Xiao Gongqin, From Authoritarian to Constitutional

Xiao Gongqin, From Authoritarian Government to Constitutional Democracy

萧功秦, “从威权政治到宪政民主的五步逻辑：大历史观视角下的邓小平改革,”  in Xiao, 超越左右激进主义：走出中国转型的困境 [Beyond Left and Right Radicalism: The Path out of the Predicaments of China’s Transformation ]. (Hangzhou: Zhejiang University Press, 2012), pp. 115-24. Originally published in东方早报 (Shanghai), January 18, 2012.

N.B.  This is a partial translation.  The full text is available for purchase as part of the volume Voices from the Chinese Century:  Public Intellectual Debate in Contemporary China, Timothy Cheek, David Ownby, and Joshua A. Fogel, eds., (New York:  Columbia University Press, 2019). 

Translated by Timothy Cheek
 
Translator’s introduction
 
This essay is a notable defense of new authoritarian politics for China which the author views as Deng Xiaoping’s policies major achievement for China since the Cultural Revolution. Originally published in Oriental Morning Post, January 18, 2012, in the special section on the 20th anniversary of Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour talks, this short essay offers a congratulatory history of Party reforms in the post-Mao period, describing a five-stage model of economic and political development that starts with authoritarian order, stimulates economic prosperity, enforces social justice, and trains the populace in the civil society habits for constitutional government. Although their names are not mentioned, the historically minded will immediately think of the “political tutelage” proposed by Sun Yat-sen in the 1920s and claimed by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government through the 1940s.

While orthodox in his support of the government, Xiao’s analysis is informed and reasoned, drawing from political science theory and comparative examples from around the world. Xiao Gongqin (b. 1946) is a history professor at Shanghai Normal University. He is the leading scholar of neo-authoritarianism and appears widely in China’s media. The article here appears in his 2012 collection, Transcending Radicalism on the Left and Right.
 
 
The Five Logical Steps from Authoritarian Government to Constitutional Democracy: A Macrohistorical Perspective on Deng Xiaoping’s Reforms
 
 
Now that China has become prosperous, our next task must be to take up the project of the people’s livelihood. Only when the will and spirit of the people are unhindered can the self-organization of society develop. And only then can we avoid a frustrated and anxious “mob” politics confronting a lawful government. Only then can we overcome populism and build a civic culture. All of this is the necessary prerequisite for China to move toward constitutional democracy and a renewed civilization.  This is also the goal to which the political elite of China’s new generation, inheriting the mantle of Deng Xiaoping’s achievements, should devote itself, thus ushering in the arrival of a new era of democratic civilization.
 
China’s Path Out of Ultra-Left Politics
 
Fortune and misfortune regularly appear together in human history. China, too, learned positive lessons from the great disasters of the Cultural Revolution. It is no exaggeration to say that the ultra-leftism of the Cultural Revolution also awakened the Chinese people from at least a half-century of fanatical obsession with the utopianism of the planned economy. It was precisely an era like the Cultural Revolution that produced the fantastic stories of the Guizhou village where the day’s work-points of two able-bodied laborers couldn’t buy a single egg, where poverty reached the extent to which women in villages around Longxi (Gansu) had no pants to wear. According to agricultural statistics from 1978, the average annual income of peasants nationwide was less than 75 RMB.
 
Such shocking facts of extreme poverty provoke profound anxiety, but only those who genuinely suffer—and not august power holders—emerge transformed. In human history, generally speaking, the august power holders remain above the fray.  In the great calamity of the Cultural Revolution, however, the founding leaders of the revolution suffered terrible blows just as did the ordinary masses and intellectuals. The marginalization and predicaments they experienced freed them from the fetters of the ideological doctrines of ultra-leftism. And like the proletarian masses they were able by plain common-sense reasoning to gain a vivid understanding of the ultra-leftist calamity that China had suffered. In fact, after Deng Xiaoping was reinstated to his position as vice- premier in 1974, he had an argument with Jiang Qing at a conference to study Dazhai. When Jiang Qing heard the report on village poverty, she said: “That is just a single case.” Deng Xiaoping could not resist the retort: “Even one case is a serious problem.” When he responded to Jiang Qing in this way, Deng’s common-sense rationality awoke and he cast off the fetters of his previous dogmatic faith.