CLM Insights Interview with Minxin Pei

Minxin Pei, The Broken China Dream: How Reform Revived Totalitarianism. Princeton University Press, December 2, 2025, 344 pp. ISBN-13: 978-0691223346

Minxin Pei CLM Issue 86 December 2025.pdf

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Insights Interview

What distinguishes your book from other works on post-Mao China?

In the field of political science, most scholarly books on post-Mao China focus on specific or narrow topics. They help us understand certain developments or issues, but they do not provide a broad narrative of political changes during the last four decades, nor do they probe the underlying political logic connecting the three distinct periods in the post-Mao era: the 1980s, the post-Tiananmen era (1992–2012), and the Xi era (since 2013). My book attempts not only to tell the post-Mao story chronologically but also to connect the dots between these three periods. My overall argument is that policies made by the Chinese leadership during earlier periods severely limit the choices of their successors, rendering some outcomes more likely than others. For example, the dual-track strategy of economic reform, which prioritized growth of the non-state sector but, at the same time, preserved the critical role of the state in the economy, generated roughly three decades of rapid growth, but it also made it politically impossible to reform state-owned enterprises or, in later decades, to force the state to cede its “commanding heights” in the economy. Another feature of the book is that it provides a more coherent and plausible explanation for how four decades of rapid economic development failed to bring about political liberalization and instead revived a form of neo-totalitarian rule that few observers predicted prior to the rise of Xi Jinping.

Most observers consider Xi Jinping’s policy since 2013 to be a complete reversal of Deng Xiaoping’s policy of “reform and opening.” But you argue that, in some fundamental respects, Xi’s strategy is not a total departure from Dengism. Can you explain why you think this is so?

On the surface, Xi does seem to have been pursuing a strategy that has overturned virtually nearly every aspect of Deng’s “reform and opening.” The revival of one-man rule and the personality cult under Xi would undoubtedly have upset Deng and other victims of Mao Zedong’s tyrannical rule. Xi’s hostility toward the private sector is also the opposite of Deng’s embrace of capitalism. Furthermore, China’s confrontational foreign policy during the Xi era, needless to say, is the opposite of Deng’s dictum of “keeping a low profile.” But when one takes a closer look, one can make a strong case that, in terms of ultimate objectives, Xi’s objectives do not fundamentally differ from those of Deng. What sets them apart is the individual components, or tactics, in their strategies. Both leaders sought to perpetuate the party’s monopoly of power, and both were willing to resort to ruthless means to achieve this objective. Deng ordered the military to crush the peaceful protests in Beijing in 1989. Similarly, since his rise, Xi has launched a sustained crackdown on civil society and ethnic minorities. Even their foreign policy objectives are nearly identical. Both want to restore China’s status as a great power. Neither has any desire to be a junior partner in a West-dominated international order. As a pragmatic Leninist, Deng was more flexible and had a more accurate or realistic appreciation of Chinese weaknesses. Obviously, China’s weaknesses forced him to be cautious and patient. “Keeping a low profile” was a geopolitical necessity. As a dogmatic Leninist astride an economic colossus, Xi has the freedom to allow his orthodox ideology to justify a more aggressive foreign policy despite any potential consequences.

You consider the 1980s as the “decisive decade” that would set the course of China’s post-Mao economic and political trajectories. Can you explain why you think so?

