For the past three decades, the Chinese Communist Party has grounded its political rule in the success of its administration—particularly in managing the economy. In the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, an implicit political bargain was struck between the government and the general population: the people would accept authoritarian rule, and in return, they would enjoy higher living standards. Although this may not have been a true “bargain”—in the sense that the general population had actual freedom of choice—the party-state did indeed make economic performance its overwhelming priority in the decades that followed, with highly favorable results.

By the mid-2010s, cracks had begun to emerge in this political foundation: growth had slowed significantly since the early years of the twenty-first century, and the economy was facing strong headwinds. Local government debt was becoming unsustainable, the real estate bubble appeared increasingly dangerous, the returns on infrastructure investment continued to decline, and, most worrying, the country was headed for irreversible long-term demographic decline. In response, social tensions over wages, inequality, and the lack of upward mobility escalated.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in late 2019 and the prolonged suspension of “business as usual” in China—until November 2022, when massive protests forced the government to finally discard its “zero COVID” policy—dramatically accelerated these developments. For a brief moment in 2021, when China managed to keep itself largely open by means of extraordinary controls on entry and internal movement, the Chinese economy once again seemed to outperform nearly the entire world. By the second half of 2022, however, any sense of Chinese exceptionalism had been shattered as severe lockdowns took a devastating economic toll. Annual GDP growth, as reported in official statistics, slowed to three percent—and in reality was probably even lower. 

Meanwhile, the long-term problems continued to worsen: both the real estate market and, correspondingly, local government finances appeared on the verge of collapse, and plummeting birthrates led to the first official decrease in the population in six decades. In 2022, for perhaps the first time since 1978, when China’s liberalizing reforms began in earnest, the economy became a grave political liability for the party-state. Although a post-pandemic rebound might drive growth back above five percent in 2023, it now seems likely that, for the foreseeable future, China’s rulers can no longer safely rely on economic performance as the primary source of political legitimacy and social support. Instead, they are increasingly turning toward the law to legitimize their rule.

LOOKING FOR LEGITIMACY

Even authoritarian regimes tend to prefer popularity and voluntary compliance over oppression, and the size of the Chinese population makes this preference all the more necessary. In fact, as early as 2013, the party seemed to recognize that economic growth alone could no longer provide a secure political platform. Many of President Xi Jinping’s signature policies over the past decade—the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), more assertive diplomacy, “common prosperity,” anticorruption, “governing the country according to law”—can be plausibly understood as attempts to create new sources of legitimacy.

These efforts fall into three categories: first, some seek to build a genuinely socialist domestic policy platform, in which capitalist interests are partially suppressed in favor of more government investment in welfare and redistribution programs. Examples include poverty alleviation programs and “common prosperity,” which thus far has been a catchall policy umbrella encompassing social welfare investment, tax increases, and government action against large private companies. Second, policies such as the BRI and diplomatic aggression stoke nationalist sentiments to boost political support. Third, a class of institutional reforms centered on anticorruption and the slogan “governing the country according to law” seeks to better portray the behavior of the government as legal. All three efforts continue to feature prominently in major political speeches and policy documents, but some are more likely to be effective than others.

The welfare reforms, although often beneficial, are unlikely to help enough people to substantially enhance the government’s legitimacy. Poverty alleviation, for example, improved the economic fortunes of many rural residents, but those who benefited make up only a small slice of the Chinese population. The urban working population, now dominant in both numbers and political importance, has yet to reap any major benefits from the “common prosperity” push. Ultimately, given the government’s increasingly precarious finances and the economy’s troubled state, any politically substantial increase in social welfare spending seems unlikely in the foreseeable future.

By contrast, it is cheaper and easier to mobilize nationalist sentiments. Nationalism has become arguably the single most important Chinese political current in recent years, shaping both government behavior and public responses to it. The Chinese government now maintains a considerable media apparatus to produce and disseminate nationalist narratives. These narratives are then circulated, often voluntarily, sometimes through more institutionalized collaboration, by major social media influencers and massive numbers of nationalist keyboard warriors. Domestic and international developments have provided ample material. These include the enactment of Hong Kong’s national security law in 2020; the detention in Canada in 2018 of Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of the Chinese telecommunications firm Huawei, whom the United States sought to extradite; the initial success of the zero-COVID policy; and then U.S. Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in 2022. 

There are, however, critical vulnerabilities in the party-state’s relationship with nationalism. Whereas some forms of nationalism—the Hindu variety currently ascendant in Indian politics, for example—are deeply rooted in social beliefs about identity and religion, the contemporary version of Chinese nationalism is predominantly grounded in narratives of national wealth and power. It captures the public imagination not because it resonates with some value system or cultural identity but because it celebrates China’s material accomplishments over the past decades and generates feelings of pride and satisfaction on that basis. As such, it relies on the country’s continued material success: economic prosperity, military strength, and diplomatic victories.

