China is steadily sliding deeper into the counterreform era. Economically, it is slowing down. Ideologically, it is closing up. Politically, it is steadily pivoting back toward personalistic one-man rule. As these trends deepen, Beijing’s leaders are erasing core elements of both the reform and revolutionary eras, reviving ruinous Maoist governance practices of the 1950s, and turning back to China’s imperial history in an effort to build a new ideological foundation for their authoritarian rule. Far from paving the way for China’s twenty-first-century rise, Beijing’s counterreforms are exacerbating its structural problems, weakening the nation and undermining its stability.
Seventy-five years ago, on 1 October 1949, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) chairman Mao Zedong stood before a bank of microphones on the balcony of the Gate of Heavenly Peace overlooking Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and proclaimed the birth of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
Mao’s China was the China of revolution. The CCP, which he had led to power, had been born into the warlord chaos of the 1920s, had grown up amid brutal struggles against Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalists as well as Imperial Japanese invaders during the 1930s, and had come to power by winning the titanic civil war of the late 1940s, sending the Nationalists fleeing to the island of Taiwan.
Mao’s appearance on the balcony did not bring this revolutionary era to an end. On the contrary, the next three decades would see one turbulent political campaign after another rock his vast and ancient country to its core. Under Mao, the CCP sought to fundamentally remodel China. Party authorities seized land and moved to purge society of all beliefs they viewed as “feudal superstition” and any sentiment they deemed “counterrevolutionary.” They established a network of CCP controls throughout state and society alike. Ideology was omnipresent, as China closed itself off from both Western capitalism and what Mao saw as unacceptable Soviet “revisionism” of Marxist-Leninist doctrine.
But the 1950s saw Party efforts at governing China through organized bureaucratic rule falter on Mao’s repeated preference for ruling — alone and unconstrained — as supreme leader at the head of mass movements that he could set off with a stroke of his pen. Politics and class struggle took precedence over governance. Economic concerns were rendered secondary. By the late 1960s, China’s nominally one-party system had slid into the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Bureaucratic institutions collapsed amid radical political struggle as rival factions (all fervently avowing their adulation of “The Great Helmsman”) fought for power — often in running street battles.
After Mao died in 1976, China changed course. Shaken by the horrors of his never-ending revolutions, Beijing’s leaders steered China into an era of reform. Ideological controls were relaxed. China opened up. Colleges and temples were allowed to function again. Academics and cadres ventured abroad. Foreign ideas, students, and culture flowed in. Politically, Party officials took a half-step back from people’s lives. Communes were disbanded; private land returned to farmers via long-term leases. Economically, China boomed.
Party leaders also changed how power was exercised. Mao had governed through revolutionary mass campaigns, struggle sessions aimed at the enemies of the day, and scriptural reverence for his words as preserved in the CCP’s famous “Little Red Book.” Reform-era China shifted toward more regular meetings of top Party bodies, increasing reliance on Party regulations as well as a host of newly enacted PRC laws, and a strict aversion to anything resembling a cult of personality. Erratic personalistic rule by a single leader gave way to somewhat more institutionalized Party governance. Such shifts were at the core of China’s reform era from the late 1970s through the early twenty-first century.
Over the past fifteen years, the PRC has moved into yet another era, this one quite different from the age of reform. The Chinese economy, whose stunning growth rates once made it a wonder of the world, is slowing down. Ideologically, the regime is closing up. And politically, the partly institutionalized norms of the reform era are giving way as the party-state degrades back into an increasingly personalistic regime.
This era — the time of Xi Jinping — is the age of counterreform. Beijing’s prime goal is no longer revolutionary social change or even economic growth, but regime stability. This end is being pursued at all costs. In its name, Chinese leaders are erasing core elements of both earlier eras (the ideological openness of the reform period and the residual socialist legacies of the revolutionary one) while reviving ruinous Maoist governance practices (such as one-man rule and the CCP’s iron grip on state and society).
Neither official Washington nor official Beijing frames China in this way. For Beijing, China is a Never-Never Land in which Xi’s pivot back toward one-man rule leads vaguely but inexorably to a gauzy “China Dream” future draped in Maoist red and imperial yellow. Official Washington inverts this into a “China Nightmare,” casting the PRC as a hypercompetent giant fifty feet tall with a masterful secret plan to dominate the twenty-first century. But China is not rising. As Beijing slides deeper into the morass of the counterreform era, the PRC is in fact becoming far weaker and less stable.
