Just How Successful Is Xi Jinping?

A ChinaFile Conversation

Ian Johnson, Trey Menefee

December 19, 2014

Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

A major construction project in a Beijing hutong rises beyond the sidewalk. Economic data show that

the countrys growth dropped to a five year low and is slowing due to a decrease in exports and

property development in recent months.

Last week, Arthur Kroeber, Editor of the China Economic Quarterly opined that the Chinese state

is not fragile. The regime is strong, increasingly self-confident, and without organized opposition.

His essay, which drew strong, if divided, attention, cautioned in its title, Here Is Xis China: Get Used

To It. Following below is a selection of responses, the first two of which poke respectful, cautionary

holes in Kroeber's line of thinking. The Editors

Responses

Friday, December 19, 2014 - 3:28pm

Ian Johnson

Arthur Kroebers essay is a good corrective for the mostly delusional idea that the Chinese

government is about to collapse. He also lists a series of technocratic successes of the Xi

administration, showing it to be a worthy successor to the Deng Xiaoping model of a development

dictatorship. These successes have allowed the Communist Party to transform itself over the past

four decades, as the political scientist Richard Lowenthal put it, from "utopia to development," while

confounding predictions that regime change must follow.

It was also refreshing to read his point that not all problems in China are existential. For too long

we've been told that economic growth must be at least 8 percent (remember those predictions?) or

the regime would collapse. Arthur argues compellingly that while the government isn't legitimized

democratically, it is able to deliver many services and probably has more support than people

realize.

But it seems to me that Arthur buries his lead: halfway down, we're told that its system means China

might not become a leader in technology or soft power, but that these "are costs the leadership has

decided to bear."

Viewpoint

12.11.14

Here Is Xis China: Get Used To It

Arthur R. Kroeber

Two problems. One, I suspect this trade-off is news to many people in the government. We can all

agree that it's unfair to expect China to be producing Googles and Apples at this point in its

development, nor for its films to rival Hollywood's influence. But the government fervently believes

that it has to innovate. It is pouring huge amounts of money into trying to become a technological

and soft-power giant. The whole of northern Beijing is becoming a high-tech park, while the Beijing-

Tianjin corridor is home to tens of thousands of people working for top-level government research

institutes, charged with innovation. Perhaps this is delusional, but such an economic transformation

is also widely seen outside the government as necessary for China's long-term economic health. That

this won't happen is a bit surprising and, to me, is more the lead than the not-too surprising point

that the CCP isn't about to collapse.

I think the essay is structured this way because the argument (and here I may be wrong but it's how I

read it) is that these problems are long-term issues that can be addressed in the future. For now,

Kroeber implies, China can grow and prosper with its current model. Leave the innovating and

movie-making to the future.

There's some merit to this. I remember talking to the economist Barry Naughton in the 1990s and he

wisely said that long-term secular trends like urbanization are going to keep China growing for

another long while. That turned out to be true, and by the same token we can say that a

technocratically led government can keep things on track, building more high-speed trains, bringing

more people into cities, and restructuring the economy away from polluting enterprises. That should

be good for many more years of growth.

The problem is that China's system isn't just an old jalopy that is doing the job and can be replaced

when it breaks. Instead, it's like a performance-enhancing drug that is delivering successes but also

damaging the body.

Recently I discussed this point with the political scientist Liu Yu. Liu wrote the 2009 bestseller Details

of Democracy, a primer on the U.S. political system that helped establish her as a prominent public

intellectual. One of Liu's main points to me was that Chinese, including the intellectual class, have

already been badly damaged by government propaganda and disinformation. In her words,

"deprogramming" people will take generations.

Of course, she said, Chinese are much better informed than a generation earlier, but government

control of information is increasing, not decreasing. Most Chinese continue to inhabit a world where

universities are mostly ignorant of foreign scholarship, scientific endeavours are primarily political

pursuits, and only a small minority of people have access to halfway reliable accounts of how the

outside world works.

