ABSTRACT
Any assessment of how successful the Chinese communist political system has been presents problems of what weight to assign to the various criteria of success. Party and government preside over the feeding and clothing of nearly a quarter of the world’s population on a mere 7 percent of the world’s arable land. The widespread economic and social disruptions they caused also led many Chinese to have doubts about the party’s ability to govern them and to improve living standards. China’s current dilemma has been compared to that existing in the late Qing dynasty. There is a crisis of meaning very similar to that of a century ago, except that now it is Marxist orthodoxy that has collapsed rather than Confucian orthodoxy. Certain key counter-elites who could potentially challenge the current communist leadership, most notably the new private entrepreneurial class, showed little concern for meaningful political change even before Xi Jinping’s efforts to curb any tendencies toward autonomy.
