[Opinion] The making and remaking of Chinese totalitarianism
an hour ago by Hotznplotzn to c/world
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/57844000
For decades, the West assumed that economic growth would turn China into a more open, liberal society, much as it did Taiwan and South Korea. Instead, China’s totalitarian institutions proved remarkably resilient, surviving decades of reform and reasserting themselves under Xi Jinping.
[Op-ed by Chenggang Xu, senior research fellow at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions at Stanford University, and the author of "Institutional Genes: Origins of China’s Institutions and Totalitarianism".]
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“Totalitarian,” it is important to note, is not a pejorative label. It describes a distinct institutional structure. If China is seen merely as a rising power, the challenge appears to be one of great-power competition, inviting accommodation and compromise. If it is viewed as a strictly authoritarian regime, the problem is one of political repression, with gradual reform offering a possible remedy. However, if China is a communist totalitarian system, then its domestic institutional structure necessarily shapes its external behavior, with profound implications for its role within the international order.
The distinction between totalitarianism and authoritarianism is not just semantic. A totalitarian party is not a political party in the conventional sense. It is an organization designed to penetrate and control the state, the bureaucracy, the economy, the media, (coercive) institutions, personnel, ideology, social organizations and even private life.
By contrast, authoritarian regimes try to monopolize political power, suppress opposition and restrict civil liberties, but might leave significant parts of society relatively autonomous. This limited pluralism can foster economic growth and an expanding middle class, which can in turn lead to liberalization and, eventually, democracy. South Korea and Taiwan are prime examples.
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What accounts for the remarkable persistence of Chinese totalitarianism? The answer lies in “institutional genes”: recurring institutional elements that enable a political system to reproduce itself over time. The most important of these elements concern the distribution of power and property rights, and the prevailing social consensus that legitimizes this distribution. Because these elements sustain the larger structure of power, those who benefit from it have strong incentives to preserve and reproduce them.
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The critical question is not who owns a particular asset, but who ultimately controls land, capital, labor and information. Such arrangements are reproduced through incentives, coercion, ideology and organizational power. While they can and do change, new policies or reformist declarations alone are rarely enough to dislodge them.
Taiwan offers the clearest example. It is an ethnically Chinese society with deep historical and cultural ties to mainland China, yet it became a constitutional democracy ... Its continued development contributed to the emergence of civil society and growing demands for political reform.
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By framing China as a normal rising power and the US as a nervous incumbent, he [Xi Jinping] seeks to focus global attention on preventing a great-power conflict, rather than on harder questions about the nature of China’s totalitarian system and what its ascendancy would mean for the world.
How democracies understand China determines how they deal with it. Misreading the nature of the regime can lead them to treat China as an ordinary great power, mistake tactical accommodation for genuine liberalization and confuse economic integration with political moderation.
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China’s experience shows why the origins and resilience of political systems matter — and why even far-reaching reforms might fail to transform them. However, history is not destiny. Institutions change when the forces that reinforce them change. Although China is not condemned by its past, its future depends on whether the institutions that have defined its political order for generations finally give way to something new. **The first step is to recognize its totalitarian regime for what it is. **
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@quokk.au
Rules:
Be a decent person.
No racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, zionism/nazism, and so on.
Other Great Communities:
Rules
Be excellent to each other
go to feed...
I keep reading this brain-fart logic that "China is and always has been X, the US always Y" therefore Thucydides blah, but that's wrong. China was opening up for decades after Mao because of their trade alliances and diplomatic outreach. Their regression now is not a result of "resilient totalitarianism", it steadily eroded after Mao's death until Xi seized power.
Xi is focused on centralizing power at the expense of diplomatic progress, so China is regressing, in the same way Trump and Putin have basically ruined their countries for the next generation.
Tolatarianism is not an immutable national characteristic, but the result of frightened despots.
Totalitarianism is self-serving and exciting in short bursts, but it is very brittle and in China has not been consistent for most of the the past half century, much less the rest of its history.
People apparently like the name "Thucydides" and since it's easy to understand machinean forces rather than complex rrlaities, historical and citical perception halts.
What is happening is happening now, it was not fated to be omce and forever.
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