Why do some governments endure through decades of upheaval while others collapse? For much of the post-Cold War era, the answer seemed simple: democracies were legitimate, and authoritarian states were living on borrowed time. Recent history has complicated that story. China’s party-state has weathered dramatic economic and social change, while established democracies in the United States and Europe face deepening polarization and a resurgence of conservatism and religious nationalism. Understanding these shifts requires asking a more basic question: on what grounds do people accept a state’s right to rule? A state may claim legitimacy through the values it upholds, through recognized political procedures such as elections, or through its ability to deliver prosperity and public goods. Each source carries its own strengths and vulnerabilities, and the balance a state strikes among them shapes how it responds to crisis, how it treats dissent, and how long it can hold the public’s trust.
Dr. Dingxin Zhao has spent decades studying how states earn the right to rule. When he wrote his first book, on the 1989 Tiananmen Square movement, the obvious frame was democracy versus authoritarianism, the dominant story of the post-Cold War era. He chose instead to build a more value-neutral framework, which sorts state legitimacy into three types: ideological, procedural, and performance. In Politics of Legtimacy, he argues that every state needs all three, and that there is no free lunch: relying too heavily on one inevitably weakens the others. In this conversation, he explains why China’s leaders have depended on economic performance since 1989 despite repeated efforts to build a new ideology, why reviving Confucianism has proved so difficult, and what his framework reveals about the rise of conservatism and religious nationalism in the United States and Europe. He also reflects on what he would add to the book today, from China’s advantage in relative performance to the political consequences of a softer younger generation.
Dingxin Zhao is the Max Palevsky Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Chicago and director of the Center for Advanced Studies in Humanities at Zhejiang University. His research focuses on historical sociology, social movements, social change, and the relationship between economic development and democratic transformation. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from McGill University, as well as a Ph.D. in insect ecology from McGill, a master’s degree in insect ecology from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a bachelor’s degree in biology from Fudan University.
Georgia Pollard: In your book, you define the typical foundations of state legitimacy to be ideological, procedural, and performance. How did you arrive at these three typologies? Do you think that a state relies on a blend of all three, or is there one that kind of always dominates in practice?
Dr. Dingxin Zhao: I arrived at this idea at two junctures. First, when I wrote my book on the Tiananmen Square Movement, the most convenient frame was democracy versus authoritarianism. That dichotomy would have placed the book in dialogue with the literature on democracy, democratization, and democratic consolidation. In the early 1990s, modern multi-party democracy was considered the end of history, so this would have been an easy approach. Had I written the book that way in the 1990s, it would have become more famous, because it would have followed the mainstream.I read extensively on the history of democracy, the history of empire, American dominance, the Soviet-American conflict, and the Cold War, and I reached quite a different conclusion. As I see it, the so-called third wave of democratization was really the result of the Soviet Union’s collapse and the rise of the United States as the world’s sole superpower. In other words, it reflected a geopolitical imbalance. That does not mean democracy is good or bad. It does mean that when a country exports democracy to places it does not have a deep knowledge, it is like planting a species in cement or in the Arctic. Many of those plants will not survive. My thinking was also shaped by the Cold War, when I saw the Soviet Union, and China as well, make mistakes because they wanted to export revolution.The so-called rise of democratization, pushed by the United States, closely resembles the Soviet Union’s export of revolution.
Instead of a third wave of democracy, what I really saw, in the long run, was a weakening, even a general crisis, of the Enlightenment project. This time was especially dangerous because democracy was being propelled in the name of liberalism. If the state pushes communism or socialism and the project fails, communism and socialism are discredited. If democratization and liberalization are pushed in the same way and fail, liberalism is discredited. I did not publish this argument in the early 1990s because I thought people would consider me a fascist. I was not then, and I am not today. My concern was that because democracy was being promoted in the name of liberalism, its failure would damage liberalism. And liberalism is the backbone of the Enlightenment.
Socialism, anarchism, nationalism, and communism all sprang from liberalism. So rather than the rise of a third wave of democracy, I foresaw a general crisis of the Enlightenment and a rise of conservatism. That was only my prediction, I never expected it to arrive so early, or so quickly, in my lifetime. Because of this alignment, I felt I should not use democratization as my framework. I needed a more value-neutral theoretical framework. I had, of course, read Max Weber, but in the end I arrived at a typology quite different from his: ideological legitimacy, procedural legitimacy, and performance legitimacy.
