Imagining Social Change through Policy Failures in China
Change and continuity are interrelated dynamics. All social scientists grapple with this interrelation. How is continuity embedded in change? How does change enable continuity? In struggling with such issues, social scientists, along with everybody else, create concepts to depict the dynamics of change and social continuity. These concepts are never a perfect match with the worlds they describe, and sometimes they distort our perceptions of the dynamics at play as much as they enable them.
Consider four ways of imagining dynamics of change and continuity: replacement, transition, transformation, and reconfiguration. Replacement of one thing with another is perhaps the easiest way to envision change but also the most obviously flawed. The very word ‘replacement’ implies that the people considering the substitution see the context of the replacement as stable over time. If you replace my essay with another one in this journal, everything else about the journal issue can remain as it was. Consider a more detailed example. Let us say the original human population of a particular city is annihilated through warfare and the original buildings and infrastructure are destroyed. The victors build a new city on the same site according to their rather different architectural tastes and plans and repopulate it with their own people, who speak another language and have rather different customs. Still, the site of the city remains unchanged. There are continuities in the climate of the place, in the flora and fauna, the fungi and insects, the bacteria and viruses, the rivers and mountains, and in the shape of the landscape and its vantage on the heavens. While the new inhabitants may differ profoundly from the original inhabitants, they would share at least some technologies, the genetic commonalities of humans, and the same climatic conditions. As the theme for an academic conference on Chinese world-making held in Heidelberg in 2023 announced, social change takes place in the ‘more-than-human world of the human–technology–nature entanglement’ (Worldmaking Center 2023).
In political arenas around the world, rhetoric abounds promising replacement of one regime with another. ‘If only I, or my party, or my faction of the army is allowed to replace the current rulers, our country will be completely different,’ they say. ‘We will have a revolution and utopia will replace dystopia.’ The promises of revolution and liberation in Maoist China were a particularly extreme example of such rhetoric. But, of course, the promised utopia was never realised, necessitating the continual search for hidden enemies of the new regime who could be blamed for the lack of progress, as happens to varying degrees almost everywhere.
Even in historical cases of genocide, such as among Native Americans in the United States or Jews in Germany, the presence of the people who suffered attacks continues in numerous ways: as a conscious political force and historical memory; through medicinal and culinary practices and artistic legacies; through techniques and technologies of farming, hunting, living, and moving; in placenames and inflections of language; in legacies of violence and governance; and in the genetic constitutions of people who deny or do not even know their own heritage. Because complete replacement is an impossible form of social change, using concepts of replacement to frame social change often gives rise to the experience of haunting. Haunting occurs whenever some social dynamic, persona, or experience that we thought was dead and buried somehow re-emerges to inform or affect our present world. Ghosts can re-emerge from any supposedly past epoch and seemingly become more powerful if we have repressed them, ignored them, or forgotten them.
So, how can we imagine change beyond replacement? The remaining three concepts involve some type of recombination of new and existing elements. Chinese concepts of Yin and Yang can help here, as transformations in a Daoist imagination necessitate reconfigurations of Yin and Yang. The Taijitu (太极图, the famous Yin–Yang diagram), begins from the assumption that there was always already a bit of Yin in the Yang and vice versa. But perhaps a simpler starting point here is the children’s toy a transformer. When the pieces are moved around, the toy can ‘transform’ from a human-like robot into a car or a truck or an airplane, but after the transformation all the original pieces are still present. Using the toy as a starting point for thought has its limitations. In the social transformations we analyse, new elements may be recombined with old elements in the new formation. But at least the toy provides a way of imagining the place of the past in the present. And if we take Daoism more literally, it is written that all the myriad things of our world emerge from the elementary forces of Yin and Yang. Everything is in some way recombinant.
