The Perfect Dictatorship: China in the 21st Century

by Stein Ringen

under Xi Jinping’s leadership there has been a shift in the mode of governance. With the pace of economic growth sliding downwards, the regime turned more strongly to the use of controls, as if it lost confidence in its ability to purchase legitimacy.

It brought ideology back in more strongly than at any time since Mao, albeit a new brand of ideology, under Xi’s label of a nationalistic China Dream.

All regimes must present themselves to their people and to the world and explain and justify their hold on and use of power.

An effective regime must then have the capacity to act. It must have a machinery through which intentions can be translated into doings.

A party-state is more than a one-party dictatorship. It is a system with two overpowering bureaucracies, side by side and intertwined. The state controls society, and the party controls the state. There is a double system of control. Control is this state’s nature. If it were not for a determination to control, there would be no rationale for the double system.

Party-states are dictatorships. All the known ones in history have been dictatorships, and the remaining ones, including China, are dictatorships.

It bears being set down at the start and then not forgotten that the regime that presents itself to the world as reformed is one that still rules, ultimately, by fear, intimidation, violence, and death.

Today’s rulers insist that their regime is the one that came into being with the communist victory in the civil war in 1949 and that the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP, by definition embodies the continuation of that regime. They claim the right to rule by having liberated the country through revolution and lifted it out of humiliation, and by having shown themselves able to hold it together and under control.

When the chips are down, the inescapable bottom line is the preservation of the regime and its power.

Dictatorship was reasserted and the Chinese told it would persist. Overnight, the only available reality for anyone not intent on being a martyr became one of accommodation. The effects have been lasting and can be seen in the nihilistic materialism, moral corruption, cynicism, disaffection, and confusion of identity that are now prevalent in Chinese culture and social life.

they are busy eradicating ethnic cultures and wasting resources by colonising the western provinces with Han officials and migrants in order to integrate these lands irrevocably into the country (a colonising strategy that is incidentally also followed, quietly and under the radar, in Hong Kong).

The combination of insecurity and assertiveness is a danger in any state, all the more so in one that is increasingly nationalistic, has great military might, and is hypersensitive to respect from others.

This is a system that has programmed the determination to control into its DNA. It controls because it must, because control is what it does.

The Chinese economy is exactly what the Chinese leaders say it is: a socialist market economy. It is a socialist economy in which market mechanisms are used to a significant degree, and a market economy with extensive state ownership and controls.

The official GDP of the provinces adds up to about 10 percent more than the GDP of the nation.

All governments want their officials to be beholden to them for their pay, which is how they secure their loyalty. The oligarchic officials, however, are not beholden to their formal employer.

The control-obsessed party-state that is supposed to have a monopoly of controlling power is dependent on an oligarchic class which operates a competing source of power.

second aim is to crush the competing power of oligarchic clusters so as to concentrate not only political but also economic power in the hands of the party-state leadership.

the core of political order to be a ‘settlement’ between the governors and their various others,

Settlement, again, comes from governors giving others what they need in order to make themselves compliant and co-operative, at least reasonably so, and others giving governors the acquiescence they need in order to lead and rule with some effectiveness.

In some of China’s near neighbours, we have seen the magnificence of modernisation that is social and political as well as economic, and qualitative as well as quantitative. We have seen that not only dramatic growth but comprehensive modernisation is possible. We have seen that economic growth and political democratisation are compatible. China’s development falls short in that comparison.

China is now a world power but has been unable to use that power to win genuine influence or, what it desperately wants, respect.44 It is strong but has no genuine friends.

The regime drives its economy forward by policies that relegate one in three or four workers to exploitation and humiliation.

A political ideology is derived from a notion of destiny or utopia. That notion serves as the ultimate purpose and justification of rule.

Along the continuum from the death of ideology to the revival of ideology, three hypotheses present themselves, which I call ‘the triviality hypothesis’, ‘the welfare hypothesis’, and ‘the power hypothesis’.

It has an intellectual emptiness which makes it vulnerable to criticism and prone to uncertainty and doubt about itself. The leaders of this state live in fear because they know that they are without legitimacy beyond what they can buy with posturing, rewards, and public policy bribery.

States that are not sure about themselves at home may seek to improve their standing by finding enemies abroad.

