Chitchat If democracy is bad, then one-party Leninism is worse!

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An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:

Martin Wolf: China crisis is just a matter of time

One-party Leninist rule allied with endemic corruption does not bode well for future



Xi Jinping: his solutions “seem to be more Leninism and more markets, yet this is a problematic combination”. Photograph: Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images

Xi Jinping, recently granted the title of “core leader” of China, is a man with two missions. The first is to purge the Chinese Communist Party of corruption. The second is to reform the economy.

These goals will, however, prove incompatible if he continues to focus his main efforts on purifying and strengthening the corrupted Leninist party-state.

In 2014, Xi described the challenge China confronts as follows: “Corruption in regions and sectors is interwoven; cases of corruption through collusion are increasing; abuse of authority over personnel and abuse of executive authority overlap; the exchange of power for power, power for money and power for sex is frequent; collusion between officials and businessmen and collusion between superiors and subordinates have become intertwined; the methods of transferring benefits to each other are concealed and various.”

This harsh indictment may be self-serving. As Minxin Pei writes in a brilliant book, China’s Crony Capitalism, it is all too easy for a would-be strongman to use the charge of corruption as a cudgel against rivals. Yet it is so effective precisely because it is plausible.

Using evidence published by the Chinese authorities, Pei shows that collusive corruption is pervasive. It distorts the economy, degrades administration and robs the party of its social legitimacy.

Corruption is indeed a cancer. Yet it did not strike by accident. The explosion of corruption since the early 1990s is the downside of successful reform.

“The emergence and entrenchment of crony capitalism in China’s political economy, in retrospect, is the logical outcome of Deng Xiaoping’s authoritarian model of economic modernisation, because elites in control of unconstrained power cannot resist using it to loot the wealth generated by economic growth,” Pei says.


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