Democracy in China

The Coming Crisis

Jiwei Ci

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780674242159
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A respected Chinese political philosopher calls for the Communist Party to take the lead in moving China along the path to democracy before it is too late. With Xi Jinping potentially set as president for life, China's move toward political democracy may appear stalled. But Jiwei Ci argues that four decades of reform have created a mentality in the Chinese people that is just waiting for the political system to catch up, resulting in a disjunction between popular expectations and political realities. The inherent tensions in a largely democratic society without a democratic political system will trigger an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy, forcing the Communist Party to act or die.Two crises loom for the government. First is the waning of the Communist Party's revolutionary legacy, which the party itself sees as a grave threat. Second is the fragility of the next leadership transition. No amount of economic success will compensate for the party's legitimacy deficit when the time comes. The only effective response, Ci argues, will be an orderly transition to democracy. To that end, the Chinese government needs to start priming its citizens for democracy, preparing them for new civil rights and civic responsibilities. Embracing this pragmatic role offers the Communist Party a chance to survive. Its leaders therefore have good reason to initiate democratic change.Sure to challenge the Communist Party and stir debate, Democracy in China brings an original and important voice to an issue with far-reaching consequences for China and the world.

PART ONE

The Legitimation Crisis

CHAPTER ONE

Legitimacy and Performance

SOME FOUR DECADES into the still ongoing “reform and opening up” (gaige kaifang) and nearly seventy years after the founding of communist rule, China has an awe-inspiring list of achievements to its credit, not least to the credit of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Although this is by no means the only list, there is little doubt that communist China as a whole has been an overachiever, surpassing even its own wildest realistic dreams. Yet, communism aside, one long-overdue task remains unaccomplished: the establishment of a political order, communist or otherwise, that can be counted on to reproduce itself over time without the permanent specter of subversion or collapse. Nowhere is this elusive goal better captured than in a Chinese phrase fondly used by official media and the CCP leadership: changzhi jiu’an, loosely translatable as “enduring order and lasting stability.” China is today no nearer this goal than it has been since the fall of the last imperial dynasty in 1911 or since the party’s seizure of power in 1949. If truth be told, neither 1911 nor, despite claims to the contrary, 1949 has turned out to be the Chinese equivalent, let alone continuation, of 1789—the inauguration of the bourgeois democratic revolution that Karl Marx, for one, both lauded as necessary and progressive and sought to move beyond for being radically incomplete.

Meanwhile the task of bringing about changzhi jiu’an has become more urgent than at any time since 1949 and especially since the start of reform in the late 1970s. The most important domestic event for China in the next ten to twenty years will be a sharp fall in the political authority of the party-state.¹ In 2029, China will be celebrating the eightieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic. By then, if not sooner, the power of its revolutionary past to impart legitimacy to the CCP will have all but exhausted itself, with no one around who has played any part in the revolution itself and with only an aging, largely inactive, and fast-depleting number of later generations who carry even secondhand memories of the revolution. A distance of eighty years, or four generations, will have effectively dispelled the aura of successful revolutionary violence, with its unique ability to inspire awe and command obedience, to naturalize and even consecrate power. A new source of legitimacy must be found, a new account of the normative origin of power provided. The revolutionary legitimacy of the CCP will need wholesale replacement in the same way that the imperial legitimacy rooted in the Mandate of Heaven did in 1911.

