10 { China’s Quest
Chinese became aware of how fabulously wealthy even ordinary people were
in advanced capitalist countries. Even war-ravaged South Korea had far
higher standards of living than people in socialist China.
The PRC under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership after 1978 step by step aban-
doned a state-planned economy and allowed a market economy to emerge
and grow alongside the old state-planned sector—outgrowing the plan, one
scholar called it.^15 China’s economic system today may not be fully capitalist;
it still favors state ownership, discriminates against private firms, allocates
substantial capital on a nonmarket basis, and refuses to fully uphold private
proper t y.^16 But it most assuredly does not any longer resemble the Soviet eco-
nomic model of the 1930s, imposed on China by the CCP in the 1950s. China
under Deng Xiaoping’s rule discarded the Soviet economic model. The same
cannot be said for the PRC’s political system. The political system of the PRC
today is essentially the same Leninist system forged in the USSR in the 1920s
and transposed to China in the early 1950s. The Chinese Communist Party
that runs this out-of-date Leninist system struggles to protect its monopoly
on state power ruling over an increasingly affluent and educated population
that no longer believes in the myth of communism. All this has occurred in a
world increasingly swept by liberal ideals, movements, and revolutions, with
ideas and information carried by revolutionary technologies like the World
Wide Web.Legitimizing a Leninist Regime in a World Swept by Liberal IdeasOne dysfunctional consequence of the remaining political half of the PRC’s
Soviet legacy is weak legitimacy—even, after 1989, a chronic legitimacy cri-
sis. Legitimacy in a Leninist system operates not only between the regime
and the citizenry, but at the elite level as well. One of the traditional and
chronic weaknesses of Leninist regimes involves the succession of paramount
power from one individual to another. Peaceful and orderly transmission of
supreme power is a core functional task of all political systems, but there are
serious weaknesses in the way Leninist systems handle this function. In such
systems—at least, ones not dominated by a supreme and charismatic dictator
such as Stalin or Mao—paramount leaders depend on support by other top
leaders to stay in office: the Standing Committee of five to seven men, or the
Politburo of twenty-five or so, and in extremis the full Central Committee
of several hundred. If an incumbent paramount leader loses the support of
these few people, he may well be removed as paramount leader. Serious lapses
from requirements of the narrative of legitimacy could offer a rival or polit-
ical enemy a potent weapon.
The traditional set of ideas that legitimized Leninist vanguard states, in-
cluding the PRC, had to do with a claim by the “proletariat vanguard” party