China is one of the 21st century's most consequential nations. It has never been more important to understand how the country is governed, and what its leaders and its people actually want and believe. Welcome to peckingology, the podcast that unpacks China's evolving political system, and the trajectory of China's domestic and foreign policy. I'm your host, Henrietta Levine, senior fellow with the Freeman Chair in China Studies at CSIS. This is peckingology. I am very pleased to be joined today by Minting Pay, a professor at Claremont Mechanicale College and editor of China Leadership Monitor. He recently published a fantastic and ambitious book called The Broken China Dream, How Reform Revived Totalitarianism. The book traces the evolution of China's political and economic system through the post-mout era, arguing that an eventual return to totalitarianism was essentially guaranteed by the way in which the party went about pursuing reform and opening starting in the 80s. It's an incredible book. The argument itself is very compelling, but the book is also a rich historical study of how Chinese elite politics have evolved over the past few decades. Mentioned thanks for coming back on peckingology. Thank you very much, Henrietta, for having me. We like to start all of our episodes with a question about how our guests came to be China experts, but you already talked about that when you came on the show last year to discuss your last book, The Sentinel State, and everyone should listen to that if you haven't already will link it in the show notes. So today, I'm hoping to start on a slightly more theoretical level. You mentioned at the end of the book in the acknowledgment section that you've gone through a significant evolution of your own thinking about the fate of China's reform and opening from your early days as a political scientist to now. Could you briefly tell us how you used to think about reform in China going back to your 1994 book from Reform to Revolution and how and why your perspective has evolved to the point that we see today in book number five, The Broken China Dream. I started out being quite optimistic about China. Like most people, what was happening in China in the early 1990s gave us some hope that China could actually go down a very different path toward a more prosperous but also through a career society, that is through the path of economic modernization. My first book was a comparison of the reform in the Soviet Union, which ended in the collapse of the Soviet Union, not exactly a very happy outcome for many Russians. Today they still are very bitter about the chaos. I think it was a very happy outcome for the world because we saw the dissolution of an empire and the regaining of freedom for hundreds of millions of people. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was a very heated theoretical debate about which path is the better path away from communism. Things are being had one path, garbage half chose another path. So in the early 1990s, I think the prevailing wisdom was that the Chinese path was the more sensible one. I think still today somebody would find that argument still persuasive. So my first book was comparing two different paths and was quite positive the Chinese paths. I genuinely believed that economic reform could open social space, could open political space, not directly. And by changing the entire economic system, by moving economic resources away from the state to the Chinese private sector, then over time, Chinese society were getting more power over the Chinese state. So there was the optimistic take in the early 1990s. Then after about my second book, called China's trap transition, the limits of developmental autocracy was actually a rejection of that optimistic thesis. That was written in the early 2000s after Hu Jingtao came to power. So the first book was finished 1994. So about 10 years later. So I was observing whether the developments I was hoping that would happen in the subsequent decade that happened what I saw discouraged me. That is in the Hu Jingtao era, economic reform began to slow down and political reform, there was some in the 1990s and in the 1980s like village elections, anybody still remembers them, more autonomy for the national peoples, congress, local peoples, congress, more civil society, more legal reform. But by the early 2000s, these things had ground to a halt. So I developed the thesis, I coined the thesis of trapped transition. The central idea is economic reform on the one party rule would eventually lose momentum because the ruling elites would no longer have the same compelling incentives to reform as things are being did because they were on the less pressure to change the system. At the same time, the political costs of reforming the remnants of the old system were much high because they would be dealing with the core components of the old system, much more resistance. So that's the second book. So the third book was even more pessimistic because I looked at corruption, how calm economic development on the one party rule gave rise to not just pervasive corruption but a unique form of corruption, that is, collusive corruption that you had groups of people inside government. Also, part of officials and businessmen, including with each other, so that's the chronic capitalism. So eventually I concluded economic monetization on the one party rule would not only slow down economic reform, but also would lead to chronic capitalism. So this book, coming back to this