Groping the Elephant of Common Prosperity
Groping the Elephant of Common Prosperity
Common Prosperity is about Common Purpose
“In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.” ― Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
”Happiness comes from struggle.” — Xi Jinping, as quoted in Qiushi
Common prosperity.
It’s a thing a lot of people are worried about. As the PRC’s biggest and newest campaign, common prosperity seems poised to impact many peoples’ lives and livelihoods—mostly within the PRC but of course beyond as well. That common prosperity is important seems obvious, but what common prosperity actually… is? Far less obvious.
For Yuen Yuen Ang common prosperity is about fighting inequality and corruption and rebalancing economic growth by instantiating a PRC-version of America’s Progressive Era. For Tanner Greer it’s about cracking down on specific industries and taming the most toxic versions of what Xi and co. have labeled ‘disorderly expansions of capital’, or what Polish philosopher Andrezj Walicki termed ‘spontaneous order.’ And for others like Andrew Batson and Barry Naughton, the common prosperity campaign is about “sweeping political objectives that cut across economic sectors”—ala Barry Naughton’s ‘grand steerage’.[1]
These three views—inequality/corruption, anti-spontaneous order, and grand steerage—seem to share a fundamental core: the current situation in the PRC is misaligned with the ultimate ambitions of the Party leadership, and there is an increasingly assertive and interventionist, Party-state led push to change that. As Greer writes, for the PRC’s urban citizens:
“Their life does not feel like national rejuvenation. Xi’s attack on the spontaneous order of the market place is an attempt to bring propaganda and reality closer in line. He seeks to rein in the forces that threaten the Dream while there is still time to do so.”
Even though this is argued in the context of his own framing, I think Ang would agree with this—though Batson/Naughton would likely say it misses the more aspirational element engendered in an ‘industrial policy for everything’.
I don’t have the foresight to definitively determine which of these frameworks best captures the moment. But to put my cards on the table, I do favor the Batson/Naughton interpretation—though with a twist!
That said: I along with all other observers and participants—Party leaders included—are just groping at the inchoate elephant of common prosperity, trying to make sense of things. So take what I’m about to say with the requisite grain of salt!
Questions Before Answers
Let me first put an essential question on the table: does Beijing even have a plan for what common prosperity is? A lot of what Beijing is doing seems highly erratic and reactive. As Logan Wright at Rhodium submits in our interview: “there's generally more coherence right now in Beijing about the critique of China's current growth model rather than coherence around what that alternative would really look like.” This seems true to me. I think it’s likely analysts are groping at the same elephant Beijing is and even arriving at conclusions before the Party itself has.
Second, what about the dogs that aren’t barking, or aren’t barking yet? This question is really directed at Ang’s thesis. What I mean is that if Beijing is really trying to reform its gilded age via State-led Progressive Era reform, why hasn’t the Party-state implemented much needed reforms itself? For example: Why do SOE dividends still play such a small role in funding the social safety net? Why are hukou (internal passports that restrict mobility/access to welfare) and rural land reforms (that would give rural citizens the ability to sell their land at market prices rather than to local governments on the cheap) still dead in the water? Why does the center not centralize health care costs and other social welfare expenditures, when it knows it is saddling local governments with expenses they can only meet via land sales and borrowing? Why is the tax structure still so regressive, taking in so little from income taxes and lacking property taxes entirely? Why are elite Communist Party members and their families so rich?
One way of answering these questions is that the Party is starting with the low hanging fruit in the private sector and building up momentum and popular support for tougher reforms in the state-sector. Though as analyst Kevin Tellier argues regarding state-capture: we are eight years into Xi’s consolidation drive! If such state sector reforms were coming, shouldn’t we have seen more progress by now?
Along similar lines: why are the major common prosperity reforms disproportionately addressing the PRC’s urban upper/middle class issues? And why are they done via stiff-arming of the private sector? One way to explain this disproportionate focus on the part of the CPC is via regime stability and legitimacy concerns: urbanites, with their rising expectations, are the scary group of people modernization theory warned would make trouble for the Party. Because this group is concentrated in urban areas, it also has far greater collective action potential than those in the countryside. But how does one differentiate Progressive Era reforms from more mundane, urban-centric stability maintenance operations—particularly when these reforms all seem to be state-led moves against a ‘disorderly’ private sector?
