For many years, predicting the downfall of the Chinese Communist Party was something of a sport among China watchers. But few serious observers today suggest that China looks unstable. Despite facing numerous challenges, including the implosion of the country’s real estate sector since 2021 and high debt loads that have bogged down local government finances, China’s political system appears strong. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has a firm hold on all the levers of power, and the country is proving to be competitive, or even dominant, in a growing number of twenty-first-century technologies, such as electric vehicles and biotechnology. Moreover, scholars consistently find overwhelmingly high levels of public support for the CCP. In comparison to the growing fragility and divisiveness of political systems elsewhere, including in the United States, the Chinese regime appears to the outside world as competent and stable—an image that Beijing is eager to project.

Two new books challenge this view. InPolitical Trust in China,the political scientist Lianjiang Lidigs deep into survey methodology to question the way that most scholars have measured public support for leaders in Beijing. He concludes that citizens’ trust in the regime is weaker than other researchers believe. InInstitutional Genes,the economist Chenggang Xu uses a sweeping comparative and historical analysis of China’s political institutions to argue that the country’s inability to reform them will condemn it to economic stagnation. In Xu’s view, the kind of authoritarian rule that worked for China’s imperial dynasties is strangling its modern economy.

Both books offer a needed corrective to the conventional wisdom that the Chinese regime is stable, but neither is definitive. To translate local findings into national claims, Li reinterprets existing data sources in ways that stretch their meaning. Xu’s metaphor of “institutional genes,” meanwhile, shows that Chinese authoritarian institutions are resistant to change—but it does not adequately explain why they cannot be reformed. Still, it is difficult to read these deeply researched texts without worrying about China’s future. Sadly, if the two authors are correct, what follows regime collapse might be even worse than the system China has now.

SURVEY SAYS

Li, a professor at the University of Hong Kong, is a veteran scholar who has spent decades trying to understand and measure the foundations of political and social trust inChina through field surveys of Chinese citizens. A well-designed survey with a valid sample of respondents produces a map of attitudes and behaviors within a population. Investigating the variation within this map allows a social scientist to analyze how different types of citizens think and act—for example, how characteristics such as education, gender, and income shape what people believe and how they behave. But Li, like all good survey researchers, is uncomfortable with some of the core assumptions of the method he uses. Gathering large quantities of survey data requires simplifying complex attitudes: citizens answering questionnaires have to express unidimensional views on multidimensional topics.

The dangers of overly simplified results are especially pronounced when scholars try to understand how citizens view the state. Researchers often ask respondents to rate their level of trust in various public institutions, such as the national government, local officials, or the police, on a scale from one to six or one to ten. Scholars frequently use the average trust level in these institutions as a variable, labeled “institutional trust,” to summarize a regime’s legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens. The Asian Barometer Survey, which since 2001 has collected six waves of data from countries across Asia (and which I advise and help design as a core partner), relies on this index to show that Chinese citizens accord high levels of trust to their government. In the 2014–16 ABS wave, for example, which surveyed citizens from 14 countries, China scored 4.6 out of 6 on institutional trust, compared with 2.1 for Taiwan, 2.3 for South Korea, and 2.6 for Japan.

Li argues that the high level of reported institutional trust in China is misleading. In China, people trust the government because they “do not have an enforceable right to retract trust through free, fair, and regular elections”—that is, because they have no alternative. It is like the fable of the fox who, unable to reach a bunch of grapes, decides he doesn’t want to eat them. The political scientist Jon Elster labeled this phenomenon “adaptive preference formation,” arguing that people form preferences by choosing among only those options that are realistically available to them. Li calls the same phenomenon “embedding,” because the range of possible preferences is embedded in the system in which the preferences are being formed. Embedded trust is still real trust—but it is different from the trust that is expressed by citizens in systems in which there is an option to distrust political leaders.

Li thus set out to find a more meaningful measure of regime support than the conventional measure of embedded trust. He narrows his focus from trust in a set of core government institutions to trust in the top power holders in the CCP, or what Chinese people call “the party Center”—which, he suggests, today consists of one man:Xi. Li further reconceptualizes trust not as a single rating between zero and six, but as a set of types based on two dimensions, “commitment” and “capacity.” Commitment is citizens’ belief in the Center’s—that is, Xi’s—commitment to pursuing good policy goals, and capacity is the belief in Xi’s ability to make the bureaucracy achieve those goals.

Trust in the party may be less robust than most scholars believe.

This approach generates four types of trust in contemporary China. Citizens expressing total trust have confidence in both Xi’s commitment to adopt the right policies and his capacity to make the bureaucracy carry them out. Those with partial trust believe in Xi’s commitment but not in his capacity, and those who are skeptical have some doubts about Xi’s commitment, capacity, or both. Citizens expressing total distrust do not have faith in either Xi’s commitment or his capacity.

