Andrew J. Nathan
For many years, predicting the downfall of the Chinese Communist Party was something of a sport among China watchers. But few serious observers today suggest that China looks unstable. Despite facing numerous challenges, including the implosion of the country’s real estate sector since 2021 and high debt loads that have bogged down local government finances, China’s political system appears strong. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has a firm hold on all the levers of power, and the country is proving to be competitive, or even dominant, in a growing number of twenty-first-century technologies, such as electric vehicles and biotechnology. Moreover, scholars consistently find overwhelmingly high levels of public support for the CCP. In comparison to the growing fragility and divisiveness of political systems elsewhere, including in the United States, the Chinese regime appears to the outside world as competent and stable—an image that Beijing is eager to project.
Two new books challenge this view. In Political Trust in China, the political scientist Lianjiang Li digs deep into survey methodology to question the way that most scholars have measured public support for leaders in Beijing. He concludes that citizens’ trust in the regime is weaker than other researchers believe. In Institutional Genes, the economist Chenggang Xu uses a sweeping comparative and historical analysis of China’s political institutions to argue that the country’s inability to reform them will condemn it to economic stagnation. In Xu’s view, the kind of authoritarian rule that worked for China’s imperial dynasties is strangling its modern economy.
No comments:
Post a Comment