This is bluntly a very vague and vibes-dependent argument. The institutional paradigms in the US and China (common law tricameral vs leninist unitary) are basically as different as they possibly could be, and trying to draw 1-to-1 analogues between the two is like comparing apples to octopi. It's necessary to take the long view and compare the historical norms of the two systems before attempting comparative analysis.
[I know you know how a Leninist party works; I'm doing this as a preface not a lecture]
The Leninist party is essentially a nested expansion of committees. One committee controls several more committees at the level below, who each individually control several more committees at the next level below, etc. At every level of the bureaucracy, party members have a quasi-legal, or in some cases literally legal, obligation to follow the directives of the committee responsible for organizing the actions of that level (there are exceptions but this is true for the large majority). And this committee is obligated to follow the directives of the committee on the next level up, which itself has to follow the orders of the committee at the level after that, etc.
If this sounds reminiscent of a military organization that's not a coincidence. The CPSU's organization was originally foraged by the necessity of compartmentalization under Tsarist persecution, and was later refined into its modern form under the existential pressure of the Russian civil war. It was retained afterward by Stalin because the organizational structures meant to facilitate the mobilization of scarce resources for warfare also happened to be excellent at mobilizing scarce resources for rapid industrialization and the development of essential defense technologies. The same is true for the CPC post-1949.
Point is, the Leninist party is a system designed and shaped by the necessity of 'concentrating resources to do big things', specifically under conditions of intense scarcity and existential threat. The obvious glaring agency problems of such a massive and all-encompassing bureaucracy are tolerated because the circumstances grant its capacity for rapid mobilization an overriding importance.
That's the challenge for Xi: the system he inherited was made for warfare and Stalin-esque industrialization, but decades of peace and rapid development had seemingly robbed it of its purpose, resulting in a perilous loss of elite cohesion, and governance-wide paralysis from corruption and institutional fragmentation.
Xi is trying to reshape the party's governing institutions so that it can still play to its coordination and resource-mobilization advantages while effectively mitigating its principal-agent flaws; basically everything he does flows from this:
Empowering the CCDI and institutionalizing its role in everyday governance, merging local-level tax administrations with that of the CG, insulating the judicial hierarchy from the authority of local governments, formalizing and expanding the leadership role of party committees in the SOEs, the creation of special bonds for local governments that require central review and approval, ending the RE cash cow, creating several new top-level committees to coordinate policy execution between different government bodies, and now just a couple weeks ago clearly delineating the jurisdiction between those committees so they can function without his constant personal oversight. The list goes on.
As you noted, while these measures do restrict the exercise of power by people lower in the hierarchy, they still leave no real constraint on that of Xi or the PSC as a group. In fact, they actually enhance the latter two's power by heavily surveilling lower-ranking actors and constraining their discretion such that they have little choice but to as they are told.
Your contention, and that of others like Yuen Yuen Ang, is that this will lead to a period of stagnation as local bureaucrats are scared out of taking initiative in policy implementation and instead choose to keep their heads down and do nothing. I think this is severely misled for two reasons:
First, the organization department exists. The party is not somehow obligated to indefinitely keep officials on who take no initiative and make little effort in carrying out the center's orders. The idea that "the harder the center pushes, the more apathetic they [bureaucrats] will become" is a thought-terminating cliche akin to ultraprogressive arguments that enforcing the law is stupid and pointless because it will just make people try harder to get away with it.
China is a large country inhabited by many Chinese. It has no shortage of highly educated and ambitious young people ready to begin the governing career by taking the soonest available village post.
In other words, local officials will have to deal with it. Are the center's demands very heavy and sometimes downright unfair? Yes. But power is an immense privilege and their was never any guarantee of total fairness in their responsibilities. Xi's message is to figure it out, and if they can't, the OD will sweep them away and very quickly find someone who will.
