Bruce Dickson on ‘the Party and the People’ and the key questions to understand China

The relationship between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese people, how the CCP deals with civil society activism, Party influence in the business sector, the 20th Party Congress, and nationalism are some of the topics I discussed Bruce Dickson recently, based on his recent book The Party and the People: Chinese Politics in the Twenty-first Century.

Bruce is a Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University. His research focuses on political dynamics in China, especially the adaptability of the Chinese Communist Party and the regime it governs.

A key tension between the Party and the people is the balance between responsiveness and repression, and the degree of accountability, which we discussed with the COVID protests and the A4 movement as an example. This discussion naturally led us to address the broader trend of civil society. Bruce painted a somber picture, highlighting the increased scrutiny faced by NGOs, even with the implementation of the new Charity Law.

We also discussed the business sector and Party control and management of national and international businesses, as well as the broader economy, increasing nationalism, and the possibility of a major political change in China.

This is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Christopher Marquis: The first question is about the structure of the book. You organize the book around a number of questions. I found it a useful and interesting way to organize a book, but not a typical way. I’d love to hear why you did it that way, and also why those questions?

Bruce Dickson: The idea for structuring the book this way came from the editor at Princeton who suggested doing a book like this. I was hesitant because of the way he was describing it sounded too much like a textbook. And I didn’t want to write a textbook. But he suggested taking my graduate syllabus to see the topics that I cover week to week and organize chapters around those topics. Then take the readings for each of those weeks that include either the main writings or the main debates on each of those topics. And that becomes the initial beginnings of a bibliography.

The idea for the book as a whole was to provide to a non-scholarly audience some of the findings that scholars take for granted, but that a non-academic audience would be surprised about. The idea was to try and utilize the existing literature and the depth of empirical research about China to see what we can learn about topics like the promotion of officials, policy making, protest, how the Party deals with civil society, and so on.

Most of this academic research is written for other scholars because we’re trying to get tenured and promoted. These literatures are written in a way that is impenetrable by most other readers. In particular, much of the recent research on Chinese politics is very quantitative, just as most of the social sciences are becoming increasingly quantitative. And it’s just, therefore, a foreign language for most readers who are not well-versed in statistics.

How do you distill down some of this conventional wisdom in ways that are manageable? In hindsight, this was a very prescient way of doing it, because it didn’t require additional field work on my part at a time when field work has become almost impossible in China. The timing just worked out really nice.

Christopher Marquis: That makes sense. What about the title? The title is The Party and the People. From the chapter questions, I can understand the people part, like the one on civil society and protests, and even nationalism is interesting — how that gets expressed across generations. But not all of them focus on the people. Could you sum up the relation between the Party and the people in in a few sentences and why that is the title?

Bruce Dickson: One of the main themes that runs through the book is that the Party remains in power by using repression, which will surprise nobody. But the Pparty also has some degree of support from the people, because it is often responsive to popular demands that percolate up. The balance between repression and responsiveness has changed over time. In the in the current era, under Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 we see more and more repression and less and less responsiveness. But those two elements are central to the relationship between the Party and the people. At earlier times, more informal practices were allowed and were more effective, whether it’s NGOs that have informal relationships with local officials, or in the same way, churches and other religious organizations were able to exist in some of the gray areas in between the formal and banned activities.

These informal rules by which the game of politics is played in China doesn’t come across so well in the articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Financial Times that most readers would be familiar with. But if you spend any amount of time in China, you realize there are such rules, and they’re also the way things actually get done.

So that combination of repression and responsiveness, not just formal institutions but informal practices, is necessary to keep in mind to understand how the game of politics is played in China.

Christopher Marquis: And in addition, this balance between responsiveness and repression, but with a lack of accountability like one would have in a democracy. And that theme runs through the book too. The last chapter was on if democracy will happen, and you also discuss a long-standing set of thinking that has now been pretty much debunked on modernization theory regarding how economic liberalization will lead to political liberalization. This tension of being responsive but not accountable and where to draw the line is interesting, particularly in recent years. How has the degree of accountableness changed over time?

