Chinese Politics Lecture 2: Overview of Authoritarian Politics

[Music] today we're going to begin our discussion of kind of a general framework for thinking about authoritarianism so we're not going to actually talk about the Chinese Communist Party too much today although I will mention it with examples but the goal for you today is to kind of come away with the general sense of the authoritarian world what it means to be an authoritarian system and one of the general strategies that authoritarian rulers use to try to stay in power before we get into that I want to just briefly talk about three logistical things the first is preset so again precepts will start next week in advance of the precepts I will send you a list of readings that we will focus on so every week I'm going to tell you what we're going to cover so you can focus on preparing that for the precept discussion and you are all slotted into your precepts at this point you should no longer be in kind of p99 or whatever it was we might make some minor adjustments to that because one of the precepts has too many people in it but overall you should be pretty much set in stone so you can think about your other parts of your schedule the other thing I want to bring up is lunches so I do try to get to know you over the course of the semester there's a lot of you this year and if you'd like to get to know me one thing I try to do is I have lunches throughout the semester either in frist or the dining halls or or maybe reading club or two so I will send out an email those lunches are entirely optional if you don't want to have lunch with me please don't everybody so but if you want to get to know me a little bit and maybe have a discussion about China that's not not in the course we can arrange for that so and then the final thing I'm going to start a class discussion board on Piazza this has failed every year so and the reason why it failed is what I've been told is there's this dynamic where no one wants to be seen as contributing because you get labeled a quote trihard that is new to me but I've learned what it means honestly that's deeply sad to me I know I joke around a lot but but I'm gonna be a little bit more serious this is Princeton you've all tried hard at different stages in life and showing effort seriously showing effort in a course should not be something you're embarrassed about that said in order to facilitate discussion what we're going to do is it's going to be a student only chapter so it's not like you're going to get some brownie points for me or the preceptors for being on this discussion board it's entirely for you so you can answer each other's questions you can ignore each other's questions you can not go on it at all I don't care but my point is that I'd like you to have a forum for which you can connect with each other to talk about China for those of you who are really interested in China so that will be on Piazza and I will try to set that up this week or next and again the rule is we will never check it so it's it's entirely for you and the last thing I would say is on the readings so on the syllabus you'll notice that there are readings that are marked with an open box and readings that are marked with the dot you only have to read the ones with an open box some of you have emailed me being like my god there are way too many readings how do I keep up and I feel sad for you because you probably read like a thousand pages so the suggested readings are just there for you if you're interested in diving deeply into a topic for like a senior thesis or just for your own reading or for a response paper or something like that but it's those are meant to give you readings beyond the course but they're certainly not required okay any questions on logistics [Music] sure yeah you're correct [Music] okay so let's get started so the goal for today is really first to introduce you to kind of what we mean by authoritarianism we've already brought it up a little bit but let's get into more detail and then introduce our key framework and then we're going to close with one of our class exercises so how do we define democracy last time does anybody remember the key key component to defining democracy either inspo liqueur from the lecture last week okay excellent so the key to our understanding of democracy is the electoral process and again the electoral process has to be real it has to be free and fair and it has to mean something this is a slightly more specific version of that definition from SPO liqu and this is how he classifies things into democracy or not free and fair competitive legislative elections or an executive elected directly and free in competitive elections or directed elected indirectly by legislature so we have to have free and fair elections at some point in the system notice here that there's a tendency in this field to make things into binaries so you're either democracy or you're authoritarian there are some people that view that this is too simplistic right so there are some countries that are more authoritarian than others there are some countries that are more democratic than others so in this discussion I will use this binary definition but I want you to be thinking about alright does this actually make sense does it captured the nuance in the political world so nevertheless if we use that definition we can look at that basically the health of democracy over time and this chart shows the number of dictatorships that's the kind of that gray mass and that the black bar is the percentage of dictatorships over time as a percentage of all countries so I want you to take a minute this could go horribly wrong because there's so many of you but take a minute talk to the person next to you what jumps out to you about this chart what are the big tracks take one minute and then please come back to me quickly because it got too chaotic last time so take one minute and then we'll come back go what jumps