Decentralized Authoritarianism In China

China, like many authoritarian regimes, struggles with the tension between the need to foster economic development by empowering local officials and the regime's imperative to control them politically. Landry explores how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) manages local officials in order to meet these goals and perpetuate an unusually decentralized authoritarian regime. Using unique data collected at the municipal, county, and village level, Landry examines in detail how the promotion mechanisms for local cadres have allowed the CCP to reward officials for the development of their localities without weakening political control. His research shows that the CCP's personnel management system is a key factor in explaining China's enduring authoritarianism and proves convincingly that decentralization and authoritarianism can work hand in hand.

China, like many authoritarian regimes, struggles with the tension between the need to foster economic development by empowering local officials and the regime's imperative to control them politically. Landry explores how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) manages local officials in order to meet these goals and perpetuate an unusually decentralized authoritarian regime. Using unique data collected at the municipal, county, and village level, Landry examines in detail how the promotion mechanisms for local cadres have allowed the CCP to reward officials for the development of their localities without weakening political control. His research shows that the CCP's personnel management system is a key factor in explaining China's enduring authoritarianism and proves convincingly that decentralization and authoritarianism can work hand in hand.

This book develops an informational theory to account for the coexistence of China’s exceptionally resilient authoritarianism and its high decentralization. The nuanced information contained in citizens’ complaints, which are filed through the petition system, helps to sustain China’s decentralized authoritarianism in three important ways. First, petitions help to alleviate the information asymmetry problem that arises when the central government has less information than lower level governments do. When studying citizens’ petitions, higher level governments can obtain valuable and accurate information about local officials’ performance in policy implementation, public goods provision, and corruption. Higher level governments need this information in order to effectively utilize the cadre management system to reward good performance and punish malpractice. The result of this interaction is the PRC’s relatively high quality of governance and effective control of local officials. There is also a second way in which citizens’ petitions help the government to overcome the dictator’s dilemma that arises when an authoritarian regime is uncertain about how much support it really enjoys among its citizens. Citizens’ specific grievances are revealed in these petitions and are mostly addressed in their beginning stages. When citizens’ complaints are rooted in central policy, they set the agenda for policy change in order to maintain social order. There is yet a third benefit conferred upon the PRC by the petition system. Thanks to the petition system, the central government can present itself as the ally of citizens when it addresses the matters raised by their petitions. As a result, the petition system grants the central government an opportunity to hold local officials accountable, scapegoat local authorities, divide citizens and local officials, and justly claim all the credit when its policies succeed. This helps to build citizens’ trust in their central government and reinforces its legitimacy in their eyes. In Huntington’s terms, the Chinese Communist Party institutionalizes mass support by addressing citizens’ grievances expressed through the channel of communication provided by the petition system. In this sense, the complaints of citizens can be very useful tools for regime maintenance. The author substantiates these points with case studies and statistical analysis.

In Populist Authoritarianism Wenfang Tang develops a theory of why Chinese citizens support an authoritarian regime, employing a wealth of data taken from more than two decades' worth of national and cross national surveys. Although China has changed considerably on the surface in the post-Mao era, Tang points to notable continuity from the Chinese Communist Party's revolutionary experiences to its current governing style. He proposes a theoretical framework of "populist authoritarianism" which is characterized by Mass Line ideology accumulation of social capital, public political activism and contentious politics, a paranoid and hyper-responsive government, weak political and civic institutions and a high level of regime trust. The CCP currently enjoys strong public support but such a system is inherently vulnerable. Because drastic changes in public opinion cannot be filtered through political institutions such as elections and the rule of law, these changes can result in system wide political earthquakes. How is it, then that the Communist Party once led by Mao-which still adheres to the Marxist-Leninist and nationalist rhetoric of yore-continues to rule with little serious dissent? Marshaling the best evidence that is currently available populist Authoritarianism will reshape our understanding of why the Chinese regime persists despite decades of predictions of its demise.

This book provides an alternative analytical approach to the study of China's political changes since the Cultural Revolution, which treats those changes as a transition from totalitarianism to authoritarianism. While depicting important political-economic events, it focuses on the changes in such major sociopolitical factors as the people's attitude toward the regime, government policy, the ruling methods of the regime, and the interrelationships among them. Based on the analyses of these factors, the book also predicts the future of the current Communist regime in terms of the challenges it will face and its ability to meet them.

The People’s Republic of China has experienced numerous challenges and undergone tremendous structural changes over the past four decades. The party-state now faces a fundamental tension in its pursuit of social stability and regime durability. Repressive state strategies enable the Chinese Communist Party to maintain its monopoly on political power, yet the quality of governance and regime legitimacy are enhanced when the state adopts more inclusive modes of engagement with society. Based on a dynamic typology of state–society relations, this volume adopts an evolutionary framework to examine how the Chinese state relates with non-state actors across several fields of governance. Drawing on original fieldwork, the authors identify areas in which state–society interactions have shifted over time, ranging from more constructive engagement to protracted conflict. This evolutionary approach provides nuanced insight into the circumstances wherein the party-state exerts its coercive power versus engaging in more flexible responses or policy adaptations.

Beijing presents a clear and gathering threat to Washington - but not for the reasons you think. China's challenge to the West stems from its transformative brand of capitalism and an entirely different conception of the international community. Taking us on a whirlwind tour of China in the world - from dictators in Africa to oligarchs in Southeast Asia to South American strongmen - Halper demonstrates that China's illiberal vision is rapidly replacing that of the so-called Washington Consensus. Instead of promoting democracy through economic aid, as does the West, China offers no-strings-attached gifts and loans, a policy designed to build a new Beijing Consensus. The autonomy China offers, together with the appeal of its illiberal capitalism, have become the dual engines for the diffusion of power away from the West. The Beijing Consensus is the one book to read to understand this new Great Game in all its complexity.

Why would an authoritarian regime expand social welfare provision in the absence of democratization? Yet China, the world's largest and most powerful authoritarian state, has expanded its social health insurance system at an unprecedented rate, increasing enrollment from 20 percent of its population in 2000 to 95 percent in 2012. Significantly, people who were uninsured, such as peasants and the urban poor, are now covered, but their insurance is less comprehensive than that of China's elite. With the wellbeing of 1.4 billion people and the stability of the regime at stake, social health insurance is now a major political issue for Chinese leadership and ordinary citizens. In Social Protection under Authoritarianism, Xian Huang analyzes the transformation of China's social health insurance in the first decade of the 2000s, addressing its expansion and how it is distributed. Drawing from government documents, filed interviews, survey data, and government statistics, she reveals that Chinese leaders have a strategy of "stratified expansion," perpetuating a particularly privileged program for the elites while developing an essentially modest health provision for the masses. She contends that this strategy effectively balances between elites and masses to maximize the regime's prospects of stability. In China's multilevel governance, both centralized and decentralized structures are involved in the distribution of social health insurance. When local leaders implement the stratified expansion of social health insurance, they respond to varied local conditions. As a result, China's health insurance policies differ dramatically across subnational regions as well as socioeconomic groups. Providing an in-depth look into China's health insurance system, this book sheds light not only on Chinese politics, but also on how social benefits function in authoritarian regimes and decentralized multilevel governance settings.