Why I Was Wrong on China
By Bruce GilleyIntellectual honesty and the integrity of the search for truthrequire that when you make an argument that is later disproven by evidence, you admit as much and explain why your argument was. . .
, you admit as much and explain why your argument was wrong. You also don’t make excuses. In a 2004 book published by Columbia University Press entitledChina’s Democratic Future: How It Will Happen and Where It Will Lead, I argued that China’s ruling communist party was in its death throes and would be extricated from rule by a reform faction on the inside that would introduce national elections. That change, I ventured, would come by 2020, and certainly not later than 2030. More than twenty years on, it is time to admit that my argument was wrong and to explain why. Whatever is looming in China’s near political future, it is not democracy. The trajectory that China has taken since my book has been very different than what I envisaged. Even if China eventually becomes a democracy, it will have taken a route very different than what I imagined, which will wrongfoot the case. After the communist party recovered from its near-death experience in Tiananmen Square in 1989, there was a burst of books on a future democracy in China. Some imagined a vaguely collectivist form of democracy, while others espied a more Confucian-style democracy. I was agnostic on the form, but insisted that the substance would be democratic. I was clear that someday I might be writing this. “If the CCP continues in office for several decades and democracy does not come to China, it must stand as a falsification of this book,” I wrote. The book might still prove useful, I noted, because it would prompt others to take apart my argument piece by piece. In the process, they would show why China’s communist system is so durable. I hoped that my arguments were sufficiently clear and transparent “to strengthen their considered dissenting opinions. ” As I wrote: “Whatever your views [about the future], the democratic lens is a powerful tool for surveying a nondemocratic state. ”So where did I go wrong? By examining the democratic forces in China, I unintentionally showed why they were not likely to prevail. Read backwards, my book provided an explanation of how CCP rule might be maintained. While many read my “The limits of authoritarian resilience” as a refutation of Andrew Nathan’s “Authoritarian resilience” article in theJournal of Democracy, in retrospect, we were saying the same thing: authoritarian regimes struggle against the democratic ideal and it is the correct paradigm for analyzing them. We differed only on whether the CCP would succeed. I don’t flatter myself that the book had such an effect (although it is held in the library of the Central Party School in Beijing, as well as in several provincial party schools). But it pointed to the stress points. As an unexpected review in the China-based academic journalStudies in Marxismput it: “Gilley vividly describes the problems of modernity in China. ” If those problems were fixed, the party could keep going. Most important has been the party’s shift in focus from economic growth to political legitimacy. Modern political systems ultimately rise and fall based on whether they can sustain a sufficiency of belief among citizens of their right to rule. The same year that my book was published, the party dramatically raised the problem of its own legitimacy for the first time. A statement from a party conference asserted that the 1949 revolution could no longer be said to “guarantee legitimacy for all time” as promised by Marxist theory: “‘The party’s governing status is not congenital, nor is it something settled once and for all,” the statement read. A flurry of discussion and books on the formerly taboo subject of the CCP’s legitimacy (one is shown below) followed. Until then, the party had operated on a Marxist or political economy view of legitimacy: establish your bona fides as the agent of world history and then deliver the material goods for the relevant political class. Presto: legitimacy. But we know that these “historical legitimacy” and then “performance legitimacy” claims, even if they were briefly true in the 1950s and 1980s respectively, fell apart as China’s society became more complex. I underestimated the ability of the party to break from Marxist dogma in this way and take a hard look in the mirror to ask what would give it the continuing right to rule. The reason the party could be “flexible” is now plain: Mao’s version of communist theory, especially his idea of the “mass line” drawn from popular sentiments, hadalwaysgiven the Chinese communists more flexibility to pursue legitimacy than Marx or Lenin allowed. I underestimated the strength of this Maoist ideal. Of course, this begs the question: what in particular did the party do after 2004 to keep itself in the good graces of a sufficient plurality of China’s people? There is both a social and a political answer to this. Socially, the party has walked back its flirtation with a free society, recognizing that this was the seedbed of a loss of dependence by “the people. ” It is not just in the economy where the state sector has been rebuilt. Everyday lives are also now more than ever subject to techno-authoritarian controls. How was this possible? Because, unlike the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the communists in China rediscovered the power of youth. If you give power to the young, they will never rebel. Areportby consultancy KPMG in 2022 found that private firms in China had the youngest CEOs in the world, at 47 years old compared to a global average of 52. China’s younger leaders not only take more risks, it argued, but they are also more comfortable with authoritarian rule. It’s not just in the economy where under-50s rule. Even in the party, the unremitting focus on youth since 2004 has driven down the average age of leading cadres. Age limits for promotion at every level have thrust power into the hands of younger people. Again, Maoist populism helped the CCP to avert the Soviet problem of gerontocracy. The only rebellious youth in China today are in the remote areas of society that have escaped the social control dragnet, but also are powerless. Frankly, the CCP does not care about such areas. China’s politically salient groups, especially the young, again see the CCP as the most legitimate game in town. Politically, the party has walked back its flirtation with internal competition and debate. This was dramatized in full public view in 2022 when former party chief Hu Jintao was manhandled out of a major party conference after openly bickering with Xi over a roster of candidates for party positions. A decade earlier, in 2012, Xi jailed another bickering rival, politburo member Bo Xilai. In both cases, lose canons were bolted down with wide support from the party. The explicit new norm in China’s elite politics is that ambition and competition is a threat to every party member. This shift emerged from a pre-2004 debate on why the Soviet Union collapsed, but it was still ongoing when I wrote my book. Ultimately, it was resolved under Xi Jinping in favor of those who saw too much competition inside the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (rather than too little) as the correct lesson to learn. I erred in thinking that the debate would be resolved in favor of the opposite view. Calling Xi a “strongman” like Putin is thus inaccurate. He merely reflects a considered consensus within the party that too much debate and competition would spell ruin. That consensus was confirmed in 2018 when Xi ended the term limit on his position that was fueling competition. Finally, we cannot escape the fact that these transformations – youth in power and elite political conflict eliminated – have actually made China better governed, which was the aim of its 2004 resolution that reopened the question of legitimacy and proposed the need to “rebuild governing capacity”. The internal debate on legitimacy in China since then has mainly been about democracy and governance, not growth, as my colleague Heike Holbig and I have shown. It has even been on the need for ideological innovation, something outsiders tell us no longer matters in China but in fact matters profoundly. The CCP has convinced the Chinese people that they live in a relatively stable, fair, efficient, and intellectually coherent political system. That has been enough. The brute fact is that the CCP is more secure domestically and internationally than ever before. I wrote my book at a time of global democratic expansion, and it reflected that optimism. If the book were to prove false, I wrote, then “I stand merely in the judgement of my times. ” The verdict is in. First published in hisSubstack