All three remaining concepts of transition, transformation, and reconfiguration rely on such a notion of recombination. What differentiates them is the way that we imagine the state of the world, the country, or the object after the recombination. In the case of transition—at least as I use the word here—we are depicting a change from one nameable state of being to another. I take the idea of transition from the classic anthropological work of Arnold van Gennep (1960) on rites of passage. For van Gennep, rites of passage ritually reinscribe a person from one type to another: from child to adult, from unmarried to married, from uninitiated to initiated, or from living being to ancestor. The process proceeds through the three steps of separation, transition, and reincorporation and has a definite beginning and end. The naming of the before and after states risks the reification of the reality these names indicate. Consider the case of a transgender person who ‘transitions’ from a man to a woman or vice versa. On the one hand, the transition reflects the individual’s strong desire to identify and be recognised as a named being categorically opposite to the type that was assigned at birth. On the other hand, the very existence of transgender people challenges the idea that people fall neatly into the two categories of men and women.
In contrast, transformation, as I use the term, indicates a type of recombinant change that proceeds in a nameable direction, but does not necessarily have nameable before and after states. Consider the process of urbanisation. The term might refer to the transformation of a cluster of houses into a small town, a town into a small city, a small city into a regional capital, or a regional capital into a global metropolis. While in all cases we could say that the place is becoming more urban, there is not necessarily a single clear line that divides the urban from the rural.
The final form of recombinant change is reconfiguration. Here there is change but no definitive before and after states or even a discernible direction of change. Imagine a Rubik’s cube in the hands of an unskilled fumbler like me. No matter how I twist the pieces around, no progress is made towards solving the puzzle. Though we can see that the positions of the individual pieces have changed, we can discern no directional process of overall transformation. Here I am reminded of the favourite poem of sixteenth-century Chinese naturalist Li Shizhen, as cited by Carla Nappi (2009: 138–39):
Transformation of the universe goes on without respite.
Cycles of ebb and flow—now advancing now retreating.
Image and essence evolve, a transforming magicad.
Boundlessly subtle, beyond language’s pale.
Ruin. Fortune’s mistress; Fortune, Ruin’s flame.
Misery and joy crowd the gate, blessing and disaster seed the soil.
All three ways of imagining change carry their own dangers. If transition risks reifying our categories, reconfiguration gives us nothing to analyse. And none of them protects us entirely from the dangers of haunting. If imagining change as replacement almost guarantees that haunting will occur, even recombinant imaginations of change risk the possibility of ignoring or forgetting one or more of the elements involved in the process of change. The ignored elements may return to haunt the post-change present.
Now that we have gone over a few ways of imagining social change and continuity, I would like to consider three rather disastrous policies of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that are not often considered together: the Great Leap Forward of 1958–62 and the resultant famine; the birth-planning policy of 1980–2015; and the zero-Covid policy of 2020–22 and its abrupt reversal. In examining these policies side by side, I move beyond the standard divisions of the Maoist era from the reform era, or even the Xi Jinping era from the Deng Xiaoping era, to explore continuities in communist policymaking and dynamics of state–society relations that emerge under CCP rule. I would also like to think about the discontinuities among these three policies, which are especially evident with the zero-Covid policy. In so doing, I want to move away from considering the policies as entirely matters of politics and society in a purely human world, and instead consider the directions of change as occurring in the ‘human–nature–technology entanglement’. In considering the forms of recombinant change that connect these three policies, I also hope to further illuminate the advantages and disadvantages of the conceptualisations of change.
The Great Leap Forward
As the earliest of these three disastrous policies, the Great Leap Forward has been thoroughly analysed by scholars and historians, though there are still many debates about the intricacies of the policies that led to mass starvation. The Great Famine is also comparable in many ways with other famines in the socialist world: Russia in 1922, Ukraine in 1932–33, North Korea during the 1990s, and perhaps, North Korea again today. What all these disasters have in common are the institution of centralised economic planning, the collectivisation of farming, controls on the movement of farmers and those fleeing famine, and the control and politicisation of information about the extent and distribution of the famine.
