Soviet Union
Is today’s China yesterday’s Soviet Union?
When Soviet-style totalitarianism collapsed three decades ago under the weight of its economic failures, China decided to stay the course. The question now is whether China’s own totalitarian experiment can last.
Stanford, California – The 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), held in October, confirmed President Xi Jinping and China’s top political leadership for the next five years. But what that means for the Chinese economy going forward will depend on three factors: the state of the country’s institutions, past and current economic conditions, and the leadership’s political intentions.
China’s most fundamental institutions are totalitarian, reflecting and reproducing the CPC’s monopoly control over every facet of society, including the economy. The party-state institutions of totalitarian control were transplanted, in full, from the Soviet Union in 1949. When Soviet-style totalitarianism collapsed three decades ago under the dead weight of its economic failures, China appeared to be an exception. The question now is whether China’s own totalitarian experiment can last.
To answer that, one must understand the structure of “totalitarianism with Chinese characteristics.” A key pillar is regionally decentralized totalitarianism (RDT), which combines highly centralized totalitarian control over politics, ideology and personnel with decentralization in administrative and economic affairs.
This is the arrangement that facilitated the post-Mao reforms. Centralized totalitarian control of the economy was relaxed, and RDT evolved into regionally decentralized authoritarianism (RDA). But since Xi came to power in 2012, China has shifted back toward totalitarianism, with the CPC leadership reasserting control, particularly over the burgeoning private sector. That reversal is a central reason for China’s sharp economic slowdown in 2022.
Opening up
Much of China’s rapid economic growth in the early post-Mao reform era was recovery following the devastation inflicted from the late 1950s until the late 1970s by the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. But the remaining share represented something beyond mere recovery, and is something of a puzzle.
China’s reforms succeeded where all of the reform efforts by its communist counterparts in the Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe had failed, because China had managed to solve a fundamental incentive problem that characterizes party-state bureaucracies. This earlier success offers clues about whether its economy remains sustainable today.
Following Mao’s death, the CPC leadership came to believe that economic growth was the key to its survival, and it settled on RDT as the institutional foundation for new reform policies. Under the new model, regional economic performance would determine the promotion of local party-state bureaucrats, which led to competition between subnational bureaucrats. To gain an advantage, some covered up or even supported illegitimate private enterprises, and thus inadvertently unleashed rapid growth in China’s private sector — a development that was incompatible with totalitarianism and certainly never tolerated in the Soviet Union.
TANIKO Madagascar 