The End of Reform in China: Authoritarian

Adaptation Hits a Wall

Youwei

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摘要
Since the start of its post-Mao reforms in the late 1970s, the communist regime in China has repeatedly defied
predictions of its impending demise. The key to its success lies in what one might call "authoritarian adaptation" --
the use of policy reforms to substitute for fundamental institutional change. Under Deng Xiaoping, this meant
reforming agriculture and unleashing entrepreneurship. Under Jiang Zemin, it meant officially enshrining a market
economy, reforming state-owned enterprises, and joining the World Trade Organization. Under Hu Jintao and Wen
Jiabao, it meant reforming social security. Many expect yet another round of sweeping reforms under Xi Jinping --
but they may be disappointed. In China, as elsewhere, economic development has led to contention: peasants are
demanding lower taxes, workers want more labor protections, students are forming activist groups, entrepreneurs
are starting charities, media organizations have begun muckraking, and lawyers are defending human rights.

全文文献

Since the start of its post-Mao reforms in the late 1970s, the communist regime in China has repeatedly defied
predictions of its impending demise. The key to its success lies in what one might call "authoritarian adaptation"-the
use of policy reforms to substitute for fundamental institutional change. Under Deng Xiaoping, this meant reforming
agriculture and unleashing entrepreneurship. Under Jiang Zemin, it meant officially enshrining a market economy,
reforming state-owned enterprises, and joining the World Trade Organization. Under Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, it
meant reforming social security. Many expect yet another round of sweeping reforms under Xi Jinping- but they may
be disappointed.

The need for further reforms still exists, due to widespread corruption, rising inequality, slowing growth, and
environmental problems. But the era of authoritarian adaptation is reaching its end, because there is not much
potential for further evolution within China's current authoritarian framework. A self-strengthening equilibrium of
stagnation is being formed, which will be hard to break without some major economic, social, or international shock.

IS CHINA EXCEPTIONAL?

One reason for the loss of steam is that most easy reforms have already been launched. Revamping agriculture,
encouraging entrepreneurship, promoting trade, tweaking social security-all these have created new benefits and
beneficiaries while imposing few costs on established interests. What is leftare the harder changes, such as
removing state monopolies in critical sectors of the economy, privatizing land, giving the National People's Congress
power over fiscal issues, and establishing an independent court system. Moving forward with these could begin to
threaten the hold of the Chinese Communist Party on power, something that the regime is unwilling to tolerate.

Another reason for the loss of steam is the formation of an increasingly strong antireform bloc. Few want to reverse
the reforms that have already taken place, since these have grown the pie dramatically. But many in the

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bureaucracy and the elite more generally would be happy with the perpetuation of the status quo, because partial
reform is the best friend of crony capitalism.

What about society at large? Modernization theory predicts that economic development empowers society, which
eventually leads to political transformation. With a per capita gdp of roughly $7,000, is China succumbing to this
logic? Many argue that the country will not, because it is exceptional. Political legitimacy in China rests more on the
goods government provides than the rights it protects, they claim. Entrepreneurs are co-opted, students are
distracted by nationalism, peasants and workers are interested only in material justice. More likely, however, what is
exceptional in China is not society or culture but the state.

In China, as elsewhere, economic development has led to contention: peasants are demanding lower taxes, workers
want more labor protections, students are forming activist groups, entrepreneurs are starting charities, media
organizations have begun muckraking, and lawyers are defending human rights. Collective action has soared, and
the country now has more than a million grass-roots nongovernmental organizations. And the Internet poses a big
challenge for the regime, by linking ordinary people to one another-and to intellectuals.

However, it takes organizational skills and ideological articulation for practical pursuits to mature into political
demands. These require at least some political space to develop, and such space is almost nonexistent in China. If
the Chinese Communist Party has learned anything from the 1989 democracy movement and the Soviet experience,
it is the lesson that "a single spark can start a prairie fire," as the Chinese saying goes. Equipped with tremendous
resources, the regime gradually developed an omnipresent, sophisticated, and extremely efficient apparatus of
"stability maintenance," which has successfully prevented the second half of modernization theory's logic from being
realized. This system for ensuring domestic security is designed to nip any sign of opposition, real or imagined, in
the bud. Prevention is even more important than repression-in fact, violent suppression of protests is seen as a sign
of failure. China's strong state is reflected not so much in its shar p teeth as in its nimble fingers.

Speech is censored, in the press and on the Internet, to prevent the publication of anything deemed "troublesome."
Actions are watched even more closely. Even seemingly nonpolitical actions can be considered dangerous; in 2014,
Xu Zhiyong, a legal activist who had led a campaign for equal educational opportunities for the children of rural
migrants, was sentenced to four years in prison for "disturbing public order." Public gatherings are restricted, and
even private gatherings can be problematic. In May 2014, several scholars and lawyers were detained after
attending a memorial meeting for the 1989 movement in a private home. Even the signing of petitions can bring
retribution.