out to you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] all right let's bring it back I wish I could take a picture it's fun to watch because you're all saying all right so what jumps out to you what are they one of the trends that you notice yeah and actually I didn't highlight this but you see changing the number of dictatorship to these bars at the bottom there so you can see that pop up so what's going on in the 60s and 70s that might explain this kind of upward trend post-colonial independence movements and so a lot of these new democracies that have created much of them in the developing world are in fact not democratic according to this definition so we actually see an explosion of authoritarian rule good what else what about kind of the temporal transform recently okay right so we see a massive drop corresponding with the fall of Soviet Union to this is the end of a lot of one-party systems this data actually only goes through 2008 I believe if you were to examine it in the last six or seven years there might be a slight uptick an authoritarian rule and so there's a lot of countries that transitions democracy is not inherently a stable system a lot of countries that are democratic and can transition back to authoritarian rule and so we might see a slight uptick in that when we think about authoritarian regimes in some sense it's a little silly to call this one category because there's a lot of different types of authoritarian regime Bullock does a nice job in that reading of breaking down authoritarianism into different dimensions and so we used to think about authoritarian regimes this is a monarchy this is a spoiler tells us look we actually just need to be thinking about specific dimensions of governance and why those dimensions matter and I should say that that data is available for any of you who are interested in data if you just google politics of authoritarian rule and go to me lines Bullock's website you will find his data and it's super easy to use and very interesting and so he tends to classify these things across five four key dimensions military involvement in politics whether or not they're political parties how the legislative branch is selected if it exists and same for executive selection and so again some of these temporal trends over time you might have already seen these charts but just to go through them first of all where would China fall is China in terms of parties where would try to fall all right that's good yeah so so again China would be considered a single-party state we see a dramatic decrease in the number of single-party States following the end of the Cold War right so we see country that were once single party states seem to be becoming multiple parties and so there are a lot of authoritarian regimes out there that have opposition parties but those opposition parties cannot compete in a free electoral competition right so they are they're disadvantaged by some means China is unique in my opinion at least and that there is no organized opposition in Chinese society okay so there are Democratic parties that exist in China today but they are under the control of the Chinese Communist Party they're not actual political party in any meaningful set the Chinese Communist Party has no opposition party as a counterweight and that is important to keep in mind another thing to keep in mind all right so legislative concentration of power so again these regimes vary and whether or not they have legislatures and whether or not these institutions how they are elected how they are chosen does anyone know where China might fall in this grouping anybody have a guess you can't be wrong well you can be wrong but it doesn't matter so just take a risk of the dream interesting so actually the the answer that school it gives which took me a while to wrap my own head around is one party or candidate per seat for the legislature I actually study China's legislate legislative system and there are multiple candidates that compete for these seats but they actually tend to all be from the Communist Party or they are their nomination process is in some sense dictated by the Communist Party so this is how school likely classified China but your characterization of one party controls more than 75 percent of seats I think he would say that doesn't work because there are no other parties really in China that would be his argument but the point here that I want you to take away is that China does have legislative institutions not all authoritarian regimes even bother to have okay in terms of the electoral process again where would China this is sort of a repeated theme here so where would China potentially fall on this chart so selected by a small unelected body seems to be a fair choice for me he classifies China as a one-party I think your answer to me sounds plausible as well but in general we would consider China for some countries for some authoritarian regimes they have elections for the executive for the presidency and they are not entirely fraudulent there's actual something resembling electoral competition Xi Jinping is chosen through an internal party process which is ratified through a rubber stamp Parliament months later okay so this is an entirely internal kind of closed drum smoke-filled room decision-making process at the executive level so that's just kind of how China stacks up to me this is the biggest takeaways from spogli and as a scholar of authoritarian Paul this was eye-opening to me to just see this data the key thing to remember is that authoritarian regimes die in any number of ways they can die through a coup d'etat a popular uprising a transition to democracy an assassination or foreign intervention the most striking thing about this figure is that most authoritarian regimes the most pressing threat to them is actually the threat from each other the threat from within a coup d'etat and that is how 70% roughly 70% of authoritarian regimes fall