Government involvement in promoting the economy through land development deals and other enterprises opens up the potential for widespread abuse of power and exacerbates the divide between the haves and have-nots. This is a familiar picture in most developing economies.
Government power, if left unbridled and unchecked, causes widespread corruption. Following this, social unrest ensues, threatening the legitimacy of the government. Over time, with the advent of democratic elections and improvements to the legal system, low levels of accountability and frequent occurrences of coercion are generally replaced by the development of rule-of-law and constraints on power.
China’s rule-of-law has not followed this familiar story. It has its own ‘Chinese characteristics’, as the Communist Party likes to remind us.
The China storyline diverges from the conventional one because the social fallout of breakneck economic growth and widespread corruption over recent decades has not merely risked slowing economic growth, but has threatened the very legitimacy of the Party’s ‘dictatorship of the people’. We witnessed this threat in the last decade during which, in every year from 2005 onwards, between 150,000 and 180,000 mass protests took place.
Over time, Party leaders have devised ways of dealing with this credibility deficit. Key to sustaining their power has been continued efforts to calibrate the legal system to function as a mechanism to constrain local-level functionaries on the one hand, and repress dissent on the other.
To rationalise this double-function, an alternative rule-of-law ideology has been developed by Xi Jinping that emphasises the centrality of the Party. It rests on an assertion that there is a fundamental harmony between three key concepts: rule-of-law, Party rule and the idea that — through Party representation of their interests — ‘the people are the masters of the nation’.
The logic here is that since the Party is supreme merely so that it can represent the people, and it is the people who are the masters of the nation, the Party does not need to build legal structures that protect the people from something that is their own manifestation of power (the Party). This justifies constraints on individual power-holders while enabling central Party authorities in Beijing to remain unconstrained in their overall authority over key aspects of governance such as legislation, law enforcement and national security.
This logic would seem preposterous to traditional liberal proponents of rule-of-law who advocate meaningful and enforceable restraints on all sources of power. Yet this is what Xi promotes as the Party’s take on rule-of-law.
This does not mean that the Xi leadership has ignored the importance of government accountability. But what it does mean is that accountability exists to protect the people against abuses of power by individuals and not the overall structures of Party power. Xi has exhorted party officials to improve their behaviour, to be models of good morality and to ‘rule the nation by means of moral virtue’ (yide zhiguo).
Currently, Xi Jinping is seeking to give the Party more effective control of the boundaries within which government accountability operates, so that all power-holders in the military, legal and security systems are clear about where power rests. The inference is that Party power (with Xi at the helm) sits above all of these areas, and by association, so too the laws under which legislature, judiciary, government and security organs operate.
On the one hand, the Xi leadership has improved checks-and-balances in the justice and security systems in an impressive but selective way. On the other, there has been intensified coercion against the people’s enemies through these systems.
Crackdowns in a number of areas of government and society have become a hallmark of Xi’s leadership. They include an anti-corruption campaign, a war on terrorism in Xinjiang and a two-year crusade against human rights lawyers that has seen hundreds of rule-of-law advocates arrested and punished.
In the West, ideology tends to be ignored as a tenebrous smoke-and-mirrors measure used to justify power through vacuous one-dimensional catch-phrases. But the Party’s yifa zhiguo and yide zhiguo ideology is much more than this.
In a very practical way, and as Xi Jinping himself asserts, it is about cultivating societal acceptance of an alternative to Western liberalism by promoting the idea that the Party rules through virtue.
This is setting down a new lay of the land for governance in China, with a renewed focus on the notion of Party-centric governance that Mao Zedong first embraced. Yifa zhiguo is working to reframe the parameters of power within which China’s security and government behemoths operate.
The Xi leadership is further integrating the Party into the state through a number of reforms to China’s national security system and through the establishment of a new National Supervision Commission. This is a mega anti-corruption body that will effectively merge state and party anti-corruption structures by way of integrating same-level Party commissions for disciplinary inspection, government corruption prevention agencies and state prosecution offices.
How the Xi leadership is reshaping Chinese governance under the umbrella of yifa zhiguo is an issue that cannot be contested in public discourse within China. The Party has locked the nation into a particular way of organising relationships in society that limits possibilities for a more robust system of accountability and checks and balances to develop outside the parameters of the Party’s leadership.
