I read Elizabeth Economy, and have to say I came away genuinely unimpressed. I feel like I could’ve written the same book just based on summarizing what I had read about China in the last few years in newspapers and magazines. I listed some alternatives in the post below. As a general matter popular works on the topic tend to be bad. But there are some real gems written by academics.
If I'm following the succession correctly, Xi's ten-year term expires this year. Is he planning to leave office, or has he found a way of getting around that rule too?
But then I tell them, if you think that a bill of rights is what sets us apart, you're crazy. Every banana republic in the world has a bill of rights. Every President for life has a bill of rights. The bill of rights of the former "Evil Empire," the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was much better than ours. I mean it, literally. It was much better. We guarantee freedom of speech and of the press -- big deal. They guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, of street demonstrations and protests; and anyone who is caught trying to suppress criticism of the government will be called to account. Whoa, that is wonderful stuff!
...
So, the real key to the distinctiveness of America is the structure of our government.
Regarding Xi anti-corruption purges that seem puzzlingly non-power-centralizing:
Apparently, some unusually large number government officials in China were actually spying for the CIA, who compensated them in part by paying the bribes that were required for these spies to advance in their government careers. The income was disguised by the ordinary activities of corruption, and having CIA funding meant US spies could pay more bribes and advance faster politically than non-spies. The anti-corruption purge stopped this by making it suddenly very suspicious to receive large sums of money, by reducing the ability of well-funded spies to advance via bribery, and by enabling the government to be purge and punish spies without suffering the loss of face associated with admitting publicly that they were full of spies.
There are nations where it's difficult (by design?) to figure out the precise chain of leadership. Who ultimately controlled Imperial Japan's foreign policy in WW2? The Emperor? The state? The war council? Extreme elements within the army? An uneasy Schelling balance of all the above? At various times various factions held sway. For Japan's enemies, it was like negotiating with a many-headed hydra.
I'd say there are deep and unspoken national characteristics that continue to express themselves regardless of what the government's nominally doing. China has never in history shown signs of being a bastion of Jeffersonian democracy or cultural liberalism. Whatever steps the CCP claims to be taking in that direction, the reality is probably somewhat different.
Minor quibble, Vietnam has always been anxious about/wanted an ally against China. At the end of WWII, Ho Chi Minh temporarily welcomed the French back in so that the Chinese would leave. After the Vietnam war, Vietnam basically allied with the USSR against China. Deng launched a punitive invasion of Vietnam in 1979. After the Soviets collapsed, the US was the logical next choice for outside protector. I'm sure this nonsense over islands hasn't helped, but they always want someone to protect them from China. It's not all Xi's fault.
Interestingly, there's a similar dynamic where Cambodia constantly wants an outside ally as protection against Vietnam.
> Aside from a few of Deng’s personal picks, we should think of this less as “China is a magic place where rational scientists hold power”, and more as “for idiosyncratic reasons, social climbers in China got engineering degrees.” Certainly none of these people were selected for the Politburo on the basis of their engineering acumen. They got their power by bribing, flattering, and backstabbing people, just like everyone else.
Right. The mechanism here is that they were told that being an engineer was necessary to get to power. So the people who were social climbers got engineering degrees. The flow is not power to engineers. It's the powerful to engineering programs.
> This isn’t a great answer to the question “how autocratic was pre-Xi China”? In particular, I don’t get exactly what prevented Jiang or Hu from seizing power, overstaying their term limits, or killing their enemies (I assume it was some mix of not being sure the military would back them and not wanting to destabilize the country, but I don’t feel like I have a gears-level understanding). I also don’t get what it meant for some Chinese leaders to be better at pursuing their policy agenda than others: what levers did they pull? How did they quash dissent?
What's an autocracy? The CCP has never been, and is not now, a government where the central government is expected to control everything down to the finest details. Instead the cadres are instructed to understand the goal and spirit of the instructions (they have a lot of study sessions) and to implement them as best suits their locality. Mao was very big on this as a criticism of the USSR and its bureaucratic formalism. This kind of looks like federal, local government. But the thing is the idea is not that the local government does things on their own. The idea is that the local government serves as a tool of the central administration. For example, the goal of the Chinese Communist Party of Smalltown is not that they represent Smalltown to the Party. It's that they represent the Party to Smalltown. They are explicitly instruments of Party control.
China has never had separate power bases. The factions were always at least formally obedient to central authority. They certainly didn't act as a check or balance on central authority. They would have been horrified by the idea that the Communist Party could fight itself or have any kind of insubordination like that. The system was, and is, set to prevent that. On the other hand, the ability to gain genuine support from key CCP officials and from the party in general matters for the effectiveness of your policies.
On the other hand, if you're the leader and you say, "let's get steel production higher," then a combination of will and competence and interest by local cadres is going to matter a lot. If you can play the game, get them onboard, etc then you'll do well. If not, well, they won't disobey. But they won't go the extra mile either. When people say Hu was not as strong a leader what they meant was that he was less capable of getting the average cadre on board or playing oligarchal games to win support. So everyone obeyed him but he wasn't able to get as much done as effectively.
Also, keep in mind that patronage networks can shift. My understanding is that if you upset your subordinates too much they can jump ship. Basically, the two way street in China is that patrons compete to attract clients and clients compete to receive rewards from patrons. Someone who doesn't sufficiently reward their clients, especially if it's because of a personal flaw rather than a lost power struggle, will find people bleeding out of his patronage network and into competing patrons'.
> Of these, I find the second hypothesis - good timing - the most plausible. Why did Xi succeed at gathering power, where others didn’t?
Communist leaderships choose their leaders for ideological reasons. You're reducing it to cynical power politics. But this isn't how the the Soviet premier got or the Chinese paramount leader gets selected. They're selected for being good Communists, effectively for outstanding achievements in Communism, combined with pragmatic political considerations. Xi didn't subvert the system. Like Deng Xiaopeng before him he rode a wave, of which he was an intellectual proponent, that it was time for a strong leader to fundamentally reform the government. The fact Xi centralized power was not a surprise. It was what his mandate was. He wrote theoretical papers that basically boil down to, "We need to end term limits and have a strong, central leader for Marxist-Leninist reasons." And then he did that. The key moment was not his removal of term limits but the adoption of his Marxist theories into the formal ideology of the CCP.
Your model is just fundamentally broken if you understand all the premiers as cynical power maximizers. They're a bunch of highly ideological Communists and they do all sorts of things that only make sense if they're true believing Communists. In fact, they have a whole bunch of cultural and even systemic thing meant to keep cynical power maximizers out of power. This can create reform tensions which is part of what Xi, by rolling back reforms, wants to resolve.
> During earlier parts of his reign, Xi deliberately left a small fraction of the public square untouched; he seemed aware of the “dictator’s information problem” where nobody would tell him when things are going wrong, and he valued public protests as a way to find corrupt officials and other problems requiring his attention. He’s since backed off on this and just started censoring everything.
China has a weird system of open public comments that happen in stages. I've heard these are pretty genuine. That is, the CCP will say, "We are having a debate on corporate tax policy. No businesspeople will be punished for discussing tax policy for the next fifteen days and will have the chance to present their opinions to decision makers at the end of the period." Then they might have periods for other groups. These are, as far as I can tell, pretty genuine. Unless you go off topic they don't consider critcisim disloyal. Likewise, they have this weird system where Party members have specific people they're allowed to talk with (supposedly) without monitoring so long as its the entire group. So, for example, supposedly the entire Congress delegation of Fujian can talk freely with each other without fear. But notably not with other delegations or in public or in private apart from the group.
It's a clear attempt to prevent national level opposition and to particularize it by region and control information flow. But that's their solution as it stands. Xi's actually ramped these periods up. He's also started to distribute powerful people into these dialogue communities so they get more genuine information. For example, Xi now represents Mongolia because he wants more genuine information on the frontier.
> By its own standards, Xi’s centralization campaign has succeeded: other factions have been marginalized, corruption has decreased, and society toes the party line more closely than ever. His other efforts are more dubious.
His other efforts are irrelevant. Xi's first stated goal is to keep the CCP in control of China and loyal to ideological doctrine. I've seen nothing in his actions that imply he's not telling the truth there. His goal, as he's stated, is to build Mao-Xi style Early Socialism in China, effectively a form of controlled and directed capitalism that will lead to a smooth transition to real socialism down the line.
Of course, the issue is that capitalism produces wealthy capitalists, celebrities, and other modes of production that tend (in the Communist mind) to produce bourgeois government. Xi was, I suspect, concerned that Party members were becoming capitalists so he severed that link pretty severely. But there's still the issue that that means CCP members are both more powerful and poorer than China's business elite and that the fusion that was ongoing has been, if anything, reversed. Of course, China has a simple way to keep these people in line: a police state. Actresses and billionaires and the like are imprisoned, re-educated, or executed. Enough that I think, especially for businesspeople, it's starting to produce a downward pressure where incentives are to be successful but not too successful. I don't have any broad evidence for this. But I at least think I'm observing that behavior.
Vietnam and China had a brief war in 1979, right as Deng Xiaoping was consolidating his power. Vietnam is a strong regional power, so they're a natural proxy/ally for the US against China.
Doesn't seem too surprising there's tension there..
Also, good book on Deng is the one by Ezra Vogel. Gives a good sense of power dynamics in 1970-1990 China.
I refuse to believe that "Economy" is a real surname. Surely this is a case of a nom de plume chosen for the subject matter, ala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacey_Dancer
Was Mao an autocrat throughout his time as Paramount Leader? When I was reading about the history of China since the revolution a few weeks ago, it had seemed like there was a period after the Great Leap Forward when Mao had become mostly a figurehead, but then his cult of personality became useful to the Party, and the Cultural Revolution happened, and he became as powerful as he had ever been in his last few years.
I thought that corruption was precisely the point of Belt and Road. You go in, promise to shower the local leadership with cash, infrastructure, and jobs, to be repaid at some later date. They embezzle the money like they're supposed to. Then you come back a few years later and say, "Hey, remember that money we gave you ? Remember how we said it was a loan ? Guess what, first payment's due now, but we'll take your port as collateral if you prefer". So the head honcho gives them the port... and the iron mine... and the plantation... and whatever else they need. China builds some military bases on the property, then moves on to the next target. It's a win-win situation for everyone but the peasants, but who cares about them ?
I strongly feel like the best summary of the conditions that led to Xi's ascension are outlined in the book "The Party" by Richard McGregor. I did a book review in the SSC comments a few years back, but I'll do a summary here:
Basically - China pre-Xi wasn't a stable system. The patronage network you outlined in this piece has a serious downside: a newly-appointed paramount leader is necessarily at his absolute weakest in terms of influence at the time he is appointed leader. This is because a large part of being paramount leader is the ability to appoint a bunch of people into important positions who will back your agenda. If you're coming into a position where all the important spots were filled by your (likely ideologically-alienated) predecessor, you come in with not that much ability to accomplish much. Conversely, however, the time when you're most powerful as a leader is when you're right on the cusp of being kicked out of power. You've had time to solidify your reign and appoint a bunch of toadies.
