There are several important elements. One is the party successfully sets long-term political goals, such as the modernization of industry or technology, or infrastructure planning. As Deng Xiaoping made clear in the 1980s, it can concentrate resources in priority areas. I see this as a strength in the initial phase of development, from say the 1980s to the mid-2000s.

Another crucial element is experimentation. This is something we ignore in the West — how unexpectedly flexible China’s deeply bureaucratic system can be. This flexibility has been demonstrated in the ability to set up pilot projects in special economic zones, in local tests — such as for housing reform or bankruptcy in state enterprises. Very difficult measures were regularly tested in pilot projects for several years before national laws were enacted.

You show how this flexibility arose from the Communist Party’s revolutionary experience.

This is very important. Because we have to ask ourselves, how did a socialist bureaucratic system get this kind of adaptability that you didn’t see in Eastern Europe? It’s due to the specific historical experiences of this party [in the 1930s and 1940s before coming to power]. It controlled very spread-out and not contiguous districts. So when it tried something like land reform it was done experimentally and in a decentralized fashion. This was fundamentally different from the Soviet Union.

Image Credit... Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

This willingness to experiment was also a hallmark of the Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin periods.

It only largely ended with Xi Jinping with the idea of “top-level design.” There was a feeling that these decentralized experiments contributed to corruption and a lack of discipline. So now every policy initiative has to be approved by the center. This has taken a lot of the energy out of China’s political system.

There was an argument that reforms must proceed in sequence, so they had to be coordinated. But the effect has been that not much has happened since 2013 [when Mr. Xi became president] in terms of ground-up problem-solving. If you rely on hierarchy and discipline, the courage to experiment at the lower levels is squeezed out. People are afraid of trying things.

Ironically, it’s only now that some countries are looking at China as a model. Can it be a model?

For many years I would have said no, but many countries are struggling with how to deal with pressing basic problems like maintaining internal security, building physical infrastructure and providing jobs. These are the basis of populist movements around the world. China is a point of orientation. It can’t be duplicated because these other countries don’t have a Communist Party with the special history and features of China’s. But in terms of considering illiberal, state-directed solutions, China is often cited as an example of how an authoritarian government can deal with things differently. China’s experience is thus a permanent question mark for the world when they ask if the Western model is the best.