** 3rd book of 2021: Reversion to the Mean **
A common fallacy among China watchers is assuming that liberal democracies are the norm or a logical endpoint of human development. I would describe this as 井底之蛙, or the frog looking at the world from the bottom of the well. Much of the American China watching community both lacks sufficient experience with non-democratic systems or, frankly, with history, to properly grapple with China’s development.
As China continues along a path that proves Fukuyama wrong and dismays American political scientists espousing ‘universal values’ and the Washington consensus, books like End of an Era take a dour approach to what the future of China holds.
To Minzner, the mechanics of power are eroding Deng Xiaoping’s reform wave to an increasingly authoritarian state. The reforms themselves were a means of resolving the principle-agent problem, whereby centralized power’s most pressing concern is policing intermediate layers of bureaucracy. Deng sought to resolve this problem, both through top down performance targets and local institutions such as citizen input to monitor local authorities. But these nascent reforms were halting and reversible. Xi has indeed halted and reversed such institutional progress in the name of security. * “Partially established norms that were built up in the reform era - whether corporate debt limits or labor contracting rules - are dissolving in light of the overriding pressure to stave off social unrest.” *
Such changes lead to potentially unpredictable results: “Lack of rule of law incentives increasingly creative and brazen forms of protest as a means to obtain political objectives: “bypassing legal channels they perceive as stacked against them in favor of trying to hit the button most likely to generate a flash alert to the desk of the local Party secretary…. to order officials and judges to show up at the negotiating table and address their grievances.” “ Religions go underground and learn how to covertly organize in order to survive.
Minzner goes on to project various dark scenarios from war with the west (see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3534146876) to internal collapse. While these are not impossible, I can’t help but look at both the Qing, Ming or even some Byzantine dynasties (see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3042726482), which each lasted 300 years. Deng’s ambitions and successful reforms may be over, but a reversion to the mean of top-down strong-leader government does not mean the end of an era or impending Chinese apocalypse.