The End of the CCP’s Resilient Authoritarianism? A Tripartite Assessment of Shifting Power in China

Cheng Li의 논문, 이 논문은 일당 정치 체제가 제도적 적응과 정책 조정을 통해 효과적으로 통치할 수 있는 국가 역량을 강화할 수 있다고 주장하는 중국 공산당의 "탄력적 권위주의 Resilient Authoritarianism"에 대한 일반적인 견해에 이의를 제기한다. 이 논문에서 Cheng Li는 먼저 탄력적 권위주의에 대한 주요 주장에 대한 비판적 검토를 제시하고, 탄력적 권위주의가 오늘날 중국 정치를 이해하는 데 부족한 이유를 설명한다. 그런 다음 중화인민공화국의 세 가지 변혁적 동향을 파악한다.

전문 링크

• https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/china-quarterly/article/abs/end-of-the-ccps-resilient-authoritarianism-a-tripartite-assessment-of-shifting-power-in-china/FFF9FFE49772D9FF702150AF9CA7799E
• https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-end-of-the-ccps-resilient-authoritarianism-a-tripartite-assessment-of-shifting-power-in-china/

다운로드 및 전문 보기에 문제가 있을 경우 위키스 프론트 데스크 문의하세요

주요내용

• If there is one recurring mistake that the international community makes when analyzing present-day China, it is to describe the world’s most populous and rapidly changing country in monolithic terms.(Perry Link, a long-time critic of the Chinese authorities, recently made a strong and valid critique of some American experts on China for their use of the terms “China” or “the Chinese” to “refer exclusively to elite circles” of the Chinese Communist Party.)

• Interestingly, Gordon Chang, another well-known critic of the CCP leadership, has continued to predict “the coming collapse of China,” while primarily referring to the potential fall of the CCP (2011).

• Over the past decade, overseas China analysts have tended to characterize the Chinese authoritarian political system as “resilient” and “strong.”According to their logic, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seems to have found a sustainable way to maintain its rule over its fast-growing economy.

• China’s political future, especially the survival of its one-party system, is a controversial issue that should be subject to more rigorous intellectual and policy debates. The notion of resilient authoritarianism, the prevailing analytical framework with which many academics in the West have studied the Chinese political system in the last decade or so, must be re-examined in the light of recent political phenomena.

• When the CCP survived the political turmoil of the 1989 Tiananmen incident, which had posed a serious legitimacy crisis, many China analysts began to appreciate the endurance and adaptability with which the Chinese leadership handled daunting challenges both at home and abroad. The political succession from Jiang Zemin 江 民’s third generation of leadership to Hu Jintao 胡 涛’s fourth generation, which took place at the 16th National Congress of the CCP in 2002, was remarkable for being the first time in PRC history that the CCP leader-ship conducted a peaceful, orderly and institutionalized transfer of power. It is quite common for overseas China analysts to view the CCP as being limber and adaptable enough to respond quickly to changes to their environment and to become better qualified and more competent with time.

• Some of the CCP adaptations were also the result of lessons learned from other authoritarian regimes. As David Shambaugh has observed, some of the CCP’s new policies and procedures were developed in response to systematic study of post-communist and non-communist Party states. The CCP proactively attempted to “reform and rebuild itself institutionally – thereby sustaining its political legitimacy and power.”

• In an interview with the Chinese media, Yu Keping 可平, a distinguished CCP theoretician, argued that it would be a grave mistake to assume that China only needs intra-Party democracy, instead of a truer people’s democracy (renmin minzhu 人民民主) or social democracy (shehui minzhu 社会民主), both of which would include grassroots and general democratic elections

• For Yu, intra-Party democracy and people’s democracy are complementary. The former is top-down or inside-out and the latter is bottom-up, but ideally the two can meet in the middle. In a strategic sense, Yu Keping and his like-minded colleagues place great importance on intra-Party democracy with the objective that it will pave the way for Chinese democracy in a broader sense. Yu believes that China’s quest for democracy should, and eventually will, have a qualitative “breakthrough” of some sort.

• These views, expressed by the liberal scholars in the CCP establishment, differ profoundly from Richard McGregor’s generalization that the Chinese people and lea-ders have no interest in democracy. McGregor recently stated: “The idea that China would one day become a democracy was always a Western notion, born of our theories about how political systems evolve. Yet all evidence so far suggests these theories are wrong.”24 McGregor’s view is also incompatible with recent public opinion surveys in China.

The English edition of Global Times (a branch of the official People’s Daily) reported that its research centre recently conducted a survey of 1,010 people in seven Chinese cities and found that 63.6 per cent of respondents did not oppose adopting Western-style democracy in China.

Zi Zhongyun 中筠, a distinguished scholar and former director of the Institute of American Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Science (CASS), apparently disagreed with both McGregor and conservative hardliners in the CCP leadership. In her recently edited book, she bluntly challenged CCP officials who have spread the false notions that democracy is not suitable for the Chinese people and that universal values are nothing but a Western conspiracy against China.