Scholars of legitimacy have generally set performance aside, believing it cannot serve as a basis for legitimacy. Here I benefited greatly from my reading of Chinese history. China had an ideology called Tianming, the Mandate of Heaven, and the mandate was justified through performance, that is, whether the state was able to provide public goods. Historically, this compelled Chinese governments to provide a great deal of them. In medieval Europe, by contrast, providing public goods was often not the duty of the state but of the local aristocracy, powerful families, or the church, and the shift of that role to the state contributed to the rise of the modern state. In China, the state played the major role from the start. This allowed me to see clearly, at least in theory, that performance should be treated as an independent dimension, one that can be defined separately from ideology and procedure.
As for your question of whether a state can genuinely rely on a blend of the three, I think that is a hope, but the reality of history is a sad one. The United States performed best when it faced a real and powerful enemy like the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union sent people into space, it worried the United States. You need outside pressure to sustain the performance aspect of the state. In the 1990s, when the United States celebrated the third wave of democracy, exported democracy everywhere, and set out to prevent terrorism, the ideological aspect of legitimacy became too strong. Everybody truly believed democracy was the end of history, and that weakened the performance aspect.
You see the same thing in China. In 1989, at a moment of ideological weakness, traditional communist ideology had almost completely collapsed, so the state could rely on nothing but performance. In a way, that is what created the economic miracle. The miracle was not really the product of the right policies; the state was compelled to perform well. The same was true of Singapore when it was expelled from Malaysia, and of Taiwan, which did well in the 1950s and 1960s after the Nationalists were driven from the mainland by the Communists.
As for whether one type always dominates in practice, I am actually not sure. From the perspective of state actors, if you are a government leader, you want ideology to be dominant, but you may not always succeed. And if you are too successful, politicians will gain too much leverage and people will turn into true believers, it always hurts both procedure and performance. This is why I am satisfied with the framework: it shows there is no free lunch. It allows us to give a sober diagnosis of history. Other theories, particularly those that were promoted in the United States during the heyday of optimism, tend to suggest there is a free lunch, that some institutions and structures simply work better than others. That is not necessarily wrong, but it misses the larger picture.
GP: Moving forward to the present day, do you feel that your analysis of Tiananmen in 1989, that movement’s failure shapes the Chinese state’s approach to legitimacy now in the decades since?
DZ: After 1989, the government shifted heavily toward performance. Deng Xiaoping’s famous Southern Tour says it all. It showed that if the leadership failed to deliver, it would not survive, and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were the precedents. But I should stress that they never for one second forgot to build ideological and procedural aspects of legitimacy. From the 1990s until around 2012 or 2015, the Party became more open, and leadership selection followed a ten-year cycle. The people in the United States tend to underestimate the importance of these efforts, partly because they believe procedural mechanisms exist only in multi-party democracies.
By procedure, I mean many different kinds of procedures. A procedure that involves only a small group of elites is still a procedure. Most important, though, was an undercurrent that came to be called patriotic education. New recruits, from high school graduates to university students, were sent to military training for a few months. All of this began immediately after 1989, but it was built very slowly. From the early 1990s to the early 2000s, China went through what is often called a neoliberal era. That is not a very good concept, and it carries many biases, but by and large it points in the right direction.
The ideological aspect of state legitimacy began to gain momentum in state building after around 2014. To a certain extent, that strengthened the state, but it hurt the performance aspect of its legitimacy. That is part of the reason for the recent slowdown of the Chinese economy, though not the whole reason. Other factors have contributed as well.
GP: What would you say the main type of legitimacy is for the current Xi administration? Would you argue that it is still performance or would you say it’s shifting back to ideological?
DZ: I think it is still performance. They may want to make the shift, but at critical moments, whether there is an economic crisis, a bad economic report, or something else goes wrong, they immediately return to performance. So they have tried to build ideological legitimacy for the state, but it has not been very successful. In the end, they always have to fall back on performance, which is more or less what I argued in the conclusion of my book.
GP: Why do you think the current leadership, and every leadership since Tiananmen, has focused more on performance legitimacy than on ideological legitimacy, given your point that leaders ultimately want ideology to be dominant?
DZ: First of all, in every country, leaders want people to believe something, and all to believe the same thing. That is the easiest way to lower the cost of governance. This is why ideology matters so much: it is the best way to make people believe what the state’s leaders say. The problem is that the Chinese government has not been able to find a new durable ideology since the collapse of the traditional understanding of communism, the ideology I was indoctrinated with as a child. There are several reasons for this. I remember a French conservative scholar, Le Bon, who wrote something very insightful around the time the Soviet Union was established. If you look at communism as a religion, he argued, its life will be very short, because it promises something too concrete. It promises to do better than the market economy and capitalism, so whenever it fails to deliver, people simply walk away.