The Counterreform Era
Nine years ago, I argued in these pages that “Political stability, ideological openness, and rapid economic growth were the hallmarks of China’s reform era. But they are ending. China is entering a new era, the age after reform.”1
All the trends I noted then are deepening now.
The ideological openness of the reform era is disappearing. This is not merely a transitory product of covid-zero policies in 2020–22, which saw Beijing seal off China from the world as numbers of foreigners present in the country plunged, authorities locked down whole cities, and digital controls limited citizens’ movements in hopes of stopping the virus. Instead, the ideological closure reflects a broader, decades-long drift back to the securitization of China’s state and society. Stability-obsessed CCP officials, ever on guard against potential risks, see them everywhere. Back in the early 2000s, it was public-interest lawyers who seemed to be vectors for anti-CCP ideas. By the 2010s, social media, civil society, and academia had joined lawyers on the list. Everywhere, Party controls have been reasserted, arrests and jail terms doled out, and the desired “chilling effect” reestablished.
The trend toward closure is spreading. Security officials regularly fan fears of foreign espionage, particularly around April 15, designated since 2016 as National Security Education Day. A 2023 anti-espionage crackdown on consulting firms shocked foreign corporations trying to conduct statistical research and due diligence. China’s LGBTQ+ groups, meanwhile, are worried by fresh official messages that not only their organizational activities but their members’ own sexual and gender identities themselves may be politically problematic. New laws criminalize defamation of regime-designated martyrs and heroes. Access to commercial and academic databases has been curbed. Even large state-sponsored efforts such as the Qing History Project (writing the official narrative of China’s last imperial dynasty) or China Judgments Online (making tens of millions of court documents publicly accessible) have come under suspicion and been politically rectified.
Economically, China continues to slow. Covid lockdowns, a rapidly aging population, and the implosion of a massive property bubble have taken a toll on the once buzzing economy. Annual growth, which registered 6.7 percent as recently as 2016, has steadily fallen. For 2024, the official rate is expected to come in at no higher than 5 percent (the IMF projection) and could be as low as 3 percent (per the New York–based Rhodium Group).
Slowing growth is causing real pain. In 2023, youth unemployment surged to a record high, topping 21 percent. Local governments reliant on land sales to finance rising expenditures are finding themselves strapped for cash. With surging local-government debt has come unpaid wages and pensions and utility price hikes, which ranged from 10 to 50 percent this year in Shanghai and Guangzhou. China’s economy continues to boast real strengths, of course. It leads the world in the manufacture of batteries, solar cells, and electric vehicles. But with graying demographics, unfavorable geopolitical winds, and national leaders who resist a shift to a growth model focused on domestic consumption, China faces a slower, more stagnant economic future.2
Politically, the slide away from the reform era’s partly institutionalized norms is gathering speed. The return of personalistic rule, noted by Susan Shirk in these pages in 2018, is becoming ever clearer.3 In October 2022, at the Twentieth Party Congress, Xi anointed himself top leader for a third term. That was expected. More surprisingly, he also cleaned out the CCP’s top ranks so he could pack them with his own supporters and yes-men. Tacit age limits governing promotion of top officials were broken; technocrats hustled out of the Politburo and into retirement.4 And in an unusual deviation from what is a normally highly scripted event, Xi’s immediate predecessor, 81-year-old Hu Jintao, was literally lifted out of his seat next to Xi during the closing ceremony and escorted from the hall by Xi’s aides as cameras rolled and the world media looked on.
