Xiao Gongqin, From Authoritarian Government to Constitutional Democracy
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Translated by Timothy Cheek
This essay is a notable defense of new authoritarian politics for China which the author views as Deng Xiaoping’s policies major achievement for China since the Cultural Revolution. Originally published in Oriental Morning Post, January 18, 2012, in the special section on the 20th anniversary of Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour talks, this short essay offers a congratulatory history of Party reforms in the post-Mao period, describing a five-stage model of economic and political development that starts with authoritarian order, stimulates economic prosperity, enforces social justice, and trains the populace in the civil society habits for constitutional government. Although their names are not mentioned, the historically minded will immediately think of the “political tutelage” proposed by Sun Yat-sen in the 1920s and claimed by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government through the 1940s.
While orthodox in his support of the government, Xiao’s analysis is informed and reasoned, drawing from political science theory and comparative examples from around the world. Xiao Gongqin (b. 1946) is a history professor at Shanghai Normal University. He is the leading scholar of neo-authoritarianism and appears widely in China’s media.
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The Five Logical Steps from Authoritarian Government to Constitutional Democracy: A Macrohistorical Perspective on Deng Xiaoping’s Reforms
Now that China has become prosperous, our next task must be to take up the project of the people’s livelihood. Only when the will and spirit of the people are unhindered can the self-organization of society develop. And only then can we avoid a frustrated and anxious “mob” politics confronting a lawful government. Only then can we overcome populism and build a civic culture. All of this is the necessary prerequisite for China to move toward constitutional democracy and a renewed civilization. This is also the goal to which the political elite of China’s new generation, inheriting the mantle of Deng Xiaoping’s achievements, should devote itself, thus ushering in the arrival of a new era of democratic civilization.
China’s Path Out of Ultra-Left Politics
Fortune and misfortune regularly appear together in human history. China, too, learned positive lessons from the great disasters of the Cultural Revolution. It is no exaggeration to say that the ultra-leftism of the Cultural Revolution also awakened the Chinese people from at least a half-century of fanatical obsession with the utopianism of the planned economy. It was precisely an era like the Cultural Revolution that produced the fantastic stories of the Guizhou village where the day’s work-points of two able-bodied laborers couldn’t buy a single egg, where poverty reached the extent to which women in villages around Longxi (Gansu) had no pants to wear. According to agricultural statistics from 1978, the average annual income of peasants nationwide was less than 75 RMB.
Such shocking facts of extreme poverty provoke profound anxiety, but only those who genuinely suffer—and not august power holders—emerge transformed. In human history, generally speaking, the august power holders remain above the fray. In the great calamity of the Cultural Revolution, however, the founding leaders of the revolution suffered terrible blows just as did the ordinary masses and intellectuals. The marginalization and predicaments they experienced freed them from the fetters of the ideological doctrines of ultra-leftism. And like the proletarian masses they were able by plain common-sense reasoning to gain a vivid understanding of the ultra-leftist calamity that China had suffered. In fact, after Deng Xiaoping was reinstated to his position as vice- premier in 1974, he had an argument with Jiang Qing at a conference to study Dazhai. When Jiang Qing heard the report on village poverty, she said: “That is just a single case.” Deng Xiaoping could not resist the retort: “Even one case is a serious problem.” When he responded to Jiang Qing in this way, Deng’s common-sense rationality awoke and he cast off the fetters of his previous dogmatic faith.
After his reinstatement, Deng Xiaoping was conscience-stricken about the erroneous line that the Party had pursued. On an inspection tour in the Northeast he said: “Our people are too good. They have already forgiven us for such great crimes. People in other countries would have long since given up on us.” According to the Chronological Biography of Deng Xiaoping, at the Party Central Committee meeting to decide on the rehabilitation of Liu Shaoqi, Deng felt compelled to say that, “We have made a few more errors than Comrade Liu Shaoqi.” “We can say that it was precisely the extreme to which the elderly Mao’s utopian Cultural Revolution developed that activated history’s “pendulum effect,” prompting many revolutionary elders (元老) to abandon utopian thinking and rediscover common sense and experience. This brought them a great awakening. When they once again took up the reins of power, Chinese history welcomed a new beginning.
Deng Xiaoping’s rethinking finds a concentrated expression in the Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, volume 3. In that volume, Deng Xiaoping Thought is summed up in four pithy sentences: 1. Socialism is not poverty; socialism enriches the people. 2. To achieve prosperity we must develop the productive forces. 3. To develop the productive forces we must embrace reform and opening. 4. While carrying out reform and opening we must uphold the Four Cardinal Principles and preserve political stability.[2] Deng’s first three sentences are the crystallization of his reflections on ultra-leftist thought and the political function of the last sentence serves to defend the legitimacy of the neo-authoritarian politics of reform and opening.