the more kind of romantic version of how authoritarian regimes fall would be some of these other categories like a transition to democracy kind of a popular uprising a revolution alright so the mass is coming together demanding political change and leading to some to some transformation but that and that is a very real issue that's roughly 10 to 20 percent of cases depending on how you lump things together but those are the two key key dilemmas facing an authoritarian regime and that's what I want to focus on in this course so we can think about these are the two problems facing any authoritarian ruler contestation from within how do i D if I'm a dictator v Xi Jinping how am i managing other elites within the Chinese Communist Party especially more prominent elites potentially economic elites or military elites how do I keep them on my team to avoid a coup and then the second dilemma is how do I avoid a popular uprising how do I keep the population in line and so what I'd like to do is just introduce a and a little problem on a computer here introduce a very simple framework for thinking about this and in political science we're going to do this a few times this semester but in political science there's a tendency to want to take the political world and abstract it down to something manageable and so this is this is often what you'll see in game theory for those of you to do economics we're trying to develop kind of generalizable simple theories of the political world and often in political science we make a distinction between these three actors so let's introduce the actors the first actor is the dictator the dictator I think of as a single individual and this is the leader of the country it's often in some authority regimes it's not clear who's quite the leaders in China's case currently it's it's pretty darn clear but it's not always the case but the most important thing to remember here is that this is the person that is is the face of the regime this is the person running this show the most senior leader some people might say oh we can think of the regime as being the Paul Perot Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party it doesn't quite matter to me the goal of the leader we can say the goal of the dictator is simply to stay in office and that's a simplifying assumption all right some leaders might have policy goals they might want to leave a certain legacy they might be ideologues they might have an ideological agenda but the most simple assumption we can make is that most of these people want to continue to rule okay so that's their endgame that's what they're trying to achieve the second group that we're going to be interested in is the citizenry this is a fancy not even fancy just another word for the population these are normal people and we lump them all together in this framework we could think of them if we wanted to is this aggregated into different groups maybe of different ethnicities or geographic locations but sometimes it's helpful just to think of them as one okay so the first strategic interaction is between the dictator and the citizenry the dictator wants to stay in power what is the citizenry want the citizenry well they want good policymaking they want welfare benefits what is the tool through which so now we have a basic sense dictator wants to stay in power citizens want some welfare standard what are the tools that each actor has to deal with the other so the first is for the citizenry the key tool that the citizenry has doesn't come through elections it comes through the threat of revolution the threat of violence and protests and even when a system is not currently in revolution we're not currently citizens aren't currently protesting it doesn't mean that that threat is gone it's always lurking in the background if your si Jinping if you're the Chinese Communist Party your goal is to avoid another tenement Square protest another democracy wall movement any sort of mass movement aimed at regime change that is your nightmare scenario we can define revolution this is a hard term to define but we can we can define as extra-constitutional effort to overthrow a non-democratic regime through a large-scale popular movement this is a definition I'm actually forgetting where I pulled it from but there's a couple of features that I want to I want to draw to your attention the first this is extra constitutional meaning it's outside the formal legal or institutional context these are extraordinary events when they do occur they're extremely rare in this instance I says to overthrow a non-democratic regime we can think of revolutions over time as generally having this character although not all of them do but for the purposes of this will keep them in that category and the key aspect of this is it's a large-scale popular movement so it's it's has to have a mass mobilization component to it it may or may not be violent it may devolve into a civil war but the point is that it's a large-scale popular movement keys and key examples of revolutions and he's history the one that we're gonna study the most will be the gentleman square protests this is Charlie who is he one of the student leaders of the Tiananmen Square movement she actually came to Princeton following the Vienna man square movement she did her master's at the Woodrow Wilson School so this is an example of chairman square protests is an example of in the Chinese system actually a failed revolution of a near revolution so that's the key tool that the citizenry has so what can the dictator do to manage the population I would argue that there's four general categories of tools that are used and the remainder of the course once we get through the history we'll be focusing on the four tools the first tool would be what we would call repression repression is a big concept it's kind of a blanket word we can define it as any tool to prevent citizen expression through the use of force punishment and