Li carried out two local surveys to test this conceptual reboot, one in 2006 and one in 2014. He asked remarkably direct questions about residents’ attitudes toward Xi and leaders at four lower levels of government, from the province down to the local township, and found that citizens assess leaders on both commitment and capacity. The more local the government, the less citizens believe in officials’ willingness to implement central government policies, which Li understands as the Center’s lack of capacity to force them to do so.

To fully assess his idea that there are four types of trust toward the party Center, however, Li needed a national sample, not a localized survey of a few areas. But it would have been politically difficult in China’s repressive research environment to conduct a new national survey on trust. So Li instead deconstructed and reassembled the standard battery of institutional trust questions from the fourth and fifth waves of the ABS’s China questionnaire, completed in 2015 and 2019, respectively. Because citizens associate the central government with setting policies and local governments with implementing them—or failing to do so—Li uses the ABS measure of trust in central government as a measure of how people perceive Xi’s commitment to pursuing good policies, and trust in local government as a proxy for Xi’s capacity to achieve his goals.

Reinterpreting the meaning of survey questions in this way risks imposing an esoteric meaning on straightforward responses, which calls into question whether these data points are valid measures of perceived commitment and capacity. Still, Li’s work provides an intriguing foundation for challenging the consensus that China’s population overwhelmingly supports the regime. The ABS finding that 95.7 percent (in 2015) or 98.3 percent (in 2019) of respondents in China trust the central government always seemed too good to be true.Li instead shows that only about 28 percent of the population has total trust in Xi. He finds that another 20 to 25 percent partially trust China’s leader—believing in his goals but not his capacity—while around 35 percent are skeptical of either his commitment or his capacity, neither fully trusting nor distrusting. Ten to 20 percent express total distrust. Even if Li’s analysis of national data should be viewed with some caution, these numbers suggest that trust in the party Center is much less robust than most scholars—and perhaps the party itself—believe.

This new perspective explains much that is otherwise puzzling about citizen behavior in contemporary China. People with total trust support the government, and those who are skeptical tend to be politically apathetic. People with partial trust, who think local officials are not implementing the leader’s correct policies, are likely those who denounce, petition, and demonstrate against local authorities, or who call government hotlines or post on online government platforms to bring pressure on local officials from above. And those with total distrust are the ones who “join protests to express discontent, to vent anger, and even to embarrass the regime and the central leadership,” as Li writes.

Li’s analysis suggests a greater likelihood that dissent will threaten the regime than is often assumed. If a large number of citizens with total distrust come out against the regime, perhaps because of an economic or public health crisis, many who only partially trust the regime’s capacity might join the protests, followed by those whom Li classifies as skeptics. In that scenario,protest would spread from group to group,in the same way thatdemonstrations grew out of control in 1989 in Tiananmen Square or during the revolution in East Germany that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the eventual dissolution of the communist bloc. Even citizens who now express total trust might change their attitude once they perceive that an option has opened up to voice distrust—like foxes who want to eat the grapes once they are able to reach them.

GENETIC DISORDER

Whereas Li challenges overly rosy views of Chinese citizens’ support for the regime, Xu disputes optimistic assessments of the health of the Chinese economy. Beijing’s official figures acknowledge that the country’s growth has slowed to around five percent per year, but Xu has claimed elsewhere that the true current growth rate is zero or even negative. In 2024, he told the German news outlet Deutsche Welle that although industries such as electric vehicles are booming, they make up only a small share of the economy compared with floundering sectors such as real estate, which are dragging down growth.

In his book, Xu claims that China’s economic problems are rooted in its political institutions. For any economy to grow, Xu explains, the state needs to give up some control. For several decades after the death ofMao Zedong, in 1976, Chinese leaders did loosen their grip on private entrepreneurship, the media, academia, and people’s personal lives. Although the government never relinquished the ultimate right to control how land, energy, and labor are used, it allowed enough openness for businesses to grow, farmers to search for new sources of income, and local economies to take off.What followed is well known: China’s economy boomed, frequently reaching double-digit annual rates of growth.

But, Xu argues, the country’s Leninist party-state system could not tolerate the increasing autonomy of private entrepreneurs, intellectuals, and the middle class that powered this expansion. To regain control, Xi has reversed many economic and social reforms since he came to power in 2012. He has punished private entrepreneurs for criticizing CCP policies or even just running companies that became too large, expanded party cells in private enterprises, tightened control over the media, and increased social surveillance.