The party-state’s propaganda organs have been infusing portrayals of Xi with the strengthening aroma of a cult of personality. Official portraits of him grow ever larger while CCP publications grow ever more replete with his quotations. And woe be to the careless cadre who misprints the supreme leader’s name. When, in March 2023, a single sentence in the CCP-flagship People’s Daily that was supposed to mention him nonetheless failed to do so, millions of copies were recalled.5
Elite politics are only part of the story. Under Xi, Beijing has been reversing the limited separation of the state from the CCP that marked the reform era. Successive rounds of government reforms starting in 2016 saw the Party cannibalize state organs. For example, the CCP United Front Work Department has since absorbed the State Administration for Religious Affairs, while the Party’s own disciplinary inspection authorities have been remodeled into a more sweeping National Supervisory Commission, gaining authority to oversee all civil servants rather than just Party cadres. The ruthless and comprehensive “rectification” of Hong Kong since 2019, however, has been the most spectacular example of Beijing’s erosion of prior bureaucratic and technocratic norms.6 Britain handed the city back to China in 1997, and Hong Kong was run thereafter under the carefully crafted reform-era compromise of “one country, two systems.” Over the last five years, however, draconian national-security laws aimed at reasserting Beijing’s grip have obliterated that compromise and begun to impose PRC-style controls over Hong Kong’s government and society alike.
Stronger controls over private life are returning as well. To ward off the specter of social unrest, Xi has been reviving Maoist models of neighborhood surveillance. Since 2017, moreover, mass political detentions in the far northwestern region of Xinjiang have seen more than a million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities sent to reeducation camps. Well-off urban Chinese citizens initially brushed these off as anachronistic ideological throwbacks or necessary measures to tame ethnic trouble in remote borderlands. Had the reform era not shown that — for affluent urbanites, at least — politics was remote and the regime’s intrusion into their private lives limited? This explains the deep psychic shock of the covid-zero lockdowns for many citizens, particularly in 2022. Many awoke to discover entire systems of social control and surveillance had been revived almost overnight, curtailing their ability to walk outside their gated compounds to purchase food.
Beijing, however, is going beyond the rejection of reform-era practices. It is also jettisoning core elements of China’s own 1949 revolutionary heritage. Textbooks based on 1950s Soviet-style ethnic policies celebrating a multiplicity of national minorities (comprising about 9 percent of the PRC’s population) are giving way to a new curriculum that touts aggressive assimilation into a single, narrow ethnonational identity defined by Beijing. Remnants of socialist feminism are giving way to talk of women’s “special role” and official promotion of marriage and childbirth.
China today is heading ever deeper into the counterreform era — an era marked by a slowing economy, ideological regression, and political erosion.
Counterarguments
Among China watchers, two counterarguments have emerged that downplay the magnitude of Xi’s changes. The first comes mainly from legal scholars who argue that, Xi’s pivot toward personal rule notwithstanding, China is continuing to institutionalize. Some take Xi’s constitutional rhetoric at face value, couple it with efforts in the 2010s to make courts and judges more professional, and maintain that China is experiencing a “turn toward law.”7 Others argue that even if Xi is expanding the CCP at the state’s expense, he is also laying down more rules to govern how the CCP runs. Under this argument, Xi is an institutionalizer, albeit a more Party-centric one.8 For them, the state’s writ may wane, but as that of the CCP waxes it will become more lawlike in its behavior.
The second counterargument is the reverse — that China never moved toward meaningful institutionalization. This claim comes from political scientists who find earlier descriptions of the reform era wildly overblown. For them, the alleged collective leadership of the 1980s was a thin veil covering actual dominance by Deng Xiaoping. Jiang Zemin’s imposition of age limits for officials in the 1990s was merely a ploy to force his rivals into retirement. In this account, Xi’s rise is the natural continuation of a single-party, Leninist system in which personalities, power, and politics always trump institutions and norms.9
Both these counterarguments undervalue the importance of the partly institutionalized political norms that lay at the core of China’s reform era. The second counterargument underestimates the impact of their creation, while the first overlooks the consequences of their elimination.
The power of norms lies not merely in their content or level of institutionalization. It also lies in how people perceive them compared to what things were like before. Even weakly institutionalized political norms can powerfully affect behavior when they provide a strong, credible contrast with the past and suggest a path to a different future. That was indeed the case in China’s late-twentieth-century reform era. Examples include:
- Not dragging the Gang of Four, Hua Guofeng, or Zhao Ziyang into struggle sessions and beating them to death (as had happened to fallen CCP leader Liu Shaoqi in 1969);
- Placing term limits on the office of the state president in 1982;
- Avoiding a cult of personality around Deng Xiaoping, who preferred to stay in the background;
- Holding regular meetings of top CCP bodies (unlike in the 1960s and 1970s);
- Building legal institutions — reopening law schools and courts and enacting a massive body of statutory law (such as the 1989 Administration Litigation Law and the 2000 Legislation Law) to govern state and society.