After 1989, when the Chinese government tried to find other sources of legitimacy, its task was, from the point of view of a sympathetic observer like me, especially hard. For all non-Western countries, the modern state was defined by the rise of industrial capitalism and the nation-state, both of which are Western. Every non-Western society, from the Ottoman Empire and India to Russia and Japan, faced a break as severe as a broken neck. For China, the break was not only at the neck. Its hands, legs, and toes were broken too.
The reason lies in the nature of China’s traditional bases of ideological legitimacy: Confucianism. In India, Russia, and the Islamic world, traditional legitimacy was rooted in religion. Religion has a strong transcendental dimension, which allowed it to establish institutions outside the state, even where the state was very strong. In the Soviet Union, Stalin tried hard to eradicate Eastern Orthodoxy, but by the Second World War he relied quite heavily on religion to mobilize people, and afterward he was never able to suppress Orthodoxy as thoroughly as he wanted. After Stalin died, the religion came back practically within the first week. The reason is that it had institutions and actors beyond the state. Whenever secular ideologies, by which I mean liberalism, communism, fascism, and the other isms, stop working well, people look for more traditional ideologies. This is why today, in the United States, Russia and almost everywhere, you see a rise of conservatism as well as religious nationalism.
The Chinese government, Chinese intellectuals, and conservative intellectuals in particular would like to bring these traditional elements back, as India and Russia have, but so far they are unable to. Confucianism was an extremely powerful ideology with a certain degree of religious elements, but it was so closely attached to the traditional Chinese state that all of its institutions were built inside the state rather than outside it. The civil service examination and the village-based lineage networks controlled by the Confucian gentry were very powerful, more powerful and resilient than churches, precisely because they were more linked to the state. But once that state was gone, the institutions built on Confucianism disappeared as well, through two revolutions, the Republican Revolution and the Communist Revolution, and through Deng Xiaoping’s market-oriented reforms, under which traditional rural society disappeared as more and more villages were urbanized. So when the government wants to build something today, it has to build it within the state, not outside it. This makes China’s Confucianism revival movement look much more like a state-sponsored initiative than a movement with a substantial mass base. Once something is produced within the state, it becomes less able to generate strong momentum from within society and compel other states to take it seriously, as it was the case in places like Russia, India or Turkey. This is precisely the problem China faces.
Another problem is that the Chinese government still carries legacies of the communist past, even though there is no communism there. It cannot drop the label, because doing so would hurt its legitimacy, but keeping it also does damage, because communism and Confucianism do not go well together. Communism is a conflict theory, grounded in class conflict, while Confucianism is a functionalist theory that accepts domination. That does not mean the two could never be reconciled. Under a good intellectual environment, someone might find a way to link them. But under the current university environment of China, those who excel are more likely careerists or even opportunists, and those who are doing research with a meaningful agenda are more likely the first to be marginalized. This is a real challenge for the government.
GP: You mentioned that the current Chinese leadership still relies on performance legitimacy, which could leave it exposed if economic growth falters. Do you think the Chinese state recognizes this vulnerability, and is it taking steps to address the risks that come with performance legitimacy?
DZ: China’s leaders focus on performance legitimacy, but they also strongly emphasize the importance of ideological legitimacy, and that is what creates the tension. They rely heavily on performance, yet they truly believe they can confidently produce an ideology, what they call “Chinese core values,” in a much more rigorous way. That creates a tension between performance and ideology.
GP: In your book, you mentioned there was an anti-establishment streak in Chinese mass and social media, even under the tight control of the current administration. What do you feel like that tension tells us about the limits of the current administration’s ideological and performance legitimacy?
DZ: This tension goes back to the late 1970s, when China began its reforms in 1978. From the state’s perspective, the government had lost a core value that could unify people, and it understood the limits of performance-based legitimacy. In the 1980s, the Chinese government genuinely believed that if it provided good public goods, people would be happy. But in the mid-1980s, a government leader, though I forget who, observed that people “pick up their chopsticks to eat meat, then put down their chopsticks to curse” (拿起筷子吃肉，放下筷子骂娘). That was the 1980s. By the 1990s and early 2000s, people were picking up their chopsticks to eat seafood and everything else, traveling abroad, and buying large apartments and villas, yet they still complained. At some point, the government realized that no matter how well it performed, it would not matter unless it had some core value to unite people.
