Martin K. Dimitrov on Why China Continues to be Communist

FISC: One of the things I appreciated about your volume is that even though your own research focuses on institutions, you featured contributors who also noted the importance of contingency and the agency of individual actors in determining whether Communist regimes survived or collapsed. Could you talk about the importance of contingency in explaining why communism collapsed in the Soviet Union and its client states in Eastern Europe and Mongolia but survived in cases like China?

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Dimitrov: The difference between structure and contingency when it comes to both the stability of communist regimes and their collapse is of course a question of central importance. I am personally more interested in structural explanations. Contingency is oftentimes linked to individual leaders and their decisions, and of course there is a rich tradition of scholarship in political science and history that looks at individual leaders and how leaders matter. The conclusion is that they do matter, but it’s hard to argue systematically how they matter.

 

What I do in this edited volume is put a premium on structural explanations for the resilience of Communist regimes, and I go into depth on various institutions. The way that I understand this, and the way that I describe it, is that there were structural preconditions for collapse; the capacity of these regimes to engage in ongoing adaptive change had stalled, and from my point of view, this is the crucial factor. But then, of course, the decisions of individual leaders like Gorbachev and the leaders of Eastern Europe who followed him to unleash perestroika and glasnost catalyzed the process of decay, and the party lost control over the process and then collapse followed. In the context of China, the decision of Deng Xiaoping and other leaders in 1989 to use repression was of course also hugely consequential.

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02  Continued Survival

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FISC: Today, eleven years after the volume’s release, all five of the regimes that survived 1989-1991 are still in power. Insofar as we can tell, there are no critical or immediate challenges to their primacy. As the editor of the volume, what does that make you think about its thesis in retrospect?

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Dimitrov: The continued survival of these regimes makes me continue to believe in the favored explanation in the volume: the strength of institutions and the capacity to continue to engage in adaptive change allow these regimes to endure. Ideology also continues to be extremely important in these five regimes, which is another argument that is advanced in the volume.

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I didn’t want to have a project that focuses only on repression, so one of the criticisms that could be leveled against this volume is that it doesn’t tell us all that much about repression. I said that of course repression is very important for maintaining these regimes, but I’m interested in mechanisms that go beyond repression. Now that the volume has been out for 10 years, however, it’s clear that repression of course continues to play a very important role in maintaining these regimes. In the group of five countries where communism survives, what’s important is that repressive capacity has not declined.

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03  What is Vertical Accountability?

 

FISC: Tell us what vertical accountability is and how it helps communist regimes remain in power

 

Dimitrov: In democratic systems, the primary mechanism of vertical accountability is elections. Citizens go to the polls, and if politicians do not deliver the goods that they promised, those politicians are punished by being voted out of office. When this volume was being produced, I got a lot of pushback for arguing that in an authoritarian setting, without competitive elections, it is possible to have mechanisms of accountability. What I argued is that when citizens complain, even though this is not voting, it has a similar function to voting, because it transmits information about dissatisfaction with the performance of specific government officials. These officials then can be, and with a certain frequency are, punished by their superiors. In this way, the citizens act as proxies for the higher levels of government, and the higher levels of government punish the officials who underperform. This is the mechanism of vertical accountability that I explore in the chapter that I authored in this volume, which is an empirical chapter comparing citizen complaints in Bulgaria and China.

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Of course, there could be questions about how well this mechanism functions, both in individual countries and over time. Citizen complaining in China is not as effective as it has been traditionally in Eastern Europe, which is why citizens in China are more likely to engage in protests than complaints. Protests represent an escalation tactic. After dissatisfaction with the outcome of complaints, citizens go out and protest. Protests also are a mechanism for holding officials accountable, so they represent another avenue for vertical accountability in a non-electoral setting.

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04  Local Protests in China

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FISC: You wrote about the significant rise in protests in China in the 1990s and 2000s and the fact that these protests were generally directed at local governments rather than the central government. It seems that a huge part of the story of the survival of the regime after the fall of communism elsewhere lies in its ability to channel people’s anger toward local governments rather than the center. Given the permissibility in China of public criticism and punishment of local and lower-down officials and the taboo on criticism of the center, how much of this locally-directed protest is due to people targeting local officials as a proxy of the center?

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Dimitrov: This is a great question, and it is certainly a question that I had when I was writing about protests. I think if we look at the issues about which citizens protest in China, we will note that the protests are overwhelmingly about socio-economic matters like employment, proper compensation for employment, payment of pensions and various other types of social security, illegal land takings, and illegal demolition of housing. If we look at these issues, the problem actually is with the local government, not the center. So I feel that on those issues, people do see the center as their ally against these local officials that are either misimplementing central policies or just corrupt. I don’t think when citizens engage in socio-economic protests they also have grievances against the center.

 

05  Workers in Tiananmen

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FISC: You spoke in your chapter about how there were essentially two Tiananmens during the protests in 1989: the one that we all know about, with students protesting for democracy and broad political demands, and another one that we hear much less about, which was workers protesting with very different demands. Talk us through the circumstances that led to this other aspect of the Tiananmen protests in 1989 and how those events were anticipated by data on vertical accountability in the 1980s.

