![]() ![]() His essay “China: From Tiananmen to Neo-Stalinism” appeared in the January 2020 issue of the Journal of Democracy.Īn even more worrying aspect of the China puzzle is that since Xi Jinping became paramount leader in 2012, the CCP has reverted to a neo-Stalinist path. In January 2021, he joined the Board of Directors of the National Endowment for Democracy. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College. Minxin Pei is Tom and Margot Pritzker ’72 Professor of Government and George R. This indicates that there are in China powerful forces-at least equal in political potency to the “resource curse”-that prevent otherwise favorable socioeconomic factors from promoting a shift toward a more democratic system. Nearly all the dictatorships that are richer (per capita) than China today are major oil and gas producers. According to World Bank data and the Freedom House ratings, most countries with a higher per capita income than China are either Free (liberal democracies) or Partly Free (either semi-democracies or semi-authoritarian regimes). The China puzzle-a relatively high level of socioeconomic development coexisting with a persistent dictatorship-is even more striking in the contemporary global context. 2 Unfortunately, the regime dominated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has not merely endured, but grown more repressive at home and aggressive abroad. In 2007, China’s economic miracle occasioned a forecast that the country could become partly democratic by 2015 and completely free a decade later. Today, the case of China, where one-party rule has persisted despite four decades of rapid economic modernization, challenges the validity of the Lipset thesis. As with any established theory in social science, Lipset’s thesis has also been constantly tested against real-world experience. More than six decades after “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy” 1 first appeared in print, Lipset’s work continues to frame scholarly debates and inspire new research. ![]() Seymour Martin Lipset’s insight that economic modernization creates favorable conditions for stable democracy is one of the most influential, robust, and time-tested theories in social science. The socioeconomic transformation of societies under post-totalitarian rule empowers social forces and greatly increase the odds of revolutionary change when these regimes undergo liberalization, as shown in the former Soviet bloc. ![]() However, the medium-term success of these regimes may only ensure their eventual demise through revolution. A closer look at this experience, however, shows that democratizing a post-totalitarian regime is far more difficult than democratizing an authoritarian regime because post-totalitarian regimes, such as the one dominated by the Chinese Communist Party, possess far greater capacity and resources to resist and neutralize the liberalizing effects of modernization. China’s experience may appear to contradict modernization theory, which links economic development with democracy. Instead of undergoing evolutionary liberalization, the Leninist party-state has in recent years reverted to a form of neo-Stalinist rule. Rapid economic growth in China over the last four decades has failed to bring about democratization. ![]()
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