The Party and the People: Chinese Politics in the 21st Century
Bruce Dickson
Princeton University Press: 2021
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China Coup: The Great Leap to Freedom
Roger Garside
University of California Press: 2021
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The Party and the People provides a wonderfully clear-eyed look at how the CCP has reinvented itself since 1989. While attentive to novelties of the Xi era, this synthetic work, which makes good use of findings by many astute scholars in the author’s own discipline (for instance Elizabeth Perry and Mary Gallagher) and other fields (such as sociologist Ching Kwan Lee), ends up stressing continuities between the last eight years and earlier parts of the post-Tiananmen era. And while stressing the need to remain open to various possible futures for the protean party now in control in China, Dickson feels continuity on big issues and variations in the details may well continue to be the hallmark of Chinese history into at least the medium-term future. We may well see the CCP continue to do a lot of tinkering and adjusting in some areas but resist making major political reforms.

The key survival strategy Dickson stresses is the party’s ability to be ‘responsive’ to the populace without being ‘accountable’ to them via elections. CCP leaders work hard to gather information about popular grievances and desires through techniques ranging from monitoring social media posts to carrying out opinion surveys. They do not give any set of people all they want and refuse to give some groups anything they want, but they keep giving some groups some of the things they want—and not just in material terms. The party’s leaders knew, for example, that the Tiananmen protests were fuelled by a desire for democracy, but also by widespread disgust with official corruption. Students also made it clear they felt hampered by limits placed on their personal freedoms, career choices and ability to engage with global youth culture. The CCP used troops and tanks to stop the 1989 protest, and it did not democratise. It has, however, launched anti-corruption campaigns, of which Xi’s is the most intense. And for a time it pulled back from micromanaging campus life and worked to give the post-1989 student generation more options in areas other than politics, though there have been some reversals here in very recent years.

Yet again, I wanted to hear more about the Nationalists—and in this case half expected to. For one focus of Dickson’s early work was Taiwan’s extraordinary democratic transition. I would have liked to hear from Dickson whether the Nationalists, too, tried to be ‘responsive’ but not ‘accountable’ in the wake of the 2/28 massacre in Taiwan in 1947, which is often referred to as that country’s equivalent to the 6/4 massacre in Beijing in 1989.

China Coup stands apart from the other books in its lack of attention to pre-2012 events and the author’s certainty that Xi will be the last Chinese Leninist leader. Reading its opening sentences, describing in detail a power play by rivals that ‘will’ bring Xi down before he has been in power for a full decade and ‘will’ end the ‘tyranny of one-party dictatorship’, I almost stopped right there. Not only did it seem an odd start to a work presented as non-fiction, but it triggered a disturbing sense of déjà vu. It reminded me of The Coming Collapse of China, a deeply flawed 2001 work by pundit Gordon G. Chang that predicted that the CCP would fall by 2011. Chang later wrote a ‘sorry, not sorry’ essay that ended: ‘Instead of 2011, the mighty Communist Party of China will fall in 2012. Bet on it.’ Thanks to works such as Chang’s, my gut reaction can be summed up in a Pete Townsend song: ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again.’

What kept me reading was my admiration for Garside’s previous book, 1981’s Coming Alive! China After Mao and two comments that follow the off-putting opening. Garside acknowledges that in some parts of his new book he takes an unusual ‘semi-fictional’ approach. And he reminds readers that few analysts thought that the Soviet system was on its last legs when Gorbachev first took power in 1986. Garside is right, of course. Political landscapes that seem stable can turn out to have important fault lines that we appreciate only after earthquakes come. Garside could have made his point here even stronger by bringing in non-Communist Leninists: few thought in 1986 that martial law, which Taiwan had been under for decades following its Tiananmen counterpart, would be lifted the next year.

I decided to treat China Coup as a kind of Orwellian-but-with-a-happy-ending foray into speculative fiction. I knew I would need to take Garside’s claims with a grain of salt, as he would focus as intently on finding cracks in seemingly smooth facades as CCP propagandists, who create ‘semi-fictional’ texts of their own, strive to present those surfaces as flawless.

This proved a good strategy. I could admire Garside’s chapter on COVID-19, for example, without being swayed by it. It details well the problems with the Party’s early 2020 handling of the disease, including punishing truth-telling whistle-blowers. But in inverting a story CCP propagandists present as a litany of successes, he glosses over an important issue. For COVID-19 to have had a Chernobyl-like impact on CCP legitimacy, things would have had to go very differently, not just there but in other places, including the United States.

I remain hesitant about making ‘will’ rather than ‘might’ statements about the future. But thinking back over Xi predictions, from Kristof’s in 2013 to Garside’s this year, I am ready to make one. In the years to come, people will keep making confident claims about China’s future. And they will nearly always be proved wrong.

This concludes a three-part essay to mark the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party. You can read part one here and part two here 

• Tags: China, Free to read, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Notebook