Think of this as an exact inverse of the american system. Instead of a honeymoon "mandate" at the start of a term, the Chinese leader has more of a gradual ramp up. Instead of a lame duck period, they have a year or so of basically uncontested rule.
So... if a leader is most powerful right when they're about to get removed, why didn't someone hang onto power before Xi? Well, it's a mix of honest-to-god admiration of Dengism on the part of the former leaders and a shadowy network of retired party officials who still exerted significant sway and could, conceivably, have made life untenable for a would-be emperor. Unfortunately, that network had mostly disolved by the time Xi was facing the boot, so he didn't have to deal with it.
Mostly though, the previous chinese system didn't work. It really weakened the central government and was quickly losing ground to private industry. It was such a flawed system that reform was basically inevitable - either the party would reassert itself through a strong leader that was able to re-centralize power or it would be glasnosted.
One thing I think is missing from the GDP discussion is the degree to which demographics is destiny. By this measure, China has done above average in terms of growth, even considering its demographics. It is however, set up for a huge slowdown in growth.
If I were an autocratic leader facing inevitable economic headwinds, I'd be consolidating power and locking down decent too. The prosperity carrot used to bargain for unity is going away. Without a carrot, what is there but a stick?
Check out this animated plot I made of gdp vs demographics for every country with a population >50m.
A Marxist reading is that the growth slowdown was at least partly deliberate and unforced (leaving aside COVID-19, of course). The Chinese remain as much, if not more, interested in capital accumulation - expanding the mass of assets (even barely profitable) under control of their enormous banks - as in GDP growth. And they're very interested in boosting domestic demand and tech self-reliance in a dirigiste, targeted way.
I don't know whether all this is rubbish according to orthodox macroeconomics, but if the Chinese are deliberately accomplishing other goals at the expense of GDP growth, then it's probably a mistake to judge Xi's performance by that measure.
"""After his death, everyone backstabbed each other furiously for several years and Deng Xiaoping ended up on top"""
Oversimplifications are usually good, but this one is missing a really critical piece. Everyone also furiously backstabbed each other for several years *before* Mao's death, as they tried to stay a step ahead of the Cultural Revolution he *encouraged* to take them all down.
The Cultural Revolution was zombie movie level scary for people who found themselves up against it. Your doctors and former military officers and powerful people were screamed at and then locked up *and then screamed at while they were locked up* and then taken out to do various important jobs like "take over from the teenagers who have been manning the Russian border because it looks like the Russians may attack". Terrifying doesn't begin to describe it. "Allie Brosh takes a lot of drugs and watches horror movies then intentionally strands herself in the woods at night" is closer.
"""In particular, I don’t get exactly what prevented Jiang or Hu from seizing power, overstaying their term limits, or killing their enemies (I assume it was some mix of not being sure the military would back them and not wanting to destabilize the country, but I don’t feel like I have a gears-level understanding)."""
It's probably the simple answer! It's probably same answer as why they cracked down so hard in Tiananmen Square: abject fear. "In my lifetime, one man has been able to goad the populace into becoming a screaming zombie mob, and they stayed that way for years. Dear Marx, I don't ever EVER want to see that happen again. Deng is right. We have to do whatever it takes to stop that from happening again."
Another interesting tidbit which bears adding, and which I've never been able to square, is this: after being sent down in the Cultural Revolution, Xi ran away and hid, and was arrested and sent back.
Everyone of any standing in his generation was sent down. It's like the fundamental commonality for the entire generation. His experience is singular and, at least from my Western point of view, seems like it should be very damning.
It should be like "Bill Clinton dodged Vietnam" times a hundred. But it never seemed to affect his career.
Is there anyone in the comments who knows more who can explain this?
The Soviet Union *never* had decentralized authority after Stalin, except maybe for a few months in 1953 while would-be Stalin successors maneuvered to succeed him. Khrushchev was an absolute ruler, so was Brezhnev, so was Andropov, (Chernenko was a placeholder while maneuvering happened), and then so was Gorbachev. So I'm not sure this comparison makes sense.
It's hard for me to comment about China, just because I'm not a Chinese-speaker, but I kind of suspect that while most of the power is at the very top, which works on patronage, in some of the better-run regions *attempts* are made to run things technocratically. One reason I say this is that, cross-culturally, patronage systems tend to be overwhelmingly male-dominated, but in countries with gender equality women do somewhat better on standardized tests than men. China prides itself on valuing performance on standardized tests highly, particularly post-Deng (and traditionally). And what we see is that...among members of the NPC born before the mid-1980s, men overwhelmingly predominate; among those born after the mid-1980s, a majority are women: https://npcobserver.com/2018/03/10/demographics-of-the-13th-npc/
The easiest explanation for this is that among really young members of the CPC there really is a shift away from patronage towards something like technocracy.
(As an aside, this suggests -- if you extrapolate straight lines out to ridiculousness -- that in two generations or so China might have an overwhelmingly female leadership class, even as its adult population at that point will be very disproportionately male: https://twitter.com/whyvert/status/1501955523976974342
A much smaller male majority in South Korea led to a totally serious mainstream political attempt at "Radicalizing The Romanceless", whose candidate actually won the 2022 presidential election. Fascinating to consider China, a few decades from now, having much more public support for a radicalized romanceless movement, but in an authoritarian society where the leaders are all unelected women.)
CIA dossier on Xi by close friend said he was incorruptible by money. He's a princeling whose sister was prosecuted to death during the cultural revolution and got sent down to the countryside only to come back a believer. LKI, who I'd categorize as preeminent PRC watcher with relations with 5 generations of PRC leaders compared Xi to "Nelson Mandela calibre" of person. These points rarely get mentioned when assessing Xi.
He's enough of a political maverick to consolidate sufficient power for massive corruption crackdown and push through military modernization as well as eliminate thorough US/western influence (see CIA debacle, domestic NGO laws). That's massive. On corruption, CCDI has disciplined 1M+, even Xi didn't start off with that many enemies. But he was competent enough to accumulate enough power to step on that many toes, something Hu/Deng couldn't do.
Incidentally crackdown among military corruption + modernization has actually evolved PLA into fairly competent force, at least enough for US to rank PRC as pacing power. Add in building SCS bases while US distracted in ME and Xi has massively improved PRC strategic posture. Note alternative to Xi was Bo, whose relationship/patronage with brass made such transformation (IMO) not feasible. Again, feat Xi's predecessors and alternatives wasn't capable of.
Dismantling CIA network, neutering foreign NGOs and ramming through NSL in lawless HK is self explanatory. It's ridiculous HK existed so long as spy capital of Asia with NSL state of exception that enables unfettered treason. Securitization in XJ, however you feel about methods, stopped terrorism completely. Repressing less than 1% of minorities for domestic security is no shit correct political decision.
I was initial Xi doubter, he sounds and looks dopey as hell, and frankly seemed too simple/stupid. Yet his achievements have been remarkable for PRC interests. He was the right man at the right time. Keep in mind US pivot to Asia under Hu. Xi inherited a US already orienting towards PRC containment and have played most of the cards right. Staggeringly so. Mao unified country, Deng built it, Xi looks to be securing it against the most powerful hegemony in world history. And he's doing a surprisingly good job, at least more than most who follow PRC geopolitics for the last couple decades would have thought. Seems like the right man to FDR a 3rd term to navigate PRC in a "world is undergoing profound changes unseen in a century".
As for development:
>Of those, China is least impressive (so far)
PRC has done best considering scale and external development environment. Other east asian tigers had support/security umbrella of US at peak hyperpower/hegemon. Singapore was city state on relatively easy mode. PRC climbed out of hole while being sanctioned by west, had to build own indigenized nuclear/space/weapons etc industries. At end of day, PRC population means PRC can't get away with specializing in a few industries to uplift population, they have to cultivate every industry and even then there's not enough global demand to uplift everyone. For reference peak PRC manufacturing employed something like 300M... all the Tigers combined and more. There was/is simply too many people. To be blunt, other tigers got A+ playing on "I'm too young to die", PRC got A- playing on "nightmare". They're not even in the same league considering all aspects of nation building and geopolitics. US satraps and countries that align with US interests do well, including authoritarian ones. News at 11. The only country PRC should be measured against is India... which speaks for itself.
Long-term resident of China (20 years) here. This was very good, actually descriptive of the China I know, unlike 99% of western media reports.
On the censorship issue, I want to complicate the picture a bit. I think all descriptions of increasing Chinese censorship are deeply flawed, because they fail to account for the massive general increase in information that the internet has brought.
So: "...to people who grew up in Hu’s China, Xi’s regime feels like a clear step backwards."
I don't know about the regime, but I have access to a lot more information now than I did under Hu, because the internet is better.
"The censoring of Southern Weekly, previously a well-regarded Chinese newspaper, is emblematic"
Sure - but the Southern Weekly and others in the Southern stable, while "well-regarded," were never actually good. What has happened is this: factional debate in China used to sometimes happen in the newspapers. It was exciting to read when it happened. Western observers salivated at the access it gave them to current Chinese political thought, which is usually very opaque. But it was always opinion within the current acceptable range of political possibility. No one who thought the CPC should not be in power ever wrote in the Southern Weekly.
About 10 years ago (I think), that kind of newspaper debate stopped. It went online, private, and into other channels. Western commentators sighed, and said, oh dear, the newspapers have been censored. But that's not really what happened: they were always very heavily censored. Now they're just heavily censored media where nothing of import is talked about.
As to total censorship: the internet is routing around. The outbreak of Covid is a classic example. The news got out, really fast. Much faster than the authorities wanted. And they cracked down later, notoriously jailing the doctor who broke the story. But the story still got out. That was basically unthinkable under Hu. (Example: the city where I live, Xiamen, was the site of one of China's few successful environmental protests, back in about 2007. I watched them march in the streets to stop a chemical plant being built near our city center. That news never got out - never reached other people, never got into the media.)
So the real censorship landscape is: increasing censorship, yes; but failing to keep up with the internet, so overall we are getting more information, not less.
The same applies here:
"Universities that previously had a long leash..." universities never had a long leash. This is rose-tinted nonsense. Any prof who had genuinely radical/democratic/non-communist views would have been weeded out at any time during the last 40 years. This is just more people going to university, so censorship has become more visible.
The other thing I would like people to know about China right now is that Xi's anticorruption campaign has been very effective for ordinary day-to-day stuff. When my older son was born 15 years ago, we stuffed cash in an envelope and gave it to the doctor to make sure my wife was treated well in the hospital. We don't do that any more.