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Dimitrov: When we think about 1989 and Tiananmen, we think about intellectuals and students protesting in the square, but students were not the only protesters. In a separate part of Tiananmen Square, which of course is huge, there were workers. The students’ demands were to be included in important positions in the Communist Party and to have a more consultative type of leadership that took their views into account. The students did not have material concerns; the workers did. The workers were very unhappy because not only Beijing but all of China was experiencing double-digit inflation for a couple of years in the leadup to Tiananmen, and also because laws had been passed in 1986 and 1987 which made it possible for state-owned enterprises to go bankrupt. That meant that those workers were facing unemployment. Both bankruptcy and unemployment were very unfamiliar and scary concepts for these urban workers who were accustomed to the guarantee of lifetime employment and all the benefits that accompanied it, like housing, health care, and education for their children. They wanted job certainty and control of prices, because large aspects of economic activity were still part of the planned economy at the time.

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How do complaints feed into this? Prior to the protests, what we have is a decline in complaining. At first, that is counter-intuitive, but it’s actually fully consistent with the theory that I develop about the relationship between complaints and protests. This decline is not reflective of diminishing grievances, but of lower responsiveness to the grievances that complainants lodged with the authorities. As complaints go closer to zero, the likelihood of citizens going into the street becomes exponentially larger. The workers came out into Tiananmen Square precisely because responsiveness to complaints had diminished.

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06  Internal Polling in China 

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FISC: Another part of the citizen feedback picture that you discussed in your book Dictatorship and Information is public opinion polling that Communist regimes conduct on an internal basis, without publishing the results. Can you tell us if that is a significant part of Beijing’s governance approach today?

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Dimitrov: Internal polling continues, and during Covid, there was a wave of the China Social Survey that had some extremely interesting questions, so the government continues to need to know what people think. How responsive it is to those preferences is a separate matter, but the center certainly continues to be mindful of the importance of getting accurate evaluations of public opinion and of the importance of maintaining a certain level of responsiveness to public opinion. This is why the letters and visits system continues to exist even though there have been longstanding discussions that it’s useless and should be scrapped.

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I’m somewhat skeptical, and communist regime insiders in some past regimes were also somewhat skeptical, about the value of these types of internal opinion polls. The problem with this type of polling was that on truly sensitive questions, such as support for the central government, for the regime, or for the regime’s ideology, citizens were likely to engage in what scholars call preference falsification, meaning that they gave the answers that they thought pollsters expected from them. I have come across evidence both in the archives and in interviews that I’ve conducted that communist regime insiders did know that, and when the pollsters conducted the polls, they told them that the numbers regarding support for the regime, the party, and the ruling ideology were unrealistic. Consequently, in East Germany, Honecker decided to simply close down the secret opinion research institute of the central committee of the German Socialist Party. 

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I feel that in China, in the last decade especially, citizens are becoming more willing to express critical opinion in their response to these classified polls, especially when this critical opinion is of lower levels of the government, but these questions are not about the center. I think that whenever we get to the center, or the Communist Party itself, we just need to be very careful. I personally remain skeptical about those numbers.

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07  Is Repression Sufficient to Ensure Regime Survival?

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FISC: You argued in your introduction that “autocracies cannot rely on force alone to survive, they also need to engage in adaptive institutional change.” In the past, you’ve also emphasized how China’s vast technological repressive apparatus is not all it’s cracked up to be. You argue that many surveillance cameras do not work, for example, and those that do still require human analysts to parse their data, so the system is far from seamless. But looking 10 or 20 years down the line, don’t you think that technological improvements and continued heavy investment in the repressive apparatus will iron out such issues and substantially shrink the space for citizens to make demands in a way that the government has to be responsive to?

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Dimitrov: This is a really great question. Ten to twenty years is a long period of time, and of course it is difficult to forecast what might happen. Technology will certainly continue to evolve, and the Chinese government and the tech giants that it collaborates with will develop new and better ways to see and know more about citizens. I think you’re correct that this will constrain the space for individuals to engage in challenges to the regime.

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But I think the question for me is, will this space be completely eliminated? I remain an optimist when it comes to the capacity of humans to devise ways to evade controls. Technology has been constantly evolving, but especially rapidly so in the 20th century. The 20th century also brought us technologies of surveillance that at the time were thought to confer totalistic surveillance, and in East Germany, the Stasi had the most pervasive surveillance apparatus, yet there was resistance, and people were able to evade it. Of course, East Germany in the 1970s and 1980s is not China in the 2020s, and who knows what China in the 2030s or 2040s will be like. It will certainly be more technologically sophisticated.

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But I think that perfect surveillance and perfectly totalistic surveillance is a fiction. There will always be a space, and if there is a real desire and a real grievance in individuals, they will find ways to resist. It will not be easy, but I hope and I feel and I trust that there will remain such spaces in the future, and that China and other authoritarian regimes will not be able to implement this perfect state of totalistic technological surveillance.

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