Just as important is the emerging mass line-that is, official public guidance- about China's critical need to maintain
stability. A grid of security management has been put in place across the entire country, including extensive security
bureaucracies and an extra-bureaucratic network of patrol forces, traffic assistants, and population monitors.
Hundreds of thousands of "security volunteers," or "security informants," have been recruited among taxi drivers,
sanitation workers, parking-lot attendants, and street peddlers to report on "suspicious people or activity." One
Beijing neighborhood reportedly boasts 2,400 "building unit leaders" who can note any irregularity in minutes, with
the going rate for pieces of information set at two yuan (about 30 cents). This system tracks criminal and terrorist
threats along with political troublemakers, but dissenters are certainly among its prime targets.

In today's China, Big Brother is everywhere. The domestic security net is as strong yet as delicate as a spider web,
as omnipresent yet as shapeless as water. People smart enough to avoid politics entirely will not even feel it. Should
they cross the line, however, the authorities of this shadow world would snap into action quickly. Official overreaction
is a virtue, not a vice: "chopping a chicken using the blade for a cow," as the saying goes, is fully approved, the

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better to prevent trouble from getting out of hand.

This system is good at maintaining order. But it has reduced the chances of any mature civil society developing in
contemporary China, let alone a political one. And so even as grievances proliferate, the balance of power between
the state and society leans overwhelmingly toward the former. Social movements, like plants, need space in which
to grow. And when such space does not exist, both movements and plants wither.

THE BURIED GIANT

Lacking support from above or below, reform in China has now stagnated, and may even be moving backward. The
current leadership still embraces the rhetoric of reform, and it has indeed launched some reform initiatives. Yet they
tend to be, as the Chinese say, "loud thunder, small raindrops."

The most significant is Xi's anticorruption campaign. Having brought about the downfall of 74 provincial-level officials
over the past two-plus years, in addition to hundreds of thousands of lower officials, the campaign is certainly
vigorous. In the three decades before Xi took power, only three national officials lost their positions for corruption; in
less than three years under Xi, five have already done so. Yet the anticorruption campaign should not really be
considered a reform program. Instead of encouraging freer media, more independent courts, and watchdog groups
to expose and check corruption, the campaign is driven and controlled from the top and characterized by secrecy,
ruthlessness, and political calculation. Yu Qiyi, an engineer at a state-owned enterprise who was accused of
corruption, died of torture while being interrogated in 2013. Zhou Wenbin, a former president of Nanchang
University, has also claimed to have been tortured, in early 2015. This is reminiscent of the Maoist "rectification"
campaigns (albeit much less intense) or even disciplinary actions in imperial China. Such campaigns tend to
produce more concentration of power rather than less, strengthening the legitimacy of particular charismatic leaders
at the expense of bureaucracies.

Small reforms are moving forward in some other areas as well, but none of them is transformational. The 18th Party
Congress, held in late 2012, emphasized judiciary reform, but so far, nothing much more than administrative
restructuring has happened. A Central Committee edict in late 2014 promised to strengthen "institutions of
independent and fair trials and prosecution," but it set the first principle of legal reform as "asserting the leadership of
the Chinese Communist Party." Party officials frequently nod to the importance of "deliberative democracy," and
early this year, the party released a plan to "strengthen socialist deliberative democracy," but it is unclear how
deliberation can be made meaningful without ways of punishing institutional unresponsiveness.

There has also been repeated talk about reforming the laws and rules that apply to nongovernmental organizations.
Progress in this area, however, is slow and dubious, as demonstrated by the forced dissolution of the Liren Rural
Library project, which was focused on extracurricular learning in rural China. The economic arena has seen some
genuine reforms, such as the reduction of licensing barriers for businesses and the introduction of more competition
in banking, but many see the efforts as mild, with state monopolies in several areas largely untouched. And in social
policy, the loosening up of the national one-child policy represents progress, but it may not be enough to make much
of a difference.

Underlying the inertia is ideological deadlock. The so-called socialist market economy principle has guided China for
over 30 years, allowing for both continuity and reform. It has always contained something of an internal
contradiction, because the impersonal legal system required by the market economy could potentially compete with
the personalized party leadership as the final arbiter of public affairs, and in recent years, the question has come to
the fore with greater urgency: Which is more important, the needs of the market economy or those of the Communist

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Party?

In practice, the needs of the party prevail. But the regime has not developed a coherent, contemporary ideological
discourse to justify that outcome. Marxism is obviously inadequate. The regime increasingly resorts to Confucianism,
with its convenient emphasis on benevolent governance within a hierarchical order. Yet the two coexist uneasily
because the party still nominally embraces Marxism- Leninism, whose emphasis on equality goes against
Confucianism, which stresses hierarchy.