Herein lies the political danger. The character of contemporary Chinese nationalism allows it to amplify public support for the party-state when national economic performance is high but does not allow it to function as a backup source of political legitimacy when the economy is struggling. This weakness has been readily apparent in recent months: whereas the mood on social media platforms such as Sina Weibo had, in the wake of China’s 2021 economic successes, been jubilant and confident as recently as early 2022, a couple of months of bad news—the Shanghai lockdown, followed by semilockdowns in Beijing and Guangzhou, all of which caused obvious socioeconomic distress—was all it took to put nationalist figures on the defensive. 

Public expressions of unhappiness, mockery, and outright condemnation of government policy became commonplace, perhaps most distinctively in the form of the online “run-ology” discourse, in which large numbers of middle-class Chinese expressed their desire to leave the country for the West. Nationalist accounts became strikingly silent in the face of this widespread unhappiness. In fact, some have even occasionally criticized government activity when it falls short of their own performance expectations. Indeed, they railed against the “timidity” of the military response to Pelosi’s Taiwan visit.

How Chinese nationalism came to include this psychological dependence on performance is exceptionally complicated, but the Communist Party’s early hostility to Confucianism and other concrete forms of traditional culture almost certainly played a large and consequential role. Even after the partial rehabilitation of “traditional culture” in recent decades—which saw numerous government officials, including Xi himself, publicly discuss facets of classical thought in a vaguely approving manner—the connection of Chinese political discourse to anything resembling a set of “organically Chinese” sociopolitical values remains weak by the standards of modern nationalist politics. It is the party that is largely responsible for molding Chinese nationalism into this performance-oriented form—good for additional social support in years of plenty, but dangerous when the economic going gets tougher.

A LEGAL AUTOCRACY?

Xi and his lieutenants are now increasingly leaning on the law to solidify their legitimacy. Western audiences may still find it strange that an authoritarian regime would invest heavily in legality, but it is important to understand that legality—as opposed to the “rule of law,” which requires thorough legal checks on even the highest-level political actors—often enhances the power of central authorities rather than reducing it. Chinese law does not, in its own terms, impose legal restrictions on the power of the central party leadership. It therefore does not purport to impose “the rule of law,” as the term is conventionally used. It does, however, impose legal restrictions on everyone else: the general public and private businesses but also the vast majority of government officials and party cadres.

Laws can be employed to control or oppress, just as they can be used to protect individual rights and freedoms. Insofar as laws are expressions of its leadership’s political will, the party has an interest in enforcing them systemically and rigorously, especially if it wants firmer control over its local agents. In other words, it has an interest in investing in technical “legality,” even if it has none in political liberalization.

The rise of sociopolitical legality in China over the past eight or nine years is unmistakable. Since 2014, the Xi regime has pushed through numerous institutional changes designed to increase general compliance with laws and regulations across the entire party-state apparatus. The anticorruption campaign that swept across the country during Xi’s first term in office was perhaps the most visible component of this program, but just as notable were a series of reforms that enhanced the professionalism, financial security, and political stature of the judiciary. For example, since 2015, the central government has shored up the budgetary independence of local courts in city and township governments. It has also empowered them to adjudicate an expanding array of administrative suits against local government activity. 

Professionalized law enforcement remains highly imperfect—it had an abysmal start after the Cultural Revolution—but it has made major strides in recent years: judges and lawyers are now better trained and more influential in the party-state than they were even just a decade ago. Local officials, too, receive more legal training than they used to and are routinely evaluated on their compliance with the law. China’s leaders seem to be serious about enforcing laws uniformly and professionally—against everyone but themselves.

The benefits of this emphasis on legality extend far beyond controlling local officials or increasing social conformity. They potentially provide an entirely separate source of political legitimacy that does not rely on economic performance: that government behavior is increasingly legalistic can be a source of social trust in and of itself. As generations of social scientists have observed, many human societies have a tendency to “accept law as reason,” to see legality as an inherent reason to accept state action. This acceptance may or may not be morally justifiable, but it is a recurrent phenomenon even in—and perhaps especially in—nondemocratic, illiberal societies.

Recent research increasingly suggests that this phenomenon exists in China, as well. Surveys show, for example, that the Chinese urban population responds positively to institutional reforms that enhance the legal professionalism of government policy, even when those reforms restrict, rather than protect, individual rights and freedoms. The Chinese government certainly seems to think that legality can be a major source of political legitimacy: recently, whenever there has been a strong wave of public unhappiness against local government action—for example, after a major scandal in 2022, in which officials in Henan Province attempted to stop a run on local banks by imposing pandemic lockdowns—the central government’s response was to reemphasize the importance of “governing the country according to law” and to promise more legal training for local officials. Clearly, it is betting that further investment in legality, rhetorically and substantively, can directly fortify public confidence in government action.

The benefits derived from this stated commitment to legality may or may not be able to fully compensate for the losses generated by poorer economic performance. But of all the alternatives that the Chinese government has thus far experimented with, it is certainly the most promising. Unlike nationalism, it does not depend on economic performance and can be used as a meaningful substitute. Unlike “common prosperity,” it does not require major welfare spending at a time of fiscal crisis. Therefore, whatever else the government might try over the coming years, it will almost certainly have to maintain its investment in legality. Its political fortunes may well depend on it.