Joseph Wong Analyzes China's Democratization Prospects in Comparative Perspective

FISC: I want to ask you about the right way to conceptualize democratization through strength, which is one of the core concepts of the book. One sense I got from your chapter on the theory was that it is an off-ramp, or a controlled fall, for authoritarian regimes that would otherwise undergo a worse collapse down the line if they waited too long to democratize. Alternatively, there was some language that I thought made democratization through strength sound like a beneficial thing for the incumbent regime irrespective of whether it faces collapse or not. Should we think of this as a necessary evil to avert a worse outcome or an outright positive for authoritarian regimes?

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Wong: That’s a great observation, and I don’t want to cheapen the distinction by saying it can be both.

 

We are very careful in saying that there is a point when the party reaches its apex of power, and then after that, it reaches what we call the bittersweet spot. It’s bitter because the regime or the ruling party is in imminent and precipitous decline, but it’s sweet in the sense that if it were to make a concession, it would in all likelihood remain in power, and at worst remain relevant, not obsolete. 

 

You have stronger regimes that are closer to the apex of power that could really turn this into a net positive, which is arguably what we saw in the case of Taiwan. If you’re further on down the curve, and you’re more bitter than sweet at this point, then it may be somewhat of a controlled fall, or as we described them, democratic experiments. We saw this in the case of Myanmar: you can always reverse it, as the military has done there. In South Korea, there was a sense that the regime was further down the curve than Taiwan’s KMT ever was, but they were still pretty strong. I don’t know that I would say [the regime’s democratization] was a controlled fall, but it was a calculated risk, and as they hoped, the opposition split and the regime’s presidential candidate won the presidency with a plurality. In our treatment of the Japanese case, we make the argument that proto-democratic institutions were in place long before the peace constitution was implemented after World War II, and for the incumbent conservatives’ political fortunes, conceding democracy was a real net gain.

 

02   Structural and Personal Factors in Democratization

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FISC: Even though this is a structural study, your chapter on Taiwan also made me think about the role of personalities and individual decisions in the democratization process. Do some of the decisions that authoritarian regimes make about whether to democratize or crack down come down to individual personalities as well as structural incentives? 

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Wong: That’s a great question. One of the things that we make very clear in the book is that democracy emerges from a series of choices. It has always been a critique of modernization theory, for instance, that it posits a sort of magical boom where democracy emerges after a country develops. I’m being overly simplistic, but that is a very structural argument, and that’s not what happens in real life. What happens in real life is that people make decisions, the democratic activist chooses to go out into the streets, the democratic martyr chooses to give up his or her life, just as the autocrat in the case of Taiwan chooses to concede.

 

Critics of the book, or rather those who would like a little deeper consideration of the individual stories that are told throughout the book, have noted that one interpretation would be that Chiang Ching-kuo was critical for Taiwan’s democratization because he chose to concede. Many of my friends and contemporaries who were on the streets fighting for democracy say, Chiang Ching-kuo was not a democrat. We actually go to explicit lengths in the book to say that we’re not saying he was a democrat. We’re saying that he got out of the way. If more dictators chose to get out of the way, the world would be a better place. That itself is still a decision, so individuals do matter.

 

We’re also very careful to say that we have no way of getting into the head of Chiang Ching-kuo because he’s not alive anymore and there’s no way we could interview him. There are some archival records, and we do know the structural forces and incentives that were in play, and we infer that he made these choices as a concession in order for the KMT to stay in power. We don’t have the ability in this book to delve into the psychology of individuals, just as we wouldn’t be able to delve into the psychology of Xi Jinping, and we don’t really go into that in the book when we talk about democratic prospects in China. Even though we all know that Xi is an obstacle to democratization, we wouldn’t go so far as to try to analyze the personality of Xi or anything like that. 
 

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03   Beijing in 1989: A Show of Weakness?

 

FISC: In your exploration of the case of China, your discussion of the events leading up to and during June 1989 very much cut against the grain. For those who haven’t read it, can you share your perspective on the crackdown on the mass protests and tell us why you diverge from the common view that the crackdown reflected the strength of the regime?

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Wong: The crescendo of our whole China analysis is that it is currently the ideal candidate case for democratization through strength, so that raised the question for us, what if we were to apply our theory back to 1989? We started thinking and theorizing that contrary to the conventional wisdom, which is that this was an extraordinarily strong regime doing what extraordinarily strong autocratic regimes do, it was actually a weak autocratic regime doing what weak autocratic regimes do, which is repress. 

 

When you start thinking about it through that lens, it actually lines up empirically. 1989 was just a decade and a few years after the end of the Cultural Revolution, where the party was completely torn apart, and the economy was still extremely poor and had barely grown in the decade and a half before. All of the hallmarks of strength that we typically think of, like a record of economic development, a strong political party or organization, a unified elite, and a regime that is confident in its ability to govern and in its bureaucratic capacity, were absent. This was not a regime that was strong enough to concede, but it was also too strong to collapse.

 

04   A Desire to Concede Democracy?

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FISC: You also used the phrase “strong enough to concede” in the book. Linking back to my question about whether democratization through strength is a necessary evil or a beneficial thing for authoritarian regimes, isn’t concession something that you do because you need to, not because you want to? Does the idea of being “strong enough to concede” suggest that they would have conceded if they could? Or did Deng Xiaoping just not want to democratize in 1989?

