The Eternal Centre: Why China is Not a Model

Witnessing four decades of rapid economic growth and relative political stability, China must be doing something right. Unsurprisingly many consider China a success formula. Some even believe that its brand of authoritarianism serves as a viable counter model to the democratic regime promoted by the West. A closer look at the fundamental character of the Chinese regime will, however, dispel the vision of a coherent “China model”.

In China, as I will show, fragmented imports from pluralistic democracies lie scattered across a social landscape shaped by China’s unique, millennia-old tradition of centralised, totalising authority. China’s regime is a contradictory compromise between democratic modernity and an idiosyncratic Confucian-totalitarian tradition radically divergent from that of any other world region. It therefore does not form a coherent regime model, let alone one that could or should be imitated by other countries. There is no China model.

But before I start my analysis, let me first sketch out what the term “China model” has come to mean to those who believe in its existence.

Prominent “China model” advocates are IR professor Zhang Weiwei, venture capitalist and polemicist Eric Li, and philosophy professor Daniel A. Bell. They maintain that China is successful, not despite, but because the Chinese do not elect their government, leaving the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) free to rule in a “meritocratic” and “harmonious” fashion. Though this conclusion fits CCP propaganda all too well, the “China model” idea gained international attention as the 2008 financial crisis shook Western confidence and many began to see China’s rise as a challenge to the Western democratic model.

In particular, Zhang, Li and Bell argue that the CCP’s way of recruiting leaders is superior to democratic elections. To recruit leaders, the CCP runs the world’s largest human resources department: the gargantuan Organisation Department. Undisturbed by public scrutiny, it distributes almost all the top-level positions in China, from local state and party commissions to the politburo and the boards of China’s powerful state-owned companies. Officials are tested at local level before they can move on to high national positions later in their career.

Bell, in The China Model, sees in this “a sophisticated and comprehensive system for selecting and promoting political talent that underpinned China’s stunning economic success”. Bell contrasts this Chinese “meritocracy” with democracy, which he closely associates with circus-show elections and demagoguery of the Donald Trump variety. Consequently, his hopes rest with the China model which, if improved upon, could “set a model for other countries” including those that are presently democratic.

Bell’s argument has drawn derision from Western critics. Thomas Kellogg and Andrew Nathan have argued that Bell’s account of China is so far removed from reality that it is essentially a utopian thought experiment gone wrong. Bell does admit that the meritocratic principles of the Organisation Department are often compromised by corruption and nepotism. But whereas Bell believes these problems are solvable, Kellogg and Nathan see them as intrinsic to the system.

The fundamental objection to Bell’s argument is, however, that critically comparing elections and internal selection by the CCP cannot stand in for a regime comparison of democracy and China. How leaders are recruited—Bell’s sole focus—is only one of the things that are important when evaluating political and societal regimes. It is neither the whole story, nor something that can be meaningfully evaluated in isolation.

To start, democracy cannot be reduced to elections. As Nathan explains, “Democracy is more than a way to pick leaders. It is also a way to subject those leaders to supervision, permit public debate over policy, and protect citizens’ rights to speak, publish, associate and organize.” I would even argue that contrary to common opinion, elections are not democracy’s defining characteristic. Rather, elections are just one important element in a larger “democratic package” which equally includes transparent and responsive institutions, human rights, a critical public sphere supported by independent journalism, an empowered civil society, and engaged citizens. Elections may actually be the weakest link in that larger chain.

Likewise, the Chinese regime cannot be reduced to the at least partly meritocratic way in which the CCP selects leaders from its own ranks, which is just one ingredient. Bell, Li and Zhang are wrong to isolate the CCP’s internal recruitment system from China’s pervasively authoritarian regime as a whole. Sure, the CCP appears to select very intelligent, competent leaders, but even the best leaders don’t necessarily create the best political or societal regime.

After all, that China’s leaders are excellent individuals, or even that the CCP is well organised, doesn’t tell us anything about the structural impact of the CCP on Chinese society. Through its policies and, even more importantly, its sheer weight, the CCP may still influence society in all kinds of bad ways. Any serious evaluation of the Chinese regime in contradistinction to democratic regimes must therefore focus on the—enormous—structural impact of the CCP on Chinese society.