Disorderly Expansions
A disorderly and corrupted capitalist economy is a theme that ties together Ang’s thesis on Progressive Era reforms and Greer’s invocation of Walicki’s ‘spontaneous order’. It is also a view shared, in part, by Li Guangman, who argued that a state-led revolution is underway to rein in much of Xi’s ‘disorderly expansion of capital’. As Li Guangman puts it, there is a profound transformation underway that
“marks a return to the original intent of the Chinese Communist Party, a return to a people-centered approach, and a return to the essence of socialism [and that] will wash away all the dust: capital markets will no longer be paradise for get-rich-quick capitalists, cultural markets will no longer be heaven for sissy-boy stars, and news and public opinion will no longer be in the position of worshipping western culture. It is a return to the revolutionary spirit, a return to heroism, a return to courage and righteousness. We need to bring all forms of cultural chaos under control and build a vibrant, healthy, virile, intrepid, and people-oriented culture.”
Meanwhile, as Greer argues, while Xi and the Party have raised expectations for a grand new style of life,
“the Chinese are not living it. Urban China is a society of miserable egoists who feel manipulated by forces beyond their own control. Their life does not feel like national rejuvenation. Xi’s attack on the spontaneous order of the market place is an attempt to bring propaganda and reality closer in line. He seeks to rein in the forces that threaten the Dream while there is still time to do so.”
Most poignantly, Greer writes:
“A people whose national anthem begins with the words “Stand up! You who refuse to be slaves!” now finds themselves trapped in a billion-man rat race.”
Struggle and Meaning
Re-reading Fukuyama’s End of History and the Last Man, I was struck by a quote the author mines from de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (written in the early 1800s..) that speaks precisely to what Greer writes about: the phenomena of atomization and disillusionment under capitalism. De Tocqueville offered this quote as a premonition of the forces that may lead to despotism under democracy, and while it’s quite applicable to contemporary life in the US, it seems equally applicable to the PRC as well:
“The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest, — his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind; as for the rest of his fellow-citizens, he is close to them, but he sees them not; he touches them, but he feels them not; he exists but in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.”
The US has a motto that embodies the idea that, at base, people are yearning to breathe free. When one stares at the world wrought—intentionally as much as unintentionally—by Liberal democratic capitalism, as de Tocquevillle recognized even in the early 1800s, one sees a world characterized by increasing atomization, loneliness, and vapid consumerism. Yet as Fukuyama argues in his book, humans innately desire more than isothymotic sameness, they desire to strive and struggle for something meaningful—for something more than mere hedonic contentedness. Fukuyama feared that at the End of History, when liberal democratic capitalism had won its final ideological battle, people driven on by this urge would revolt:
“If men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle.”
I think Greer is right in diagnosing in Xi and the Party leadership a dislike of the ‘spontaneous order’ of the market that sucks time, energy, and resources into Red Queen dynamics that seem to serve no greater purpose than ‘to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which [people] glut their lives.’ But Greer’s analysis does not go far enough.
Under Xi, the Party is not just interested in reining in ‘disorderly capital’ in private industries, he is actively striving to harness and redirect the populace’s innate desire for meaning and worthwhile struggle toward something aspirational. Which is why I find the Batson/Naughton interpretation more compelling when it comes to understanding common prosperity: Xi and his Party-state are helmsmen actively trying to mobilize, unite, and steer their country in a particular direction. In goading the populace into a collective sense of mission, Xi is grappling with that quandary raised in the End of History, which is in fact a defining question of our globalized, consumerist, postmodern era. What makes the suffering innate to human existence bearable? What can valorize the innate human desire to struggle for something greater than oneself? What gives life meaning?
In the PRC, the question becomes more poignant when juxtaposed with the Party’s own revolutionary history. Did the Party overthrow the big comprador bourgeoise and feudal oppression just to establish a country with among the greatest inequality in the world, ruled by a red aristocracy, wherein the average urbanites’ lived experience is of toiling endlessly (九九六/996 becoming 零零七/007) to simply stay in place (i.e. involution 内卷化)? Some people argue that the lying flat movement (躺平运动) isn’t fundamentally political, and from the point of view of the participants that’s probably right. But from the point of view of Party leadership, disillusioned youth ‘checking out’ is a gut check.
Common prosperity is about ‘reining in’ certain parts of the private sector, yes, and it is about addressing the PRC’s gilded age, yes. But it’s also entwined with inspiring people and innervating within them the notion that there still exists a worthwhile, collective, meaning to life. Something that is worth struggling for and remaining faithful to.
