Even though President Joe Biden has indicated a recalibration of China policy from that of the Donald Trump administration, little has changed since the 2020 presidential election with regard to the tone—which is to say that Beijing is still considered a challenge to be confronted and has the potential to be a competitor in a new Cold War. The urgency of constructing the appropriate foreign policy toward China necessitates, now more than ever, a deeper understanding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its leaders. Steven P. Feldman's Dictatorship by Degrees: Xi Jinping in China and David Shambaugh's China's Leaders: From Mao to Now are two such books for anyone who seeks to understand the thought processes and motivations of China's leadership and how these might affect the future of China, the direction of US foreign policy, and market implications for China.
In Dictatorship by Degrees, Feldman takes a unique theoretical approach in analyzing China's leadership. First, his is a study of the Chinese political system that examines “how the thread of the past runs through the present in the governance of China” (p. ix) based on data collected during a year of fieldwork in China. Over the course of that year, Feldman interviewed “business executives, professors (management, law, and the social sciences), lawyers, journalists, and nonprofit executives” about their opinions on China's political leadership and its effects on Chinese society. He notes that the remaining 25 percent of his data were obtained from “observation and participation in everyday life” (p. x).
From such interviews and observations, Feldman derives several key themes that drive his analysis. He notes that the CCP is tightening its control over all aspects of business and society in China, even as the Party is riven by factions and conflict. The most important theme, however, is the relationship between censorship and power, and how trauma—operating through memory and repression of memory—is central to China's political culture and Party domination.
Throughout the book, Feldman analyzes events, opinions, and perspectives by utilizing a concept that he calls “pre-totalitarianism,” referring to a “dictatorship in which distinct totalitarian patterns of control are dormant or exist in a fragmented or low intensity condition” (p. x). During the Cultural Revolution, China fell into a completely totalitarian state that allowed Mao Zedong to initiate a terror campaign that “destroyed the Communist Party organizational structure, institutional processes, and personnel, replacing them with a continuously changing stream of ideas, schemes, and people that made possible movement toward the creation of a fictional world” (p. xi). Totalitarian ideology, therefore, “becomes a supersense that rules over life. All awareness follows logically from” this fictitious world (p. 14). Using Mao-era China as an analytical lens, he argues that Xi Jinping's leadership exhibits signs of pre-totalitarianism and examines throughout the book whether Xi's dictatorship has the potential to move from pre-totalitarianism to totalitarianism.
Feldman relies on works by Lynn White, Andrew Walder, Andrew Nathan, David Shambaugh, and Elizabeth Perry to understand the history and workings of the Chinese political system. He also utilizes works from anthropology, psychology, and sociology to understand aspects of Chinese society, such as the notion of “face” and how history, memory, and trauma operate on the mainland.
As a professor of management, Feldman uses marketing tools to conduct an analysis that weaves in aspects of historical analysis, psychological profiling, consumer behavior (the Chinese people being the consumers and the Party being the product), and how truth is perceived in China. This is a fascinating study that probes where China lies on the spectrum of totalitarianism and assesses Xi's leadership. Feldman offers many insights based on his interviews and daily observations. One must note, however, that all of his interviews were conducted with Chinese and other elites. A good many of his interviewees were American and European expats who had lived in China for at least several years as business executives and other professionals. One must assume that the opinions expressed are very likely to be different from the majority of those in China. His volume might have been more insightful if he had drawn upon available data from public opinion surveys, such as the one produced by the Ash Center, or from Bruce Dickson's book The Dictator's Dilemma,Footnote 1 which also includes a public survey of Chinese sentiment on the CCP and its leadership.
In his literature review, which also serves as a historical overview of China's political system beginning with the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC), Feldman relies very little on the actual words of China's leaders, such as those written by Mao or Xi, nor does he closely examine Xi Jinping Thought. Some analysis of these sources might have provided more illumination of the current thinking of China's leadership and the country's prospects for the future.Footnote 2
In one sense, it is unfortunate that Shambaugh's China's Leaders was published at the same time as Feldman's Dictatorship by Degrees, as both could have benefited from a reading of the other's work. In China's Leaders, Shambaugh thoroughly analyzes the leadership styles and tactics of rule of the five leaders who have shaped China and the CCP since the founding of the PRC seventy years ago: Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping. He finds that leaders in totalitarian or authoritarian systems have an outsized impact on their societies and the world at large; China is no exception to this rule. His intent was to write a book about the five leadership styles of China's most influential leaders. He has done so ably.
Although whole books have been written on each leader, Shambaugh summarizes the most salient characteristics that define each of them. For example, he writes that Mao was “an extraordinarily complex figure and leader . . . by far, the most difficult of the five leaders to summarize [because he] had no singular style [and] utilized differing strategies and tactics to cope with differing situations” (p. 319). Deng is to be remembered as a pragmatic reformer, a delegator of authority, and much more a consensus seeker than Mao; Deng was in many ways the anti-Mao. At first, Jiang was perceived to be a mere bureaucratic functionary serving as a transitional placeholding figure until a more powerful leader would take his place. He surprised many by surviving longer in office than Deng and showed his political ability in “building a diversified power base and adroitly navigating a series of challenges” (p. 330). Hu Jintao, however, was tapped early on to succeed Jiang, but he wasted a decade as leader-in-waiting that he could have spent learning policy and building his base. In line with current Hu narratives, his rule is “generally seen as unremarkable” (p. 335).
As for Xi, Shambaugh describes him as a modern emperor who “rules and behaves very much in ways reminiscent of China's traditional emperors: all-powerful, regal, respected, feared, sycophantically revered . . . and a ruthless dictator” (p. 336). Xi, Shambaugh writes, has amassed an extraordinary amount of personal and institutional power through purging of political rivals, making the Chinese political system a patron-client one that is described as “Patriarchal Leninism” (p. 337). At the same time, Xi has placed his indelible imprint on China's much more assertive foreign policy and on the creation of the “China dream” of national rejuvenation. Shambaugh provides many more insights than these pithy summarizations, of course, but these examples help elucidate the value of his research.
China's Leaders does not, however, challenge existing notions about these leaders; rather, it reaffirms current narratives. Shambaugh writes that he has been teaching Chinese politics for many years and “always wished that there was a single volume that covered China's main leaders and their periods of rule from 1949 to the present” for his courses (p. xi). This book is that volume, and it synthesizes Shambaugh's thoughts on each of China's leaders, which he has developed over the course of his long and impressive career. One should not expect novel insights based on newly released archival evidence or from recent qualitative interviews, but rather a very good summation of the five leaders’ styles based on his past research and observations. Another minor quibble is that he does not summarize China's political system; he assumes the reader is already familiar with China's form of governance and political culture. Perhaps a short section on these topics would have been useful for novice scholars just learning about China.
Nevertheless, both books add to the body of knowledge that Western scholars possess on China and aggregate information that will be useful to specific audiences. The insights that Feldman derives from elite opinion in China about its political system would be of value to global business leaders who want to do business in China or sell to Chinese markets, for example. Shambaugh's book would be very useful, as he mentions, to undergraduate courses on Chinese politics. Overall, Feldman and Shambaugh have produced well-researched and insightful works that will be useful to scholars, corporate executives, and students interested in China.
