Abstract
The main research question addressed in Jie Chen and Bruce J. Dickson’s Allies of the state is whether China’s private entrepreneurs have pushed the party-state towards democracy. The authors conducted their survey in five coastal provinces. The private sectors in these provinces is the most developed, with more than 70 per cent of the country’s private entrepreneurs. The authors utilized an original set of data which were collected from a representative sample of private entrepreneurs in 2006–2007 and completed an extensive survey of firms of various sizes and in different business sectors.
Based on their findings, Chen and Dickson conclude that China’s capitalists are unlikely to push for change in the state’s political structure. This is not a novel finding, most recent empirical research concludes that China’s capitalists do not strongly support democracy. Chen and Dickson’s research nonetheless explains in more detail why private entrepreneurs cannot be the agents of political change in China. Three main reasons can be identified from their research. The first one is the high degree of political embeddedness of entrepreneurs in the party-state and business organizations, which makes private entrepreneurs comparatively obedient to one-party rule. Secondly, they argue that private entrepreneurs’ financial connections with the state and their evaluation of government policy dramatically influence their attitude towards democracy. In particular, their findings confirmed that private entrepreneurs who received loans from state-controlled banks were less supportive of democracy. As Chen and Dickson argue at the beginning of their book, the closer the affinity between capitalists and the state, the less enthusiastic is their support of democracy. Thirdly, the authors find that most of China’s new capitalists support the CCP regime mainly because they do not believe in democracy or see the need for it. This can be attributed to several subjective variables, for instance, life satisfaction and approval of governmental policy performance.
In terms of research findings, this book is not the first one to assert that, in the case of China, private entrepreneurs do not favour regime change. It is an echo of much previous research on this topic. Research on wealth and regime change in China confirms that private entrepreneurs in China generally follow the traditional Chinese saying ‘Business is business, politics is politics’. Chen and Dickson’s research along with other seminal works argue that economic development cannot lead to a change in China’s party-state. This finding in itself is a contribution to highlight a shortcoming of modernization theory; nevertheless, this finding cannot answer the question of why wealth and democracy in China are not positively causally related. If we assume that all entrepreneurs focus on material interests, then the question arises as to why Western entrepreneurs care about regime change but Chinese or, more generally, Asian entrepreneurs do not. Current studies about the emergence of democracy in China already confirm that private entrepreneurs strengthen the party-state system rather than challenge it. Hopefully, future research will throw some light on the failure of Western modernization theory in this respect.
Nevertheless, the contribution of this book lies in the systematic review of theoretical frameworks in the realm of political economy and comprehensive survey methods. Chen and Dickson’s survey is based on a representative sampling of private entrepreneurs. They also take into account regional variations in levels of development, and they consider differences in size and scope of enterprises in their sample. Unlike much of the previous research based on the unit of company, Chen and Dickson’s research also pays attention to individual variables to explain entrepreneurs’ attitudes towards both the current political system and potential democratic future. Furthermore, this book can be viewed as presenting the most theoretically comprehensive and robustly methodological research in this realm.
Chen and Dickson’s book therefore is useful to students and researchers who are interested in the relationship between business and government in China. At the theoretical level, it also benefits researchers who are interested in the political economy of China, especially the focus on the correlation of economic development with political change. At the end of their book, Chen and Dickson mention that ‘China’s capitalists may be important allies of the state at the present, but their loyalty cannot be guaranteed in the long run’. From the perspective of policy analysis, it is also in the government’s interests to know how and why, and perhaps most importantly when, that change will come in the near future, when China’s capitalists no longer support a one-party regime.