It is Even Worse than It Looks
A Review of End of an Era by Carl Minzer
Over the last decade, the Chinese Party-state and society has descended from “soft” or “resilient” authoritarianism toward populist nationalism. Since populism is opposed to reform and nationalism opposed to open-up, the revival of both tendencies signals the end of Deng’s Reform and Open-Up. Americans should prepare for the worst.
In a book titled, It is Even Worse than It Looks, two political scientists, Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein, warned that tribal politics and asymmetric political polarization threatened the American constitutional system. What the authors imply is that abandoning the norms that governed American politics and succumbing to tribal political discourse has effects that extend beyond the narrow political realm. With the election of Donald Trump, Americans are currently grappling with those effects. In writing End of an Era: How China’s Authoritarian Revival is Undermining its Rise, Carl Minzer, an expert of Chinese law and governance at Fordham Law School, makes an equally provocative statement on the erosion of basic norms, such as collective leadership and open experimentation, that have guided China’s leadership since the Reform era in 1979.
In a podcast promoting his book on the popular website for China-related content, SupChina, Minzer explains why these norms are significant, “The prosperity and stability of the Reform era has been founded on a certain set of semi-institutionalized political norms. The reason why I am worried is that those norms are like a Jenga set. I cannot see how you remove norms without creating larger problems.” Minzer shares Overholt’s concern that successive missteps driven by paralyzing fear of change can trigger a wholesale rejection of Deng’s reforms. Individually, these decisions may not have an obvious effect on the normal functioning of the Party-State apparatus. But experts who look closely at the changes in the Counter-Reform era, which Minzer pinpoints as beginning in Hu’s second term, can see signs of mounting instability.
That instability is not simply limited to the Party-State apparatus itself. Rather, leadership anxieties about building instability have compelled them to respond in ways that trigger the radicalization of society. Minzer contends that stamping out formal channels to bring attention to legitimate grievances has convinced advocates, who were formerly moderate stakeholders, that the prospect of gradual reform is an illusion, which has intensified mass protests. These changes taking place within Chinese society ensure that China’s rejection of Reform era principles runs much deeper than many other China scholars suggest.
Recall Minzer’s analogy to the Jenga set. Removing norms does not only mean that Deng’s principle of collective leadership is discarded and sustained economic growth is jeopardized, but also creates “larger problems”. These larger problems involve the disturbing trend away from ideological openness based on experimentation and learning from other countries. Deng’s principle that “[China] needs to open the windows, even if a flies come in,” no longer holds true when ethnonationalist narratives like the “China Dream” (zhongguo meng) hold increasing sway. In Minzer’s estimation, China’s traditional revival is so important he dedicates an entire chapter in a relatively short book to the subject of religion.
Why Contemporary China is Like Imperial Russia
To drive the point home on the set of larger problems afflicting China at the current moment, Minzer has another analogy for the historically inclined—imperial Russia before the Russian Revolution. In the two decades before reformist Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881, imperial Russia pursued a series of agricultural, industrial, and limited political reforms that were similar to the ones Deng pursued when he initiated Reform and Open-Up in 1979. The serfs were emancipated in 1861, bringing a tide of rural migrants to urban factories to fuel the Tsar’s attempts to modernize Russian industry and catch up with the rest of the Western world. Legal and political reforms during this exceptional period of Russian history were even more significant. Seeking greater professionalism and more effective government administration, Tsarist authorities imported foreign legal institutions, including a professional bar, Western courts and juries, and advanced legal codes. Politically, officials even established local representative assemblies the experimented with the concept of self-government. Just as happened in China at the apex of its liberal period immediately prior the Tiananmen crackdown, Russian citizens embraced these channels to push reform.
In both imperial Russia and Reform era China, a single external event heightened elite anxieties such that it they felt compelled to gradually roll back these experimental reforms. In Russia, Tsar III believed that his father’s weakness empowered the radical populists who murdered him. He launched a two-decade long crackdown in response. He tightened censorship, jailed anybody suspecting of plotting to form an organized political opposition, eviscerated local councils, and crowded out previous legal norms with an extensive police state. Likewise, the actions China’s leaders make today can be explained as falling within the shadow of the Tiananmen protests of 1989.