intimidation so this includes everything from torture force detention in China there's a phenomenon called being taken for tea where local officials usually from the Public Security Bureau will invite people to drink tea but this is a form of intimidation so this is kind of like the the more violent brutish side of the Thornton rule all authoritarian leaders have some repressive coercive capacity to their rule this can also take the form of more dramatic events this is the famous tank man image from Tiananmen Square where they're the dictator is actually responding to a revolution with repression but more often actually repression is kind of very quiet and in the background humming along affecting only a few people mostly the dissident population alright so if I'm a dictator and I'm trying to stay and off in power and you are the citizenry and you're potentially trying to overthrow me if you're particularly unsatisfied I can repress you okay I can use the the institutions of repression to keep you down and intimidate you and make you scared another tool would be what I would call redistribution the way I'm using it here is again a broader term to capture just a provision of goodies okay provision of wealth and public good and responsiveness to citizen demands this isn't actually it can be in part like actual final fiscal redistribution actually financial transfers but I would I would call things like building roads ensuring economic development and other other aspects of this nature quasi democratic institutions or I can just listen to you and try to govern well and keep you happy and actually often when we talk about a Thornton rule we forget about this and often when we talk about the Chinese Communist Party we forget about this as well and so many people believe that one of the main reasons why the Communist Party is in power sure it's highly repressive and very sophisticated in that regard but in terms of policy responsiveness and redistribution 600 million people out of poverty all right tool number three would be what we would define as co-optation so if I'm trying to keep you down if I'm trying to stay in power I can repress you I can listen to you and respond or I can bring you in I can bring you into the ruling regime so the strategy of co-optation is just a fancy way of saying bringing people from the population into the regime into the ruling coalition and this doesn't necessarily mean I'm taking citizens and putting them into polyp row standing committee this can be something much larger than that the party itself has 98 million people it's the largest political party in the world so we could argue that the Communist Party is co-opting members of society by bringing them into the party itself not necessarily at the elite level most average party members don't have any real power but they get a vested interest they have a vested interest in the success of the regime we're going to talk about this in more detail one one way we've seen this in the past manifest itself is through managing of ethnic minorities in China so if you're an ethnic minority in the political system there's actually provisions that guarantee you representation in the parliament and representation and other institutions within the Chinese Communist Party we've seen a lot of co-optation of businesspeople in the last 20 years so once upon a time businesspeople were labeled rightists and capitalists and we're not allowed in the Chinese Communist Party there's actually a lot of discussion on this in the 2000 the 2000s that the party is basically welcomed so-called red cat red capitalists welcomed business people into the party so this is a way again of co-opting them giving them a vested interest in the system if I'm in the system I'm going to be less likely to challenge it here's an image of ethnic minority delegates to China's National People's Congress they are actually required to wear their ethnic dress I believe at least for the first day this is not an accident this is a way these sorts of images are put on state-owned media this is a way to show ethnic minorities that the party is inclusive okay this is a form of co-optation okay the final tool which is a big one and I am in my opinion kind of a more sinister one and fascinating one of the Chinese Communist Party is the is the use of manipulation so if I'm trying to stay in power and you're the citizenry I can repress you I can intimidate you make you scared I can listen to you I can try to bring you into the regime or I can shift your understanding of the world around you to make you more complicit with my rule okay I can change your information environment and I call that manipulation manipulation is again kind of an umbrella category that would capture things like propaganda which is the dissemination of positive messages about the regime or the government and censorship which is the flip side of that which is the deletion or the prevention of access preventing citizens from accessing critical information or negative information so they're kind of two sides of the same coin they tend to work in tandem combine that can create citizens that think the Chinese Communist Party is actually a democratic regime when no political scientists would agree with that it can combine to create citizens that believe Western democracy is not appropriate for China or that the United States is violent I had a friend once who used to work for CCTV and he was in charge the segments of the news that would show news in the United States and he was told to always emphasize news that emphasize the violence in American society so people would be showed images of gun deaths and so forth on TV and that would paint democracy as chaotic he was also coincidentally show told to never show an American flag unless it was burning which is I remember that quote for me it's like yeah we could never show an American flag unless it was burning and then it was okay oh my god so you know and