It is no secret that the communist teleological-revolutionary legitimacy² of the CCP has been steadily declining since well before the death of Mao Zedong and especially since the launch of the economic reform by Deng Xiaoping—the latter signaling nothing less than the abandonment of the revolution as both telos and means. So far, however, this fall in one source of political authority has apparently (for we have yet to figure out exactly what has been going on) been made up for by a dramatic rise in another—that is, the great success of the party-state in creating economic growth, higher standards of living, and, later, the much more complicated phenomenon known as national pride. The result is the effective maintenance of the party-state’s authority on a rather different basis, or so it seems: not so much its normative appeal as its sheer performance, its ability to deliver the goods. The goods have been coming thick and fast for nearly three decades, although they have been far from equitably shared and have come at incalculable human and environmental cost. This apparent compensatory mechanism—the shifting from one leg (legitimacy) to the other (performance) instead of walking on the twin legs of legitimacy and performance—has all along been dogged by the improbability that the extraordinary times of recent decades will continue indefinitely.³ As a matter of fact, such times, characterizing as they do the earlier developmental phase of a so-called newly industrializing economy, seem already to have come to an end. The current leadership is trying to cool expectations by referring to this rise in China’s economic challenges as the New Normal, and to transform ambitions by sublimating the individual desire for prosperity into the collective dream of national rejuvenation. Moreover, to its credit, and by force of circumstance, the CCP leadership has finally embarked on the paradigm shift from high-speed growth to high-quality growth, in an attempt to move beyond a growth model overtaken by the country’s own success and to move up the international value chain. This very shift means that economic performance is no longer a matter of growth per se but one of successful upgrading and rebalancing—an even taller order than growth itself. Indeed, Chinese leaders themselves have acknowledged, openly and with a fitting sense of gravity, the sheer newness, as well as enormity, of the challenges ahead. If they show no sign of counting on any easy and predictable surmounting of such challenges, no one else has more reason to. Barring unforeseen improvements in the global economy, it is thus safe to say that China’s economic performance potential has passed a point of no return: no more dramatic growth, and hence no more dramatic boost to legitimacy from this source. Prudence dictates, especially given what is at stake, that we err on the side of caution rather than confidence. In any case, the point is not that China’s economy is not doing reasonably well but rather that we are gradually approaching (or must prudently project) a situation in which walking on one leg—the compensation by extraordinary performance for weak legitimacy—will no longer suffice when the leg that has so far carried China has become considerably weaker. But as we know all too well, China has become overreliant on this leg precisely because the other one, the old revolutionary legitimacy, was showing signs of terminal wear and tear. This other, hitherto hobbling leg cannot simply be pressed back into service as in the past.

Within the next ten to twenty years, then, communist China will be facing a crisis of political authority the likes of which it has never experienced before. It is only a matter of time before the party-state will no longer be able to draw at all on the legitimation potential of its revolutionary past as a basis for its authority. And it is also only a matter of time before it will no longer be able, even in the face of further waning legitimacy, to rely so lopsidedly and headily on performative success as a complementary source of prestige and authority. The compounding of a legitimation crisis by performance problems will be all the more daunting in that performance has come to cover not only economic growth but also such other tough items as social justice, official corruption, and, with an ever-rising profile in public consciousness and expectations, food and vaccine safety and an unpolluted environment. This double shortfall—in both legitimacy and performance—or, put another way, a weakening of both legs at the same time, is one that the CCP has never faced before, and it must be dealt with in ways the party has never had to contemplate before. Unless it is handled by such extraordinary means as are adequate to the challenge and handled in a timely fashion, China’s future could be bleak indeed. There is no need to rule out the possibility of a rosier scenario—of performance, not legitimacy—coming true. Countless predictions have been made, positive, negative, and anywhere in between. All these may be set aside in favor of two simple truths: that we cannot know for sure, not even remotely in this case, and that it is imprudent to base regime authority and political stability solely or even primarily on the uncertain fortunes of the economy. Unless there is a high probability of a positive scenario, it would be reckless to rely on it to save the day. And we have not even considered the potentially shattering implications of the demise of communist teleological-revolutionary legitimacy—assuming a reasonably good level of performance and hence largely regardless of performance.

June 4, 1989, and the Rise of Performance Legitimacy

I have been speaking of legitimacy and performance as two alternative sources of political authority as if they were clear and largely unproblematic categories. They are not, and we must now delve deeper into what they mean and how they are related in the context of reform-era China. Especially problematic and requiring clarification is the notion that performance can contribute to political authority in such a way that the result deserves to be considered a distinct kind of legitimacy—namely, performance legitimacy.

