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By Root 475 0

can promote sustained economic growth. The proponents of neoauthoritarianism discount—if not overlook altogether—the risks posed by a predatory state to sustainable growth. Without effective political constraints to check the power of rulers, it is impossible to guarantee that a state capable of pursuing worthy development goals will not be tempted to adopt predatory policies and practices. China’s experience provides a sobering example of how an autocratic state can lose control of its agents even in an otherwise progressive process of decentralization and market-oriented reforms. Although there is no evidence to suggest that accompanying democratic reforms would have restrained decentralized predation by such agents, the absence of institutional checks on the power of neoauthoritarian rulers, especially at the local level, greatly increases the risks of decentralization of state predation.

The transformation of the Chinese state into a decentralized predatory state will have profound implications for China’s political system, economic development, state-society relations, and prospects for democratization. Doubtlessly, China’s state capacity will continue to erode, as state agents undermine the interests of the state with a full range of predatory practices. Sustainable economic development will be put at risk, since a decentralized predatory state tends to deliver insufficient public services and provide inadequate protection for property rights. More important, thieving agents directly threaten the fiscal health of the state itself. State-society relations arc likely to grow tense because the predatory behavior of state agents unavoidably impinges on the property and civil rights of ordinary Chinese citizens. Prospects for a peaceful and gradual transition to democracy may also grow dim because these negative effects will hinder the development of the social, economic, and political infrastructures conducive to a peaceful democratic transition. Regime transition may still be possible, but such a transition, when it comes, is more likely to be tumultuous and disruptive.

FIVE

China’s Mounting Governance Deficits

THE COMBINATION of lagging political reforms, entrenchment of rent-seeking groups, and decentralization of state predation is a recipe for deteriorating governance. As long as China’s ruling elites refuse to confront these deeply embedded structural and institutional problems, they are unlikely to sustain the momentum of economic development that has played a critical role in maintaining the political monopoly of the Communist Party. In developmental autocracies that eventually degenerated into predatory states (the best example being Suharto’s Indonesia), high rates of growth can mask the weak political foundations of authoritarian regimes. Rising prosperity and inflows of foreign capital, which serve as a measure of international confidence in the regime, often give the ruling elites a sense of security and reduce incentives for reforms that might shore up their political foundations.

China is no exception. Its sustained high rates of growth since the late 1970s have strengthened the ruling elites’ belief in the idea that economic growth can be a panacea for most social and political ills. Thus, economic growth has produced a perverse effect: instead of taking advantage of the economic boom to push through difficult political reforms that can help sustain long-term growth, Chinese leaders in the 1990s saw no need for such measures. The ruling Communist Party’s inability to implement meaningful political reform is responsible, in retrospect, for a rapid and substantial accumulation of governance deficits.

Conceptually, governance deficits refer to a government’s deficiencies in fulfilling the most important functions in ruling a society. Such deficits include both the erosion of state capacity and the ruling regime’s ability to mobilize political support. Accumulation of governance deficits constitutes a long-term threat to a regime’s survival because these deficits will inevitably be reflected