all governments do this there's propaganda if this is not to say there's no manipulation of our own preferences in a Western society and this is done by news organizations and political parties and private actors but the key here is that this is regime sponsored manipulation of information you know people the the you would think of kind of propaganda this is Mao's little red book images of that during the Cultural Revolution propaganda images but actually much of what happens now is much more sophisticated and high-tech so it's not you walk around China today you can see images of Xi Jinping and kind of propaganda slogans but the stuff that really matters much of it is online and we're gonna read that book by Professor Molly Roberts on censorship where she really gets at the the nitty gritties of that okay so that's kind of the first game that's going on so when I think about authoritarian politics I think of it as like basically two games that are being played simultaneously so you have this game between the citizenry the population and the regime the citizenry is threatening to revolt trying to organize and potentially revolt if they are dissatisfied with the regime then the regime is you a combination of repression redistribution manipulation and co-optation to try to keep the population at bay so that's the threat from below but what we learned is that it's actually the threat from within that is in some sense the most pressing or more pressing and the threat from within again let me introduce this third after so the ruling coalition so we have the dictator the ruling coalition is a somewhat baked from you'll sometimes hear the word selectorate to describe the ruling coalition when we talk about authoritarian politics is simply the group of societal elites through which the dictator depends to stay in power so no dictator can rule a country by himself or herself every single dictator relies on the support of some group of belief what's the ruling coalition in China today is it the Chinese Communist Party itself 98 million people that's probably too big the average party member in a village doesn't matter at all it might be we might say if the National Party Congress which is a little over 2000 people these are the 2000 most importantly you might say that plus the military or maybe the definition frankly I don't think it's productive to say who's in the ruling coalition and who is not the point is that there's a set of elites that have power outside of the dictator and they have their tool they don't stage revolutions they stage coos alright so they can threaten a coup and try to remove the dictator through violent means and there are I'm hesitant to show this this is a news story from 2012 from frankly a news source that is nut has no repute I can't even remember where it came from but in discussion forums over the last six years there's been discussions of coup attempts going on in China at different points in time we don't really know if they happen you don't know if a coup happened unless it's exceeds right so this could just be rumors it could be nothing but within the last five years there's been maybe two or three instances where I've heard rumors of coup attempts going on within China that could be just rumors it could be bad journalism you will not see major news outlets report on coup so-called coup rumors because they're just there's not enough factual basis to them but this is just a way of for me to show you that there is some relevance when we think about contemporary China that the the threat of a coup against you Jinping it's a possibility is it happening probably not but it is a possibility that people are thinking about so the ruling coalition has the threat of staging a coup if you're the dictator what can you do what are the tools you have well you can purge and promote people that's the the first main tool to purge as someone is to simply remove somebody so to try to remove them from the system to debase them to remove them from the ruling coalition and this is again often through extra legal or violent means this can be actually assassinating somebody or it can be using existing institutions to take them out famous examples of this which we're going to study in more detail this is Joelle Kong who was a rival to Xi Jinping and who was former Politburo Standing Committee member so a key member within the Chinese Communist Party and he was investigated for corruption several years ago right when XI Jinping was consolidating power Xi Jinping has removed several top-level leaders through the anti-corruption campaign are they being removed because they are corrupt maybe or are they being removed because they are against him and a rival fashion it's unclear but if you look at purges at the elite level people being removed at the elite level there tends to be a pattern where they're generally not viewed as she didn't paying supporters and then they are removable conversely you can promote people right so you can cultivate a base of support and try to pack the elite institutions of the party or of the regime whatever regime you're of with your allies and this is again a key feature of the Communist Party it's a lot of senior-level leaders have expanded networks extending all the way down a very low levels of government to people who are very young and it seems to be often a game of trying to get my people promoted and up if I get my people promoted that means I am more powerful the power and the Chinese system is based on networks and you're the power of your network versus somebody else so I can try to play this game of purging and promoting to stave off a coup and debase my enemies the other feature of this is I can try to keep the ruling coalition happy by giving them goodies and the fancy term for this would be called rent distribution so this is the provision of benefits or policy influence it can be money it can be private material benefits or it can be influence