Even the most compelling critics of China’s institutionalization in the 1980s and 1990s recognize both the existence of such norms, and their contrast with the past. Joseph Fewsmith specifically notes the commitment (under Deng) to regular leadership turnover and a more limited policymaking role for the CCP that left actual implementation to state authorities, while Joseph Torigian quantifies the shift in quoting CCP elder Li Rui’s comment that “Deng Xiaoping was half a Mao.”10
Despite their partial nature and weak institutionalization, such reforms mattered in the early reform era, because they were a crystal-clear signal to those who had just emerged from the chaos of the Maoist era that Beijing was committing itself to different governance norms. Going from “full Mao” to “half Mao” was a sea change in that context.
That was key. For Party cadres in the 1980s, who had seen national politics shift within a decade from radical Red Guards beating officials to death in the streets for perceived ideological deviations to semi-regularized authoritarian rule wielded through formal party-state institutions, it created the possibility that such a trajectory might continue and deepen. Might “half Mao” in time become “quarter Mao”? Might the importance of legal institutions and technical expertise increase while that of ideology declines? Shifts in trajectory mattered for ordinary citizens, too. Those multiyear leases first granted to farmers in the 1970s and city dwellers two decades later were at best partially institutionalized guarantees of property rights. Nonetheless, for anyone who had lived through forcible state expropriation of private land and the establishment of rural communes in the 1950s, it represented a major shift in direction. China was seemingly headed toward a future of more-secure property ownership. Such beliefs served to underwrite an entire generation of investment and growth in China — not just by foreign investors, but by Chinese citizens themselves.
The perception that China was moving in a different direction than what came before was crucial to both the stability and growth of the reform era. Under Xi, this has changed dramatically.
The first group of critics fails to grasp how fully Xi’s rollback of the reform era is a tidal shift that is progressively swallowing one field after another. Considered in isolation, moves a decade or so ago by the Supreme People’s Court to promote judicial professionalism and publish rulings online may have looked important, but they were “lonely outliers” amid a broader change in political climate.11 The far more important trend was Beijing’s centralization of power in CCP bodies, with ideological regression and a focus on security enforcement to match. Scholars such as Li Ling and Ben Liebman have since documented how the specific legal reforms mentioned above were carried away by these shifting political winds.12
Others are now making the same mistake with claims that Xi is crafting rules for the CCP so as to build a stable, Party-centric system of governance. Once again, crucial context is left out. As China continues to slip yet further backward, Party rule is now devolving back into personalistic one-man rule by a leader-for-life whose own words (whether “Xi Jinping Thought on Culture” or “Xi Jinping Thought on Rule of Law”) — not formal decisions by CCP bodies — are steadily emerging as the core guiding texts for China’s counterreform era. “Half Mao” is trending back toward “two-thirds Mao.” As Holly Snape notes, “rather than depersonalizing power, institutions that constrain Party members and organizations are leading to stronger personalization . . . to the detriment of those stable norms of the reform era and potentially to state capacity.”13
What is taking place now is full-blown erosion. The entire political superstructure of the reform era is being undercut. Norms that were once partly institutionalized have been eradicated, and China’s whole direction changed. For Chinese officials and citizens alike, the question now is not “How might reform-era trends evolve?” but “Just how far back might we go?”
Futures
History is not linear. Nations evolve in cycles — reform and regression, revolution and restoration. The French Revolution produced a short-lived constitutional order followed by the radical Jacobin Reign of Terror, which in turn provoked a counterreaction, rule by a junta, and finally the reconsolidation of power under Napoleon and the birth of his empire. In Russia, the Great Reforms of Alexander II in the 1860s provoked a late-nineteenth-century wave of conservative counterreforms after his 1881 assassination by revolutionary socialists, which in turn intensified anarchism and contributed to the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. In the U.S. case, historian Gary Gerstle has tracked how the mid-twentieth-century New Deal political order has slid into early-twenty-first-century populism.14
With 75 years of windings through revolution to reform and on to counterreform behind it, where will China go next? I can sketch three general scenarios.
