Carl Minzner was interviewed for a New York Times Q&A about China’s government under the leadership of President Xi Jinping.
Q. If China’s government slides away from institutionalization and toward more personalized rule, what will the consequences be?
A. Remember what China actually looked like back when it had full-blown personalized rule — i.e., under Mao. State policies could alter dramatically at his whim — the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution. Elite politics were highly unstable. Mao’s first designated political successor [Liu Shaoqi] died on the cold floor of a prison cell after being purged by Mao himself, while his second [Lin Biao] perished in a mysterious plane crash after allegedly attempting a coup and trying to flee to the Soviet Union. That’s what happens in a system that lacks political institutionalization — when the rules of the game are simply the laws of the jungle.
In contrast, partial institutionalization of the political rules of the game — adoption of collective leadership, efforts to rule China through more regularized bureaucratic channels, the party taboo against resorting to mass social movements — has been crucial to the relative stability that China enjoyed during the reform era.
If you start unwinding those efforts, dark doors in China’s history thought to have been firmly shut could start to reopen.
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Q. What is the practical difference between governance in a Leninist, quasi-institutionalized model and governance by a strongman who seeks to rule by centralizing power in himself and appealing to nationalist ideology, such as the “China Dream”?
A. Pushed to the extreme, it’s the difference between China under Deng Xiaoping and Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe. One of China’s distinctive features has been its long tradition of effective, centralized bureaucracy. It is not simply a tinpot dictatorship. The question is: Could internal political tensions lead it to slide in that direction?
Q. Do you consider the recent moves to have the media stop using the term “Xi Dada” — Big Daddy Xi — as a recognition by the party leadership that a cult of personality around China’s top leader might be dangerous?
A. One would hope so. The positive interpretation might be that there are some tacit reform-era norms that still carry weight among the party elite — such as resistance to a full-blown cult of personality centered on the top leader, or a reluctance to flirt with Maoist-style mass movements. But we really have no idea.
The negative interpretation is that perhaps this just a temporary pause in a complex internal political struggle. The next iteration might see the tacit age and term limits for China’s leaders that emerged over recent decades erode at the 2017 party congress, opening the door for China to move down the path of Russia, with Putin’s seemingly perpetual presidency.