These aren't problems you can easily reverse one day in the future. The longer the repression

persists, the harder the shift will becomethink of what Russia has turned into. Communism

collapsed after seventy years but, twenty years after that, many still yearn for Stalin, think Putin is a

great leader, and mostly don't care that they are annexing neighbouring countries.

We used to think that China was better off because it jettisoned Maoism after 30 years, while the

Russians had its totalitarian-authoritarian system much longer. This was true economically but

politically the old system has mostly remained in place. After a 10- or 15-year period at the end of

the Cultural Revolution when the state retreated from daily life, it began rebuilding the domestic

security and censorship apparatus. Now it is almost assured to stay in power longer its Soviet

counterpart, continuing to stunt society with a warped world view.

So, yeah, this is Xi's China and get used to it. That much I think we can all agree on. But that this

system is getting the job done despite bearable costsat that point I think we disagree. It's getting

some of the job done, yes, but is leaving China a debt that will be far greater than the technocratic

challenges of bad loans and over-investment.

Friday, December 19, 2014 - 3:51pm

Trey Menefee

There are no successful autocracies. The most charitable defence of Kreobers recent argument that

China is a successful authoritarian developmental state which is now rich enough to start setting its

own rules rather than just accepting other peoples is that he is capturing a snapshot in time.

Indeed, at this moment it is a strong, increasingly self-confident regime without organized

opposition. Yet all the signs point to this strength being purchased at the cost of longer-term

fragility. It was only last month that people thought Putins regime signalled the arrival of a new

political order.

Charles Tilly has observed that, substantial increases in governmental capacity propel a broadening

of rights when the essential resources for the government's operation come from the population

within the government's jurisdiction. Chinas rise, then, should be generating a proportionate rise in

the number of political stakeholders who feel they are owed certain rights and protections. The

stakeholders span the spectrum from school teachers and rural migrants to Ministers of Public

Security and mayors or Chongqing.

The Chinese Communist Party is not in an enviable position. The wheels are coming off the political

cart. Beijing must manage a periphery (even the rich and urban periphery) that is restive and far too

commonly violent, petty, and corrupt cadres, provincial bosses that dont follow orders, and a

generation of Chinese with new ideas of what political participation looks like. They are using a

century-old discredited political model to implement a half-century old discredited economic model.

To move towards democratization might well trigger the sorts of landslides witnessed in the collapse

of the Soviet Union. To move towards totalitarianism is to generate even more political contention

that demands suppression and fuels an eventual release.

Consequently, Xi is moving in precisely the opposite direction. As one Xi supporter noted, he has

adopted Leninist ideology not to return to the old Leninist path, but to suppress an explosion in

political participation, and create a healthy, stable political environment for reform. Xis China isnt

just non-democratic, it is de-democratizing from an already low baseline. On the authoritarian-

democratic continuum, Xi is moving China closer to totalitarianism than any Party leader since Mao.

Xi is digging in, centralizing power, and cutting off dissent both inside and outside the party. Any

tiger, fly, blogger, or scholar that stands in the way must be crushed.

What we see inside the CCP is likely true of the Chinese polity in general: it is incapable of making

political transitions without violence or turmoil. Deng Xiaoping arose through the purge of the Gang

of Four, Jiang Zemin emerged through the purge of Zhao Ziyang, and would not originally relinquish

military power to Hu Jintao. We now have a old-style Party purge reminiscent of the 1950s and

1960s with quota-driven arrests, summary trials, mysterious disappearances, and suicides, which has

already entrapped, by our calculations, 100,000 Party operatives and others.

If the past is any guide, Xi or his surviving clique will one day face the same fate. This arises because

of the exclusivity of political claims in Chinait is not Western observers, but the Chinese

Communist Party that views civil society, dissent, and economic malaise not as problems but as

sources of existential crisis to the regime. By making political claims even more mutually exclusive

Xi is making Chinese politics even more contentious and incendiary. There are no successful

autocracies. There are only autocracies that have not yet reorganized through democratization

processesfinding viable pathways to channel political contentionand those that have not yet

released these contentious energies through collapse, purges, color revolutions, or collective

violence.