Once the old revolutionaries had become reformers, they possessed special advantages that the young reforming elites did not. First, the authority, the personal prestige, and the personal connections within the establishment of these old hands who knew the ropes—all invaluable political resources—allowed them to lead institutional reform in the manner of enlightened patriarchs. They were able to reduce massively the cost of political reform, and when reform encountered setbacks they had sufficient political room to maneuver. The political experience accumulated over long revolutionary careers enabled these old revolutionaries to remove the resistance to and assaults on reform by radical liberals outside the establishment and conservatives inside. They were able to preserve the necessary political stability during reform and opening.
Secondly, once the revolutionary elders had taken charge of the reforms, China’s developmental path was firmly set, and China moved in the direction of an enlightened and developmental neo-authoritarian politics rather than the populist democratic politics idealized by radical intellectuals. This was because they had a profound memory of the great democracy of the Cultural Revolution and had no wish to repeat the disastrous policies of street populism. On the other hand, this was due to Deng Xiaoping’s political experience and perceptiveness. He realized that during the early stages of development, Western-style great complete democracy would affect political stability and in the end lead to the failure of reform. He spoke about this many times. In addition, there were deeper causes, including Deng Xiaoping’s own personal history, memories of the revolution, and ideas and emotions forged in the revolutionary era. These merged in him to form an instinctive rejection of any plan to directly apply Western-style pluralistic liberal politics to carry out reform. No matter what the reason, once Deng Xiaoping set out the policy of combining the Four Cardinal Principles and reform and opening, history decided that China’s future basic road would be one of enlightened authoritarian politics, and not the romanticism and political shock therapy of radical pluralistic democracy chosen by the callow, politically inexperienced Gorbachev.
We can see in Deng Xiaoping’s reforms the historical trajectory of the transition from the omnipotent planned economy to an enlightened authoritarian politics: in the realm of economic reform the Chinese people did not start out with a comprehensive blueprint for reform based on ideal principles. Rather, they felt for stones as they crossed the river, in Deng’s famous phrase. They faced actual problems by addressing them on the basis of feasibility and cost-benefit analysis. They completed the transition to a competitive market economy step by step, by implementing the agricultural responsibility system (that is, dismantling the communes and returning land to household production), township and village enterprises (the famous TVE workshops), the open share/stock system, the establishment of special economic zones (SEZ), opening (the economy) to the outside world, the transformation of state owned industries (SOE), and entering the WTO, etc.[3]
In the political realm, we can see that after the end of the 1980s the government used an iron fist to marginalize the radical liberals. For a time after this, Party conservatives were active. However, during his talks on his Southern Tour in 1992, Deng Xiaoping made use of his supreme authority to point out: “We should be on guard against the right, but more importantly we must defend against the left.” His stance deprived the extreme leftist forces of their discursive authority. The basic spirit of Deng’s talks on his Southern Tour was an endorsement of policies that would preserve the Party’s hold on power while the economy continued its opening to the outside world, the idea being to use the practical results of economic development to ensure the legitimacy of the CCP’s political power. Thenceforth, both the radical liberals outside the establishment and the conservative political forces within the Party were marginalized and withdrew from the center of political life.
In the realm of ideology, we can observe a series of creative developments from Deng Xiaoping onward: the significance of “the comprehensive understanding of Mao Zedong Thought” and “Practice is the sole criterion of truth” lay in stripping the “Whateverists” of their discursive initiative[4]; “the initial stages of socialism” concept legitimized market economics in the ideology of the ruling Party; the “Three Represents” emphasized that after discarding the promise of utopian egalitarianism, the CCP would maintain its position as the ruling party, leading the people of the entire country as long as it upheld advanced productive forces, advanced culture, and protected the basic interests of the whole people.[5] In this sense the “Three Represents” has become the milestone marking the transformation of the CCP from a revolutionary party to an enlightened neo-authoritarian ruling party. “Harmonious society” signals an ideological innovation, a shift from revolutionary language based on the philosophy of struggle to a new, enlightened value system which can contain a plurality of interests and ideas. These creative ideological formulations (tifa 提法)[6] embrace the novel contents of reform and opening while preserving the continuity of the Party’s ideological history. They also make up the ideological basis of enlightened authoritarian politics.
