Good news! Western commentators too often conflate Xi’s centralization with his reactionary politics. These need to be conceptually separated—in China and around the world—because progressive politics also requires overcoming fragmented politics, but for very different ends.
A big reason Western commentators interpret centralization under Xi as nothing but authoritarianism is that don’t really know anything about how the Chinese state has operated for the last forty years. So a crude stereotype of monolithic Oriental despotism fills in the gap. 2/
In fact the state became highly fractured among jurisdictions and within officials (their public duties at odds with their private interests). What Xi is attempting with the anti-corruption and Party discipline campaigns is to regain the center’s ability to impose priorities. 3/
The way to judge those priorities is not democracy vs authoritarianism, which only describe the outcome of a social process. It’s on the substance of the social process they build: progressive vs reactionary. /4
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Quite a troubling piece from János Kornai: life in China “had frozen under Mao”; Western liberals naïvely brought the spark of life (market reform), inadvertently causing “the resurrection of the Chinese monster”; the West must now destroy the monster. 1/ ft.com/content/f10ccb…
It's hard to read the Frankenstein metaphor as anything other than a claim about the racial or civilizational essence of China. What’s interesting is the tension within the piece between the remnant abstract universalism of liberalism, still the conscious commitment, and the 2/
emergent culturalism, which has now become the real (though still unconscious) substance of the thinking. That’s best seen here, where the disavowal of the obvious consequences of his point serves as a crude screening device to escape awareness of his betrayal of liberalism. 3/