Abstract
This chapter places the ideas of authoritarian institutions as well as the power-sharing scheme in the Chinese context. The analysis not only helps us understand how China’s authoritarian institutions were initially designed by Deng Xiaoping and how they structured the elite’s/bureaucrats’ incentives, but also, more crucially, sheds light on how the dictator’s growth curse transpired in China’s institutional/political landscape. It lays the groundwork for the following case study on China’s trade policymaking, where I provide more detailed narratives on how the authoritarian institutions determined the resource allocations related to international trade and the economic growth gave rise to the centrifugal effect on the dictator–elite relationship.
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Notes
- 1.
Ana Unruh Cohen, currently the Deputy Staff Director, U.S. House of Representatives, was the Director of Environment Policy at the Center for American Progress when she wrote this policy piece.
- 2.
This piece was a confidential report prepared by the Eurasia Group for the US–China Economic and Security Review Commission.
- 3.
Setting up ad hoc leading groups as a coordination mechanism among different bureaucratic agencies is very common at all levels of China’s decision-making processes. The leading groups set up by the CPC, such as Central Financial and Economic Leading Group and Central Foreign Affairs Leading Group, are all led by members of the standing committee of the Politburo, arguably the most powerful political organ in China. The National Energy Leading Group, by contrast, was established by the State Council, and is chaired by the Premier, Wen Jiabao. Nonetheless, while it is also led by a standing Politburo member, the leading group at this level is lower than those affiliated with the CPC. For instance, the State Council Leading Group of Product Quality and Food Safety established in 2007 in order to deal with the quality crisis of China’s exports to Japan and the USA was chaired by the then vice Premier, Wu Yi, who was just a non-standing Politburo member. Compared to the Central Foreign Affairs Leading Group whose members include three Politburo members, it is not difficult to gauge how seriously the Chinese leadership viewed this issue. From this perspective, while China observers tend to view energy as a critical strategic issue to China, given the political composition of the members of the National Energy Leading Group, the Chinese leadership obviously did not give the highest priority to energy issues, or at least did not regard them as something that is so important as to set up another central leading group solely for this purpose. This can also partially explain the regulatory failure embodied in the inter-ministerial turf wars the Eurasia Group researchers observed.
- 4.
This is also what the “recent reforms to China’s energy regulation structure” in the Eurasia Group report refer to.
- 5.
Of course, China observers are going to continue to disagree with each other, but, with the integrative framework developed here, at least their debates will be raised to a higher level.
- 6.
While people tend to label China and North Korea under the same category of dictatorship, North Korea is in fact closer to the personal rule in pre-reform China in the sense that there is a paramount leader who stands above the rest of the political elites. The paramount leader’s de facto power may vary over time according to fluctuations in political dynamics, but the leader’s de jure supremacy in the political system is never questioned. The current president of North Korea, Kim Jong-il, is, without a doubt, the paramount leader of this sort, but you cannot find Kim’s counterpart in China after the last paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, died. Even before Deng died, during the first Jiang administration, Deng had mostly stayed away from ordinary politics and therefore did not actually play the role as the paramount leader as much as he or Mao did in the past.
- 7.
Because the idea of reciprocal accountability was developed during the early 1990s when the helmsman of China’s reform, Deng Xiaoping, was still alive, what most China scholars meant by competition then was mainly that among political elites who would be the successor of the paramount leader. For instance, in the 1980s and before Hu Yaobang was forced to resign from the position of General Secretary of the CPC in 1987, it was well-known that Hu and the then Prime Minister, Zhao Ziyang, were competing with each other to be Deng’s successor. Hence, many of their policies are interpreted to be geared toward building up patron–client ties with members on the Central Committee.
However, the intra-party competition goes beyond simply winning the office. For office-holders, the competition is also about maintaining the home turf already under their control. This second aspect of the competition has become more salient in post-Deng politics. When there was still a paramount leader such as Deng standing on top of the entire political system (e.g., except the chairman of the Central Military Commission, Deng did not hold any position in the party or the government after 1983), the authority of the office was derived from the fact that the person holding it was the successor chosen by the paramount leader. Nonetheless, after Deng died in 1997, there was no longer someone like him standing behind the President and the Prime Minister, and this created a layer of power vacuum that could not be filled by any of Deng’s successors for their lack of legendary past and personal charisma compared to either Deng or Mao. As a result of the power vacuum, the authority of those top positions lost their political underpinnings and this loss then started driving a wedge between de jure and de facto authority attached to those positions. In other words, without the paramount leader, the party leaders now have to rely more on the cooperation of Central Committee members for either consolidating their de jure power or maximizing their de facto power. The post-Deng President could be either more or less powerful than the Deng-period counterparts depending on how much support he enjoys from the Central Committees, but the point is, the power fluctuations are wider than they were under Deng’s personal rule.