Centralised economic planning proceeds through the logic of quotas. Information about all commodities including grain is summarised through numeric quotas and this information is used to control and plan the distribution of the commodities. Each factory or farm is given a quota to produce a particular product and the leaders of that unit can be evaluated in terms of whether they meet that quota. When evaluating cadres, the quotas can be reified in two different ways. Sometimes the goal is simply to meet the quota. In this case, centralised planners have determined the optimum amount for the quota and reward cadres for meeting this target. In the case of the Great Leap Forward, however, centralised planners did not simply set quotas, but also encouraged local leaders to set quotas as high as possible, often well beyond what was possible. The setting of exceptionally high quotas was linked to political rhetoric that suggested that by adopting Maoist methods of planting, harvesting, fertilising, and organising agricultural production, or by politically committing oneself to working harder to meet Maoist ideals, higher production targets could be realised. All the limits of nature and technology could be overcome by politically motivated effort.
The collectivisation of farming enabled the extraction of the grain from the farmers. When farming is enacted by individualised family farmers, the farmers have a voice in determining how large the harvest is and how much of the harvest must be turned over to the central authorities in the form of grain taxes. The size of the harvest is widespread local knowledge and the grain is first harvested by individual households and only later given to the state. But on large collectivised farms, harvested grain is directly placed into local state coffers. Some households might not have a clear idea of how good the harvest is in all the places in their collective. The organisation of collectivised farms thus facilitated the extraction of grain from communities at rates that led to mass starvation. It also exacerbated food shortages as starving collectivised farmers were reluctant to work—one of the factors leading to the famine extending across several harvests instead of just one.
The ways in which starving farmers could survive were also greatly restricted during the Great Leap period. The two most common means of surviving famine (at least in non-socialist regimes) are to conserve energy by not working or to flee famine-affected areas, moving to a place where it is possible to work or beg for food. In general, China’s household registration system, in combination with the ways in which food was distributed in the planned economy, made fleeing famine difficult, though many individuals undoubtedly did so. Such flight was facilitated in some places by local governments that turned a blind eye to fleeing farmers or even encouraged some of their inhabitants to leave. Though finding work outside the centrally planned economy was difficult, small informal corners of illegal, black-market work existed even at the height of the Maoist period. But in other places local government collectives organised security forces to prevent people fleeing and to force them to work. As starving people are extremely difficult to motivate, these forces became infamous for their brutality. Consequently, many of the deaths that occurred during the Great Famine were the direct result of state violence rather than simply starvation, as Yang Jisheng (2018) has so painstakingly documented.
A final aspect of the Great Famine are the restrictions on information that blocked knowledge about the horrors of the violence and starvation from becoming widespread. It was not simply a matter of the lack of freedom of the press, though that was certainly important. Government officials were also encouraged to lie and exaggerate to each other in a variety of forums, and being unwilling to do so was often taken as a sign of political disloyalty. Local leaders could also be punished if their districts were seen to be enduring famine, thus such leaders often took steps to control the forms of information emerging from their districts. Preventing starving farmers from fleeing famine-hit areas was often as much about preventing the flow of information as it was about preventing cities from being hit with an influx of beggars. The persistence of the famine for three full years was also driven by the lack of a free flow of information, though one of the more interesting historical debates about the Great Famine is the extent to which central leaders knew about the horrors to which their policies had led and simply chose to ignore the evidence; compare, for instance, the depictions of the famine by Dikötter (2010) and Garnaut (2014).
The Birth-Planning Policy
The second of the three policies I will discuss is the birth-planning policy of 1980–2015. Though it is associated with the reform era and the regime of Deng Xiaoping in particular, many of the elements discussed in the analysis of the Great Famine can be identified in recombinant form in the birth-planning policy. Let us begin with its name. I have chosen to translate this as the ‘birth-planning policy’, not only because it is the most literal translation of jihua shengyu (计划生育), but also because this name captures the Leninist elements of the policy much more clearly than other English terms like the ‘birth-control policy’ or the ‘one-child policy’.