The CCP is the most powerful political organisation on earth. Consisting of 88 million members plus a youth league of 89 million, it is the sole master of the Chinese state, with direct control over the military, education and the media, and indirect control over any major organisation including NGOs, law firms and large private enterprises. In terms of the structure of society, this enormous concentration of power in a single organisation—a single centre—is what most strongly sets China apart from liberal democracies.

Under the CCP’s leadership, political power is not only centralised in one powerful party, but also exerts a much more unhindered and pervasive influence over the rest of society than it does in democracies. The party-state deeply penetrates Chinese society, from the legal field, academia, journalism and religion to business and the military, diminishing their autonomy and independence.

My favourite example comes from the party-state’s penetration of religion. The officially atheist Communist Party insists with the straightest of faces on selecting which Tibetan babies are “discovered” to be the reincarnation of deceased Buddhist lamas. It thereby breaks the autonomy of Tibetan Buddhism’s religious hierarchy.

Similarly with journalism—but easier to overlook given the abundance of glossy magazines and hip online media—the unifying voice of the CCP pervades the field. As the journalist Doug Young notes in his book The Party Line:

On major issues, the Chinese media speak with a single voice, which is that of the Communist Party. Any semblance of many voices created by the nation’s wide and varied range of newspapers and TV and radio stations is mostly an illusion.

Also, Western hopes that the internet would democratise China—would open a realm of free communication—have repeatedly been disproven by hard reality. In an extensive report, the Economist journalist Gady Epstein likens the Chinese internet to “a giant cage”.

We sociologists are less surprised; we know that social structure tends to trump technology. Social structures determine how new technologies are used more than technologies are able to destabilise established social structures.

So let’s talk social structure: has a rising “civil society” empowered Chinese society vis-à-vis the party-state? Only to a limited extent, because although Chinese NGOs have proliferated over past decades, China’s NGOs are still solidly state-corporatist—perhaps more so than in any other country. Its NGOs are “non-governmental” mostly in name only; they are dependent upon, and connected to, the extensive corpus of the party-state. To be allowed to exist, each NGO has to be registered with a civil affairs bureau and obtain a sponsor organisation connected to the state, both of which monitor its political desirability.

The economy has grown tremendously more autonomous since the dismantling of Mao’s command economy. Nonetheless, state-owned enterprises still account for a third of national GDP. And via its many members and commissars, the party also controls the boardrooms of large private enterprises. Correspondingly, political capital is still the surest way to wealth. The New York Times has reported that the extended family of former prime minister Wen Jiabao earned a total of at least $2.7 billion. Of course, business and politics mingle almost everywhere on earth. But business is less independent from politics in China than in Western democracies.

Under the CCP, China is led by an enormously powerful centre that deeply pervades the whole of society, concentrating the bulk of societal power in one field and one organisation, thereby greatly diminishing the autonomy of other social fields and organisations all across Chinese society. This doesn’t mean all orders come from Beijing. Many decisions are made by local officials on the level of provinces, prefectures, counties, townships and villages. But though the CCP possesses many different roots and branches, it forms one unitary, fifteen-tiered hierarchy—one giant tree overshadowing the rest of the forest.

This concentration of power in one centre provides China with a trademark feature that differentiates the country from democracies and, in fact, from all contemporary societies except North Korea. But a trademark feature does not automatically make for a consistent regime model.

On the surface, certainly, the CCP seems to have discovered a coherent and successful model of centrally-guided development and “societal harmony”. But closer inspection reveals that the CCP’s bravado masks deep contradictions and compromises. China’s enormous development over the last four decades was perhaps more despite rather than because of the CCP’s pervasive presence, while involving the haphazard import of all kinds of organisational forms from democratic societies.

Maoist China (1949 to 1976) was enormously totalitarian and uniform, with politics pervading seemingly everything. Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in the 1980s began to close some of the “diversity” gap between China and the rest of the world. This is where China’s success story starts. What allowed China’s growth spurt in the wake of Deng’s reform policies was that the CCP gradually began a partial retreat from various social fields: from business most noticeably, but also from journalism, academia and the legal field. Partially freed up from political domination, those fields could develop more autonomously, which allowed them to begin professionalising. It would follow that China’s progress over recent decades didn’t spring from its idiosyncratic concentration of power in one centre, but, to the contrary, from the party’s strategy of lessening that concentration of power in a controlled fashion.

