Rethinking Chinese Politics: A Book Talk

[Music] welcome to csis online the way we bring you events is changing but we'll still present live analysis and award-winning digital media from our drakopolis ideas lab all on your time live or on demand this is csis online well good morning everyone and uh welcome uh today we're we're delighted to be hosting this discussion of uh joe fusma's new book rethinking chinese politics my name is jude blanchett and i'm the freeman chair uh in china studies here at csis and i'm delighted to be co-hosting this event with my colleague scott kennedy the trustee chair in chinese business and economics this is a fortuitous timing for this event because right now we're seeing a host of actions and behavior coming out of china's regulatory and political system that is frankly for a lot of us just bewildering we've just had the announcement of the six plenum and along with that attendant rumors that we might be seeing a third resolution on party history we've got the 20th party congress coming up next year where xi jinping will likely take a third term as general secretary which would formally and finally eradicate discussion about norms of a chinese leader only serving two five-year terms and while i suspect many observers of chinese politics casual or otherwise will be surprised if xi jinping takes a third term our main speaker today will likely not be one of them and as he argues in this fantastic new book we have long overestimated the degree of institutionalization in china's political system and underestimated the importance of leninism as an organizing feature of the communist party of china so many of course will know professor joe few smith as one of the wisest and most experienced observers of chinese politics since the 1980s and he has indeed he's profoundly shaped how i think about china's political system and and the communist party so we're really delighted to have him today but we're also thrilled to be welcoming professor jessica teats of middlebury college who has uh carved out a position i think as one of the leading analysts looking at and tracking evolutions in china's governance system and she really sits at the cutting edge of this so we're delighted to have jessica joining us for comments after we hear from professor few smith so with that i'd like to get right into it but first just a quick logistics note um the order of the program is i'm going to shut up in a minute and turn it over to joe who will talk for about 15 or 20 minutes and run through the main arguments of this book after that i'll my colleague scott kennedy will take over and invite jessica to join the discussion uh this is meant to be uh given the limitations of a virtual event nonetheless participatory mass democracy so to speak so at any point uh folks can be sending questions and and comments uh to us via the event page at csis.org just go to events look for this specific event page unless you button that you can click and indeed we've already got questions coming in we'll try to weave those in uh to the discussion um when when joe wraps up his comments so again thanks to everyone for joining us this is going to be a great discussion and with that with this i'd like to turn it over to comrade few smith for the next 20 or so minutes well thank you very much jude very kind introduction and it's wonderful to be at csis however virtually it might be um uh in any case as uh jude said uh the book is and the reason to write the book is really because i think that the thesis of institutionalization of chinese politics has been overplayed over the recent years um just one example and i'm going to pick on a non-china specialist just because he sums up the case so well uh milan is fuller uh a prominent political scientist at yale wrote while while xi jinping was still heir apparent he wrote that he would be expected to serve no more than two five-year terms and be accountable to a set of institutions within the communist party of china that carefully balanced two major political coalitions as well as regional and organizational interests within the chinese political system now i'm really not picking on uh professor zvolik because he's not as i say a china specialist but i do think he was summing up what a lot of prominent uh china specialists were writing and thinking about that time and i think it's now obvious and probably will become more obvious in about a year after the 20th party congress that china is nowhere near as institutionalized as his rather optimistic prediction suggested it's really not an institutionalized authoritarian system it's a leninist system and leninist systems are dominated by mobilizational parties not by uh institutions that constrain power you know i i have to say one word about institutionalization uh because i think what institutionalization does uh i think we can go on to the next slide is that it's really a decision-making rule uh at least for elite politics it's a decision-making rule uh about how power passes from one leader to another uh and if you don't have those rules um you know the succession can be messy and power really needs to be consolidated by each leader when you take over the position of general secretary you're not inheriting a number of institutions you're inheriting a number of um relationships and you have to figure out how to consolidate power just a quick mental experiment um just imagine that you were dropped into the chair of the general secretary after a party congress you'd kind of look around the room and see some friendly faces and a lot of perhaps not so friendly faces and you have to figure out how do you keep power how do you consolidate power uh for those of you who have been watching china for a while you remember that hui bang chaozi young were not able to consolidate power uh they fell along the way and um certainly when jung's uh when johnson men took over in 1989 i certainly recall a lot of people saying he'll never be able to consolidate power uh he did and that's part of the story and each leader either consolidates power or doesn't so how do you do this um well i think you start by looking around and identifying the really critical positions not all positions are created equal some are much more important than others and you know just in observing chinese politics uh the military is certainly one of those that you need to have control of and johnson men certainly did not have control of