May 25, 2016
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in China, a decade-long explosion of chaos and political intrigue that was the brainchild of one man: Mao Zedong. Mao’s successors, especially Deng Xiaoping, successfully pulled the Communist Party away from personalized, arbitrary rule by one leader, rebuilding China’s bureaucracy and introducing market-oriented economic policies that brought about decades of world-beating economic growth.
Carl Minzner, a professor of law at Fordham University in New York, argues that this period of institutionalization is ending. A new era of personalized rule, now centered on Xi Jinping, the president of China and general secretary of the Communist Party, is at hand. That may not augur well, he says, for China’s long-term economic growth, its relations with the rest of the world and its political stability. In an interview, he discussed how Mr. Xi’s tenure differs from that of his predecessors and why, in authoritarian states, institutionalized governance is preferable to more personalized rule. Mr. Minzner lays out his arguments in more detail in “China After the Reform Era,” a paper published last year in The Journal of Democracy.
Carl Minzner
Photograph provided by Carl Minzner
Q. If China’s government slides away from institutionalization and toward more personalized rule, what will the consequences be?
A. Remember what China actually looked like back when it had full-blown personalized rule — i.e., under Mao. State policies could alter dramatically at his whim — the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution. Elite politics were highly unstable. Mao’s first designated political successor [Liu Shaoqi] died on the cold floor of a prison cell after being purged by Mao himself, while his second [Lin Biao] perished in a mysterious plane crash after allegedly attempting a coup and trying to flee to the Soviet Union. That’s what happens in a system that lacks political institutionalization — when the rules of the game are simply the laws of the jungle.
In contrast, partial institutionalization of the political rules of the game — adoption of collective leadership, efforts to rule China through more regularized bureaucratic channels, the party taboo against resorting to mass social movements — has been crucial to the relative stability that China enjoyed during the reform era.
If you start unwinding those efforts, dark doors in China’s history thought to have been firmly shut could start to reopen.
Q. Are we already witnessing some undesirable consequences from this move away from institutionalized rule by the Communist Party?
A. Definitely. Recentralization of power over a broad range of fields in the hands of a narrow group of people at the top of the system has already rendered China more susceptible to bad decision-making. Witness the handling of the stock market bubble last year. The massive, black-box anticorruption campaign — Beijing’s effort to scare graft and malfeasance out of the system by the politics of fear — has created a degree of paralysis within the bureaucracy. Many midlevel cadres are simply deciding that the safest course is to play it safe, stay in the office and try to avoid any tough decisions that might get them in trouble later on. A pervasive sense of uncertainty about what the future may hold is leading many in China to at least try to get one foot out the door, in the form of overseas property holdings or an investor visa.
Q. You argue that the takedown of Zhou Yongkang, the former domestic security chief, is a departure from the practice of not prosecuting former members of the Politburo Standing Committee. But could one argue that his prosecution was sui generis because, as now seems increasingly clear, he was part of a political bloc along with Bo Xilai, the since-jailed party leader of Chongqing, that appeared to be seeking power at Mr. Xi’s expense?
A. I’d argue that proves my point. We’re moving into an era where power struggles among top leaders are being resolved by resort to much tougher tactics. The brass knuckles are coming out, you might say. On the one hand, this could lead to the emergence of a long period of rule by an unquestioned single political leader at the center — a capo di tutt’i capi. But on the other hand, well … remember what happens in the film “Godfather” when the peace between the Five Families breaks down.
Q. What is the practical difference between governance in a Leninist, quasi-institutionalized model and governance by a strongman who seeks to rule by centralizing power in himself and appealing to nationalist ideology, such as the “China Dream”?
A. Pushed to the extreme, it’s the difference between China under Deng Xiaoping and Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe. One of China’s distinctive features has been its long tradition of effective, centralized bureaucracy. It is not simply a tinpot dictatorship. The question is: Could internal political tensions lead it to slide in that direction?
Q. Do you consider the recent moves to have the media stop using the term “Xi Dada” — Big Daddy Xi — as a recognition by the party leadership that a cult of personality around China’s top leader might be dangerous?
A. One would hope so. The positive interpretation might be that there are some tacit reform-era norms that still carry weight among the party elite — such as resistance to a full-blown cult of personality centered on the top leader, or a reluctance to flirt with Maoist-style mass movements. But we really have no idea.
The negative interpretation is that perhaps this just a temporary pause in a complex internal political struggle. The next iteration might see the tacit age and term limits for China’s leaders that emerged over recent decades erode at the 2017 party congress, opening the door for China to move down the path of Russia, with Putin’s seemingly perpetual presidency.