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Wong: Would this have even been in the dictator’s toolkit in 1989 in China? I think that a good argument could be made that the answer is, likely not. Given its own revolutionary past and so forth, that’s just not part of the party’s arsenal of choices. From a pure structural politics point of view, though, and incentive alignment point of view, we just want to be clear in saying it could have been a very plausible choice in 1989. 

 

I think the interesting point looking forward is that if ever there was a regime that should be strong enough and confident enough to concede democracy, it should be the CCP of today or at least the CCP of a few years ago, when we were writing this book. Yet we see no indication that the regime would ever consider a democracy through strength scenario. 

 

It’s always struck me in talking to many of my friends in China that the comparison to the former Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the lessons that are derived from that, at least in the minds of the Chinese elite, are the wrong lessons to take. They look to the collapse of the USSR as evidence that if you democratize, you’re inviting chaos and instability. That lesson is only partially right. That’s what happens when you concede when you’re weak. Even though perestroika and glasnost were viewed as top-down liberalizing reforms, they were liberalizing reforms that simply revealed the inherent rot that was already in the system. The cautionary tale to take from the Soviet Union is not that if you democratize you’re going to invite chaos and instability, but rather if you wait too long and go beyond your best before date, the prospects for the incumbent regime are that much more dire. Talking to people in China, they might not instinctively think about things that way, but when you reason with them through it, many can actually see that if China were to democratize, doing it sooner rather than later makes more sense for the incumbent regime.

 

05   Imagining Chinese Democratization through Strength

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FISC: If China were to try to democratize through strength, what do you think that would look like? Are there institutional obstacles to the regime democratizing in a stable way? 

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Wong: There are two ways to think about that question. One is, would the regime do it? The second is, could the regime do it in the way in which we saw it in the rest of the region?

 

As we argued in the book, there are lots of reasons to expect the regime not to choose to do this. The central regime is very good at deflecting blame and localizing blame for people’s ills. You also have to consider the ideological basis of the CCP. In the book, we talk about how in the socialist developmental cluster, there is the real challenge that democracy was just never part of the menu of options in the birth of these revolutionary regimes. We also talk about the issues of geopolitical rivalry and Xi Jinping’s clear resistance to this. 

 

But even if the regime chose to democratize, could it? I think there are some distinct differences between the role of the CCP in China and the role of the ruling party in some of the other developmentalist regimes in developmental Asia. The PLA is under the control of the Party, not the state apparatus, and even when you had autocratic regimes in places like Taiwan, even though the party controlled the state, the military was nonetheless not part of the ruling party. If China were ever to liberalize, it would need to sort this out. We saw what happens in militarist regimes when the military and the civilian regime split: the military can always rear its dictatorial head again once it senses instability. One also can’t imagine the CCP ever conceding liberal democracy in the current context of geopolitical and ideological rivalry between the allied democratic West and the non-democracies. 

 

It really does make one think, are there ways in which we can rethink how we do democracy promotion? How do we talk about democracy in the context of this geopolitical rivalry? If we talk about democracy as a product of the West or the better regime type, that kind of pressure just strikes me as being not particularly useful in today’s China. One can’t imagine that Xi Jinping is going to wake up one morning and say, boy, that pressure’s really getting to me, so I think I’m going to democratize now. I think looking for a regime to collapse or looking to shame Xi Jinping into making that kind of choice is a fool’s game. 

I think when we think about democracy promotion for a regime like the CCP that has absolutely no interest other than staying in power, one can actually say to them, democracy can be incentive-compatible to your preferences. You can democratize and create a more level political playing field while staying in power through a new kind of democratic legitimacy that is actually more forgiving than relying solely on economic performance legitimacy, which can be fleeting and hard to regain. Hopefully the regime will see that democratic transition is not something to be fearful of, and that it can actually further enrich and develop China.
 

 

06   An Update to Modernization Theory? 

 

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FISC: Given your findings in this study, do we need to update our understanding of modernization theory in any way? You noted that the global trend of wealthier countries tending to be more democratic remains strong, but you also observed that many polities in Asia do not bear out the predictions of modernization theory. 

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Wong:  That’s a great question. I think that in one sense, we’re all updating modernization theory. Modernization theory has been refined in many ways over the years, in terms of how we think about everything from growth equaling democracy to a zone of growth equaling democracy, natural-resource-dependent rich economies being less likely to democratize, and so forth. 

 

In our book, we understand development as a way in which regimes can accumulate antecedent strengths, which is of course critical to our theory, so I think there’s some refinement there. We also make the point that while our book was really motivated to explain democratic transitions in the region, it is as much a book about development. It’s a story about how these societies were not only politically transformed but socially and economically transformed from what were once very poor economies into in some cases some of the richest, biggest economies in the world. So it is also a story about development, which is very much a modernization theory kind of story.

 

We finish the book by saying that democracy is, by our estimation, a universal value, or at least not inconsistent with other value orientations around the world. However, we also are very careful in saying that the ultimate values are prosperity, peace, and a fulfilling life. These are shared universally, and if a democracy fails to deliver development, just like in an autocracy, the regime is always under threat.

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