To understand the importance of performance and the rise of performance legitimacy, we must go back to the legitimation crisis that led to the events of June 4, 1989, and was, in turn, exacerbated by them and their aftermath. June 4 signaled two things: a deepening of the legitimation crisis involving the CCP’s revolutionary past, and a new discontent with the party-state’s purely economic performance. The students’ invocation of the deceased Hu Yaobang—the former CCP general secretary known for his exceptional willingness, in the interest of reform, to move away from aspects of the party’s revolutionary past—spoke volumes about the nature of the legitimation crisis. At the same time, the students were reacting, and understood themselves to be reacting, to changes in the Chinese economy that seemed to have little directly to do with legitimacy. Chief among their grievances, shared by society at large, was a set of what have since come to be called livelihood issues (minsheng wenti)—namely, a spate of unprecedented price rises that had started to cause panic among the general public. These two sets of concerns—with the legitimacy of the CCP’s mandate as rooted in its revolutionary past and with the “performance” of an economy in the process of being reformed—came together in an irrepressible outpouring of public resentment of official corruption and the loud and clear call, spearheaded by the protesting students, for democracy. The students may not have had a clear idea of what they were after or, as a later complaint has it, even what democracy was. But in joining together the twin concerns in their protests, they were nothing if not prescient—a harbinger of things to come and of a problematic that is still with us.

The CCP, for its part, first had to deal with the immediate challenge to its legitimacy, indeed to its very survival. It did so by violently putting down the student-led democracy movement and then launching a nationwide ideological campaign aimed at restoring its legitimacy, at least a semblance of legitimacy in the form of the complete absence of resistance, even verbal resistance. It was not without internal division at the highest level of the party, nor indeed without moments of mortal danger, that Deng was able to muster the determination and the sheer military force to crush the students’ “rebellion.” But when all is said and done, we must see in Deng’s decision and its successful execution what must have been a very substantial degree of intraparty legitimacy. Had this legitimacy been even higher, there would undoubtedly have been less division and less hesitation than we later heard about. But the very fact that the CCP was able to put down an extremely popular movement with the open and determined use of deadly force is indicative of a level of intraparty legitimacy, and hence unity, that must have been very considerable indeed. And it is worth noting that the CCP’s intraparty legitimacy has always mattered even more than its legitimacy in the country at large. In a way, from the very fact of a high level of intraparty legitimacy, we may even infer the belief among the more powerful members of the CCP at the time that the party still enjoyed a substantial degree of legitimacy in the country at large. This belief was to be proved entirely correct by subsequent developments, but not before the CCP had gotten around to addressing the second of the students’ grievances—namely, those directed at livelihood issues and hence at the economy as a whole.

This second prong of the CCP’s response to June 4 took the form, especially, of Deng’s famous southern tour in 1992 to revive the economy and the sinking fortunes of the party in the wake of the national and international shock of 1989. Everyone knows what happened after Deng’s initiative, and it would be no exaggeration to say that the reform got its second lease on life—and what life! From that point on, the party started to pursue economic growth with unprecedented determination and freedom from dogma and, some would say, at all cost. We have since witnessed not only rapid economic growth culminating in China’s rise to the status of the world’s second-largest economy but, more importantly for our purposes, a renewed legitimacy for the party. Thus, not only has the students’ second concern been effectively addressed, but their first grievance, having to do with the basis of the CCP’s legitimacy, has also receded. And the latter is due as much to genuine popular approval of the CCP as to the deterrence effect of June 4. Since this rejuvenated legitimacy has a lot to do with economic growth and with efficient performance in general, it is thought by many to be a brand-new kind of legitimacy. What else could it be but performance legitimacy?

What Is Performance Legitimacy?

But what exactly is performance legitimacy? It is sometimes also called performance-based legitimacy, making it explicit that the legitimacy in question is a function of good (meaning, mostly, efficient) performance, or performative success, and nothing else. In the Chinese case at hand, this notion usually seems to carry the implication that performance legitimacy is all that the CCP has enjoyed since 1989 and all that is needed. In other words, the implication is that performance legitimacy has been a comprehensive substitute for the CCP’s old teleological-revolutionary legitimacy, and that, as such, it has been independently effective and, indeed, very much so.