the military when he took over um he had had zero military experience had worked in no military related industries or anything of that nature and uh by all accounts uh the young brothers young uh young sean young by bing were not so uh welcoming to him and this is where uh deng xiaoping gave uh zhang zamin a lot of support in 1992 after the 14th party congress he engineered the purging of the whole young brother network in the pla which was extensive they'd been in those positions for a long time and uh you know to you you really had to purge those people and bring in other people he turned over power to lyohua ching and jung jin who were elderly and had no political ambitions of their own and seem to have really played an important role in building support within the military for jiangsu men and then you know luck plays a role uh the elders have been interfering in chinese politics you know we talk about the so-called eight immortals playing a vital role during the uh tiana aman and a lot of those leaders began to fade from the scene uh lee sien nien and wu chao mo died in 1992. john yun passed in 1995. deng xiaoping was certainly aging uh and it became obvious that you needed to have uh you know younger leadership there and so you know the the role of the retirees of the elders uh uh changed and diminished and the turning point really comes in 1994-95 you have the fourth plenum in the fall of 1994. where according to people's daily and editorial uh power passed from the second generation of leadership to the third generation and then in the following spring taking advantage of his seemingly more consolidated power uh john got rid of chanshi tong the uh party secretary of beijing uh you know getting changed out of beijing was not that easy he was really a product of that beijing machine and it affected a lot of a lot of rice bowls but doing so really can help consolidate power uh it was not so easy to um buck uh zhang zamin after that uh and then of course there was the retirement of uh tau shirt a couple of years later in 1997. this is supposedly what institutionalized politics in china but sometimes you look at authoritarian system and institutions end up doing what the authoritarian leader wants them to do that's not institutionalization and the institutions control other people not the leader uh if you look at the retirement of chaos sure it's really interesting uh chow sure of course was had uh made the polar bureau years before jung zamin got there he'd run the organization department he'd come out of the security services uh there every reason to believe that he might have resented uh jungzeum in passing him over and by his public speeches he was really a thorn in the side of john zumin and so as the uh party congress in 1997 came up uh johnson man was able to send boy bull who was actually one of his strong supporters over to convince chow sure that it was time to retire this was the first time retirements had been instituted in the uh uh chinese communist party system uh and you know this was very delicate chelsea was 70 jungzhamin was 71 and nevertheless boy boy allegedly said while jungzerman has taken power at a time of critical need so he can stay on despite being overaged but you need to retire there was one other really rather good reason for moving chauscher out of he was senate head of the people's congress and that was to move lipong into the national people's congress uh lee pong of course was deeply controversial because of his role in the tiananmen activities and he happened to be 69 so if you set the age at 70 it catches ciao sure but it doesn't catch the pong and if lipong had just been retired after two terms as premiere a lot of people would have been saying you know rumors that uh china was reassessing tiarama and et cetera politically it would have been very very delicate so you move him over to the national people's congress a less uh influential position although lipong held on to his number two ranking in the hierarchy it's all very very delicate moves which just by the delicacy of these moves you you can see that institutions are not the primary moving factor here it's the um setting up the right balances uh if you go on to the next slide um ah yes uh moving on to mujin tao who takes over as as general secretary in 2002 um 16th party congress you know hu jintao really was appointed by deng xiaoping in 1992 that's when he joined the uh bola bureau standing committee and apparently this was a decision passed by the poll bureau standing committee uh and so when chow sure was forced to retire he let it be known that was the successor and would be in 2002 and made it impossible for zhang zamin to stay on but jungzhamin can do a lot of stuff to make it much more difficult for hujin tao to consolidate power in uh 2002 the polar bureau standing committee was expanded from seven people to nine uh and uh associates of zhang zamin were the people who uh expanded it people like huang zhu uh that joined the bullet bureau standing committee uh wu bang guo and zhang chong yun were added to the secretariat and when you move people from uh the uh beijing and uh shanghai party committee on to the polar bureau that opens up two seats uh which leochie and chun liang yoo took so you get you know four of your associates on to the polar bureau two of them on the standing committee and that more or less ties uh who gentiles hands uh you know if you're talking about controlling critical positions it's jongz and men's folks who control those uh critical positions this is when wobul shong and shui sai ho were appointed vice chairs of the central military commission they held them for the entire ten years that hu jintao was general secretary uh so if controlling the military is an important part of um of holding power in china mujinta simply did not have the same sort of control that jung zamin did before him so um was he really uh general secretary i think that a lot of the sort of lost year talk about hujin tao is because leadership was really divided you had huge in tao in the formal positions but jung zamin uh hovering above him in these uh well the chinese like to call it mother-in-law position you know controlling a lot of the informal politics uh next slide please uh oh okay wichita's time is over um so uh as i say i think that um deng xiaoping did in fact try to institutionalize leadership transitions he did not like the idea of a leader choosing his own