to members of the ruling coalition to try to keep them at bay to keep them invested in the political system again this is a key feature of the Chinese political system you once upon a time that it used to be commonplace for there to be large banquets with high-level party members so it's good to be an elite member of the Chinese Communist Party since the anti-corruption campaign some of these banquets have been kind of toned down but the broader take away I want wants you to come away with is that the use of corruption is actually strategic in some sense it's like a game so you'll hear about games sometimes in the United States will force new members to commit a crime and this kind of binds them to the game because now they're guilty they're all in it together my opinion is that corruption in China kind of operates in the same way most people at the senior level often through their family members and their personal networks could be plausibly investigated for corruption and that actually binds them the corruption is like a glue there it prevents people from defecting if I want to defect staged a coup or staged some sort of promote myself and try to become the next president I there's dirt there's enough dirt on me that I could be taken off so I think that's in my mind how some of this stuff operates so again so the de game between the dictator on the ruling coalition is the threat of a coup and then the use of these two tools to try to stave that off so then we put everything together because actually the interaction between all right so let's keep going and so these are the two threats and again the key takeaway for this lecture is that I want you to to always be thinking about the reason the trade war one good response paper I have assigned response papers but I will next week so how would a trade war affect she did ping prospects for staying in power does the trade more make revolution more likely does it make a coup more likely why why not what I want to close and in that in that vein I want to spend the last maybe five or six minutes thinking about these questions and kind of getting in the habit of but I want you to get in the habit of being able to take some of these more abstract ideas and then draw an implication out from them that could be potentially testable with a data set like what we see from school like our other people and so let's just get in a exercise where I'm going to come up with a factor there are no right answers to these questions I have my own intuitions but they could very well be wrong but let's start with one so China has a parliament it's called the National People's Congress it's got three thousand people it's got hundreds of thousands of people in the system at different levels so there's provincial People's Congress is there's prefectural people's privacy there's literally hundreds of thousands of people who are legislators in China okay so how does the existence of that institution its existence of a parliament how does that affect the likelihood of a coup and other revolution does it make a coup more likely or less likely insane for revolution take a minute talk it through when you're at 30 more seconds okay let's bring it back again there's no rock yes sir so I don't really care what you say who's we think an inclusive Parliament is going to make who's more likely less likely okay so these are excellent answers and I would quickly a realizing that there's a lot of different ways we can hear at all right that's good and actually as an instinct when you're reading a research paper you should try to attack the person's assumptions or try to complicate it so if you're already starting to think along line so my personal instinct on the Cupra is that it it's going to maybe decrease the likelihood there's a paper action that shows this and the argument in that paper is that this is a mechanism imagine if there were no Parliament then you have no way for leads to kind of have a seat at the table so Parliament's serve to coop elites or kind of bring I guess that's the wrong work to kind of bring that red distribution serve as a forum for rent distribution and policy influence for release and that strengthens the bond between the declare no ruling coalition some of these other ideas I think are quite possible Parliament's give elites a platform through which to exercise power that could go against through gene I think those are interesting things to think about what about real quick revolutions sure so this is again an argument you see in the literature is that Parliament's stave off the threat of revolution because they are ways for regimes to show that they listen to the population and learn about some grievances within the population and empirically again this is true so regimes with Parliament's tend to last longer and have are less likely to face the threat of revolution so we're just about out of time I will say one last one real quick anti-corruption campaign a large-scale anti-corruption campaign where hundreds of thousands of officials are removed a likelihood of a coup up or down do you think it's gonna increase likelihood raise your hand decrease raise your hand want to get out of class this is something to chew on maybe something to think about in my in my opinion my guess would be that it's going to increase the likelihood of a coup because you're drying up that glue right so for a long time equilibrium it's been identity corrupt in there and have no problems now you're taking away from it that away from me I have a reason to fight you it's gonna likely stave off the threat of revolution because it makes the citizens happy anyway this is all just speculation but it's the exercise I want you to get to have them so we'll see you

Channel: Rory Truex

Views: 4,697

Rating: 4.7669902 out of 5

Keywords: China, Chinese Politics, Authoritarianism

Id: LDMxx-vQwuk

Length: 48min 59sec (2939 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 24 2020