Legitimacy of One-Party Government in China
A recent post to Fifty Year Perspective described challenges facing China in establishing its strategy toward achieving leadership abroad while maintaining tranquility and stability at home. Technology is central in achieving national and domestic objectives – it serves China’s international military and economic expansion, and underpins intelligent surveillance, early-warning, and control systems within their borders.
China’s President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have become more aggressive in exerting control over domestic financial markets and in dictating cultural norms. A flood of new regulatory activity targeted monopolies. The expected hit on tech profitability sent stock values down, wiping out billions of dollars in equity.
President Xi encouraged Chinese firms to work toward “common prosperity,” and called for restraint in awarding excessively high earnings to technology firm founders. Investigations into tech firms have generated multi-billion dollar fines and forced withdrawal of planned initial public offerings and delisting of Chinese firms from overseas stock exchanges.
The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) is targeting online entertainment “at odds with socialist values.” Internet celebrities generate huge revenue from ads in an industry that the government wants to control. That includes blacklisting celebrities who had committed some transgressions, such as evading taxes or inciting illegal gatherings.
From a Westerner’s perspective, these moves by President Xi and the CAC might bode ill for the relationship between the Chinese government and its people. Chinese investors are threatened by financial losses, and access to favorite web apps and celebrities are subject to being banned. But an article titled “What the West Gets Wrong About China” in the May/June 2021 issue of Harvard Business Review (HBR) suggests three “myths” in Western thinking. The authors draw upon their knowledge from visits to China going back to the early 1990s.
Westerners have assumed that economic prosperity would move China away from authoritarianism to liberalism. However, authors of the HBR article find “many Chinese believe that the country’s recent economic achievements—large-scale poverty reduction, huge infrastructure investment, and development as a world-class tech innovator—have come about because of, not despite, China’s authoritarian form of government.” The authors cite polling indicating 95% approval among Chinese citizens of their government.
Furthermore, the authors add, Chinese regard their single party form of government more legitimate and effective than democracy. Ordinary Chinese citizens believe the CCP produces “relatively competent leaders: They are chosen by the CCP and progress through the system by successfully running first a town and then a province; only after that do they serve on the Politburo.” The traditional Confucian concept of “harmony” embraces respect for authority, even to the extent that pervasive surveillance that rewards or punishes citizens is accepted as “a perfectly reasonable part of the social contract between the individual and the state.”
Finally, the authors cite a distinctive behavior of mainland Chinese: a tendency toward short-term thinking and planning. The unpredictability of life remains within living memory, tempering trust in what the future holds. “Decisions—by both individuals and the state—about how to invest all serve one purpose: to provide security and stability in an unpredictable world.” China’s history influences how people invest and the country’s view of international relations. “This shared quest for predictability,” the authors conclude, “ explains the continuing attractiveness of an authoritarian system in which control is the central tenet.”