successor which is what he thought was uh the problem of concentration centralization of power what had happened to mao uh and so he decreed that gentile replaced john zamin this is sort of uh the idea of giving one faction or one wing of the party uh control for a while and then another one uh and as i say chow sure was uh made sure that changzhamin had to stick to this arrangement so wujonta i don't think ever was able to centralize power next slide there this is where i think one can really observe the pathologies of leninist system uh it's not all organization uh particularly in the zhang zamin period continues very much into the who gentile period corruption metastasizes and you know this is very interesting i i've come to believe that you know why do you follow zhang zamen say well jung zamin can allow you to become really really rich and many of the people joyoung kong shoots shoots ai ho and so forth apparently did become very rich there's a tendency for decentralization and localities to build fashion factions which makes beijing relatively weak uh so this happens particularly with the weak and divided leadership which is what we had in those uh years next slide and that paves away for xi jinping xi jinping is coming in and trying to restore the party you know you have to remember that when when xi jinping came in he was absolutely obsessed by the fall of the communist party in the soviet union and has done for nine years everything that he can to strengthen the party and not to follow the soviet path uh you know he's really sort of the anti-deng xiao ping deng xiaoping was deliberately self-effacing xi jinping is high profile deng xiaoping decentralized power xi jinping centralizes it uh deng xiaoping open to the west uh i don't want to say xi jinping is closed to the west but certainly he's much more cautious about um about opening to the west xi jinping also because of his anti-corruption drive was able to consolidate power very quickly he tried to attack factionalism uh or at least other people's factions uh he has promoted his own uh he's stressed party building new rules are being enunciated almost on a daily basis and what really is interesting i think is the personalization of power uh you know when you have the party now pledged to um uphold the what are called the two upholds one of which is uh xi jinping as core of the party uh it's a very personalized approach to power uh two members of the polar bureau standing committee after the 19th party congress had never even served on the central committee not as alternates or um or as regular members of the central committee they were able to leapfrog those positions uh four members of the politburo uh not the polar bureau standing committee but the public bureau were promoted from the alternate list that's jumping at least two slots um we have helicopter promotions um and so what are the implications of all this well i think we're going to see one of the implications uh next year uh it seems uh that xi jinping is going to go for a third term uh there must be enormous resentments of what xi jinping has done in the party certainly parts of the military parts of the parts of the party organization xi jinping has berated lower level officials for not working hard well why would you work hard when you might make a mistake it's become very difficult to do that uh there's this question of personalization of power versus the power of the organization the centralization decentralization i mentioned um you know deng xiaoping talked about the separation of party and state and for xi jinping it's the party leads in everything uh interesting things now happening with the party and business or the economy more broadly uh with the investigations of of uh not only didi chushing but alibaba and so forth very interesting what's this is going to do for innovation and i know that scott uh follows issues of innovation so maybe he can respond to some of those questions is he creating an environment that will allow for continued innovation and of course we see the continued rise of nationalism in any case i think i've thrown out a lot on the table and so i'll pass it back to jude uh or or to jessica or whoever is next and get some feedback thank you very much appreciate it thanks joe i'm going to turn this right over to uh colleague and friend uh comrade scott kennedy who will uh take the discussion from here terrific well thank you jude and and joe thank you for being with us for writing this terrific book um i i think uh in my time at csis this may be the fourth or fifth time that we've called upon you to uh enlighten us about what's going on in in chinese politics and really a tour de force uh book here um and uh really makes all of us rethink a lot of our assumptions about how uh chinese politics works um i wanna bring in now jessica teats who also provides amazing thought leadership on chinese politics and jessica is an associate professor in political science at middlebury college uh she's also an editor with the journal of chinese political science and she's the author of civil society under authoritarianism the china model which was published in 2014 and uh has written and spoken on a whole range of of critical issues about china about authoritarian systems about their relationships with civil society uh and she's going to offer us her take uh about uh these big questions um and then uh i'll follow up with with a few others and then we will turn things over to the audience and and see uh where that populous uprising takes us uh for the remainder of the program so jessica thank you for for joining us i would just say before handing you the baton that it's clear that you have already appropriately anticipated the challenges of climate change and are living in the best part of the country in vermont compared to the rest of us so congrats on your your foresight thank you scott um i'll check back in with you around january and see what you think then right [Laughter] so i wanted to thank uh both scott and jude for inviting me um i had joe's book sitting on my desk and i wanted to read it but you know how it is to find time to to do that and so having a deadline like this was great um and i also wanted to um acknowledge the intellectual debt that joe references in his book um to ezra vogel and i think you know not only was was ezra vogel a great scholar but he also was a big proponent of this public intellectual ship right so