Bruce Dickson: That’s a great question because that also gets into some of the differences between informal and formal practices. The Party is a one-party regime. It very zealously protects this monopoly on organized political organizations. So it hasn’t even wanted to be accountable to itself in a way.

The investigation of corruption, at least before the Xí Jìnpíng 习近平era, was always under the control of local leaders. They never wanted to point the swords at themselves. They were able to minimize what constraints they faced because they made exceptions for themselves when they were doing these kinds of investigations. For example, they didn’t allow independent media to be a watchdog on what the Party or government did. They also didn’t allow NGOs to have that kind of supervisory role. So the kinds of institutions that we often take for granted in democracies just simply don’t exist or at least don’t operate the way they do in a democratic context.

Most people in China recognize that you can’t organize groups that are designed to challenge or question or supervise the Party, that is just a non-starter. The Party does not want to be accountable to society as a way of building trust and support in itself. During the Xí Jìnpíng习近平era, the Party recognizes and will acknowledge that it’s made mistakes, but it claims it’s capable of correcting its mistakes. It doesn’t need elections and other things to hold it accountable. It tries to be responsive as a way of preempting demands for greater accountability and so far has been successful in doing so.

Christopher Marquis: Some of the protests I’ve studied over time were in areas the Party would be more supportive of, for example around the environment issues, or possibly chemical plants where it seems that actually the general public through protest was able to, in some ways, hold the governmental actors, broadly speaking, to account. However, again, those are less threatening areas.

And this made me think about the COVID protests or the A4 protests where people were fed up with the lockdowns. And so then overnight, things were reversed. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the COVID protests, and how the insights you have may shed some light on to what happened there.

Bruce Dickson: The A4 protests were breaking out at the time when in hindsight, it now appears the Party was getting ready to give up the Zero COVID policies. When it finally did give them up, it never acknowledged that it was doing so for any other reasons than the time was right to finally move beyond them.

Party leaders may have been responsive to the protests. Or they may have been disappointed that there were protests because it made them look like they were responsive instead of benevolent. It’s a combination of both responsiveness and repression: The Party lifted the Zero COVID policies, but some of the people out in the streets for the A4 protests were taken in for questioning. The police were tracking who was present by whose cell phones were pinging off of nearby towers.

They were using their surveillance tactics to figure out who was actually there at that time. Most of the protestors were not professional protesters, like the political dissidents, who knew how to deal with police tactics. Instead, these were regular citizens who may have been protesting for the first time. They really got rattled by the fact that they thought it was just simple, peaceful protest but then they got taken into the police station. The Party was using both of its tactics. On one hand, it was responsive to the protests and recognized the frustration about the Zero COVID policies.

On the other hand, they also used repression against the people who are actually in the protests. I don’t have a good sense, and I’m not sure if anybody does, on either how widespread or how large the protests were. How many people were involved? Was it snowballing? It got nipped in the bud so fast, and the policies got lifted so fast that they preempted larger scale protests. We may be talking about hundreds of people. But anyway, it was a clear sign, a very vivid sign of popular sentiment, and the Party’s fear of losing its control over the discussion about the Zero COVID policies.

Christopher Marquis: Your protest chapter notes they have stop releasing data on protests and now it seems that they in general are very able to use technology to head off protests more quickly. And I think that Zero COVID protest is as you described it, an example of how they nipped in the bud very quickly as well. How about more general trends in civil society? For instance, the restrictions on international NGOs, and seemingly even local NGOs, particularly if certain topics are certainly off the table. Can you discuss some of the trends around civil society in particular?

Bruce Dickson: It’s not a very promising trend. This is part of the effort of maintaining Party control over everything especially anything that could have a political agenda behind it. There are two types of NGOs. One type is formally registered with the state, and the others are active but are not registered. NGOs are often encouraged by local officials not to register because that would signal to higher ups that civil society is growing in that community, which might create concerns about potential instability. Local leaders are willing to let NGOs operate because they realize they provide useful services for the population.