Many observers attribute this reversal to Xi’s personal thirst for power, but Xu blames China’s institutions. He proposes the concept of “institutional genes,” which he describes as the fundamental components of China’s historical approach to property rights, government administration, personnel recruitment, and ideology. These institutional genes replicate themselves over time and limit how China can change. Notable examples of institutional genes from imperial times were the emperor’s right to commandeer any person’s land, top-down bureaucratic control of political and judicial functions, and the use of the examination system to enforce ideology and to prevent wealthy families from emerging as an independent hereditary nobility. These institutional features are replicated in today’s communist party-state, which maintains a monopoly over key industries and land, administers its program through several levels of local government, and metes out influence and regulates ideology through college entrance examinations, tests to enter the civil service, and a performance-based promotion system within the party.

China’s institutional genes were compatible with Leninism.

To show that past institutional patterns control future institutional developments, Xu argues that China failed to establish a constitutional democracy in the first part of the twentieth century because restrictions on government power did not fit its authoritarian traditions.The imperial system had eliminated independent social forces that could have formed the basis of a constitutional republic. The revolutionaries who overthrew the empire in 1911 did not seek to empower citizens but rather embraced a superficially appealing Western political model to increase national wealth and power. In Xu’s view, China’s experiment with constitutional democracy was dead on arrival.

China’s institutional genes were instead compatible with the Leninist party-state system, which China imported from the Soviet Union. Leninism reproduced in modernized form the patterns of centralized control over the economy, administration, personnel recruitment, and ideology characteristic of the Chinese dynasties. Given these institutional genes, partial liberalization under Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening” policy that began in the late 1970s could not continue indefinitely, much less expand. Xi’s retrenchment was the inevitable expression of the CCP’s deeper genetic makeup, and it ended China’s growth spurt.As Xu writes, “Communist totalitarian systems are fundamentally unreformable, making economic reforms destined to fail, leading to economic stagnation.”

Xu substantiates his analysis with a deeply informed account of how Chinese institutions have developed through history. But his use of the gene analogy falls short in explaining the mechanisms by which the past blocks change in the present. The science of genetics explains in chemical and biological detail how an organism’s characteristics are passed from one generation to the next. It also shows how organisms with the same genes can vary, as genes express themselves differently in different environments, and how organisms evolve as genes mutate.

Xu does not present a similarly concrete theory of how political institutions replicate themselves or how they change. Drawing on mechanism design theory, a branch of economics focused on incentives, Xu argues that an institutional change will survive only if it aligns with the self-interest of those already in power. But this line of reasoning is circular: if an institutional change sticks, then Xu determines that the incentives for adopting it were in place; and if it doesn’t, they were not. This reasoning rules out the possibility of fundamental change, which is contrary to how real genes evolve.

At times, Xu grasps for other ways of explaining why institutions endure, suggesting causes as varied as culture, norms, or social consensus. But he does not explain how any of these forces come into being or what enables them to resist change. These arguments, too, ultimately seem circular: institutions persist because they are able to persist, and they change when change is compatible with the interests of their members. These may be truths, but they are not explanations.

CRACKS IN THE FOUNDATION

Both Li’s and Xu’s books imply a bleak future for the party and what may come after it. Li establishes that regime support is connected to the perception that the regime is unassailable, and this image of unassailability is fragile because it depends so much on one man. “Aside from the practical challenges,” Li writes, “a much graver challenge for the ruling party is maintaining the credibility of the paramount leader. As the ultimate object of political trust, the top leader is the soul and face of the Center. His credibility is critical for sustaining trust in the Center as an institution.” The current party leadership, which has bristled at any criticism of Xi, seems to agree that unraveling trust in the top leader could threaten the regime.

In Xu’s telling, meanwhile, China is today so obsessed with fine-grained surveillance and social control that it is strangling itself economically and socially. The state-dominated economy is inefficient, household income is too low, China’s population is declining, and top-down control of personnel and ideology stymies innovation. The ongoing real estate slump, Xu suggests, could even spark “a financial and fiscal crisis.”

Such an event—or a public health emergency or failed attempt to take Taiwan by force—could crack Xi’s veneer of invincibility, spurring those with partial trust to join their compatriots who fully distrust Xi and trigger a spreading movement against the regime. Li does not say what might follow such a trust meltdown, but both his and Xu’s theories suggest that a collapse of political order is more likely than a democratic transition. Xu notes that if the regime were to fall, China lacks the resources, including “widespread private property rights, a civil society, and a social consensus on human rights, property rights, and the rule of law and constitutionalism” that it would need to reconstruct itself as a stable democratic system. If trust in the party were to collapse, the only forces able to reimpose order would be either a party faction or the military—neither of which would bode well for China’s future. The country would likely undergo a period of painful chaos and end up with some other form of authoritarian rule.

Although many U.S. observers and politiciansmight liketo exploit China’s fragility to topple the CCP, the implications of these books should serve as a warning. Lacking either the trust or the institutional genes to set up a more stable alternative, a post-CCP authoritarian regime rooted more in raw power than in engineered consensus might be even harder for the West to deal with than the relatively disciplined and strategic regime China has today.