The policy was implemented through the logic of quotas. As part of a grand centralised plan for the whole of China, demographers calculated a quota of births for the entire country for a given year. Demographers then calculated the number of people of marriageable age who were registered in the official household registration booklets for every city and province in China. Provincial officials did the same for every rural county in their provinces and so on. The centralised national quota thus became smaller quotas for every governed place-based entity in China, often down to the village level. In urban areas, where the policy was literally a one-child policy, this logic was not so apparent. Every legally married couple had the right to bear one child. But in rural areas the issue of quotas dominated the state–society dynamics of the policy. In most rural areas the policy was a one-and-a-half–child policy. Legally married couples were entitled to one pregnancy on marriage, but could have a second child, after a considerable delay, if the first child was a girl. In practice, this meant officials could keep the number of births in their district within the quota by regulating the time between the birth of a first daughter and the allocation of ‘a quota’ for a second child. Rural leaders who did not enforce the quotas for their districts could face harsh penalties. Illegal births or pregnancies were labelled as being ‘out of quota’ (超额).
The enforcement of the policy required a small army of birth-planning cadres to check on the most intimate details of the reproductive lives of all women of childbearing age in China, including menstrual cycles, birth-control methods, and, of course, pregnancies. The implementation of the policy also reinforced China’s household registration policy as a way of keeping track of both women who lived in the districts where they were registered and women who migrated for work or other reasons. In urban areas, most of the population conformed to the demands of the policy, as they did in some rural areas. But in other rural areas, resistance to the policy resulted in considerable levels of out-of-quota pregnancies. As in the case of preventing starving farmers from fleeing famine-hit districts during the Great Leap Forward, different dynamics of state–society interaction emerged in different places. In some, the policy was enforced by compelling abortions and sterilisations on people who did not comply.
In 2013, official government sources stated that 336 million abortions and 196 million sterilisations had taken place under the birth-planning policy (Ma 2013), though these numbers do not indicate what percentage of these abortions and sterilisations were essentially involuntary. (As sterilisation is rarely chosen voluntarily, it is safe to assume that most of the sterilisations were involuntary.) In other instances, women with out-of-quota pregnancies managed to hide their condition from officials and give birth to children who were never registered. These children were described as having ‘black’ household registrations and their numbers are largely unknown. Children with black household registrations cannot attend public schools, do not receive publicly provided services like vaccinations, and must live entirely outside the realm of state-provided services and regulations. In a third dynamic, state officials tacitly allowed out-of-quota births, but fined parents astronomical sums, usually about six times the average annual income in a given area. The budgets of many local governments greatly benefited from these fines, but their legacy of child impoverishment in rural China cannot be neglected.
Different scholars have different interpretations of the effects of the birth-planning policy. Some argue that the supposed reductions in population achieved by the policy are illusory; that a policy based on mild economic incentives, strong propaganda, and strong services for both couples who did not want children and for those who had them would have achieved a similar reduction in population without the pain of the forced abortions, forced sterilisations, and the child impoverishment that resulted from the black household registrations and fines (Whyte et al. 2015). Others argue that the policy did reduce the size of the population, but that in hindsight this reduction has not benefited China, as the country is now suffering from a birthrate that is too low (Feng et al. 2016; Qi 2024; see also Greenhalgh 2024). But few seem to claim that the policy was a success, that its benefits outweighed its considerable costs. So, why did the policy persist for so long?
As in the case of the Great Leap Forward, part of the answer lies in the dynamic interplay of the use of quotas in governing, the empowerment of an army of officials in the enforcement of the policy, the mechanisms of tracking the physical location of all women in China, the politicisation/moralisation of the quotas in the process of enforcement, and the relative silencing of alternative views about the policy or even basic information about its disastrous effects. The stories of the victims were silenced in a twofold manner. The absence of a free press prevented news about them from reaching the public, while the desire of lower-level officials to present a positive picture of their accomplishments to higher levels prevented the smooth flow of negative information through official channels. The more the achievement of quotas required extremes of sacrifice by some, the more the quotas were portrayed as sacred matters of morality, of patriotism, of loyalty to the regime. The empowerment of an army of officials to enforce the policy also created a bureaucracy that benefited from the policy’s continuation. And this bureaucracy simultaneously internalised the sacralisation of the policy narrative and became a powerful force for reproducing the narrative in the public sphere. While there were debates about the policy at the highest levels, the voices of those wishing to change it were weakened.
