Ramping up rationality

Splitting the difference between Mao and Deng

See my translation of a think-piece Lin Shangli published in 2017, around the time he was promoted from Shanghai’s Fudan University to the Central Policy Research Office as a protégé of its long-time boss Wang Huning.

The Sixth Plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee of the CPC takes place on 16 November 2021. It’s noteworthy: previous paramount leaders Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping used similar occasions to launch ‘new eras’, big switches of the Party mission.

They are more significant than routine PR or propaganda however: alongside the high political theatre, Mao and Deng rang the changes on personnel, policies and indeed went on to deliver constitutional changes with worldwide impact. In domestic terms, the Party’s legitimacy claims and political-social contracts changed seriously.

Current Party General Secretary (and incidentally President and Military Commission chair) Xi Jinping has flagged that he heralds a new era. What will be its distinctive features? The Party has in the past taken delight in wrong-footing Western media, pulling last-minute reversals on the outcomes expected by pundits (and the likes of Beijing Baselines).

So we offer only a menu of main possibilities. A ‘new era’ automatically implies the end of the old one. Then why must it end? The question requires some kind of answer. As we see it, there are two broad options.

(1) Xi could claim to outdo either Mao (in a ‘left’ direction) or Deng (in a ‘right’ direction). These are high-cost options, implying , respectively, tighter closure and broader opening in trade, economic, cultural and ideological terms.

(2) Xi could claim to split the difference between Mao and Deng. This may involve defining some policy dimensions they have in common, but beyond them a third ‘path not taken’—and now take it, with great fanfare and solemnity.

There are arguments for all these and other options. We see a pattern that might favour (2): the writings of Lin Shangli, protégé of ideological authority Wang Huning 王沪宁. Wang is known to have the ear of Xi and indeed of two previous Party General Secretaries, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao.

See my translation of a think-piece Lin published in 2017, around the time he was promoted from Shanghai’s Fudan University to the Central Policy Research Office.

The article, ‘Institutions and development: political logic of self-confidence in China’s institutions’, raises the concept of ‘common prosperity’, obscure at the time but now turning wheels in the macropolicy dimension. But of deeper interest to Beijing Baselines, Lin Shangli subtly shifts the basis of the Party’s legitimacy (its ‘right to rule’) from both Maoist class struggle and egalitarianism, and Dengist development, to its ‘rationality’ and ‘efficacy’.

This really is splitting the difference; it also uncannily echoes the theoretical language of Stanford University’s Francis Fukuyama. Xi Jinping publically scoffs at Fukuyama’s youthful The End of History (1989, 1992), but the mature Fukuyama, author of Political Order and Political Decay (2014) has a broad following in the PRC, that just may include Lin Shangli. On visits in recent years Fukuyama typically raises Beijing’s lack of transparency and accountability, but sweetens the message by citing its rationality and efficacy…