Evolution without democracy: Toward a unified framework for understanding the success and failure of Chinese Communism

This paper establishes an evolutionary framework for studying the dynamics of the power struggle within the Chinese Communist Party in relation to the wider power struggle in the nation. It posits four essential conditions for the applicability of the framework and a prediction of consequences. If a political party meets all the key conditions, then the model predicts that the ultimate winner of the internal power struggle is one who has identified the optimal strategy for the party to win the national power struggle and who has demonstrated the ability of putting it to practical use. The theoretical framework is briefly applied to several periods of the modern Chinese history. One of the evolutionary conditions is that the norm of promotion based on merits, which I argue the CCP inherited from the traditional Confucian culture, figures as the basic rule of game in deciding the intra-party power struggle. Thus, “evolution without democracy” is essentially a continuation of the traditional political culture in the new social context. My basic observation is that the CCP before 1949 met most of the evolutionary conditions, with Mao Zedong emerging as the ultimate winner of the internal power struggle at the same time as the CCP won its national victory. After 1949, however, the CCP has gradually changed from a revolutionary party to a status quo party, with Mao himself the biggest status quo winner, and some of the evolutionary assumptions began to be violated. I suggest that, in the post-Mao (and especially the post-Deng) era, these conditions might begin to be satisfied again. These preliminary observations are to be tested further by extensive case studies. The author thanks Professor Ross Terrill and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on the earlier drafts of the paper.