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.

The “New Normal” in China: A Neopolitical Turn, a New Era, or a Reversion?

Maintaining the rule of the CCP, to this day, remains the Party’s top priority. To a large extent, this has been a two-pronged attack through promoting the legitimacy of the CCP and stifling public dissent. Quelling social unrest and outbursts of public dissent has been a methodological and straightforward process (utilizing censorship and pathways for the public to express tolerable complaints) since the Tiananmen Square protests, but ensuring legitimacy in the eyes of the public has arisen as a much more complicated issue. During the Maoist period, ideology and revolution served as the pillars of legitimacy; through the current Era, astronomical economic growth has been used to justify single-party rule of the CCP. Now, however, there has been a turn in the political climate of the PRC, coinciding with an economic slow down that threatens legitimacy of the CCP and consequently social stability within China.

Authors Jeremy Wallace and Carl Minzner both agree there is an observable change in the political atmosphere under Xi Jinping. Whereas Wallace argues that a “neopolitical turn” has occurred, replacing the technocratic with the political under the larger umbrella of continued economic reform, Minzner argues that the collateral of rapid economic development is surfacing and will require an undoing of the institutionalization that pervaded the reform era.

Here, I argue that whether or not the Reform Era has ended largely depends on the extent to which Xi unravels that era’s institutionalization in the next several years, especially considering a few key upcoming decisions such as surpassing the ten-year term limit for the Presidency. Further, I view the guiding framework for the direction of the political climate to be solely dependent on perceived regime threats: the only constant during this transitional turn is that the CCP will act in accordance with what is best for maintaining regime control. The adaptive authoritarianism constructed in post-Mao China will continue to adapt, casting aside any guise of the rule of law or of political liberalization if need be.

Though I believe the most accurate analysis will stem from Xi’s upcoming decisions, there is some evidence to consider now for future predictions. Ideology seems to be on the rise within China, and two prominent aspects come to mind: international disputes and the revival of Confucianism. The numerous political confrontations regarding the South China Sea has spurred a wave of Chinese nationalism. Boisterous claims by the CCP leadership sparks waves of support among the general populace (for example, the outcry and looting of Japanese businesses after the Japanese PM visited the Yasukuni Shrine). The CCP may be using rallying calls to unite its citizens in the face of unrest from economic downturn. Second, mentions of Confucianism in political rhetoric and increased investment in Confucian education serves the Party’s interest as well: notions of obedience and harmony are politically expedient, given the current political climate.

What is important about this use of ideology is that it is reminiscent of pre-Reform Era political strategy. As Wallace argues, it is a neopolitical turn. Similarly, as Minzner argues, it unravels much of what the Reform Era worked to institutionalize. Personally, I lean toward Wallace’s current assessment that the Reform Era has been shifted in a new direction, but has not ended. Many of the economic reforms brought about during this period would cause huge dissent if reversed. As for the social reforms and further democratization that typically accompanies globalization and economic reform, the CCP security apparatus has been continually suppressing this potential source of public dissent since Tiananmen. Thus, the heavy-handedness of Xi’s rule represents a bolstering of defense against unrest that will surely follow continued economic slowdown, while the core fundamentals of the institutionalization of economic reform will remain intact.