Description

Numbers came to define Chinese politics, until they did not count what mattered and what they counted did not measure up. Following Mao’s death and the Cultural Revolution’s ideological apotheosis, the Chinese Communist Party-led regime transformed an ideological organization into a pragmatic growth-promoting machine by limiting its vision of localities to just a few numbers, producing excellent performance on these measures and negative externalities elsewhere. This limited vision—GDP, fiscal revenue, investment—did not see important problems coming to plague Chinese society: most notably, pollution, corruption, and debt. The numbers failed to measure up in two ways. With increasing regularity, cases of officials juking the stats came to light, undermining internal and external faith in the reality of Chinese economic growth, but perhaps even more worryingly, the numbers were moving in the wrong direction—growth was slowing. China’s recent efforts on anti-corruption, centralization, and official calls for governing according to moral and national traditions are again reshaping the country’s politics and economy. As the costs of technocratic rule mounted, the center altered course, increasing monitoring of locals and promoting official morality among the officers of the party-state.

Jeremy Wallace is an associate professor of Government at Cornell University. His research focuses on Chinese and authoritarian politics. His first book, Cities and Stability: Urbanization, Redistribution, and Regime Survival in China, examines the ways that China has managed its growing cities to maintain order. His current book project, Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts: Information, Ideology, and Authoritarian Rule in China, explores how and why authoritarian regimes rule as they do. The book argues that numbers defined Chinese politics, until they failed to count what mattered and what they counted did not measure up. He continues to work on the environmental, political, economic, and social issues of urbanization through Cornell’s Institute for Social Sciences project, China’s Cities: Divisions and Plans. His research website is http://www.jeremywallace.org.