(There's still plenty of corruption, running through personal acquaintance networks, but the cash bribery part of ordinary transactions has been effectively stamped out in my middle-class city. Teachers react with horror if you try to buy them a gift; we recently had a house refitted and the man who came to check whether our gas main was properly routed wouldn't accept a bribe, so we had to install an extra door.)
From my perspective, this elimination of cash bribery has been a massive benefit. Whatever the intentions behind it, it's made life much better.
Obligatory disclaimer: Anything positive I say about China or its government should not be understood to mean that I support its censorship, oppression, or imprisonment of innocent people.
Could it be that the `outer layers' are not entirely rubber stamps, and that the `standing committee' has total power, but ONLY within some range of options that will broadly be seen as legitimate by the outer circles of the governing apparatus? And within that range, they can pick whatever policy options (or personnel) they like, and the outer circles will dutifully rubber stamp it, but if the standing committee and/or paramount leader try to implement policies that the outer layers of the onion view as fundamentally illegitimate, then there is a constitutional crisis and maybe the entire standing committee gets defenestrated? (In principle - the politburo is smart enough that they never totally exceed their mandate in this way). If this setup is true (and it seems plausible to me), then the standing committee in fact does not have absolute power - it is constrained by a broader consensus on a range of `legitimate policy options,' and this consensus can be shifted, but presumably only slowly, so it is not sufficient to get a clear majority of cronies on the standing committee in order to seize absolute power, you also need to steer the consensus in the outer layers of the onion to a point where `Xi seizes absolute power' is seen as being a legitimate thing to do.
In the faction discussion I was somewhat surprised the military faction was not mentioned. The sabre-rattling against Taiwan helps a lot in keeping them happy and in some ways they are the most important of all factions.
Perhaps Xi's special ability is merely to keep the maximum amount of factions satisfied at once without benefiting China itself in any particular way. And perhaps Xi's goal is little else than personal power, after all he was effectively sent to the gulag as a teenager for the "sins" of his father and may just want to be the one giving orders rather than taking them.
Maybe religion is a tool of dictators to efficiently control their population. Xi never used that, did he?
A friend sent me an interview with an Indian communist. Communists have been decimated in election after election.
This guy was very frustrated. He seemed upset that communism never took off in India like it did in Russia and China. He worshipped Mao, as do all Indian communists. He said rather sadly, that early leaders in independent India, such as Gandhi and Nehru, were a lot trickier than Chiang Kai Shek. He also blamed the " cunning upper castes" in general, for having stopped his utopia from materializing in India.
I'll try to link to this video, if I find it again.
I learned a lot from this post, and loving the dictator book club. May I suggest this charming chap - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Sassou_Nguesso - only problem is there are no actual books about him in English.
No discussion of the human rights abuses of China would be complete without a discussion of the horrendous one-child (now two-child) policy. Forced abortion is not a choice. See Women's Right's Without Frontiers (https://www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org/) for more information.
It looks like you have a pretty idyllic idea of American "democracy". Putting aside the fact that America is hyper-capitalist and therefore intrinsically oligarchic, anti-democratic, aristocratic etc, America also has the fundamentally and explicitly anti-democratic system of the 'electoral college' along with serious gerrymandering (especially along racial lines), extreme corporate control of legislation etc.
>The results flatter my biases as a quasi-libertarian: the state-owned companies are much worse than the private ones:
You have a very bourgeois-dominated view of "success", if you measure success by how much the bourgeois gets enriched then sure they are more "successful" but China does not have such an anti-humanist attitude to "success". The purpose of SOE is to enrich the people not the few and in this sense it is far more successful.
There was a really long yet impressive Chinese article called 客观评价习近平 (Objective evaluation of Xi Jinping) worth reading, it's not as objective as it claims to be, but some of your questions may be answered, you may try the DeepL, the translation is pretty good.
The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers by Richard McGregor https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7822182-the-party is probably the best place to go for an explanation of how the system worked (or didn't) pre Xi. Does a particularly good job exploring the incentives of mid level officials and how that warps the system.
>After trying to atone by self-criticism and the obedient acceptance of ritual humiliation, Xi Zhongxun was demoted to deputy manager of a tractor factory in Luoyang... Having been punished as an individual, with the arrival of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 the elder Xi was brought back to Beijing to be punished again as a former member of the party elite: there is a photograph showing him with a placard listing his sins. He was driven and pummelled and kicked down the street with his wife walking alongside to hit and curse him as a revisionist traitor. She must have been convincing: although she was repeatedly beaten during this period, she was not imprisoned, nor did she spend six years digging ditches in Inner Mongolia like her daughter Qi Qiaoqiao, nor was she driven to suicide like Xi Jinping’s half-sister, Xi Heping.
I think it needs to be added that China took #1 in external trade (not PPP-adjusted). It's already more influential than USA in trade and USA advantages in influence are non-economic.
An interesting but curious book review in that Marx and "theoreticians" are never mentioned once.
Does Dr. Economy not mention either?
There really wasn't much of anything in the review (and thus I'd gather the book) that is new knowledge that someone wouldn't know by reading WAPO and NYTIMES over the last 30-40 years.
"Universities that previously had a long leash are finding that professors are increasing getting disciplined for teaching non-state-approved courses, and new university hires are now mandated to pass “political correctness interviews” along with having subject-specific qualifications, plus undergo a background check to make sure they never expressed dissenting political opinions.
(I’m not claiming that modern America has any moral standing to object to this, just that it’s bad in an absolute sense)"
I mean...yes, we do? This is operating on an entirely different scale and order than the problems (which I certainly acknowledge exist) with American academia.
Always enjoy these posts. I'm not aware of a good book on MBS but I would recommend The Call by Kritika Varagur (it has a 4.4 on goodreads if you care about that) about the Salafi project from mid-70's-9/11, and the lasting influence since then. It's only like 200 pages and very good.
If you haven't read it already, I highly recommend the Dictator's Handbook by Mesquita and Smith. It's a good summary of political science research on the dynamics of taking and consolidating power in autocratic regimes (they attempt to expand the scope to democracies too, but I think their analysis is oversimplifying those dynamics a bit).
Some relevant points loosely inspired by the book:
* dictators almost always turn on the people who helped them get into power because those people know how to topple a regime. A dictator wants sycophants whose power flows from the dictator not competent people who have an independent base of power.
* dictators retain power by buying off key powerholders in a country. They can afford to do this better if they personally take a smaller cut of corruption revenue. This means one relatively stable situation is a dictator who personally takes relatively little state revenue but makes the other key players fantastically wealthy. Because any replacement would take a larger cut for themselves, the other players aren't incentivized to change the system.
* always pay attention to who has the loyalty (whether bought or earned) of people with weapons as they're fundamentally the ones who decide who rules
* external competition (either from other factions, social groups, or foreign powers) can reduce internal dissent. If the next leader after Xi would be likely to radically change who has power in China that strengthens Xi in relation to current powerholders.
Doesn't make a difference to the rest of the review, but the first diagram has the Central Committee on the right having authority over the National Party Congress. The second lists the National People's Congress, which in the first diagram is on the left. Are these two different NPCs, and is one of the diagrams mixing them up?
"Partly this is inevitable; economies usually have a period of impressive catch-up growth as they develop, then stagnate as they near the technological frontier."
China isn't stagnating because of 'the technological frontier.' They're stagnating because of collapsing birthrates and an ageing demography (one of the worst in the world) leading to a shrinking labour force and collapsing domestic demand. (Same thing has happened to Japan and is happening to Korea, the former is just managing the process of decline more gracefully.)
"One alternative to that narrative - I think the gist of the case Noah presents - is that Deng Xiaoping was a genius, Jiang and Hu were pretty impressive too, and Xi hasn’t added anything to their work and may have subtracted from it. I find this pretty plausible."
Deng may or may not have been a genius, but he inaugurated and imposed the one-child policy and his successors failed to notice this was setting up their country for an economic and social suicide for around 40 years. I'm not inclined to judge them very favourably in retrospect. Xi is just inheriting the mess that they bequeathed to him.
I tend to agree with Noah Smith's assessment that Xi just isn't of the same caliber as Deng was (but not many people are; in terms of scale x competence, Deng was probably the most effective leader of the 20th century). But I do think increasing censorship of Western internet platforms is a good thing, both from a narrow Chinese national interest perspective and from a more universalistic "what-is-good-for-humanity" perspective. From a PRC perspective, China is one of the only countries (possibly the only country) where nationalism and patriotism increase among smarter, younger, and better educated people. Russia, which also has pretensions to independent Great Power status has faced a huge exodus of its smartest young people who are generally more liberal-internationalist. China has avoided that. From a universalist perspective, a separate Chinese internet ecosystem helps insulate China from Western mind-viruses (see my one and only Substack post for a longer elucidation of this), which otherwise tend to quickly spread to the rest of the world via the internet. China is perfectly capable of developing its own mental viruses (see: Taiping Rebellion, and the nuttiest incarnations of Maoism. Both partly derived from Western ideas of Christianity and Communism, but mostly indigenous), but at least they'll be *different* mind viruses. Helps stop one particular set of bad ideas from dominating the entire world through the Anglosphere.
"which argues that given the current state of the economy China will stagnate sooner than expected, never really catch up to developed world standards, and plateau at around the same (absolute) GDP as the USA."
This is something that will be clear in a few years at most. China has to drop to 2-3% growth pretty soon - by or before the decade's end. Are there any prediction markets for this?
It would mean that China would be spectacularly unsuccessful as an Asian nation, as the piece pointed out. The Chinese within China would be the worlds least successful Chinese people. It is true that doctrinaire Marxism might hold them back, its clearly a less efficient economic system, but I can only assume that the communists would reform back to the economics of Deng era if it looked like they couldn't pass the US in GDP. Xi would be gone.
Otherwise I can see why a fairly industrious, smart, and well educated people with a potentially massive internal market would stall in the middle income trap.
"Should we argue that non-democratic systems are doomed to collapse into authoritarianism? Deng Xiaoping was a really smart guy, he put a lot of effort into trying to build a multipolar oligarchy, and . . . it doesn’t seem to have put up much of a fight. Xi just walked in and took over."
I think China may be a particular case. Their history is that it is better to have an Emperor. When you have "multipolar oligarchy", you get the Spring and Autumn Period which leads right into the Warring States period.
You have a choice of being a high-up minister under the Emperor (and running your own agenda to increase your power) or being lord of an independent feudal state, with all the *other* lords of independent feudal states warring with you, plus somebody somewhere is a really *good* lord and general and is getting ambitious about becoming Emperor, starting with taking over your state (and generally chopping your head off in the process).