Imperial redux. If we take state propaganda at face value, the answer is simple: back to China’s own past.
Beijing has been draping the Communist party-state in imperial garb. In 2021, the Central Committee put out a resolution on history that called for infusing Marxism with “fine traditional culture.” Xi himself now laces his speeches with classical idioms, while state television hosts a program that unpacks his historical references and links them to CCP slogans and current social realities. As the official news agency now frames him:
When he was young, Xi once expounded on the Confucian idea of “Ping Tian Xia,” or bringing peace and order to the world, which represents the ultimate stage of one’s four-level personal pursuit. The other three are cultivating the moral self, managing the family, and governing the state. . . . Xi is no longer considered merely an inheritor or protector of a great civilization but the creator of one, too. China’s cultural traditions and national conditions determine that Chinese modernization, a new form of human civilization led by Xi, will take a path distinct from the West.15
As revolutionary red dissolves into imperial yellow, one can see the outline of a new official narrative take form: Beijing’s current leaders are the successors to imperial rulers of the past. Backed by the civilizational weight of thousands of years of Chinese history, tradition, and ideology, they too are poised to rule securely and majestically far into the future.
Will such a pivot to neotraditionalism make China’s increasingly personalistic regime more stable? No. First, replacing Marxist rhetoric with Confucian sayings will not change the core governance challenges facing China. If anything, the switch highlights the underlying risks of personalistic rule. Imperial dynasties rose and fell on the backs of individual leaders. They could be enlightened and vigorous like the Kangxi Emperor of the Qing dynasty during his reign (1661–1722), extravagant and inattentive like the Qianlong Emperor late in his (1735–99), or cruel and despotic like Emperor Yang (604–18) of the Sui dynasty. And as scholar Wang Yuhua has shown, only half of China’s emperors left office via natural death — the others fell in civil wars or were killed by rebellious elites.16 It also matters which historical periods Beijing decides to raise up as models in the coming decades. Do you praise the cosmopolitanism of the Tang dynasty (618–907), whose rulers descended in part from non-Han steppe nomads? Or do you elevate the Ming (1348–1644), who turned inward and cut China’s links to the rest of the world?
Second, Beijing’s embrace of neotraditionalist ideology will itself exacerbate existing social rifts. Young graduates facing a weak economy and dismal job prospects chafe at being scolded by aging officials for “lying flat” rather than simply buckling down like their elders did back in the last century. Those new college texts and required classes stressing a more racialized, Han-centric conception of the nation bode poorly for ethnic relations.17 And the decision of the CCP Politburo — two-dozen men in their sixties and seventies — to pivot the country back to traditional gender roles and pro-natalist policies to address graying demographics will put Beijing on a collision course with a whole generation of educated young women. In cities, roughly half of them say that they have no plans to marry, and online complaints about gender discrimination and patriarchal norms are common.
Third, the imagined past of imperial stability to which Beijing nominally seeks to return is a mirage. Traditional China’s true source of stability was not the emperor, much less any set of ideological fulminations coming from Beijing. Imperial China was a state of limited reach. Heaven was high, the emperor far away. For better and worse, the real stability of imperial society and governance was rooted in an entrenched network of social institutions — extended family ties, clans, temples, merchant guilds, and landlord-tenant links — that structured and ordered the day-to-day lives of ordinary people.
Precisely because they structured a system he sought to overthrow, Mao blasted those institutions to smithereens with decades of revolutionary violence. What little was left, the delirious boom years of the reform era then swept away. Mass urbanization hollowed out the Chinese countryside, rising wealth changed social values, and demographic decline reworked family relationships. China today is an atomized, deinstitutionalized society where all the embryonic forms of alternative social organization — religious bodies, public-interest lawyers, LGBTQ+ groups — are regularly asphyxiated (or absorbed) by a jealous, Borg-like single-party regime.
There will be no return to China’s classical past, because the Party obliterated all ties to it. Nor can China today organically grow anything new, because the Party is regularly ripping out any seedlings that do sprout — and salting the earth to prevent others from ever taking root.
Back to the future: 1950s China. If imperial history and classical tradition can provide no alternative form of governance, what about earlier versions of CCP rule? Could they be an option?
