Minxin Pei’s newest monograph, The Broken China Dream, adds to his critical assessment of the Chinese regime’s trajectory by combining and extending his earlier works, particularly China’s Trapped Transition (Harvard University Press, 2006) and China’s Crony Capitalism (Harvard University Press, 2016). Pei argues that Deng-ist reforms made during the “decisive decade” of the 1980s, while allowing for temporary miraculous economic growth, failed to institutionalize self-reinforcing economic reform and true restraint on the executive. These weak guardrails, along with stagnated economic growth, could not prevent a return to personalistic rule seen in China’s New Era with the rise of Xi Jinping, which has led to a “new cold war” with the US.
Pei argues that the current version of China’s “neo-Stalinist” regime is not a break from post-Mao reforms, but rather a logical inevitability given the incomplete (or uncommitted) political and economic reforms of the three prior decades. To make this argument, Pei analyses the interrelated political and economic path dependencies through three distinct periods.
During the “decisive decade” of the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping acted as a reluctant ally with the liberal reformist wing of the Party to implement his wide-ranging economic reforms while maintaining his strong support of the Leninist party-state. This led to poorly institutionalized limits on executive power which would never fully take root and would eventually be dismantled under Xi Jinping. Economic reforms of the 1980s unleashed China’s productive capacity, but Deng’s political conservatism and prioritization of preserving Party interests above all else, especially in maintaining the powerful state-owned economy, precluded self-reinforcing economic growth. While Pei makes a path-dependent argument, he walks a fine line between the inevitability of the long-term failures of the 1980s reforms and the alternative counterfactuals possible in the 1980s. The ousting of Party reformers including Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang cemented the regime’s trajectory, allowing the fundamentals of totalitarianism to remain deeply entrenched.
The political and economic order established after the 1980s “contained seeds of its own destruction” (p. 129) during the second period of neo-authoritarianism (1992–2012). With no powerful liberal opposition, economic reforms stagnated in part because of the wealth generated from the initial reform period. Political legitimacy dependent on economic growth, with a purposefully stunted legal system and civil society, selective repression and continued control of the economic “commanding heights,” led to the inevitable rise of crony capitalism defined by systemic corruption. Corruption, in turn, hamstrung economic growth and became a weakness of neo-authoritarianism that Xi could exploit to dismantle collective decision-making within the Party.
In the final era, which Pei argues is a neo-Stalinist regime, Xi Jinping took advantage of the weaknesses in Deng’s political reforms, namely the inadequately institutionalized restraints on top Party leaders, to consolidate power and dominate politics within the Party. Pei argues Xi used advancing technology to implement stricter social controls, crackdowns on civil society and draconian control over ethnic minorities.
While the rise of Xi himself was not inevitable, economic stagnation and weakly institutionalized constraints on the executive allowed an opportunistic player to re-establish a personalistic regime. The rampant corruption that burgeoned under neo-authoritarianism created the opportunity Xi needed to consolidate power through anti-corruption purges that further narrowed the ideological base of the top elite. Xi continued the broadening of central dominance by returning to statist economic policies as stimulus packages in response to the global financial crisis in 2008, and structural flaws in the Chinese economy were revealed a decade later.
The final substantive chapter of the book, less integrated than the other chapters, explains that the common thread of China’s foreign policy post-Mao was the need to cultivate “national strength” to ensure Chinese state and Party security (p. 223). China’s more assertive foreign policy, combined with President Trump’s first administration and what Pei asserts is Xi’s misjudgment of China’s strength (p. 224), created a “new cold war” with the United States.
An ambitious project, this book does important work on integrating the consequences of both the political and economic reforms of the post-Mao era. The rigorous analysis drawing on policy documents, a wide source of speeches from multiple Party players, and secondary literature balances both the big-picture argument with nuanced details. One example of this is the evaluation of provincial propaganda chiefs’ summaries of a Xi speech to identify language possibly scrubbed from the public transcript (p. 178). In some ways, from the perspective of the study of regime types, Pei buries the lede on the fundamental overarching paradox defining China’s regime evolution: that a market-driven economy and all of its benefits for growth is inherently incompatible with a Leninism because the “loss of control over economic activities carries an unacceptable risk of ceding political power to economic and social forces that might underwrite or become organized opposition” (p. 196). Relatedly, Pei’s argument would have been strengthened with a comprehensive evaluation of the substance of Party ideology under Xi, especially given the importance of ideology in Chinese politics broadly but also in the distinction between regime types.
The Broken China Dream provides a deeply pessimistic counter-narrative to theories of authoritarian resilience dependent on the more sanguine period of the 1990s and 2000s. This book is not only an important read for the Chinese politics and economics communities, but also for those interested in non-democracies and institutional change.