It's safer and more profitable to be a minister under an emperor. Besides, if the emperor is too incompetent, you can always overthrow him and seize the mandate of heaven for yourself (if you're careful, capable and powerful enough). And Chinese history shows over and over again, separate warring states eventually get conquered and unified under one emperor, like it or lump it. So better not to put up too much of a fight when a new, potential emperor shows up, and that way you can keep your head.
I'm very interested if anyone has some good thoughts or empirical evidence regarding the quote:
>[anit-corruption]...cost China an estimated 1 to 1.5 percent of its annual GDP during 2014 and 2015.
Presumably there are some good effects of lowered corruption as well. That money should not have been purely lost, but held or spent by someone other than party officials. (It's also pretty insane to think that 1%+ of China's GDP was funneling through party official's private hands). Related, and probably harder to measure, I would think that a less corrupt economy would also be more efficient, because contracts would be made for economic instead of corrupt reasons. That may very well have been offset by other choices that made growth worse, as mentioned by Scott.
Is there any reason to think that reduced corruption didn't increase the economy?
> When Xi succeeded Hu (2012), he was able to pick up the power-gathering project almost where Jiang left off, with only a little bit of “damage” from Hu’s ruleDuring.
Everyone spends all their time singing the praises of liberal democracy. But have any political scientists (since Machiavelli) spent any time on figuring out the best way to structure and run an oligarchy/autocracy -- assuming you have to have one?
For example, is it structurally better (in terms of producing stability and beneficial policies for the nation) to have ultimate power reside in one Supremo, a small clique, a big committee with subcommittees? Or is it always just luck of the draw as to the personalities and abilities of the people who actually claw their way up the slippery pole of power.
Maybe if you can't have a full-blown democracy a hereditary monarchy is the way to go. Perhaps the Chinese should bring back the Emperor.
Thanks for the great writeup. I lived and worked in Shanghai for 4.5 years starting in 2015. When I saw the news in early 2018 that term limits for president had been abolished (and by implication Xi was now dictator-for-life), I began planning my exit. My reasoning was simple: if Xi, in a country of 1.3+ billion people, could not find a single person he thought was trustworthy enough to take over his job after his term ended, either China is doomed from widespread incompetence, or heading towards doom because it's now going to be governed for life by a supremely selfish person with no vision of a world beyond himself. (I guess another option, that he's actually an Ozymandias-style genius who sincerely has China's best interests at heart, didn't seem plausible to me.)
I got out in late 2019 and, COVID notwithstanding, feel that I absolutely made the right decision. During my final years there, internet censorship and traditional policing were visibly increasing all the time. The economy was great but I got a sense of widespread paranoia and intellectual stagnation. Smart young Chinese colleagues and friends repeated propaganda with completely straight faces. Many of my clients (well-off but not wealthy educated Chinese people) were looking for the exits, wanting to move their families to Canada/Aus/NZ/USA and start over. Especially to send their children to Western colleges. It didn't seem sustainable then, and it doesn't seem so now.
Bottom line, I just don't think there's any getting around the fact that a one-man dictatorship is an inefficient, outmoded style of government. It's all too easy for states to fall into this situation, but that doesn't mean it's desirable. Ironically, upon moving back to the USA, one of the commonest things I'd hear in political conversations with American peers was how much they admired China and wanted an benevolent dictatorship here—led by their preferred politician of course. Never mind that that's never how dictators get chosen.
It wasn't easy for Xi to take power. Bo Xilai very nearly beat him to it. Bo's murderous corruption was quite normal for Chinese rulers, not an exception. When it was exposed it almost caused a civil war in China. Xi just got very lucky every single thing fell into place for that not to happen.
"(why are all China analysts named things like “Elizabeth Economy” or “David Dollar”? This also sounds like something that would happen in a children’s book.)"
Simulation is running low on resources, obviously.
I've never understood the logic behind dictators giving themselves vote tallies like 2970-0. Surely you would get 10 people to be like "eh, Xi is fine but I like this other guy better," to feign a tad more legitimacy. Are they being hubristic, or is it actually likely better for some reason I don't understand?
If the quoted statement were true, the above log-log scatterplot of GDP per capita in 1950 vs gdp per capita in 2016 would have a trendline slope less than 1. But in actuality it has a trendline slope far greater than 1. This means that the countries that were already above average in 1950 grew faster in percentage terms than the countries that were below average in 1950. China's fast catch-up growth is the exception, not the rule. It's an anomaly caused by anomalously high IQ in global terms, plus the sudden removal of factors that were holding them back earlier (civil war, communism, lack of free trade). Ordinarily, whatever qualities made a country have good economic growth pre-1950 would have made it more likely to have good economic growth from 1950-2016, and whatever factors made a country have poor economic growth pre-1950 would have also made it more likely to have poor economic growth from 1950-2016. These factors are likely to include IQ, economic policy, rule of law, and proximity/access to wealthy trading partners.
Eh, Poland probably shouldn't be used as a benchmark, given what a huge outlier it is itself. Most of its peers which "cast off stifling forms of Communism" around that time ended up with recessions lasting at least a decade.
I wonder if Xi has taken a path similar to Stalin's. Stalin built a personal network within the party that linked him to third and fourth level provincial party members. It was like the old Chicago machine with its chain linking ward healers to the mayor and central players. Effectively, there was a party government within the party, and it was this that let Stalin challenge Lenin and then destroy Trotsky. Stalin worked on this behind the scenes, but by 1930, he was completely entrenched.
Also, the engineering thing. Look up Qian Xuesen. He's a bit of a folk hero by now, the man who brought Western systems engineering to China. He had been working with von Karman's group at JPL, but got kicked out as a security risk and went on to found China's nuclear and space programs as well as laying the ground work for its security state. It was quite a career.
I wonder if those "zombie companies" are actually doing something really important (at least as far as government priorities are concerned) that doesn't show up in traditional capitalist metrics like profit or growth.
Amusing comment on the state of censorship in China:
I posted the NPC joke in a language-related chat group on WeChat (China's Facebook). There were no consequences for two days, because Chinese censors don't waste their time analyzing jokes in English language chat. But after a couple of days the American moderators of the group (resident in China, like me) decided to eject me from the group and break off all communication.
This is how it works. Occasionally, the state heavies do shut down a newspaper. But 99% of the time, it's self-censorship.
"A few months before his ascendancy to the party leadership, Xi disappeared from official media coverage for several weeks beginning on 1 September 2012."
Huh, I didn't know that so many leaders in the early 2000s had engineering degrees. This explains the Chinese students that end up in Melbourne and why a lot of them seem startled to struggle with the curriculum (many adapt, but I feel like they kinda kill themselves to do so because they were expecting it to be much easier, and the shame of failing an "easy" degree would be unbearable). I always did wonder what kind of jobs awaited them back in China - the few I talked to were predominantly middle class and research focused and wanted to get into local or Chinese academia but they're definitely a minority. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some elite children in my graduating class, but I never got to talk to them!
How can you write about a government who has "censors" to let the news slip about the guy who committed murder, and not write that that government was also authoritarian, even if it was an oligarchy rather than a monarchy like what came next?
Overall, it seems like Scott is still looking for a better book on Xi. I look forward to him finding one.
> I dwelt on some of Xi’s failures or questionable decisions in that last section, because I was impressed by Noah Smith’s article What If Xi Jinping Just Isn’t That Competent? With the incredible economic rise of China over the past few decades, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking their leadership must be geniuses, or at least have managed something that merely democratic countries never could.
I still have the same criticism as I did when Noah's article was last mentioned: it is assumed that raw GDP growth is a goal onto itself. From a Dictator's Handbook perspective, we should expect this to be true in democracies but not dictatorships.
Economic growth in China that isn't controlled by Xi (even indirectly) isn't an asset, it is a liability. It means more money rivals can use against you. Looking at some of the points brought up in these two articles, they all seem to fall inline with this view:
> The effort is so effective that there are worries about unintended consequences
>> ...Officials who remain in power are often paralyzed by their concern that green-lighting new projects or undertaking new reforms will draw unwanted attention. Some have reportedly started avoiding entrepreneurs and are refusing to move forward on projects...
I don't think Xi sees this as an unintended consequence. From his view this is a happy little accident. Noah's article also talks about how SOE are less effective than private yet growth is pushed via SOE. Noah also talks about Xi cracking down on industries he doesn't like.
From the perspective of "GDP is a goal for its own sake" then these are all bad moves. From the perspective the Dictator's Handbook these are all the moves you'd expect from a competent dictator who is trying to perpetuate power.
Re Belt and Road:
> The basic procedure is: China goes up to a developing country and asks “would you like giant low-interest loans to create a humongous port?” The developing country says yes without asking any citizens or businesses, faces protests, loses a lot of the money to corruption, mismanages the construction project, and ends up without a humongous port. Then China either has to harass and threaten them to get the money back.
This also seems to be working as intended. Having the money get "lost" to corruption isn't a mistake it is an intended feature. You just can't admit that publicly. Having a bunch of small countries that owe China money (or a port) that they can never pay back is exactly what China wants. If they do what China asks, China can "kindly" delay the missed payments. If they instead act in their own interest China can demand the loans on time, punishing this insolence.
This is something you could see a classic Joe Pesci character do: get a victim to owe you a debt they can't possibly repay; make it clear that severe harm will occur if the debt is not payed on time; when the victim can't pay up, demand they do stuff on your behalf; make it seem like you are being generous to the victim for offering this deal; still demand the money; repeat. China is just doing this at the country scale.
>it’s so irrelevant that it’s literally called “the NPC”.
Oh, that is choice!
I read Elizabeth Economy, and have to say I came away genuinely unimpressed. I feel like I could’ve written the same book just based on summarizing what I had read about China in the last few years in newspapers and magazines. I listed some alternatives in the post below. As a general matter popular works on the topic tend to be bad. But there are some real gems written by academics.
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/reflections-on-2021
If I'm following the succession correctly, Xi's ten-year term expires this year. Is he planning to leave office, or has he found a way of getting around that rule too?
Reminds me of a favorite quote:
But then I tell them, if you think that a bill of rights is what sets us apart, you're crazy. Every banana republic in the world has a bill of rights. Every President for life has a bill of rights. The bill of rights of the former "Evil Empire," the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was much better than ours. I mean it, literally. It was much better. We guarantee freedom of speech and of the press -- big deal. They guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, of street demonstrations and protests; and anyone who is caught trying to suppress criticism of the government will be called to account. Whoa, that is wonderful stuff!
...
So, the real key to the distinctiveness of America is the structure of our government.