Strength without purpose can be a threatening constellation. A state that has no other strings to play on than strength has no other way of pursuing its interests than with weight, bullying, and force.

triviality hypothesis says that in the Chinese case the state is its own purpose and that there is nothing more or less to it.

This hypothesis says that there is more to the Chinese state than self-preservation and that the leaders are seeking to realize an idea of purpose.

Deng’s successors inherited a restored and dictatorial party-state but also an ideological vacuum. His mission of salvaging the regime from destruction was accomplished, but he had not articulated a new narrative of purpose beyond growth and prosperity.

he dressed up his initiatives, administrative manoeuvres, and repressions in a new super-message under a new slogan, that of the China Dream.

In the China Dream, then, the party-state is finding, or trying to find, a narrative of ideas to justify its rule. If this interpretation is valid, two further questions present themselves. Is the China Dream enough of a belief system to establish itself as ideology? And if so, what kind of ideology is it? But these questions I leave hanging for now, to be returned to towards the end of the book.

With some careful caveats, it is still correct to say that China is a country in which the party knows everything.

China in the era of economic opening up is a money culture in which money has become the measure of all value.

For a Chinese leadership that takes itself seriously, ‘control’ is explanation enough. It wants control because anything it does not control, be it oppositional activities or economic operations, represents a threat against its determination to self-preserve.

China’s oldest dissident, as far as is known, is Zhou Youguang, who turned 109 in January 2015, a revered linguist known as ‘the father of Pinyin’, the system for transliterating Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet. In an interview on his birthday he said that ‘China needs to take the path of democracy. I have always believed that.’ He continues to be active and to write, and his works continue to be censored.

The trend is not in the direction of liberalisation. Rather, during 2013 and 2014, repression increased and it became more dangerous to be an activist.

The Chinese dictatorship rules by fear. The technique of arbitrary force—sometimes being meted out when there is little cause and sometimes held back when it should be expected—is cultivated to perfection.

The social meaning of the policy is, finally, a manifestation by the state into the intimacy of every family of its will, ability, and ruthless determination to control their lives according to its own dictate. In this meaning, the policy persists. It is a stark reminder to the people that they have no other rights than those it is in the pleasure of the state to grant them.

The propaganda stuff may seem bland and crude and one might wonder if anyone listens. However, the Chinese leaders are very serious about propaganda as a powerful tool, and we who look in from outside should also take it seriously. Our experience is from an environment of free information, and we may not fully grasp what the absence of something we take to be obvious means. Where information is controlled, what is repeated and repeated again gets believed, and what is not naysaid becomes truth.

seven false ideological trends: Western constitutional democracy, universal values, the promotion of civil society, the promotion of neo-liberalism, Western ideas of journalism, promotion of historical nihilism, and questioning the nature of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

There is a growing sector of private for-profit schools, with no effective system of licensing and accreditation, which contribute to removing the children of affluent families from the public school system.

Schooling is strong on mechanical learning but weak on skills such as independent, creative, and critical thinking.

On many indicators of quality and enrolment in schooling, the trend is towards widening inequalities and disparities.

a political will manifested in a consensus coming out of the trials of the Second World War that British society should be transformed into one on a higher level of social justice.

Is there a tendency in the system to modify the play of market forces? The answer is no. On the tax side, the system is regressive in the extreme and rather worsens than modifies market inequalities. Crudely, the poor pay more. On the service side, the main body of provision is through social insurance, which by and large reproduces market inequalities.

A state that can keep 1.4 billion people under constant Orwellian control and that is perfectly capable of putting 2 million bureaucrats on the job of keeping bad information out of the Internet could give the poor and small in society more help and support than it does, if it wanted to. This regime has reluctantly accepted social protection as a necessary add-on but has little further interest in it.

Social policies, to repeat, are always instruments of social control and regime legitimacy. They can also be instruments of social justice. In the Chinese case, they are not. The system is designed for the purchase of legitimacy and for no more. That it is not designed as an instrument of justice is policy, not lack of vision.

Chinese society is organised by the principle of divide and rule. The urban, rural, and migrant populations have different forms of citizenship and with different entitlements. These divisions are enshrined in the hukou, the household registration system, as a barrier against broad and working-class solidarities. Rather than bridging such divisions, the system of social protection is so designed as to maintain them. Social provisions divide the population into manifold groups which are separated and treated differently and are not designed to bring the population together into a ‘harmonious society’.