Second, it must be recognized that, as an economy changes, the optimal governing techniques for developing the economy will change as well. There is no reason that what worked well in 2005 should still be what works best today. Therefore complaints about Xi's policies inhibiting "local experimentation", to the extent they were ever grounded in fact, are still unwarranted. The Chinese economy is not what it was 20 years ago. Why should it be taken as a given that the economic governing practices of that time are optimal for the present-day Chinese economy? Yuen in particular likes to treat this as so obvious that it should go without saying, but it really really isn't.
If one cuts through the party jargon, the main thesis of Xi's thought on the economy is this:
As the economy develops, the structure of its production matrix changes.
The overriding trend in economic development is for size and connectivity of the production matrix to gradually and irrevocably increase.
Therefore, given the increasing degree of complexity and interdependence of a country's industrial structure as it develops, it follows that the economic policymaking of local governments must be increasingly subject to top-level design and coordination so as to ensure that this complexity and interdependence is properly reflected in the government's actions.
Thus while it may seem to observers that many of Xi's governance reforms are arresting economic growth and """dynamism""", he is in fact priming the party for effective long-term governance of an increasingly mature and interlinked industrial economy where the indigenous generation and diffusion and new technologies is paramount.
First of all, thanks for this long and thoughtful reply. I agree with most of your analysis here. Particularly your very astute point on Xi's overriding concern with de-fragmenting the Leninist system. Also, I fully admit that a post-Moses analogy is vibes based. Like all analogies, if taken too literally, it is flawed and imperfect. But I still like it for a few reasons.
Now, the Leninist conceit of a streamlined bureaucratic military organization is a platonic ideal that has never actually existed—much like Weber's platonic ideal of the bureaucracy as impersonal implementation machine. Xi's de-fragmenting and anti-corruption have certainly had an impact in hewing more toward this Leninist ideal, but the reality is still a mish mash of horizontal and vertical bureaucracies 条块 with unclear scope and constantly evolving/shifting leadership vs business relations.
Most importantly: The overarching mobilizing goal has become more complicated. From "the contradiction between the people's ever-growing material and cultural needs and backward social production" -> "evolved into the contradiction between unbalanced and inadequate development and the people’s ever-growing needs for a better life."
High-quality development, the key task of this new era, directly flows from this.
And leads readily into areas that industrial maximlaist Lu Feng complains about in other interviews/writings: the Party-stat putting all sorts of restrictions on production to work toward resolving this new principal contradiction.
Central and provincial OrgDeps no doubt also face this central challenge—what do now that GDP is no longer the overawing ubermensch of metrics. As I'm sure you're aware, the criteria for evaluation has evolved—expanded—over the years (see: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01442872.2025.2501031).
So many modernization mandates to provide "for a better life" now reduce the ability and incentive in China's political-economy to go for growth at all costs. That is really the heart of the post-Moses analogy. A post-Moses era is in many ways clearly for the good. But the overall efficacy will be for the future to reveal.
With regard to the impact on officialdom and, in turn, whether or not local governance really has an impact on growth... I agree with your criticism of me and Ang (I've posted on twitter that Heilmann's privileging of experimentation under hierarchy, which Ang calls directived improvisation, is overdone).
That said I do think the downstream consequences matter for good governance, and have economic relevance (even if I'm not entirely sure how).
"To better make sense of grassroots overload, it is important to unravel three underlying processes that have occurred in the Chinese party-state: the centralization of power and authority, the politicization of administrative tasks, and the bureaucratization of grassroots governance. The latter two structural changes are the natural consequences of centralization, and they help sustain the highly centralized power structure. Policy demands have largely been politicized to guarantee the faithful enforcement of central orders, turning into unnegotiable political missions with high stakes (and less cost sensitivity). To signal political loyalty to the center and reduce their own risks, subnational leaders at each level tend to double down on those missions, driving policy targets to unreasonable levels when they are assigned to the grassroots bureaucracy."
It's understandable given UN politics what bias their estimates would have, it is ofc important to have a more calibrated view out in the more thoughtful media.
The Real GDP per capita numbers I usually look at to gauge "who's where in development" also seem to match the 40s-50s story.