book, is that it's really a summary of my own intellectual journey. I just told chronologically how one period would lead to another period, try to uncover explain the underlying logic between each different distinct period. Diving into the book to start in the 80s, in your view, what were the economic and political institutions of totalitarianism that were in place at that time and how did Deng's economic and political reforms interact with those institutions? Yes. The 1980s, when you look back, was a very unique decade. In the book I call this the decisive decade because what happened in the 1980s actually created conditions for later development but also limited options for future leaders. Also the 1980s was the only decade in which China had multiple paths, the least realistic was actually the liberal path. But the other two paths was the Deng Xiaoping path, which is new authoritarian rule, one party rule, but fortified with capitalist economic development. Then you had the much more traditional paths advocated by hardliners like Cheng Yun, they advocated a return to the 1950s. So this is some overview of the 1980s. So in terms of political institutions, what happened in terms of political institution change was that Deng Xiaoping decided that he would not want to dismantle the totalitarian institutions, which would mean party control of the government, party control of the military, party control of the judiciary, party control of information, party control of ideology. That is, the traditional components of the totalitarian rule would be maintained. But then being very pragmatic, we are going to preserve the institutions but we are not going to continue the practices. There is a real distinction between totalitarian institutions and totalitarian practices. This is very similar to the post-Stylnist Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc in the 60s, 70s, that they kept all the key components of a totalitarian system, but they did not do the kind of personality cult mass terror campaigns as was the case on the Stalin's rule. In the 1980s, you had a very weird combination. That is, the totalitarian system was maintained. It was dormant. Totalitarian practices were suspended. But this meant that at some future point, if the leaders wished to, they could always revive the practices. They could rely on saying, underlying totalitarian institutions. I mean, we saw this happen in the Xi Jinping era. The 1980s, as I said, was a period in which the liberal past was possible. But eventually, it did not happen. That's because at that time, two very unique individuals who were born and Zao Zian, genuine liberals, were in charge of the parties. They today affairs. They did not have the ultimate decision-making authority, but they were on the front lines managing the parties day to day affairs. So they managed to create an atmosphere of relative tolerance. The 1980s, in retrospect, is the freest decade in post-1949 China. And we're not seeing a similar decade. And that's really because of these two leaders. And also, there is one episode which is not very well known in the West. That is, between 1986 and 1987, Deng Xiaoping asked Zao Zian to design a blueprint for the genuine political reform. For political reform, Deng wanted serious administrative reform to make the system work better. But Zao Zian took the mandate, and he genuinely tried to change totalitarianism. The blueprint has never been published, but based on the recollections of the participants in the process of designing that program, he wanted to change the totalitarian system into an authoritarian system. Today was our, what's the difference? It's such a big difference because there were no cases of a successful transformation through reform of a totalitarian system into a democracy. There were many, many cases of transforming an authoritarian regime into democracy. So it has to be done in two steps. So Zao Zian and his chief advisor, Baotong, at the time, devised that program, talking about a lot of the things that were actually dismantled the totalitarian state. Deng Xiaoping took a look at the program and didn't like it. So ostensibly he said it's okay, but he did not push it. So the party did not adopt it in late 1987. So there was one chance, but they blew it. On the economic side of the ledger while we're in the 80s, you highlight the importance of the de-collectivization of agriculture for creating a real private sector in China in that de-collectivization created entrepreneurs by freeing up labor and capital by allowing peasants to save money. And this increasingly allowed, as you point out in the book, China to, you say, grow out of the plan, or in other words, achieve growth without reforming or even de-emphasizing the state sector and SOEs. So how did that dual track transition play out and how did it constrain future policy? The dual transition, the dual track, that is there is a state-owned track, which is highly inefficient. There is a new private sector during track, very efficient. That happened actually not by design, but by accident, because when they declativized agriculture, which in itself was a revolution from below, things have been gotten supported as very late in the game. Once they declativized agriculture, several unanticipated but very positive developments occurred, one is because they declativized agriculture was a lot more efficient, so they did not need a lot of labor. So what do you do with superlabor? In second, among superlabor, you had a lot of