Many Western analysts and policymakers rely on the transformative logic of the path to modernization taken by the West in predicting the demise of the Chinese Communist Party based on the notion that escalating demands for political participation from China’s middle classes will compel the country to democratize. I side with Josh’s skepticism on this and would add that it is not only China’s elites who have benefited from the current system—its middle classes seem quite satisfied too.

A critical part of China’s political-economic success of the last two decades is that the CCP has developed a state-society compact through which the government provides a certain measure of economic prosperity in return for society allowing it to govern unchallenged. The middle classes are given order and wealth in exchange for their political freedoms and civil liberties; and to the degree that the state continues to deliver on its promise, the regime is unlikely to moderate.

Shedding its Marxist economic ideology, the regime has maintained its legitimacy by reformulating the pursuit of economic liberalization and growth into a nationalist project—it justifies reforms, such as the introduction of profit-making incentives for state-owned enterprises, as necessary in the pursuit of national competitiveness in the global economy. We have only to remember the virulence of the anti-Japanese riots in many major and prosperous Chinese cities two years ago to know the power of such nationalist sentiment. The CCP has constructed a new rationale for its firm grip on power and I doubt that the buds of freedom that many Western analysts have often claimed to see over time—such as in the 1989 Tiananmen uprising, the spread of Internet usage since the mid-1990s, and the more recent uptick in rural social protests—will flower any time soon.