China's Trapped Transition_ The Limits of Developmental Autocracy - Minxin Pei [123]
The breakdown of the mechanisms of political accountability has led to pervasive corruption and collusion among the ruling elites, while the loss of confidence in the regime’s own future has motivated its insiders to engage in unrestrained predation. The inevitable deterioration of governance that has resulted from these institutional failings has undermined the state’s capacity, heightened social tensions, and cast into doubt the sustainability of the progress that China has achieved since the late 1970s. Even China’s gradualist economic reform strategy, which has received almost universal endorsement for its flexibility and efficacy, is centered on the CCP’s goal of political survival, and not the development of a true market economy. The economic costs of ensuring the CCP’s political monopoly through policies of rent protection, though hidden, are real, substantial, and growing.
By critically examining the understated social and political costs of China’s neoauthoritarian development strategy, this book also tries to question three ideas that have retained their allure despite mounting skepticism about their validity.
The first idea is that economic progress is the key determinant of political liberalization. While it is true that economic growth and modernization can create favorable conditions for the emergence of liberal political regimes, China’s slow movement toward political openness in spite of twenty-five years of rapid economic growth suggests that the choices of its ruling elites are the real determinants of democratization. In fact, if anything, rapid short-term economic growth may have a perversely negative impact on democratization because it provides all the incentives for the ruling elites not to seek political liberalization.
The second idea is that the gradualist reform strategy works better than the so-called big-bang approach. Of course, the big-bang approach has failed miserably in Russia and several other former Soviet bloc countries, but the achievement of China’s gradualist strategy has been greatly overstated. More important, as Chapter 3 shows, the gradualist strategy is ultimately unsustainable because of the dynamics of rent dissipation and the mounting costs of inefficiency incurred by path-dependent partial reforms.
The third idea is that of the efficacious neoauthoritarian developmental state. Despite the examples of successful neoauthoritarian developmental states in East Asia, the political logic and institutional determinants of autocracy—patronage dictated by regime survival, the political monopoly of the authoritarian regime, and ineffective monitoring and policing of the state’s agents in the absence of the rule of law, civil liberties, and political opposition—are more likely to create a predatory state than a developmental one.
This book also underscores the centrality of politics in general, and the control of political power in particular, in setting the course of economic and regime transitions. As the analysis of the political considerations behind the Chinese leaders’ policies on political and economic reforms shows, the most critical determinant of their strategies is whether they will strengthen or endanger their political survival. To the extent that the overall effects of the chosen strategies increase the chances of their political survival, the ruling elites can be flexible in tactical terms, allowing partial reforms to boost the short-term vigor of the political and economic systems. But such tactical flexibility and adjustment have strict limits and must not blind us to the fundamental incompatibility between a monopolistic ruling party’s determination to perpetuate its power and a society’s collective desire for a more autonomous and rule-based economic and