There is a particular, deeply predictable rhythm to the life cycle of an authoritarian government. In the early stages, the planners arrive armed with clipboards, grand blueprints, and an unshakeable faith in their own managerial genius. They promise order, prosperity, and harmony, all managed with the brisk efficiency of a well-oiled machine. But when the arithmetic inevitably falls apart—because economic reality is stubbornly resistant to bureaucratic decree—the state behaves like an embarrassing uncle whose holiday dinner lecture has gone completely off the rails. It stops pretending to persuade, knocks over the punch bowl, and demands absolute deference under threat of eviction.
Beijing reached that familiar inflection point long ago, but this week’s personnel choreography offers a fresh masterclass in the genre. As Xi Jinping prepares the runway for an unprecedented fourth five-year term atop the Chinese Communist Party, the regime has elevated a military general directly into the Politburo while launching a renewed campaign for strict party discipline. To anyone who treats the state with the healthy skepticism usually reserved for unsolicited phone calls from offshore princes, the subtext could not be plainer. When the centralized economic machinery sputters and the public grows weary of ideological sermons, the regime invariably reaches into the closet for its favorite accessory: a heavily decorated uniform with a sidearm.
Whenever an apparatus of state power talks about strengthening discipline, one ought to check their pockets and back slowly toward the exit. In bureaucratic dialect, discipline is merely the polite term for making sure nobody giggles when the central committee insists the Emperor is dressed in the finest tailored silk. The Chinese economy is currently wrestling with cratering property markets, youth unemployment so grim the state simply stopped publishing the numbers for a while, and the slow, agonizing hangover of decades of misallocated capital. Naturally, the response from the ruling cadre is not to loosen their suffocating grip, but to squeeze until their knuckles turn white.
It is here that Friedrich Hayek inevitably taps us on the shoulder. In *The Road to Serfdom*, Hayek dedicated an entire chapter to explaining why the worst get on top in collectivist systems. He noted that as a society surrenders more and more individual autonomy to central authorities, the success of the enterprise requires an ever-increasing degree of conformity. Persuasion and debate are inefficient; they slow down the five-year plan. Therefore, the people who rise to the apex of such systems are rarely the imaginative or the compassionate, but rather those unburdened by scruples about using coercion. Elevating the military into the heart of civil governance is not an aberration of the socialist model; it is its logical, terminal destination.
The modern administrative state, whether in Beijing or closer to home, always harbors a fantasy of itself as a team of dispassionate technocrats merely pulling economic levers to optimize human happiness. But when those levers snap off in their hands, the illusion evaporates, leaving behind the only tool the state actually owns: a monopoly on violence. Bringing a general into the top tier of civilian decision-making is an explicit admission that administrative red tape alone can no longer hold the ceiling up. The clipboard has formally yielded to the bayonet.
Watching Xi engineer his fourth term is like watching a catastrophic slow-motion experiment in the fatal conceit. The tragedy of the central planner is that he always believes the disaster was caused by an insufficiency of control. If only the regional governors were more disciplined, if only the entrepreneurs stopped pursuing their own self-interest, if only the citizens would display a little more enthusiasm for the doctrine, the grand design would work. The planner never considers the simpler, more humiliating possibility that human society is far too complex and spontaneous to be managed by a huddle of aging men sitting in a fortified compound.
Those of us in the West should resist the temptation to smirk too smugly at Beijing’s transparent paranoia. While our domestic regulators may prefer subpoenas and compliance codes to politburo purges, the underlying psychology remains identical. Every government agency, once established, views human liberty as a nuisance to be regulated and dissent as an administrative error to be corrected. The Chinese Communist Party simply lacks the patience to wrap its authoritarian impulses in modern therapeutic language.
Xi will get his fourth term, of course. His new general will nod attentively in meetings, and party discipline will be vigorously enforced until morale visibly improves. But history has a notoriously low tolerance for men who mistake total obedience for actual stability. The more the state tightens its grip, the more brittle it becomes, until one day the whole rickety edifice crumbles under the sheer weight of its own hubris. Until then, the rest of the world can only watch, take notes, and remember why trusting an all-powerful state to run an economy is the most dangerous fantasy humanity ever invented.