Dictatorship by Degrees: Xi Jinping in China by Steven P. Feldman (review)

Dictatorship by Degreesis an important book about Xi Jinping’s ongoing campaign to centralize the Chinese Communist Party’s power and suppress dissent. As a scholar of management and business ethics, Steven P. Feldman spent over a year in China talking to business people, journalists, scholars, and others about how the Party’s policies affected their careers and everyday lives. Using a concept of “pre-totalitarianism” to distinguish the current form of dictatorship from full-blown totalitarianism, the book argues that China today is not yet a fully totalitarian society, but there are troubling signs that it may be heading in that direction. This book helps us better understand how people in China today still live in the shadow of the Cultural Revolution and how the Party under Xi Jinping has been using extralegal campaigns, indoctrination and propaganda, censorship, and cult of personality to maintain and expand its power over Chinese thought and society.

From June 2015 to July 2016, Feldman was a visiting scholar at Peking University and went on side trips to Hong Kong and Singapore. There he compiled 2,000 pages of research notes from interviews and personal observations. The book’s main strength is its analysis of the political system from the perspective of nongovernment elites. As Feldman reflected, “As a professor of management, I had significant access to business executives, professors, lawyers, journalists, and nonprofit executives. These groups represent the business and professional classes involved in the state-society interface” (p. xi). The fall 2015 Confucian Entrepreneur Conference at Peking University was an especially important opportunity to discuss Chinese business leaders’ interaction with the state and how many who grew up during the Cultural Revolution were still affected by its violence. Summaries of conversations with various professionals are fascinating windows into how people cope with memories of past Communist Party violence, and try to conduct their lives and businesses in an environment where the rules are ambiguous and subject to unpredictable future state actions. Most interview subjects are identified only by their roles like “Chinese professor of political science,” “European consultant,” and “Chinese executive MBA student in her mid-30s.” The fact that interviewees mostly wished to remain anonymous is a clear indication that professionals fear an increasingly repressive political climate. To put these interviews in context, the author uses an anthropological approach and draws on a wide range of English-language scholarship on Chinese history, politics, and society, as well as theoretical works on totalitarianism.

For its conceptual framework, the book builds on Hannah Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism and Juan J. Linz’s analysis of the differences between authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Feldman defines pre-totalitarianism “as a dictatorship in which distinct totalitarian patterns of control are dormant or exist in a fragmented or low intensity condition” (p. x). He expands this point, “In the pre-totalitarian phase, people still maintain their private lives and private relationships. Much of normal life goes on. The principle of economic efficiency is still primarily followed in the economic sphere” (p. 17). Observers have long hoped that a growing middle class in China would lead to an increasingly successful pressures for democratic reforms. When Deng Xiaoping came to power and moved China away from the Maoist ideological excesses of the Cultural Revolution, it appeared that totalitarianism was in retreat until the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre initiated a new wave of repression. With Hu Jintao, there were renewed hopes that more voices were being heard in top-level policy making. However, when Xi Jinping succeeded Hu, it soon became clear that the Party was increasing its use of censorship, strict management of historical memory, strong police forces, and other instruments of repression against any challengers to the regime. From the interviews in this book, it is apparent that the middle class is willing to go along with the regime...