Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021. xv, 311 pp. US$120.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-7936-1667-8.
Dictatorship by Degrees: Xi Jinping in China offers a sweeping commentary on contemporary Chinese politics and political culture. According to Stephen P. Feldman, emeritus professor in business ethics at Case Western Reserve University, China is in a state of “pre-totalitarianism,” wherein dictatorship is ever-present but incomplete, repression everywhere on the rise but still selective, and where strongmen cling to hollow ideologies in an effort to make up for institutional weakness. Pre-totalitarian insecurity helps explain why China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, opts for centralization and idealism over the decentralized pragmaticism of his predecessors. Pre-totalitarian instability also raises the specter of a China descending ever deeper into full totalitarianism.
The argument is based on field data—including semi-structured interviews, news clippings, and observational commentary—collected by Feldman in China between June 2015 and July 2016. The book is organized thematically, with each theme incorporating a dozen or so sub-themes populated by interview quotations and snippets from news articles. Within each sub-theme, Feldman provides a miniature discussion section, where he gives the reader his own interpretation of the topics and questions covered by the field data. The eclectic empirical approach and the sweeping thematic structure allow Feldman to cover much ground, from the strategic logic motivating political elites to the political psychology binding average citizens to a system that is both morally corrupt and physically repressive.
Feldman’s ambitious analysis may prove overwhelming for some readers. Different data categories are used interchangeably, making it difficult to ascertain how individual pieces of information were collected or to determine how different data points are triangulated across the numerous discussion sections. Careful readers will thus have hard a time adjudicating evidence because they do not understand how the various sources were chosen, privileged, or discounted. Likewise, China scholars, who have their own vantage points for studying the Chinese political scene, may find it difficult to engage with conclusions drawn from individual conversations or observations. Ethnographers too may question the extent to which Feldman’s analysis captures how his interlocuters interpret their own political system versus their attempts to communicate as much to an American in the context of highly charged bilateral relations and a sensitive political environment.
Empirical and methodological concerns aside, the book offers generous insights that will invite conversation and debate. Feldman, for instance, seems to side with his interlocuters in concluding that Xi Jinping is not an average strongman out for himself, but rather a patriarch who would “do anything to protect the [Chinese Communist] Party” (274) and an extended family of princelings (offspring of founding leaders) from whom Xi draws support and with whom he perceives a common destiny. Political scientists will take note of such claims insofar as they challenge conventional wisdom about the office-seeking nature of elite politics in authoritarian systems. Organizationally, Feldman claims that an increasingly elitist Party is worried about losing its connection with the poor, working masses. In response, the Party is “recruiting cadre from less cosmopolitan parts of the country” (293). While the scale of this recruitment is unclear, the proposition warrants future study.
Some of Feldman’s passing arguments can at times feel overly deterministic, others border on the unfalsifiable. At one point, Feldman argues that “If Mao is discredited the Communist Party falls” (28). This may be true, but history demonstrates that incumbent regimes are capable of criticizing and downplaying former leaders. De-Stalinization under Khrushchev, for instance, was extensive. When Feldman observes that “Fluidity is the central characteristic of the Chinese political system,” few would disagree. Yet readers may find that wisdom overshadowed by the fact that China’s Communist Party is now one of the longest ruling single-party regimes in history, second only to that of Vietnam.
Feldman’s logic also leaves some important questions on the table. Is Xi responding to a pre-totalitarian environment or was it Xi himself who ushered in a pre-totalitarian moment? Feldman does not take a strong position on this question, but the field notes emphasized in chapter 3, suggest that the current regime is a party of one and that it was Xi’s personal style that led to characteristically pre-totalitarian tactics, such as violent anti-corruption campaigns. This North Korean-like interpretation is, however, at odds with recent work in China studies, which, while acknowledging the prominence of Xi Jinping, has instead focused the intellectual lens on mobilization and organization strategies that improve governance while insuring party control. Indeed, Feldman’s literature review suggests that the Party was facing a political crisis before Xi came to power—indicating that it is ruling-group insecurity, not personal whims, that give way to pre-totalitarianism. If so, institutional counterfactuals—like the liberalization and decentralization that followed the instability of China’s Cultural Revolution period—are also possible but not explored.
Pre-totalitarianism as a concept also does not reveal why Chinese citizens would endorse a political culture that seems to put them at risk. According to Feldman, tradition and indoctrination collude in sustaining a regime-supporting political culture. Confucian culture, for instance, makes the Chinese public more accepting of paternalistic rulers, while mass indoctrination leaves the public tolerant of policies that subjugate the individual to the collective while also eroding the memory of suffering from similar policies in the past. Such claims will draw ire from regional specialists who will be quick to point out nearby counterexamples where Confucian societies have fostered vibrant democracy. By over-paternalizing Chinese popular psychology, Feldman risks infantilizing the very people his study sought to give voice to. Indeed, the more provocative argument is, as Feldman points out in chapter 6, that many Chinese citizens value the social, economic, and political stability the Party has curated over the last three decades. Underscoring this point further would, however, come into tension with Feldman’s core assumption about pre-totalitarianism being inherently unstable.
Dimitar D. Gueorguiev
Syracuse University, Syracuse