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[Seventy-eight-year-old Shanghai historian] Xiao Gongqin is the architect of a theory of strongman politics known as “neo-authoritarianism.” In the nineteen-eighties, reformers with varying predilections for democracy and capitalism consolidated power in Communist states. Mikhail Gorbachev restructured the Soviet Union’s planned economy and loosened censorship. In China, Deng Xiaoping ushered in an era known as “reform and opening up,” though the reforms went only so far; he also evinced a limited tolerance for dissent, believing full democracy untenable. In this, he was supported by a group of Chinese thinkers led by Xiao and a prodigious Shanghai academic named Wang Huning. The word “authoritarian” is a rote pejorative in the West, synonymous with tyranny, but in the China of the late twentieth century Xiao and his allies managed to reframe it as a rational, pragmatic, East Asian-specific strategy for modernization. 

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Wang entered government in 1995 and shot through its ranks. He is now one of Xi Jinping’s closest advisers, the preëminent craftsman of Xi’s authoritarian ideology. Xiao, who coined the term “neo-authoritarianism” at a symposium in 1988, continued his advocacy as a professor in Shanghai, until he retired a decade ago. His argument that democracy was a “rootless politics,” alien to Chinese culture, remains part of a dominant strain of the country’s thought. Whether Xiao had influenced the Party’s direction or merely justified it is hard to say. But, in 1988, Deng was briefed on “neo-authoritarianism” by another Chinese leader, who described it as a system where a “political strongman stabilizes the situation and develops the economy.” Deng reportedly responded, “That is exactly what I stand for”; his only qualm was that it could use a rebrand. Later, as China’s economy took off, the world would accept more diplomatic names—“state capitalism” or, more vaguely, “the China model.”

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[Xiao is] a man quietly wrestling with the consequences of his ideas. Xiao has deeply conservative instincts—he counts Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott among his influences—but he was, and is, an incrementalist who dreams of China becoming a “constitutional democracy.” His was a theory of enlightened rule, wherein a dictatorship would vanquish the “radicals,” steward an economic miracle, and then, ideally, relinquish power to the people.

He had ready-made examples in places such as Taiwan, whose leader Chiang Ching-Kuo dismantled his own autocracy before his death, in 1988. Xiao has not disavowed authoritarianism […] but as the immediate prospects for democracy have all but vanished from China, his politics have shifted from reaction to reflection. Authoritarianism, Xiao [said], “has its own problems.”

When Xi Jinping came to power, in 2012, he used his newfound authority to launch an anti-corruption drive, which Xiao endorsed. Since then, though, Xi has abolished Presidential term limits, decimated civil society, and intensified clampdowns on free expression. As a mainland Chinese scholar, Xiao was careful not to betray his views about the regime. He instead spoke to what he now sees as an unsolvable “dilemma” in his theory. A democrat risks welcoming dangerous ideas into a culture—ideas that, legitimate or not, could hasten a nation’s demise. Xiao turned to authoritarianism partly because he believed that China was careening in that direction. And yet “a neo-authoritarian leader must be wise,” Xiao told me, with a hint of exasperation. “And he may not be.” Once you pin your hopes on a justice-delivering strongman, in other words, he may take the righteous path, or he may not. The only certainty is that he has control./

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Xiao, who was born in 1946 and grew up under Maoism [and who is saying he is “not fundamentally opposed to Western democracy” as he personally feels “very envious of the United States and the West”], witnessed the worst excesses of this kind of armchair statecraft. When Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, in 1966, Xiao had recently graduated high school and was working in a factory. He hadn’t been able to enter university, likely for harboring “bourgeois” sympathies—including his passion for Western philosophy—and he allied himself with the Red Guards as a leader of a “rebel worker faction” at his machinery plant. But, as the revolution wore on, he himself was denounced as a “revisionist,” and he spent the next several years consigned to gruelling work at the factory.

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One is not born but becomes an authoritarian. […] Xiao was inspired by Yan Fu, the reformist intellectual and translator of Adam Smith who, after living through China’s own republican experiment, decided that his people were “not capable of self-government.” And, in the U.S., one finds examples like Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who declared, in a 2009 essay, that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” […] Over the years, Thiel’s shift toward the authoritarian right has coincided with the growing acceptance of his ideas in the mainstream. He is now one of the biggest funders of the conservative nationalist movement, a mentor to Vice-President-elect J. D. Vance, and a supporter of “neo-reactionary” figures like Curtis Yarvin, who admires the state-capitalist societies of Singapore and Deng Xiaoping’s China.

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“The problem with Xiao,” Joseph Fewsmith, a professor of Chinese politics at Boston University, [says], “is that he tackles the question of how countries get from autocracy to democracy, but he never explored how not to get stuck. Which is what happened.” When […] asked …] what a democracy in China might look like, he [Xiao] said that he hadn’t really thought about it. The proponent of a so-called “soft landing” for democracy did not, ultimately, spend much time designing a parachute.

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For most of his life, Xiao has claimed that the central danger to Chinese society was not the dictator but his liberal opponents. Whether Xiao was right we will never know. We cannot peer into the universe where Liu and his reformers won [literary critic Liu Xiaobo was a leading figure in tbe 1989 Tianamen Square protests who died of untreated liver cancer in 2017, after spending nearly a decade in prison], where they are alive and well, rather than silenced or dead. Ours is the world of strongmen, where decisions increasingly turn on the whims of a vanishing few. In China, the risk of Xiao’s theory has come to pass—the strongman changed tack. At his trial for “subversion of state power,” in 2009, Liu Xiaobo prepared a statement of warning to his political opponents. It remains just as relevant today as it was then. “An enemy mentality will poison the spirit of a nation,” Liu wrote. It will “destroy a society’s tolerance and humanity, and hinder a country’s advance toward freedom and democracy.”