New piece out: Is China a Technocracy?

I try to separate two questions that are too often collapsed into one.

First: in what empirical sense was the post-Mao PRC actually technocratic?

Second: why has the West so consistently wanted to see China through a technocratic frame?

The answer, I think, is more uncomfortable than the usual “China is efficient” or “China is techno-authoritarian” story allows. China’s technocratic disposition is real, but it is filtered through Leninist party control, developmental-state imperatives, and a longer Chinese intellectual history of pragmatism, systems thinking, and statecraft.

And the Western fascination with Chinese technocracy has often been less about China than about the West arguing with itself.

The missing figure in both stories is the Chinese intellectual: the person who helped build, translate, contest, and suffer under these systems, but is rarely visible in either the admiring or dystopian version of the story.