从朱元璋、毛泽东非“主权在民”式反殖官主义的失败， 看中国治理范式转型的必然要求

Finally, a Brief Clarification

After reading the abstract of On Reproductive Officialdom, Dr. Zhao Xiao, a well-known Chinese economist, raised a question. He asked why phenomena such as the “anti-Confucian–pro-Confucian trap,” the “Huang Zongxi trap,” and the “Huang Yanpei trap” should be explained through the concept of *“Chinese-style Reproductive Officialdom.” Would not the explanatory power of “autocratic royal power” be stronger? He further argued that “Mao was not anti-bureaucratic at all; he was a modern totalitarian—Qin Shi Huang plus Marx! He used his own officials to fight against the officials of his rivals.”

My response was as follows.

“Autocratic royal power” is an old concept. Once it is placed within the analytical framework of reproductive officialdom, it becomes evident that the underlying logic of both royal power and party power is essentially the same: reproductive officialdom. Indeed, traditional political science has long relied on “royal autocracy” to characterize premodern regimes. However, this concept is no longer sufficient to explain the deep-rooted, virus-like self-replicating resilience of bureaucratic systems.

Moreover, the transition from royal power to party power represents, in essence, different stages in the development of reproductive officialdom. Under royal autocracy, the bureaucratic system was still constrained by the long-term maintenance costs of “a polity ruled by a single family name,” and the burden imposed on the population was relatively lighter. This is why such systems were able to sustain long cyclical stability over several centuries. Party-state autocracy, by contrast, constitutes the extreme evolution of reproductive officialdom. It pushes bureaucratic penetration and extraction of society to their limits, resulting in a sharp escalation of governance costs.

As early as 2014, I discussed with Feng Shengping, a U.S.-based expert on the Chinese Communist Party, the issue that the social costs of “party-led constitutionalism” are far higher than those of “monarch-led statehood.” Even earlier, in 2003, in a letter to a deputy editor-in-chief of People’s Daily, I argued that the lowest-cost and most sustainable political arrangement would be a form of “constitution established by social merit-holders”—that is, a constitutional order centered on rebuilding social self-organizing capacity and constitutionally empowering contributors of genuine civic merit within the People’s Republic. Two sets of correspondence arising from these discussions were later circulated online by Chen Xiaoping, former host of Voice of America.

The “semi-Chinese, semi-Soviet” system established by Mao’s group was already facing collapse by the late Cultural Revolution. Without the institutional externalities introduced by the Deng group—namely, opening to the United States—and the accompanying “reforms” that temporarily sustained it, the system would have snapped much earlier. Yet the Deng-era model of a “half-regulated, half-market” economy (initiated in 1984 and consolidated in 1992) had already, by the late 1990s, generated what may be called China’s “pain of the century”: the stripping of workers’ and managers’ stakes during state-owned enterprise restructuring, unfinished infrastructure projects, chronic overcapacity, excess capital, and surplus labor. China’s political economy entered a state of severe structural imbalance, which the Hu–Wen leadership later described as “limping reform.”

It was only because the Jiang–Zhu leadership pushed China’s accession to the WTO at all costs—once again importing institutional externalities—that the system gained a reprieve. During the first decade after accession (2001–2011), reproductive officialdom not only survived but also captured the dividends of economic globalization, rising to second place globally in GDP and first in PPP terms.

The fatal problem, however, was that reproductive officialdom became intoxicated with its apparent success. Structural imbalances were swept under the rug and even mistaken for “institutional advantages.” The ruling elite completely ignored the fact that the gains from globalization had not reached China’s grassroots population. In 2020, Premier Li Keqiang publicly acknowledged—citing data from the China Household Income Project (CHIPs) at Beijing Normal University based on 2019 samples—that 600 million people in China earned less than 1,000 yuan per month (more precisely, under 1,090 yuan, accounting for 42.8% of the population). What he did not mention was that updated CHIPs data in 2021 showed approximately 964 million people earning less than 2,000 yuan per month, while high-income groups remained extremely small: fewer than 1% of the population earned more than 10,000 yuan per month. The growth of Chinese citizens and social self-organization thus remained firmly suppressed by reproductive officialdom.

In fact, as early as the 2011 “Two Sessions,” Liu Xirong—then Deputy Director of the Legislative Affairs Commission of the National People’s Congress and former Deputy Secretary of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection—summed up the livelihood problem in four words: “official saturation as a societal affliction.” He was merely updating an earlier statement made thirteen years before (1998) by Zhang Quanjing, then Minister of the CCP Organization Department, who warned that “too many officials become a public hazard.” The concerns expressed by Zhang and Liu had virtually nothing to do with royal autocracy.

Admittedly, when internal extraction through internal colonization approaches its limits, bureaucratic systems inevitably seek external markets through globalization. However, when the outward spillover of reproductive officialdom repeatedly manifests as disguised external colonization—where capital and industrial capacity exports are driven not by market competition but by bureaucratic will (through export subsidies, foreign exchange controls, currency manipulation, and intellectual property theft), and are further wrapped in pseudo-nationalist rhetoric to export opaque contracts and extractive models (such as resource-for-project deals and debt traps)—the attempt to transform the world into a field of bureaucratic reproduction begins to reveal imperial ambitions. At this point, the externalization limit of reproductive officialdom is reached, triggering immune responses and backlash from the international community: technological blockades, supply-chain decoupling, financial sanctions by Western countries, and debt restructuring demands from developing nations. As external dividends dry up, irreconcilable conflicts intensify—most visibly in the U.S.–China trade and technology wars—forcing reproductive officialdom back into inward involution.

As for whether individuals such as Zhu Yuanzhang, Mao Zedong, or their successors were personally authoritarian or totalitarian, this has no bearing on the existence of reproductive officialdom itself. Incidentally, the persistence of reproductive officialdom does not undermine the rational self-confidence of China’s knowledge-officials. We therefore see many respected Chinese elites (most of them personal acquaintances), along with so-called left-wing Western media and numerous economists, habitually confining their “rational critiques” within the rule paradigms provided by the reproductive officialdom system. At the same time, they respond with fear and rejection to Donald Trump’s direct appeal to popular sovereignty and his attempt to dismantle the bureaucratic intermediary structures that skim value at every layer. They fail to grasp that Trump’s policies essentially constitute a genuine de–internal-colonization movement targeting the modern reproductive officialdom system. Consequently, they instinctively misinterpret Trump’s challenge to the bureaucratic establishment (the so-called Deep State—a variant of reproductive officialdom under representative systems) as a return to “royal power” or a “restoration of autocracy,” even staging absurd “anti-king protests.” Such readings are entirely detached from reality and reflect collective cognitive failure.

This makes one conclusion unavoidable: without penetrating the ontological nature of reproductive officialdom as a force corroding social life, human governance will remain trapped in endless cycles of different authoritarian forms. The obsolete discourse of “royal power” must therefore be abandoned, and the reality of party power as the terminal form of reproductive officialdom struggling in its final phase must be confronted head-on.