The last emperor? lessons for the prospects of liberal authoritarianism from Xi Jinping’s China

Abstract After China seemed to weather the 2008 financial crisis much better than its liberal democratic competitors, many commentators and scholars contemplated the possibility that nondemocratic regimes could compete successfully by achieving stability, prosperity, and power that eluded rival forms of government. By 2024, however, the sheen has rubbed off the China model. Xi Jinping’s China seems plagued by the related problems of high municipal debt, over-supply of real estate, over-capacity in manufacturing, low consumer demand, demographic decline, and structural dependence on government-led investment in infrastructure for economic growth. The question remains whether these problems are inveterate to authoritarian regimes or just the happenstance of one leader’s poor judgments. This article answers this question with some cautious pessimism about the future of liberal authoritarianism. Political theory since Machiavelli and Bodin has noted that regimes led by a single monarch confront two basic and related problems: first, obtaining and exploiting accurate information is difficult, and second, such systems lack reliable systems for executive succession. This article suggests that these problems are twins, connected to each other by the effect of the politics of executive succession on the willingness of public and private actors to supply information to the leadership. These twin problems are also, this article argues, responsible for China’s current travails. Democratic partisan competition is one way to overcome the problem of succession politics’ distorting information available to an authoritarian regime’s leaders, but power dispersion can undermine energetic government. Power sharing and power concentration, in short, pose an unavoidable dilemma of balancing the benefits of generating information through stability against the costs of paralyzing governmental response to problems like corruption.