Long Live China's Authoritarian Regime?

In Dali Yang's book Remaking the Chinese Leviathan (Stanford University Press, 2004), the author focused on a series of recent incremental administrative and legal reforms undertaken by the Chinese bureaucracy.

These include the enactment of the Administrative Litigation Law, strengthening "letters and visits" as a mechanism for redressing abuses of government authority, proliferation of "e-government" Internet websites and business-friendly government service centers, increased use of public hearings, and permitting expanded citizen input into policy deliberations.

Yang argued that these measures helped improve the efficiency, transparency and accountability of the state. The initiatives also "help bridged the gap between elite and masses, and go some way toward curbing rampant corruption." Yang even went one step ahead to suggest that in the long run, "an efficient and well-governed administration will be indispensable if and and when elite politics do make a democratic transition."

But as Richard Baum noted in his article The Limits of Consultative Leninism (June 2006), Yang's optimism may be difficult to square with the rapidly frequency and intensity of reported incidents of organized social protest over the past several years.

And while analyst Minxin Pei agreed with Yang that narrowing the state-society gap was the key to improving governmental performance, Pei argued that China is locked in a "trapped transition." In this transition, new socio-economic elites, having been successfully co-opted by the party-state to become willing partners in a corrupt system of "crony capitalism," have little interest in altering the political status-quo.

As Baum argued: "In the short-term, consultative Leninism - bolstered by robust economic growth - has arguably extended the life span of China's authoritarian regime."

In a recent Foreign Affairs article, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and George W. Downs suggested that authoritarian governments can add substantially to their longevity by combining economic liberalization and the effective provision of administrative goods with tight restrictions on political liberties, press freedom, and unrestricted Internet access.

Drawing data from over 150 countries between 1970 and 1999, the two authors concluded that by combining the carrots and sticks, "competent authoritarian governments" can delay the onset of democratization for up to a full decade, or even longer.

As Baum concluded: "If their calculations are correct, China's unreconstructed Leninists may already be living on borrowed time."