Frank Pieke is a Dutch anthropologist and Sinologist. He has done interesting work on China throughout his career, beginning with a dissertation and first book on the Tiananmen protests of 1989, which he observed firsthand. He later moved on to other topics, including Chinese migration to Europe and, most importantly, the way in which cadres of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are trained in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). His key work on the latter subject, The Good Communist: Elite Training and State Building in Modern China (2010), is impressive.
Stein Ringen, by contrast, is a Norwegian sociologist and political scientist who only recently began directing his attention to China. Before writing The Perfect Dictatorship, he worked on such subjects as democratization in South Korea (something he draws on for comparative purposes in the book under review to explain why a growing middle class in China will not necessarily lead to the end of one-party rule as happened there). His book before this one was on democracy; its cover showed three American leaders above the title and three British ones below it.
The books by these two authors are, like their career trajectories, in some ways a study in contrasts. This is not just because Pieke takes up issues of social structure and economics as well as politics, while Ringen concentrates more tightly on what makes the party-state tick. A broader difference is that Pieke wants to convince Western readers that the PRC is a less repressive place than many of them imagine it is, whereas Ringen insists that too little attention has been paid lately to the dark side of the CCP’s system of rule. The following early comments in each book are telling. “Violence and repression are no longer directed at the population as a whole” but only at quite specific targets, Pieke writes in Knowing China, arguing that the CCP should be seen as having “reinvented itself” since 1989 as a “modernizing, technocratic and largely benign authoritarian regime” (p. 2). In The Perfect Dictatorship, on the other hand, Ringen says that the CCP only “presents itself to the world as reformed,” while remaining a dictatorial organization “that still rules, ultimately, by fear, intimidation, violence, and death” (p. 2). This suggests a twofold divide between the two authors. Not only does Ringen view the PRC of today through a much darker lens than does Pieke, but the former also sees much more continuity than the latter across watershed years, such as 1976 (when Mao Zedong died), the late 1970s (when Deng Xiaoping launched his reforms), and 1989 (a year of massive protests and massacres in China, as well as the end of Communist Party rule in parts of Eastern and Central Europe).
Not surprisingly, Hannah Arendt and George Orwell get entries in Ringen’s index, but not in Pieke’s. Ringen, assuming that China remains a dictatorship, wrestles with how best to describe the particular sort of variant on the “Big Brother” state it has become, making the case in the end for the term “controlocracy” to describe it. Pieke is also concerned with definitional issues, but of a different sort. He is interested, for example, in whether and in what ways the PRC is still “socialist,” as well as whether it is best thought of as a “nation,” an “empire,” or a bit of both.
In light of all of these dissimilarities, it is worth stressing four things that the books have in common. First, each was written with general readers rather than just specialists in mind. Second, each is by an author who feels a sense of urgency to get his views out, in order to combat misunderstandings he feels have too much currency. Third, each argues that what he is doing in his book is very different from what other authors have been doing recently in theirs, with Pieke claiming that academic China specialists have shied away from writing books about Chinese politics aimed at broad publics, and Ringen stressing that as someone who is not a Sinologist by training and has not had a long-term interest in the PRC, he is able to present it in a manner that is not distorted by the romanticizing tendencies that color the views of many other writers on the topic.
Finally, though Pieke wants to convince readers that post-Mao China is more fundamentally different from its predecessor than they may think it is, and that post-Tiananmen China is also very different from pre-Tiananmen China, while Ringen wants to convince readers that there is more continuity than they imagine between the nature of politics during earlier periods and today, each author stresses the need to treat the current status quo in the PRC as more than temporary. Both feel, in other words, that a first step toward understanding China is to stop thinking in terms of either its impending collapse or impending conversion to Western liberal-democratic norms. We need, each insists, to find a way to get a clear-eyed view of actually existing twenty-first-century Chinese authoritarianism, as a system that is in place in the PRC now and is not likely to either disappear or mutate dramatically anytime soon. We need to once and for all leave behind the illusions that flourished when shifts in the former Soviet bloc gave terms such as the “End of History” and the “Leninist Extinction” widespread currency.
I agree with both authors that it is important to avoid the trap of thinking that China’s future must resemble the recent past of some other place. The CCP has continually tinkered with its strategies and structures, often doing so specifically to minimize the chances that the PRC will implode the way that the Soviet Union did in 1991, democratize the way that the anticommunist but rigidly authoritarian South Korea did in the late 1980s, or move in another direction that leaders think of as good to avoid. In part because of this, and in part because of changes in the wider world, it is foolish to assume that China is just one step away from disintegrating or liberalizing. Plenty of political scientists (e.g., David Shambaugh and Andrew Nathan) and academics in other disciplines (including this reviewer) have written before about the need to take note of the diagnostic and adaptive nature of the CCP and guard against thinking that the PRC is bound to soon be a totally different kind of place than it is because of what happened in X or Y other country. The best journalists working on China have made these arguments, too. And yet, though in this regard as elsewhere Pieke and Ringen overstate the novelty of their projects and arguments, the notion that China will collapse or convert keeps showing up in new forms, meaning that there is value in continuing to offer counterarguments, as the authors of these two books do.