What Xi presents most often are the so-called socialist core values. Now posted everywhere in China, these include
"prosperity, democracy, civility, harmony, freedom, equality, justice, the rule of law, patriotism, dedication, integrity,
friendship." The list reads more like an ad hoc patchwork than a coherent vision. It reflects anxiety more than
confidence, and with good reason: a praxis without ideological grounding is weak and unsustainable.

FOUR FUTURES

China faces four possible futures. In the first, which the party favors, the country would become a "Singapore on
steroids," as the China expert Elizabeth Economy has written. If the anticorruption campaign is thorough and
sustainable, a new party might be born, one that could govern China with efficiency and benevolence. Policy reforms
would continue, the country's economic potential would be unleashed, and the resulting productivity and progress
would boost the new party's legitimacy and power.

Such a future is unlikely, however, for many reasons. For one thing, Singapore is much less authoritarian than
contemporary China; it has multiple parties and much more political freedom. Political competition is not completely
fair, but opposition parties won 40 percent of the popular vote in elections in 2011. For China to emulate Singapore,
it would have to open up political competition significantly, possibly stepping onto a slippery slope to full pluralistic
democracy-an outcome the Communist Party does not want to risk. Singapore is tiny, moreover, and so the cost of
supervising its administration is relatively small. China is huge, and the party would find it increasingly difficult to
supervise the country's vast, multilevel governmental apparatus from the top down.

The second and most likely future, at least in the short term, is a continuation of the status quo. Whatever problems
it has, the regime's current model of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" is not exhausted. From demographics
to urbanization to globalization to the revolution in information technology, the structural factors that have facilitated
China's rise are still present and will continue to operate for some years to come, and the regime can continue to
benefit from them.

But not forever: a regime relying on performance legitimacy needs continued economic growth to maintain itself in
power. With growth already slowing, fear of a hard landing is rising. A housing bubble, manufacturing overcapacity,
financial instability, weak domestic demand, and widening inequality represent significant vulnerabilities. The
bursting of the housing bubble, for example, could cause problems throughout the economy and then in the political
sector, too, as local governments lost a major fiscal source that they rely on to support public services and domestic
security.

This could trigger the third possible future: democratization through a crisis. Such an outcome would not be pretty.
With the country's economy damaged and political demands soaring, conflicts could intensify rather than subside,
and several time bombs planted by the current regime (a demographic crisis, environmental devastation, ethnic
tensions) could eventually explode, making matters worse. The result might be the reemergence of some form of
authoritarianism as the country recoiled from democratic disorder.

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A fourth scenario-controlled and sequenced democratization-would be the best for China but is unfortunately
unlikely. An enlightened leadership in Beijing could take steps now to lay the groundwork for an eventual transition,
with multiparty elections organized as the final step of the process, well down the road. Enabling gradual judicial
independence, empowering the National People's Congress to deal with fiscal issues, encouraging the development
of civil society, and introducing intraparty competition are measures that could pave the way for a smoother
transition later on, and that in conjunction with reforms on policies relating to population control, minorities, and the
environment could help China dodge some future trauma. Such prepared and sequenced reform, however, would
require a coalition of pro-reform politicians within the leadership, which is absent now and unlikely to appear soon.

As for outsiders, what they can do is limited. External pressure tends to ignite defensive nationalism rather than
indigenous liberalism. For a country with China's size and history, democratization will have to emerge from within.
But the fact that the world's most powerful countries tend to be liberal democracies creates a strong ideological pull-
and so the best way for the West to help China's eventual political evolution is to remain strong, liberal, democratic,
and successful itself.

Sidebar
Mad in China: a labor protest in Beijing, January 2013

AuthorAffiliation
YOUWEI is a pseudonym for a scholar based in China.

索引

业务索引编制术语: 主题: Entrepreneurs Economic reform Economic development Entrepreneurship; 行业:

81394 : Political Organizations

主题: Human rights; Political leadership; Entrepreneurs; Economic reform; Economic

development; Entrepreneurship; Authoritarianism; Bureauc racy; Corruption; Society;
Political parties; Modernization; Reforms; Democracy; Nongovernmental
organizations--NGOs

地点: China

标题: The End of Reform in China: Authoritarian Adaptation Hits a Wall

作者: Youwei

出版物名称: Foreign Affairs; New York

卷: 94

期: 3

页: 2-7

页数: 6

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 出版年份: 2015

出版日期: May/Jun 2015

出版商: Council on Foreign Relations NY

出版地: New York

出版物国家/地区: United Kingdom, New York

出版物主题: Political Science--International Relations

ISSN: 00157120

e-ISSN: 2327-7793

CODEN: FRNAA3

来源类型: 杂志

出版物语言: English

文档类型: Feature

报告包含: Photographs

ProQuest 文档 ID: 1674234916

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版权: Copyright Council on Foreign Relations NY May/Jun 2015

最近更新: 2023-11-25

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