In sum, in the twenty years since Deng’s talks on his Southern Tour, China has undergone multifaceted reforms in the economy, politics, and ideology. Through a process of “trial and error and step-by-step consolidation,” we followed a process of systemic renewal in which we transformed ourselves from “a totally controlled society” to a diverse society of “enlightened authoritarianism and a competitive market economy.” The Chinese people were hence liberated from the planned economy of household registration (hukou 户口) and from the system work unit (danwei 单位) ownership, and through the market mechanism they became free to pursue their individual interests. The stimulation of the competitive power of the Chinese people, the emergence of contracts to manage exchanges between economic agents, and the rise of competition between regions meant that China bid farewell to the inherent limitations of China’s traditional society, which gave way to the new competitive civilization now taking shape in China.
Why this kind of neo-authoritarianism can give us an edge
A Taiwanese entrepreneur who has an enterprise in Kunshan used this metaphor when he was speaking with colleagues back in Taiwan: “China engages in the market economy much like it waged guerilla warfare in the past. In the front line headquarters each department works together, makes its decision, double-checks its calculations, and builds the whole kit and caboodle. You can’t find that kind of efficiency in any other country in the world.” This is a mode of operation that ingeniously combines centralized mobilization and market competition. This is one more important reason for the emergence of the China miracle.
As a matter of fact, from the perspective of political science we can say that China’s new political system since Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour represents a “post-totalitarian authoritarian politics.” Or, in plain language, a new kind of enlightened autocracy. Here we use enlightened autocracy as a value-neutral concept in political science. Its characteristic trait is that it continues to use the political resources and mobilizational methods of the “totalitarian system” in order to protect the development of a market economy. In this sort of authoritarian politics, state control and mobilizational capacity are strong while social autonomy is relatively weak. This is a “strong state—weak society” model.
Since the Southern Tour talks, China’s economy has developed massively and Deng Xiaoping’s contributions to the establishment of this neo-authoritarian system cannot be denied. Generally, the authoritarian politics of late-developing countries in the process of economic modernization can be divided into three types: the first type is a patrimonial system that turns state into private property in a hereditary system in which politics is based on cliques that degenerate into patriarchal rule. This is undoubtedly the most backward model of development. Many countries in Latin America and Africa unfortunately fall into this category. The second type is “decentralized plural politics.” India is an example. The characteristic of this kind of state is that it has implemented Western-style competitive multiparty democratic elections before achieving modernization. The state essentially lacks the ability to make comprehensive plans and the integrative capacity to promote economic transformation and to mobilize resources. Rather, under this pluralistic system, parasitic interest groups are able to use legislatures to obstruct systemic reform and the rationalization of the distribution of social benefits. The third type, to use the words of the American political economist Professor Atul Kohli, is “cohesive capitalism” represented by South Korea, Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan. More concretely, politics are centralized, cohesive, while the economy is guided by the market. A cohesive government can effectively formulate industrial policy beneficial to economic development. It can forcefully control and effectively use finances and guard against financial risk. The active cooperation between government and entrepreneurs facilitates joint planning for economic development and resource integration. The strengths of resource integration and systemic mobilization characteristic of “cohesive capitalism” cannot be found in the other models of economic development. This system is different from the liberal laissez-faire doctrine of India’s weak government and as well as from the new hereditary states in Latin America and Africa.
From the perspective of comparative politics, we can see that the Deng Xiaoping model is a new species in political theory. Its efficacy in government-directed economic transformation, its ability to mobilize resources, its ability to control society and resolve unforeseen incidents, and its capacity to deal with unavoidable risks all exceed the capacities of “cohesive capitalist” countries. This is an enlightened autocracy with a high-level integration of resource mobilization and market competition. This is the key to China’s success.
Deng Xiaoping’s system in a century’s historical perspective
Over the past century, in the process of facing the challenges of modernization since late Qing times, China has made six political choices: the enlightened despotism of the late Qing reforms, the multi-party democracy of the 1911 Revolution and its immediate aftermath, the strongman politics of Yuan Shikai, the authoritarian politics of the Nationalist Party, the totalitarian planning system of Mao Zedong, and the reform and opening of Deng Xiaoping. In this broad historical perspective, the Deng Xiaoping model has important characteristics and significance in the history of modernization.
In the late 19th century, the Qing dynasty’s simple and crude authoritarian system was unable to respond to the challenges of modernization after the mid-century Opium Wars. The late Qing’s New Policies likewise were unable to produce a new, enlightened autocracy and could not avoid being toppled by the anti-Manchu nationalism of the 1911 Revolution.
Because of the endless fighting among the parties and the weak government, the multi-party parliamentary politics set up after the 1911 Revolution was unable to surmount the combined dangers of the day and so the contradictions of a multi-party system dissolved into utter polarization. In other words, even though Song Jiaoren’s political party and cabinet were established by national elections, it was a divided and fragmented polyarchy that was completely unable to address the complicated tasks of political integration and economic mobilization.