making sure that scholars were sharing what they know about chinese politics with policymakers because first of all this is a really important time to study chinese politics and to try to understand what's going on it's a time of a really rapid change um and in some ways uh change that isn't continuous right so it's harder to predict but also and i don't know if if uh joe and jude and scott feel the same way that i do but sometimes i tell my students that the more you study chinese politics the less you feel you know so you tell students you know this is this is how things happen and then they do something different and you have to try to understand why so um i learned a lot about elite politics in reading this book um this is not exactly my area i mostly look at local governance and so i don't have a lot to offer as far as joe's read on elite politics and how these things are shaking out it seems really accurate uh given what i know but he also brings up some really good structural questions and i think that those structures that he talks about institutionalization party politics factions how those play out in addition to the personalities of the people at the elite level might help us understand what's going to happen next in china and what's happening right now so i'd like to address um two of those issues one was this idea about the value of comparison so does it make sense to compare china to other single party systems or should we instead think about it as unique or as a leninist system and the second big question is just the nature of political institutionalization does china have it do they not what does that mean for the future so the first question about um the usefulness of comparisons with other single party systems joe talks a lot about this in the introduction and he finds this category too broad and too diverse to really help understand china and so this is why instead he uses that comparison to this sort of ideal type of a leninist system and i i see why he's doing that but i think that i would also push back to argue that china doesn't really fit either of these categories of a leninist system or a single party system in the way that we might understand it in other countries um i tried to do this in my research as well and ended up just coming up with um a new term of consultative authoritarianism because china didn't exactly fit in any of the existing categories that i could have used but i guess what i i thought about that exercise was that i think that that comparison actually is really profitable because where china does look like other single party systems probably tells us something important that there's a logic of single parties at work there and where it doesn't fit well with how we might understand single parties to operate around the world might get it something unique in the china context and i think that this comparison is really profitable because it can show us you know what things are really important and what things maybe are normal if you want to call it that right we could predict these things so for example when you think about um promotions and emotions in the chinese system we we know that local officials can be demoted but they hardly ever are and so joe points this out in his book um and other scholars have found this as well and this really gets the idea of the logic of a single party right so margaret pearson and sachimae wrote a really good article um looking at how officials aren't demoted they're simply moved into other positions and then they um they get promoted or they rise a little bit more slowly after that so that's what demotion looks like in the chinese system that doesn't necessarily make sense in a purely leninist system where you would see frequent ideological purges but it makes a lot of sense in a single party in a single party what you're trying to do is channel all elite ambition through one party right you want the elites to stay within the party because that's where they see their future versus going outside it and challenging and so if you don't ever demote anyone they still have a future in the party right this also goes to explain why when you go to china and you meet a vice mayor you look around for the other 12 vice mayors that are probably lurking off in the background somewhere if you have to promote people up through a hierarchical system you have to have lots of positions to promote them into right so you tend to see that sort of sprawl um so i do think that there is value in trying to compare china to other single parties within this comparative literature i also think though that china has a lot to teach comparative authoritarian scholars about single party systems like what we see in china so for example if you think about the role of factions and how those are maintained and how those are challenged in china this i think could actually be a really good addition to that comparative literature which depends on like um you know patronage politics and those sorts of models which i don't think are rigorous enough so i would just encourage people to continue to make those comparisons and actually embrace the areas where china doesn't fit easily or might tell us something different the bigger question though and i think this one's really important for for everybody not not just academics is the nature of political institutionalization and so as joe pointed out he finds that elite politics unlike what what andy nathan has argued were not institutionalized but he does find some nascent norms like the retirement age um and this analysis though leads to two big questions about the nature of political institutionalization and one is that institutionalization is a process right so it's not an end state but it's a process so institutions are always recreating rules they're always being challenged and so inside of institutionalization um steven levitsky's work shows us that we have the rules of the game which is what we talk about but also these supportive norms or the connective tissue that help build out the rules and in addition to the fact that there are both rules and norms um that this process of institutionalization is also subject to constant change and pressure not stasis right so we should expect a lot of shifting a lot of challenge during this process and so that's one thing that we need to think about about institutionalization the other is that institutionalization might be uneven right so we might