Stan．Lingen｜Perfect Dictatorship: China in the Twenty-First Century

China’s political system is actually different from what everyone thinks; it is a political system that has never appeared in human history.
Today, the People’s Republic of China seems to attract people’s praise, even with the brutality and disastrous consequences of Mao Zedong’s autocratic rule; even with the political massacre of 1989. People are still constantly praising China. Businessmen and scholars from all over the world are scrambling to get on the stage of China.
With the new leaders taking office in 2012, the People’s Republic of China entered a new stage of historical development. The previous stage, that is, the stage of Deng Xiaoping and his followers, can be said to be a transitional period for the renovation of this building; and the new stage, that is, the current stage of Xi Jinping, is to work for the well-being of the Chinese people on the basis of that renovation.
The question the author of this book raises in the book is: Does the Chinese regime (state), which has undergone reforms, really serve the people? This regime should be so, because it calls itself the People’s Republic; its leaders also boast that they are serving the people. But is this country really so? If they say they are serving the people, then they are also doing it in their own way. Their system has “Chinese characteristics.” When they claim to be democratic, or a market economy, or the rule of law, they will add “Chinese characteristics”—democracy with Chinese characteristics, market economy with Chinese characteristics, rule of law with Chinese characteristics.
There is a deep-rooted misunderstanding of China from the outside world, that is, that China will become “normal” in society and politics with economic growth, but this is from the high ground of the West, capitalism, and democracy; that is to say, China will become more like “us.” However, China will not be like “us,” and China has not become “normal”; whether it is now or in the future, China will always be very different. Especially under the new leadership, the substance and form of governance have been fundamentally changed; the current China is even very different from itself before the reform.