Controlled Burn: Perpetuating Authoritarian Rule Through Quasi-Democratic Reforms

Speaker: Peter Lorentzen, Assistant Professor, Political Science, University of California, Berkeley
Moderator: T. J. Pempel, Professor, Political Science, University of California, Berkeley

Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS), Center for Chinese Studies (CCS)

China’s leaders face major challenges in gathering two important kinds of information: information about corruption or other official malfeasance and information about the nature and extent of social grievances. This talk will discuss the variety of quasi-democratic institutions and policies the regime has put in place to address this problem, including legal reform, toleration of public protest, controlled liberalization of investigative journalism, the petition system, local elections, legislative bodies, and toleration of non-governmental organizations. It will discuss how the virtues and dangers of each of these practices relative to each other as well as relative to more traditional authoritarian tools such as the public security system and party discipline.