After 1914, Yuan Shikai dissolved parliament and ran a strongman government. This would seem to have been a new opportunity for social integration, but the intense cliquishness and patriarchal color of Yuan’s government, as well as his effort to become emperor, doomed his government to revert to a hereditary and sultanist politics which was fundamentally unable to address the needs of modernization.
After the success of the Northern Expedition in 1928, the authoritarian politics of a unified party state that Chiang Kai-shek established came apart. On the one hand were the various sides in the wars on the central plains and on the other the rise of the Communist Party. Together with the Japanese invasion, civil war, and finally it own corruption, Chiang’s government was unable to avoid defeat in the national civil war.
Mao’s post-1949 system enjoyed a combination of great organizational power and mass belief. But this belief became unmoored, and China fell into the great disaster of a self-defeating egalitarian utopianism and personal dictatorship and the “extreme left Cultural Revolution.”
Deng Xiaoping’s model of reform and opening arose to respond to the needs of the day in 1978. On the one hand, his model made use of the legacies of strong government from the revolutionary system as a lever to mobilize economic development, and on the other it used market economics to give play to the local energies of social actors, including individuals, enterprises, and groups. From the perspective of the previous five political choices, this effective integration of mobilizational levers and mechanisms of competitive market economy shows that the key to the successes of the Deng Xiaoping model has been precisely its ability to address these two needs of late developing countries by organically integrating organizational strength and competitive strength.
The Five Steps to China’s modern civilization
How do we get from the Deng Xiaoping model to the higher stages of modern democracy and culture? A large, late-developing country that wants to move toward a modern civilization based on democracy must, in the logic of development, meet a series of conditions: first, economic prosperity; next, social justice; and finally, the nurturing of civic culture.
It must be stressed that simple economic prosperity is not a sufficient condition for realizing democratic politics. This is because the prosperity of free market economics in late developing countries is often accompanied by two negative consequences. The first “authoritarian political regression,” manifested in the corruption of power, Mafiaization, and the collusion of power and capital. The second is the social inequality and polarization of rich and poor hidden behind economic prosperity. Globally, there are many late developing countries that are now unable to solve these two great problems and have become mired in the trilogy of “social revolt—mass violent revolution—weak populist democracy.” The “Jasmine Revolutions” of Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya in the Middle East are examples. After the euphoria of democratic revolutions overthrowing corrupt authoritarian regimes, these countries are now by degrees approaching the calamity of anarchy. This disaster has by no means concluded; it has only just begun.
From this we can see that, if China wants to move toward democracy after economic development, it must first avoid falling into the twin traps of political corruption and social polarization. Only in this way can we avoid the vicious cycle between regressive authoritarian politics and weak pluralistic politics. It is necessary to seek out a new road.
According to this logic, we might argue that after neo-authoritarianism has achieved economic takeoff and the preliminary goal of economic prosperity, the next step is to use the great wealth and capital created by society in the process of economic development to support the people’s livelihood, to resolve the contradictions of social injustice and the polarization of rich and poor. Only when social justice permits the will and spirit of the people to flourish will we have met an important precondition for future democracy.
Subsequently, we must rebuild civil society, but a society in which citizens organize themselves can only be established when the will and spirit of the people flourish. This is the only way to avoid creating a “mob” politics full of frustration and anxiety that will challenge the legitimate government. Civil society is the great school that fosters civic culture. Only with autonomy and through the social organization of good works can citizens cultivate the necessary political culture of tolerance, forgiveness, and reason and the capacity to engage energetically in public affairs.
It is precisely for this reason that after China has prospered, it must attack corruption and eliminate the collusion between power and capital so as to develop the people’s livelihood and build civil society. These are all the necessary preconditions for China’s pathway to a modern New Civilization. This is also the goal to which the political elite of China’s new generation, inheriting the mantle of Deng Xiaoping’s achievements, should devote itself, thus ushering in the arrival of a new era of democratic civilization.
From a broad historical perspective, in the decade from the early 1980s through the Southern Tour talks, Deng Xiaoping brought order out of chaos, kept reformers in power, and achieved political stability. He established the first substantial basis for China’s development, accomplishing the first step in this Long March. In the decade between the 1992 Southern Tour talks through 2002, China’s economy underwent a successful transformation, achieving economic takeoff and essentially realizing the goals of the second step.
