The Dictator’s Dilemma: The Chinese Communist Party’s Strategy for Survival by Bruce J. Dickson (review)

The title of this new work by American political scientist Bruce J. Dickson is a little misleading. It sounds like the book will be largely speculative and join a long list of those that have already appeared contemplating various challenges the Communist Party faces along with assessments of how it might deal with these. In fact, at the heart of this study is material taken from a number of public opinion surveys conducted in China between 2010 and 2014 in different places and across different socioeconomic groups. In that sense the book is more about current public opinion in modern China than anything that is going to happen in the future.

Chinese public opinion is something of a mystery. Pew and other surveys produce annual assessments of the mood within China toward the government, and they invariably record high levels of satisfaction. This is hardly surprising in view of the high costs those who challenge the Party’s monopoly on power pay—some of whom Dickson refers to in his chapter on democracy and the understanding of it within the country.

Despite this, surveyors do now have strategies to uncover more nuanced aspects of Chinese opinion, and Dickson’s book illustrates some of these. The fact that the data presented covers a period of elite leadership transition, from Hu Jintao to Xi Jinping, during 2012 and into 2013, adds to its significance. Beyond their intrinsic value, therefore, they also provide a useful audit of how this event—one which had a huge impact on the wider public but was, as far as we know, decided by only a handful of people—affected public views about where they thought their country was going.

Some things widely evidenced in already extant surveys elsewhere are simply reaffirmed here. On the whole, Chinese respect central leaders more than they do local ones. Perceptions of the corruption, efficiency, and work ethic of local leaders are almost uniformly negative. There are also clear differences linked to generation and age. The older generation of Communist Party members who joined in the era prior to the 1980s are shown to have done so for idealistic reasons. Those who joined afterward largely did so through pragmatic calculations of the usefulness of membership for their career.

A more complex issue addressed in the book is that of what motivates fidelity toward the one Party state among the public. Dickson refers to the large amount of material that shows that through modernization, rising living standards, and development (the things the Party currently builds public support on in China) countries are likelier to eventually end up as multiparty democracies of one form or another. In many ways, until now, China has bucked this trend. But the key question is whether, for all its declarations of marching into an eternal, glorious future, the Party is in fact stimulating the kinds of wealth-creating model that will end up leading to its inevitable demise.

Dickson is frank about some of the tactics the Party utilizes now to support its rule—tolerance for most things but utter inflexibility on the matter of organized challenges in the political realm. For those who dare wander into this area, it deploys repression and threats. The problem with this tack, however, is its expense, and the likelihood it has of eventually alienating people. Does this use of such harsh methods indicate that deep down the Party is aware of the paradox of pushing for a society whose prosperity, levels of education, and demands will eventually put it out of business?

Anxiety about its sustainability must be one of the reasons why the Party in recent years has been assiduous in utilizing nationalistic narratives to gain support. But Dickson is right in contesting the usual statement that Party legitimacy post-Mao until the era of Xi, relied on GDP growth to gain public...