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Chloé Froissart is Professor of Political Science at the Department of Chinese Studies at INALCO, Paris.

More than ever, China is asserting its desire to exercise global leadership, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region, where it is exerting increasing influence. While affirming its willingness to contribute constructively to what it calls “the common destiny of mankind”, it constantly opposes the “universal values” of democracy and human rights and often displays an aggressive and bellicose attitude. Does China have political standards to export?

During a speech delivered to the Central Party School in January 2013, President Xi Jinping outlined his thinking:

We firmly believe that with the development of socialism with Chinese characteristics, our system will inevitably mature; it is also inevitable that the superiority of our socialist system will become more and more visible. Inevitably, our path will become broader; inevitably, our country’s development path will enjoy increasing influence in the world. (Xi, 2019)

The desire to promote an economic and political model alternative to liberalism, as pushback against a century of humiliations and decades of taking the West as a model, is one of the major themes of the Xi Jinping presidency. Throughout the president's first five years in office, this has been expressed through the triumphant affirmation of a Chinese solution (Zhongguo fang’an), which has been forcefully asserted in several international forums.Footnote 1

So does China have a political model based on clear political norms that it can propose to, if not impose on, the rest of the world?

From my point of view, it is difficult to speak of Chinese political norms, in the sense of a coherent and intangible set of values, practices and institutions formalised and put forward by the regime. Political norms are the result of multiple and contradictory influences. Democracy, Leninism and Marxism, inherited from the relations that China has maintained with the West and the USSR, are all at the foundation of the Chinese regime. Moreover, these norms have been reinterpreted throughout Chinese history in a pragmatic way and have been assigned varying emphases in relation to each other in response to the concrete conditions and challenges of the moment. These political norms find their coherence only in their opposition to liberal democracy and human rights, as codified in international law. China is a one-party dictatorship, which in my view has now reverted to totalitarianism after an authoritarian moment that coincided with the reform era. The current totalitarian moment is characterised by two major dynamics. On the one hand, the Party regained control over the state and society, and more particularly the Supreme Leader regained control over the Party, the state and society. On the other hand, the importance of ideology has been reaffirmed. But the People's Republic of China has always claimed to be a democracy. Like the USSR before it, it includes formal features of democracy in terms of both institutions and practices. This is what is highlighted in the White Paper published by the State Council in December 2021, entitled China: A democracy that works (Embassy of the PRC in the United States, 2021). This document proposes an alternative political model to the Western liberal democracy in crisis, in the form of a model of good governance that would make it possible to guarantee social stability, economic development and “people’s rights” through the resolution of concrete problems, and without bothering with values relating to the fundamental rights of individuals. In a way, it is the Chinese regime’s trademark, on which China intends to base its appeal and legitimise its growing influence over international organisations and countries of the Global South. But the document itself is contradictory. It emphasises key concepts of democracy such as elections, participation and power-limiting practices. At the same time, it recalls the basic mechanisms of the CCP dictatorship: the democratic dictatorship of the people, democratic centralism and the mass line.Footnote 2

What exactly does this model refer to?

It is a model of authoritarian governance based on an instrumental conception of democracy that aims above all to strengthen the CCP’s capacity to govern, i.e. its leadership role and legitimacy. It is also a model, according to the White Paper on China’s Democracy (2021), that should allow for the reform of the Party and the state, by implication to make them more efficient. Stein Ringen, a political scientist and professor at Oxford, refers to this model as a “perfect dictatorship”, i.e. a dictatorship that would not appear to be one because it takes into account the needs and demands of the people to a certain extent, and allows for a certain degree of participation.

As the White Paper (2021) points out, Chinese dictatorship is based, among other things, on elections at the local level, in particular at the village level. Elections of the village committee and its chief have taken place since the late 1980s. These are supervised elections, with very little competition (the number of candidates is about 5% higher than the number of posts). If candidates are not necessarily members of the CCP, they must be loyal to the Party. Although village cadres still have to follow the directives of the higher level of the party-state (at the county level) and be evaluated by the latter, these elections introduced a relative degree of accountability by grassroots cadres to the villagers, whose needs were better taken into account. For example, in some localities, corruption and the levying of arbitrary taxes diminished, while the construction of infrastructure increased. To some extent, village elections have led to the emergence of more effective local elites and improved transparency in local government. But in some villages, such as Wukan in Guangdong Province, elections have failed to prevent local authorities from seizing villagers’ land and have not promoted compensation to villagers in accordance with the law.