This is where Xi himself wants to go. He seeks a return to an idealized form of 1950s-style Party rule, with himself at the center. In 2017, he quoted Mao to the National People’s Congress: “Party, government, military, civilians, academia; east, west, south, north, center — the Party leads everything.” Then he put the slogan into the CCP charter as a core political tenet. In a rollback of the reform era, the Party is now tightening its grip on private businesses, “Sinicizing” religions such as Islam and Christianity, and returning CCP officials to the daily running of higher education.
In wanting to go back to the 1950s, Xi is giving the chaotic high Maoism of the 1960s a wide berth. He wants top-down control, not bottom-up street movements. Indeed, the core slogan — yi gui zhi dang, yi fa zhi guo “use (Party) regulations to govern the Party, use law to govern the country” — is the language of a harried middle manager rather than a hot-blooded revolutionary. If Mao in the 1960s told people to “Bombard the headquarters,” Xi’s version in the 2020s is “Sit tight and follow orders.”
Superficially, the idea of running China through a revamped CCP purged of Maoist populism is not implausible. Indeed, some would argue, it draws on China’s own institutional strengths. The Chinese party-state is not a tinpot affair but a well-organized technocracy with deep capabilities and millennia-long traditions of effective bureaucratic rule. Did not that party-state navigate the reefs and shoals of the reform era for decades through careful long-term planning? Why should it not be able to do so far into the future?
And therein lies the rub.
The more any institution — whether in China or elsewhere — concentrates power in a single person, the more the institution itself decays. Distinctions between the person of the leader and the institution itself collapse. Underlings increasingly fear reporting bad news. Channels of information dry up. Cults of personality form. Technical expertise gives way to ideological fawning. Courtiers battle for favor. State policies begin to veer erratically. Byzantine succession politics start to loom large.
This was China’s core political problem in the 1950s. Was the CCP an institution merely led by Mao? Or had Mao risen like a deity above it, with the Party existing merely to enact his will? And this is the same tension that is reemerging as China continues down its current trajectory.
Here, some will object that Xi is no Mao. The Helmsman had immense popular support from his years at the front lines of the revolution. He had battled through the Long March and suffered the horrors of war to rescue China from decades of humiliation by warlords and foreign enemies. Xi is a colorless bureaucrat who has risen to the top via palace intrigue and politicized purges. How far, really, could this go?
Now think again. Sliding away from more institutionalized governance in the direction of personalistic one-man rule does not require a charismatic — or even an effective — leader with a careful, decades-long plan. If an unremarkable midlevel KGB officer can launch his country down this path, then you can bet that a red princeling whose formative experience was being sent down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution can do the same in China. Indeed, China’s path today back toward full-blown one-man rule is perhaps even easier to imagine than it was in the 1950s. There are no modern counterparts of Peng Dehuai (who challenged Mao in 1959) or Deng Xiaoping — figures with deep experience and storied revolutionary pasts who had the standing to question the top leader or at least pick up the pieces when he failed. Xi has swept the CCP’s top ranks clean of anyone who might fit that bill; tame cronies fill every seat.
Of course, China’s downhill slide is only in its early stages. Key CCP bodies still meet, even if on more erratic schedules. State ministers disappear without explanation, but do not — as yet — seem to be turning up dead. (Although the rumors that flew after a 2023 heart attack claimed the life of Li Keqiang, China’s former second-ranked leader, suggest that many are starting to watch for this.) Centers for “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” are proliferating at Chinese colleges, while CCP journals that used to carry dense essays on Marxist ideology now merely publish Xi’s quotations. But Xi’s own ideological musings have not yet been reduced to anything as catchy, color-coordinated, or pocket-sized as Mao’s.
However, Xi has only been in charge for twelve years. Recall the infamous 21 February 2022 video of top Russian officials meeting with Putin — shaking in their boots, voices quavering, sitting like children dozens of feet away from the august body of the emperor himself — as he called on each to rubber-stamp his imminent invasion of Ukraine. That was more than two decades after Putin assumed power. Or think of Mao’s last days, some 27 years after he proclaimed a new era for China. Terrified advisors huddled around the decrepit, barely comprehensible top leader, the nation shuddering as the domestic political chaos he unleashed a decade earlier raged blindly outside.
Those are glimpses of what near-total decay into one-man rule looks like. And on Beijing’s current trajectory, some version of that lies in China’s future.
