China Is Not a Garden-Variety Dictatorship
The Chinese National People’s Congress is convening to consider among other things a “recommendation” to abolish term limits for China’s president and vice president. The outcome of that deliberative process is unusually un-suspenseful. President Xi Jinping will soon rule for life, confirming him as the most absolute ruler of China since the death of Mao Zedong. Chinese authorities have decisively suppressed dissent in any forum, including online media. The last flickering hopes for Chinese political liberalization seem crushed for years to come.
Twelve years ago, at a time when those hopes still burned bright, a dissenting China expert named Minxin Pei published an arresting argument. Not only would the Chinese Communist Party never willingly liberalize, he argued, but rather than permit liberalization, the party would eventually smother China’s economic growth too. I read China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy shortly after it was first published. Pei and I have kept in touch over the years since. Pei now serves as the director of the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at Claremont-McKenna College.
On March 2, I spoke with Pei via Google Doc to inquire how it felt to deliver one of modern political science’s most powerful and resounding “I told you so”s.
: A decade ago, you broke ranks with almost all conventional China expertise and predicted that the People’s Republic would not successfully transition toward true economic and political freedom.
