Is China a ‘black box’?
The Tangram | No 08.2025
This is the eighth Tangram from Observing China, where the leading China experts give a diverse range of succinct responses to key questions on the development of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
Beijing’s political and governance system is notoriously complex, and somewhat deliberately so. Authoritarian regimes rely on the ambiguity of their rules and regulations to keep people in line. Even if you want to circumvent an oppressive system, how can you successfully evade punishment, when much of the time you do not even know what would elicit it?
As much as foreign experts of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) may caution their respective governments and industry executives on the difficulties involved in undertaking legal or business cooperation with the PRC from the outside, the truth is that many Chinese citizens are kept just as in the dark.
But surely for the country to function domestically and internationally, there is some knowledge of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) playbook? Where is that information hidden, and where should we look for it? How has it changed under Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the CCP?
In this week’s Tangram, I asked four experts to share their tips, gleaned from entire careers dedicated to understanding where the power really lies in the PRC; the only country that Elbridge Colby, Under Secretary of Defence for Policy in the United States (US), believes has ‘the ambition, resources and military might to knock the United States off its pedestal as the world’s leading superpower.’
Editor of China Heritage and co-founder of The Wairarapa Academy for New Sinology
When commenting on scholar Wu Guoguang’s insights into the PRC’s political black box, I quoted Frederick Teiwes, a respected expert on the inner workings of the CCP. He observed that:
The dominant contemporary Western scholarly assessments of Chinese Communist Party elite politics in almost every period of the history of the People’s Republic of China have been either dramatically wrong, or a very mixed bag, or in critical respects speculation that cannot be verified on existing evidence. Moreover, in some important cases erroneous findings have remained conventional wisdom even as new information and analysis has appeared, supporting alternative interpretations.
Little has changed, even as ‘China Watching’ enjoys something akin to a Golden Age.
How then to get to grips with the PRC today? First, study what Isaiah Berlin called ‘the artificial dialectic’ and thereby better appreciate the art of leadership pursued by Xi and his predecessors. Secondly, build up an understanding of what, decades ago, Simon Leys called ‘the lugubrious merry-go-round of Chinese politics’. Given that there are so many unknown unknowns in the equation, by and large the student of contemporary China will try to make sense of known knowns, albeit with a wink and a nod. Will Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) prove to be a deus ex machina? If nothing else, it certainly will generate beguiling hallucinations.
The ultimate ‘known known’ is that, sooner or later, biological attrition will see off Xi. Then, for a moment at least, the black box of Chinese politics will disgorge some of its contents.
PhD Candidate, University of Oxford
Secrecy is the hallmark of Leninist systems – but so is an extensive bureaucracy which produces vast volumes of paperwork. Scholars describe politics in the PRC as the ‘rule of documents’ – as opposed to the ‘rule of law’ – as power runs through directives issued by party leaders, not an independent legal system. Officials in the PRC are also prolific essay writers. Text is used to signal policy shifts, demonstrate compliance or attract the leadership’s attention to lower-level innovation and creativity. Official output of all kinds is compiled in yearbooks, statistical databases and policy compendiums, much of which is available online.
As research into the PRC’s intelligence agencies shows, these resources can shed light on even the most secretive areas of politics. The best material does not usually come from the central government, where secrecy regulations are carefully enforced, but local governments, who may have a hazier sense of what constitutes sensitive information. As local leaders operate at arm’s length from Beijing, and control their own publishing outlets, leakage from these sources is more common. For example, those seeking to understand the functions of the PRC’s secretive National Security Council may find little in centrally run outlets, but a trawl through local government websites yields surprising results.
For researchers with Chinese language skills, research expertise and the ability to decipher the party-speak of official documents, text-based resources offer good insight into the workings of the PRC’s political system. Unfortunately, in recent years, Xi’s government has enforced tighter censorship and monitoring of key online databases, such as the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI). However, given the enormity of the country, its reliance on internet-based knowledge and communication, and the autonomy of local officials, Beijing will struggle to control information flows completely. To use a Chinese adage: ‘The mountains are high and the emperor is far away.’
Philippa Jones
Founding Partner and Managing Editor, China Policy
In major policy sectors – take energy, environment, health and education – the short answer is ‘no’. Indeed, counterintuitively, if you look at the policy process, the PRC can even be more transparent than a multiparty state.
Serious followers of the CCP administration must consume a fire hydrant of policy documents and commentary which pours out of Beijing day in, day out. Such organisations are proof that it is far from impossible to track, map and analyse major PRC policy sectors.
How does the PRC policy process differ? Broadly speaking, major social and economic legislation often traces an arc from beginnings in thinking among the academic and research community to five-year plan research agendas set by the state. Ideas then go through sometimes robust deliberation and drafting when the broader policy community and officials sit down together to nut out new laws and policies for final ratification by the State Council. Throughout this process, ideas and positions are often aired in the press or expert literature.
In multiparty states, a party in power must prevent opposition parties from gaining prior knowledge of its policy intentions. It therefore develops its policies under strict security, only announcing new ones when fully ready to release them for public comment.
So, how to be alert to next moves in the PRC? It isn’t rocket science: monitor downstream regulatory and legal notices, and map connected agencies, commentators and officials. Move back upstream, track what they are discussing, and you will likely gain insight into what may drop next.
There’s a major catch: it is mainly in Chinese, although the language barrier is not as total as it used to be. With a modicum of application, current technology can help.
But there’s another catch: what does it all mean? Deciphering, interpreting and then digesting is often the biggest hurdle. In 2015, Beijing issued a policy: ‘Made in China 2025’, which sets out its innovation plans for the next ten years. Under a deluge of adverse global coverage, Beijing went quiet on the name but not the policy. We never stopped tracking the sector. A decade later, governments and businesses worldwide are scrambling to contain Beijing’s tech onslaught. Did it come out of a black box? Could governments and businesses have tracked what was about to happen and have been better prepared for it? They sure could.
Roger Garside is a former British diplomat and capital markets adviser to transition economies.
On 7th April 1976, Deng Xiaoping was dismissed from all his offices, accused of masterminding the anti-Mao demonstrations which had gripped Beijing for the past week. My ambassador summoned me to his office and asked: ‘What now, Roger?’
‘Deng will return to power and rule China’, I replied. And he did.
This totalitarian regime is secretive, and its inner workings are opaque, but the PRC is not a black box. In the 67 years since I began to study the PRC, there have been periods of greater and lesser openness, but the broad outlines of its strategies have always been on public display. Careful study of the facts, and judgement formed by front-line work on economic and political change, allow us to understand the dynamics which shape developments there.
So we know that when Xi came to power in 2012, he judged that the time had come to challenge the global leadership of the US and its allies. As a result, he has condemned the PRC to an alliance of convenience with three pariah states – Russia, Iran and North Korea – forming the ‘CRINK’. That tells us much about the quality of his judgement.
Already in 2007, Wen Jiabao, then Premier of the PRC, declared that the country’s economy was ‘unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable’. Since then, the debt mountain has grown, the property market has collapsed and the crisis of funding in local government (responsible for 80% of public expenditure) has proved insoluble. No black box could hide these systemic failures.
Now, some predict that the totalitarian regime which rules the PRC will, before long, be overthrown in a political revolution. The book China Coup: The Great Leap to Freedom, published in 2021, laid out the facts which have led to that prediction. Exactly how or when this revolution will come we cannot say, but come it will.
Grace Theodoulou – Policy Fellow, China Observatory
Email: grace@geostrategy.org.uk
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