With an eye toward achieving a high level of democracy in China, the state, in the relatively long period between the beginning of the 21st century and now, and on the basis of the relatively flourishing economy created by the ruling party, has been able to use the enormous capital obtained through economic development to engage in a massive project to improve the well-being, particularly of low- and middle-income groups.
Having improved the people’s livelihood and achieved social justice, the next step is to put great effort into cultivating civil society, to let citizens acquire from society itself the civic culture necessary for democratic politics. This is the fourth stage. All four stages create the political, economic, social, and cultural conditions for the arrival of China’s future democratic constitutional stage. In the fifth step, the maturation of civic culture will naturally produce socialism’s era of high-level democratic politics.
In every ideal model of modernization, the state must be an active player. There are two kinds of state intervention by centralized governments in late developing large states. If a strong state fuses with a utopian project, or becomes part of an expansionist nationalism, or merely becomes a tool to satisfy the interests of private parasitic groups, then this will be a calamitous misfortune for the people. If, on the other hand, there is a fusion of a strong state and practical reason, and if every effort is made to secure the welfare of the whole people and the goals of democracy, then in the words of a foreign political scientist, this will be “a great force in the service of the good.” Through a strong state developing a strong society, the century-long dream of democracy can be realized. Of course, this is just a tentative plan, but a plan entrusted with our most beautiful hopes.
You might ask, why go through this five-step logic instead of going straight to democratic government? I think democracy, like seedlings, is something you cannot force to grow. It cannot transcend social conditions. This five-step program is an incremental stage theory. In plain language, only if reformers are in power will there be economic transformation; only with economic transformation will it be possible to achieve economic takeoff; only with economic takeoff can the state accumulate vast economic power through taxation and undertake the project of addressing the people’s livelihood and realizing an equal and prosperous society. Only when these goals are all achieved will there be the conditions for creating the development of a healthy civil society. Only on this basis can civil society develop, can democratic culture be nourished, populism overcome, and the final step toward constitutional democracy be realized.
We must clearly recognize that democracy has necessary social, economic, and cultural conditions. Over the past century we cannot say that the cry for democracy among China’s masses and intellectuals has not been strong. But subconsciously, people took democracy to be a kind of moral system, simply a tool with which to overcome despotism and corruption. They basically had no idea that democracy arose in the West through a series of social developments and is the product of the collective experience of a long period of trial and error. If we view democracy solely as a tool by which to realize moral government and yet completely neglect the conditions necessary for the achievement of democracy, then fledgling democracies risk falling into anarchy and political division. The ceaseless struggles of parties under the provisional constitution right after the 1911 Revolution is but one example of this sort of political anomie. Another possibility is the malignant spread of populism. In today’s world, many late developing countries have been caught in one or the other and cannot get out.
[1] Xiao Gongqin 萧功秦, “Cong weiquan zhengzhi dao xianzheng minzhude wubu luoji: da lishiguan shijiao xiade Deng Xiaoping gaige 从威权政治到宪政民主的五步逻辑：大历史观视角下的邓小平改革,” in Xiao, Beyond Left and Right Radicalism: The Path out of the Predicaments of China’s Transformation 超越左右激进主义：走出中国转型的困境, Hangzhou: Zhejiang University Press, 2012, pp. 115-24. Originally published in: Dongfang zaobao 东方早报 (Shanghai), January 18, 2012.
[2] Translator’s note. The four cardinal principles 四项基本原则 are still in force in China today: keep to the socialist road, uphold the dictatorship of the proletariat, uphold the leadership of the Communist Party, and uphold Marxism-Leninism Mao Zedong Thought.
[3] Translator’s note. These are all key institutions of China’s economic reforms: TVEs were the first fruits of decollectivization in the countryside and the start of economic production outside the State Plan; SEZs allowed the first private enterprises since Mao’s times beginning in the early 1980s; the number of lumbering SOEs was massively cut through privatization in the 1990s and 2000s (though under Xi Jinping this has been somewhat reversed), and China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001.
[4] Translator’s note. The “Whateverists” 凡是派 refers the Party loyalists who in the late 1970s famously followed Chairman Hua Guofeng’s dictum to follow “whatever Mao said.” The more pragmatic leadership the coalesced around Deng Xiaoping called themselves the “practice group” in contrast.
[5] Translator’s note. Most commentators summarize these three “represents,” which were credited to General Secretary Jiang Zemin in the early 2000s as: to allow business leaders (capitalists) to join the Party, to treat intellectuals better, and to end class struggle.
[6] Translator’s note. Tifa 提法 or formal political phrases or slogans are central to CCP political life. Each of the formulations discussed in this paragraph was proposed by a top Party leader, from Deng Xiaoping to Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao to legitimize their policy innovations.
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