March 5, 2018, witnessed a historical moment in China’s political history as 99% of the representatives of the National People’s Congress (NPC) voted “Yea” (2958 out of a total of 2964 valid ballots) for a bill proposed by the Communist Party of China (hereafter CPC) that the two-term limit for president and vice president be eliminated. Introduced along with the reinstatement of both posts during 1982s constitutional reform,1 the removed term limit epitomized Deng Xiaoping’s endeavors to institutionalize Chinese politics in the wake of the Cultural Revolution and lay down the political foundation for China’s economic miracle (Qian 2017). In other words, this constitutional amendment not only culminated a series of Xi Jinping’s political maneuverings since 2012 to concentrate more power in his own hands, but also unwound Deng’s legacies in China’s political institutionalization.
In this book, I investigate Xi’s institutional engineering by offering an analytic narrative à la Bates et al. (1998) and Rodrik (2003), including a dynamic theory of authoritarian institutional change and an in-depth country case study on post-reform China.2 I ask why China’s political institutions that seemed to work in bringing about its economic success for three decades—as touted by Lau et al. (2000) as “Reform without Losers”—stopped being self-enforcing among political elites, why the elite failed to overcome the collective action problem and countervail Xi’s encroachments, and what trajectories such a change took in China under Xi. More generally, I develop a dynamic framework for bringing to light a previously neglected effect, the dictator’s growth curse—the political centrifugal force of economic growth—and how it gives rise to instability in authoritarian institutions.
1.1 The Puzzle
We have punished tigers and flies. It has nothing to do with power struggles. In this case there is no ‘House of Cards.’ (Xi Jinping, September 22, 2015, State visit to the USA)
Xi Jinping’s first term since 2012 has dazzled many seasoned observers of Chinese politics. There were open trials of prominent political figures who used to be worshiped in China’s political pantheon. There was an anti-corruption campaign that swept across upper and lower echelons within the Chinese bureaucracy. There were also new social initiatives launched to engage newly emerging opinion leaders and tighten up the government’s control over society. These new developments defy much of the conventional wisdom in the field of China studies, and the comparative authoritarianism literature does not provide us with much insight either. For instance, almost a decade before Xi Jinping succeeded Hu Jintao, a prominent China scholar, Andrew Nathan, made a statement about Chinese factionalism that can hardly square with what we have witnessed today:
Political factions today have neither the power nor the will to upset rules that have been painfully arrived at. The absence of anyone with supreme power to upset these rules helps make them self-reinforcing. (Nathan 2003, p. 10)
Standing in 2018, we can easily identify the “rules” or authoritarian institutions—for example, the informal institutions for the division of labor among standing members of the Politburo—that were viewed by Nathan (2003) as self-reinforcing, but had been abolished, modified, or reinterpreted by Xi during his first term.
Was such an authoritarian institutional change all because, as some suggested, the leadership style of Xi Jinping made possible such a great transformation in Chinese politics (Lam 2015)? Or were there any more systematic and non-personal factors that could account for this? I believe that the answer should lie somewhere beyond Xi’s personal background and factors,3 in the institutional matrix of the Chinese authoritarian regime instead. To pursue this direction, the book presents an analytic narrative with a theory of authoritarian institutional change and a case study on China to illustrate how the theory works “on the ground.” Moreover, in a broader context beyond the Chinese case, a recent quantitative literature on comparative authoritarianism also shows that, while authoritarian institutions, like any institution, can be sticky, they are by no means stuck fast (Slater 2010). A theory of authoritarian institutional change is therefore critically in demand to explain either a single case such as China or cross-national patterns identified in the literature.
More critically, another motivation for why we need such a theory arises from the development of the authoritarian institutions/comparative authoritarianism literature itself. This recent rise in the scholarly interest in nominally democratic institutions—including both power-sharing and co-opting institutions—in authoritarian countries has demonstrated both theoretically and empirically that these institutions help make the regimes in these countries survive longer and, among other things, obtain higher economic growth rates and more investments (Boix and Svolik 2013; Brownlee 2007; Gandhi 2008a; Gehlbach and Keefer 2011; Svolik 2012). Topics related to their formation and change, however, still remain relatively untouched.
This lacuna can be readily noticed in a recent review article of formal models on non-democratic politics published by the Annual Review of Political Science earlier in 2016 (Gehlbach et al. 2016). In the section on “Institutions,” the authors list the puzzles that have been addressed by the existing literature:
Do institutions have any independent power or are they mere reflections of underlying power relations? How can institutions constrain leaders in political systems where violence is a frequent and often the ultimate arbiter of conflicts? Can institutions alleviate commitment and credibility problems that plague societies where rule of law is weak or nonexistent? How can institutions bind the very same actors who adopt or devise them? (Gehlbach et al. 2016, p. 570)
It is more than clear that none of these questions touches upon the issue of change. The existing literature focuses exclusively on the static effects of (authoritarian) institutions and their persistence, leaving the questions about how they evolve (endogenously) totally unanswered.
This book directly engages the literature on authoritarian institutions. To my knowledge, it is the first attempt to offer a theory of authoritarian institutional change. In the literature, once an authoritarian regime develops authoritarian or seemingly democratic institutions, it will become very stable and the institutions that contribute to this stability will simply stay. For instance, Boix and Svolik (2013) point out that without proper institutional arrangements to make the information regarding how the pie is divided between the dictator and his supporters transparent, the latter might mistake an exogenously induced decrease in total benefits (e.g., a natural disaster) for the former’s intentional violation of the distributional scheme they agreed upon. This misunderstanding can create a sense of betrayal among the incumbent’s sup...