Debating Regime Legitimacy in Contemporary China

Popular Protests and Regime Performances

Suisheng Zhao

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367139315
• eBook ISBN: 9781351972147
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

This comprehensive volume is a three-part study of whether the Chinese political system has maintained a significant degree of regime legitimacy in the context of rising domestic discontent, in particular the popular protests against socio-economic inequality and environment degradation. Part I presents the scholarly debate on the theoretical refinement and empirical measurement of regime legitimacy in contemporary China. Part II focuses on the challenges to regime legitimacy of the increasingly widespread popular protests and civil activism. Part III examines the regime's responses to these challenges, including coercive repression, adaptation, and economic performance. This book finds that, while repression can hardly stop popular protests – and often backfires – economic performance legitimacy is increasingly difficult to be maintained. The only way out is the adaptation to the changing domestic and international environment.

The chapters in this collection were originally published in the Journal of Contemporary China.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Legitimacy? Contributing to a new research agenda

PETER SANDBY-THOMAS

Previously in this journal, Gunter Schubert’s article, entitled ‘One-party rule and the question of legitimacy in contemporary China’, called for the setting up of a new research agenda to analyze the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). While making a valuable contribution to the study of the CCP’s legitimacy, Schubert’s emphasis on the empirical measurement of this concept gives rise to a number of conceptual and theoretical issues. As a consequence, this article seeks to contribute to the research agenda by addressing these issues. In so doing, it suggests that a shift away from a narrow empirically-measured focus on legitimacy towards a broader conceptually-driven concern with legitimation would allow for a more inclusive agenda within the China studies community and lead to a more complete understanding of why the CCP remains in power.

Introduction

The problem of legitimacy has puzzled social scientists for many years. Indeed, Zelditch traces this back to the fifth century BCE and concludes that legitimacy is ‘one of the oldest problems in the history of social thought’.¹ Yet, despite this, legitimacy continues to be operationalized in the study of politics. The reason for this may lie in the fact that, of the many concepts available, legitimacy offers the best possibility of providing a coherent, multi-faceted and multi-dimensional explanation for why regimes maintain or lose power. In light of this, it is perhaps not surprising that, with the prospect of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) losing power appearing to be low, there has been a rise in the number of scholars in the China studies field deploying the concept.² And yet, Holbig and Gilley make the point that ‘[s]cholars … approach the question of legitimacy in contemporary China with much trepidation. They not only want to avoid a teleology of inevitable democratization, but also seek to avoid the equal and opposite teleology of an inevitable authoritarian durability’.³ It is against this backdrop that, previously in this journal, Gunter Schubert proposed a research agenda for the collaborative study of legitimacy which offers the possibility of avoiding the pitfalls identified by Holbig and Gilley.⁴ This research agenda is valuable, not only in putting forward a method for the ‘systemic exploration’ of legitimacy at the micro-political level but also in articulating a broader approach to conceptualizing the CCP’s legitimacy.⁵ That said, this article contends that there are a number of important conceptual and methodological issues within this research agenda concerning the way in which its claims are substantiated. The intention of this article, therefore, is to address these issues and, in so doing, contribute to the ongoing development of this agenda. It will begin by highlighting the areas in which Schubert’s article makes a significant contribution before identifying and addressing the issues raised by the research agenda. The final part of the article will suggest that the research agenda would benefit from moving beyond a narrow empirically-measured focus on legitimacy towards a broader conceptually-driven concern with legitimation and, to that end, will briefly present my own research on the Party’s legitimating use of the stability discourse since 1989.

Asking the right questions: contributions

Schubert’s article makes three principal contributions to the study of the CCP’s legitimacy. The first one is to take ‘Western academe’ to task for the widely-held view that the end of its rule is inevitable.⁶ Indeed, amongst scholars focusing on the political durability of the CCP, the main difference of opinion centers only on how long the Party will remain in power, with some making specific predictions about when ‘regime change’ will take place while others insist only that such change will eventually happen. For Schubert, the effect of such thinking has been to produce research in which the political, economic and social successes of the reform period have been discounted in favor of highlighting the problems and potential challenges to the reform. While agreeing with the thrust of this argument, it must also be acknowledged that the Chinese political system is fragile. Indeed, the concept of legitimacy helps to bring this fragility into sharp relief by offering the possibility of analytically distinguishing between the legitimacy of the political system and the regime.⁷ The extent to which this distinction can be made is dependent upon the extent to which power has been institutionalized, with a political system in which power has been institutionalized being viewed as more stable. In the case of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the entwining of the system’s legitimacy with that of the Party means that power has not been fully institutionalized and so results in a less stable system.⁸ Indeed, though the effect of this entwining has been to raise the costs of challenging the Party’s power, it has also increased the likelihood of systemic change in the event of a successful challenge.