entrepreneurs, so there is a supply of entrepreneurs, and then because the declativized agriculture was more productive, parents had savings, so you had capital, you had labor, you had entrepreneurs, so they had created. And at that time, also the Chinese economy was a shortage economy in consumer goods, so there was market demand for consumer goods. The rural industry, the private sector, emerged because of that, it was not planned, and because it operated in this no-man's land, economics speaking, it did not really face that much competition from the state sector, because the state sector did not have the capacity to compete with the private sector, so they grew very fast. And over time, I think by the end of the 1980s, they already produced roughly the same amount of industrial output. Then you shall be later recognized that this was a really positive development, and he said, the Central Committee did not take credit for this development, so that is what I think Barry Dottens is growing out of the plan. When you look at China's history of performing stale owned enterprises, it's a history of failure. So now, how this development constrained the later development, that is because reforming stale owned enterprises always polythode difficult, because this is where the so-called loneliness commanding heights are located. But because the development of the private sector delivered this sustained period of growth, the Chinese comes party, did not have the burning incentive or the courage to deal with a very difficult political task. So over time, the task became even more difficult, and because the party controlled the allocation resources, so what happened is that they would use the private sector's efficiency through the fiscal system, through the banking system to subsidize the stale owned enterprises. So we have this very paradoxical development that is the stale sector is kept alive today. But the stale sector takes at you very big. We're talking about 25-70% of GDP and Chinese GDP is roughly 20 trillion. So what I'm talking about, roughly $6 trillion economy. And it's all in vital sectors. So today, the stale sector is tied in with the Communist Party's own survival. So that makes reforming even harder. So I think in the early 1980s, probably it was easier to reform at that time than today, because today, if you reform this in political risks, are much, much bigger. So you have this problem of a very dynamic sector existing along an extremely inefficient sector, which happens to be the economic foundation of one party rule. So the decision to avoid dealing with the more difficult problem of reforming is the own sector, made the stake sector almost impossible to reform in the future. And you've mentioned that the 80s may be the only period of time during which different paths really were available to China's development path. And those options start to close down definitively, of course, in the wake of the 1980-19. Tiananmen protest and the massacre that followed in part, as you mentioned, because of the ejection of liberals from the party in the government. And they've never really returned. I wonder, do you think China's path could have looked meaningfully different if who really had gone, died a few years later? It's not who you'll buy. I think who you'll buy, probably he could not be salvaged, because when Deng got rid of him, it was end of the 186th, early, January 187, I think we really need to look at Zao Xie Yang. That is, now just imagine Zao Xie Yang did not go to North Korea. This sector, the tuning point of Zao Xie Yang went to North Korea. And when he was away, Li Pun organized this political political party, the Standing Committee meeting, and then he went to Deng Xiaoping and Deng Xiaoping said a bunch of things, very, very tough, hard-line, Li Pun took notes, gotten published in the infamous April 26th editorial. So Zao Xie Yang, now gone to North Korea. This would not have been published. And subsequent student protests there, explicit, was the retraction of the editorial. It was impossible. So Zao Xie Yang had to work very hard to get up. Now I think Zao Xie Yang survived, even though I think he was politically precarious, he did not lose Deng Xiaoping's confidence before the trip. So had he survived, because he would be the party chief for 87, 92. So the person who would succeed him would be Hu Qi Li, another liberal, who voted against Marshala, only two people voted against Marshala, Zao and Hu Qi Li. Hu Qi Li was Hu Qi Li. So 92 would be Hu Qi Li. So Hu Qi Li would be there, 92 to 2002, so there would be no Hu Jing Na era, right? Reform could have deepened and you would not have Jiang Zeming, probably you are not going to have Xi Jinping, right? It would be very different. So you have very different leadership line up and I don't think China would have been stuck in this past. And all the revolutionaries would have died off by 2000s. So the liberals would have a relatively clean slate and had Zao Xie Yang put in place after the old revolutionaries passed away, Zao Xie Yang would have the power to implement his two-step solution, turning China into a authoritarian regime first, rather than sort of a sticking-wish-toded authoritarian regime. But the North Korea trip did happen and so here we are, now moving ahead to the period between Tiananmen and the rise of Xi Jinping, you argue that China was developing a neo-authoritarian system. What does that mean? Okay. Neo-authoritarianism in China was very popular in the late 1980s. Late 