From China’s Galaxy Empire (John Keane & Baogang He, 2024) pp116-20
“A large empire where the ruler did not have absolute power would necessarily become divided, either because the provincial governors did not obey, or because, in order to make them obey, it was necessary to divide the empire up into several kingdoms”.
We are about to see that when it comes to China things are much less straightforward than Montesquieu supposed. An important reason is that the galaxy empire has emerged during the era of monitory democracy: a period in which the contagious spirit and practical substance of free elections and the public monitoring and restraint of arbitrary power by independent courts, anti-corruption commissions, and other watchdog institutions have spread to every continent of our planet. 3′ Montesquieu was right to observe that imperial hubris-—the failure of imperial rulers, despite their best efforts, to secure support at home and abroad for power exercised arbitrarily over great distances-was an enormous challenge confronting every known empire. What he could not have anticipated is that public refusals of despotic authority® and ‘absolute power’ accused of arrogance, incompetence, and corruption haunt every form of rule in these years of the twenty-first century. The party apparatchiks of the Soviet empire were taught this lesson during the ‘velvet revolutions’ of last century; citizen revolts on its western fringes spelled the end of empire. The United States is no exception to this rule. Especially because its elected governments are nominally committed to the ideals of democracy’, their imperial adventures whip up storms of controversy, at home and abroad. Their economic grip in foreign lands is denounced as corporate exploitation. Their spreading cultural influence arouses local symbolic resistance to ‘neo-colonialism’ and ‘imperialism’. Military adventures conducted in the name of democracy are variously denounced as abuses of power poisoned by fiscal wastefulness, corporate profiteering, the destruction of ecosystems, war booty grabs, and bogus stage-managed secrecy and deception (the alleged existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, claims about murdered Kuwaiti babies in incubators, and North Vietnamese attacks on US naval ships in the Gulf of Tonkin). And fears are expressed that imperial hubris is gradually destroying democracy itself 2 The galaxy empire, we are going to see, does not escape charges of hubris. Hence the pressing questions: When judged in terms of the foundational problem of arbitrary power and imperial arrogance, how does the galaxy empire measure up? As its rulers improvise their way into the future, are they aware of the paradox that the survival and flourishing of China depends on restraining the power they want to extend? That becoming an empire means being drawn inescapably into tricky situations in which the control of others and their ecosystems is as necessary as it is risky? That hubris at home and abroad may well prove to be the greatest weakness-and the great underminer—of this young galaxy empire? Do they realize that while every rising empire aims to shift the balance of power in its favour, no empire lasts forever, and that some are stillborn, because they indulge illusions of greatness and reckless power adventures?
In reply to this question, foreign journalists and politicians often jump to conclusions. Differences between the inside and the outside, dynamics at home and dynamics abroad, are usually of little interest to them. China is China. Simple-minded reductionism is their specialty. They like to say that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is a worrying instance of what Montesquieu called ‘absolute power’. Sometimes they speak of ‘totalitarianism’. Mostly, they describe China as an ‘authoritarian regime’. Their general view is that within the Chinese political system the hungry tigers and wolves of power and their corrupting effects are uncontrolled. The whole polity is in the grip of the arbitrium, the arbitrary power of party rulers who suppose that they can always decide and get away with things unopposed; or suppose, without losing a wink of sleep, that their own power is self-justifying, as if they have the heavens, or history, or human luck on their side. That is why, so the reasoning runs, cunning and camouflage aside, the rulers of China treat their subjects at home and abroad badly, with disrespect. Putting themselves on a pedestal, they ditch the dignity principle. They have no regard for the precept that people should be treated as beings worthy of respect because all people are capable of publicly explaining themselves and their actions to others. The rulers do not believe that those who exercise power should be required openly to give account of their actions, and to be held publicly responsible for their slipups, fraud, and mendacity, their capricious lawlessness and violence. China is thus a political system whose merchants of arbitrary power typically rig things to their advantage. Its rulers restrict or ban outright opportunities for questioning or actively refusing their own power. They boss and bully their subjects, and even resort to eliminating their opponents, through torture, imprisonment, disappearance, or death. The weak have few or no means of speaking against the strong by pressing home their concerns freely in public. Their dignity is dispensable. The regime deems people as fit only for bowing and scraping in the presence of masters. There is no room for genuinely democratic politics. The whole system (the terms are often used interchangeably) is ‘autocratic’, authoritarian, or ‘totalitarian’.
These assessments by observers of China’s rise rightly take aim at the issue of arbitrary power, but they are careless of language. Strictly speaking, as we have already pointed out, totalitarianism refers to a one-party political order ruled by violence, a single ‘glorious myth’ ideology, all-purpose terror, and compulsory mass rallies. Within the heartlands of the galaxy empire, most Chinese people would say that daily life in their country just isn’t like that. The Mao days are over. There’s a larger point here, for the realities of life inside China and in its outlands contradict the key terms found in mainstream political science textbooks. When seen as an emergent whole, the inner and outer parts of the empire are neither ‘autocratic’ nor totalitarian’ nor describable as a Mugabe-style corrupt military-bureaucratic dictatorship nor a tyranny’, if by that term is meant a state ruled by a strong man consumed by lawless desires. China watchers who use these terms to describe Beijing’s government as a form of iron-fisted ‘authoritarian’ rule sustained by the material benefits it delivers to its toad-eating subjects seriously misperceive things. Not only do they marshal Orientalist prejudices (kowtowing Chinese who haven’t yet realized the beauty and benefits of Western liberal democracy), but they ignore basic facts. Those who describe the Chinese political system as heavy-handed ‘authoritarianism’ or ‘totalitarianism’ get at least two things wrong 33 They fail to see that while within the heartlands of the PRC there is certainly plenty of public and private bellyaching about how the party periodically makes mistakes and is prone to corruption, citizens who stay inside the government’s electric fences enjoy a wide range of daily freedoms without fear. 4 China watchers convinced that the PRC is ruled ultimately by iron fists wrapped in lies and censorship also underestimate the preoccupation of the CP leadership with the use of and techniques of adaptive governance’ and other sophisticated methods of clever rule. ” The leadership strives hard to foster the sense that government is for the benefit of ‘the people’. It’s a key reason why state violence and legal coercion are carefully calibrated, cleverly targeted at troublemakers-during street protests, and in places such as Tibet, Hong Kong, and Xinjiang. It’s also why the party state uses opinion polling, elections, public forums, anti-corruption agencies, and other tools of government that lend it a people-sensitive, ‘democratic’ feel.
Why do the CCP leaders strive hard to be seen as accountable to the people whose loyalty at home they seek to win? The shortest answer: because they know from their history books and their immediate experience the political dangers of self-aggrandizement. The rulers’ skittishness is palpable. While they live the illusion of their own indispensability, they constantly worry about losing power over people. They recall from their history books details of large-scale rebellions like the Yellow Scarves peasant revolt (184-205 CE) and the 1850-64 Taiping uprising, which claimed the lives of at least twenty million souls during perhaps the bloodiest uncivil war ever recorded in human history. They learned from events such as the 1989 Tiananmen uprising that the political system is vulnerable to disorder and implosion, popular resistance, and breakdown, and they well understand the general rule that political orders appear stable and legitimate until the moment they crumble and collapse. They understand that governing is less like hammering nails into wood and more like balancing on slippery eggs, as the Chinese saying goes.
The rulers also know the old dictum that power is the ability to succeed in the world, to outflank opponents, to set aside the need to learn from previous mistakes, and to ignore their costs, or to heap them onto others, or postpone remedying their consequences until a later date.
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