OPINION | Blowing down the Communist Party of China’s house of cards - President Xi has laid bare the flimsy nature of his predecessor’s ‘rules-based system’
There is nothing shocking about China’s struggles to uphold rules and norms. Even mature democracies such as the United States face such challenges, as Donald Trump’s presidency clearly showed. But should formal constitutional checks and balances fail, democracies can at least count on a free press, civil society and opposition parties to push back, as they did against Trump.
In dictatorships, rules and norms are far more fragile, as there are no credible constitutional or political enforcement mechanisms, and autocrats can easily politicise institutions, such as constitutional courts, turning such bodies into rubber stamps. And there are no secondary enforcement mechanisms. China has no free press or. If a rule becomes inconvenient – as the constitutional limit on presidential terms did for Xi – it can easily be changed.
While trampling institutional rules and norms might benefit autocratic rulers, it is not necessarily good for their regimes. The CPC’s experience under Mao is a case in point. Unencumbered by any institutional constraints, Mao engaged in ceaseless purges and led the party from one disaster to another, leaving behind a regime that was ideologically exhausted and economically bankrupt.
Deng understood that a rules-based system was essential to avoid repeating that disastrous experience. But his conviction could not overcome his self-interest, and the institutional edifice he built in the 1980s turned out to be little more than a house of cards. Project Syndicate Minxin Pei, professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, is a non-resident senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United StatesThe views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the
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