The picture becomes more complicated when performance legitimacy is paired with the other, more standard kind of legitimacy in the distinction between input legitimacy and output legitimacy. Performance legitimacy is output legitimacy—what a regime is able to deliver in the shape of visible goods, which is amenable to assessment after the delivery. By contrast, input legitimacy is a regime’s title to state power, an already warranted position from which it will then be able to try to deliver what it intends to deliver. For the CCP, the title, or mandate, even today still comes from whatever is supposedly contained in its name (gongchandang, communist party), or else its name would have outlived its usefulness and deserved to be abandoned for something else. More on this later, but for now it is necessary to take up a question that concerns the relation between input and output legitimacy and is prompted by this very distinction. In the Chinese case, the question takes this specific form: What is the nature of the relation that has existed since, say, 1992 between the so-called performance legitimacy newly gained by the CCP and the party’s old teleological-revolutionary legitimacy? This question, in turn, gives rise to further questions—or different ways of raising what is essentially the same question. How much of the old teleological-revolutionary legitimacy is left, or, how strong is it today? Does it even matter how much is left and how strong it is, and why? Is so-called performance legitimacy a sufficient basis of political authority? Is it independent or dependent, and if the latter, on what is it dependent? Is de facto power—the sheer fact of being in power and being powerful enough to maintain that power, at least for the time being—enough to provide a starting point, a prior position of authority, for performance legitimacy? Or is legitimacy—that is, input legitimacy—necessary to create the starting point for performance legitimacy—that is, output legitimacy—to get off the ground?

Before we address such questions, some clues provided by the CCP itself are worth noting. True, the CCP may have been pursuing economic growth at all cost, but at the same time it has been guarding its links to the revolutionary past—to 1921 and 1949 and the Long March (literally and metaphorically) in between—with even greater jealousy and determination. True, the CCP has been using performative success to strengthen its position, but it has never given any indication of doing so as a substitute for its old communist revolutionary legitimacy; otherwise it would not have needed to care so much about the latter. True, the CCP is giving the Chinese Dream a teleological substance—“the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” (replacing the earlier emphasis on individual prosperity and happiness)—that seems to have nothing explicitly communist or revolutionary about it, but it has done everything possible to place the Chinese Dream in the context of 1921 and 1949 and to render the party essential, rather than merely contingently useful, to its realization.⁴ “Stay true to the original aspiration” (Buwang chuxin) is the party’s foremost exhortation to itself, tirelessly highlighted at the nineteenth party congress and ever since. Whatever one may say to draw attention to the subtle or not-so-subtle reinterpretation of “the original aspiration,” even more telling is the emphatic reference to this aspiration as the original one. True, the CCP, in pursuing economic growth and other performance goals, has turned China into what, in many respects, looks like a capitalist society, but it has also stuck to its public self-understanding as a communist party presiding over a socialist market economy, with the result that it has acquired a double identity, neither component of which is less important or defining than the other. One could go on in this vein, but this is already enough to suggest that the proposition that the CCP’s performative success, amounting to performance legitimacy, has served as a substitute for its old communist revolutionary legitimacy is one that the CCP would be the first to reject. And I believe the party would be entirely correct in doing so.

This implies, of course, that the CCP still believes it enjoys to a considerable degree its old teleological-revolutionary legitimacy, or else what is no longer serviceable would be ripe for substitution or radical adjustment. In this too I think the party is entirely right, although the exact degree of legitimacy in question is hard to gauge and must be left open to debate. Recall what I said earlier about the CCP’s intraparty legitimacy and its dependence on (the perception of) wider legitimacy in the country at large and vice versa. I said all that with reference to the strength of the CCP’s position during and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: A Prudential Approach to Democracy
• Part One: The Legitimation Crisis
• Part Two: The Democratic Challenge
• Part Three: The International and Hong Kong Dimensions
• Concluding Reflections
• Notes
• Index