In comparison with the Great Leap Forward, a few contrasts can be made. During the Great Leap, those empowered by the policy were the local militias who used murderous levels of violence to control the movement and working habits of hundreds of millions of starving farmers. With the birth-planning policy, an entirely new, mostly female bureaucracy was established. The birth-planning policy lasted much longer than the Great Leap Forward, though both policies clearly extended for much longer than their glaring faults could possibly seem to justify. The Great Leap Forward required collectivisation, while the birth-planning policy targeted families, or even individuated women. Finally, the birth-planning policy pushed the whole Chinese society in a direction it was headed anyway, while the Great Leap Forward attempted to move the country in a direction that it would not have gone without an extremely forceful intervention.
The Zero-Covid Policy
The third policy I will examine is zero-Covid and its sudden reversal in 2020–22. Covid-19 was a problem throughout the world and many countries endured policy reversals and high death rates. In the case of China, government restrictions on basic mortality data mean that the world might never know how many people died there from the virus or what the rates of excess mortality were. Just as the Chinese Government withheld basic demographic data about the country from the Great Leap Forward until 1982, the current Chinese regime is refusing to share basic demographic data under its new ‘Measures of Data Cross-Border Transfer Assessment’. It is highly likely that China suffered both from mortality rates that were as high as those anywhere in the world and lockdowns that were longer lasting, more painful, and more economically, psychologically, and medically destructive than those in other parts of the world.
If one were to use the fifth wave of Covid-19 in Hong Kong as a guide, which was caused by the Omicron variant, there would have been approximately 2.5 million deaths in China after December 2022. Hong Kong did have a slightly more elderly population, but it also had a higher vaccination rate, more vaccinations with the more effective Biotech vaccine (as opposed to the less effective Sinovax vaccine), greater availability of hospital beds with ventilators for Covid patients, and greater availability of medicine for Covid patients than China. Given the lack of health infrastructure in many poorer parts of China, as well as the fact that the spike in Covid rates in China was extremely sharp (an occurrence that public health experts say should be avoided at all costs), I would not be surprised if as many as five million people died.
For 2020 and 2021, China’s zero-Covid policy was largely successful, with frequent demands for nucleic acid testing and painful but relatively short and localised lockdowns and quarantine restrictions seeming to be a reasonable price to pay for containing the virus and limiting mortality rates to levels much lower than for the rest of the world. But after the more transmissible Omicron variant emerged in December 2021, the severity and frequency of the lockdowns and testing requirements increased, as did the numbers of people forced into quarantine facilities. News of deaths attributable directly to Covid containment measures spread even on China’s highly restricted internet and various forms of protest emerged, especially in China’s richest city, Shanghai. Despite the wealth there, lockdowns were so long and severe that many people suffered from food shortages (Ling 2023). For a very long 2022, ever more severe lockdowns tortured large portions of China’s urban population until the government suddenly relented at the end of the year, resulting in a massive and globally unprecedented surge of Covid. The extent of morbidity and mortality from that surge may never be fully known.
Until late 2022, the Chinese Government attributed the successes of its zero-Covid policy to its unique socialist system of government, and it is true that China’s ability to enforce repeated mass testing, quarantines, lockdowns, and travel restrictions, as well as to build and staff testing and quarantine facilities and to police lockdowns, exceeded that of any other country in the world. Some of China’s advantages reflect dynamics discussed in relation to the first two policies. Its command structures and strict internal hierarchies enabled it to quickly focus resources and redeploy personnel. Its campaign-style focus on a single quota, zero Covid, led to the sacralisation of this target. The pursuit of and support for the policy by officials and the public at large were labelled as evidence of loyalty to President Xi and as a contribution to the project of proving to the world the superiority of China’s socialist system. Political rhetoric closely linked the containment of the disease to a morality of effort or devotion to the cause. The sacrifices of people suffering through, and local governments paying for, seemingly unlimited quantities of nucleic acid testing resulted only in silence. Those who opposed any of this sacrifice were accused of ‘lying flat’ (躺平)—an absolute form of anti-nationalist evil thoroughly denounced by the propaganda apparatus.
