China’s Inclusive Authoritarianism

Digital connectivity makes responsive government without democracy possible.

Paige Stampatori for Noema Magazine

BY NATHAN GARDELSJANUARY 14, 2022

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“A specter is haunting the Communist world — the specter of economic failure,” I

wrote in the Wall Street Journal after visiting Party ideology chiefs in Beijing and
Moscow in 1989. “While supermarkets, shopping malls and personal computers
describe the post-industrial West, the economies of the East are still struggling with
the abacus and the cabbage, the slide rule and the smokestack. In a cruel paradox of
history, the future has left its vanguard behind.”
What seemed so clear to me and almost everyone else at the time was that statist
socialism just could not resolve the “computational problem” of managing complex
societies as the West was able to do through the robust feedback loops of market
signals, democratic elections and freedom of speech. 

The grand illusion that centralized planning by apparatchiks and control of the
population by a Leninist party could create progress and prosperity on par with the
West was evident for all to see. As open societies were innovating their way into the
information age, the stodgy socialist states, China included, fell further and further
behind.

Fast forward to 2022. Today, a specter is haunting the democratic world — the specter
of political failure fueled by cultural civil war. Overwhelmed by the ceaseless tsunami
of feedback signals unleashed by digital connectivity, the body politic is fragmenting
into so many subjectivist tribes that a governing consensus seems beyond our grasp.
Open societies, it appears, are spinning out of control.

While connectivity is splintering the West, it is consolidating control in China, where

the Leninist form of governance that failed in the industrial age has been given a new
lease on life.

“Thanks in part to the advent of digital technology,” Dimitar Gueorguiev writes in

Noema this week, “China’s leaders are now at a point where they believe they have
the tools to overcome and move past the computational challenge of managing ever
more complexity by deepening control through connectivity.”

“Digital control in China operates as a dual-use technology — repressive in a security

sense but progressive from a socialist one,” says the author of “Retrofitting Leninism:
Participation Without Democracy in China.” “On the one hand, it serves a
conventional coercive function by keeping tabs on 1.4 billion people and letting them
know it. On the other, it facilitates public polling, responsiveness, oversight and
probabilistic forecasting enabled by massive caches of aggregated data on individual
and group-level behavior.” 

For Gueorguiev, this attentive authoritarianism brings to mind the Australian scholar
John Keane’s observation that “China’s leaders are so fearful of the loss of control
that comes along with democracy that, paradoxically, they act like elected officials in
the West who constantly plumb the public mood in the hope of winning the proverbial
ballot.” 

As George Yeo, the former foreign minister of Singapore, once put it to me, digital
connectivity solves the age-old problem that historically plagued China’s institutional
civilization: poor “ground-reality” feedback reaching the imperial center because of
too many layers in between. Today’s technologies that are both symbiotic and
adversarial, he says, enable “tiào,” a Chinese word which, in this context, means
continuous tuning of a complex system.

Gueorguiev goes on: “Smartphones and facial recognition, for instance, make it near
impossible for dissidents or protesters to organize; they also make it easier to fine
jaywalkers or redirect traffic in case of a jam. Public complaints about corruption can
be weaponized for political purges, but they are also a tool against self-serving
officials who embezzle or waste public funds. Social credit scores will help the state
coerce a preferred form of citizenship, but they also help alleviate mistrust and risk in
China’s unruly consumer market.”  

In other words, China’s densely wired society is a two-way platform. While the state
monitors from above — surveillance — connectivity also enables the public to
monitor the state and the market from below — “sousveillance.” 

We in the West are not wrong to suspect that an unprecedented 21st-century techno-
totalitarianism is taking shape in China. But to dismiss the inclusive and adaptive
nature of connectivity with Chinese characteristics risks misreading the sustainability
of the system. To the extent the Party-state remains responsive to the public mood and
concerns gathered from ubiquitous monitoring, a kind of systemic accountability
perpetually refreshes its own legitimacy.

As in all else, everything depends on the balance. President Xi Jinping’s over-

suppression may well undo what has worked so far for China. The system will surely
falter and fail in the future if repression displaces adaptation and if authority is
enforced from the top instead of legitimated by inclusiveness from below