Regarding Xi anti-corruption purges that seem puzzlingly non-power-centralizing:
Apparently, some unusually large number government officials in China were actually spying for the CIA, who compensated them in part by paying the bribes that were required for these spies to advance in their government careers. The income was disguised by the ordinary activities of corruption, and having CIA funding meant US spies could pay more bribes and advance faster politically than non-spies. The anti-corruption purge stopped this by making it suddenly very suspicious to receive large sums of money, by reducing the ability of well-funded spies to advance via bribery, and by enabling the government to be purge and punish spies without suffering the loss of face associated with admitting publicly that they were full of spies.
Summary here: https://www.axios.com/xi-jinping-corruption-drive-intelligence-china-b0adc8ff-8f43-4077-81e1-dab0d05d6c7d.html
Details here (I think; it's been a while and I haven't re-read it): https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/12/21/china-stolen-us-data-exposed-cia-operatives-spy-networks/
There are nations where it's difficult (by design?) to figure out the precise chain of leadership. Who ultimately controlled Imperial Japan's foreign policy in WW2? The Emperor? The state? The war council? Extreme elements within the army? An uneasy Schelling balance of all the above? At various times various factions held sway. For Japan's enemies, it was like negotiating with a many-headed hydra.
I'd say there are deep and unspoken national characteristics that continue to express themselves regardless of what the government's nominally doing. China has never in history shown signs of being a bastion of Jeffersonian democracy or cultural liberalism. Whatever steps the CCP claims to be taking in that direction, the reality is probably somewhat different.
Minor quibble, Vietnam has always been anxious about/wanted an ally against China. At the end of WWII, Ho Chi Minh temporarily welcomed the French back in so that the Chinese would leave. After the Vietnam war, Vietnam basically allied with the USSR against China. Deng launched a punitive invasion of Vietnam in 1979. After the Soviets collapsed, the US was the logical next choice for outside protector. I'm sure this nonsense over islands hasn't helped, but they always want someone to protect them from China. It's not all Xi's fault.
Interestingly, there's a similar dynamic where Cambodia constantly wants an outside ally as protection against Vietnam.
I read "How China Became Capitalist" and it was pretty ok. I even have a copy that has the pages in the reverse order if you want it.
> Aside from a few of Deng’s personal picks, we should think of this less as “China is a magic place where rational scientists hold power”, and more as “for idiosyncratic reasons, social climbers in China got engineering degrees.” Certainly none of these people were selected for the Politburo on the basis of their engineering acumen. They got their power by bribing, flattering, and backstabbing people, just like everyone else.
Right. The mechanism here is that they were told that being an engineer was necessary to get to power. So the people who were social climbers got engineering degrees. The flow is not power to engineers. It's the powerful to engineering programs.
> This isn’t a great answer to the question “how autocratic was pre-Xi China”? In particular, I don’t get exactly what prevented Jiang or Hu from seizing power, overstaying their term limits, or killing their enemies (I assume it was some mix of not being sure the military would back them and not wanting to destabilize the country, but I don’t feel like I have a gears-level understanding). I also don’t get what it meant for some Chinese leaders to be better at pursuing their policy agenda than others: what levers did they pull? How did they quash dissent?
What's an autocracy? The CCP has never been, and is not now, a government where the central government is expected to control everything down to the finest details. Instead the cadres are instructed to understand the goal and spirit of the instructions (they have a lot of study sessions) and to implement them as best suits their locality. Mao was very big on this as a criticism of the USSR and its bureaucratic formalism. This kind of looks like federal, local government. But the thing is the idea is not that the local government does things on their own. The idea is that the local government serves as a tool of the central administration. For example, the goal of the Chinese Communist Party of Smalltown is not that they represent Smalltown to the Party. It's that they represent the Party to Smalltown. They are explicitly instruments of Party control.
China has never had separate power bases. The factions were always at least formally obedient to central authority. They certainly didn't act as a check or balance on central authority. They would have been horrified by the idea that the Communist Party could fight itself or have any kind of insubordination like that. The system was, and is, set to prevent that. On the other hand, the ability to gain genuine support from key CCP officials and from the party in general matters for the effectiveness of your policies.
On the other hand, if you're the leader and you say, "let's get steel production higher," then a combination of will and competence and interest by local cadres is going to matter a lot. If you can play the game, get them onboard, etc then you'll do well. If not, well, they won't disobey. But they won't go the extra mile either. When people say Hu was not as strong a leader what they meant was that he was less capable of getting the average cadre on board or playing oligarchal games to win support. So everyone obeyed him but he wasn't able to get as much done as effectively.
Also, keep in mind that patronage networks can shift. My understanding is that if you upset your subordinates too much they can jump ship. Basically, the two way street in China is that patrons compete to attract clients and clients compete to receive rewards from patrons. Someone who doesn't sufficiently reward their clients, especially if it's because of a personal flaw rather than a lost power struggle, will find people bleeding out of his patronage network and into competing patrons'.
> Of these, I find the second hypothesis - good timing - the most plausible. Why did Xi succeed at gathering power, where others didn’t?
Communist leaderships choose their leaders for ideological reasons. You're reducing it to cynical power politics. But this isn't how the the Soviet premier got or the Chinese paramount leader gets selected. They're selected for being good Communists, effectively for outstanding achievements in Communism, combined with pragmatic political considerations. Xi didn't subvert the system. Like Deng Xiaopeng before him he rode a wave, of which he was an intellectual proponent, that it was time for a strong leader to fundamentally reform the government. The fact Xi centralized power was not a surprise. It was what his mandate was. He wrote theoretical papers that basically boil down to, "We need to end term limits and have a strong, central leader for Marxist-Leninist reasons." And then he did that. The key moment was not his removal of term limits but the adoption of his Marxist theories into the formal ideology of the CCP.
Your model is just fundamentally broken if you understand all the premiers as cynical power maximizers. They're a bunch of highly ideological Communists and they do all sorts of things that only make sense if they're true believing Communists. In fact, they have a whole bunch of cultural and even systemic thing meant to keep cynical power maximizers out of power. This can create reform tensions which is part of what Xi, by rolling back reforms, wants to resolve.
> During earlier parts of his reign, Xi deliberately left a small fraction of the public square untouched; he seemed aware of the “dictator’s information problem” where nobody would tell him when things are going wrong, and he valued public protests as a way to find corrupt officials and other problems requiring his attention. He’s since backed off on this and just started censoring everything.
China has a weird system of open public comments that happen in stages. I've heard these are pretty genuine. That is, the CCP will say, "We are having a debate on corporate tax policy. No businesspeople will be punished for discussing tax policy for the next fifteen days and will have the chance to present their opinions to decision makers at the end of the period." Then they might have periods for other groups. These are, as far as I can tell, pretty genuine. Unless you go off topic they don't consider critcisim disloyal. Likewise, they have this weird system where Party members have specific people they're allowed to talk with (supposedly) without monitoring so long as its the entire group. So, for example, supposedly the entire Congress delegation of Fujian can talk freely with each other without fear. But notably not with other delegations or in public or in private apart from the group.
It's a clear attempt to prevent national level opposition and to particularize it by region and control information flow. But that's their solution as it stands. Xi's actually ramped these periods up. He's also started to distribute powerful people into these dialogue communities so they get more genuine information. For example, Xi now represents Mongolia because he wants more genuine information on the frontier.
> By its own standards, Xi’s centralization campaign has succeeded: other factions have been marginalized, corruption has decreased, and society toes the party line more closely than ever. His other efforts are more dubious.
His other efforts are irrelevant. Xi's first stated goal is to keep the CCP in control of China and loyal to ideological doctrine. I've seen nothing in his actions that imply he's not telling the truth there. His goal, as he's stated, is to build Mao-Xi style Early Socialism in China, effectively a form of controlled and directed capitalism that will lead to a smooth transition to real socialism down the line.
Of course, the issue is that capitalism produces wealthy capitalists, celebrities, and other modes of production that tend (in the Communist mind) to produce bourgeois government. Xi was, I suspect, concerned that Party members were becoming capitalists so he severed that link pretty severely. But there's still the issue that that means CCP members are both more powerful and poorer than China's business elite and that the fusion that was ongoing has been, if anything, reversed. Of course, China has a simple way to keep these people in line: a police state. Actresses and billionaires and the like are imprisoned, re-educated, or executed. Enough that I think, especially for businesspeople, it's starting to produce a downward pressure where incentives are to be successful but not too successful. I don't have any broad evidence for this. But I at least think I'm observing that behavior.
Vietnam and China had a brief war in 1979, right as Deng Xiaoping was consolidating his power. Vietnam is a strong regional power, so they're a natural proxy/ally for the US against China.
Doesn't seem too surprising there's tension there..
Also, good book on Deng is the one by Ezra Vogel. Gives a good sense of power dynamics in 1970-1990 China.
Typos: “Fang Binxing” (with one more G), and the link to the VPN incident just goes to the Wikipedia page without the relevant section anchor.
I refuse to believe that "Economy" is a real surname. Surely this is a case of a nom de plume chosen for the subject matter, ala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacey_Dancer
"Should we argue that non-democratic systems are doomed to collapse into authoritarianism?"
Venice lasted over a thousand years as an oligarchy and plenty of other medieval/early modern republics weren't much worse.
Was Mao an autocrat throughout his time as Paramount Leader? When I was reading about the history of China since the revolution a few weeks ago, it had seemed like there was a period after the Great Leap Forward when Mao had become mostly a figurehead, but then his cult of personality became useful to the Party, and the Cultural Revolution happened, and he became as powerful as he had ever been in his last few years.
I thought that corruption was precisely the point of Belt and Road. You go in, promise to shower the local leadership with cash, infrastructure, and jobs, to be repaid at some later date. They embezzle the money like they're supposed to. Then you come back a few years later and say, "Hey, remember that money we gave you ? Remember how we said it was a loan ? Guess what, first payment's due now, but we'll take your port as collateral if you prefer". So the head honcho gives them the port... and the iron mine... and the plantation... and whatever else they need. China builds some military bases on the property, then moves on to the next target. It's a win-win situation for everyone but the peasants, but who cares about them ?
I strongly feel like the best summary of the conditions that led to Xi's ascension are outlined in the book "The Party" by Richard McGregor. I did a book review in the SSC comments a few years back, but I'll do a summary here:
Basically - China pre-Xi wasn't a stable system. The patronage network you outlined in this piece has a serious downside: a newly-appointed paramount leader is necessarily at his absolute weakest in terms of influence at the time he is appointed leader. This is because a large part of being paramount leader is the ability to appoint a bunch of people into important positions who will back your agenda. If you're coming into a position where all the important spots were filled by your (likely ideologically-alienated) predecessor, you come in with not that much ability to accomplish much. Conversely, however, the time when you're most powerful as a leader is when you're right on the cusp of being kicked out of power. You've had time to solidify your reign and appoint a bunch of toadies.
Think of this as an exact inverse of the american system. Instead of a honeymoon "mandate" at the start of a term, the Chinese leader has more of a gradual ramp up. Instead of a lame duck period, they have a year or so of basically uncontested rule.