The CCP has also set up a range of consultation channels such as letters and visits (or petitions xinfang) bureaus, administrations that receive citizens’ complaints and settle them, at best, through conciliation; as well as government office visit days (jiefang ri), administrative appeals (xingzheng fuyi) and administrative trials (xingzheng susong). China’s Environmental Protection Law allows NGOs to file public interest lawsuits in an attempt to promote legal change. Local governments across China have been required to set up Internet portals to solicit residents’ evaluations of municipal government performance and to respond to their complaints. These institutionalised practices make the administration more efficient and transparent and allow higher levels of government to be informed of local problems. The population is also consulted on draft laws in areas considered non-sensitive (not related to the fundamental interests of the state such as security, defence, etc.), i.e. economic, social and some Internet-related issues.

While these consultations certainly carry very little weight in the way laws are drafted by the National People’s Congress Standing Committee, they give people the impression that the government is listening and that they have a say in policy decisions.

The White Paper also mentions mechanisms of “power restraint”. Under the Hu Jintao–Wen Jiabao administration (2002–2012), these included social practices of supervision of the lower echelons of the party-state, with citizens often challenging local cadres who abused their power. The media—whose role in representing public opinion and controlling power was to some extent encouraged—as well as online mobilisations made it possible to bring cases of injustice at the local level to the attention of the public and the higher echelons of the party-state. This helped to influence legislation and policy-making, whether it was the abolition of custody centres where migrant workers were detained, the inclusion of PM 2.5 in pollution measurement, the halting of dam construction, etc. These practices, which were an integral part of the Chinese regime’s modus operandi in the 2000s up to 2016, did in fact allow for greater consideration of citizens’ rights and interests, but ended up threatening its stability at the beginning of the Xi Jinping era.

What about this model today?

This model, which the Hu-Wen administration underpinned with a discourse on the rule of law and human rights, and which generally balanced the divergent interests of society and the Party, has been challenged under Xi Jinping. As soon as Xi came to power, he emphasised control, surveillance, state security, discipline within the Party and society and the rejection of so-called Western values (constitutionalism, civil society, independence of the judiciary, etc.—in short, all terms referring to liberal democracy). This resulted in the repression of everything that had to do, de facto if not de jure, with a liberal and combative civil society that worked for the defence of citizens’ rights, and in the establishment of top-down modes of governance to the detriment of dialogue with society.

Most of the institutionalised channels of consultation (those allowing citizens to complain to the administration, administrative and public interest litigation, consultation on draft legislation) have not disappeared under Xi. What has disappeared are the non-institutionalised channels of consultation and participation, i.e. those initiated by social actors, including meetings and talks called by citizens and NGOs to bring problems formulated in their own terms to the attention of the administration and to propose solutions to the leadership.

Power-limiting practices have been widely challenged by the Party’s takeover of traditional and social media. Traditional media are now expected to act solely as the Party’s transmission belt and to instil confidence in the CCP among the people. In addition to increased control and censorship, the CCP has become a master at manipulating public opinion, whether through fake news and persuasion tactics or by influencing the practices of Internet users.

The limits of taking public opinion into account were amply illustrated by the way the CCP managed the Covid crisis and emphasised a model of total deprivation of freedom. The inhabitants of Shanghai shouting their anger and despair from the windows of their buildings were met by drones ordering them to suppress their desire for freedom. This extremely strict confinement was for both health and political reasons. Apart from the fact that the Party, especially its supreme leader, is supposed to be right all the time, Xi Jinping could not back down just months before the Twentieth National Party Congress when he had made this mode of management the mark of superiority of the Chinese model. The president also claimed that the way the crisis was handled in Shanghai corresponded to the Party’s modus operandi. But this model has once again demonstrated its inhumanity: we will never know how many people died of hunger or lack of medical care, while the violence against those who did not obey the Party’s directives was unprecedented.

In other words, not only does the Chinese Communist Party no longer tolerate the development of forms of counter-power within the regime—whereas these were encouraged under Hu-Wen—but it has considerably reinforced its modes of control. Three mechanisms are at work. First, China’s surveillance infrastructure has expanded considerably, both online—for example, now covering blogs that were once a space of relative freedom—and offline through the development of facial recognition technologies that allow the identification of protesters, but also of “suspects”. The changing aims of mass surveillance reveal a shift in the CCP’s understanding of security. It is no longer just about monitoring society and harshly punishing those who undermine the stability of the regime through their actions. The new systems are part of a logic of permanent control and even predictive mass control against “extremism”, particularly in Xinjiang. The data collection and cross-referencing system establishes a fine-mesh surveillance network that aims to catch all the seeds of dissent before they take root by tracking down “two-faced” individuals, i.e. those who hide their true political identity. The system is capable of analysing a huge amount of data according to an arbitrary grid of criteria to flag “unusual” behaviour and classify individuals according to the degree of risk they supposedly pose.

