In 2013, a year after Xi Jinping took office, he issued a stern warning about the role that the country’s gross domestic product should play in its politics. During an investigation tour of Hunan Province, Xi conceded that, although China must fix its sights firmly on the task of economic construction, officials must not reduce “development” to a simple matter of merely increasing GDP and blindly rank some as political “heroes” based solely on GDP growth. Officials at all levels must instead pursue what he referred to as “real GDP” as measured in terms of “efficient, high-quality, and sustainable economic development” (People’s Daily, 2013).
Xi’s turn away from the “limited, quantified vision” (p. 3) of his immediate predecessors is Wallace’s point of departure for this intriguing new book: “How did a revolutionary Communist Party come to justify itself through a limited number of statistics,” Wallace asks, “and why is it currently shifting away from doing so?” (p. 3). In the wake of Mao’s death, “revolutionary ideology was supplanted by quantified state capitalism as the regime’s main argument for staying in power” (p. 15). Beginning with Deng Xiaoping’s canny deployment of Mao’s 1938 invocation to “seek truth from facts,” Wallace traces the complex process by which the early post-Mao leadership championed the “fact-based empiricism of ‘practice’” (p. 52) as a guide for action and, ultimately, policy making. In bringing back to power those cadres who were purged during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Deng succeeded in populating the regime with technocrats who agreed on the goal of economic development, although perhaps differing on the means to attain it. This cohort of successors propounded the idea that China’s political and economic dilemmas were reducible to straightforward technical issues that could be quantified and therefore solved, ushering in a new era—and a new ideology—of “limited, quantified governance” (p. 53); in this era, superordinate authorities focused mainly on a small number of statistics at the aggregate level and paid close attention to a few critical outputs to assess the performance of localities (p. 128).
Wallace notes at least the initial functionality of this system, which took China’s GDP from 364 billion RMB in 1978 at the start of the reform era to a whopping 30.3 trillion in 2008. The Chinese economy grew sixteen-fold, helping ensure the regime’s durability and survival into the future. At the heart of the system, Wallace argues, is the cadre evaluation system, which in 1998 involved a weighted series of 18 indicators for local officials that included “soft targets, hard targets, and priority targets with veto power” (p. 112) evaluated on an annual basis. Over time, the number of performance indicators proliferated. Although some later additions were admittedly more abstract and less easily quantified, economic and revenue growth targets remained of paramount importance (p. 113); these measures generated moral hazard problems and “gaming the system” problems (“hiding facts”) for those whose performance was being assessed (p. 128). Unsurprisingly, over time, significant externalities emerged that rendered the evaluation system “unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable” (p. 107), as Premier Wen Jiabao lamented in 2007. Attempts to expand the indicators on which the system of cadre evaluation relied and so correct such trends—for example, by creating a “green GDP” (p. 124) measure capable of discounting some of the more egregious excesses in the existing system—ended in failure.
By the end of the Hu-Wen era in 2012, the externalities generated by a “limited quantitative vision” simply overwhelmed the system. “Suffocating pollution, pervasive corruption, stark inequality, rising debt, persistent poverty, inefficient investment, deliberate falsification, and slowing growth” resulted; [what] mattered was not counted, and what was counted did not measure up” (p. 164). Wallace writes off the “uncertainty and narrative swings” that characterized Xi’s first year in power as a prime example of “a Bayesian learning model of new authoritarian leadership with weak priors and a vast, multidimensional political space” (p. 179). But he finds that “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” quickly coalesced around a coherent diagnosis of the failures of the preceding leadership teams, as well as a tripartite cure: a thorough-going and far-ranging anticorruption campaign designed to weed out malfeasance and instill new norms of behavior, a centralization of political decision making to correct the centripetal pathologies that were undermining the functioning of the party-state system, and a reinvigoration of the role of the party.
These three elements comprise Xi’s “neopolitical turn,” which has also been accompanied by a potent embrace of both traditionalism and nationalism in the public sphere. Wallace argues that both the propaganda and justification strategies of the current regime project an understanding of the world as chaotic and conflict-ridden, replete with egregious failures and sinister enemies, in which only the strong and steady hand of Xi guiding the ship of state can afford safety and security. Nevertheless, the author warns that Xi’s governance model is likewise fraught with potential vulnerabilities. A chief example is the regime’s response to the COVID-19 crisis and the resultant wave of public anti-lockdown “A4 protests” in November 2022, some of which called for Xi’s ouster. By eschewing the mask of technocratic jargon and justifications for policy shifts, Xi has put politics front and center in public discourse, potentially opening up the regime’s justifications to challenging questions that raise issues of justice, fairness, and accountability. The institutional changes wrought by Xi’s seemingly relentless effort to consolidate power leave the center more exposed when decisions backfire. Another of the contemporary regime’s counterintuitive and worrying responses to the problems of “limited, quantitative vision has been to attempt to quantify everything” (p. 5; emphasis in original) by imposing a vastly ambitious social credit system.
Perhaps the most controversial claim undergirding Wallace’s analysis is his core contention that even though “dictators desire data” (p. 79), China’s post-Mao political center “intentionally limited its vision into localities” (p. 62; emphasis added) as a conscious and deliberate strategy. The author repeatedly asserts that although “the regime’s center had the capacity to see more deeply or broadly when it chose to do so,” for the most part, the system of “limited, quantified vision represented a choice” deliberately exercised by the top leadership in Beijing (p. 155; emphasis added). His claim is that this willful “blind-eye governance” strategy is what allowed for the “directed improvisation” of local officials to spur rapid economic growth while shielding the center from both exogenous charges that it was adopting overtly capitalistic policies and endogenous opposition from the revolutionary socialist old guard within the party ranks. It also, Wallace argues, permitted more entrepreneurial local officials to pursue higher-risk growth strategies while allowing more cautious locales to adopt a wait-and-see approach (p. 62).
This contention, if correct, challenges one of the ungirding assumptions of the “adaptive governance” paradigm that characterizes the post-Mao policy-making process as one of continual and careful adjustment. One of the hallmarks of that approach views “maximum tinkering” as taking place under the “Leninist hierarchy” of the watchful party center; the results of local experiments were not only closely monitored by Beijing but were also fed through an elaborate “CCP learning system” that, although not immune to malfunction, was designed to disseminate positive models and draw lessons from failures.
Instead, Wallace offers a different portrait of a reform-era party-state that previously governed quantitatively from a distance by choice but has embraced an increasingly extreme “personalization, centralization, and partyfication of power” under Xi Jinping. It is not clear on what evidence Wallace’s claim of deliberate “blind-eye governance” rests; presumably an equally plausible case could be made that, whereas the Deng era party-state lacked the capacity to monitor its local agents effectively, as economic reform expanded the resource base of the state, it was better able to surveil and control its agents. Yet Wallace’s lack of clarity on this point does not detract from the value or originality of this book, nor from the importance of his conclusion about the human toll exacted by bureaucrats driven by “limited, quantified vision.”