For the people of China, the development of a pluralistic society, a society where ideas and power are freely contested, is now further out of reach than it has been for decades.
Susan Trevaskes is a Professor in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences at Griffith University and Adjunct Director of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University.
Goodness! This brief article manages to present an awful lot of common misconceptions in a few words! Let us count the ways:
“Xi has exhorted party officials to improve their behaviour, to be models of good morality and to ‘rule the nation by means of moral virtue’ (yide zhiguo)…In a very practical way, and as Xi Jinping himself asserts, it is about cultivating societal acceptance of an alternative to Western liberalism by promoting the idea that the Party rules through virtue. This is setting down a new lay of the land for governance in China”. New? New? It’s been the bedrock of Chinese governance since the Duke of Zhou exemplified it in 3,000 BC and Confucius codified it in 500 BC and Emperor Qin Shi Huang began implementing it in 250 BC. It’s not exactly novel.
And the Chinese government has done a better job of implementing it than any previous dynasty, as Edelman Corp’s annual Global Trust surveys evidence: China has the most trusted government on earth, by a considerable margin. https://www.slideshare.net/EdelmanAPAC/2016-edelman-trust-barometer-china-english?qid=c13f229d-8a8f-4a93-bce8-aeb779e8cc70&v=&b=&from_search=1
As to “there has been intensified coercion against the people’s enemies through these systems,” where has there not been intensified coercion against the people’s enemies through these systems? The USA, lacking real enemies, even invents them in order to ‘crack down’ (far more brutally than the Chinese) on those it deems enemies.
And regarding the “two-year crusade against human rights lawyers that has seen hundreds of rule-of-law advocates arrested and punished,” closer inspection of these gentlemen always reveals that they have been trained and funded by the USA, whose human rights record, compared to China’s, is abysmal.
And, finally, it’s true that “Party leaders have devised ways of dealing with this credibility deficit”. They’ve done so in a particularly cunning, Communist way, by winning the people’s trust. According to the recent World Values Survey, 96% of Chinese expressed confidence in their government (compared to 37% of Americans). Likewise, 83% of Chinese thought their country is run for everyone’s benefit rather than for a few big interest groups (36% of Americans thought the same). http://www.wvsevsdb.com/wvs/WVSData.jsp?Idioma=I+(http://www.wvsevsdb.com/wvs/WVSData.jsp?Idioma=I).
1 In my view, the writer’s characterization of the rule of law in China has no merit. China’s multi-trillion dollar BRI will herald in a new Eurasian renaissance, with the free exchange of consumer goods, skills and ideas between the East and the West. For this grandiose, multilateral trade-initiative to work, can China’s rule of law be only a party-led regime?
2 “When emerging economies are in their early development phase, breakneck economic growth causes social dislocation and unequal distribution of wealth…”
If this is a universal truth then it implies that in a developed nation this is not a familiar picture. But American author Mr Stephen Lendman has a different view. He wrote in a recent piece entitled ‘America: A cesspool of criminality, inequity and injustice’ that “Among all developed nations, inequality in America is the most extreme. A land of opportunity for everyone is baloney…”
Mr Paul Craig Roberts, a former Reagan Treasury official, lamented: “As an economist I cannot identify in history any economy whose affairs have been so badly managed and prospects so severely damaged as the economy of the United States of America. It’s the first country in history to reverse the development process and to go backward by giving up industry, manufacturing and tradable professional skill jobs.”
3 China, on the other hand, was a basket case in 1978. Today, China has the world’s 2nd largest economy (largest in PPP terms since 2014) and is now the world’s biggest trading nation, with over US$3 trillion in foreign reserves. She has lifted some 900 million people out of poverty. Today, there are 700 million netizens in China (twice the total population in the US) and 120 million people travel overseas annually.
Mr Alfred McCoy, in his new book entitled ‘In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power’, wrote: “American leadership in technological innovation is clearly on the wane. In 2008, the United States still held the number two spot behind Japan in patent applications with 232,000. By 2014, China actually took the lead in this critical category with 801,000 patents, nearly half the world’s total, compared to just 285,000 for the Americans.”
He added that for the first time in 2010 China launched the world’s fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A and held the lead for the next 6 years. In 2016 China “finally won in a way that couldn’t be more crucial: with a supercomputer that had microprocessor chips made in China. By then, it also had the most supercomputers with 167 compared to 165 for the United States and only 29 for Japan.”