So... if a leader is most powerful right when they're about to get removed, why didn't someone hang onto power before Xi? Well, it's a mix of honest-to-god admiration of Dengism on the part of the former leaders and a shadowy network of retired party officials who still exerted significant sway and could, conceivably, have made life untenable for a would-be emperor. Unfortunately, that network had mostly disolved by the time Xi was facing the boot, so he didn't have to deal with it.
Mostly though, the previous chinese system didn't work. It really weakened the central government and was quickly losing ground to private industry. It was such a flawed system that reform was basically inevitable - either the party would reassert itself through a strong leader that was able to re-centralize power or it would be glasnosted.
Nitpick: Yang Gang's surname is Yang, not Gang. (I googled this to be sure, and discovered that Andrew Yang also has a gang.)
Your next Dictator Book Club should be a biography of Huey Long, Dictator of Louisiana. ;)
One thing I think is missing from the GDP discussion is the degree to which demographics is destiny. By this measure, China has done above average in terms of growth, even considering its demographics. It is however, set up for a huge slowdown in growth.
If I were an autocratic leader facing inevitable economic headwinds, I'd be consolidating power and locking down decent too. The prosperity carrot used to bargain for unity is going away. Without a carrot, what is there but a stick?
Check out this animated plot I made of gdp vs demographics for every country with a population >50m.
https://epiapps.com/files/gdp.gif
A Marxist reading is that the growth slowdown was at least partly deliberate and unforced (leaving aside COVID-19, of course). The Chinese remain as much, if not more, interested in capital accumulation - expanding the mass of assets (even barely profitable) under control of their enormous banks - as in GDP growth. And they're very interested in boosting domestic demand and tech self-reliance in a dirigiste, targeted way.
I don't know whether all this is rubbish according to orthodox macroeconomics, but if the Chinese are deliberately accomplishing other goals at the expense of GDP growth, then it's probably a mistake to judge Xi's performance by that measure.
"""After his death, everyone backstabbed each other furiously for several years and Deng Xiaoping ended up on top"""
Oversimplifications are usually good, but this one is missing a really critical piece. Everyone also furiously backstabbed each other for several years *before* Mao's death, as they tried to stay a step ahead of the Cultural Revolution he *encouraged* to take them all down.
The Cultural Revolution was zombie movie level scary for people who found themselves up against it. Your doctors and former military officers and powerful people were screamed at and then locked up *and then screamed at while they were locked up* and then taken out to do various important jobs like "take over from the teenagers who have been manning the Russian border because it looks like the Russians may attack". Terrifying doesn't begin to describe it. "Allie Brosh takes a lot of drugs and watches horror movies then intentionally strands herself in the woods at night" is closer.
"""In particular, I don’t get exactly what prevented Jiang or Hu from seizing power, overstaying their term limits, or killing their enemies (I assume it was some mix of not being sure the military would back them and not wanting to destabilize the country, but I don’t feel like I have a gears-level understanding)."""
It's probably the simple answer! It's probably same answer as why they cracked down so hard in Tiananmen Square: abject fear. "In my lifetime, one man has been able to goad the populace into becoming a screaming zombie mob, and they stayed that way for years. Dear Marx, I don't ever EVER want to see that happen again. Deng is right. We have to do whatever it takes to stop that from happening again."
Another interesting tidbit which bears adding, and which I've never been able to square, is this: after being sent down in the Cultural Revolution, Xi ran away and hid, and was arrested and sent back.
Everyone of any standing in his generation was sent down. It's like the fundamental commonality for the entire generation. His experience is singular and, at least from my Western point of view, seems like it should be very damning.
It should be like "Bill Clinton dodged Vietnam" times a hundred. But it never seemed to affect his career.
Is there anyone in the comments who knows more who can explain this?
The Soviet Union *never* had decentralized authority after Stalin, except maybe for a few months in 1953 while would-be Stalin successors maneuvered to succeed him. Khrushchev was an absolute ruler, so was Brezhnev, so was Andropov, (Chernenko was a placeholder while maneuvering happened), and then so was Gorbachev. So I'm not sure this comparison makes sense.
It's hard for me to comment about China, just because I'm not a Chinese-speaker, but I kind of suspect that while most of the power is at the very top, which works on patronage, in some of the better-run regions *attempts* are made to run things technocratically. One reason I say this is that, cross-culturally, patronage systems tend to be overwhelmingly male-dominated, but in countries with gender equality women do somewhat better on standardized tests than men. China prides itself on valuing performance on standardized tests highly, particularly post-Deng (and traditionally). And what we see is that...among members of the NPC born before the mid-1980s, men overwhelmingly predominate; among those born after the mid-1980s, a majority are women: https://npcobserver.com/2018/03/10/demographics-of-the-13th-npc/
The easiest explanation for this is that among really young members of the CPC there really is a shift away from patronage towards something like technocracy.
(As an aside, this suggests -- if you extrapolate straight lines out to ridiculousness -- that in two generations or so China might have an overwhelmingly female leadership class, even as its adult population at that point will be very disproportionately male: https://twitter.com/whyvert/status/1501955523976974342
A much smaller male majority in South Korea led to a totally serious mainstream political attempt at "Radicalizing The Romanceless", whose candidate actually won the 2022 presidential election. Fascinating to consider China, a few decades from now, having much more public support for a radicalized romanceless movement, but in an authoritarian society where the leaders are all unelected women.)
Some thoughts:
CIA dossier on Xi by close friend said he was incorruptible by money. He's a princeling whose sister was prosecuted to death during the cultural revolution and got sent down to the countryside only to come back a believer. LKI, who I'd categorize as preeminent PRC watcher with relations with 5 generations of PRC leaders compared Xi to "Nelson Mandela calibre" of person. These points rarely get mentioned when assessing Xi.
He's enough of a political maverick to consolidate sufficient power for massive corruption crackdown and push through military modernization as well as eliminate thorough US/western influence (see CIA debacle, domestic NGO laws). That's massive. On corruption, CCDI has disciplined 1M+, even Xi didn't start off with that many enemies. But he was competent enough to accumulate enough power to step on that many toes, something Hu/Deng couldn't do.
Incidentally crackdown among military corruption + modernization has actually evolved PLA into fairly competent force, at least enough for US to rank PRC as pacing power. Add in building SCS bases while US distracted in ME and Xi has massively improved PRC strategic posture. Note alternative to Xi was Bo, whose relationship/patronage with brass made such transformation (IMO) not feasible. Again, feat Xi's predecessors and alternatives wasn't capable of.
Dismantling CIA network, neutering foreign NGOs and ramming through NSL in lawless HK is self explanatory. It's ridiculous HK existed so long as spy capital of Asia with NSL state of exception that enables unfettered treason. Securitization in XJ, however you feel about methods, stopped terrorism completely. Repressing less than 1% of minorities for domestic security is no shit correct political decision.
I was initial Xi doubter, he sounds and looks dopey as hell, and frankly seemed too simple/stupid. Yet his achievements have been remarkable for PRC interests. He was the right man at the right time. Keep in mind US pivot to Asia under Hu. Xi inherited a US already orienting towards PRC containment and have played most of the cards right. Staggeringly so. Mao unified country, Deng built it, Xi looks to be securing it against the most powerful hegemony in world history. And he's doing a surprisingly good job, at least more than most who follow PRC geopolitics for the last couple decades would have thought. Seems like the right man to FDR a 3rd term to navigate PRC in a "world is undergoing profound changes unseen in a century".
As for development:
>Of those, China is least impressive (so far)
PRC has done best considering scale and external development environment. Other east asian tigers had support/security umbrella of US at peak hyperpower/hegemon. Singapore was city state on relatively easy mode. PRC climbed out of hole while being sanctioned by west, had to build own indigenized nuclear/space/weapons etc industries. At end of day, PRC population means PRC can't get away with specializing in a few industries to uplift population, they have to cultivate every industry and even then there's not enough global demand to uplift everyone. For reference peak PRC manufacturing employed something like 300M... all the Tigers combined and more. There was/is simply too many people. To be blunt, other tigers got A+ playing on "I'm too young to die", PRC got A- playing on "nightmare". They're not even in the same league considering all aspects of nation building and geopolitics. US satraps and countries that align with US interests do well, including authoritarian ones. News at 11. The only country PRC should be measured against is India... which speaks for itself.
Long-term resident of China (20 years) here. This was very good, actually descriptive of the China I know, unlike 99% of western media reports.
On the censorship issue, I want to complicate the picture a bit. I think all descriptions of increasing Chinese censorship are deeply flawed, because they fail to account for the massive general increase in information that the internet has brought.
So: "...to people who grew up in Hu’s China, Xi’s regime feels like a clear step backwards."
I don't know about the regime, but I have access to a lot more information now than I did under Hu, because the internet is better.
"The censoring of Southern Weekly, previously a well-regarded Chinese newspaper, is emblematic"
Sure - but the Southern Weekly and others in the Southern stable, while "well-regarded," were never actually good. What has happened is this: factional debate in China used to sometimes happen in the newspapers. It was exciting to read when it happened. Western observers salivated at the access it gave them to current Chinese political thought, which is usually very opaque. But it was always opinion within the current acceptable range of political possibility. No one who thought the CPC should not be in power ever wrote in the Southern Weekly.
About 10 years ago (I think), that kind of newspaper debate stopped. It went online, private, and into other channels. Western commentators sighed, and said, oh dear, the newspapers have been censored. But that's not really what happened: they were always very heavily censored. Now they're just heavily censored media where nothing of import is talked about.
As to total censorship: the internet is routing around. The outbreak of Covid is a classic example. The news got out, really fast. Much faster than the authorities wanted. And they cracked down later, notoriously jailing the doctor who broke the story. But the story still got out. That was basically unthinkable under Hu. (Example: the city where I live, Xiamen, was the site of one of China's few successful environmental protests, back in about 2007. I watched them march in the streets to stop a chemical plant being built near our city center. That news never got out - never reached other people, never got into the media.)
So the real censorship landscape is: increasing censorship, yes; but failing to keep up with the internet, so overall we are getting more information, not less.
The same applies here:
"Universities that previously had a long leash..." universities never had a long leash. This is rose-tinted nonsense. Any prof who had genuinely radical/democratic/non-communist views would have been weeded out at any time during the last 40 years. This is just more people going to university, so censorship has become more visible.
The other thing I would like people to know about China right now is that Xi's anticorruption campaign has been very effective for ordinary day-to-day stuff. When my older son was born 15 years ago, we stuffed cash in an envelope and gave it to the doctor to make sure my wife was treated well in the hospital. We don't do that any more.
