to provide a steady majority with reasons to be optimistic about their futures, and to improve its performance in key policy areas, such as inflation and minimising the gap between rich and poor.
This conditional popular support is nonetheless accompanied by a widespread sense of acute fear of the consequences of social chaos. Ninety-three per cent of respondents prefer to live in an orderly society than in a freer society that is prone to disruption. Reference [26]. In other words, many people in China - probably a very large majority — conclude that China needs an authoritarian regime for fast and stable economic growth. Reference [27].
That the party’s institutions, such as collective farms, state enterprises, or TVAs have shrunk, atrophied or morphed into private businesses is not in doubt. Clearly, the party no longer represents the interests of peasants and workers, but rather faces widespread apathy, and popular antipathy, in addition to a small but active dissident community.
Even more worrying for the party is the spread of social groups and movements, filling out the space left by the retreat of the party’s own organisations from civil society. Worse, the triads - China’s homegrown mafia - were discovered to have taken over the municipality of Shenyang, in the north-east, while an illiterate peasant pocketed enough money to buy the party, army, police and customs officials in Xiamen, the main port of the coastal province of Fujian.
Recruitment to senior positions still runs through party institutions: the party still holds to the Leninist principle that the communist party controls the cadres. Reference [28]. Following the official declaration to move China to a socialist market economy, new guidelines were defined for recruitment to leadership cadre position at the level of counties and upwards.
Between 1992 and 1998, 323,600 new cadres were appointed, out of a total leadership cadre of 508,000. Of these new cadres, 60% were younger than 45 years, and 80% had completed university education. In other words, the party-state holds nomenklatura power, and has used it forcefully to rejuvenate senior membership. The younger cadres are there to implement the economic policy reforms that are rapidly awakening China’s civil society.
Given such a contrast between the inherited features of the regime, and the social changes fostered by its own policies, it is hardly surprising that Jiang Zemin and his Politburo colleagues have experimented on political reforms. Reference [29]. They have dabbled with direct elections, but their heart is in creating a well-educated, Singapore-type elite under CCP supervision. At the 15th Party Congress in September 1997, Jiang Zemin pledged to “extend the scope of democracy at the grassroots level to make sure that people directly exercise their democratic rights”. Reference [30].
The Chinese leaders then observed with horror the introduction of western-style democracy in Indonesia. Soon, Jiang was telling party delegates that he did not favour elections above village level. His preference went to picking a whole new corps of young professionally qualified, reformist and (politically) trustworthy cadres. Reform of the cadre system is reported as being the only move in political liberalization to be expected for the rest of the decade. Reference [31].
Nonetheless, when Sichuan province went ahead under its own authority in November 1998 in Nanjing township, the elections were eventually reported in the national press in 2001. Beijing too gave approval for Guandong province to hold direct township elections. Both Presidents Clinton and Bush have spoken out in China, and in the presence of the Chinese leadership, in favour of religious freedoms and free elections. The signal is clear enough: the Chinese leadership is not opposed in principle so much as to the circumstances and conditions in which these freedoms are exercised in China.
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Towards a consolidated democracy 'China Style'
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Where,then, are the detonators of regime change in China? In the case of authoritarian dictorships, when the leader dies, so does the regime. In China, the party-state lives. There therefore have to be other detonators of regime change: these may range from defeat in war, to military coups, failure to suppress organised opposition, or the formation within the regime of a powerful group ready to negotiate with an organised opposition.
None of these detonators have played in China. As we have seen in Chapter Two, the regime has been careful to avoid major military conflicts, especially after the bloody nose it received in its war against Vietnam in 1979. The armed forces are just another expression for the party-state, and remain under strong political control. The regime brooks no extra-regime opposition. In Taiwan, events took a different course in the 1990s, when a series of constitutional reforms led to the establishment of a mixed presidential-parliamentary system.
In Hong-Kong, over which China resumed sovereignty in June 1997, and despite a return to executive rule, the democratic reforms introduced by the UK had taken root. Talk of regime change was therefore in the air. But by December 1998, Jiang Zemin referred tentatively to something called China-style democracy. Reference [32]. What that implied is that the reformers in the regime would have to disprove the contention that the bottleneck to institutional transformation was political reform; they would have to demonstrate that the regime was capable of transforming itself into a legitimate manager of a China-style state under law. The regime has to show that it can hold the political fort, while all is flux round about.
Now in the pre-transition phase, Reference [33], the proximate condition for breakdown of the old order is that the incumbent power is unable to resolve a growing list of problems. In contemporary China, three key related problems are
- the present trend to an open society,
- freer labour markets and
- partial representation.
They are not susceptible to quick fixes, and can be addressed only through further reforms. Sooner, rather than later, this involves reformers in a competitive rush to build up their power bases against their opponents in the regime. One way to do this is to woo China’s various opposition groups.
