Sometimes the books that a country’s top leaders read can reveal a lot about what they are thinking. So one of the books recently read by some of the incoming members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the country’s top decision-making body, may come as a surprise: Alexis de Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the Revolution.
These leaders – to whom the CCP is about to pass the baton at its 18th congress, scheduled for November 8 – reportedly not only read Tocqueville’s diagnosis of social conditions on the eve of the French Revolution, but also recommended it to their friends. If so, the obvious question is why China’s future rulers are circulating a foreign classic on social revolution?
The answer is not hard to find. Capital flight from China is now at a record high. Polls of China’s dollar millionaires reveal that half of them want to emigrate. Amid intensifying calls for democracy, China’s leader-in-waiting, Xi Jinping, reportedly met with the son of the late Hu Yaobang, a political reformer and icon of Chinese liberals. While one should not read too much into such a visit, it is safe to say that China’s next leader knows that the Celestial Kingdom is becoming unsettled.
Several emerging trends have greatly altered the balance of power between the CCP and society. One such is the emergence of inde-pendent figures of public moral authority: successful businessmen, respected academics, journalists and writers, and influential bloggers – people such as Hu Shuli (who founded two influential business magazines), Pan Shiyi (an outspoken property developer) and the bloggers Han Han and Li Chengpeng.
Taking advantage of the internet and weibo (the Chinese equivalent of Twitter), they have become champions of social justice. Their moral courage and social stature have, in turn, helped them to build mass support. Their voices often reframe the terms of social-policy debate and put the CCP on the defensive.
For the party, this development is clearly worrying. It is now ceding the commanding heights of Chinese politics to autonomous representatives of social forces that it cannot control. The CCP’s monopoly of public moral authority is long gone, and now its monopoly of political power is at risk as well.
That loss is compounded by the collapse of the party’s credibility among ordinary people. In the last decade, a series of scandals and crises – involving public safety, adulterated food and drugs, and environmental pollution – has thoroughly destroyed what little credibility lingered.
Repression is yielding diminishing returns for the party, owing to a third revolutionary development: the dramatic decline in the cost of collective action. Autocracies stay in power if they can divide the population and prevent organised opposition activities. Although the CCP faces no organised opposition today, it confronts virtually organised protest activities on a daily basis.
If governing by fear is no longer tenable, China’s new rulers must start fearing for the CCP’s future. As the country’s silent political revolution continues to unfold, the question is whether they will heed its signs, or attempt to maintain an order that – like the French monarchy – cannot be saved.
• Minxin Pei is professor of government at Claremont McKenna College