see that a system is better institutionalized in some places and some processes than others and so it might make sense to talk instead of talking about institutionalizations like an end state it might be better to talk about it more like a spectrum and so for example what i see in my research on chinese governance is that the system is really bifurcated so you have lower levels that really do follow the rules of the game um however at the upper levels where joe's research is at elite politics you see that that there are a lot more um politics and and maybe less roles what's interesting is under xi jinping that we see that this institutionalization below the level of elite politics is really being pushed which leads us to this question is you know is the system really politics all the way down or should we instead understand it as differing or uneven levels of institutionalization in the system we also see that these levels of institutionalization have changed over time and again i don't think that this is evidence that that this system is not institutionalized but instead it's showing us a process of institutional challenge and so this is also where that comparative authoritarian literature really helps us so when we look at this process of norman and institution challenge we have the people we talk about as the rule takers the elites or sorry the rule takers at the lower level and the rule makers the elite but we also have rule breakers right and so when we look around the world at increasing authoritarianism or even challenges in strong democracies like the u.s what that's shown us is that institutions are not as strong as political scientists once thought and that this elite consensus to break norms or rules can destroy what previously maybe we would have predicted to be stable institutions and reveal some sort of new equilibrium so i guess what i would like to point to as as future research is to try to better understand this process of institutional challenge that we're seeing with xi jinping so instead of trying to decide is the system institutionalized or not maybe instead to ask questions also at what level which rules and norms exist who is challenging where and when are the institutions more constraining and where are they more malleable and when we think also about um you know institutions as an equilibrium what we might see is a shifting equilibrium in china and so what might this tell us about what's happening in the system so milan's folic um who joe brought up earlier he might argue that this shows that she has amassed enough power to no longer share it with the other elites okay that that could be interesting but how did that happen so why did other elites allow this to happen and not mobilize to prevent it um why did they let washi light be you know taken out and and not stop that um why was jung so jongz and men so good at maintaining power with who but but not with she right we might see other scholars would argue um that uh the people who study for example single party systems like ben smith or jason brownlee they might argue that this represents a shift in elite consensus and that she had mobilized elites to support him against threats and these threats are not inside the elite but they're outside of the elite and this is really important implications then for how we understand the future so one thing that we might understand about chinese politics is that there is increasing institutionalization but it's bifurcated right so we might need different ways to understand elite politics than we do for local politics and local governments this is also uneven throughout the bureaucracy so there might be some departments and bureaus that are more institutionalized than others and then about the nature of elite politics this is going to be really challenging right so single party um systems are really strong if they maintain elite cohesion because that then they can channel elite ambition so given the the collapse of these norms about retirement age and you know having two terms what will this next five years look like and will xi jinping be able to maintain that elite cohesion so joe's laid a really important foundation to tackle these questions and and i really learned a lot so thank you terrific thank you so much jessica those are terrific insights and uh really helpful perspective um i wanted to offer a couple additional points uh for for to uh spur conversation uh i think what we've uh you've laid a terrific foundation though and i think some of the things i'm gonna say uh overlap a little bit uh with what you mentioned although i'm going to end on a policy question as opposed to a future academic research question um the the place i'm going to start and this may sound uh like a a a unfair attack but it's not meant to be at all it's just about the book title rethinking chinese politics so having been a professor for a long time through much to the period that that joe writes about my expectation during that period is that the big shift within and the rethinking going on with about chinese politics was actually about state society relations and the and that there were uh sources of trajectories in china's overall political system which didn't originate from elite leaders that in fact in some places they were responding to others uh not just simply setting the agenda and others reacting um so that's reflected you know for example in the work that i've done on business lobbying andy murtha on protests uh and you know sort of um you know uh authoritarian i guess fragmented authoritarianism fragment authoritarianism 2.0 the work on civil society some of the work uh as well by jessica chun weiss on the complexities of nationalism and its relationship to foreign policy things like that so i was thinking that that you know so having a this title rethinking chinese politics it may reflect a little bit because of elite politics privilege about you're able to have a title of a book that's so broad that that those of us who work on the society side of things affecting politics we we couldn't consider doing that um and so in some ways i've just that's and i want to admit that that's unfair because everyone knows that you write about elite politics and no one's telling you that you shouldn't write about elite politics because that's critical but in some ways the book could have been titled rethinking chinese elite politics uh which would have been sort of more precise