The Perfect Dictatorship: Seeing China With Fresh Eyes

The hard work and enterprise of China’s people—not Communist Party policies—have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
By HOWARD W. FRENCH

THE PERFECT DICTATORSHIP
By Stein Ringen
Hong Kong University Press, 191 pages, $25

More than two-thirds of the way into Stein Ringen’s slim, curious volume on contemporary China, he describes the sorts of conversations that Westerners who watch the country closely tend to have.
“Professor A: China is a dictatorship,” Mr. Ringen writes.
“Professor B: 500 million people have been lifted out of poverty.”
“Silence.”
Such indeed is the nature of a great deal of the back and forth about the world’s most populous country, whose economy has been utterly transformed over the past four decades but whose politics, for the most part, have not.
Mr. Ringen, a Norwegian emeritus professor at Oxford with a background in sociology and political science and a wide-ranging list of books to his credit, boasts of another credential for a book that reaches strong conclusions about China—and it is an unusual one. 

Before writing “The Perfect Dictatorship,” Mr. Ringen had no expertise on the topic and little exposure to the country. 

“I do not come from China studies and am not an authority on China,” he writes early on, seeking to make a virtue of this seeming weakness. 

“Where I do come from is state analysis, which I have been doing for forty years, and I have tried to bring that experience to bear on a new case.”

It is certainly possible that a fresh, nonspecialist approach will have value. 

When waxing ironic, scholars of China have long observed that the more one works at understanding this extraordinarily diverse and fast-changing country the less certain one becomes. 

For large chunks of “The Perfect Dictatorship,” however, Mr. Ringen labors over pedestrian observations—the telltale signs of a dilettante, expert readers might feel tempted to conclude. 

One of the most insistent of these observations is that China is something called a “party-state,” meaning that the government cannot be separated from the Communist Party. 

Another is that the country maintains effectively separate labor markets by restricting the movements of large numbers of rural citizens through a registration system known as the hukou.
Yet for all of this familiar material, Mr. Ringen also delivers up compelling arguments. 

Take the would-be debate-ending claim—a favorite of the Chinese government—that Beijing has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty (the precise number is always being adjusted upward). 

There are two reasons why this assertion has always grated. 

First, by late in Mao Zedong’s nearly three-decade rule, which ended in 1976, Chinese per capita income ranked only slightly ahead of Bangladesh, a fact that derives from disastrous policies under the same Communist Party that rules the country today. 

Second, if the Chinese stopped making colossal mistakes in economic policy beginning under Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, the country’s rapid growth has had less to do with any supposed “lifting” by the government than with the hard work and enterprise of the Chinese people once they were allowed to seek their fortunes.
Mr. Ringen explodes this favorite propaganda slogan even further and does so with the fresh eye he promises. 

China’s growth over the past few decades, he says, is far from unique and has been even less uniquely transformative. 

Many nowadays forget—and he reminds readers—that several other East Asian societies, including Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, pulled off similar growth spurts over a roughly 40-year period before China did. 

Using South Korea as an example, Mr. Ringen argues that China’s recent achievements should be assessed in a much broader social context, one in which they begin to pale.
“In South Korea, in forty years, there were three monumental achievements: Poverty was turned to affluence (and to real affluence, making Korea a high-income country), dictatorship was turned to democracy, and a safety net was spread under the country so that no significant section of the population was excluded from the benefits of economic advancement,” he writes. 

“China’s reform and opening up has now been unfolding for nearly forty years but has followed South Korea in only one achievement, in economic growth. And in the time South Korea made itself a high-income country, China has made itself no more than a middle-income one.” 

Moreover, South Korea, like Japan and Taiwan shifted from authoritarianism to democracy by allowing non-state actors to organize and associate freely, something that Beijing solemnly forswears.
Much of “The Perfect Dictatorship” is given over to pondering the nature of the Chinese polity under the ambitious current leader, Xi Jinping, who speaks of making this the century of the Chinese Dream. 

Is China a new kind of welfare state, whose central preoccupation is attending to the well-being of the world’s largest population? 

Or is it a power state obsessed with strength, focused on a higher values-oriented purpose? 

Or should China be seen instead as a “trivial state,” a system with little purpose beyond “perpetuation of the regime itself and the protection of the country’s territorial integrity”?
Mr. Ringen turns these questions over and over, almost playfully, until finally addressing them inconclusively: “If the Chinese state continues to operate as a custodian of economic growth and political control, and does so effectively, it is likely to remain dictatorial but pragmatic. If it becomes dependent on ideology and embraces a narrative in which persons are subsumed in the nation, it will have made itself a totalitarian state of the most sinister kind, the kind in which persons are only ‘the masses’ and do not matter individually.”
Which path will China take? 

Unspeakable in public, this question resonates in the minds of more and more Chinese, especially the newly minted members of the middle class, who await an answer.