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Who is Xi? | Opinion of investigators

 


Minxin Pei is a prominent Chinese expert; he is also a leading researcher on democratization in developing countries. Last December, he gave the prestigious Seymour Martin Lipset lecture on democracy in the world. Building on his previous research, including China: From Tiananmen to Neo-Stalinism, which appeared in the January 2020 issue of the Journal of Democracy, Professor Pei focused his lecture on what he called Totalitarianisms Long Shadow Over China. This talk has now been published in the April 2021 issue of the same influential journal.

In short: his analysis of Xi Jinping as the undisputed leader of China is deeply concerning. The first since Mao Zedong to amass the three most powerful positions in China Secretary General of the Communist Party, Chairman of the Central Military Commission and therefore Commander-in-Chief of the Army, and Chairman without term of office Xi is a direct threat not only to the democratic policies in the world but to the democratic prospects of China itself.

In other words, Pei took the opportunity of the Lipset Lecture to challenge the main theory for which Lipset, a hugely influential scholar on democracy, is best known. Pei began his lecture as follows:

According to Seymour Martin Lipsets, economic modernization creating conditions for a stable democracy is one of the most influential, sound and proven theories in social science. Today, the case of China, where the one-party rule has persisted despite four decades of rapid economic modernization, calls into question the validity of Lipset’s thesis. In 2007, China’s economic miracle prompted a forecast that the country could become partially democratic by 2015 and completely free a decade later. Unfortunately, the regime dominated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) not only lasted, but became more repressive at home and aggressive abroad.

But the conference was as much a confession as it was a challenge, for Pei was, in his own words, a true supporter of economic reform leading to political change. Lipsets ‘own theory was much more nuanced, and Peis’ lecture carefully noted these nuances. (For example, Pei quoted Lipsets’ warning words: The more the resources of power, status and wealth are concentrated in the state, the more difficult it is to institutionalize democracy. Under such conditions, the struggle politics tends to approach a zero-sum game in which the loser loses everything.)

Pei sums up the long shadow that Maoist totalitarianism continues to cast on China in three propositions.

First: the legacies of totalitarianism blunt and neutralize the democratizing effects of economic modernization. Among the examples he offers, the most surprising to me (taken from the 2015 Andrew Nathans Lipset lecture) is the true nature of China’s famous new middle class. It is less autonomous and more state-owned

dependent on the middle classes elsewhere. The reason is obvious: too much of it still works for the state. According to Chinese governments online China Statistical Yearbook 2020, as of 2019, fully state-owned entities employed more than 54 million people. They included a large number of professionals, managers and skilled workers from China.

Second: If the interests rooted in the Leninist party-state remain in place, economic reform will lose momentum and the CCP regime will become even more resistant to democratization and hostile to democratic values. One of those entrenched interests: state-owned enterprises, which, despite four decades of economic reform, still account for around a quarter of GDP and 16 percent of the workforce. Under Xi, we can’t expect much improvement. He told the CPC Central Committee last October: State-owned enterprises must be stronger, better and bigger.

Third: the absence of political reform, including democratization, greatly increases the risks of a return to the neo-Stalinist regime. The irony is sharp; in its attempt to exorcise the ghost of the totalitarian regime of Maos, the CCP ended up being haunted by another totalitarian leader. Pei writes: Deng and his companions, victims of Maoist rule, have built an edifice of elaborate-looking institutionalization. Xi exposed it as nothing more than a house of cards.

Born in Shanghai, Pei is Chinese-American and teaches at Claremont McKenna College. But there are also flashes of resistance even in the upper echelons of the CCP. For example, Cai Xia, a professor at the Central Party School, the party’s main academy, called on the party last August to become a political zombie. And Xi, she said, carries a lot of guilt. For her frankness, Cai was kicked out of the party and now lives in exile. (She published an article in the January / February 2021 issue of Foreign Affairs, titled The Failed Party.) She writes: A Personality Cult Now Exists Around Xi People Who Did Not Live in Mainland China over the past eight years can hardly understand how brutal the regime has become, how many quiet tragedies it is the author.

We must include among these tragedies the cruel occupation of Hong Kong and the slow-motion genocide of the Uyghurs. Pei is cautiously optimistic about the long-term prospects for democratization, but he also writes that the greatest threat to New Chinese

The Stalinist order is a struggle for succession. This struggle will create calmer tragedies and worried tragedies, in China and beyond.

On Twitter: @jnery_newsstand, email: [email protected]

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