The government’s experience in tracing the physical location of its residents and restricting their movements proved invaluable. Its restrictions on the press also gave it a strong hand in controlling the narrative on how the zero-Covid policy was playing out, but, as with the other two policies, this control proved embarrassing when the policy eventually had to be reversed. While with the first two policies it is probable that many local governments were able to deceive the central government about problems encountered during implementation, in the case of zero-Covid, it was very difficult for local leaders to hide information about outbreaks in their localities. The nature of the disease is to spread, and the diffusion of the disease also spread information about the disease. The sudden reversal of the policy was most likely also linked to the disease’s abilities. As the costs and difficulties of enforcing the policy mounted, cracks appeared in the enforcement edifice. These cracks enabled the disease to begin spreading and, once that happened, it could no longer be contained without an unimaginable level of enforcement. The Xi regime did not so much acquiesce to the arguments of those who opposed the zero-Covid policy, as it accepted a reality that it could not cover up with layers of propaganda and silencing (Li 2023; see also the special section in HAU organised by Ling and Zhang in 2023).
Other problems emerged linked to controlling the flow of information or, rather, extracting it from the population. During the Great Leap Forward, authorities were most concerned with individuals who were hiding stores of food. During the birth-planning policy the government was concerned with women hiding pregnancies. In both cases extreme methods were taken to force disclosure of the required information. With zero-Covid, local governments feared that individuals with Covid might mask their symptoms to avoid testing and quarantine and, hence, they limited the availability of common cold and fever medications. As these restrictions were enacted over two years, the factories that made these medicines in China ceased production. Consequently, when the policy was abruptly reversed at the end of 2022, China lacked even the most basic medicines. Similarly—and arguably also because authorities were singularly focused on detecting and controlling instances of the disease—the government stopped emphasising the vaccination of the population and refused to import significant amounts of externally produced vaccines, which were superior to the locally produced variety. Vaccination did little to enhance zero-Covid, as vaccinated individuals could catch the disease but remain symptomless. In other words, China’s singular, campaign-style focus on detecting the disease exacerbated the effects of catching it, which is why it is highly probable that China’s Covid mortality rates were as high as the worst in the world.
But if some of the dynamics of the zero-Covid policy seem familiar, new elements are equally visible. While the desire to control the movement of the population and the flow of public information has deep historical roots, how such control was enacted was heavily influenced by the digital revolution. China has invested heavily not just in smartphone technology, but also in policing and surveillance capabilities that can be enhanced using such technology. The real-time location data that smartphone use enables are further enhanced in China by the extensive use of surveillance cameras, especially in urban areas. In China, algorithms that integrate data from surveillance cameras, smartphones, and social media use, as well as methods for combining these data with human police work, have been polished for the past decade in Xinjiang, where vast resources have been deployed to police, surveil, and control the Uyghur population and thereby to develop these capabilities (Byler 2022). During the zero-Covid policy, many of these techniques were redeployed on the majority Han populations of China’s wealthiest cities.