However, acknowledging the fragility of the PRC’s political system does not mean that the CCP necessarily lacks legitimacy. Indeed, amongst scholars who have been predicting regime change, there has often been a failure to explain why the CCP has managed to remain in power since 1989. Rather, the predictions of imminent collapse in the aftermath of the 1989 demonstrations have given way to claims of ‘resilience’ and ‘delay’ to account for the regime’s continued hold on power. Such explanations, however, still presuppose the inevitability of change and, as such, do not acknowledge the possibility of the CCP generating legitimacy over the course of the reform process.⁹ Acknowledging such a possibility is the second principal contribution of Schubert’s article. Indeed, this possibility constitutes its central argument, namely that ‘the Chinese political system is able to generate significant degrees of regime legitimacy by adapting rather successfully to a changing domestic and international environment’.¹⁰ The level of popular support recorded in a wide array of public opinion surveys alone adds weight to this argument. Summarizing the results, Kennedy states that ‘[a]ll surveys examining public opinion toward the CCP conducted since the early 1990s show that over 70 percent of respondents support the central government and the party’.¹¹ Even the widespread number of protests taking place at the local level each year does not directly diminish the findings of these surveys, with much research indicating these protests are mostly confined to specific localized grievances.¹² That said, the use of such evidence to support Schubert’s hypothesis draws attention to the need for the definition of legitimacy being deployed to be made explicit. Indeed, despite its common usage, it is possible to identify three emergent strands within the academic literature on legitimacy.¹³

The first strand takes a normative view of legitimacy in which particular regimes are assessed against a set of prescriptive criteria, such as the protection of individual human rights and levels of civic participation. In this, the position of the analyst is privileged by determining legitimacy in terms of what it ought to be.¹⁴ The second strand that can be identified takes an analytical view of legitimacy in which particular regimes are assessed using measurements of popular support, such as public opinion surveys.¹⁵ In this, the views of people are privileged by determining legitimacy in terms of what it is. The final strand within the academic literature is a blending of the first two strands, so that legitimacy constitutes a mixture of what it is and what it ought to be.¹⁶ Of the three strands, Schubert’s research agenda seems intended to fall within the second strand. However, it is the first strand that is the most commonly accepted and applied understanding of legitimacy and, as such, many analysts find the second strand, with its exclusive reliance on the beliefs of people, to be problematic. This viewpoint is encapsulated by Schaar, who reasons that

[i]f a people hold the belief that the existing institutions are ‘appropriate’ or ‘morally proper’, then those institutions are legitimate … [hence] the investigator can examine nothing outside popular opinion to decide whether a given regime, institution or command is legitimate or illegitimate.¹⁷

For many analysts, this point is particularly relevant when assessing the legitimacy of the CCP, given the Party’s continued control over the flow of information and use of coercive force. As such, the notion of the CCP generating legitimacy is rejected on moral/normative grounds. Indeed, Schubert appears to acknowledge this possibility when suggesting that ‘[e]ven if such a regime type [a rather strong and enduring “party-state democracy”] runs counter to our beliefs, the “legitimacy hypothesis” could at least be useful in a counterfactual sense’.¹⁸ However, I would go beyond Schubert in suggesting that normative and analytical approaches towards legitimacy are ontologically distinct and, despite using the same term, are intended to research different phenomena. Consequently, research that adopts an analytical approach towards legitimacy should not be discounted on account of morally uncomfortable outcomes but rather be pursued by scholars who intend to better explain why the CCP remains in power.¹⁹

The third major contribution made by Schubert’s article is to conduct research on the legitimizing effects of political reform at the micro-political level. The significance of this contribution is that it helps to move the debate on the CCP’s legitimacy beyond the oft-cited ‘economic performance + nationalism – communism’ formula. This formula is not incorrect per se; rather, it does not fully capture the complexity of the CCP’s legitimacy. Moreover, the link between each element in this formula and the legitimacy of the CCP is more complex than commonly acknowledged. On the notion of economic performance, while it is widely agreed that the consistently high growth rates have benefited the regime, the relationship between such growth and regime legitimacy is unclear. As Zhong points out, ‘economic growth in and by itself does not directly contribute to political stability … [i]n fact, it has been argued that economic development and modernization lead to political instability’.²⁰ Given the uneven nature of economic development in China thus far, both geographically and amongst different sections of society, the expectation would be for more instability to have occurred than there has been to date. For some, this lack of instability provides evidence for the legitimizing effect of nationalism. Again, while the extensive propagation of ‘patriotic education’ in the post-Tiananmen period can be said to have promoted political loyalty to the state, the 1990s also witnessed the emergence of a popular nationalism that has contested the government’s official nationalism. Indeed, Gries and Rosen go so far as to suggest that the Party’s ‘legitimacy now depends on me...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• PART 1: The debate on the regime legitimacy in China
• PART 2: The challenge of popular protests to the regime legitimacy
• PART 3: Meeting the challenge: repression, adaptation and performance legitimacy
• Index