In China's Governance Puzzle: Enabling Transparency and Participation in a Single-Party State (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Edmund Malesky, Jonathan Stromseth and Dimitar Gueorguiev argued that Hu–Wen era reforms that aimed to increase government transparency and open up new channels for public consultation in law-making succeeded in significantly improving public administration and, therefore, governance outcomes across China. By disclosing information on government budgets and allowing for limited forms of public participation via hearings and public comment campaigns, the central party-state has been able to deter corruption and ensure downstream compliance, ultimately boosting both the effectiveness and legitimacy of the regime. Gueorguiev's new monograph seeks to press beyond the model of public consultation described in China's Governance Puzzle, and to catalogue the fuller range of participatory arenas that cast Chinese citizens as participants in the project of authoritarian governance.
Gueorguiev refers to this as “controlled inclusion.” If the “preoccupation with control at the expense of inclusion leads to brutish and crude dictatorship” (p. 27), and increased inclusion without upscaled control leads to social instability, Gueorguiev's analysis posits the possibility of a dynamic balance between the two that can become not only self-perpetuating, but even self-reinforcing. He acknowledges that this is a difficult balance to strike: “controlled inclusion presupposes a level of control that is most likely out of reach for low-capacity or narrowly constituted authoritarian regimes … [however] for those regimes that have either inherited or invested in broader public support bases and more sophisticated methods of control, greater inclusion becomes an option as well as an opportunity” (p. 30). Allowing critics to speak on behalf of their interests and concerns during the policy formulation – instead of implementation – process can pre-empt and otherwise reduce overt opposition. Selective inclusion of the public in deliberation can provide agents of the state with valuable information that can improve outcomes, as well as boost legitimacy.
These are not new findings; but the author hones in on the specific mechanisms by which this is achieved – those efficient controls that “not only make inclusion less risky … but also help the regime render inputs generated by inclusion into useful information” (p. 32) – in the Chinese context. These include citizen tip-offs that aid in anticorruption efforts, structured consultation campaigns and public opinion surveys that are generally targeted to dovetail with regime preferences, as well as the participation of delegates in local people's congresses. Each of these opportunities for inclusion, naturally, is accompanied by inherent dangers: internet portals inviting informants to report corrupt dealings could flood a system with spurious and unfounded accusations; public opinion surveys could spark popular debate that might potentially deepen polarization and create political flashpoints around sensitive issues; allowing delegates to coordinate their proposals could encourage organized opposition. The downstream policy effects of controlled inclusion in practice likewise involve substantial trade-offs: public consultation slows implementation, participatory budgeting tends to raise public expectations regarding accountability, and the government's heavy reliance on internet platforms and massive data-driven efforts like China's social credit system could ultimately shrink the utility of the Party's role in mediating between state and society. “Ironically, one of the outcomes of automated control is that political identity becomes rather remote. To put it simply, the CCP's success in automating Leninism may one day render the Party … politically irrelevant” (p. 189).
Despite such dangers, Gueorguiev finds that the CCP demonstrates a surprising degree of proactive and responsive governance by “retrofitting” essentially Leninist theories of organization and inclusion with high-tech surveillance and data-collection to address contemporary challenges. Because he aims to capture and measure the effectiveness of controlled inclusion, Gueorguiev's study presents a positive depiction of Chinese governance that largely steers clear of the frequent policy mishaps, malfunctioning bureaucracies, popular dissatisfaction and disaffection detailed elsewhere. However, Retrofitting Leninism nonetheless offers a substantial contribution to the comparative literature on citizen inclusion under authoritarian rule, making impressive use of the Chinese case to detail the means by which popular participation can successfully be elicited, channelled and processed. Methodologically, the analysis is enriched by the author's impressive compilation of multiple original data sets, including: one linking publicly available information on anticorruption investigations to reports from citizen-informants; a national policy-focused opinion poll, the China Policy Barometer (CPB); and digital legislative records from Shenzhen that are no longer accessible online. As such, Retrofitting Leninism presents an instructive and empirically robust view of how authoritarian resilience is managed in China today, and offers several ingenious models of how valuable data can be harvested in highly restrictive and information-poor environments by researchers with the insight, skill and patience to do so.
