The Dictator’s Tightrope Walk: Power versus People in China’s Distributive Politics
How do states sustain transformative economic change when reforms upset entrenched distributions of resources and power? In this book, I theorise the strategies through which autocracies sustain reform while preserving ruling coalition cohesion under tight fiscal and political constraints. The book advances a unified argument that sustained development requires a tripartite equilibrium among elite accommodation, bureaucratic adaptability, and mass consent. States maintain this balance through private side payments to elites, flexible and adaptive bureaucratic implementation, and strategic management of public information. This framework speaks to broader debates on state capacity, distributional conflict, and the political conditions under which large-scale economic transformation can be sustained. It extends existing theories by identifying the compensatory and distributional mechanisms that allow autocracies to pursue reform while retaining political control.
This project is funded by the Early Career Scheme of the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (2022-2025). The completed book manuscript consists of the following chapters.
The first chapter introduces its main research questions and situates them within studies of authoritarian politics and distribution. It outlines how autocracies face distributional dilemmas that affect survival and stability, and briefly explains the book’s methods and structure.
Chapter 2 analyzes how economic liberalization in authoritarian regimes—especially China—empowers social elites outside state patronage and weakens the regime’s control over resources. It develops a theory of authoritarian redistribution: selective side payments to elites, new incentives to coopt social elites, and propaganda to sustain public support. It concludes with testable hypotheses.
Chapter 3 examines China’s legislature and how the regime allocates limited resources between political elites and the public, using an original dataset of full‑text legislative and policy responses. It shows selective policy satisfaction that maintains elite privilege while addressing public demands. Parts of this chapter draw on previously published research.
Chapter 4 studies how the regime compensates political elites who lost privileges during economic reforms. Using budget and anti-corruption data (2011–2020), it shows that elites receive side payments, often at the expense of public welfare, thereby ensuring continued elite loyalty.
Chapter 5 relies on extensive interviews, fieldwork, and archival studies. It systematically explains how China attracts and retains social elites before and after the reform era. As material rewards decline, the regime shifts toward institutional and non‑material benefits and expands influence in the private sector without ownership, maintaining its appeal and control.
Chapter 6 shifts the focus to examine the effects of the regime’s distributional strategies on its targeted recipients. Using survey experiments, this chapter shows that China’s distributional strategies effectively secure loyalty from both bureaucrats and the public. By combining selective material and non‑material benefits with propaganda, the regime satisfies recipients even when it does not fully meet expectations.
Chapter 7 examines how the regime shifts blame for perceived distributional injustice onto the private sector. Drawing on combined survey experiments and ethnographic evidence, this chapter demonstrates how the regime can adopt its uneven distributional strategies without incurring major political consequences. It further argues that this scapegoating works partly because of China’s revolutionary and communist legacy, even after four decades of economic reform and liberalization.
The final chapter summarizes the book’s arguments and shows how the framework explains broader phenomena in other developing and autocratic countries. It reiterates the central dilemma: economic liberalization empowers the public and weakens elite privileges, complicating coalition management and shaping long‑term political and economic outcomes.
This book not only sheds light on China’s unique political landscape but also offers insights applicable to other authoritarian regimes experiencing similar economic transitions. By understanding these dynamics, we can better grasp how authoritarian governments adapt to maintain stability and control as they adopt market reforms and economic liberalization that erode the regime’s monopolistic control over resources and opportunities. Additionally, the book offers new insights on China’s current economic challenges from a political economy perspective, examines its ambivalent attitudes toward the private sector and entrepreneurs, and discusses the potential future development of China’s political and economic model.