That lessening concentration of power represents a step, however preliminary, towards the pluralistic social structure of democracies. I argue that democratic societies are marked by a high degree of “field pluralism” or “field differentiation”. In a highly field-differentiated society, you have many relatively autonomous social fields (the legal field, state bureaucracy, journalism, science, business, religion), each with its elite and inner hierarchy, standing alongside each other, forming competing centres of power. Who really leads the US, for example? Is it the White House? The Senate? The legal field headed by the Supreme Court? Wall Street and big business? Hollywood and commercial media? The answer is that all of them share power in society. Even if there is still a cosy upper class, that upper class is, to a much greater extent than in China, divided between independent field elites.

That is what makes democratic societies dynamic, creative and free. I’m not simply reiterating the familiar pleas for a “free market” and “political checks and balances”. My point is both more general and more fundamental. A high degree of differentiation and independence on the part of fields across society—what I call “field pluralism”—is the foundation of a vibrant civil society and public sphere, as well as the most favourable condition for each of these fields to professionalise according to its own internal principles. Most basically, field plurality is what organises and empowers society vis-à-vis politics, producing a power constellation in which politicians, whether elected or not, are forced to be at least somewhat responsive towards society’s needs. Field pluralism is the true cornerstone of liberal democracy and much more fundamental than elections, which only consolidate society’s empowerment.

Seen from this angle, present-day China stands somewhere between the field-pluralistic, democratic model and the field-unitary, politics-dominated model of Maoist China. In Maoist China, the socialist life was the only legitimate ethical ideal; political doctrine the only higher truth; the party-state the only well-organised social field. In following a terrifying totalitarian logic, this formed a consistent regime model—though not a good one. Much has changed since then. Chinese society has improved in countless ways, but it is no longer a model. Instead it’s a contradictory compromise between two models, the elements of which are awkwardly juxtaposed rather than meaningfully synthesised. You find fragmented imports from the democratic model lying alongside dysfunctional and half-abandoned leftovers from China’s totalitarian and imperial pasts. Just look at the state of the legal field, education and the military.

China’s legal field consists of two parts: a Western-style legal system with lawyers, prosecutors and judges, and the xinfang petition offices. The xinfang offices derive from Maoist China and the imperial Qing dynasty before it. These offices are where the ordinary Chinese traditionally go to file their complaints to officials, often in response to their lands having been confiscated. The local xinfang officials lack the legal mandate to settle disputes or offer legal counselling, but they will make every effort to console petitioners because they get into trouble if complaints reach their Beijing superiors. Also, a petitioner’s desperation is sometimes noted by a high-ranked official with the power to directly intervene. Though this happens in only 2 per cent of cases, many of the more traditionally-minded Chinese nonetheless prefer the xinfang system, trusting an appeal to the authorities over “unharmonious” litigation. The xinfang system represents the old, partly discarded regime model in which the political and legal fields were undifferentiated from each other, with Confucian scholar-officials and later communist officials serving as the people’s “fathers and mothers”.

Alongside this stands an increasingly influential Western-style civil law system. It represents the increased autonomy and differentiation of the legal field from politics. There are now 300,000 lawyers in China; forty years ago there were none. The party supports the legal field’s growing autonomy, since it forms an inescapable tool for managing conflict in a complex economy. Still, judges continue to take orders from politicians while most law firms have party commissions ensuring lawyers conduct themselves harmoniously.

Curiously, the split in the legal field parallels that in education. Education is bifurcated between the standardised, creativity-crushing education system in which high school students are drilled for the Gaokao college placement exam, and an elite, Americanised international track that bypasses the Gaokao system altogether and grooms students for higher education in the US. There are, really, two Chinese education systems, as there are two legal systems, which reflect the difficulty of combining China’s tradition and Western imports. They don’t mix well.