1980s, of course, as China was quite open, they were debating what would be the past forward. There was a minority said we need to follow the Western liberal path, democracy plus, economic modernization. By the time the Stalinist, the totalitarian past, going back to the 50s, lost its appeal. But there's a different path, that is one party rule plus economicization on capitalism. So using capitalist methods, so that's new authoritarianism. In perically, they pointed to very success stories of East Asia, the Fort Haegi, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong. All of them developed without democracy. So the idea was capitalism plus enlightened dictatorship could produce economic miracles. And there was the Xi Jinping's idea all along in the book. Zhao Zeyun checked with the Xi Jinping. The Xi Jinping said, oh, that's my idea all along, but I don't want to talk about it. So Xi Jinping had that vision. He was firmly convinced that only the Communist Party could mobilize the resources, maintain stability, and make tough decisions. His biggest objection to democracy was that democracy could not get things done. So now the formula for success is one party rule plus capitalist economic development. So that's new authoritarianism. When then was alive, when he was in power, it was a concept, not even proven concept, not proven elsewhere, but in China it was sort of a concept. Who actually turned this vision into reality was Jiang Zeyun. He's received much less credit for turning the concept of the authoritarianism into an actual political order and a set of policies. Not in one stroke, but through trial and error. So over time in the 1990s, Jiang Zeyun and his political conservative, but technically quite competent colleagues, developed a set of survival strategies for the Communist Party to deal with a fast-changing society globally connected through economic integration with the West. Now, we know what their playbook was. It is your focus on economic development, performance legitimacy, your cultivate nationalism as an additional source of political legitimacy for the support. You toughen social control, but not excessively so that you prevent internal opposition, then you co-opt social elites to broaden your base. In the meantime, you keep control of the stay on sector. This is the survival strategy and it worked for two decades. So the post-Tiaming era, roughly 1992, then Xiaoping's visit to southern China and then the rise of Xi Jinping, the end of 2012. These two decades were the golden era of Chinese communism because they had prosperity, they had relative political stability, they did not have any massive purchase, the relationship with the outside world was relatively peaceful, stable and cooperative. Now they have none of that. So that was the new authoritarian era. I'm not saying that new authoritarian era was sustainable. It contained its own seeds of demise because toward the end of the Hu Jingtao era, that new authoritarianism could no longer be sustained because economic reform was not happening. So productivity was slowing down, they had to rely on bubbles to sustain economic growth. Politically corruption became very rampant and society thanks to monetization became much more assertive in terms of challenging one party rule. And within the party, you had strong world characters like BushiLai and others who saw an opening. So the post-Tiaming era, that kind of political harmony within the party was really becoming very, very fragile. Then you have the Xi Jinping era. So that's the story of new authoritarianism. And in this neo-authoritarian interrednum, you see the very limited political reforms instituted by Deng continuing to basically hold, even though as you point out there is no real enforcement mechanism. And so recognizing those constraints are about to fall apart as soon as we get to see, why do they hold, why are they effective for at least those two decades? Two decades is a very strange decade because today we saw this full regression into the authoritarian rule in China. Then you say, what happened in the post-Tiaming era? My answer is for about two decades, they had a very fragile but still effective balance of power at the very top. You had equally matched political factions. They would not allow one faction to dominate. So they had all kinds of deals. This system was quite corrupt, but what happened was that they managed to maintain internal peace. So let me just give you one example. Jiang Zemin. When Jiang Zemin became the party chief, after Deng died, he was really first among the equals. So when you look around him, who do you see? You see Li Pun, not exactly BushiLai. He's on power base, conservative. You should Zhu Rongji, very capable, highly respected. And you see another person called Qiao Si, who actually outranked Jiang Zemin for most of his career was once the chief of organization, the chief of internal security. These were not Bushovas. So Jiang had to share power with them. And now when you look at the Hu Jingtao era, he had to share power with Jiang's supporters on the part of your standing committee. So he was sort of hampering. It could not do. He wanted to, the kind of things Xi Jinping later actually did. So even though Jackson Balances would be a bad word in this, that's all effective. Yeah, that's all effective. It seems like effectively, there's an authoritarian iteration of Jackson Balances that persist during those two decades. Totally. I call this multiple-larity with Chinese characteristics. So