To be sure, China is not identical to imperial Russia. Minzer stated explicitly on his twitter account that his reason for emphasizing that particular historical example is to correct the delusion of authoritarian modernization theory. During the Reform era, China had an economic model defined by long-term planning at the center and flexible experimentation locally. This combination of features meant that it was appropriate to label China a “soft” authoritarian state. It is simply not the case that this model is one stage in a linear progression ending in liberal democracy.
But what about South Korea and Taiwan? Superficially, both of these countries had authoritarian states at early stages of their development, which gave way to liberal democracy once their leaders had successfully lifted most of the country out of grinding poverty. However, Minzer notes that the civic conditions that existed in Taiwan and South Korea that enabled those countries to successfully make the transition to stable democratic rule simply do not exist in China. He states the obvious— democratic transitions are not economic, but political. Even a country that reaches a certain level of per capita income will not become a democracy unless various political actors are permitted to organize groups that exert pressure on the state via formal channels. No matter how wealthy China becomes, democracy is out of the question so long as these conditions are suppressed.
The conditions do not exist in China because the Party is “tightening” in the direction of “hard” authoritarianism. Even facing this political reality, many China observers express the hope that China will self-correct to the stable equilibrium of all educated middle class states—liberal democracy. Grasping for straws, they emphasize that neither governing philosophy is capable of aggregating and adjudicating the complex political, economic, and social interests that have emerged as a result of China’s rapid development. A researcher of democratic trends, Larry Diamond, captures the essence of this view in an article predicting China’s impending transition to democracy, “A looming crisis of authoritarianism will generate a new opportunity for democratic transition.”
Minzer wishes he could offer the same optimism on China’s crisis of authoritarianism, but cannot see how the transition Diamond describes would play out in practice. To put it bluntly, sometimes there are not any opportunities to be had in a crisis. China’s crisis of authoritarianism is exactly as it appears. No amount of leadership from the top will set China on the right path, because those paths are closing off. For this reason, China has already passed the “crossroads” situation that many commentators continue to invoke. Instead China is experiencing a “downward spiral” to Populist Nationalism propelled by evoking popular passions. Under these conditions, Minzer shares the assessment of one former Chinese diplomat, Wu Jianmin, who succinctly stated that populism jeopardizes Reform and nationalism jeopardizes Open-up. The revival of both tendencies therefore signifies the dawn of the Counter-Reform era.
A problem with our foreign policy with respect to China is that we have only prepared for one scenario—that China would become more democratic and stable as it grew richer. Minzer’s final chapter, Possible Futures, lays out some of the other scenarios that many chose to overlook as they were busy searching for happy endings. He forces his readers to grapple with the possibility that China is not only drifting in the direction of increasingly hardline authoritarianism but that drift will sow the seeds of instability. The U.S. government should prepare for the short-term scenario involving a recalcitrant government in Beijing. There is also another longer term scenario where, after years of building pressure, the Chinese state and society is susceptible to “black swan” events, such as a banking crisis or a mass citizen protest that spirals out of control.
Conclusion
Readers looking for a reason to be optimistic may not think to look here. Even Minzer himself confessed that his realism precluded him from offering much optimism. That would be a mistake.
I found his concluding point to be immensely consoling. The choice that China faces today is not between the constructive foreign ideology of liberal democracy and an amalgam of damaging domestic ideologies drawing from its imperial and Maoist past. If China’s fate depended on fully accepting an alien ideology, there would be no reason to offer hope.
In actuality, the constructive option to continue the political, economic, and ideological dimensions of reform are all drawn from Chinese culture and history. Politically, the choice is between the Three Gorges Dam in Hubei province—an artificial top-down political system that gradually accumulates societal pressures—or Dujiangyan in Sichuan province—institutions that naturally channel these pressures. Economically, the choice is between Mao’s fiery radicalism or Deng’s gradual reform. Ideologically, the choice is between the closed, ethnocentric empire of the Ming or the open, gradual empire of the Tang.
The U.S. should plan for the hard way as well as the easy way in how it chooses to conduct its relations with China. But it would also be wise for Americans (and other countries) to accept Socratic humility, recognizing that China’s path is beyond its control. In the end, true insight about the sources of China’s domestic problems will only come when Chinese people reexamine their history and come to their own conclusions.