um beyond that then we could have said you know it really focuses on this on succession right so if you're going to be super precise it would have been rethinking chinese elite political succession that's really the core of the book and so that again it gets thrown from the cheap seats for folks who work on other parts of the system and um the second question is about institutionalization and i agree uh broadly with uh jessica's uh sort of uh perspective here um yes there are different there and i'm but i'm gonna i'm gonna bring in a curveball at the very end uh which is so i think of institutionalization as about norms and expedite expectations and predictability um and that um it applies both to succession transfers of power but also regula about decision-making for big big issues and the implementation of them so that the participants in the process kind of have a sense of of how that process is supposed to go who the players are uh and and what's likely to affect the outcome these may not be written down rules they may be unwritten rules but they're things that people kind of think of and i'd also say that this isn't either or uh that it's just sort of a free-for-all with no you know a hobbesian state of nature where folks are doing things in a totally unpredictable way even the conflict can be have predictability there's certain types of tools of power you use to crush someone else or get your point of view where you wouldn't you wouldn't you wouldn't expect it um so i and so i wonder if we might end up somewhere more in the middle because so many people i know in china not just outsiders like me have been so surprised and shocked by what xi jinping has done that i've gotten so many emails and and wechat messages and and other types of signals that they were just shocked when he uh overturned the apple cart at the 19th party congress and didn't appoint a vice president who was going to be the likely successor i mean we still got wong chi shan where's wong chi shan going right you know um and so i'm wondering if um it's possible that in this sort of middle space of of institutionalization xi jinping has really been a change agent that uh if he hadn't been there uh we might have had a different kind of expectation about how uh the interaction amongst elites work and i think about that in the context of january 6 here in the united states and the last several years under under president trump um i think there's an ex expectation that there wasn't a possibility that january 6 would have led to a coup in the united states because the norms were too strong but i don't i think that it's not out of the world to think about the efforts that were underway to try and mobilize supporters for him that might have changed the way things turned out uh in january and i think that really i think there's lots of of uh being now that institutionalization in american politics is now up for grabs um so that's just sort of one question about institutionalization last one is just sort of the policy takeaway um so let's let's just accept the outcome exactly as you've described it that uh either xi jinping is revealed that there's not as much institutionalization as we thought or perhaps jessica's broken up that institutionalization and weakened it so we're at that state um what's that mean for um how long we think he can be in power how dominant he will be how complicated will it be for the united states and others to deal with china is is this breakdown or revelation of lack of institutionalization of the breakdown of institutionalization going to make it harder for the united states and other major powers to find a constructive way to interact with with china um or might it make it easier because he you know schwarzwan you know he what he says goes and so therefore we know exactly who we need to negotiate with uh he doesn't have to go back and build consensus he can just you know if he wants to change and find a reachable settlement you know he could just do it so anyway i'm sorry to throw a lot more on the table but your book really is inspiring uh in i'm gonna throw things back uh who can turn things back to you or bring in additional questions but uh thanks so much joe why don't we give it turn it over to you for some uh some thoughts but if you you know maybe you know can we try and save the last 10 or so minutes i want to get in some of the audience q a but maybe take five or so minutes to um to offer some thoughts and reactions well yeah um first of all thank you both for some very stimulating uh uh questions and thoughts um uh you know i i i'm jessica i'm all in favor of comparison i'm also in favor of 40-hour days uh you know sometimes you have to choose between reading the literature on uh comparisons and digging deeper in in china and i tend to fall on the digging deeper side uh although i don't ignore that literature entirely um it's just boy it's tough to do both as i know you know and uh scott uh i i also have paid a lot of attention to um uh societal issues out there if you recall i i thought huge intel was so boring i went and read wrote a book on logic and limits of political reform in china looking at what i thought were some really interesting efforts to deal with societal issues and my conclusion was that those efforts to introduce just some very rudimentary intraparty democracy measures uh ran up against leninist institutions and ultimately the party decided it wanted to keep the leninist institutions uh you know i think most of us with our background would say that wasn't a very good decision uh you could move from a more leninist system to a more typical authoritarian system probably keep power but certainly keep a better uh state societal relationship and i think that that is the issue that will come up whenever xi jinping goes to see marx it will be he's going to leave a incredible pile of issues on the table and i think that that is what people in washington should be thinking about uh you know one of the questions that has always uh fascinated me is why is it in china's interest to pick fights with the united states and i frame that somewhat controversially but you know where does this you know we all know the pew report that came out a few months ago that basically said nobody likes china their opinion of china has declined rather precipitously um this strikes me as entirely un unnecessary the so-called wolf warrior diplomacy um why is this to china's advantage