now moving ahead to 2012, Xi Jinping is appointed General Secretary. Everything starts to change again. I appreciate that the book almost marvels at the speed with which she breaks collective leadership, especially when we remember he was ostensibly a week figure lacking a real power base. He was a compromise picked. So how did she so rapidly rebake the political scene? First I want to make the point that what she did to the Communist Party, in China since the end of 2012, was totally unanticipated by the party itself. Had party leaders foreseen Xi's later behavior, he would not have been appointed. So now the interesting question is how did that happen? How did Xi dismantle the post-Temor order, the new authoritarian order and replaced it with form of authoritarian order so easily? Then you have to go back to the Xi Jinping. Look at what happened in the 1980s. So these are the things that happened. As I said, Xi Jinping ended totalitarian practices, but he preserved totalitarian institutions. The system was intact. You could actually revive the system very easily. My analogy is that the system was like this machine with its power source cut off, but it was not dismantled. So all you need to do is to flip back power and that you would spring to action. So one thing that he preserved the system, he made it very clear that any reform could not touch his bottom line, which is so called four cardinal principles. One of them is people's proletariat, democratic dictatorship, how can I call it, but that's really sort of a coercive power controlled by one party rule. So the other is that the other and his colleagues genuinely did not want to see another model. They were terrorized by Mao. So they wanted to put in a system that would prevent the rise of a future strong man. However, they did not devise clear enough provisions rules norms. For example, the misconception in the words that comes to party had age limits, term limits. That's wrong. When you read age limits do not apply to senior leaders. Term limits applied until 2018, only to the state chairman, not the president. The least powerful position of the all three in our Xi Jinping holds. So in other words, you don't have explicit limits. Then the other problem is how do you enforce it? They don't lay out detailed provisions about what happens to those leaders who violated these norms and principles. One of them is the principle against personality cult. And then third is the thing was so death set against liberalization, democratization that within Chinese society, now within the Chinese state, they don't have so-called third party enforcers, independent judiciary, civil society, opposition party. So the conditions you need in order to prevent the return of a moral life figure exist on people only. They do not exist in reality. So when Xi Jinping came back, he tested against the edifice, it crumbled. And then of course, any politician in the initial success would lead to future success. So all he needed to do is to systematically push against the post-Herman order dismantled peace by peace. So by 2018 when he abolished the presidential term limit, he was effectively a sort of the second army of Mao, so to speak. And you often refer to the Xi era not only as totalitarian and not as neo-Mauis, but as neo-Stalinist. And in some ways, it's clear why you would go in that direction, for example, the perpetual purges that are a key feature of Xi's rule are certainly reminiscent of a Stalinist era. But if you were to ask a random person in China about their experience of government, maybe outside of Xinjiang and Tibet, and compare that to a resident of Stalin's Soviet union, I think you'd see vastly different experiences, vastly more personal freedom, at least in certain contexts in China. And of course, it's also interesting that you went with Stalin rather than Mao. So I'm just wondering how you reached this conclusion that Xi is walking ultimately in Stalin's footsteps. OK. First, I want to distinguish Xi from Mao. Xi is obsessed with stability. Mao delighted in chaos. So she would rely on state coercion. Mao would rely on mass movement as the primary instrument of policy. So you often hear comments in Washington that certain elements of Xi's rule are like reminiscent of the cultural revolution when you see forced confessions, that kind of thing. But it sounds like you're saying it's really the opposite. It's the opposite. Because I think she would never allow cultural revolution type chaos. Actually, it's reminiscent of Stalin's show trial. You look at those confessions. And unfortunately, we don't have TV footage of the show trials in Moscow, in the Soviet union, in the 1930s. So why sort of his closer to Stalin's end to Mao? It's always, he's not a replica of Stalin. First, I think, I'm not saying he's totally unlike Mao. He liked Mao in the sense that he liked personality, the cult. And Stalin she is that. So there, so you take that box. When you look at Mao, did not like constant purge. Mao liked just one big purge, the cultural revolution. Stalin was constant purge. Xi Jinping is perpetual purge, so that's another one. And another thing that would put him closer to Stalin's end to Mao, that is foreign policy ambition. Mao did not have the foreign policy ambition, because China did not have the power. Stalin had the one, and then now Xi Jinping has clearly a far more ambitious foreign policy agenda than any Chinese leaders before him. And that's because of China's power. So that's, I think, these