I'd be interested in seeing (and reading about) more about how the differences in the Chinese model/society/political structure might affect these "diminishing focus on manufacturing" and "more attention to environment/social impact of it" trends. I feel with their system they might be less flexible than the US one was, and to an extent that's my impression of what happened: how far they let the construction bubble go, the relatively slow and limited turn to "environmentalism" and the ilk and remaining commitment to Deng model past what some commentators would've seen as most prudent (though maybe this is incorrect if they are still in the 40s-50s not 60s-70s) And ofc they'd have the US lessons in mind, not wanting to end up with quite our NIMBYism and ossification.
I'm not sure to what extent Chinese current competitive landscape is that much worse than the US one after 40s: after all it was much less of a free trade era, Europe was rebuilding, Japan started to rise. Are their competitors really worse than Germany and Japan that US faced, and trade limitations more?..
I'd also like to see some thinking about "capacities" and how that would interact with GDP per capita: US had a much smaller fraction of the world population in 1950 than China does now, facing a more "unsaturated" market (at least in terms of practical limits if not buying power). This kinda matches the story of "China having to go higher in technological sophistication/product value add earlier in development/richness than US did": British could get away with selling pins to colonies, US could do cars and appliances or whatever it did in 1950, with few competitors, it's good to be first, and with those probably costing much more relative to natural resources and labor than they do now (and that Chinese current wares do?..). Eg, is China facing more environmental impact per $ value add in manufacturing than US did given more market saturation?..
local governments and firms groping through a fog of modernization mandates and diktats?
We should import some Chinese fog because, after firms grope their way through it, they'll find themselves in a booming economy. China will grow GDP 10x faster than America this year: $1.8 trillion vs. $0.18 Tn., despite embargoes and tariffs.
Now do one for Cultural Colossus: Japan vs. 1980s America about how Japan's cultural manufacturing (anime) will overtake Hollywood by 2030, at which point everything new that our teenagers love will be stories from overseas that parents can even sit through because "cartoons aren't real"
This is bluntly a very vague and vibes-dependent argument. The institutional paradigms in the US and China (common law tricameral vs leninist unitary) are basically as different as they possibly could be, and trying to draw 1-to-1 analogues between the two is like comparing apples to octopi. It's necessary to take the long view and compare the historical norms of the two systems before attempting comparative analysis.
[I know you know how a Leninist party works; I'm doing this as a preface not a lecture]
The Leninist party is essentially a nested expansion of committees. One committee controls several more committees at the level below, who each individually control several more committees at the next level below, etc. At every level of the bureaucracy, party members have a quasi-legal, or in some cases literally legal, obligation to follow the directives of the committee responsible for organizing the actions of that level (there are exceptions but this is true for the large majority). And this committee is obligated to follow the directives of the committee on the next level up, which itself has to follow the orders of the committee at the level after that, etc.
If this sounds reminiscent of a military organization that's not a coincidence. The CPSU's organization was originally foraged by the necessity of compartmentalization under Tsarist persecution, and was later refined into its modern form under the existential pressure of the Russian civil war. It was retained afterward by Stalin because the organizational structures meant to facilitate the mobilization of scarce resources for warfare also happened to be excellent at mobilizing scarce resources for rapid industrialization and the development of essential defense technologies. The same is true for the CPC post-1949.
Point is, the Leninist party is a system designed and shaped by the necessity of 'concentrating resources to do big things', specifically under conditions of intense scarcity and existential threat. The obvious glaring agency problems of such a massive and all-encompassing bureaucracy are tolerated because the circumstances grant its capacity for rapid mobilization an overriding importance.
That's the challenge for Xi: the system he inherited was made for warfare and Stalin-esque industrialization, but decades of peace and rapid development had seemingly robbed it of its purpose, resulting in a perilous loss of elite cohesion, and governance-wide paralysis from corruption and institutional fragmentation.