The military, similarly, builds on a contradictory compromise. To this day, every higher officer with military expertise is paired up with a political commissar of the same military rank who keeps an eye on him. We are talking one-on-one political surveillance; one individual’s full-time job is to monitor another individual around the clock. This heavy-handed device was a Maoist import from Stalinist Russia but also has forerunners in imperial China. I call it the “buddy system” and like to imagine that there is some kind of buddy event at the beginning of each year in which newcomers are matched like exchange students to language partners.

The CCP simultaneously, however, seeks to modernise the military. To that end, the military has reportedly adopted a less political and more professional ethos in recent years. But though the mood is jubilant—last September, hundreds of millions were glued to their television sets when Xi oversaw one of the largest military parades in the PRC’s history—it may be difficult to optimise the military’s prowess so long as half of the higher officers have political rather than military expertise.

Similar stories could be told about journalism and social science. Again and again, the party’s two primary goals—maintaining tight political control and modernising China by professionalising social fields—conflict with each other, because it is political control that prevents these fields from further professionalising. The party is standing in its own way; it can only modernise China by stepping back and partly relinquishing political control.

But every step towards fields enjoying greater independence moves China one step closer to democratic field pluralism. That is exactly where the CCP leadership doesn’t want to end up. But what’s the alternative? The CCP hasn’t found a formula for modernisation that doesn’t rely on the professionalisation of social fields. It’s desperately looking for the alternative formula that it pretends to have found already. In consequence, its policies are often contradictory.

Despite this unresolved dilemma, however, the CCP still has enough to make it seem worthy of imitation. Due to its omnipresent control, stability and popular support, the CCP can usually affirm its authority without physical force. This renders it the envy of every Third World dictator, all of whom rely on goons with machine guns. But even if they would love to copy the CCP, they couldn’t.

The concentration of power in one centre—one central field that eats up all alternative platforms of power—is rooted in the idiosyncratic history of imperial China. This history is its cradle as well as what causes it to resonate with a widespread sense of what makes for legitimate authority. “The Chinese conviction that all power should reside in the central authority,” as Lucian Pye stated in Asian Power and Politics, “has been one of the most powerful factors in shaping Chinese history.” Since the comprehensive authority of the CCP builds on this long tradition of deference for unified power, such authority cannot simply be copied by other governments outside East Asia.

In China, the intrusive dominance of one powerful centre has for centuries subdued field pluralism. Before the arrival of the communist regime, power had already for thousands of years been concentrated in the Confucian scholar-official elite. In imperial China, the central field of the emperor and his Confucian scholar-officials, who were promoted on the basis of their success in the Confucian exam system, created a society centred on one elite, and any organised counterforce to that central elite was suppressed. This was the original centre of which the current centre, the CCP, is the structural heir.

The deep historical continuity is obscured, however, by the fact that Mao’s communists rejected the surface-level contents of the old Confucian-imperial ideology and presented themselves as a revolutionary new beginning. When the communists hung Mao’s portrait above the main gate of Beijing’s Forbidden City in 1949, it carried great symbolism because the Forbidden City had been considered the universe’s holy centre in imperial times. Mao’s portrait was intended to symbolise the triumph of communism over the old imperial centre.

But did the new really triumph over the old—or did the old instead absorb the new? Is the Forbidden City in fact telling us that it now owns the CCP too? Through the CCP, the centre re-established itself. CCP officials became the new total exemplars and “parental officials” (fumu guan) while the communist party-state filled the gap left by the Confucian-imperial bureaucracy.

It was in fact, I argue, because of this Confucian-imperial legacy that totalitarian ideologies from Europe travelled so well to East Asia. Present-day North Korea and Maoist China are the numbers one and two most pervasively totalitarian societies in human history. Professor Yuan Weishi of Guangdong’s Sun Yat-Sen University notes: “The [party-state] system is all from the Soviet Union, but the CCP has taken it to an extreme.” Imported Soviet totalitarianism became more rather than less totalitarian once it landed on East Asian soils because the ground had been prepared by 2000 years of Gleichschaltung under Confucian literati.