However, that kind of informal practice has become less acceptable than it was previously, and so there’s been a requirement to formally register all the different groups be, or shut them down. The ones that are formally registered and are large enough to have the proper conditions are expected to have Party organizations within them. Even though many of them are so small, they don’t have enough Party members to have their own Party organization, this effort still shows the Party’s intention to carefully monitor what NGOs do. It has been a troubling trend of more restrictions over the NGO space.

But, on the other hand, one of the positive developments has been the new charity law that got passed about the time that the constraints on NGOs were put in place. The charity law allowed donations to the NGOs which gives them a more stable financial base than they had before. They no longer have to simply rely upon government contracts for what their funding. So the ones that were able to register in some ways benefited because of the new opportunities for raising money that had not been there in the past.

But that’s a small piece of good news that doesn’t negate a much larger picture, which is that even NGOs that were not posing any threat at all to the government have been under greater scrutiny, under greater control, or even shut down. As long as Xi is in power, that trend seems likely to continue. That desire to have the Party control more and more just seems to be the mantra of his leadership.

Christopher Marquis: So we discussed protests. And now civil society. Now I’m curious about the business sector. Your earlier work on Red Capitalists in China is how I first became familiar with your work.

You talked about Party organizations and NGOs. This is something that’s in the news around Western multinationals, and clearly private Chinese firms. This is something that’s important. Alibaba or ByteDance, they are very proud of their Party organizations. The golden shares are certainly something coming to the fore in the management and oversight of particularly the tech sector. Can you say more about the management of the business sector and economy more generally? Then maybe from your early book on red capitalist, what some of the key trends are that you are seeing in how the Party is enhancing control.

Bruce Dickson: There are a couple of key trends or key changes in recent years. My understanding of it is really influenced by the work from Margaret Pearson, Meg Rithmire, and Kellee Tsai. During the reform era, the Party’s main focus was economic growth and economic modernization. Xi has shifted away from growth-oriented policies and interactions with the private sector to encourage a focus on security and stability. As a consequence, the private sector, which had been increasingly privileged during the nineties and into the Hú Jǐntāo 胡锦涛 years, is no longer so privileged. Now the companies that you mentioned are under the gun in ways that are very different than the way things ran before. This change fits with the notion that the Party wants to control everything. It doesn’t really trust markets because it can’t control markets and it doesn’t trust private companies because their goal is to produce profits, not necessarily promote the Party’s agenda. There’s also been a renewed emphasis on building Party organizations in private firms.

And this is where the absence of being able to do field research in China makes it difficult to know what that actually means. When I was studying the Party’s relationship with the private sector before, these Party cells in private firms were not really there to monitor or control. What they did was more involved in logistical work. How do you build a brand? How do you manage human resources? How do you advertise your products? It was just basic executive education in a sense because these entrepreneurs had no business background. They didn’t come from a history of family business, so they were just making all kinds of blunders that you’d expect first time business owners to do. Is that the way Party organizations in firms work today? Still that type of logistical support? Or is it now more politically oriented to make sure what they’re doing is consistent with the Party’s agenda? That would be my hunch, but without actually having access to the type of sources we had before, we really don’t know. It’s very frustrating. We can count how many private firms have Party cells, but what they’re actually doing remains — at least to me — a mystery.

Christopher Marquis: Sure, going back to between responsiveness and accountability and a bit more on the accountability theme. You’ve discussed in these last three areas this increasing repression, and you also mentioned the Party very much wants to only be accountable to itself. And so, these trends are definitely emblematic of that.

But it’s interesting because you have a chapter on leadership that describes norms around leaders age and two terms, for the supreme leader, so to speak, which have been broken increasingly.

It seems that the accountability to the Party, or at least within the Party, may be disintegrating a bit as well. I’m curious, given your studies of how the formal and informal leadership and succession processes have evolved, what you make of the Twentieth Party Congress? Any speculation about Hu Jintao’s leaving? That’s maybe a side point. But given that chapter and leadership it was published before the Twentieth Party Congress, what news did you learn at the Party Congress? And how does that sync with what you present?

Bruce Dickson: Some of the details from the Twentieth Party Congress surprised me, but the overall shift did not. We knew back in 2018 when the National People’s Congress revised the State Constitution to get rid of term limits on the Presidency, that now Xi had no constraints on him continuing as the top leader for as long as he wants.