If China has done something right why is there a need to emulate the West whose economic system is failing? The United States is now the biggest debtor in the world with a National Debt in excess of US$20 trillion, not counting the unfunded debt which was US$222 trillion in 2014, according to Prof. Lawrence Kotlikoff of Boston University
4 “Government power, if left unbridled and unchecked, causes widespread corruption. “
This is true also for the United States and the EU but at least, as the writer points out, there is “an anti-corruption campaign” in China, initiated by President Xi.
In Mr Greg Hunter’s recent piece entitled ‘$21 Trillion Missing-US Government a Criminal Enterprise’, former US Assistant Secretary of Housing, Ms Catherine Austin Fitts, reportedly said that $21 trillion of missing Federal money can be added “on top of the $20 trillion US deficit”.
That may not include the US$8.5 trillion missing in the Pentagon today, up from US$2.3 trillion announced by then Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on prime time news on the eve of 9/11.
If the Pentagon is a public corporation, the CEO and CFO would now be languishing in prison but it is business as usual at the Pentagon and its accounts are still not audited. What happened to the rule of law?
And according to a 2014 BBC report the extent of corruption in the EU was “breathtaking”. The then EU Home Affairs Commissioner reported that the true cost of corruption was “probably much higher than 120 billion euros”.
5 “This logic would seem preposterous to traditional liberal proponents of rule-of-law who advocate meaningful and enforceable restraints on all sources of power.”
This is no longer true. According to Prof. Jean-Pierre Lehmann in his recent piece entitled ‘The Empires continue to strike back as international order continues to collapse’: “(t)here can be no doubt that the definitive coup de grace that destroyed whatever hope there might have been of a viable progressive new post-Cold War world order based on the rule of law came with the illegal American invasion of Iraq in 2003. Here was the then hegemon, alleged leader of the global liberal order, champion of the rule of law, egregiously violating the very principles it was meant to uphold and promote. In view of this act of lawlessness, the consequences of which have caused immense geopolitical mayhem and tragic human suffering, what possible grounds could Washington have for criticising others?”
6 “For the people of China, the development of a pluralistic society, a society where ideas and power are freely contested is now further out of reach than it has been for decades”.
But there is more than meets the eye for the people in the West. According to Mr Paul Craig Roberts “In America Government is not in the hands of its people. Government is in the hands of a ruling oligarchy. Oligarchic rule prevails regardless of electoral outcomes. The American people are entering a world of slavery more severe than anything that previously existed.”
Mr Stephen Lendman opined: “America is a plutocracy, not a democracy. The nation is run by sinister dark forces, a one-party state with two right wings serving them, Republicans and undemocratic Dems alike on vital issues mattering most, especially permanent wars, corporate empowerment, and police state enforcement”.
Professor Trevaskas’ piece begins with a series of jumbled propositions which grossly misrepresent
what serious economic scholars say about the rule of law and a country’s economic fortunes. She
says: ‘When emerging economies are in their early development phase, breakneck economic growth
causes social dislocation and unequal distribution of wealth. Government involvement in promoting
the economy through land development deals and other enterprises opens up the potential for
widespread abuse of power and exacerbates the divide between the haves and have-nots. This is a
familiar picture in most developing economies. Government power, if left unbridled and unchecked,
causes widespread corruption. Following this, social unrest ensues, threatening the legitimacy of the
government. Over time, with the advent of democratic elections and improvements to the legal
system, low levels of accountability and frequent occurrences of coercion are generally replaced by
the development of rule-of- law and constraints on power. Were the ‘storyline’ she relates all quite
so simple. Your readers will find a more nuanced account in Hutchinson and Das here:
https://www.routledge.com/Asia-and- the-Middle- Income-Trap/Hutchinson-
Das/p/book/9781138935112. It’s important to get the connections between markets and legal (and
other) institutions right to judge where Xi and China are at and what might succeed in delivering on
these promises. The distinction between different kinds of institutions and legal frameworks at
different levels of development is obviously important. Meta-governance issues, including political
system restraint on the power of power may well be a crucial bottleneck to to fulfilling the ambitions
of the relatively rich but of no consequence over a wide range of income levels. To say that debate
has been closed down about these things in China in the face of Xi’s Party morality drive defies all
credibility. It’s right up front in the academic institutions and even in the press, however blinkered
it’s supposed to be.