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This article was published in the South China Morning Post. It can be found here in its original form. 

By pure coincidence, on the day the Chinese Communist Party marked its 91st anniversary, July 1, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) of Mexico, which lost power in 2000, won back the presidency. Its telegenic candidate, Enrique Pena Nieto, emerged victorious in a three-way race.

One may wonder why this event is relevant to the Communist Party’s leadership. The short answer is that the return of the PRI to power through a democratic process should encourage the Communist Party to think outside the box and start a process of political transformation that will both safeguard China’s stability and ensure the party’s long-term viability.

First, a little background. The PRI, once dubbed “the perfect dictatorship”, ruled Mexico from 1929 to 2000, relying on a mixture of coercion, co-optation and corruption to keep power. It built ties to business groups and leaders of labour unions, and relied on their support in winning rigged elections. In the late 1980s, the PRI’s hegemony began to unravel, and it had to steal the 1988 presidential election to avoid defeat. Seeing the writing on the wall, the leadership introduced democratic reforms gradually. It established an independent election commission. In the ensuing decade, political competition on a more level playing field allowed opposition parties to gain strength in states and the congress, eventually paving the way for Mexico’s smooth transition to democracy in 2000.

While Mexico has been racked with drug violence and its economy has performed poorly in the past decade, its democratic institutions have taken root. With Pena Nieto’s election, presidential power has been transferred from one party to another for the second time, a critical marker of democratic consolidation. Few expect the return of the PRI to result in the restoration of the “perfect dictatorship”. 

Chinese leaders may not find the Mexican experience interesting or useful. That is indeed unfortunate. For the past two decades, the Communist Party leadership has obsessively focused its intellectual energy on trying to learn the wrong lessons from history. Instead of looking at how one-party regimes successfully transformed themselves into democracies, Beijing has devoted its attention to the collapse of communist regimes in the former Soviet bloc, especially the fall of the Soviet Union.

This intellectual exercise might have yielded useful insights had the leadership drawn the right lessons from the Soviet collapse – a one-party dictatorship that has resisted reform for too long will be impossible to save. Instead, the party seems to have reached the opposite conclusion– a one-party regime must do everything in its power to resist democratisation. The survival strategy adopted since Tiananmen, consisting of selective repression, co-optation, political patronage and reversal of limited
political reforms, is deeply informed by its perspectives on the Soviet collapse.

Today, the party should take a look at how the former Soviet Communist Party has fared in the past two decades in the political wilderness. Except for a brief resurgence in the mid-1990s, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation has been relegated to a fringe position, capable of garnering 10-20 per cent of the votes in national elections but hopeless in regaining power. It has only 160,000 registered members, mostly elderly. The party’s appeal to the younger generation is non-existent.

Compared with the former communist parties in Eastern Europe, Russia’s communists might be considered lucky. No former communist party in Eastern Europe has survived as a coherent political organisation. None has recaptured political power.

By contrast, authoritarian one-party regimes that initiated managed political transitions early, from a position of relative strength, have fared much better. Mexico’s PRI is not the only example. Taiwan’s Kuomintang provides another illuminating case. 

Starting in the late 1970s, the KMT began to allow the opposition to participate in semi-competitive elections as independent candidates. In 1986, president Chiang Ching-kuo deliberately took no action when the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) announced its formation, an illegal act at that time. Through a series of democratic reforms and negotiations with the DPP, the KMT was able to bring about one of the most successful democratic transitions in history.

Of course, the KMT lost the presidency in 2000, as did the PRI in the same year. But that loss did not spell the end of the KMT as a political force. In 2008, it won back the presidency. The contrasting fortunes of two types of one-party regimes offer two important insights.

First, once driven from power, post-totalitarian one-party regimes have little hope of gaining it back, unlike their authoritarian one-party counterparts. The most persuasive explanation for this contrast is that these two types of regimes are structured very differently despite their ostensible similarities. A post-totalitarian one-party regime is much less reformable than an authoritarian one-party regime.

Second, any one-party regime that initiates apolitical transition while it maintains a relative political advantage against the opposition should fare better. Typically, this means reform should start sooner rather than later.

By definition, introducing democratic transition will mean these regimes’ eventual exit from power. But since such exit will be peaceful, legitimate and democratic, the former ruling party will be able to maintain its political viability and hope to return to power through elections in the future.

By contrast, once overthrown, one-party regimes that have refused to democratise fare much worse. They have no bargaining power with the democratic opposition. They are seen by their own people as criminals and thieves. It is impossible for them to regain power through the democratic process.

It is questionable whether Beijing will read the recent histories of Mexico, the Soviet Union and Taiwan this way. Leaders may even interpret the PRI’s electoral triumph as Mexican voters’ rejection of democracy. Let us hope that Beijing will not misread history again.

Minxin Pei is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and a non-resident fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States

Image by PRI.