What gave their rule such a field-unifying impact was that the Confucian scholar-official was many things at once—as the hyphen already suggests. They were simultaneously politician, bureaucrat, judge, philosopher, artist, businessman, and sometimes even military commander, embodying human excellence in all its forms. This left little room for other fields, other forms of life, to flourish independently.

Whoever wanted to succeed in imperial China had to climb the Confucian scholar-official hierarchy. No other career tracks got you far. For his famous study China’s Gentry, the Chinese sociologist Fei Xiaotong interviewed retired gentry in the Chinese countryside of the 1940s, tracing their traditional careers through the early twentieth century. We learn that these gentlemen—whether slightly more focused on governance, scholarship, the military, or business—ultimately all played the same game, advancing their careers through nepotism, bribing and the prestige of one’s certified knowledge of the Confucian canon. A certain Mr Ting, who originally did try a different path, setting out for a pure business career, quickly discovered that he needed links to the centre because: “One who had no connections with officialdom would have no security even if he had money.”

So there was really only one all-encompassing societal hierarchy, at the top of which stood a singular elite. Though local governance was in the hands of local gentry who partly operated outside the central command structure, their ideology was that of the emperor’s scholar-officials who represented society’s unitary standard of prestige and legitimacy. Everyone looked up to the same kind of people. In that sense, imperial China formed one big pyramid. The anthropologist Andrew Kipnis speaks of the empire’s “holistic hierarchy” and argues that its ideological legacy lives on in present-day Chinese education and governance.

Western society has, by contrast, for centuries resembled a set of pyramids—some taller, some shorter—standing next to each other. Even in the European Middle Ages, you had the Church and the aristocracy, each with its own system of ranks, status markers and rules for promotion. You could be high in one hierarchical ladder without automatically being high in the other. In ancient Athens, for example, you could be a major philosopher or tragedian without being a powerful politician, and vice versa. In the seventeenth-century Dutch republic, Rembrandt was a celebrated painter but not an influential politician, poet, clergyman or scholar. Sociologists call this “status incongruity”.

It was the staggering “status incongruity” that turned European cities from ancient Athens to seventeenth-century Amsterdam into bastions of tolerance. Tolerance, everyone simply tolerating each other’s existence—and not respect or agreement—was the highest virtue attainable, as different value systems clashed in a creative free-for-all. The ethnic, philosophical and religious pluralism of these places is well known; seventeenth-century Amsterdam, for example, is famous for housing Catholics, Calvinists, Lutherans and Jews. But often overlooked is the even more fundamental pluralism of differentiated social fields and their irreconcilable logics for ranking and valuing people: political, religious, economic, intellectual, artistic. In societies built on so many layers of pluralism, tolerance was the essential virtue.

In contrast, China has always been fixated on harmony. Everything needed to be harmonised under one closed ideological system. When the world religions entered China, the centre either expelled them to the fringes, as with Christianity and Islam, or took them under its sway and subdued them, as with Buddhism. The Dutch sinologist Erik Zürcher showed that the Confucian literati first accepted the presence of Buddhism from the fourth century onward—three centuries after Buddhism’s introduction to China. Buddhist leaders became acceptable only after they had begun styling themselves as Confucian literati and thereby confirmed their subordinate, dependent position within one harmonious structure. The Buddhists first had to be “registered”, so to speak, like NGOs nowadays.

Independent platforms of authority were unacceptable. Or in Lucian Pye’s words: “Whatever was ‘societal’ was traditionally regarded as illegitimate by the Chinese mind.” The art historian James Cahill used to lament that even paintings tended not to be considered fully legitimate if they were made by a professional painter rather than by a Confucian scholar-official. As total exemplars, scholar-officials were also deemed the best painters. They were even seen as the highest military experts and often acted in the capacity of generals, since their understanding of warfare was considered superior to that of military professionals without Confucian scholarly credentials.

Still, China wasn’t totalitarian before the communist era. What kept imperial China from turning totalitarian were its organisational inefficiencies and the Confucian (but Daoist-influenced) ideal of self-restrained governance through “non-action”. These traditional restraints were lifted with the arrival of more powerful national administrations in the twentieth century, starting under the late Qing and republican governments but accumulating in the CCP’s party-state. The CCP replaced “non-action” with communist social engineering.