Eventually, China’s political system becomes democratised through the holding of general elections, the drawing up of a constitution, and the consolidation of the reforms which the country’s present rulers have initiated. For this to happen peacefully, a defining moment would come when the leadership would announce the introduction of new norms governing future political development. As I argue in the last chapter, there is every reason to believe that the body language of the regime indicates movement in that direction. For the moment, this is not practical politics. If it were, there would be two contending coalitions,
- one initially led by hardliners in the regime against any change,
- and softliners who argue the case for a dialogue with moderate opponents. Reference [34],
For the moment, China is a mature post-totalitarian regime, and the first concern of party members is to secure their positions, enjoy their wealth, avoid upsets, and place some unspecified limits on the leadership. Making life agreeable for fellow citizens, while wielding a big stick appears a reasonable formula.
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The conclusion is paradoxical
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Viewed through political lenses, China’s near future looks particularly unclear. It is by no means clear that the monopoly party-state can introduce a rule of law. But measured in relation to an ideal state of consolidated democracy, the future is not entirely so. In fact, we know more about China’s future than we give ourselves credit for. Let’s ask ourselves the factors about China that we know to be in the pipeline, as it were, and then we can list the key uncertainties. The uncertainties lie in the imponderables,
- such as the behaviour of randy Chinese males,
- the possible emergence of Mao-type figures from the back of beyond,
- the revolutionary material lying around in China for radical political leaders to exploit,
- or the personal rivalries and failings of the political leadership.
The two - what is in the pipeline, and the imponderables - together are the central components of credible scenarios. Reference [35].
- There is a lengthening list of things that are in China’s political pipeline.
- We know the tasks confronting China if it is to become a consolidated democracy, and how far the regime is from that.
- We know that the party’s ideology is a barrier, but not insurmountable.
- We have evidence that widespread poverty, a mass peasantry, and a traditional political culture are not ideal materials to create a well-functioning constitutional democracy, even China-style.
- We know that the Chinese people are scared stiff of a return to the tragedies of the previous two centuries.
- We know that the party-state is only too well aware of the narrow way, and the many dangers, that lie ahead.
- We know that our four elements of the world’s transformation—US pre-eminence, global markets, the Zeitgeist of market-democracy, and the internationalisation of production—bind China irreversibly into the global system.
- We know that the regime wants to join the lead group of powers in the world, and that the necessary but not sufficient condition for membership is creating a state under the rule of law.
- We know that the party’s prime legitimation of its hold on power is that it is the sole guide available to chart China’s road to prosperity.
- We know that the party-state is not keen on experimenting with Utopias, and that it prefers to feel its way into an uncertain future.
- We know that this has, and will continue to entail moving away from the command to the market economy, to deepening interdependence and away from autarky.
- We know that this creates major tensions in the rural-urban balance to be struck by the regime.
- We know therefore that while the political system changes little in appearance, a constant flow of legal and of economic policy measures are being implemented. Incrementally, we also know that these imply extensive changes in the political system.
- We need no reminding that political leaders are liable to moral failings, and that this is something that China truly shares with the rest of the world.
- We can only state as a probability the future timing or content of such measures, as each one is the outcome of political negotiations among the changing kaleidiscope of factions.
- Not least, we can only guess at the time such reforms will take to implement before China becomes a consolidated democracy. But we know that the regime’s monopoly powers are shrinking fast, as the plural reality of China bursts into view, and that a frightened regime is therefore in danger of dithering between a policy of no rush or accelerated reform.
The present leadership deploys the future as a resource to locate problems too knotty to deal with now; the party’s shrinking political monopoly suggests that reforms should be speeded up. That is where the reformers efforts to supplement their domestic power base through alliances abroad come into the picture. The reformers main policy here is to join the WTO and import all the regulatory baggage to China from the developed world. Not surprisingly, serious differences have opened up between economic nationalists and economic liberals. Reference [36].
- The first wish to protect domestic firms, guide foreign investment to fit national needs, and promote national ownership,
- whereas the second seek to promote China as a platform for efficient production.
A central question for the regime’s future is whether policy can continue to be fashioned through mutual trade-offs between the two broad coalitions, or whether one coalition emerges victorious over the other. The very fact that the regime has to maintain such a balance indicates that China’s party state cannot keep to the status-quo. It has to continue to move towards laying the institutional foundations of a constitutional order, if it is to keep the refomers satisfied.
In short we know what we know, and we know what we don’t know about China’s future, which is decidedly an improvement over knowing nothing. In particular, we know that public opinion is the ghost at the party-state’s banquet, and that it would not be wise for the leadership to take the Chinese people’s acquiescence in their rule for granted. What we know above all is that the leading edge of reform is with regard to economic policy institutions, and that this is in effect transforming the Chinese polity. There is no turning back. WTO membership is the battering ram of the reformers to accelerate domestic changes.
Chapter Five: Feeling the Stones as You Cross the River (Part One)
Chapter Five: No alternatives to market-democracy (Part Two)
Chapter Five: Why the trend to market-democracy (Part Three)
Chapter Five: Key characteristics of totalitarian regimes (Part Four)
Chapter Five: References (Part Six)
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