Since the early 1980s, Chinese media and Chinese intellectuals have tended to be anti-establishment largely because China’s open up left a vacuum in terms of core values. What the government can do is control the media and limit its freedom, and it does, but that makes people very unhappy. A more genuine way to win over intellectuals is to convince them that what the government believes is actually true. That is why the government has worked so hard to build the ideological aspect of state legitimacy. Of course, as my book argues, so far it has not been a successful pillar.
GP: The framework in your book was meant to apply beyond China, and you’ve mentioned that it speaks to the global rise of conservatism and religious nationalism we’ve discussed. Which non-Chinese case do you think tests your theory most thoroughly?
DZ: Every country I watch can test the theory, but the theory does not really predict anything. It describes a spectrum. Its first claim is that the state needs to rely on all three types of legitimacy. Second, there is no free lunch: if a state relies too heavily on one, it hurts the others. Third, the framework has no ideology behind it. Which type of legitimacy a given state relies on is, in a way, path-dependent. The United States, for example, relies too heavily on ideology as the basis of its legitimacy, and that has made liberal ideology increasingly superficial there.
This has worried me since around 2010. My generation grew up during the Cultural Revolution, and I am a very liberal, open-minded person. But among my colleagues and the younger generation in the United States, I have seen the liberal left become increasingly frivolous in the agendas it promotes. The liberal left has begun to promote their agenda first, instead of taking care of the poor and the neglected. This is not what matters to people who are struggling, and it will not put bread on the table for people in Appalachia and other low-income parts of the United States. So you can see what happens when a state relies too much on ideology. When you believe your ideology is the end of history, you become lightheaded and frivolous.
You also see the rise of Trump. The poor, people who have no hope, start to fight back, perhaps in a rather irrational way. The same is true in Europe. The first time I went to Europe was in 1990, when I drove through Western Europe for a month. I remember that Berlin was entirely German and white. When I went back in 2004 or 2005, there were many Russians and Eastern Europeans. Now, wherever I go in Europe, I see many Muslims.
This was already happening in the early 2000s. Around 2003 or 2004, I had a student who wanted to study neo-fascism in Europe. Eventually, he did not follow my approach. Perhaps he thought I was too conservative. It was very early, and he interviewed people who told him, in effect, “We are enlightened people. If Islam one day went through its own Enlightenment and became like Catholicism or Protestantism, we would welcome immigration. But Islam has not gone through an Enlightenment.” I thought that was quite insightful. I am opposed to those views myself, which I see as indeed too conservative, but my experience of the Cultural Revolution tells me that, deep down, there is something right in them. They are right not because they are conservative, but because liberalism, as good as it is, can only provide a platform where different ideologies and religions compete freely. It does not guarantee that good ideas will always prevail.
So I told him that he could oppose those views, but that he should also take seriously the elements of truth in them. If you fail to see the elements of truth in such conservative views, then twenty years down the road you will see a Europe, endowed with a sense of the end of history, admitting more and more Muslims through illegal and legal migration, as refugees, and so on, until they reach a certain share of the population. If you try to coerce them into giving up a faith that does not align with European values, that is called anti-liberal. But if you let them grow without being able to absorb and incorporate them, they become a problem. At that point, I said, real fascism will come, not the fascism you are seeing now.
I told the student about what happened in China, across my grandfather’s generation, my father’s generation, and my own, and how radicalization went on and on, until the early radicals came to look completely conservative. I told him that what he was seeing was just a precursor. But he was a liberal and young, and I think he must have thought I was actually a conservative, so he did not follow me. Still, I believe he will be successful. He is a very smart person.
So I really do see the danger. I can say all this openly to you today because Europeans have now become concerned about it themselves. Ten or fifteen years ago, when I went to Europe to talk with European colleagues, I could not speak so frankly, because people might have labeled me a fascist. I am not. I actually think migration is a good thing, but you have to keep a clear head and be very clear-eyed about it.
GP: You’ve suggested that the rise of religious conservatism in the United States and Europe stems in part from an over relying on ideological legitimacy. How might these governments begin to restore performance legitimacy to address those problems? What can a government, like the U.S., do to start swinging the pendulum back?
DZ: The United States is a particularly difficult case, first because of its historical background. The Founding Fathers, the generation of the Federalist Papers, wanted a limited government that was highly federalized and decentralized. That design does not work well when strong state action is needed. In the 1930s, when Roosevelt introduced the New Deal, it did not really work. Elsewhere in the world, in Europe and particularly in the so-called fascist nations, the Great Depression of 1929 was long over, while the United States was still experiencing it until the bombing of Pearl Harbor saved the country.