Increasing internal risks. What does such a future look like? Here is where some Washington politicians and pundits paint Beijing’s leaders as dark masterminds endowed with unlimited resources, carefully drawing up impressively titled long-range plans to achieve regional or even world domination. And that logically leads others to begin talking about the alleged need for a new decades-long Cold War to defeat China.18
But this hypercompetent China of limitless potential is not what I see. For me, that is a distorted, funhouse-mirror version of the PRC, driven as much by what those in Washington want to see as it is by the distressing reality of what is actually taking place. What I see instead is a China in decay. The country today resembles less a rapidly rising power such as the Soviet Union or Japan in the 1950s — full of vigor, on the cusp of a decades-long expansion — and more a mix of stagnant Brezhnev-era USSR and 1990s Japan, after its economic bubble collapsed and it entered a long period of sluggish growth. Resting crazy-quilt style atop the whole thing is a patchwork of unresolved Maoist politics, latent reform-era social tensions (inequality is now as sharp as it is in the United States), and the approaching reality of China’s becoming (by about 2050) the world’s most aged society.
None of that is to deny the very real risks of Sino-U.S. clashes during the coming decade over a host of discrete and conflicting interests, such as industrial policies or Taiwan. But the dystopian and overheated rhetoric issuing from Washington (and Beijing) regarding fears of (or claims to) a “Chinese century” or a “generational challenge” is inaccurate.
Such rhetoric overstates China’s strengths and underestimates its weaknesses. It throws Xi a lifeline by allowing him to successfully frame the root cause of China’s emerging problems as a civilizational rejection by the outside world, and particularly the United States, of China and the Chinese people, rather than Xi’s own policies. And it ignores the very real risks that domestic trends pose to Chinese citizens themselves.
Xi’s counterreform era itself is at the heart of China’s burgeoning internal problems. Many find the ideological environment stultifying. Others fear that their children will face narrowed economic prospects, and that political trends are undermining governance in the PRC.
Many of Beijing’s recent moves are indeed redolent of the 1950s, when policies could change overnight on the whim of the top leader. China’s covid-zero policies are one clear example. In 2020, Xi prematurely framed China’s early successes in fighting the pandemic as a personal victory punctuated by his triumphal March entry into Wuhan and a victory celebration six months later in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People. By hanging his own legitimacy on near-zero virus counts, he forced the bureaucracy into a reflexive reliance on costly, ever more massive lockdowns that spread city by city as more highly transmissible variants appeared. Planning for any transition away from covid-zero policies became politically impossible. When a flagging economy and proliferating protests forced authorities to lift controls in the last quarter of 2022, the effect was head-spinning: There was almost no notice or time to prepare. Instead, three years of tough controls dissolved virtually overnight as the paramount leader changed his mind. Rapid viral spread ensued, resulting in more than a million deaths in mere weeks.
Worried about the future, some in China are already looking for an exit. The number of millionaires leaving the country is steadily rising, from 10,800 in 2022 to 13,800 in 2023 and a projected 15,200 in 2024.19 China’s wealthy are increasingly choosing to relocate their money to Singapore, while a surging number of middle-class professionals are opting to cross the Pacific and brave the roadless, bandit-infested jungles of the Darién Gap on a hazardous trek to uncertain prospects at the U.S. border.
The worst dangers for China and its citizens lie ahead, however. The political erosion and economic malaise of the counterreform era risk reactivating a virulent and dangerous strain of Chinese politics that has lain dormant for decades. Politics of division and mass mobilization were core governance tools under Mao. Authorities pitted segments of society against one another — often violently — to entrench Party rule, enforce ideological conformity, buy loyalty with plundered resources, and promote some leaders or classes while demoting others.
With the reform era, those tactics were thought to have been consigned to history by a generation of leaders who bore personal scars from the Cultural Revolution. But in China today, it is easy to imagine how Beijing’s new rulers — much like their counterparts elsewhere in the world — could decide to dust off Mao’s populist playbook to address social anger over the economy, or to hurry China farther along the path of personalistic, one-man rule. And many of Beijing’s recent moves — ramping up fears of minority secessionism, raising alarms about foreign espionage, and scrubbing the internet of references to the billionaire founders of some of China’s best-known private firms — play dangerously close to seismic fault lines running deep through Chinese society. Should those split open in a time of crisis, China could be dragged further into the dark recesses of its own past.
