For years, dissident scholars such as Minxin Pei and public intellectuals like Gordon Chang questioned the durability of Communist Party rule in China. Although Pei is a respected scholar and Chang’s book sold well, their prognostications of the CCP’s impending collapse were dismissed by most establishment China watchers as wishful thinking by people who clearly have axes to grind with Beijing. However, when David Shambaugh penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month arguing that “the endgame of Chinese communist rule has now begun”, China watchers took notice. Why was that?
To begin with, Shambaugh is considered a leading authority in the field and is well respected in academia. Second, he has little to gain and much to lose by questioning the regime. As he admits in his op-ed, he has privileged access (for a Western scholar) to the Communist Party. Given the visceral reaction of Chinese state media to his piece, it is unlikely that he will continue to enjoy such access. Most important, the piece is further evidence of the evolution of his views on China’s political system. As Howard French notes, Shambaugh previously credited the CCP for its adaptive resiliency. Conversely, his current frustration with China stems from Beijing’s abandonment of political reforms since 2009 and the corresponding scaling up of repression, censorship, and propaganda. His primary argument is that reversing political reforms will make it very difficult to repair an already “crumbling system.” With this in mind, Shambaugh’s current critiques of the PRC’s failings are obviously not the result of some irrational bias, as China Daily claims. Rather, they are a consequence of the changes in his thinking on a subject he knows a lot about.
For Beijing, this ought to be worrisome. The same scholar who just half a-decade ago was praising the CCP for taking critical steps to avoid stagnation, is now arguing that the regime is slowly ossifying.
In his 2008 book Atrophy and Adaptation, Shambaugh argued that proactive political reforms in the 1990s and early 2000s strengthened the party and helped avert a Soviet-style collapse. Because the CCP was already far ahead of its European counterparts in pursuit of economic reforms, the primary lessons drawn from the collapse of the Soviet bloc were political. Political reforms sought to fortify the party by instilling professionalism through mid-career cadre training, improving intra-party discourse, developing feedback mechanisms to gauge popular sentiment, strengthening state institutions (which had long been neglected due to the party’s historical dominance), building a more meritocratic party body, and broadening the party’s base to include businesspeople and intellectuals. For example, one way the CCP sought to foster meritocracy was by establishing seventy as a retirement age for senior leaders, thereby forestalling the emergence of a gerontocracy, which most certainly would have stifled the emergence of talented young leaders in the 1990s such as Zhu Rongji and Wen Jiabao. As Shambaugh notes, “an increasingly anxious regime has rolled back every single one of these political reforms (with the exception of the cadre-training system).”
It is important to note that many China watchers agree with Shambaugh’s observations, if not his conclusions. In a series of response pieces on Chinafile, China scholar Suisheng Zhao began by writing: “I agree with Shambaugh to the extent that the C.C.P. regime is in crisis. But the regime has muddled through one crisis after another, including the catastrophes of the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen crackdown, by tackling its symptoms.” Even if the regime is able to muddle through this crisis as Zhao suggests, the way it will do so will likely spell trouble inside China as well as for the East Asian region. Absent political reform (institutionalization, norm-building, developing feedback mechanisms, building rule of law, and so forth), it is doubtful that the current system can resolve the myriad problems it faces. For example, Xi’s anti-corruption campaign/purge may succeed in tamping down corruption temporarily, but as long as China clings to its one-party system, the regime will stifle organizations that could foster transparency and provide oversight, such as a free media or watchdog NGOs like Transparency International. Absent political reform that fosters norm-building and institutionalization, informal institutions (nepotism, corruption, and the like) will persist alongside formal institutions. Consequentially, the PRC will have great difficulty resolving its many pressing problems: sluggish economic growth, the need to privatize large swathes of the state sector, environmental degradation, widening income inequality, and so on.
Because of the Party’s inability to do much more than palliate its problems, the Xi government will continue to step up repression, promote the growing cult of personality around Xi, pander to China’s lower/middle classes through Bo Xilai-style populism, and stoke nationalist sentiment to relieve political pressure at home. There are already worrisome signs that Xi is moving in this direction. During the Jiang and Hu eras, the state was primarily concerned with dissent that could foster organized, coordinated resistance to the regime. However, under Xi the Chinese government has vastly widened its definition of dissent to include anything that might portray Chinese society in a less than harmonious light. For example, last week China detained at least ten women’s rights activists to prevent a national campaign against sexual harassment on public transportation that coincided with International Women’s Day. This is indicative of the fact that, as the party struggles to overcome crises, it seeks to monopolize all public discourse. Likewise, consider the fate of Chai Jing’s hugely popular film Under the Dome, which tackled China’s massive and growing air pollution problem: After a brief run, the film was yanked down by censors.
Even more worrisome is the growing cult of personality around Xi Jinping, which is unprecedented in post-Mao China. To be sure, Xi is popular among China’s Laobaixing (the “old hundred names”—a Chinese idiom for “common people”). Unlike his predecessors, he is a charismatic leader with whom people can identify. However, as the New York Times has pointed out, his popularity “has also been primed by relentless propaganda portraying Mr. Xi as an indomitable alloy of Superman and Everyman who holds up his own umbrella, kicks soccer balls and knows how to fire a rifle.” The more the regime leans on brute force and its propaganda apparatus to bolster Xi’s legitimacy, the more likely it is to veer toward the mass-line style politics of the Mao-era that inflicted terror on millions of Chinese and stymied economic growth for a generation. Even a slight step in such a direction would be a big step back for China, both internally and for its standing in the world.
Shambaugh’s critics might be right that China will not collapse. But even if it doesn’t, it is likely to enter a period of economic stagnation, political repression, and a foreign policy driven as much by Xi’s need to pander to nationalist firebrands at home as it is by China’s interests. Either way, China’s future is looking dimmer by the day.