Minxin Pei on China’s Return to Totalitarianism |
During China’s reform and opening process, there were moments when it seemed like the country could move beyond just economic reform toward political opening. The pro-democracy movement in 1989 was brutally quashed, but a new hope began to grow with the combination of China’s WTO accession and the advent of the internet. Suddenly, China had an influx of new voices championing constitutionally-guaranteed rights, relatively open (though always ultimately censored) discussions of social issues, and even experiments with village-level elections.
The China of the 2000s now seems like a distant dream. What happened?
Dr. Minxin Pei, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in California, sat down with The Diplomat’s Shannon Tiezzi to talk about how China went back to the bad old days of totalitarianism under Xi Jinping, as outlined in Pei’s new book, “The Broken China Dream: How Reform Revived Totalitarianism.” You can watch the interview in the video above, or read the transcript below.
Shannon Tiezzi: So as you probably guessed from the title, Professor Pei’s book looks at how China, despite its era of reform and opening that began in 1979, has actually pivoted back toward a totalitarian version of government that we haven’t seen since the Mao era. Professor Pei has offered to answer some questions about the book. And I want to start with one that I think kind of gets to the heart of the issue, which is that Xi Jinping has brought China back to this level of totalitarian rule that we haven’t seen since Mao. But also under Xi Jinping, the CCP is trying to redefine its governance system to say, actually, we are a democracy, what China calls a whole process people’s democracy. So why do you think Xi and the CCP are so keen to embrace the title of a democracy when it’s clear they want nothing to do with the substance of a democracy?
Minxin Pei: I think they realize that at the rhetorical level they are at a huge disadvantage because democracy as a value has truly become universal. All you need to do is to look at the formal name of North Korea, the Democratic People’s Republic. The country is probably the most cruel, the most dictatorial country in the world and still they would put democracy in the formal........