In a nutshell, the scope of the intra-party competition among contending leaders does not simply include the competition for succession, which had been the focus of the bulk of the earlier literature on reciprocal accountability (Shirk 1993, 1994; Yang 1996), but also that for de facto political power.
- 8.
In the China field, China scholars periodize China’s political history by who the paramount leaders are. The permanent Chairman, Mao Zedong, without a doubt, was the leader of the first generation since the communist takeover in 1949. The first generation ended in 1976 when Chairman Mao passed away, and the second generation of leadership began when Deng Xiaoping returned to the center of the political stage to replace the unpopular successor of Mao, Hua Guofeng. One key qualitative difference between the first two generations of leaders and those after is that the former were composed of revolutionaries who personally participated in the establishment of the People’s Republic of China and therefore enjoyed almost unquestioned authority, while the latter spent their formative years when the republic had been established and therefore had no legendary past to buttress their political rule. As a result, when characterizing the leadership from the third generation on, scholars normally add “collective” before leadership in order to emphasize the absence of strongmen in China’s top leadership.
- 9.
The complete lists of Politburo members are appended to the end of the chapter (see Appendix).
- 10.
While there can be a third set, people in this residual set are simply retired party cadres whose political careers are essentially over.
- 11.
This exclusion is innocuous since military officials and civil servants never switch career tracks.
- 12.
One of the Politburo members, Tan Shaowen, the then party secretary of Tianjin, is discounted because he died right after the election of Politburo in the 14th plenary meeting of the Central Committee of the CPC in 1992. While the vacancy was later filled 1994 by Huang Ju, who replaced Wu Bangguo to be the party secretary of Shanghai, another member, Chen XiTong, who was the then party secretary of Beijing, was ousted in 1995 as a result of a political struggle between him and the then President, Jiang Zemin. Consequently, the total number of Politburo members remained 21, and Tianjin never regained the lost seat during the first Jiang administration.
- 13.
Regarding his retirement from the Politburo in 2002, while it surely allows a political interpretation that he was not favored by the then new Hu administration, it could also simply be because of the age issue since he was already 70 years old in 2002.
- 14.
Given Beijing’s special status as China’s capital city, it is almost a convention to include its party secretary in the Politburo.
- 15.
I have no intention to introduce the vague dichotomy between “general/national” and “special/local” interests here. As will be made clearer later, the concept of parochiality used here is so defined that parochial behavior can run counter to the Politburo’s concern over the political survival of the entire regime. While this can be viewed as one interpretation of the so-called national interest, there could be a diametrically opposed perspective arguing the collapse of the current communist regime to be the real “national” interest for China. To avoid this debate, the contrast between general and special interests here is going to be limited to one between interests favorable and unfavorable to regime stability.
- 16.
This term is introduced in order to conceptually separate the institutional environment from bureaucrats’ policy choices. In other words, reciprocal accountability is treated as the institutional environment that can induce bureaucrats to act in certain ways.
- 17.
To be more precise, what the dynamic career effect means is that “where you stand” is not determined by “where you sit ‘now’” but “where you ‘are going to’ sit.”
- 18.
As Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003) point out, when one’s coalition grows larger, private rents won’t be enough to buy off necessary political support, and therefore the coalition leader needs to employ distributional public policies to generate enough rents to maintain the loyalty and solidarity of her coalition.
- 19.
While Yang remained as a member of the Politburo, he was essentially deprived of any position owing to the factional conflict within the party.
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Appendix
Appendix
1.1 Politburo Members 1992–2007
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Tung, H.H. (2019). Authoritarian Institutions, China Style. In: Economic Growth and Endogenous Authoritarian Institutions in Post-Reform China. Politics and Development of Contemporary China. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04828-0_4
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