China’s ideological imports from Europe—nationalism and communism—formed a lethal combination with the Confucian-imperial legacy, which had left a “flattened”, emptied-out society—an ocean of farms and villages lacking any powerful religious organisations, firms, or civil society associations. If you put a gigantic, modern administration into that field-empty landscape, you’ll almost automatically end up with totalitarianism, because the society lacks institutional counterweights.

In Europe, empowered, field-pluralistic societies provided counterweights to the rising totalitarianisms of the early twentieth century. The Nazis, for example, took over a country with a professional state bureaucracy, powerful churches, large industrial firms, a professional military with a million soldiers, and well-established, prestigious universities. These obstructed and stalled their attempts at totalitarian uniformity. In their twelve years in power, the Nazis greatly diminished the autonomy of fields across German society, but despite their aggression, they never even tried to destroy all of it. Instead they felt forced to compromise, and pockets of independent authority persisted. Priests and pastors continued preaching Christianity, and many officers including Rommel, Hitler’s favourite general, refused to join the Nazi Party, citing apolitical professionalism—an equivalent in Maoist China is unthinkable.

Maoist China was more totalitarian in social structure than Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany and even Stalin’s Russia. Still, China and the Chinese people have become freer from the centre over past decades—a change that simultaneously works out in society’s macro structure and the changed attitudes of young urbanites. So what about the future?

The most important question concerning China’s future is whether the fledgling field pluralisation of the past four decades will continue. This depends on whether the CCP will allow fields to further increase their professional autonomy from politics. If that becomes China’s path, the drivers of change will not be the party’s social engineers, nor the few isolated dissidents celebrated in Western media, but rather professionals who just want to do their job. The push for autonomy will come from within the social fields themselves. It will be led by the mundane revolutionaries listed in Richard McGregor’s book The Party: “entrepreneurs, lawyers, journalists, religious worshippers, teachers, academics, historians and even doctors”, who are all “increasingly demanding the right to simply do their jobs or pursue their beliefs, free of political interference”.

The next question is what happens if the party ultimately will not allow China’s gradual field pluralisation. Sure, China enjoys great mid-term economic prospects, while continuing to progress in education, science, technology and entrepreneurial prowess. But will China be able to keep modernising in the long run? McGregor notes that China is running on “Leninist hardware”. Actually, some parts of China’s regime hardware are even older, deriving from the imperial era. Can China keep upgrading its societal software without having to adopt new regime hardware?

This is essentially a new version of the question that preoccupied Chinese nationalists in the nineteenth century. They wondered whether China could adopt the superior technological, scientific and organisational abilities of the Western colonial powers, the “Western function” (xiyong), without having to reform its “Chinese core” (zhongti) of the Confucian bureaucracy and exam system. Most believed it could; some warned that the “Chinese core” also needed reform. Now, over a century later, this old question has returned in a new form: Can China become as innovative and advanced as the most advanced democracies without reforming its new core, the party-state?

I suspect that the different generations of holistic, “core-too” reformers—from Liang Qichao and Chen Duxiu to Zhao Ziyang—rightly intuited that politics, culture, education and social development form one holistic whole, that fundamental, lasting change always involves all of them at once. Because regimes form such comprehensive “packages”, China cannot endlessly cherry-pick what it likes about democratic societies: innovation; creativity-enhancing education; the best universities; efficient employees capable of taking initiative; dynamic organisations open to critical feedback; and professionals with a strong sense of professionalism. It cannot fully adopt all those elements without society as a whole moving towards democratic pluralism. China may only be able to progress fundamentally in the long term if the CCP allows for China’s gradual democratisation.

Unless, of course, the CCP one day finds its desired alternative regime formula for modernisation and the good society after all—which is not impossible. It would be a gigantic victory for humanity if the CCP, the world’s most powerful political organisation, were to discover a new, synthesised regime model so good that it equals or even tops democracies.

In the meantime, in the absence of such discoveries, China, though not without strengths, doesn’t offer a coherent, let alone imitable, regime model to other countries. We are where we started. The established democracies, despite all their problems, will continue to serve as the world’s leading model.