I’m still having a hard time understanding how he was able to do that so easily, because clearly there must be people at the top who understand the benefits of a regular rotation of leaders that is now upended. But those voices obviously were not paid attention to. By the time the Twentieth Party Congress, we knew he was going to be the general secretary. It wasn’t obvious who would also be on the Politburo Standing Committee and therefore who would be expected to be in the top government positions. When the former PParty SSecretary of Shanghai, Lǐ Qiáng 李强, was announced as the number two person, I was completely surprised because I had expected him in beginning of that year to get fired because he managed COVID so badly as Shanghai’s top leader.

And it turns out that apparently accomplishments are not quite as important as they used to be. That’s the kind of detail that surprised me – the fact that Xi was able to load up with his own supporters. The fact that there was no successor identified further indicates that he has no intention of going away anytime soon. And the fact that so many of them seem to be promoted because they’re cronies of his, not because of what they’ve done. Previously there were factions within the Party. The Shanghai gang lost when its symbolic leader Jiāng Zémín 江泽民died. The Youth League faction seems to be eliminated. When Li Keqiang was not able to remain on the Politburo Standing Committee, he was forced to retire, even though he was the same age as Xi. And then, when Hú Jǐntāo 胡锦涛was very dramatically, symbolically ushered off the stage, it just shows that everything is now centralized in Xí Jìnpíng 习近平.

But I still don’t understand how he was able to do that. The benefits of collective leadership, the benefits of rotation of leaders, and these norms of term limits and a retirement age just made great sense. Xi was able to just dispose of them, and not just for himself. Other people on the Politburo and the Central Military Commission also exceeded the age limit. It’s just remarkable how easily that was done.

Christopher Marquis: Very much agree. I think the thing that probably surprised me the most in your book, at least the items I wasn’t aware of, is the chapter on nationalism. You show that youth is less nationalistic than older people if I remember correctly, and that nationalism is not on the rise. What I see in the media would have suggested otherwise. Can you say a little bit more about those findings and studies, and maybe why that is. And maybe why we might have a misperception around that.

Bruce Dickson: There’s a couple of things to that that are revealed in multiple public opinion surveys over the years. One is that China is one of the most, if not the most, nationalistic countries in terms of popular attitudes. Young people in China are extremely nationalistic is another key finding. But they’re not as nationalistic as their elders. That trend is evident in every survey I looked at, and also supported by talking to other people who had done similar surveys about what their data showed.

So how do we reconcile this idea that youth are less nationalistic, but are more vocal about it. I think youth attitudes may be marginally less nationalistic than their elders, but still quite high. Nationalism has become more important in part, because of its an influence on policy and influence on public discourse. This supports Andrew Nathan’s observation that nationalism is the only acceptable form of dissent in China. If you criticize the government for not standing up for China’s interest, that’s kind of okay. If you say, we need a democracy, well, you’re going to go to jail.

If you focus on the nationalist element, “we need stronger leaders, we need a stronger response, we need to take necessary action,” that is increasingly acceptable. The space for that kind of nationalist rhetoric online and by government officials and Chinese diplomats has become increasingly the norm. It doesn’t seem to reflect a change of attitude among the people but it does reflect a change in the PParty’s willingness to allow certain types of ideas to circulate at a time when it’s limiting most other types of critical attitudes.

Christopher Marquis: Interesting. I wonder, do you mean, with particularly the recent backing away from the strong focused on economic performance and private business growth, that stoking of nationalism is about reinforcing identity. And it’s us against them is a way to bind the people when economic growth is not as because salient.

Bruce Dickson: There is a recognition that just relying on economic growth is too thin a source of legitimacy for the PParty. So it looks for other things, and one of them is nationalism —— identify a foreign threat. “If it wasn’t for us, we would be run over by these people who have ill intentions towards the country,” and that plays very well with the public. And it’s reinforced by the patriotic education policies in schools and the media that emphasize the historical basis for foreign aggression against China. Things are framed in terms of that narrative of historical grievances against outside influences.

