Using Ideology to Maintain Control

In their article “Standoffish States: Nonliterate Leviathans in Southeast Asia,” authors Dan Slater and Diana Kim suggest that the highest desire of a state is not “maximizing economic extraction” (as Scott 1998 purports), but rather minimizing political challenges to the state. They argue that states do not have a ubiquitous desire to govern and rule populations and territories within the state, but their willingness to expend energy and effort to make these populations “legible”, or standardized under law and taxation, is a function of the risk involved with attempting to govern these populations. States act “standoffish” when they choose to leave subsets of the population as unstandardized and ungoverned, or “nonliterate”.

Slater and Kim offer their standoffish state model as a framework to analyze why states choose to administer or ignore certain populations. Here, I would like to extend their findings to the uprisings in Syria. Within Slater and Kim’s framework, the rebellion in Syria represents an insurgent challenge to the regime. As modeled by Slater and Kim, the Assad regime did not resort to state campaigns to standardize and homogenize, but rather implemented militarized pacification. This is in support of their statement that often states seek to minimize political challenges rather than resource extraction maximization. Furthering this, Slater and Kim argue that the type of insurgency will dictate what response—nonliterate means such as militarized pacification or standardizing legibility—the regime will enact. They argue that urban uprisings threatening the social and economic elite will more likely produce legibility. Accordingly, as Lisa Wedeen argues in her article “Ideology and Humor in Dark Times: Notes from Syria”, large-scale resistance in the two key cities of Aleppo and Damascus were heavily delayed until the waning hours of the rebellion. Lack of an urban movement dictated Assad’s response; that is, to enforce nonliteracy on the insurgents rather than placation and standardization.

Shifting focus away from how information affects states’ decision-making calculus, I would like to discuss the use of ideology in maintaining state control. In Syria, a misuse of ideology led to the instability that fostered the Syrian civil war. As Wedeen argues, the locus of dissent in Syria arose from the conflicting logics of neoliberalism and authoritarian crackdown. That is, the opening up and progress (in more than just an economic capacity), combined with the regimes usage of old-guard styled crackdown and rule that produced a cognitive dissonance in the public. Wedeen writes,

 

“The contemporary period’s ambiguities suggest the intricacies of rule in a market-oriented, information-awash era in which various forms of sovereignty—both personal and collective—are threatened not only by violence but also by new forms of disorientation and uncertainty. This uncertainty is connected to the ways in which ideology ceased in the 2000s to be the privileged domain of the party, which both regulated the content and controlled the institutional circuits of discursive dissemination.”

 

What is evident from this analysis is that the publics’ uncertainty, or lack of concrete information about what was acceptable in a period of rapid change and transformation (exemplified by the Syrian first family’s glorification of glamour and fashion) led to challenges of sovereignty. As Wedeen discusses, publicly demonstrated Soviet-style methods of control and crackdown sent a clear message of acceptable behavior. This message became muddled through the ideology of neoliberalism disseminating among the masses, leading citizens to push the fringes of what was previously tolerated and resulting directly in tensions with a regime with no tolerance for dissent.

If the conflicting logic between neoliberalism in social/economic spheres and an authoritarian government led to rebellion in Syria, are the same patterns present in China? Assuredly not; instead, a homogenizing and standardizing force is present within the CCP. In contrast to Syria, the use of ideology in the form of neoliberal politics has helped China maintain stability and cull unrest. Despite protests in the tens of thousands each year, China seems to have avoided mass unrest by coordinating an opening up of society with an opening up of the political process.  In his article “Fragmented Authoritarianism 2.0”, Andrew Mertha describes how China’s political system has become more open to new policy entrepreneurs who influence outcomes based off issue framing. I argue that this opening up can be seen as an effort to make more groups “legible”, to use the definition of Scott (1998).

China’s efforts to standardize more policy entrepreneurs all hinges on the desire of the state to include more populations in its governance. As Slater and Kim argue, willingness, rather than capacity, should be the defining characteristic of how successful a state is. If a state has no unfulfilled desire to govern a certain population and is comfortable with the status quo, then it could be viewed as “successful”. This definition is particularly intriguing when relating it to China and its claims on an independent Taiwan, numerous border disputes, and a South China Sea in conflict.

China’s Current Changes

Even in less than fifty pages, the readings this week make it clear that China is undergoing an economic and institutional revolution driven by changes in policies and norms. Both Wallace’s “The New Normal: A Neopolitical Turn in China’s Reform Era” and Minzner’s “China After the Reform Era” show that since Mao, China has undergone numerous changes, but perhaps the greatest and most impactful changes are those that have been promulgated by the current Chinese leader Xi Jinping. According to Minzner, Xi Jinping has succeeded in recreated a Mao-like popularity, becoming a personalistic ruler. While Minzer focuses a lot on Xi Jinping’s image in Chinese society as a backbone for his popular support, Wallace focuses instead on the reforms that have been led by Xi Jinping in China, and the effects that these decisions have had on both maintaining the Chinese economy and ensuring that the Chinese regime has legitimate claims to power.

Wallace argues that the first of two important changes seen under Xi Jinping is the centralization of power. The drive for this is represented in the new power and popularity of the Party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI). The most important aspect of the CCDI’s rejuvenation in China is the fact that it is now prosecuting high ranking Party officials. This is something that Xi Jinping has done not only to secure political power against his competitors, but also to help legitimize the state while targeting corruption.

The second of these important changes is a change in the perspective of the politicians, more specifically in the goals that they have as those in power have switched from the technocrats of the past to those belonging to the neopolitical wave that is currently sweeping the nation. While Minzner also mentions the new political and power dynamics in China, he focuses more on the economic future of the regime, and the effects that the decisions of past leaders will have on Xi Jinping’s ability to react.

As someone who has little background knowledge in China, I thought that the most interesting parts of each of this week’s readings were not the author’s analysis of the Chinese economy or predictions on the future of Chinese politics, but rather that both author’s allude to the fact that Xi Jinping is operating via self-reflection, not only on his past decisions but on the past decisions of all authoritarian leaders. This is more prevalent in the Minzer article. On multiple occasions Minzer mentions that Xi Jinping’s decisions, and the decisions of many Chinese leaders, were motivated by the failures of the Soviet Union. An example of this can be seen in the decision to encourage retirement from leadership positions, to spark economic development, and to maintain a Party that, for the most part, views the people within its borders as equals.  As this class comes to a close, it is both rewarding and concerning to know that Authoritarian rulers are using what we’ve learned as motivators for their decisions; that the topics and case studies we’ve been discussing are not just theory on paper.