three sort of points, he's closer to Stalin than to Mao. I hate to use, but I have to use words like Stalinist, the new Stalinist. We just don't have good enough words to describe that kind of individual. In the book, I try to make some modifications, subtle denue-als, so that we know he's similar but not identical. Charting his own path. Yes. Your book tackled modernization theory in a really interesting way. And this theory suggests that economic growth should create more fertile ground for democratization, and so China is the obvious counterpoint to the theory. But throughout the book, you highlight interesting moments in which economic growth did seemingly catalyze the emergence of pro-democracy social forces. But ultimately, through various means, the party prevents these movements from growing into organized political opposition. So how do you think about this imbalanced dialectic between civic engagement and coercion from the state? When you look at what economic modernization has done to China, you'll find two contrasting pictures. On the one hand, the political system itself, it's stagnant, it hasn't changed that much. But at the same time, you look at Chinese society, it's vibrant, it's full of diverse forces, it contains, you might call seeds for more political opening. And you actually see much more active forces of resistance, both in the central part of China, Beijing, Shanghai, those big, but also on the periphery, the ethnic minority areas. So I think modernization does, if you give modernization its credit, it does create societal pressure for change, but that's not enough. That's totally far from sufficient. It may not even be necessary. The most important thing for democratization to happen when you look at the actual cases is not modernization. Its decisions made by the ruling elites. When they are ready to democratize, they will. If they are not ready, if they are resistant to democratization as the Chinese leadership was after Tiananmen, they would put down any challenge to the party's authority with force. We saw this not just in the case of social protest, pro-democracy forces like Liu Xiaobuo and others, we saw this with foreign government, right? Not explicitly pro-democracy, but clearly a very well-organized social force that could challenge Australian one party rule. So that's why I think if we want to make the connection between modernization and democratization we have to treat it in a much more sophisticated way. That is, your look at the social effects very positive. But you have to say how modernization changes the political calculations of political elites. That's a very different matter. A few months ago we had Ron Emitter come on the show and talk about his latest foreign affairs piece, which argues, as I'm sure you know, that the generation of CCP cadres who came of age in the more open period of the 80s and 90s will start to assume real decision-making roles soon. And as a result, we may see the party return to a less totalitarian, still authoritarian, but more open version. Is that what you would expect to see? I would count less on generational factors. Generating factors make a difference. But I also being struck by how power can corrupt people. That is, you don't have to look very far. Just look around. And then once you get into power you think very differently, the kind of values you use to sort of uphold might no longer be dear to you. You might actually value power a lot more than other things. But I think what Roner got right is that future elites have a lot of challenges to deal with. Now, Deng Xiaoping came into power. So we have to look at back at history in order to have some idea of how future Chinese elites will choose their path. So Deng Xiaoping came into power and said, my rhythm, that's not the party's path. The party cannot survive on this path. Okay. We're going down the new or certain paths. Worked for two decades. For one reason or another, Xi Jinping came along and said, that's a lot of paths. For us, I'm thinking you back to the two different paths. We don't know how long he will hand around two decades, 25 years. So he is by the time he's gone. And it's very likely he will leave China in a big mess. Then the party will be faced with another existential choice. We've tried three things. The Maoist path, the Deng Xiaoping's path, and the Xi's path. None of the<|zh|> minds really work. So what shall we do? We can go back to the Deng Xiaoping's path that appears to be the path of least resistance. But it probably would be pretty difficult because people are saying, well, that there's nothing of the problem. So we might see a force path. Well, that is, I don't know. Because they've tried three business strategies. None of them has delivered. So long-term enduring, what shall I say, peace, security, for them. So they may have to. So I think it's right to look at how future elites will do. Most likely they are not going to be driven by their values, but by their existential need for survival. I think we'll have to wrap there. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me on the show. To our listeners, I really hope you will read a new book, The Broken China Dream, How Reform Revived to Talitarianism. It's a fantastic read. And as always, we'd love to hear what you thought of today's conversation and what issues you'd like peckingology to unpack in future episodes. You can send your ideas to peckingology.cs.org. If you're new here, we hope you will subscribe, and we'll be back in your feed.