If there was one narrow window of opportunity to turn China into an economically prosperous and politically more open society, that window existed in the 1980s. For much of the decade, liberal leaders such as Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, along with other lesser-known individuals, were in charge of the party’s day-to-day affairs, and they exercised considerable influence over policy even though they were less powerful than the revolutionary veterans, such as Deng Xiaoping and his archrival Chen Yun. The contributions of the liberals to China’s reform are incalculable. Hu, Zhao, and other liberals spearheaded nearly all the critical reform initiatives in the 1980s (such as the de-collectivization of agriculture, the integration of China into the global economy, improvements in conditions in Tibet, and support for a nascent private sector). Economically, these reforms laid the foundation for China’s economic take-off in the post-Tiananmen era. Politically, such tolerance helped make the 1980s the most open and free decade in the history of the PRC. But Deng’s staunch opposition to any reform that might threaten party power severely limited any freedom of action by the liberal reformers and made their political viability precarious. In retrospect, given the lopsided balance of power against the liberal reformers, they faced steep odds in trying to set China on a different path. The possibility of an evolutionary process of liberalization and democratization initiated and managed by regime reformers vanished after they were completely purged from the party’s top leadership in the wake of the Tiananmen crisis.

The post-Tiananmen era (1992–2012) was supposed to be the golden age of the Chinese Communist Party. But that era does not appear to have ended well. Economic reform lost its momentum, and collective leadership was replaced with open-ended one-man rule. How did this happen?

There are two related stories here: one is China’s stalled economic reform during the Hu Jintao era, and the other is the return of a form of neo-totalitarian rule under Xi Jinping. Most scholars now consider the Hu Jintao era to be the decade when market-oriented reform effectively ended. Hu Jintao came into office facing very favorable economic conditions, in particular efficiency gains from the mass bankruptcy of state-owned enterprises at the end of the 1990s and greater access to global markets after China’s entry into the WTO in 2001. But it is difficult to identify a single major economic reform measure pushed through by his administration. In fact, the macroeconomic balances in the form of excessive investments and inadequate consumption deteriorated during the Hu era. Although it is easy to blame Hu’s weak leadership for the stalling of economic reform, Deng’s neo-authoritarian strategy – economic development under one-party rule – is the real culprit. A fundamentally flawed assumption in Deng’s strategy of using capitalist tools to save party rule after the Cultural Revolution was that the party would continue to pursue market reforms to increase the standard of living and bolster its performance legitimacy. What Deng did not foresee was that the regime would have decreasing incentives to deepen reform as the initial market-opening policies worked and shored up regime legitimacy. Such incentives would become even weaker as more politically difficult reforms were needed to generate new momentum for growth (such as privatizing state-owned enterprises and ceding regime control of the “commanding heights” of the economy). This would lead to a “trapped transition.” As a result, toward the end of the Hu era, economic growth may have still been high, but it was driven almost exclusively by booming exports, favorable demographics, and, most importantly, an epic credit bubble that would implode a decade later. (In fact, data on productivity growth, a proxy for measuring gains from reform, show a steady decline in the second half of the Hu era.) The re-emergence of a Mao-like figure was also a high-probability outcome of Deng’s neo-authoritarian strategy. To be sure, in the 1980s the party under Deng’s leadership instituted some reforms to prevent a future leader from dominating and terrorizing the party. But the reforms implemented by Deng were partial and ultimately ineffective. Provisions for term and age limits were intentionally left vague and did not apply to him or other aging revolutionaries. Also, rules on collective leadership and term limits had no explicit enforcement mechanisms. Deng’s opposition to the rule of law and democracy of any kind (even within the party itself) would make it impossible to rely on third parties to enforce the very rules that could prevent the return of a Mao-like figure. Since no autocratic regime is capable of enforcing rules against the interests of its rulers, the so-called institutionalization of elite politics under Deng was, in retrospect, a house of cards. Another flaw in Deng’s neo-authoritarian strategy is that corruption will become endemic when a one-party regime rules a fast-growing economy without any political constraints on its exercise of power. Consequently, a large number of senior party officials were tainted by corruption, making them vulnerable to a future strongman who could weaponize anti-corruption investigations to destroy rivals and amass power. This is exactly what Xi did after becoming party chief at the end of 2012. It may be an exaggeration to claim that Xi is an inevitable outcome of Deng’s neo-authoritarian strategy. But it is probably correct to say that the rise of Xi and the return to neo-totalitarian rule was an accident waiting to happen.