“The competent should be guided by the virtuous [in governance].”
「賢者在位，能者在職。」
— Mencius, a foundational Confucian text
“Kings of old used [lyrical poetry] to regulate marital relations, cultivate appropriate reverence, thicken social bonds, refine moral education, and improve social customs.”
「先王以是經夫婦，成孝敬，厚人倫，美教化，移風俗。」
— The Great Preface to the Mao Odes, another foundational Confucian text
In 1924, Sun Yat-sen, the father of the Chinese republic, pondered the best way to save the Sinitic civilization. The Xinhai Revolution of 1911 had overthrown the sclerotic Qing Dynasty, yet the domestic turmoil and foreign aggression which bedeviled the Qing were only getting worse. In a series of seminal speeches that year, Sun, well versed in Chinese and American history and fluent in English, laid out his diagnosis of the fundamental challenges and his vision for the future. Having transcended feudalism millennia before Europe (article here), he argued, what China lacked was organic and intermediate social organization beyond the outdated Confucian bureaucracy. A heap of loose sand (一盤散沙) was his metaphor. Thus, a strong revolutionary party was the only path forward to build a modern fiscal-military state, concluded Sun. As he was articulating this aspiration, he was putting it in action by reorganizing the KMT along Leninist lines despite rejecting Marxism. After his death, both Chiang and Mao, fierce ideological enemies, shared Sun’s assessment and prescription.
Fast forward to the present: while party in power has changed, the view that a centralized and paternalistic party-state is necessary for Chinese modernization and rejuvenation remains.
A Political and Disciplined Technocracy
In contrast to the idealized Western model of an apolitical administrative state answerable to politicians, China does not pretend politics can or should be separated from the bureaucracy, or that private ethics have no bearing on public life. Ideological purity is not only part of the selection criteria but also the training program for the party-state cadre. Private misconduct including affairs and dissenting outside official channels is part and parcel of disciplinary enforcement. Periodically, the party-state evaluates junior officials and supervises individualized career development, which typically involve rotations across functions and regions in addition to postgraduate education at party and policy schools. Although personal connections continue to play a role in promotions, by the time someone becomes a ministerial-level official, they will have accumulated decades of varied government experience and recurrent mid-career training.
The Politburo Standing Committee as the Highest Coordination Device
Similar to British parliamentary supremacy or the U.S. Supreme Court in constitutional disputes, the Politburo Standing Committee of the CCP sits at the apex of Chinese political power. Its co-equal members of seven live in the Zhongnanhai compound in central Beijing and speak with one voice in public, notwithstanding an order of precedence. It sets strategic priorities for the country, reviews key personnel decisions, and resolves coordination problems not just between different branches of government, but between the public and private sectors. One recent example is the effort directed by the Standing Committee to curb the deeply rooted problem of excessive competition in the Chinese examination system, encompassing public schools and private tutoring.
Media Policy as an Indispensable Tool
Instead of surrendering cultural power to technology and media companies, the Chinese party-state takes a hands-on approach. Facing the natural centrifugal force of the market and cosmopolitanism like the rest of the world, its interventions in the news, social media and entertainment advance family values, work ethics, and respect for the state. At the same time, it constrains divisive topics such as class and gender grievances, the saliency of unrepresentative disasters, and pessimistic outlooks on the future. It restricts social media and gaming consumption for minors, limits nudity, gore, and swearing for adults, and propagates classical culture, science, and a unifying narrative for the nation. Last but not least, it monitors social media to gauge population sentiment and public opinion as a valuable input for policymaking.
Instrumental Liberalism and Decentralization
Is China over-intervening and over-centralizing at the expense of innovations, tolerance, local adaptability? Learning from mistakes from the past, it attempts to strike a balance between stagnation and chaos, known colloquially in the Chinese political discourse as “一管就死，一放就乱”.
· Outbound traveling and studying are encouraged, totaling more than 140 million trips per year, where Chinese are exposed to global pluralism, among them critiques of the CCP.
· VPN use bypassing the Great Firewall is implicitly allowed and widespread among the Chinese professional class, enabling them to access and exchange information on the world internet.
· High-brow intellectual and cultural ecosystems are given wide latitude due to their lack of mass appeal, ranging from academic debates on the Great Leap Forward to the full availability of ardent anti-communists such as George Orwell and Hayek.
· Entrepreneurship on the technological frontier covering aerospace, semiconductors, biotech, robotics, and open-source software enjoys extensive support.
· Gay bars and dating apps are tacitly tolerated and well known among elites.
· Investigative reporting and public criticisms of local government failures are permitted.
· Provinces are gaining discretion in urban planning, investment approvals, taxes, and family support. New policy sandboxes have been set up in the last six years in Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Hainan for further liberal experimentations in immigration, trade, and services. Hong Kong and Macau are being pipelined into the mainland economy via financial integration and selective regulatory harmonization.
From North Korea to Singapore
The death of Mao in 1976 ended China’s dogmatic wandering in Marxism. For the first time in more than a century, pragmatism became her guiding principle of action. “空谈误国，实干兴邦”, as Deng put in 1992. It draws ideas in governance from socialism and capitalism, from Confucianism and classical liberalism, from the Asian Tigers and America. In so doing, it is transitioning from North Korea to Singapore. Only hundreds of times as large and momentous.