The Dictator’s Tightrope Walk: Power versus People in China’s Distributive Politics
(Book manuscript, currently under review at Oxford University Press)
How do states sustain transformative economic change when market reforms upset entrenched distributions of resources and power? In this book, I theorize the strategies through which autocracies sustain economic reform while preserving ruling coalition cohesion under tight fiscal and political constraints. The book advances a unified argument that sustained development under autocracy requires a delicate equilibrium among political elite accommodation, social elite co-optation, and mass consent. Regimes maintain this balance by pairing targeted fiscal side payments and institutional privileges for elites with strategic perception management and blame-shifting toward the mass public.
Speaking to broader debates on state capacity, distributional conflict, and comparative political economy, the book explains China’s ambivalent posture toward the private sector and entrepreneurs, sheds new light on its current economic challenges, and demonstrates how authoritarian regimes adapt as market liberalization erodes their monopolistic control over resources.
Chapter Overview
The first chapter introduces the 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 the public and 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.
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. More importantly, this chapter shows that anti-corruption may actually damage public welfare rather than enhance it, because autocrats have to compensate political elites for their losses in anti-corruption efforts at the expense of public welfare spending.
Chapter 5 relies on extensive interviews, fieldwork, and archival studies. It systematically explains how China has attracted and retained 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 requiring direct state 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 project is funded by the Early Career Scheme of the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (2022-2025).