Xi Jinping Lacks New Thinking

This essay posits that Xi Jinping’s greatest challenge is his inability to produce a new developmental vision; only a shift toward a democratic developmental state—what we might term a developmental Gorbachev—can secure autonomous, sustainable development.

For more than a decade, debates about China’s political trajectory have been dominated by a procedural fixation: the abolition of presidential term limits. From this perspective, the erosion of collective leadership is treated as both the cause of China’s current malaise and the key to its reversal. Restore term limits, the argument goes, and China’s authoritarian resilience will reassert itself.

This diagnosis mistakes institutional form for developmental substance. By the time Xi Jinping assumed power in 2012, China was widely celebrated as a paradigmatic case of “resilient authoritarianism,” a concept famously articulated by Andrew Nathan to capture the Communist Party’s adaptive capacity through elite circulation, technocratic governance, and limited institutionalization. Yet what appeared as resilience was already masking a development model approaching exhaustion. Centralization did not derail a stable system; it confronted a crisis that institutional rotation alone could no longer contain.

China’s predicament today is not primarily about how power is distributed, but about the absence of a viable developmental vision. Centralized authority is only a means. Renewal depends not on power itself, but on whether it generates ideas capable of restructuring the relationship between state, capital, and society. On that front, China’s ruling elite—Xi included—has so far come up short.

The Limits of Authoritarian Resilience

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, China appeared to embody the virtues of authoritarian resilience. The Jiang Zemin–Zhu Rongji administration consolidated market reforms and secured China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, while the subsequent Hu Jintao–Wen Jiabao period preserved collective leadership and formal succession rules. Compared with the Soviet collapse, China looked not only stable but dynamically adaptive.

That interpretation was not entirely wrong—at the time. These institutional arrangements reduced elite uncertainty and facilitated policy continuity. But they did not resolve China’s structural contradictions; they merely deferred them. Growth continued, yet so did debt accumulation, inequality, regional fragmentation, and elite capture. Authoritarian resilience functioned less as a developmental mechanism than as a stabilization device for an accumulation regime whose internal tensions were already deepening.

By the late 2010s, the limits of this model had become unmistakable. What resilience stabilized was not a self-correcting development path, but a political economy increasingly unable to generate autonomous upgrading. Institutional rotation could manage succession, but it could not reform the underlying logic of elite accumulation.

At its core, this resilience rested on a specific configuration of power and capital: crony comprador capitalism. Political privilege structured access to domestic resources, while deep integration into global capital markets sustained growth. The system proved effective at mobilizing investment and accelerating accumulation—but only within parameters compatible with global capital. It produced expansion without autonomy, growth without structural transformation.

Centralization, in itself, was not the core problem. The critical question was whether concentrated authority would be used to dismantle the underlying structures of crony comprador capitalism or merely to discipline its excesses while leaving its foundations intact.

Crony Comprador Capitalism and China’s Semi-Peripheral Ascent

Crony comprador capitalism did not derail China’s rise; it structured it. Over time, this system has produced a powerful elite coalition whose interests have aligned with continued openness to global capital, while resisting internal redistribution, political inclusion, and institutional accountability.

The fusion of political power, domestic rent extraction, and external dependence has generated rapid accumulation, but has locked China into a growth path compatible with global capital and hostile to sovereign control over finance, technology, and income distribution. What has resulted is China’s dramatic ascent—but within a semi-peripheral orbit. Unlike postwar Germany or Japan, China’s integration into the global economy did not culminate in full developmental autonomy.

As geopolitical rivalry intensified and global economic rules grew increasingly hostile to late development—through tighter intellectual property regimes, financial openness, and the weaponization of interdependence—the vulnerabilities of this model were exposed. External markets became less reliable, technological access more contested, and capital mobility more constraining. The very mechanisms that had once enabled growth now amplified systemic risk.

Yet China’s elite coalition largely failed to recognize this structural trap. Success bred complacency rather than reflection. Chinese policy elites remain deeply influenced by neoliberal economic orthodoxy—the legacy of domestic “Chicago Boys” whose reach extends across academia, technocratic agencies, and official think tanks. Alternative developmental frameworks are not simply debated and rejected; they are structurally insulated from decision-making channels.

To date, centralization under Xi has not been used to rethink the development model, but to contain instability while preserving the logic of semi-peripheral development. The result is tightening control without conceptual renewal—without what Gorbachev once called “new thinking.”

Developmental States After the Cold War

Historical comparisons are instructive—but only if treated with care. The postwar success of East Asian developmental states occurred under Cold War conditions that no longer exist. Whether democratic, as in Japan, or authoritarian, as in South Korea and Taiwan, these states benefited from a permissive international environment and extensive U.S. security and geopolitical sponsorship.

That world has disappeared. Contemporary globalization—marked by capital mobility, neoliberal norms, and rule-based constraints on industrial policy—has narrowed the space for late development. Under these conditions, development without democratic accountability no longer produces autonomy; it systematically reproduces dependence.

In the post–Cold War era, democracy and development have become increasingly reinforcing rather than mutually exclusive. Political inclusion functions less as an obstacle to growth than as a corrective mechanism: dismantling elite capture, expanding domestic demand, and anchoring development in social legitimacy rather than perpetual expansion.

For a late-developing power like China, democratic developmental statehood is therefore not a liberal aspiration but a condition of autonomy. Without managed democratization, state power remains vulnerable to elite capture; without a strong state committed to autonomous development, democratization itself risks degenerating into comprador politics. Only their combination can overcome both crony capitalism at home and dependency abroad.

Toward a Developmental Gorbachev

China’s fundamental challenge is not whether to restore term limits or revive collective leadership. It is whether a late-developing great power can transition from semi-peripheral ascent to full development.

Xi Jinping commands more authority than any Chinese leader in decades. Yet authority without conceptual renewal yields diminishing returns. Absent a framework capable of transcending crony comprador capitalism, centralization tends to consolidate existing structures rather than transform them.

What China requires is a leader willing to use concentrated power to institutionalize its own limitation—to combine managed democratization with a strong state committed to autonomous development, thereby forging a democratic developmental state. In short, China does not need another strongman. It needs a developmental Gorbachev.

Whether Xi can—or will—become such a figure remains the central unanswered question shaping China’s future.

Jianyong Yue is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics. He previously taught Chinese politics and development at King’s College London and the LSE. He is the author of China’s Rise in the Age of Globalization: Myth or Reality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and Crony Comprador Capitalism: The Institutional Origins of China’s Rise and Decline (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).

Photo by zhang kaiyv