China's recipe for dictatorship: absolute power for limited terms

China's recipe for dictatorship, which increasingly seems like a winning formula for the anti-Western democratic world, is essentially the following: a successful dictatorship is one in which absolute power is exercised by a single leader for only a limited time; a failed one is one in which such a leader tries to prolong his rule indefinitely, and hence progressively loses more and more real power.

Fu Zhenghua, the fast-rising star of the Chinese police state, has been leading the intensifying crackdown on financial corruption in the wake of the summer's stock market crash. Meanwhile, China's increasingly two-tier economy looks set to diverge even further in 2016 and beyond. The battle between reformers and conservatives is gearing up now that the IMF's inclusion of the yuan in the SDR has raised the stakes of Beijing's long-term bid to internationalize its finances. Xi Jinping is clearly on the reformers' side, if his official words are to be believed.

The crackdown on the finance industry just might succeed, and just might make the country a more welcoming place for international investors. This is clearly Xi Jinping's gambit. The danger in such a scenario is that he'll simply redistribute the monopoly interests to his own cronies. But he has a big limitation: he'll be in power only through 2022-23. And even if he tries to rig the succession by aggressively promoting his own underlings in the Politburo, his own experience tells him that trying to control someone else once you've handed over your post(s) to him is a fool's errand: that's why true dictators know they (or their immediate family) must stay in office as long as humanly possible in their respective countries.

By this criterion, China is less dictatorial - and hence more stable - than the dictatorships that fell in the Arab spring, or in the case of Assad's Syria, have been truncated to a shadow of their former selves. Indeed, by this standard China may even be more stable than Putin's Russia, which looks increasingly unlikely to emerge from that KGB man's shadow so long as he lives.

While he's still in office, though, Xi benefits greatly - and can make a strong case that the entire nation benefits greatly - from quasi-absolute powers and no meaningful dissent.

Interestingly, in today's age of ISIS, even not-so-stable dictatorships lose their urgency of redress.

This AP interview with Ted Cruz, the firebrand nationalist Republican presidential candidate who's the only realistic alternative on the hard right to Donald Trump, reveals a growing realism in the US that just because some leaders are bad and the world would probably be better off without them, doesn't meant that getting rid of them wouldn't actually exacerbate the immediate security problems and overall global stability:

“If you topple a stable ruler, throw a Middle Eastern country into chaos and hand it over to radical Islamic terrorists, that hurts America,” Cruz said.

Specifically on Bashar al-Assad in Syria:

While Assad is undoubtedly a “bad man,” removing him from power would be “materially worse for U.S. national security interests,” he says. He is unwilling to send more U.S. ground forces into the Middle East and rejects the idea that torture can serve as an appropriate interrogation tool.

Now granted, to have lost control of over half his territory, it's not quite correct to say that Assad was by any realistic standard a "stable" ruler before the Arab spring, and it's also well-established that he deliberately promoted the terrorist groups when it suited his interests to dilute the legitimate secular democratic opposition to his ruthless police state. But it's worked out for him - inasmuch as he still controls the chunk of Syria that he does - only because he was right that religious fanaticism would greatly weaken the cause of liberal reformists.

Those who question the legitimacy of CPC rule, then, should also consider the larger question: what would replace it? As a start, a lot of bureaucratic and corporate special-interest corruption would continue even in a democratic system with perfectly free elections: just look at Ukraine and Moldova, for instance, where after 24 years of freedom, it's still doubtful that any meaningful improvements in their civil service systems will be enacted.

In the latter's case, corruption has now gotten so bad that a substantial portion of the population now seems to be leaning toward Russia - that is, they seem to prefer strongman rule of a single undisputed leader (Putin) to the fecklessness of mediocre wimps they keep putting into office, who make huge promises to all the people to get elected, only to make sure their tiny clique of billionaire buddies get all the special benefits of their office first, last, and always.

Let's not forget that even Hitler rose to power by getting elected.

On the other hand, for those of us who view Xi in a positive or (like myself) mixed light, we must hope and pray that the man doesn't succumb to the temptations of indefinite unchecked power should his anti-corruption campaign succeed.