The most notable dynamics of state–society interaction in relation to zero-Covid revolved around these technologies. Chinese citizens just wishing to feed themselves or secure basic medicines utilised smartphone technologies to order goods and to share information on what modes of delivery were possible in an ever-shifting landscape of restrictions on the movement of people and goods. Chinese citizens who wished to avoid being locked down by algorithms learned which places at which times of the day were most likely to trigger algorithmic sanction. Migrant workers who lived in places with partial but incomplete surveillance camera coverage learned where the gaps were. Chinese citizens who were outraged about their suffering under zero-Covid used virtual private networks (VPNs) to get around state controls on self-expression or filmed themselves and their neighbours suffering and shared this information on social media. The Xi-era propaganda apparatus has responded with ever more severe repression of those who express their opinions in the Chinese public sphere and continues to restrict the ability of Chinese citizens to share their opinions, or even basic information about the country, with anyone outside China. The digital age clearly provides not only more channels for accessing and sharing information, but also more tools for surveillance, repression, and policing. Every hopeful wave of new forms of expression only seems to be matched with counterwaves of repression.
Conclusion
So, what conclusions can be drawn by comparing these three policies? The first is to reinforce some of the points with which I began. Replacement is a myth. The reform era did not replace the Maoist era, and the Xi Jinping era has not replaced earlier reform periods. Rather, there have been strong continuities in governing styles and dynamics across the various eras. These include the use and politicisation of quotas in campaign-style governing; the control of people through identifying their location and restricting their movement; the control of information about the negative effects of policies, which affects the dissemination of information not only among the public, but also within and among various levels of the Chinese bureaucracy. The result of this control of information is that disastrous policies are often extended well beyond their use-by dates.
For those used to thinking of historical turning points in terms of political regimes or of Chinese society as continually improving, the most recent Covid campaign might appear to be a bad case of haunting. How is it that so much effort was put into such a bad policy only for the disastrous outcomes of the policy to be covered up? I would say that the covering up of the disastrous outcomes and the haunting are interrelated phenomena. Continually covering up policy failures makes their re-emergence seem unthinkable. Imagining contemporary Chinese history as a series of regimes defined by the switching of the top leaders of the party is a part of the coverup. China is defined not simply by the names of its leaders.
The three policies relate to one another as forms of recombinant change. From the vantage point taken in this essay, the relationship between the Great Leap Forward and the birth-planning policy is primarily one of reconfiguration. The elements that make up the latter policy shift to reflect its differing targets, but it is hard to discern any overall direction to the difference between the two policies. If there is one, it would be that of the modernisation of kinship dynamics in which a desire for tiny families spreads from a relatively small urban sector to most of the nation. In contrast, the connections between birth planning and zero-Covid reveal a more definitive direction, which is towards the digitisation of society. The role of smartphone technology and the analysis of big data in state–society relations underwent a massive transformation during the 2010s. Here, I cannot help but note that the most major changes in Chinese society have to do not with the regime of its leaders, but with the natural/technological environment in which the country exists. Moreover, the failures of these policies painfully reveal the dangers of attempting to control ‘nature’ by controlling people. More humble attitudes towards the limitations of centralised control are needed.
Classic liberal analyses of East Asian modernisation assume that countries naturally become more democratic after they reach a certain stage of development. China has proven this assumption unfounded, although I do not think all aspects of such analysis have been disproven. The classic argument suggests that in the early stages of modernisation or economic development, the paths to success are clear. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan demonstrated in a million ways the types of policies and investments that were most likely to succeed in mainland China. But as China, or any late-developing country, catches up in terms of technology and infrastructure, the directions that will enable continuing development are not so clear. It is not so easy for a benevolent dictator to see what has been done before, demand that everyone follow him in doing it, and have successes to show. In addition to having the examples of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan to follow, China had the size of its internal market and the youth of its growing population as advantages. But China’s demographic dividend, advantages of being a late developer, and levels of international tolerance for its nationalism and authoritarianism are all shrinking. These changes do not guarantee democratisation, and I believe that the space for disastrous authoritarian policy failures will only grow. The low-hanging fruit of easy economic expansion exists no more. The possibilities of disaster will be further enhanced by campaign-style governing and the covering up of poor results.
How bad could it get? One need only look at North Korea or perhaps Russia to see how poorly a regime can treat its people and remain in power.
Featured Image: Bricks by @thepismire (CC), Shanghai Bund Crowd by @spez (CC)
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