industrial processes, finding new markets to maintain export growth and, more importantly, ramping up domestic demand. China is attempting to avoid the pitfalls of some of the East Asian economies such as Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia, which have fallen into the middle-income trap. China’s immediate neighboring economies such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong have provided it with good examples. All these high-income economies have demonstrated that to avoid the middle-income trap, an economy must move from growth that is dependent on cheap labour and capital to one based on high productivity and innovation. In this regard, China will have to build a highquality education system which encourages creativity and supports breakthroughs in science and technology. As a part of the East Asian community, China is expected to sustain its economic growth and become a high-income economy. In the next 15 years or so, a 6–7% annual growth, lower than the official target of 7.5% set by Premier Li Keqiang at the recently concluded National People’s Congress, will lead the country to realize this goal.
In my view, the biggest challenge for China is still political, namely, the survival of the CCP. As many have pointed out, the CCP can be brought down by corruption, internal party struggles and massive social unrest. However, China’s experiences since the reform show that many problems the CCP has encountered are developmental in nature. Many other regimes in the developing world had experienced the same problems although they may differ in terms of scale and complexity. But unlike many other developing countries which do not have the pillar of governance, China’s strength is the existence of the CCP. While many negative things can be attributed to the CCP, one cannot deny that the CCP has also done good things. Overall, it is a fast learning organization, learning from other countries and from its own past. The current anti-corruption campaign is a good case. In a short period of time, dozens of high-ranking party cadres and government officials have been investigated and arrested. Due to its rampant and widespread corruption, the CCP was regarded by many people as hopeless and helpless, and its only choice was to wait for its inevitable demise. However, waves of anti-corruption campaigns in the past decades have demonstrated that as long as the party leadership has a strong political will, the party can perform.
It is important to note that engaging in anti-corruption is the minimum requirement for the survival of the CCP. More important is that the CCP has to innovate itself by setting up new sets of institutions. The leadership is fully aware of it. The evolution of the CCP since the reform and opening up has its own reasons.
In the past three decades, the CCP has transformed from a one-party personal dictatorship to an increasingly open party system. This differentiates the CCP from other communist parties in the Eastern bloc before they collapsed. After the fall of communism, Eastern European states chose the Western path, allowing different interests to found different political parties. To avoid the misfortune of party collapse, the CCP has chosen a different way by opening up the political process to all social and interest groups. Due to this approach, China has evolved into an open party system under one-party rule.
Openness is becoming an important feature of China’s party system. Any political system that is not open will become exclusive and closed. Only with openness can politics be inclusive. In the West, political openness materializes through external pluralism, i.e., multi-party politics, in which each kind of interest can find representation in a party. In China, political openness is realized through a set of mechanisms I call “internal pluralism,” which means the openness of the ruling party. When different interests emerge in society, the ruling party opens itself to them, absorbing them into the regime and representing their interests through different institutions and mechanisms.
The institutional transformation of the CCP has been very rapid. Since no opposition party is allowed, for any social groups, entering into the political process of the CCP is the most efficient way to express their interests. The “Three Represents” concept proposed by Jiang Zemin in the early 2000s typically reflects the CCP’s realistic perception that it has to represent different social interests. Today, China’s increasingly large middle class, including private entrepreneurs, has demonstrated very strong demand for political participation. This is why the ruling party kept pace with the times by not only providing constitutional protection to non-state-owned sectors, including private enterprises, but also allowing and encouraging private entrepreneurs to join the ruling party. The change in the nature of party membership is an indicator. In the Maoist era, workers, peasants and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) constituted the majority of CCP membership, but since the reform period, intellectuals, professionals and the newly risen social stratum have made up an increasing proportion of members in the party. After the successful incorporation of private entrepreneurs into the party and the political process, the CCP has now begun to put an emphasis on “social governance” to expand its ruling foundation by absorbing more social forces, which have gained significant growth and development in the past decades. As the social base of the CCP enlarges, the demand for intra-party democracy has also increased. This is why the ruling party has been searching for various forms of inner-party democracy in the past decade. Scholars have coined China’s political development as “corporatism,” in which expanding middle classes, particularly private entrepreneurs, become the allies of the state, not independent civil society outside the state.
Nevertheless, the effectiveness of such internal pluralist openness is no less than that of any other system. Internal pluralism has differentiated China from other regimes in the Arabic world where most regimes are closed, with one family (monarchy) or a few families chronically monopolizing political power and dominating the country. The number of people entering into politics from lower social levels is much larger in China than many other countries, including democratic ones. The rule of the CCP is not based on a political family. It is a mass party with highly diversified interests.
A key feature of China’s party system is that political openness has facilitated the rapid alternation of political elite in a highly institutionalized manner. The nature of Western democracy is to realize peaceful alternation of political elites through periodical elections. China has steadfastly refused to follow the path of Western democracy; instead, it has developed a very efficient system of power succession. The late Deng was successful in establishing a number of important political institutions, including term limits, age limits and collective leadership.
The first is the term limit. The term limit matters. In general, leaders including the General Secretary of the CCP, the President of State, Premier and other important positions are allowed to serve at most two terms in office, i.e., 10 years. This system is not hugely different from many Western presidential systems. Obviously, the term limit is an effective institutional tool to prevent personal dictatorship which was prevalent under Mao, and to a lesser degree, under the late Deng. That is to say, although China does not have a Western form of democracy, it has found an alternative way to prevent personal dictatorship. When a person or a family has dominated a country for several decades, the system is prone to malpractices and abuses, which are unacceptable to the society.
The age limit also matters. It provides an exit system for aged political leaders and bureaucrats, i.e., the retirement system. In other political systems, the retirement system applies to civil servants, namely, bureaucrats. But in China, the system applies to all, including political leaders, civil servants, congress representatives, heads of social organizations and all other important governmental and semi-governmental organizations. For example, at the Political Bureau Standing Committee level, those who are 68 and above will have to retire regardless of the system of two-term limits; and those who are 67 and below can stay. (Of course, the exit age is changeable, depending on the need of the time.) At the ministerial level, those who are 65 and above will have to retire. At the bureau level, those who are 55 and above will have to retire.
Both the term limit and age limit have enabled Chinese political elites to renew themselves at an extremely fast pace and can thus effectively reflect generational changes and changes of interests. Compared to many other political systems, the Chinese political system facilitates the rapid and massive renewal of public officials. With the rigid enforcement of age limit, there are thousands of officials leaving their positions