(There's still plenty of corruption, running through personal acquaintance networks, but the cash bribery part of ordinary transactions has been effectively stamped out in my middle-class city. Teachers react with horror if you try to buy them a gift; we recently had a house refitted and the man who came to check whether our gas main was properly routed wouldn't accept a bribe, so we had to install an extra door.)
From my perspective, this elimination of cash bribery has been a massive benefit. Whatever the intentions behind it, it's made life much better.
Obligatory disclaimer: Anything positive I say about China or its government should not be understood to mean that I support its censorship, oppression, or imprisonment of innocent people.
Could it be that the `outer layers' are not entirely rubber stamps, and that the `standing committee' has total power, but ONLY within some range of options that will broadly be seen as legitimate by the outer circles of the governing apparatus? And within that range, they can pick whatever policy options (or personnel) they like, and the outer circles will dutifully rubber stamp it, but if the standing committee and/or paramount leader try to implement policies that the outer layers of the onion view as fundamentally illegitimate, then there is a constitutional crisis and maybe the entire standing committee gets defenestrated? (In principle - the politburo is smart enough that they never totally exceed their mandate in this way). If this setup is true (and it seems plausible to me), then the standing committee in fact does not have absolute power - it is constrained by a broader consensus on a range of `legitimate policy options,' and this consensus can be shifted, but presumably only slowly, so it is not sufficient to get a clear majority of cronies on the standing committee in order to seize absolute power, you also need to steer the consensus in the outer layers of the onion to a point where `Xi seizes absolute power' is seen as being a legitimate thing to do.
In the faction discussion I was somewhat surprised the military faction was not mentioned. The sabre-rattling against Taiwan helps a lot in keeping them happy and in some ways they are the most important of all factions.
Perhaps Xi's special ability is merely to keep the maximum amount of factions satisfied at once without benefiting China itself in any particular way. And perhaps Xi's goal is little else than personal power, after all he was effectively sent to the gulag as a teenager for the "sins" of his father and may just want to be the one giving orders rather than taking them.
I think the GDP graphs are much more informative on the log-scale:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-2020?yScale=log&time=1948..2018&country=CHN~JPN~KOR~TWN
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?tab=chart&yScale=log&country=CHN~POL
Maybe religion is a tool of dictators to efficiently control their population. Xi never used that, did he?
A friend sent me an interview with an Indian communist. Communists have been decimated in election after election.
This guy was very frustrated. He seemed upset that communism never took off in India like it did in Russia and China. He worshipped Mao, as do all Indian communists. He said rather sadly, that early leaders in independent India, such as Gandhi and Nehru, were a lot trickier than Chiang Kai Shek. He also blamed the " cunning upper castes" in general, for having stopped his utopia from materializing in India.
I'll try to link to this video, if I find it again.
I learned a lot from this post, and loving the dictator book club. May I suggest this charming chap - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Sassou_Nguesso - only problem is there are no actual books about him in English.
No discussion of the human rights abuses of China would be complete without a discussion of the horrendous one-child (now two-child) policy. Forced abortion is not a choice. See Women's Right's Without Frontiers (https://www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org/) for more information.
Maybe we *are* in a children's book, and you're the first to tell. Beats the simulation hypothesis...
It looks like you have a pretty idyllic idea of American "democracy". Putting aside the fact that America is hyper-capitalist and therefore intrinsically oligarchic, anti-democratic, aristocratic etc, America also has the fundamentally and explicitly anti-democratic system of the 'electoral college' along with serious gerrymandering (especially along racial lines), extreme corporate control of legislation etc.
>The results flatter my biases as a quasi-libertarian: the state-owned companies are much worse than the private ones:
You have a very bourgeois-dominated view of "success", if you measure success by how much the bourgeois gets enriched then sure they are more "successful" but China does not have such an anti-humanist attitude to "success". The purpose of SOE is to enrich the people not the few and in this sense it is far more successful.
There was a really long yet impressive Chinese article called 客观评价习近平 (Objective evaluation of Xi Jinping) worth reading, it's not as objective as it claims to be, but some of your questions may be answered, you may try the DeepL, the translation is pretty good.
https://2047.one/t/17320
https://2047.one/t/17321
The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers by Richard McGregor https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7822182-the-party is probably the best place to go for an explanation of how the system worked (or didn't) pre Xi. Does a particularly good job exploring the incentives of mid level officials and how that warps the system.
More detail on the purge of Xi's father, a former vice premier (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n11/edward-luttwak/goethe-in-china):
>After trying to atone by self-criticism and the obedient acceptance of ritual humiliation, Xi Zhongxun was demoted to deputy manager of a tractor factory in Luoyang... Having been punished as an individual, with the arrival of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 the elder Xi was brought back to Beijing to be punished again as a former member of the party elite: there is a photograph showing him with a placard listing his sins. He was driven and pummelled and kicked down the street with his wife walking alongside to hit and curse him as a revisionist traitor. She must have been convincing: although she was repeatedly beaten during this period, she was not imprisoned, nor did she spend six years digging ditches in Inner Mongolia like her daughter Qi Qiaoqiao, nor was she driven to suicide like Xi Jinping’s half-sister, Xi Heping.
Of course censoring american social media was smart by the chinese, it is the minimum requirement for sovereign governance today.
I think it needs to be added that China took #1 in external trade (not PPP-adjusted). It's already more influential than USA in trade and USA advantages in influence are non-economic.
An interesting but curious book review in that Marx and "theoreticians" are never mentioned once.
Does Dr. Economy not mention either?
There really wasn't much of anything in the review (and thus I'd gather the book) that is new knowledge that someone wouldn't know by reading WAPO and NYTIMES over the last 30-40 years.
"Universities that previously had a long leash are finding that professors are increasing getting disciplined for teaching non-state-approved courses, and new university hires are now mandated to pass “political correctness interviews” along with having subject-specific qualifications, plus undergo a background check to make sure they never expressed dissenting political opinions.
(I’m not claiming that modern America has any moral standing to object to this, just that it’s bad in an absolute sense)"
I mean...yes, we do? This is operating on an entirely different scale and order than the problems (which I certainly acknowledge exist) with American academia.
Always enjoy these posts. I'm not aware of a good book on MBS but I would recommend The Call by Kritika Varagur (it has a 4.4 on goodreads if you care about that) about the Salafi project from mid-70's-9/11, and the lasting influence since then. It's only like 200 pages and very good.
If you haven't read it already, I highly recommend the Dictator's Handbook by Mesquita and Smith. It's a good summary of political science research on the dynamics of taking and consolidating power in autocratic regimes (they attempt to expand the scope to democracies too, but I think their analysis is oversimplifying those dynamics a bit).
Some relevant points loosely inspired by the book:
* dictators almost always turn on the people who helped them get into power because those people know how to topple a regime. A dictator wants sycophants whose power flows from the dictator not competent people who have an independent base of power.
* dictators retain power by buying off key powerholders in a country. They can afford to do this better if they personally take a smaller cut of corruption revenue. This means one relatively stable situation is a dictator who personally takes relatively little state revenue but makes the other key players fantastically wealthy. Because any replacement would take a larger cut for themselves, the other players aren't incentivized to change the system.
* always pay attention to who has the loyalty (whether bought or earned) of people with weapons as they're fundamentally the ones who decide who rules
* external competition (either from other factions, social groups, or foreign powers) can reduce internal dissent. If the next leader after Xi would be likely to radically change who has power in China that strengthens Xi in relation to current powerholders.
Great review. This stuff is totally outside my ken, so I found this quite informative.
Doesn't make a difference to the rest of the review, but the first diagram has the Central Committee on the right having authority over the National Party Congress. The second lists the National People's Congress, which in the first diagram is on the left. Are these two different NPCs, and is one of the diagrams mixing them up?
"Partly this is inevitable; economies usually have a period of impressive catch-up growth as they develop, then stagnate as they near the technological frontier."
China isn't stagnating because of 'the technological frontier.' They're stagnating because of collapsing birthrates and an ageing demography (one of the worst in the world) leading to a shrinking labour force and collapsing domestic demand. (Same thing has happened to Japan and is happening to Korea, the former is just managing the process of decline more gracefully.)
"One alternative to that narrative - I think the gist of the case Noah presents - is that Deng Xiaoping was a genius, Jiang and Hu were pretty impressive too, and Xi hasn’t added anything to their work and may have subtracted from it. I find this pretty plausible."
Deng may or may not have been a genius, but he inaugurated and imposed the one-child policy and his successors failed to notice this was setting up their country for an economic and social suicide for around 40 years. I'm not inclined to judge them very favourably in retrospect. Xi is just inheriting the mess that they bequeathed to him.
Great analysis. Wish we knew more about China, it definitely sounds like a lot of the internal politics are opaque to us.
I tend to agree with Noah Smith's assessment that Xi just isn't of the same caliber as Deng was (but not many people are; in terms of scale x competence, Deng was probably the most effective leader of the 20th century). But I do think increasing censorship of Western internet platforms is a good thing, both from a narrow Chinese national interest perspective and from a more universalistic "what-is-good-for-humanity" perspective. From a PRC perspective, China is one of the only countries (possibly the only country) where nationalism and patriotism increase among smarter, younger, and better educated people. Russia, which also has pretensions to independent Great Power status has faced a huge exodus of its smartest young people who are generally more liberal-internationalist. China has avoided that. From a universalist perspective, a separate Chinese internet ecosystem helps insulate China from Western mind-viruses (see my one and only Substack post for a longer elucidation of this), which otherwise tend to quickly spread to the rest of the world via the internet. China is perfectly capable of developing its own mental viruses (see: Taiping Rebellion, and the nuttiest incarnations of Maoism. Both partly derived from Western ideas of Christianity and Communism, but mostly indigenous), but at least they'll be *different* mind viruses. Helps stop one particular set of bad ideas from dominating the entire world through the Anglosphere.
Soviet Union never stopped being an autocracy. Yes, Khruscev and Gorbachev were removed in a coup. That happens in autocracies.
"which argues that given the current state of the economy China will stagnate sooner than expected, never really catch up to developed world standards, and plateau at around the same (absolute) GDP as the USA."
This is something that will be clear in a few years at most. China has to drop to 2-3% growth pretty soon - by or before the decade's end. Are there any prediction markets for this?
It would mean that China would be spectacularly unsuccessful as an Asian nation, as the piece pointed out. The Chinese within China would be the worlds least successful Chinese people. It is true that doctrinaire Marxism might hold them back, its clearly a less efficient economic system, but I can only assume that the communists would reform back to the economics of Deng era if it looked like they couldn't pass the US in GDP. Xi would be gone.
Otherwise I can see why a fairly industrious, smart, and well educated people with a potentially massive internal market would stall in the middle income trap.