Xi is trying to reshape the party's governing institutions so that it can still play to its coordination and resource-mobilization advantages while effectively mitigating its principal-agent flaws; basically everything he does flows from this:
Empowering the CCDI and institutionalizing its role in everyday governance, merging local-level tax administrations with that of the CG, insulating the judicial hierarchy from the authority of local governments, formalizing and expanding the leadership role of party committees in the SOEs, the creation of special bonds for local governments that require central review and approval, ending the RE cash cow, creating several new top-level committees to coordinate policy execution between different government bodies, and now just a couple weeks ago clearly delineating the jurisdiction between those committees so they can function without his constant personal oversight. The list goes on.
As you noted, while these measures do restrict the exercise of power by people lower in the hierarchy, they still leave no real constraint on that of Xi or the PSC as a group. In fact, they actually enhance the latter two's power by heavily surveilling lower-ranking actors and constraining their discretion such that they have little choice but to as they are told.
Your contention, and that of others like Yuen Yuen Ang, is that this will lead to a period of stagnation as local bureaucrats are scared out of taking initiative in policy implementation and instead choose to keep their heads down and do nothing. I think this is severely misled for two reasons:
First, the organization department exists. The party is not somehow obligated to indefinitely keep officials on who take no initiative and make little effort in carrying out the center's orders. The idea that "the harder the center pushes, the more apathetic they [bureaucrats] will become" is a thought-terminating cliche akin to ultraprogressive arguments that enforcing the law is stupid and pointless because it will just make people try harder to get away with it.
China is a large country inhabited by many Chinese. It has no shortage of highly educated and ambitious young people ready to begin the governing career by taking the soonest available village post.
In other words, local officials will have to deal with it. Are the center's demands very heavy and sometimes downright unfair? Yes. But power is an immense privilege and their was never any guarantee of total fairness in their responsibilities. Xi's message is to figure it out, and if they can't, the OD will sweep them away and very quickly find someone who will.
Second, it must be recognized that, as an economy changes, the optimal governing techniques for developing the economy will change as well. There is no reason that what worked well in 2005 should still be what works best today. Therefore complaints about Xi's policies inhibiting "local experimentation", to the extent they were ever grounded in fact, are still unwarranted. The Chinese economy is not what it was 20 years ago. Why should it be taken as a given that the economic governing practices of that time are optimal for the present-day Chinese economy? Yuen in particular likes to treat this as so obvious that it should go without saying, but it really really isn't.
If one cuts through the party jargon, the main thesis of Xi's thought on the economy is this:
As the economy develops, the structure of its production matrix changes.
The overriding trend in economic development is for size and connectivity of the production matrix to gradually and irrevocably increase.
Therefore, given the increasing degree of complexity and interdependence of a country's industrial structure as it develops, it follows that the economic policymaking of local governments must be increasingly subject to top-level design and coordination so as to ensure that this complexity and interdependence is properly reflected in the government's actions.
Thus while it may seem to observers that many of Xi's governance reforms are arresting economic growth and """dynamism""", he is in fact priming the party for effective long-term governance of an increasingly mature and interlinked industrial economy where the indigenous generation and diffusion and new technologies is paramount.
First of all, thanks for this long and thoughtful reply. I agree with most of your analysis here. Particularly your very astute point on Xi's overriding concern with de-fragmenting the Leninist system. Also, I fully admit that a post-Moses analogy is vibes based. Like all analogies, if taken too literally, it is flawed and imperfect. But I still like it for a few reasons.
Now, the Leninist conceit of a streamlined bureaucratic military organization is a platonic ideal that has never actually existed—much like Weber's platonic ideal of the bureaucracy as impersonal implementation machine. Xi's de-fragmenting and anti-corruption have certainly had an impact in hewing more toward this Leninist ideal, but the reality is still a mish mash of horizontal and vertical bureaucracies 条块 with unclear scope and constantly evolving/shifting leadership vs business relations.
Most importantly: The overarching mobilizing goal has become more complicated. From "the contradiction between the people's ever-growing material and cultural needs and backward social production" -> "evolved into the contradiction between unbalanced and inadequate development and the people’s ever-growing needs for a better life."
