China's Trapped Transition_ The Limits of Developmental Autocracy - Minxin Pei [93]
The implications of this analysis are troubling on two accounts. First, the run-for-the-exit dynamics have a self-accelerating characteristic because insiders tend to increasingly fear missing out on the opportunities to cash in on their investments. This means that the availability of new exit options will contribute to more voracious decentralized predation. Second, insiders with secure exit options are less motivated to defend the regime because their future risks have been greatly reduced by the insurance policy they have acquired through such exit options. As a result, the regime becomes more brittle and less capable of withstanding crises.
Declining Ideological and Institutional Norms
Many scholars have observed the declining appeal of the communist ideology in post-Mao China.73 The fact that the ruling Communist Party launched innumerable “rectification” campaigns to reinvigorate the CCP ideologically in the reform era is, in itself, telling evidence of the erosion of ideological values. The causes of the erosion of ideology arc easy to identify. Post-Mao political demobilization and promarket economic reforms necessitated replacing the communist ideology with economic incentives as the main source of motivation. Experience in other communist societies suggests that official ideologies need to be personalized by charismatic leaders to have real appeal to the masses. The death of such leaders also ends their personalized ideologies. Erosion of ideological appeal then becomes inevitable in spite of the ruling parties’ efforts to resurrect or reinvent it.
Results from opinion surveys indicate that the old-style communist ideology has lost its attractiveness to both the ruling elites and ordinary citizens. A survey of more than seven thousand mid-level Communist Party officials conducted in the late 1990s revealed that half the respondents thought “communism is too far from reality.”74 A poll of 7,330 prefect and county officials conducted in 1997 found that 11 percent were skeptical about the goal of communism, 23 percent thought communism was “too far from reality,” and 26 percent thought that the majority of local officials were skeptical about upholding the party’s basic policy for one hundred years.75 In a 1999 survey of 11,586 party members conducted by the provincial CCP committee of Sichuan province, 61 percent reported that their local officials did not devote time to “ideological studies” because “there was too much work,” even though the same officials would always find time to take overseas trips. About two-thirds thought that local officials lacked “political perception” and “political judgment.” Only 16 percent said that local officials would place “national interest” first in their decision making; 44 percent thought “local leaderships lacked self discipline.”76
A survey of nearly 14,000 party members in Sichuan in 1997 reported that “the most striking characteristic of prefect and county-level officials was their superficial theoretical grounding in Marxism and Leninism.” In a test of political and ideological knowledge administered to 439 division-level (chu) officials under the age of forty-five, 128 of them failed to answer a single question correctly. Some of them did not even know what Deng’s four cardinal principles were. About 30 percent of the respondents complained that the young officials were “indifferent to ideals and values”; 24 percent thought such officials “lacked the sense of discipline demanded by the party and the government”; and 34 percent believed that such officials “were deficient in their sense of integrity and self-discipline.”77
The loss of faith in the official ideology is expressed in both polling data and telling anecdotes. Press stories of official corruption show that perpetrators of corruption had little faith in communism and had sought spiritual guidance in religion or superstition. Cong Fukui, the executive vice governor of Hebei who received a suspended death sentence for corruption, had regularly consulted fortune-tellers about his political future and