"Should we argue that non-democratic systems are doomed to collapse into authoritarianism? Deng Xiaoping was a really smart guy, he put a lot of effort into trying to build a multipolar oligarchy, and . . . it doesn’t seem to have put up much of a fight. Xi just walked in and took over."
I think China may be a particular case. Their history is that it is better to have an Emperor. When you have "multipolar oligarchy", you get the Spring and Autumn Period which leads right into the Warring States period.
You have a choice of being a high-up minister under the Emperor (and running your own agenda to increase your power) or being lord of an independent feudal state, with all the *other* lords of independent feudal states warring with you, plus somebody somewhere is a really *good* lord and general and is getting ambitious about becoming Emperor, starting with taking over your state (and generally chopping your head off in the process).
It's safer and more profitable to be a minister under an emperor. Besides, if the emperor is too incompetent, you can always overthrow him and seize the mandate of heaven for yourself (if you're careful, capable and powerful enough). And Chinese history shows over and over again, separate warring states eventually get conquered and unified under one emperor, like it or lump it. So better not to put up too much of a fight when a new, potential emperor shows up, and that way you can keep your head.
I'm very interested if anyone has some good thoughts or empirical evidence regarding the quote:
>[anit-corruption]...cost China an estimated 1 to 1.5 percent of its annual GDP during 2014 and 2015.
Presumably there are some good effects of lowered corruption as well. That money should not have been purely lost, but held or spent by someone other than party officials. (It's also pretty insane to think that 1%+ of China's GDP was funneling through party official's private hands). Related, and probably harder to measure, I would think that a less corrupt economy would also be more efficient, because contracts would be made for economic instead of corrupt reasons. That may very well have been offset by other choices that made growth worse, as mentioned by Scott.
Is there any reason to think that reduced corruption didn't increase the economy?
> When Xi succeeded Hu (2012), he was able to pick up the power-gathering project almost where Jiang left off, with only a little bit of “damage” from Hu’s ruleDuring.
Is "ruleDuring" a typo?
Everyone spends all their time singing the praises of liberal democracy. But have any political scientists (since Machiavelli) spent any time on figuring out the best way to structure and run an oligarchy/autocracy -- assuming you have to have one?
For example, is it structurally better (in terms of producing stability and beneficial policies for the nation) to have ultimate power reside in one Supremo, a small clique, a big committee with subcommittees? Or is it always just luck of the draw as to the personalities and abilities of the people who actually claw their way up the slippery pole of power.
Maybe if you can't have a full-blown democracy a hereditary monarchy is the way to go. Perhaps the Chinese should bring back the Emperor.
Thanks for the great writeup. I lived and worked in Shanghai for 4.5 years starting in 2015. When I saw the news in early 2018 that term limits for president had been abolished (and by implication Xi was now dictator-for-life), I began planning my exit. My reasoning was simple: if Xi, in a country of 1.3+ billion people, could not find a single person he thought was trustworthy enough to take over his job after his term ended, either China is doomed from widespread incompetence, or heading towards doom because it's now going to be governed for life by a supremely selfish person with no vision of a world beyond himself. (I guess another option, that he's actually an Ozymandias-style genius who sincerely has China's best interests at heart, didn't seem plausible to me.)
I got out in late 2019 and, COVID notwithstanding, feel that I absolutely made the right decision. During my final years there, internet censorship and traditional policing were visibly increasing all the time. The economy was great but I got a sense of widespread paranoia and intellectual stagnation. Smart young Chinese colleagues and friends repeated propaganda with completely straight faces. Many of my clients (well-off but not wealthy educated Chinese people) were looking for the exits, wanting to move their families to Canada/Aus/NZ/USA and start over. Especially to send their children to Western colleges. It didn't seem sustainable then, and it doesn't seem so now.
Bottom line, I just don't think there's any getting around the fact that a one-man dictatorship is an inefficient, outmoded style of government. It's all too easy for states to fall into this situation, but that doesn't mean it's desirable. Ironically, upon moving back to the USA, one of the commonest things I'd hear in political conversations with American peers was how much they admired China and wanted an benevolent dictatorship here—led by their preferred politician of course. Never mind that that's never how dictators get chosen.
It wasn't easy for Xi to take power. Bo Xilai very nearly beat him to it. Bo's murderous corruption was quite normal for Chinese rulers, not an exception. When it was exposed it almost caused a civil war in China. Xi just got very lucky every single thing fell into place for that not to happen.
"(why are all China analysts named things like “Elizabeth Economy” or “David Dollar”? This also sounds like something that would happen in a children’s book.)"
Simulation is running low on resources, obviously.
I've never understood the logic behind dictators giving themselves vote tallies like 2970-0. Surely you would get 10 people to be like "eh, Xi is fine but I like this other guy better," to feign a tad more legitimacy. Are they being hubristic, or is it actually likely better for some reason I don't understand?
"economies usually have a period of impressive catch-up growth as they develop, then stagnate as they near the technological frontier."
FACT CHECK: This is literally the opposite of what's been observed empirically.
https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth-since-1950
If the quoted statement were true, the above log-log scatterplot of GDP per capita in 1950 vs gdp per capita in 2016 would have a trendline slope less than 1. But in actuality it has a trendline slope far greater than 1. This means that the countries that were already above average in 1950 grew faster in percentage terms than the countries that were below average in 1950. China's fast catch-up growth is the exception, not the rule. It's an anomaly caused by anomalously high IQ in global terms, plus the sudden removal of factors that were holding them back earlier (civil war, communism, lack of free trade). Ordinarily, whatever qualities made a country have good economic growth pre-1950 would have made it more likely to have good economic growth from 1950-2016, and whatever factors made a country have poor economic growth pre-1950 would have also made it more likely to have poor economic growth from 1950-2016. These factors are likely to include IQ, economic policy, rule of law, and proximity/access to wealthy trading partners.
Eh, Poland probably shouldn't be used as a benchmark, given what a huge outlier it is itself. Most of its peers which "cast off stifling forms of Communism" around that time ended up with recessions lasting at least a decade.
I wonder if Xi has taken a path similar to Stalin's. Stalin built a personal network within the party that linked him to third and fourth level provincial party members. It was like the old Chicago machine with its chain linking ward healers to the mayor and central players. Effectively, there was a party government within the party, and it was this that let Stalin challenge Lenin and then destroy Trotsky. Stalin worked on this behind the scenes, but by 1930, he was completely entrenched.
Also, the engineering thing. Look up Qian Xuesen. He's a bit of a folk hero by now, the man who brought Western systems engineering to China. He had been working with von Karman's group at JPL, but got kicked out as a security risk and went on to found China's nuclear and space programs as well as laying the ground work for its security state. It was quite a career.
I wonder if those "zombie companies" are actually doing something really important (at least as far as government priorities are concerned) that doesn't show up in traditional capitalist metrics like profit or growth.
Amusing comment on the state of censorship in China:
I posted the NPC joke in a language-related chat group on WeChat (China's Facebook). There were no consequences for two days, because Chinese censors don't waste their time analyzing jokes in English language chat. But after a couple of days the American moderators of the group (resident in China, like me) decided to eject me from the group and break off all communication.
This is how it works. Occasionally, the state heavies do shut down a newspaper. But 99% of the time, it's self-censorship.
I recommend these recent articles on factions and political connections:
https://ftrebbi.com/research/ftx.pdf
https://sites.bu.edu/fisman/files/2019/04/politburo-withtables.pdf
Also, be sure to triple-check any empirical papers about China:
https://michaelwiebe.com/blog/2021/02/replications
An interesting fact:
"A few months before his ascendancy to the party leadership, Xi disappeared from official media coverage for several weeks beginning on 1 September 2012."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Jinping#Disappearance
Huh, I didn't know that so many leaders in the early 2000s had engineering degrees. This explains the Chinese students that end up in Melbourne and why a lot of them seem startled to struggle with the curriculum (many adapt, but I feel like they kinda kill themselves to do so because they were expecting it to be much easier, and the shame of failing an "easy" degree would be unbearable). I always did wonder what kind of jobs awaited them back in China - the few I talked to were predominantly middle class and research focused and wanted to get into local or Chinese academia but they're definitely a minority. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some elite children in my graduating class, but I never got to talk to them!
How can you write about a government who has "censors" to let the news slip about the guy who committed murder, and not write that that government was also authoritarian, even if it was an oligarchy rather than a monarchy like what came next?
Overall, it seems like Scott is still looking for a better book on Xi. I look forward to him finding one.
> I dwelt on some of Xi’s failures or questionable decisions in that last section, because I was impressed by Noah Smith’s article What If Xi Jinping Just Isn’t That Competent? With the incredible economic rise of China over the past few decades, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking their leadership must be geniuses, or at least have managed something that merely democratic countries never could.
I still have the same criticism as I did when Noah's article was last mentioned: it is assumed that raw GDP growth is a goal onto itself. From a Dictator's Handbook perspective, we should expect this to be true in democracies but not dictatorships.
Economic growth in China that isn't controlled by Xi (even indirectly) isn't an asset, it is a liability. It means more money rivals can use against you. Looking at some of the points brought up in these two articles, they all seem to fall inline with this view:
> The effort is so effective that there are worries about unintended consequences
>> ...Officials who remain in power are often paralyzed by their concern that green-lighting new projects or undertaking new reforms will draw unwanted attention. Some have reportedly started avoiding entrepreneurs and are refusing to move forward on projects...
I don't think Xi sees this as an unintended consequence. From his view this is a happy little accident. Noah's article also talks about how SOE are less effective than private yet growth is pushed via SOE. Noah also talks about Xi cracking down on industries he doesn't like.
From the perspective of "GDP is a goal for its own sake" then these are all bad moves. From the perspective the Dictator's Handbook these are all the moves you'd expect from a competent dictator who is trying to perpetuate power.
Re Belt and Road:
> The basic procedure is: China goes up to a developing country and asks “would you like giant low-interest loans to create a humongous port?” The developing country says yes without asking any citizens or businesses, faces protests, loses a lot of the money to corruption, mismanages the construction project, and ends up without a humongous port. Then China either has to harass and threaten them to get the money back.
This also seems to be working as intended. Having the money get "lost" to corruption isn't a mistake it is an intended feature. You just can't admit that publicly. Having a bunch of small countries that owe China money (or a port) that they can never pay back is exactly what China wants. If they do what China asks, China can "kindly" delay the missed payments. If they instead act in their own interest China can demand the loans on time, punishing this insolence.
This is something you could see a classic Joe Pesci character do: get a victim to owe you a debt they can't possibly repay; make it clear that severe harm will occur if the debt is not payed on time; when the victim can't pay up, demand they do stuff on your behalf; make it seem like you are being generous to the victim for offering this deal; still demand the money; repeat. China is just doing this at the country scale.
this article explains the Bo thing in more detail which helps to see what happened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chongqing_model