High-quality development, the key task of this new era, directly flows from this.
And leads readily into areas that industrial maximlaist Lu Feng complains about in other interviews/writings: the Party-stat putting all sorts of restrictions on production to work toward resolving this new principal contradiction.
Central and provincial OrgDeps no doubt also face this central challenge—what do now that GDP is no longer the overawing ubermensch of metrics. As I'm sure you're aware, the criteria for evaluation has evolved—expanded—over the years (see: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01442872.2025.2501031).
So many modernization mandates to provide "for a better life" now reduce the ability and incentive in China's political-economy to go for growth at all costs. That is really the heart of the post-Moses analogy. A post-Moses era is in many ways clearly for the good. But the overall efficacy will be for the future to reveal.
With regard to the impact on officialdom and, in turn, whether or not local governance really has an impact on growth... I agree with your criticism of me and Ang (I've posted on twitter that Heilmann's privileging of experimentation under hierarchy, which Ang calls directived improvisation, is overdone).
That said I do think the downstream consequences matter for good governance, and have economic relevance (even if I'm not entirely sure how).
https://x.com/JonathonPSine/status/1853868670034084005:
"To better make sense of grassroots overload, it is important to unravel three underlying processes that have occurred in the Chinese party-state: the centralization of power and authority, the politicization of administrative tasks, and the bureaucratization of grassroots governance. The latter two structural changes are the natural consequences of centralization, and they help sustain the highly centralized power structure. Policy demands have largely been politicized to guarantee the faithful enforcement of central orders, turning into unnegotiable political missions with high stakes (and less cost sensitivity). To signal political loyalty to the center and reduce their own risks, subnational leaders at each level tend to double down on those missions, driving policy targets to unreasonable levels when they are assigned to the grassroots bureaucracy."
Great piece!
It's understandable given UN politics what bias their estimates would have, it is ofc important to have a more calibrated view out in the more thoughtful media.
The Real GDP per capita numbers I usually look at to gauge "who's where in development" also seem to match the 40s-50s story.
I'd be interested in seeing (and reading about) more about how the differences in the Chinese model/society/political structure might affect these "diminishing focus on manufacturing" and "more attention to environment/social impact of it" trends. I feel with their system they might be less flexible than the US one was, and to an extent that's my impression of what happened: how far they let the construction bubble go, the relatively slow and limited turn to "environmentalism" and the ilk and remaining commitment to Deng model past what some commentators would've seen as most prudent (though maybe this is incorrect if they are still in the 40s-50s not 60s-70s) And ofc they'd have the US lessons in mind, not wanting to end up with quite our NIMBYism and ossification.
I'm not sure to what extent Chinese current competitive landscape is that much worse than the US one after 40s: after all it was much less of a free trade era, Europe was rebuilding, Japan started to rise. Are their competitors really worse than Germany and Japan that US faced, and trade limitations more?..
I'd also like to see some thinking about "capacities" and how that would interact with GDP per capita: US had a much smaller fraction of the world population in 1950 than China does now, facing a more "unsaturated" market (at least in terms of practical limits if not buying power). This kinda matches the story of "China having to go higher in technological sophistication/product value add earlier in development/richness than US did": British could get away with selling pins to colonies, US could do cars and appliances or whatever it did in 1950, with few competitors, it's good to be first, and with those probably costing much more relative to natural resources and labor than they do now (and that Chinese current wares do?..). Eg, is China facing more environmental impact per $ value add in manufacturing than US did given more market saturation?..
local governments and firms groping through a fog of modernization mandates and diktats?
We should import some Chinese fog because, after firms grope their way through it, they'll find themselves in a booming economy. China will grow GDP 10x faster than America this year: $1.8 trillion vs. $0.18 Tn., despite embargoes and tariffs.
Now do one for Cultural Colossus: Japan vs. 1980s America about how Japan's cultural manufacturing (anime) will overtake Hollywood by 2030, at which point everything new that our teenagers love will be stories from overseas that parents can even sit through because "cartoons aren't real"