China's Governance Model

Flexibility and Durability of Pragmatic Authoritarianism

Hongyi Lai

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780415734196
• eBook ISBN: 9781317859512
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Many studies of government in China either simply describe the political institutions or else focus, critically, on the weaknesses of the system, such as corruption or the absence of Western-style democracy. Authors of these studies fail to appreciate the surprising ability of China's government to rapidly transform a once impoverished economy and to recover from numerous crises from 1978 to the present. This book, on the other hand, takes a more balanced, more positive view. This view is based on a study of changes in China's institutions for coping with critical crises in governance since 1978. These changes include better management of leadership succession, better crisis management, improved social welfare, the management of society through treating different social groups differently depending on their potential to rival the Party state, and a variety of limited, intra-party and grassroots democracy. This book applies to the Chinese model the term "pragmatic authoritarianism." It explains changes to and the likely future direction of China's governance model. It compares current risks in China's governance with threats that terminated dynasties and the republic in China over the past four thousand years and concludes that the regime can be expected to survive a considerable period despite its existing flaws.

"Few topics in Chinese politics are as significant as the nature, state and prospects of the political regime. While the topic had been unduly understudied for a long period of time, a young generation of scholars has emerged on this subject. Among others, the book by Hongyi Lai stands out and provides a comprehensive and penetrating analysis on this topic....I am confident that his book will make a significant contribution to the study of Chinese politics and may well define the debate on China's political development, governance and model for years to come." - Yongnian Zheng, Director, East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore

Part 1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315832654-1

1 Understanding China’s model of governance and development

Improvement without democracy

DOI: 10.4324/9781315832654-2

China, long being the most populous country, has become the second largest economy and the second most influential country in the world. It is expected by some analysts that it may become the largest economy in a decade. Understandably, governance of China profoundly affects this upcoming superpower and the rest of the world. As widely known, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) dominates the Chinese state (hence it is coined the Party state) and is the pivotal force of governance of China. Inside and especially outside China skepticism over the serious problems in China’s governance and structural problems in the Party state abounds. A proper understanding of China’s governance, the past trajectory of its evolution, and its likely development is of immense value for the international community as the latter’s stake in the well-being of China has grown exponentially over the years.

This book aims to address the question where China is heading politically by examining the major institutional changes in governance in China in the recent decades. I will start with a related topic that has attracted tremendous attention from within and outside China, that is, the so-called China model of development. I will briefly review the debates on the China model that have been waged in Chinese and English among China scholars and observers. I will then move to discuss the debate on the political development and possibility of democratization in China in the Western literature, followed by an overview of the Chinese and English literature on governance in China. The last section is about the theme of the book and of each of the following chapters.

The China model: the Chinese and Western perspectives

By sustaining near double-digit annual economic growth for the past three decades, China has created an economic growth miracle unparalleled in world history in several aspects. First, no other countries have kept growing at an average around 10 percent a year for over three decades. Second, no country has witnessed such a rapid lift in the overall living standard within such a short time. In 2011 per capita disposable incomes of urban and rural houses were over ten times as much as that of 1978. Third, no country has experienced such a drastic decline in the population in poverty. The population with income less than US$2 a day at purchase power parity in China declined from 97.8 percent in 1981 in an early year of reform to merely 27.2 percent in 2009, an incredible decline by 70 percentage points within 28 years. ¹ Understandably China’s economic and social successes in the course of development have attracted worldwide attention, as well as scholarly analyses. ² In the following paragraphs I will first sketch the brief history of the academic discussion on the China model of development in and outside China, and then proceed to outline and comment on these viewpoints.

The earliest efforts to popularize the concept regarding the Chinese approach to development were done by the Western analysts. In 2004 the United Kingdom’s Foreign Policy Centre published a booklet by Joshua Cooper Ramo entitled The Beijing Consensus. Ramo, a former senior editor and foreign editor of Time magazine, regarded the Beijing Consensus as an alternative economic development model to the Washington Consensus, which is a pro-free-market policy program the IMF, World Bank and U.S. Treasury have been promoting in developing countries. He claimed that the Beijing Consensus followed three theorems, that is, innovation-driven development, sustainable and equitable economic development that goes beyond per capita GDP growth, and self-determination. ³

Prompted by the international attention and discussion on the so-called Beijing Consensus Chinese scholars also launched their own discussion on the Chinese approach to development. One of the biggest and earliest efforts was an international academic conference on the Chinese developmental path in Tianjin in August 2005. Jointly sponsored by the Central Translation Bureau of the Central Committee of the CCP, the conference was attended by Joshua Ramo, noted Chinese scholars such as Yu Keping and Zhu Guanglei, accomplished China scholars from the West, such as Joseph Fewsmith and Arif Dirlik, and international scholars and intellectuals such as Samir Amin and David Schweickart. The papers and discussions at the conference were published as a book in Chinese in 2006 entitled The China Model and the Beijing Consensus. Clearly, Chinese scholars such as Yu Keping preferred to coin the Chinese path of development as the China Model, and refrained from using the Beijing Consensus largely because the concept was not properly specified.

In the following years the discourse on the topic resulted in three collections of essays in Chinese published in China. They included a book entitled On the China Model written by scholars from Renmin University and published by the People’s Press in 2007, a book entitled The China Model edited by Pan Wei and published by the Central Translation Bureau in 2009, and a book entitled The Debate on the China Model published by the Chinese Social Science Press in 2013.

