Lampton provides a concise summary of his general argument as follows:
The fact is that China’s central government operates today in an environment fundamentally different, in three key ways, from the one that existed at the beginning of Deng’s tenure. First, individual Chinese leaders have become progressively weaker in relation to both one another and the rest of society. Second, Chinese society, as well as the economy and the bureaucracy, has fractured, multiplying the number of constituencies China’s leaders must respond to, or at least manage. Third, China’s leadership must now confront a population with more resources, in terms of money, talent, and information, than ever before. (Lampton, 2013)
With regard to the first difference between the Deng period and the current one, Lampton draws on Weber to argue that leaders have three sources of power: tradition, personal qualities (charisma) of the leader, and constitutional/legal norms. In Lampton's view, while Deng benefited from a mix of the Mao tradition and his own charisma, the foundations of legitimacy in China shifted as the selection criteria for leaders began to include age and term limits, performance, and opinion polling in the Communist Party. In his words, this has resulted in the following situation:
China, in other words, has gone from being ruled by strongmen with personal credibility to leaders who are constrained by collective decision-making, term limits and other norms, public opinion, and their own technocratic characters. As one senior Chinese diplomat put it to me in 2002, “Mao and Deng could decide; Jiang and the current leaders must consult.” (Lampton, 2013)
The second change in the Chinese political system that Lampton identifies is the fracturing of the society, economy, and bureaucracy into a larger set of competing interests. This has required the leadership to focus more on maintaining than transforming the system as they try to manage the competition between these interests, as he describes below:
Since Mao, however, China’s society and bureaucracy have fragmented, making it harder for Beijing to make decisions and implement policies. To deal with the challenge, the Chinese government, particularly since Deng, has developed an authoritarian yet responsive system that explicitly balances major geographic, functional, factional, and policy interests through representation at the highest levels of the CCP. Although the pathways for political self-expression remain limited, and elite decision-making opaque, China’s rulers now try to resolve, rather than crush, conflicts among competing interests, suppressing such conflicts only when they perceive them to be especially big threats. (Lampton, 2013)
Now, if we look at these two changes through the lens of Selectorate Theory, we might argue that the second change has largely driven the first one. What Lampton sees as the fracturing of the society, economy, and the bureaucracy might be interpreted as growth of the size of winning coalition (WC) needed to rule in the system. Given that Lampton describes the norms of leader selection as "incomplete, informal, and reversible," we can well imagine a situation in which social, economic, and bureaucratic development has produced the unintended effect of increasing the minimum number of people or interests in the Selectorate (i.e., the Chinese Communist Party or CCP) that a leader needs to include in his winning coalition.
If the WC is growing in size, than we would expect that the essential task of political survival (i.e., the provision of private benefits to members of the WC) would become complex and time consuming for leaders. This would especially be the case if the interests of the members of the WC became more heterogeneous as this would create more conflicts between the private interests of the WCS members and complicate the provision of private benefits to them.
In such a situation, it would not be surprising to see leaders who are more skilled at managing multiple constituencies and resolving conflicts to bubble to the top of the leadership selection process because these are the people who will be best at amassing a WC from among heterogeneous interests within the Selectorate and will be viewed as a credible supplier of private benefits among those interests. Also, in practice, Leaders will need to spend more time devoting themselves to providing benefits and resolving conflicts within the WC. Just as importantly, conflict resolution is more likely to be visible from the outside and the process of providing private benefits will be more notable. Therefore, the norms of selection and the perceptions of the leaders may be driven by changes in the size and characteristics of the WC.
Of course, the third difference between the current political situation and the one faced by Deng remains to be considered. Here, Lampton argues that the people, in the form of individuals and local governments, are gaining in resources, in terms of capital, human capital and information, vis-a-vis the national leaders. This has driven the government to become sensitive to public opinion and active monitor it through opinion polling. So, where, Mao sought to define public opinion and Deng only followed it where it accorded with his view, Lampton describes the current attitude as follows:
Today, in contrast, almost all Chinese leaders openly speak about the importance of public opinion, with the goal being to preempt problems. In August 2013, for instance, the state-run newspaper China Daily reminded readers that the National Development and Reform Commission had issued regulations requiring local officials to conduct risk assessments to determine the likelihood of popular disturbances in reaction to major construction projects and stated that such undertakings should be shut down temporarily if they generated “medium-level” opposition among citizens.(Lampton, 2013)
On the face of it, this concern with public opinion (to the extent that it is genuine) runs counter to the central story of Selectorate Theory. According to the theory, Leaders of nations with small Winning Coalitions will focus on providing private benefits to the members of the WC and generally disregard considerations of public benefit. They certainly will not compromise the provision of private benefits to WC members that one one expect to occur in a major construction project for the sake of people who are not in the WC. In, general, Leaders are not expected to be concerned with public benefits unless they are in a system with a WC so large that providing private benefits to the members of the WC is more expensive or difficult than providing public benefits to the society as a whole. So, unless the concern with public opinion is viewed as symbolic window dressing, it would appear that Chinese leadership is violating one of the rules of the Dictator's Handbook (BDM and Smith, 2011). Rule 5 to be precise.
While this might be the case, there might be something else going on. Consider that, according to Selectorate Theory, the endurance of leaders in Soviet style systems is based not only on having a small WC but also having a large Selectorate (i.e., the party). The size of the Selectorate is important because, even if members of the Selectorate aren't in the WC, they have nonetheless a chance of being in one and, therefore, are more likely to support the system in place. The CCP had a membership of 82.6 million in 2012 and added 17 million members between 2001 and 2012. (China Daily, Nov, 5 2012) While that accounts for only 6% of the country's population, the party has expanded 25% in size since 2001 and thus is including a larger portion of the population that has a shot of being in a WC. Of course, if the WC is growing, that only increases their hopes of being included.
However, the 82.6 million people's shot at being in a WC that will provide them with private benefits if the current system is successfully challenged by the 1.27 billion or so people in China who are not in the CCP. Therefore, one can imagine there being broad support for a rule that constrains the provision of private benefits to members of the WC when it causes noticeable public opposition. Of course, in practice, implementing the rule in a particular case would be problematic as it involves denying a private benefit to a member of the WC who might value receiving that benefit more than promoting the overall system's long term survival (especially if one considers that the delay or cancellation of any one project will make a very small difference in the system's long term prospects). So, there may be as much tension between elements of the CCP involved here as between the CCP and the population.
References:
Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce, Alastair Smith, Randolph Siverson, and James D. Morrow. (2003) The Logic of Political Survival. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce, Alastair Smith. (2011) The Dictator’s Handbook: Why bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics. New York, NY: Public Affairs.
Lampton, David M. How China Is Ruled. (2013, December 16). Foreign Affairs. Retrieved February 3, 2014, from http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140344/david-m-lampton/how-china-is-ruled?nocache=1
No comments:
Post a Comment