Populist Authoritarianism addresses a core puzzle among scholars of the Chinese political system: why do Chinese citizens support the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)? Using data from 20 different public opinion surveys, spread over two decades, Wenfang Tang argues that the current Chinese system can best be described through the concept of “populist authoritarianism” (PA).
As Tang defines it, populist authoritarianism in contemporary China has several core features: the continued use of “Mass Line” ideology (direct interaction between state and society); high levels of social capital and interpersonal trust; regularized contention (protests, petitions, and other dispute resolution mechanisms); weak political institutions; and government responsiveness to political demands. Combined, this configuration has lead citizens to support the CCP regime, especially the central government.
Each chapter examines a feature of the PA model with public opinion data, and the conclusion presents a broader conceptual definition and synthesis. The empirical chapters present dozens of findings, which can be somewhat arduous and repetitive to get through, though rewarding in the end. Some highlights include: Chinese citizens display extremely high levels of nationalism (p. 47) and interpersonal trust (p. 60); nationalism is lowest among the youth and more educated (p. 50); and policy satisfaction has generally increased over time after its nadir just prior to the Tiananmen massacre (p. 30). Tang also probes perceptions of protest and dispute resolution channels (Chapters 6 and 7).
It should be noted—as Tang does throughout the manuscript— that many of these arguments are already present in existing political science scholarship on China. Li (Lianjiang Li, “Political Trust in Rural China,” Modern China 30 [2, 2004]: 228–58) highlights how Chinese citizens trust the Center but not local governments; Lorentzen (Peter L. Lorentzen, “Regularizing Rioting: Permitting Public Protest in an Authoritarian Regime,” Quarterly Journal of Political Science 8 [2, 2013]: 127–58) discusses how protest has become regularized to provide information to the regime; Shi (Tianjian Shi, Political Participation in Beijing. Harvard University Press, 1997) describes vibrant political participation among Beijing residents; and Chen and Dickson have asserted high levels of regime support for the CCP across several works (e.g., Jie Chen and Bruce J. Dickson, “Allies of the State: Democratic Support and Regime Support among China’s Private Entrepreneurs,” China Quarterly 196 [2008]: 780–804). The core contribution of the book is to synthesize this collection of arguments under the lens of populist authoritarianism, and subject them to greater empirical scrutiny.
The credibility of the empirical chapters often rests on how much the reader trusts public opinion data from China and the broader cross-national survey enterprise. As one of the founding fathers of public opinion research in China, Tang demonstrates an awareness of these criticisms, specifically concerns about social desirability bias. Chapter 8 smartly uses a list experiment to test for the presence of desirability effects, and the evidence suggests that concerns about preference falsification in China may be exaggerated. To use his words:
While such concern of political desirability may have been a serious problem in the past, recent development in China’s political environment seems to suggest that people are less afraid in openly expressing their dissatisfaction towards the government. Although our findings show some political desirability effect, even with our most conservative estimates the level of political trust in China is still significantly higher than in many other countries (p. 151).
To me, the more pressing concern is that questions and scales may mean different things to different people, a problem exacerbated in the use of cross-national survey data. A four on a Likert scale for a Chinese citizen may represent a two for a citizen of somewhere else, leading to false conclusions about relative levels of support, interpersonal trust, and so forth. King et al. (King, Gary, et al., “Enhancing the Validity and Cross-Cultural Comparability of Measurement in Survey Research,” American Political Science Review 97 [4, 2003]: 567–83) have demonstrated as such in their research on anchoring vignettes. With raw data, Chinese respondents report higher levels of political efficacy than Mexican respondents, but this is because Chinese citizens have extremely low standards for what qualifies as a having a “say in government.” This raises serious questions about many of the empirical conclusions Tang draws from the World Values Survey and other cross-national datasets. The finding that Chinese citizens possess some of the highest levels of interpersonal trust in the world is quite remarkable (p. 60), but from my own fieldwork experiences, does not seem to have face validity (though perhaps I have spent too much time in crowded, polluted urban areas).
The impact of the book beyond the China field will be determined by the broader utility of the populist authoritarianism concept. Scholars of authoritarian politics tend to attach labels to the term, differentiating subtypes of non-democratic rule: bureaucratic authoritarianism, electoral authoritarianism, personalist authoritarianism, and consultative/responsive authoritarianism, to name a few. Concept proliferation is not a bad thing, and it rightly reflects the reality that not all dictators face the same constraints or employ the same governance strategies. A concern arises when concepts are not precisely defined, which can lead to conceptual stretching and confusion.
As stated in the book, Tang’s notion of populist authoritarianism lacks this precision. A good typology is mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive, with categories that are easily distinguishable. At the very least, we should be able to know a populist authoritarianism regime when we see it. Tang provides no referent point to populist authoritarianism, and we are left wondering how to describe regimes that do not fully meet his six conditions. If Chinese citizens stopped trusting each other (assuming they currently do), would it cease to be populist authoritarianism? It is also unclear which other governments worldwide might actually simultaneously possess a “mass line” ideology, high levels of interpersonal trust, regularized contention, weak institutions, hyper-responsive government, and high levels of support. Many China scholars would debate whether the current CCP leadership even meets this definition. China under Mao—a possible example raised by the author—certainly would not.
This criticism is perhaps unfair; Tang describes the final chapter as a “preliminary theoretical discussion,” and the book proceeds inductively, with the conceptual definition itself building from the various public-opinion findings. The intellectual scaffolding has been left in place, so to speak, which should give other scholars a footing from which to build. And there is much to build on in this book.
