This article discusses two recent books by Chenggang Xu and Minxin Pei which challenge the notion that economic growth would lead to a liberalisation of China. Xu believes that the authoritarianism of a Communist China has been entrenched for centuries through institutional frameworks. Pei reveals how the economic reforms after 1978 actually enhanced the CCP’s power, allowing Xi Jinping to advance his surveillance and political controls. The important takeaway for India is to view China through its institutional logic, reduce strategic trade reliance, and regard economic vulnerability as a threat to its strategic security.

For many years, there has been an attractive conviction among diplomats, academics, and business executives that China’s growing economic engagement with the rest of the world would necessarily push the Communist state in the direction of political liberalisation. The underlying argument, that markets breed a middle class, that a middle class generates pressure for accountability, and that accountability eventually leads to democracy, can be traced from modernisation theories through the democratic peace tradition to the expectations of the 1990s that admission into the World Trade Organization (WTO) would inevitably lead to political transformation in China. But it never did. The question that contemporary China scholarship faces is not only why this did not occur, but also whether this hypothesis was actually capable of grasping the object under study.

Two recently published books, one by Stanford economist Chenggang Xu and the other by Claremont McKenna political scientist Minxin Pei, demolish this hypothesis. These books may well represent the most insightful studies of Chinese authoritarianism to be conducted in recent years. Indeed, they provide valuable insights into the nature of authoritarianism from different perspectives, with implications for India which shares a 3,488 km contested border with the political system they describe.