we're used to thinking of countries advancing their own interests national interests and china seems to be moving in directions that don't advance its national interest and there must be as jessica would point out a political logic to this uh and i have to think that that political logic has something to do with both party building and power building um and that's what makes xi jinping so very difficult to deal with uh because basically the united states would i think other nations as well like to constrain him in certain norms of behavior and certain expectations and he's saying no i want to go this other route so i think he's going to be very difficult and i think it's up to the united states to point out that these problems are not necessarily a problem of of china or even of the chinese communist party uh the united states was able to get along with china under zhang zamin dung chopping other leaders just fine these two problems of uh a particular leader and maybe uh other chinese elites well at one time or another uh choose to deal with those problems i'd like to i've always been an optimist can i um maybe to make you a pessimist for a moment joe i want to ask first you and then i actually would love jessica's thoughts on this well i'm going to start just pulling from some of the questions uh one that just came in which um i think is on a lot of folks minds especially as we look to a third term and and maybe rule in perpetuity or at least till he sees marks is what would happen if this is not a mao zedong style slow deterioration but rather sudden exit of xi jinping via some sort of health event earlier on um what might emerge in that vacuum and so you know joe wants to get your thoughts at the elite level and then jessica i think a really important sub question is how does the the governance system and the party as a whole respond to this is there enough resiliency and integrity within the the sort of base political system or the foundational political system that even if there was some volatility at the top as there's jockeying you know the trains would still run on time so maybe joe first to you on the what would happen at the elite level in that vacuum and then i'll turn it to jessica i think that's a very difficult question uh i i certainly remember as you do back in 2012 when xi jinping disappeared for two weeks and everybody was you know there were rumors of assassination attempts uh uh hurting his back swimming i mean it was all over the map and what if he'd had a heart attack and died uh you know this was two months less than two months before the party congress uh boy that party would have had real trouble sorting out elite politics um you know there are so many balances and uh interest to take care of it would have been very very difficult to go back to baidaiho or whatever and just reshuffle the deck because there would be real winners and losers from that process and certainly one of the great problems of the mao zedong era was that they were unable to work out major policy conflict you know coming out of the great leap forward and so forth i'm not convinced that they have solved those issues how do you do how do you deal with major elite conflict well in the case of boshilai they made a decision to um excise the problem uh you know it's it's not a delicate process not subtle there are winners and losers in this system and um you know so you know if if there were a major health incident or something like that uh especially when power is so centralized and so personalized i think the pro the system would have real problems dealing with it um you know and i don't think that they you know the problem is that i'd hard to imagine them bringing in 200 central committee members and discussing in that large of a form and yet you don't have eight immortals that can go into a room or their secretaries go into a room and sort it out that way so i think we're at a point where they don't have a good mechanism for sorting out precisely such issues yeah um and that that's just a quickly that's a great point i hadn't really thought of of who would lead the discussion yeah um you know i don't see like having the street cred to to drive an entire discussion of the full central central committee plus you know whoever else you'd need in the room from from the cmc um jessica thoughts i guess this is totally speculation and it would totally depend on the scenario and what's going on but just some base thoughts about the integrity and resiliency of the system yeah i mean the scenario that you describe is probably the most dangerous one that that china would face if you had a sudden unplanned exit um i mean one one thing is is that the party is stronger now than it has been in a really long time so i think just thinking about everyday governance that that would be fine i think the dangerous part would be what would happen at the elite level and so would you see the fracturing of the party into different factions that didn't even really try to pretend that they were in the same party and that sort of jockeying for power um i i think that we might instead see what happened after mao zedong's death where you bring somebody in who nobody likes but nobody dislikes right you sort of bring somebody in who is just a placeholder and everybody knows that that's the role and then with that person in power then you would see that everybody would have to talk behind the scenes but it will be really interesting because the way that you would pick that successor would be different than what we've seen in the past because xi jinping has done a really good job in breaking down the power of the factions at the local level and so before you would have stability by making sure that you alternated between different factions you know somebody as as the president somebody is the vice president but if you don't have that mechanism of making sure that all elites feel that their ambitions are being met and that they have a path forward then it becomes the zero sum competition for the top slot and that's what we see in other single-party systems that make it so dangerous that lead to you know coup attempts and assassinations and all of those sorts of politics so i think it would be a really dangerous time um but i do think that the party is much more cohesive and stronger than it has been in the past and that might be a factor to help prevent that outcome scott any any thoughts on this yeah um