My Take | Sources of Chinese political legitimacy
- Besides the oft-cited ‘performance legitimacy’, more refined criteria need to be considered about the Chinese social contract or ‘the mandate of heaven’
People have long debated about the nature and legitimacy of the Chinese communist state. This debate is captured well in a new, widely read news feature from the US-based news site Christian Science Monitor, “Vilified abroad, popular at home: China’s Communist Party at 100”.
I am glad the writer of the article, Ann Scott Tyson, makes a valiant effort at even-handedness; that’s quite rare in American news media these days, especially when it comes to reporting on China. It recognises what people who know anything about the state of public opinion in China today have long known: most Chinese people support their government.
Instead of arguing tediously about the Chinese state being a dictatorship and therefore illegitimate because it doesn’t hold elections, more knowledgeable and intelligent outside observers have tried to look for other sources of its legitimacy.
The one most often cited, and one on which the article is also based, is performance legitimacy, which the writer equates – wrongly in my opinion – with “the mandate of heaven”.
“The anti-poverty campaign trumpeted by Xi [Jinping] is one example of the party’s overarching strategy of ‘performance legitimacy’,” Tyson writes.