Foreign Affairs - Best of Print

For Ang’s essay “Autocracy with Chinese Characteristics: Beijing’s Behind-the-Scenes Reform” (adapted from How China Escaped the Poverty Trap)

See the Best of Print in 2018

“Since opening its markets in 1978, China has in fact pursued significant political reforms—just not in the manner that Western observers expected. Instead of instituting multiparty elections, establishing formal protections for individual rights, or allowing free expression, the CCP has made changes below the surface, reforming its vast bureaucracy to realize many of the benefits of democratization—in particular, accountability, competition, and partial limits on power—without giving up single-party control.

Although these changes may appear dry and apolitical, in fact, they have created a unique hybrid: autocracy with democratic characteristics. In practice, tweaks to rules and incentives within China’s public administration have quietly transformed an ossified communist bureaucracy into a highly adaptive capitalist machine.

But bureaucratic reforms cannot substitute for political reforms forever. As prosperity continues to increase and demands on the bureaucracy grow, the limits of this approach are beginning to loom large…

What broader lessons on democracy can be drawn from China? One is the need to move beyond the narrow conception of democratization as the introduction of multiparty elections. As China has shown, some of the benefits of democratization can be achieved under single-party rule.

Allowing bureaucratic reforms to unfold can work better than trying to impose political change from the outside, since over time, the economic improvements that the bureaucratic reforms generate should create internal pressure for meaningful political reform. This is not to say that states must delay democracy in order to experience economic growth. Rather, China’s experience shows that democracy is best introduced by grafting reforms onto existing traditions and institutions—in China’s case, a Leninist bureaucracy. Put simply, it is better to promote political change by building on what is already there than by trying to import something wholly foreign.

- Excerpted from Ang 2018, pp. 39-40 and 45