The Myth Of "Authoritarianism"

"Transition","breakdown","resilience" are among the most prevalent keywords in overseas China studies,which may root in Western scholars'classification of China's regime type and their bias about the feature of China's political system.It has been problematic to understand and analyze the political system of post-Mao China through a perspective of contemporary Western political regime typologies.In most cases,the scholarship on China tends to create many "authoritarianism with adjectives" to de-scribe China's political system and its operation.Why are the existing regime typolo-gies problematic on China?Is "authoritarianism",particularly "authoritarianism with adjectives",an accurate concept on China's political system in post-Mao era?What are the problems and limits when using Western regime classification framework,such as authoritarianism,on China?This thesis is trying to answer fore-mentioned questions by revisiting the method-ology and conceptualization of regime classification.The framework of contemporary Western regime classification is dominated by and based on the concept of Western liberal democracy,under which the rest regime types are distinguished by their differ-ences with democracy."Authoritarianism" is such a "residual category" and this con-cept needs to travel around the complex and diverse regimes outside the Western world from the very beginning.In the process of travelling,"authoritarianism" also includes presumptive bias and value judgment.Authoritarianism is considered as an inherently fragile and unstable regime,facing an ultimate transition to liberal democracy.In addi-tion,influenced by "electoralism",the research on authoritarianism tends to pay most attention to elections and its potential alternatives,namely power-sharing and co-option institutions,in authoritarian regimes.The bias and limits of the regime type and authoritarianism are also reflected in their extending to China.China's political system cannot be easily put into certain re-gime type such as "post-totalitarianism" and "authoritarianism" and the prevalent global regime indexes also can hardly reflect the development of China in the past dec-ades.Eventually,the most prevalent approach is to use "authoritarianism with adjec-tives" to describe China's political system,of which most are based on single-case re-search of China.This thesis presents an overall and brief summarization of the "authoritarianism with adjectives" that appear in overseas Chinese politics study in the past decades and their research contents and findings.The core of this approach is to pay attention to the particularity of China's political system,especially those characteristics distinguish China from general authoritarianism,based on which researchers try to answer and ex-plain the puzzles of China's political transition and development.However,this ap-proach also suffers from the bias and limits of "authoritarianism" itself and becomes a"myth"-a belief or explanation that many people believe but may be untrue.These"authoritarianism with adjectives" concepts,based on some partial and static findings and paying most of their attention to China's transition limited by the "teleological bias"and exaggerate the function of what they considered as the substitution of elections and other alternatives of power-sharing and co-option institutions,cannot understand China's political system comprehensively and accurately,and cannot even be con-cluded into certain regime type or subtypes.It relies on revisiting the indicators of classifying regime types and reconsidering conceptual innovation to comprehensively frame the political system and political de-velopment in post-Mao China,and in a general sense,to classify regimes in compara-tive politics research.