At a time when the economy has been slowing for more structural reasons, nationalism is an easy thing to utilize. But I think it’s not just a strategic use of national sentiments. I think it really is more genuine because nationalist rhetoric resonates with the public in a way that other types of things like Xí Jìnpíng 习近平Thought does not. So I think it’s more than just a useful tool. I think there is a common notion that the Chinese public takes a great deal of pride in the country’s accomplishments, but also recognizes the dangers that the country faces.

Christopher Marquis: The last question I have about the concluding last chapter which is on if China will ever adopt democracy. You go through a number of reasons why, based on a variety of ideas in theory, one would expect it, and then the opposite.

Given what we’ve discussed, under the current regime, it seems pretty far-fetched. Maybe when you wrote the book, things were not as constrained as now, but that in some ways the idea that we’re thinking about democracy in China seems to reflect our own biases. But that said, I’m curious if you have any forward-looking thoughts around the possibility of democracy.

Bruce Dickson: One of the reviewers for the book proposal said this: “Why are we even talking still about the prospects for democracy in China?” But I know from public talks and from my teaching that this is a question that a lot of Americans want to know about and so it has to be addressed.

All of my research has been trying to downplay the notion that China is going to become democratic, or that the CCP is going to be the vehicle for democratization. I think both of those things just seem very unlikely in part, because the Party is opposed to it, and because it recognizes that it enjoys a monopoly. Monopolies don’t really enjoy competition and a transition to a democracy would require it to be accountable to the public.

It has had opportunities in the past to open up, to engage in more ambitious political reform, but has always chosen not to. It is safe to assume that there are democrats within the CCP, but they’re so outnumbered that they don’t seem to be a force for change. There is something to the notion of modernization theory in the sense that the people who modernization theorists would expect to be most in favor of political change, most critical of the regime are the urban educated elites. So in that sense it can be a very slow process.

As the country becomes more urbanized, a bit more globalized, as levels of college education increase, those long-term trends seem to be favorable towards the potential for democracy. But if we look at other cases of which countries have democratized, modernization theory is not a very good predictor of when that happens. Wealthier countries tend to remain democracies, but democracy has been attempted at all levels of development. Economic modernization by itself doesn’t give us much to go on.

I think the things we should be looking for are not so much positive changes, but negative ones. Is there a major crisis? COVID could have been that type of a crisis. Is there a major international crisis? If China lost a showdown over Taiwan, that would probably be the end for the CCP. Something dramatic like that.

A potential positive sign would be if the CCP would reassess the verdict on the 1989 demonstrations, to say, “in fact, they were patriotic demonstrations.” That would be a clear signal that CCP leaders are open to the idea of extensive political reform. The odds of that are close to zero. Another sign would be division among the top elites, which is often a sign that change is about to happen because when the leaders are divided, they reach out to society for greater popular support for their position, as happened in 1989. That would also be a sign of a potential moment for change.

But since 1989 there has been a remarkable show of unity among the top leadership, and especially in the Xí Jìnpíng 习近平era. There must be some differences of opinion among Party leaders. People are very upset about the way things are going. We hear little rumors and whispers of disagreements, but nothing that you could point to to indicate an elite split, even under such dramatic changes that he has put in place. You don’t get a sense about major divisions and factional rivalry that would lead to a split within the leadership. So all those things make democratization seem unlikely anytime soon.

The final point is that assuming that the alternative to the CCP in China is a liberal democracy ignores the fact that most examples of regime change end up with a new authoritarian government, not a democracy. Would a new regime be better than this one? Are people in Egypt better off now than they were under Mubarak? It’s more the same, not really an improvement. For all those reasons, I don’t want to be pessimistic, but as area of research, I think studying the potential for democracy in China is a dead end.

The more important issue is how does the Party stay in power? And what is the popular response to Party rule in China? Hopefully things will open up enough that we’ll be able to resume the kind of field research that we used to do. But looking for signs of democracy, I think, is simply not the most important research question for us to focus on at this point in time.

Christopher Marquis: That’s not a great sentence to end on. But we have to stop there. Thanks so much for the really interesting conversation about your book, Bruce.