Does this sound melodramatic? Perhaps! But consider this 2018 piece from Xinhua titled “Struggle is Happiness.” It reads similarly into Xi Jinping’s vision—tying together themes of struggle, meaning, and economic reform:
“"A great cause is great not only because it is just and grand, but also because it is not plain sailing." in the dictionary of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, there has never been the word "easy". For this reason, general secretary Xi Jinping pointed out that struggle is happiness, and struggle is also arduous, long-term and tortuous. Without hardship, it is not true struggle. The reason why the spirit of struggle is valuable is that the more we face difficulties and contradictions, the more we can stimulate extraordinary strength. Shoulder a new mission and embark on a new journey. Facing many weak links such as insufficient development quality and efficiency, weak innovation ability and shortcomings in the field of people's livelihood, we need to "Maintain the style of hard struggle and guard against arrogance and impatience" and "in the spirit of time being of the essence" strive to better shoulder the mission entrusted by the times, as emphasized in the report of the 19th National Congress.”[2]
There’s even an entire e-reader titled ‘Happiness is Earned Through Struggle’ that builds on this premise, ostensibly to educate Party members on how struggle can help with all sorts of economic reform initiatives.
Tactics & The Importance of Unity
While neither analysts nor the Party likely have a precise definition of common prosperity, it seems to me that this is an emerging tactical campaign in the helmsman’s toolbox to gin up support amongst the populace as he steers the ship of Party-state toward his and his Party’s long desired ends. This is my heuristic for understanding common prosperity. While Logan Wright is quite correct in noting that Beijing is groping for a new way forward, to me it’s principally a question of tactics, not of strategy and certainly not of ends.
Common prosperity is, like so many other tactical campaigns in PRC history, part of a broader *strategy* of figuring out how best to *unite* the people—given the particular circumstances of the era—in achieving the *’common’* ambition of the Party-state. This is why grand steerage works well as an analogy. Lest you are unfamiliar with the longstanding concern of uniting the people, I offer these quotes I assembled from a past essay on atomization—they are very much worth reading:
"Despite four hundred million people gathered in one China, we are, in fact, but a sheet of loose sand [yipan sansha (一盘散沙)]. We are the poorest and weakest state in the world, occupying the lowest position in international affairs; the rest of mankind is the carving knife and the serving dish, while we are the fish and meat…If we do not earnestly promote nationalism and weld together our four hundred millions into a strong nation, we face a tragedy–the loss of our country and the destruction of our race." — Sun Yat-sen
"Loose grains of sand cannot be tolerated" — Chiang Kai-shek
"It is only through the unity of the Communist Party that the unity of the whole class and the whole nation can be achieved, and it is only through the unity of the whole class and the whole nation that the enemy can be defeated and the national and democratic revolution accomplished." — Mao Zedong
“Government, army, society and education — east and west, south and north, the Party leads all” — A Mao era phrase now quoted by Xi Jinping
Our mission "requires all the Chinese people to be unified with a single will like a strong city wall.” — Xi Jinping's vision, as he told “the broad masses of youth” in his Labor Day speech of May 2015
“We must unite the 1.4 billion Chinese people into a majestic and boundless force driving the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” — Xi Jinping, in 2021 at the Party History Study and Education Mobilization Conference
Most recently, Xi repeated this theme of uniting the people in some variation nearly 20 times in his big centennial speech. Saying things like:
“The patriotic united front is an important means for the Party to unite all the sons and daughters of the Chinese nation, both at home and abroad, behind the goal of national rejuvenation.”
And
“All the struggle, sacrifice, and creation through which the Party has united and led the Chinese people over the past hundred years has been tied together by one ultimate theme-bringing about the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”
And, of course, who could forget the following phrase that he repeated three times, with various endings attached?
“To realize national rejuvenation, the Party united and led the Chinese people in…”
Much like Marxism famously critiqued liberalism for only having a negative view of freedom—i.e. carving out an area wherein people cannot be coerced—I similarly believe Xi has a positive/aspirational view for how the Party is to cultivate and guide its populace, not just rein in the private sector. The routine omission of aspirations in analyses I think, in large part, stems from a similar issue pointed out by Dan Tobin: the tendency among analysts to sell the Party’s aspirations profoundly short, in arguing that their grandest ambition is merely to stay in power. Of course the Party wants to stay in power, but it also wants to build something for which it will be widely lauded and respected.