Another factor is the American party system, which is built on pre-modern ideologies. The parties are very loose, and the voting system does not allow a third party to emerge, so people have to fight for their agendas within the two existing parties. At the top, among the elites, both Republicans and Democrats, not today but around 2000, may have been more or less religious, but they were also highly secular. At the bottom, particularly in rural America, the country is very religious. That is partly shaped by history, because many religious groups came to the United States from Europe to escape religious wars and persecution. Today, Europe finds it very hard to bring religion back because it is over-secularized. The United States never went through a European kind of Enlightenment process.
So today, on the one hand, the ideology legitimacy of the American state has weakened. You can see growing tension between the two parties. In democratic theory, we call this disloyal opposition: the two parties no longer seem loyal to the same values. On the other hand, democracy is still the only game in town. It is the only thing the United States knows. A civil war in the United States today is utterly impossible, given modern weapons and a modern army. Yet genuine reform is extremely hard, because a highly federalized government has veto points everywhere. So the only things the United States gets are a superficial socialism or people like Trump, who are unable to build anything but able to destroy. The United States still has a long way to go, because it is very easy to reform in the liberal direction, on the right, but very difficult to reform in an egalitarian, socialist direction. But democracy is by far the only game in town. The United States will stick with it, be constrained by it, benefit from it, and suffer from it for a long, long time.
GP: I have one last question for you. If you were to write a second edition of this book covering the past few years, are there recent developments in China’s state-society relations that would challenge or refine your three-part model?
DZ: I don’t think I would challenge it, but I would add a lot of nuances. I can mention a few points. First of all, I could not have expected what happened. I finished two papers on the Chinese economy in 1991, both published by 1994, and it predicted that the Chinese economy would be very successful, but I did not expect it to be that successful. China became very rich. Not everyone became rich, but people born in the late 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s more or less benefited after the early 1990s, through urban expansion.
So even though the Chinese economy has not done very well recently, this has not fundamentally damaged performance legitimacy, because of the money in people’s pockets. Many young people today, those just graduating from university, cannot find jobs, a very high percentage of them. If you only look at those numbers, you would think the Chinese government faces a serious problem. But I have interviewed their parents, and some of their parents think it’s better this way: in the past their children never came home, and now they come home and stay with them. So what? It’s free. The Chinese call this tangping (躺平), “lying flat,” and they can afford to lie flat. I have visited some tangping villages. If you talk to the people there, they blame this and blame that, but you find that they can get money from their parents or from somewhere else. Many people do not realize this. After more than thirty years of double-digit growth and urban expansion on a huge scale, many families, a great many, have a few million assets in their pockets.
Second, I did not anticipate how quickly the worldwide rise of conservatism would come. In the early 1990s, I wrote three area examination papers to fulfill the requirement of McGill’s Ph.D program, and one of the areas I chose was democratic transition and consolidation. In the end, I wrote it from the perspective I described at the beginning of our interview. What I saw coming was a general rise of conservatism and a general crisis of the Enlightenment. That was my prediction, but I did not realize it would come so quickly in my life time.
Back to China. One of my former students, who now teaches at, I think, the City University of New York, recently wrote a paper and asked me to read it, and I completely support her view. She argues that in recent years, the Chinese government has increasingly been able to rely on what she called negative performance legitimacy. Yes, the Chinese economy has not done very well recently, but Western economies, including the United States, have not done well either. Last year, Chinese businesspeople were joking about this at the dinner table, and I was laughing when they told me. They used to think China had lost its brake and was heading in a terrible direction. But a few months after Trump was elected and chaos in the US followed, they felt good, because they saw that the United States was the one that had lost both its break and handbrake, while China still had its handbrake. In my reading, China still has that handbrake because it has not been able to build strong ideological legitimacy. It still needs strong performance legitimacy to sustain its rule.
The third thing I did not realize, and did not write about in my book, is something I increasingly regret. As the saying goes, a fish cannot see the water. I did not realize how rebellious my generation was, how much we knew about rebelling and defying the government. Hard lives trained us. People of my generation knew how to fight, how to take to the streets, how to burn cars. That generation includes people born in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, up to the early 1980s. People born after the late 1980s are increasingly soft. They are not like that at all. They have become very civil. They line up for the train and buses. They wait to cross until the light turns green, and even then they walk slowly, looking at their phones and watching news or something on the screen. They have become a soft generation. I would take twenty years of hard life to harden them to become us. The softness of the younger generation gives the government a lot of leeway. So those are the three things I did not realize. I did not realize how tough we were.