Secondly, the Party has increased legal mechanisms to strictly control activities and organisations that could potentially become political, as evidenced, for example, by the restrictions imposed on NGOs. According to the Charity Law and the Law on the Management of Overseas Organisations enacted in 2016, social organisations are now confined to the role of extensions and auxiliaries of the party-state. Private companies are also forced to collaborate with the authorities, particularly in matters of personal data and in criminal matters with the creation of broadly defined offences. The Party has passed a series of laws that allow for the systematic violation of human rights in the name of national security, and that institute a Schmittian conception of law in the service of the omnipotence of the state. The party-state thus has full latitude to establish “states of exception” enabling it to fight its “enemies”. The revision of the Criminal Procedure Law in 2012 and the passage of a law on “state supervision” in 2018 sent a clear signal to Chinese citizens that the enforced disappearance of certain types of suspects and targets is legal. In other words, tools traditionally associated with democracy or pluralism such as the law, public participation and NGOs are being methodically turned on their heads as means of perpetuating the regime and defusing social conflict.

Thirdly, the will to homogenise the social body is also obvious in attempts to discipline citizens and transform ways of thinking. The social credit system is based on the idea that every citizen should be subject to constant monitoring and evaluation of his or her conduct, whether in terms of payment of taxes or critical comments on social networks. “Thought reform” (sixiang gaizao), a feature of the Maoist totalitarian regime, is at the heart of “training centres” in Xinjiang where more than one million Uighurs and Kazakhs have been arbitrarily detained. These centres, which are supposed to rid these populations of their ethno-religious identity that designates them from the outset as “extremists” and “terrorists”, are the most successful expression of the importance given to the ideological education of citizens in general, in a context where universities are seen as fortresses of the regime. In a speech given at Renmin University on 25 April 2022, Xi Jinping said that Chinese universities should “inherit the red gene” and “follow the Party”, thus reviving the practices of the Cultural Revolution years (1966–1976). At that time, the selection and promotion of elites was based primarily on political loyalty: one had to be identified as “red” in order to serve the Party in achieving its ambitions for the development of the country. “Expertise”, i.e. competence, was not enough. The latter, confined to the purely technical domain so as not to contradict the Party's values, remains essential today insofar as it conditions the training capacities, scientific advances and innovation potential on which China’s geopolitical influence is based. Indeed, the new world leadership that Xi Jinping is trying to establish as an alternative to that of the United States defends a system of values that is different from that of democratic regimes, but which nevertheless aims to be modern and efficient in terms of results, particularly in the areas of science and education, which form the basis of the Chinese governance model.

How important is the kind of discourse developed in the Chinese White Paper on Democracy (2021) for research on political norms in Southeast Asia?

One has to distance oneself from what is primarily a political marketing strategy in the context of the rivalry between China and the West, especially the United States. Apart from the fact that, as I have just explained, political norms in China have changed over the past ten years, a political model can never be exported as it stands because it depends on the history, institutions and culture of a country. In this respect, all ASEAN countries are certainly not equally receptive to the Chinese “model”. A country such as Vietnam, which shares a communist history and the basic features of China’s political system, and whose culture has long been influenced by its powerful neighbour, is naturally more inclined to draw inspiration from the Chinese model, despite the tensions between the two countries. Moreover, it is necessary to distinguish between what is part of the political system and what is part of governance techniques that can be exported independently of the political system, two dimensions that the White Paper tends to confuse.

In addition, China is probably less interested in exporting a political or ideological model than in advancing its economic and geostrategic interests in the region. China fights against democracy, human rights and international law as obstacles to its interests, but whether it actively seeks to export a political or governance model, as it has in Hong Kong, for example, remains to be seen. Preliminary work by Maria Repnikova, an American political scientist who has studied the training of journalists and civil servants organised by China in Ethiopia, shows the opposite to be true. According to the author, these training sessions are primarily aimed at imparting technical solutions that may serve China’s economic interests, but not at training Ethiopian elites to integrate the Chinese experience into the governance of their country (Repnikova, 2022).

Nevertheless, the values put forward by China in its white papers on democracy and human rights—such as the idea that the right to subsistence takes precedence over all else, or that the security of the state and its citizens takes precedence over freedom—can provide justification for regimes seeking to legitimise their authoritarian tendencies. In the same way, Chinese laws on NGOs or cybersecurity can serve as a model. China’s political influence must also be taken seriously as a corollary of its policy of investment, internationalisation and development aid, especially as the struggle with the United States over influence in the region suggests that China leaves nothing to chance. China’s need to secure its economic and other interests in the region and to secure allies may have repercussions on the political life of ASEAN countries, the way they operate politically, the rule of law, civil societies and human rights.

In short, while China can hardly export a political model, its influence can be decisive in the hardening of political regimes in ASEAN countries. The aim would be to study how this political influence is exercised at different levels and to identify the different actors and practices.