obviously things could go totally haywire and in chinese politics the general rule is uh you look up right to decide what you're supposed to do right whether it's a bureaucrat or your faction leader or something like that but i want to posit the other possibility that italy or thailand could be china's future italy and thailand have very uh unstable elite politics right yet their bureaucracies work relatively seamlessly regardless of what's going on at the very top you can travel to italy or thailand which i've done at least to thailand in the middle of a coup and the rest of the system operates and it's possible that the norms that jessica described with regard the base and the bifurcation may still run normal relatively normally even with that stuff going on i don't know i think it's a fabulous question it's the big question of course uh but there's i i think we ought to think about the range of potential outcomes um we only have um about four minutes left so i'm going to see if we can get around robin and i'll just go quickly through the three of you um again these are all speculative questions but that makes it fun because they're our answers are unfalsifiable hopefully over over the near term um does xi jinping is a great question does xi jinping recognize the risks of personalization are there any signs that he is taking this is now my editorialization of the question are there any signs that he is taking steps to mitigate some of the known problems of power centralization and and personalization or do you just when you get that powerful you become so blind you know acton's power corrupts absolutely i'll go around the go around the room here joe um we haven't seen it uh you know jessica just said the party is more powerful than ever and it seems that way but they're doing all sorts of things uh you know controlling the hours that kids can play on video games uh trying to put some form of xi jinping thought into the school curriculum it seems to me that the party is scared of any sort of thing that it doesn't immediately control um and you know i i just think they're setting themselves up for some really big problems i just want to throw out one book scott rozelle's invisible china a wonderful book and he points out that the model of growth is at an end china's got to find new ways of growing and if it doesn't some of the economic outcomes could be uh disastrous uh so in addition to your question jude about health incidents uh really major economic upsets i think would really uh shake up the system and maybe it would provide other people in the system to say you know xi jinping hasn't been doing such a great job so you know economics and uh personalization of power i just see a slew of problems confronting china in the future jessica final final closing thoughts here i don't think that he thinks about the personalization or centralization as as a problem yet because i think he still sees so many areas where they don't have as much control as they would like at the central level um and i also think he still worries about the presence of factions he's done a really good job in eliminating them and having everyone sort of loyal to the center but i think he doesn't think that he's quite finished yet i think this also though points to a really important lesson for policy makers which is that we're always looking for allies within the system you know people who are being quiet right now because they're afraid of xi jinping but really they agree with us and we just need to empower them and then policy will shift and i see a lot of elite consensus that xi jinping has correctly identified the threats to the party that he's correctly identified the collapse of the soviet union and that he's finally tackling problem areas that people have seen for a long time so i don't get the sense that there are a lot of really powerful people who are still in the party um who disagree with him and so that search for allies might not be really useful and it might be better instead to identify pragmatic policy overlaps where what xi jinping wants to solve is a problem we also want to solve and that's where we may be able to work together scott final thoughts and then maybe i could ask you to just close this out sure i think the solution that he settled on for this problem uh is orwell that is uh ai data if you can't depend on folks to tell you honestly the truth and help you really figure out those problems and where the mistakes are well you use the social credit system you use other ways to track folks monitor people you don't let two politburo members get in a room by themselves you make sure you've got asymmetrically more information than everyone else so i think this this turns around about information and data as his backstop to try and fig to uh you know square the circle um and of course there is garbage in garbage out problem in any kinds of data and that and so it doesn't necessarily protect him uh from that kind of problem um so uh what we found is that the trajectory of chinese politics uh is uncle uh and we know our study of chinese politics is institutionalized that we have great folks and leadership like from joe and jessica but the trajectory of the system uh is gonna be hard to fathom but joe has given us a really good pathway to think about these challenges and jessica's also offered some ways to to further try and map out uh the complexities of the system where it may be institutionalized where it may not and and why which is important both for academics and for policymakers and of course it's most important for folks in china so we are going to continue to be watching very carefully i want to thank uh my co-host and partner in crime jude uh and his team uh in the freeman chair my team in the trustee chair for doing a great job and collaborating uh to joe and jessica for inspiring us with uh their work uh today and every day and for all of you watching uh at home or wherever you find yourselves thank you for your comments reactions and for participating in this program i hope everybody has a terrific day take care thank you [Music] you

Channel: Center for Strategic & International Studies

Views: 10,826

Rating: 4.57551 out of 5

Keywords: Center for Strategic and International Studies, CSIS, bipartisan, policy, foreign relations, national security, think tank, politics

Id: rdZM5D9u3Ng

Length: 62min 5sec (3725 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 02 2021