A New Chimerica?

Neo-authoritarianism's American practitioners

American elites today remind me of Chinese elites in the 1990s. They value tradition over pluralism, technological acceleration over economic redistribution, and—to riff on Churchill—autocracy as the “least worst option” to save a stagnant, or backwards, society. How did this happen? For the New Yorker, I revisited the China of the 1980s, where a theory of strongman politics known as “neo-authoritarianism” first took root. Through conversations with its architect, Xiao Gongqin, a 78-year-old historian in Shanghai, I piece together its origins and what lessons we, or America’s incoming political class, might learn from it.

For all my attempts to contextualize Xiao’s views, there is something unsettlingly universal about his reactionary politics. I was struck most by how he came to frame his reformist adversaries in the 1980s—such as the hunger strikers in Tiananmen Square in 1989—as existential threats to China’s future. But over three decades have gone by, and Xi Jinping has taken China in a direction Xiao’s theory did not anticipate. He is now more cynical of the prospect that a strongman will do what his underwriters want. (This feels like politics 101, but Xiao is playing with live rounds.) For tech elites and the New Right, the question is this: for all the heady fixation on “day 1” planning, what happens if something goes awry on day 100? What happens when the strongman changes plans—as he always can?

The historian Niall Ferguson has long sounded the death knell of “Chimerica,” the economic convergence between the U.S. and China that propped up decades of global wealth creation. Now, it seems as though another “Chimerica” is taking shape in the realm of ideology and domestic governance.

Happy Holidays,

-Chang