Outside China one of the best efforts to examine the topic were a number of articles published in the Journal of Contemporary China (JCC). They were authored by Suisheng Zhao, Barry Naughton, Scott Kennedy, Minglu Chen and David Goodman. ⁴

An additional title in the English list of the publications on the topic included a book entitled The Beijing Consensus by Stefan Halper. He argued that China’s state-directed capitalism and authoritarianism constituted an alternative model of development in the world away from the western model. However, Halper’s book has a focus different from the main theme of my book. Instead of investigating in detail how the China model operated at home, which this book focuses on, Halper examined the global influence of China’s model of development. ⁵ Indeed, as he rightly suggested, the Chinese model is seen by a growing number of countries as an alternative to the liberal democracy and free market that Western countries promote. Up to the present the Chinese state has intentionally avoided ostensibly promoting its model of development abroad despite its active initiatives to project its soft power in recent years. Its aim is not to arouse unnecessary hostility from the West that could in return hinder China’s further development. ⁶

In the following paragraphs I will first outline the Chinese discourse of the China model by examining primarily Chinese authors in the four aforementioned books in Chinese plus a few other commentaries. I will then turn to the English discourse by discussing the books by Ramo, Halper, non-Chinese authors in the aforementioned The China Model and the Beijing Consensus and especially the articles from the JCC.

Ramo’s characterization of the Beijing Consensus has been criticized intensely by the China scholars within and outside China. Suffice it to say here that his conception of the Beijing Consensus was loose and that his analysis was not accepted by many mainstream scholars in China. As Scott Kennedy suggested, Ramo tried to use the Beijing Consensus to denote an alternative to the Washington Consensus, but the three so-called “theorems” of the Beijing Consensus did not substitute for those in the Washington Consensus. In addition, it is an exaggeration to claim that China has not adopted any contents from the Washington Consensus. Kennedy argued that “China essentially followed eight of the ten elements” of the Washington Consensus. ⁷

The three “theorems” of the Beijing Consensus were problematic. The first “theorem” of the Beijing Consensus was largely questionable. China’s rapid economic growth has not been based on technological innovation as much as on borrowing of readily available foreign technology. More importantly, China’s high growth is possible largely because of its adoption of sound incentive structures and good economic institutions that promote competition among firms and reward hard-working individuals. The second theorem, namely, sustainable and equitable growth, was counter-factual. At the time of the publication of his booklet, China’s officials were still mainly emphasizing a rapid growth in GDP often at the expense of the environment and a comfortable life of the public, and China was experiencing serious but still rising income inequality. The third “theorem,” i.e, self determination, is a somewhat clumsy term used by Ramo to describe independence of diplomacy and avoidance of a major conflict with the U.S. While it captured an important feature in China’s foreign policy, China and the US are closely linked economically, and such an economic interdependence is critical for stable and peaceful ties among these two giants. Importantly up to the present China’s leaders realize that it should not mount any challenge to the US leadership in the world, and should not advocate a replacement of the US global agenda such as the Washington Consensus with China’s own agenda such as the Beijing Consensus. ⁸

In addition, the concept of the Beijing Consensus has simply left out many critical features in China’s development. A non-exhaustive list of these elements should include incremental reform instead of shock therapy, national implementation of prior successful local experiments, progression of reform from a basic sector (such as agriculture) to a complex sector (such as manufacture and finance), utilization of China’s comparative advantage through promoting labor-intensive manufactured exports, a linkage with the global economy, promotion of non-state enterprises, incremental reform of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), an emphasis on rapid economic growth, improvement of governance and cadre promotion, a stress on political stability, and slow political reform. ⁹

Out of these reasons, it is not surprising that many China scholars, be they based in China or in the West, refuse to accept Ramo’s concept of the Beijing Consensus. Put straightforwardly, there is no consensus among scholars on the Beijing Consensus. Rather, China scholars prefer to use the term “the China model” to describe the possible components and features in China’s path of development. Yu Keping, for example, stated plainly that he did not agree with the use of the Beijing Consensus and that he preferred the concept of the China model, as a consensus implied a widely recognized and agreed program and remedy. Following his definition I use the concept of the China model, which refers to distinctive developmental strategy, institutions and ideas. ¹⁰

Three discernible views emerge in the Chinese discourse on the China model. They can be regarded as three stances on a spectrum. At one end of the spectrum is one group of Chinese scholars who proudly proclaim that the model is substantive, very successful, and sustainable. I term this school the affirmative view. The advocates of the affirmative view include a number of leading scholars on Marxism, such as Cheng Enfu, the Director of the Marxism Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, incumbent or retired senior officials on ideology such as Yang Huang, the chief editor of Qiu Shi (Seek Truth), the top Party theoretical journal, Zhu Muzhi, the former Director of the Press Office of the State Council, and Zhao Yao, the Honorary Head of the Chinese Scientific Socialism Society, as well as a few noted scholars of China’s politics such as Pan Wei. Cheng proclaimed that the China model has matured and that China has established comprehensive and mature political, economic, social and cultural institutions. Yang, Zhu, Zhao, and Cheng regarded the CCP leadership as one of the core elements of the China model and argued that the success of the China model demonstrated the superiority of socialism to capitalism and the attraction of communism (or in Zhu’s view, Chinese socialism) in the long run. They held that the success of the China model suggested that each nation could successfully find its path of development suitable to its national conditions. ¹¹ Pan, a professor in international relations at Beijing University, though briefly admitting the serious errors in economic policies in Mao’s era, argued with exuberant confidence and ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Frontmatter Page
• Half Title Page
• China Policy Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Part 1 Introduction
• Part 2 Economic and social governance
• Part 3 Political governance
• Part 4 Conclusion
• Index