Shortly after the events of 6/4, Deng infamously said that the biggest mistake he and the Party made were in the realm of education. Patriotic education has been a consistent theme throughout Deng, Jiang, and Hu’s tenures, and it operates with the express goal of molding the worldview of PRC citizens so that they become not merely passive recipients of power, but active participants and supporters of the Party’s developmental ambitions. While making the PRC populace an active participant has been a continuing aim of the Party, it wasn’t successful under Jiang and Hu. Ergo the Tocqueville quote. Greer touches on these lived experiences in his piece. It’s something Xi Jinping is very concerned about in regards to the CPC’s 90 million cadres—at least if his writings are to be taken as indicative of his thoughts. In Governance of China and various other speeches (likely to be included in the 4th volume, which we all eagerly await!) he stresses repeatedly the importance of holding firm to ideals and being willing to struggle. I don’t think it’s a stretch to think he and other leaders would have looked favorably upon the parts of Li Guangman’s essay wherein he argues that ‘tittytainment’ (奶头乐) was a western conspiracy designed to distract the populace from more important things. The difference in this respect between Xi and his predecessors is not in kind, but degree: he wants the PRC citizenry even more actively engaged in ‘rejuvenating the Chinese nation’, ‘achieving the China dream’, and ‘building socialism with Chinese characteristics’.
The ends Xi seeks have been written ad nauseam in Governance of China and various other speeches: uniting the people to achieve the centennial goal and achieving the ‘Chinese Dream’ of rejuvenation! This is not a goal that simply emerged from nothing—it is one that he inherits from and shares in large part with Qing era reformers like Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, from Sun Yat-sen in the Republican era, from Chiang Kai Shek and the Nationalists, through Mao and the CPC’s revolutionary era, and through Deng and the reform era.
Xi wants Sun Yat-sen’s ‘sheet of loose sand’ to actively participate in the Party’s ambitions, to find in common prosperity common purpose. I think this may also partially explain why the Party is largely willing to forego Western economists recommendations on efficiency and growth. In a very Maoist sense, Xi believes that if the people are properly energized, they can achieve amazing feats. (Mao famously thought revolutionary energy would unleash amazing results during the GLF.)
Xi is no Mao, though. In fact, Xi is far more similar to Deng, who similarly believed that a strong and disciplined Leninist Party was the quintessential ingredient for wealth and power. Xi, like Deng, has no interest in a chaotic mass of energized people ‘bombarding the headquarters.’ What Xi and the Party want is an energized populace ready and willing to follow guidance and actively participate in the building of a new ‘New China.’ That is, Xi wants to sublimate the innate human desire for greater purpose into serving the nation, according to his view of what serving the nation entails. Rather than authoritarian populism, one might call it Leninist populism.
With any luck, Xi and the CPC will have hit on a new tactic for success, combining some Maoist elements of mobilization with Deng era developmentalism and faith in the Party. Common prosperity is about facilitating the rise of a common sense of purpose—ensuring that the people, as de Tocquevillle warned, do not lose their commitment to country. Through energizing, cultivating, and uniting the citizenry with common purpose (especially urbanites), the Party believes it can best steer the PRC ship towards wealth and power. Grand steerage necessitates common purpose.
In the final analysis, then, might we say common prosperity joins the pantheon of slogans such as socialism with Chinese characteristics, the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, and the Chinese Dream as the things Xi hopes provide reason for sacrifice, justification for struggle, and ultimately meaning in life?
P.s.
This has just been one analyst’s attempt to grope at the elephant of common prosperity.
[1] Per Ang, we (think we) know the Party wants to fight against corruption and decadence. Per Greer, we (think we) know the Party believes certain industries need to be reined because they are not making people’s lives better. And per Batson & Naughton we (think we) know that the Party has larger political ambitions to increasingly steer society.
[2] Translated from the original Chinese:“伟大的事业之所以伟大，不仅因为这种事业是正义的、宏大的，而且因为这种事业不是一帆风顺的。”在中华民族伟大复兴的词典里，从来没有“容易”一词。正因如此，习近平总书记指出，奋斗是幸福的，奋斗也是艰辛的、长期的、曲折的，没有艰辛就不是真正的奋斗。而奋斗精神之所以可贵，就在于越是面对困难和矛盾，越能激发出非凡的力量。肩负新使命、踏上新征程，我们面对发展质量和效益不够高、创新能力不够强、民生领域存在短板等诸多薄弱环节，需要像十九大报告所强调的那样，“保持艰苦奋斗、戒骄戒躁的作风”，“以时不我待、只争朝夕的精神”更好担负起时代赋予的使命。