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The problem is, the CCP is a party built on the basis of Leninism. It controls all the resources of the country ... under a market economy, after property becomes legitimate and legal, the CCP inevitably becomes corrupt. Those with power will certainly use their control of the resources to turn society’s wealth into their private wealth. These people have become a huge entrenched interest group ... What China has now is the worst form of capitalism. Western capitalism in its carly phase was also bad, but it could gradually become more progressive. But the worst form of capitalism in China today is incapable of becoming more progressive.30

Of course, there are other irreconcilable conflicts between the self-interest of the CCP and its declared goals of reform, such as building a socialist market economy and ruling the country according to law. To the extent that a market economy requires a minimum degree of the rule of law, which in turn demands institutionalized curbs on the power of the government, these two goals run counter to the CCP’s professed determination to maintain political supremacy. The CCP’s ambition to modernize Chinese society also leaves unanswered the question of how the new autonomy of society is to be respected by the state and protected from the caprice of the government. The CCP’s perennial fear of independently organized social interests does not prepare it well for the likely emergence of such forces, which a more industrialized society inevitably creates.

These unresolved contradictions, fundamental to China’s transition away from communism, are the source of rising tensions in the Chinese polity, economy, and society. At the intellectual level, the intensification of these contradictions raises doubts about whether China could, as many of its East Asian neighbors, evolve along a neoauthoritarian development path, eventually perhaps toward a more open society. 31 In terms of policy, these tensions make the political and economic strategies adopted by post-Mao rulers appear increasingly unsustainable. China’s transition to a market economy and, perhaps potentially, to some form of democratic polity, risks getting trapped in a “partial reform equilibrium,” where partially reformed economic and political institutions support a hybrid neoauthoritarian order that caters mostly to the needs of a small ruling elite.32 Under this order, the power of the state is used to defend the privileges of the ruling elite and to suppress societal challenges to those privileges, instead of advancing broad developmental goals. Notably, opinion polls conducted in China since the late 1990s reveal that the Chinese public, including both the intelligentsia and the masses, increasingly believe that members of the ruling elites have gained the most from economic reform while ordinary people, such as workers and peasants, have benefited the least. Such a perception of a self-serving elite supports the hypothesis of a partial reform equilibrium trap.33

Indeed, symptoms of a trapped transition have become highly visible or even pervasive. Some keen observers of Chinese politics have warned of the “death of reform” because the political and ideological forces that initially energized China’s reform have dissipated.34 On the economic front, important reform measures have encountered strong resistance. 35 The sense that economic reform has stalled is widely shared by Chinese corporate executives, many of whom are members of the CCP. A poll of 3,539 senior corporate executives across the country conducted by the State Council’s Development Research Center in late 2002 found that only a minority was satisfied with the progress of key reforms. For example, about a third rated as “satisfactory” the progress in establishing a modern corporate system, in reforming the foreign trade system, and in healthcare reform. Between 25 and 28 percent of the executives were satisfied with the results of the reforms of the financial system, the fiscal system, and state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Ninetccn percent were satisfied with