It is tempting to think that the only thing left for me to do here is explain why I find either Knowing China’s rosier view of the PRC or Perfect Dictatorship’s darker one more compelling. But things are not that simple. Knowing China is certainly the more informative and subtler book, and it handles well various specific issues, such as transformations in the way cadres are socialized and educated (a subject its author knows so well), the economic challenges that lie ahead for the CCP, and the reasons that Beijing is so intent on keeping control of Xinjiang and Tibet. It is challenging for a scholar to write about these topics concisely without veering toward oversimplification, but Pieke pulls it off. In contrast, Perfect Dictatorship handles many subjects in a less nuanced manner, is more prone to repetition, and presents the CCP as more thoroughly draconian than it is.
Nevertheless, I find Knowing China’s vision of a “modernizing, technocratic and largely benign authoritarian regime” (p. 2) deeply problematic. Some of Pieke’s phrasing is jarring in a context that has recently seen the CCP ratchet up repressive measures in Xinjiang, move to tighten its grip on Hong Kong, and continue its persecution of Liu Xia, a woman who has never been accused of a crime but is suffering simply because she was married to gadfly intellectual Liu Xiaobo, who recently became the first Nobel Peace Prize laureate to die in prison since the era of the Nazis. It is not just recent events that create problems for the author’s analysis, though, as for almost a decade now, and especially since Xi Jinping took power, there have been moves toward tightening rather than loosening. I am not convinced that Ringen’s term “controlocracy” is apt, but he gets at an enduring obsession with control that Knowing China makes it too easy to overlook.
Knowing China would have seemed more convincing if recent years had seen a continuation of the very gradual easing of pressures on civil society and slow expansion of the public sphere that we saw from the mid-1990s until around 2008. But they have not. Recent changes in the PRC also make it harder to accept Pieke’s view that ideology is becoming less and less important. Xi has been a more ideological, more charismatic, and less coldly technocratic leader than were his immediate predecessors. This causes problems for the complete-break-with-Mao’s-time camp, but not for the lots-of-continuities-with-it camp to which Perfect Dictatorship belongs.
If Knowing China would have seemed more persuasive had tightening trends in evidence since 2008 not made their mark, Perfect Dictatorship’s vision of an essentially unchanging and monolithic party-state would have seemed more persuasive if the country’s current leader had not done so many novel things since taking power. When Xi rose to the top of the CCP hierarchy late in 2012 and then became president of the PRC early in 2013, the main predictions that foreign experts made about him were of two general sorts. Some thought he was likely to be a figure much like Hu Jintao, his relatively colorless predecessor who seemed just the first among equals in a collective leadership group. Others suggested he would be more of an economic and perhaps even more of a political reformer than the man he replaced, with some linking this idea to his being the son of a reform-supporting father. Xi has defied both sets of expectations, doing many things that differentiate him from Hu—but not via embracing reforms.
For example, Xi is less of a first-among-equals sort of leader than was Hu and has embraced a more charismatic style of rule than we have seen in China for decades. He has accumulated more titles than his immediate predecessors, leading Sinologist Geremie Barmé to recommend that we simply refer to him as China’s “Chairman of Everything,” rather than try to keep track of them all. His name appears in The People’s Daily and other key CCP organs with a frequency reminiscent of Mao, and while books of the speeches and writings of post-Mao leaders did not fill bookstores until after they gave up power, large stacks of Xi’s are often the first thing one sees when entering those venues. He often presents his goals as efforts to help China regain the position of centrality that it enjoyed centuries ago, and he is fond of both quoting the ancient classics and calling for the country to embrace and excel in the creation of futuristic technologies. And yet Xi has also done some things that bring to mind eras in between the periods he invokes when strongman leaders of the mid-to-late twentieth century were in charge.
To make sense of the China of Xi, we need not only a framework that breaks free of notions that the country is on the edge of imploding or democratizing, but also one that can make room for a leader who is both carrying some existing post-Mao trends forward and shifting the country onto a curious trajectory that combines novel moves with the rebooting of things that seemed for a time to have disappeared from the Chinese political landscape. Unfortunately, neither Pieke’s nor Ringen’s books, despite their strengths, does this.
