Retrofitting Leninism is a big and important book. It brings together numerous modes of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) governance under one theoretical framework, explaining how China’s authoritarian system works through a mixture of control and inclusion. The book fits into the broader category of works that explain China’s authoritarian resilience, a veritable cottage industry within Chinese studies since Andrew Nathan’s 2003 article of the same name was published in the Journal of Democracy. Dimitar Gueorguiev’s ambition is to change that debate in several ways, all of which enhance our collective understanding of China’s governance puzzle. This review summarizes these contributions and, at the end, raises a question that remains unanswered.
First and foremost, Retrofitting Leninism, as the title suggests, brings Lenin back into our conceptualization of the CCP’s Marxist roots. A 2011 volume by Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth Perry focused on Maoist contributions, which tend to emphasize the informal, perhaps even anarchic, ways in which Chinese governance could be adaptive and nimble to changing situations on the ground. Gueorguiev, in contrast, focuses on China’s Leninist roots, emphasizing hierarchical organization and its ability to achieve “controlled inclusion” of the masses into CCP governance. Controlled inclusion is the practice of inviting popular participation in policy making while gathering information and public opinion in a limited and controlled way. This prevents social mobilization and horizontal networks between citizens from ever gaining sufficient capacity to oppose the state and to threaten the CCP’s monopoly over political power.
Retrofitting Leninism is not looking at a new or underresearched aspect of Chinese governance. Indeed the field’s focus on China’s authoritarian innovations has yielded numerous concepts that explore this innovation of participatory authoritarianism, including Jessica Teet’s “consultative authoritarianism,” Chris Heurlin’s “responsive authoritarianism,” and Wenfang Tang’s “populist authoritarianism,” to name just a few. Gueorguiev’s novel contribution is to focus on the control aspects and how this control, as a deliberate mode of Leninist practice, can help explain why China’s authoritarian resilience can withstand public participation without spinning out of control toward political liberalization. The game changer that may be enabling Leninist governance now to achieve what the Soviets failed at is technology—specifically, the Chinese state’s ability to monitor, poll, and interact with its citizens.
Gueorguiev’s Leninism is narrowly focused on certain facets of Leninist practices of party–society interaction. Retrofitting Leninism shows how the party gains legitimacy and popular support through consultative and deliberative practices that are not democratic but yet are unusual in authoritarian governance because they risk activating mass interest in politics and raising expectations about what the state should deliver to citizens. Some of these practices have been deeply integrated into CCP governance since Mao’s experiments in Yenan in the 1930s and 1940s, such as the mass line, the quasi-democratic elections of cadres, and a petitioning system that incorporates elements of both Soviet practice and the imperial institutions of dynastic China. As I discuss later in this review, Gueorguiev’s theory does not analyze the internal structure of the regime itself nor how changing modes of centralization and the erosion of democratic centralism (another key component of Leninist practice) under Xi Jinping may make controlled inclusion more difficult to sustain when the CCP itself is less resilient and internally cohesive.
Retrofitting Leninism is an empirically rigorous and theoretically ambitious book. It provides a broad theoretical framework that structures the main argument. Yet each empirical chapter can stand alone as an excellent example of a more tractable research question that individually builds the case for Gueorguiev’s overall argument that the CCP has mastered the art of governing with social input without sacrificing its autonomy. Chapters 3–8 each provide a key part of the argument about controlled inclusion and its benefits for the regime’s legitimacy, responsiveness, and policy stability. But Gueorguiev does not overstate his claims about controlled inclusion. It is not always deployed, and unpopular or sensitive policies might be pushed through without consultation and with brutality. Instead, Gueorguiev argues that when it is used, the regime and governance are better for it.
Chapter 3 examines the use of citizen input and feedback in the state’s anticorruption campaign. Launched by Xi Jinping in 2013, the anticorruption campaign has been incredibly popular among citizens in China, who have long felt cheated by the massive corruption at all levels of the political system. By asking citizens to take part in the campaign by reporting the malfeasance of local cadres who control so much of their daily lives, the central government not only mitigates the principal-agent problem inherent in top-down political systems but also improves its standing among the people who observe a benevolent dictator at the center combating local “bad apples.” Using an instrumental variable approach to deal with endogeneity problems involving base levels of corruption and the number of citizen reports, Gueorguiev still finds that citizen complaints of corruption are associated with higher numbers of investigations. These cleanup campaigns against corrupt officials, aided by direct citizen complaints, may have gone far in convincing Chinese citizens that the CCP under Xi Jinping is finally serious about good government.
Chapters 4–8 provide similar investigations of key components of China’s controlled inclusion, examining public consultation in legislation (chapter 4), local congresses’ input on policy decisions (chapter 5), whether public consultation leads to policy stability (chapter 6), participatory budgeting (chapter 7), and the increasing use of digitized surveillance through the social credit system and its effect on citizen trust in the government (chapter 8). This final empirical chapter is the least optimistic about the sustainability of China’s Leninist experiment. Gueorguiev finds that when survey respondents are given new information about the extensiveness of the social credit system, their trust in the government declines. This survey was completed before the COVID pandemic, but this finding corroborates anecdotal evidence that Chinese people rebelled against the misuse and overuse of health apps and public health surveillance to control its citizenry during the pandemic.
As Gueorguiev shows in chapter 1, controlled inclusion is the hallmark of single-party Leninist regimes, including not only the PRC but also the Republic of China (Taiwan) before the 1990s and Singapore via the People’s Action Party, which is strongly anticommunist but Leninist in origin. Leninist regimes that fail to maintain the balance between control and inclusion degrade into instability, which was the fate of the Soviet Union. Taiwan, of course, also went through a period of instability from the 1970s to the 1990s; social and labor movements, students, and emerging opposition parties put immense pressure on the ruling party, the Kuomintang, to liberalize, which it did gradually before emerging as a stable multiparty democracy in the early 2000s. Gueorguiev’s scope does not extend to explaining these varied outcomes, but one important factor might be the internal structure of the Leninist regime and how both intra-elite and societal challenges are managed and contained. One important facet of Leninism is, of course, democratic centralism, which manages intraparty dynamics by tolerating dissent and disagreement as policy formulation occurs but demands strict compliance and cohesion once a policy decision has been made. For the past two decades, China’s top leadership has used collective leadership and consensus decision making in the Politburo Standing Committee to control intra-elite competition and factional infighting. Under Xi Jinping, however, collective leadership has been jettisoned in favor of a strong, authoritative core leader. Policy debates are more muted; possibly because of fear of investigation by his anticorruption campaign, there is far less appetite for vigorous discussion that might criticize policies associated with Xi. The chaotic ending of his signature “Zero COVID” policy in December 2021 was made much worse due to the lack of preparation for its replacement. Were policy makers too afraid to raise alternatives for fear of disparaging the core leader?
Democratic centralism within the CCP might be crucial to the sustainability of controlled inclusion because external public opinion and debates need to feed into an internal process of robust deliberation and evaluation. Gueorguiev suggests that this degradation in China’s policy making and public consultation might have peaked in 2012 (p. 179), and automated social surveillance may be replacing the hands-on approach of grassroot cadres. To understand the future of the Leninist CCP in China, we also need to understand how it manages the increasingly fraught problem of internal decision making.
