There’s Been a Revolution in How China Is Governed
About this episode
Ang, a Johns Hopkins professor of political economy and author of China's Gilded Age, argues the West misunderstands China by fixating on how leaders are chosen rather than how it is governed. Deng Xiaoping's reform era, she says, built an 'autocracy with democratic characteristics' — term limits, accountability, competition, pragmatism — whose profit-sharing incentives gave every official a stake in growth, producing both development and Gilded Age corruption, inequality and debt. She decomposes corruption into 'access money' (steroids that accelerate growth until crises erupt, as in 19th-century America) versus petty graft. Xi Jinping, she contends, has ended the reform era in favor of personalist dictatorship, replacing growth incentives with loyalty tests — exemplified by the promotion of Shanghai's lockdown enforcer — though November 2022's protests forced a reversal of zero-Covid. She frames the U.S. and China as mirror images: America limits government and empowers society; China does the reverse.