On the seventy-fifth anniversary of the PRC’s birth, this is the real irony. As China heads deeper into the counterreform era, the country’s worst enemies are neither the foreign threats that Beijing imagines around every corner nor the rising domestic tensions that the regime wants so desperately to suppress. Rather, they are China’s own historical and institutional demons that the PRC’s leaders are in the process of reviving.
NOTES
1. Carl Minzner, “China After the Reform Era,” Journal of Democracy 26 (July 2015): 140.
2. Daniel H. Rosen and Logan Wright, “China’s Economic Collision Course,” Foreign Affairs, 27 March 2024. The CCP plenum that ended in July 2024 gave little sign of any significant shift in economic policy. Neil Thomas, “Why Did Xi Jinping Stick to His Guns at China’s Third Plenum?” Asia Society Policy Institute, 25 July 2024.
3. Susan L. Shirk, “China in Xi’s ‘New Era’: The Return to Personalistic Rule,” Journal of Democracy 29 (April 2018): 22-26.
4. A study of two decades of Party promotion patterns notes that tacit age limits in place since the 1990s (for China’s Politburo and Standing Committee) have each been broken exactly twice (both in 2022), when Xi sought to strengthen his control over Party institutions yet further. Ling Li, “The Hidden Significance and Resilience of the Age-Limit Norm of the Chinese Communist Party,” Asia-Pacific Journal 20, no. 19 (2022).
5. James Palmer, “Why Did China Recall Millions of Newspapers?” Foreign Policy, 5 April 2023, https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/04/05/why-did-china-recall-millions-of-newspapers.
6. Carl Minzner, End of an Era: How China’s Authoritarian Revival is Undermining Its Rise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 109–12.
7. Taisu Zhang and Tom Ginsburg, “China’s Turn Toward Law,” Virginia Journal of International Law 59, no. 2 (2019): 306–89; Taisu Zhang, “Xi’s Law-and-Order Strategy,” Foreign Affairs, 27 February 2023.
8. For Peerenboom, this is “a turn away from state socialist rule of law toward a new hybrid Party-state socialist rule of law model.” Randall Peerenboom, “The Transformation of State Socialist Rule of Law into Party-State Socialist Rule of Law in the Xi Jinping Era of Comprehensive Rules-Based Governance,” Hague Journal of the Rule of Law (2024), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4736955.
9. Joseph Fewsmith, Rethinking Chinese Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Joseph Torigian, Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion: Elite Power Struggles in the Soviet Union and China After Stalin and Mao (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022).
10. Fewsmith, Rethinking Chinese Politics, 182–83; Torigian, Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion, 3.
11. Minzner, End of an Era, 93.
12. Li Ling, Governance of the Party-State: Corruption, Law and the Modus Operandi of the Chinese Communist Party (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming); Benjamin L. Liebman et al., “Rolling Back Transparency in China’s Courts,” Columbia Law Review 123 (December 2023): 2407–82.
13. Holly Snape, “The Rise of Party Law: Rewiring the Party, Recalibrating the Party-State Relationship,” China Journal 92 (July 2024): 1–26.
14. Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022).
15. “Xi Focus-Profile: Xi Jinping, Man of Culture,” Xinhua, 1 February 2024, https://english.news.cn/20240201/8e74c32a0c5748ed9c0f9e53846b5224/c.html.
16. Yuhua Wang, “Can the Chinese Communist Party Learn from Chinese Emperors?” in Jennifer Rudolph and Michael Szonyi, eds., The China Questions: Critical Insights into a Rising Power (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 58–64.
17. James Leibold, “New Textbook Reveals Xi Jinping’s Doctrine of Han-Centric Nation-Building,” China Brief, no. 11, 24 May 2024.
18. Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher, “No Substitute for Victory,” Foreign Affairs 103 (May–June 2024).
19. Devon Pendleton, “China and Britain Face an Exodus of Millionaires, Study Shows,” Bloomberg, 18 June 2024, www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/china-and-britain-face-an-exodus-of-millionaires-study-shows/ar-BB1os0Gw.
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