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By Root 466 0

political reform, and assesses the effects of the various institutional reforms that have occurred since the late 1970s. Chapter 3 critically evaluates the economic legacy of gradualism and seeks to demonstrate the hidden costs of piecemeal reforms in the Chinese context and the political logic behind them. Chapter 4 traces the decentralization of state predation in post-Mao China and probes the underlying institutional causes responsible for the runaway corruption symptomatic of a decentralized predatory state. Chapter 5 focuses on the consequences of a trapped transition and highlights the three difficult challenges facing China’s one-party regime that epitomize a trapped transition: declining state capacity, eroding mobilization capacity of the ruling party, and rising state-society tensions. In the concluding chapter, I discuss the theoretical and policy implications of the Chinese transition experience.

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Why Transitions Get Trapped: A Theoretical Framework

IN PROBING the underlying causes and dynamics that have contributed to the emergence of a partial reform equilibrium that exhibits, metaphorically speaking, the distinct characteristics of a trapped transition, we now turn to three sets of theoretical literature: democratization, economic reform, and the state. By applying the theoretical insights from the literature, we can better understand the logic of trapped transitions and the political and institutional mechanisms through which market and political transitions under autocratic rule lose momentum and direction.

Economic Development and Political Change

Most studies of the impact of economic development on political change suggest a robust link between rising levels of economic well-being and the openness of the political system, and between changing social structures and the emergence of political competition.1 Historical examples of democratization and more recent cases of democratic transition in several fast-growing East Asian societies (South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand) further bolster the hope that China could follow a similar evolutionary path toward political openness. The absence of substantive movement toward such openness in China—even after twenty-five years of economic reform that have produced one of the economic miracles in history—does not necessarily negate the key theoretical assumptions of the relationship between economic development and democracy. For one, China’s rapid economic growth started on a relatively low base. The per capita GDP was US$151 in 1978 and US$769 in 1999, based on the exchange rate. It is likely that despite more than two decades of sustained high growth, China’s economic development may not have reached a level sufficiently high enough for democratic transition to occur. This makes China lie outside the “democratic transition zone” hypothesized by Samuel Huntington, who found that non-democratic countries with per capita GDP of US$1,000 to $3,000 were more likely to liberalize or democratize.2 Judging by per capita GDP on a purchasing power parity basis, however, China may have entered the transition zone in the late 1980s.3

In addition, several factors unique to China may also explain why a movement toward democratic transition has failed to materialize. China’s huge size and enormous regional disparities in economic development constitute an extra hurdle because the growth of social forces, considered essential for the emergence of democracy, is uneven across regions. The costs of organizing and coordinating countrywide collective action can be prohibitive, especially in the context of authoritarian repression and underdeveloped communications infrastructure. The institutions, practices, and collective mentality of China’s quasi-totalitarian regime pose another, and definitely tougher, obstacle to progress toward democracy. In all former communist countries, transition toward democracy has occurred only after a sudden breakdown of the old regime. Historically, no communist regime has ever completed an evolutionary process of democratic transition.