China’s announcement on January 17th that its economy had grown by an estimated 5% in 2024, right on target, was greeted with widespread disbelief on the country’s social media. “It feels unreal—everything around me seems so bleak,” wrote one netizen. “The folks at the statistics bureau worked hard,” said another. On Weibo, a microblogging platform, more than 240 comments were posted below state television’s summary of the GDP news. Only a handful remained visible, suggesting that most had failed to meet the account’s strict censorship standards. Amid high youth unemployment and a property-market slump, cynics abound.
The government prefers a different spin. Last year “social confidence was effectively bolstered and the economy recovered remarkably,” it said in a statement about the economic data. This achievement was “particularly” the result of “timely” stimulus measures, it declared. There is some truth in this. The economy did pick up late in the year, partly helped by a state-subsidised trade-in scheme that caused sales of household appliances to leap by 39% year on year in December. But the public remains unenthused. Following three years of harsh (and, by the end, widely resented) pandemic restrictions, and two subsequent years of economic malaise, China’s social compact is under pressure. For many, the better life they had expected in return for acquiescing to Communist Party rule is not materialising.
The country’s leader, Xi Jinping, may wonder whether a warning he gave in 2014, less than a year and a half after he took power, is gaining relevance. “The ancient Roman historian, Tacitus, proposed a theory that when public authority loses credibility, no matter what it says or does, society will view it negatively. This is the ‘Tacitus trap’,” he told officials. “Of course, we have not reached this point, but the problems that exist are indeed serious…If we were ever to reach that day, it would endanger the party’s ruling foundation and governing position.”
Even now there is little evidence that the party is tottering. But the danger of falling into a Tacitus trap clearly haunts it. The term was invented by a Chinese scholar, Pan Zhichang, who wrote about it in 2007. It took off after Mr Xi borrowed it. In China, books and academic literature referring to the trap have since proliferated. It is often mentioned alongside two other potential pitfalls that Chinese officials fret about. One is the “middle-income trap” (so-named by Indermit Gill of the World Bank and Homi Kharas, now of the Brookings Institution). It describes how, having enjoyed rapid growth, some countries fail to become rich. The other is the “Thucydides trap”, a term coined by an American scholar, Graham Allison, which is about the risk of war between a rising power and the prevailing hegemon.
A possible reason why Mr Xi appears more hesitant to talk about the Tacitus trap than the other two dangers is that it could invite uncomfortable comparisons between him and the unpopular Roman emperor, Galba, about whom Tacitus was writing. (Galba was murdered after a few months in power.) But Mr Xi does highlight the dangers of regime collapse, often referring to the fate of the Soviet Union. “The Soviet Communist Party distanced itself from the people and became a privileged bureaucratic group that only safeguarded its own interests,” he told provincial leaders in 2021. Keeping the public on side clearly matters to him.
Poll watchers
The importance to the party of public opinion is reflected in the energy it expends on trying to gauge it. Local officials often commission opinion polls to assess citizens’ views of their policies. They use the public’s “satisfaction level” when conducting officials’ performance reviews. China’s rubber-stamp parliament, the National People’s Congress, last month began soliciting opinions online about what the prime minister should say in March in his annual report to the legislature (don’t bother suggesting faster economic growth: another year at around 5% is very likely to be the target he sets).
Given that the party controls news media, officials pay particular attention to online comments—even as censors (or algorithms) delete those they don’t like. Classified digests of hot topics on social media, and others summarising petitions submitted to the government by aggrieved citizens, circulate among bureaucrats. This intensive monitoring of public opinion is part of what China trumpets as its “whole-process democracy”—a form, it says, that is better than the Western kind.
Amid the current economic gloom, officials regard such efforts as all the more important. They are keen to learn, not least, of public complaints that could cause social unrest. Local governments often prefer to satisfy workers’ demands rather than risk the spread of strikes. Officials have been putting pressure on companies to make sure wages are paid in full before the country celebrates the lunar new year on January 29th. Grumbling about arrears, especially among construction workers, often triggers protests in the run-up to the holiday.
But a serious souring of the public mood may be difficult for the government to monitor effectively. Fearing repercussions if they speak out, people censor themselves online, or find roundabout ways to express their views. The government appeared to be blindsided by scattered small-scale protests against covid-19-related lockdowns late in 2022, some of which involved rare demands for political freedom and Mr Xi’s resignation. These may have hastened the scrapping of the zero-covid policy, but the ensuing crackdown on dissent may also have made it harder for officials to read the public mind (in recent months they have silenced several economists who have dared to express pessimism). Foreign pollsters struggle, too. They are forbidden from carrying out opinion surveys in China without domestic Chinese partners, who have become increasingly wary of getting involved.
Early in Mr Xi’s rule, those looking for clues to China’s long-term stability found food for thought in another foreign work, Alexis de Tocqueville’s book “The Old Regime and the Revolution”, published in 1856. It became a bestseller in the country after Mr Xi’s anti-corruption chief, Wang Qishan, recommended it. The message many readers took from this work was that reformist regimes face danger after a period of prosperity if they fail to meet rising public expectations. Chinese officials clearly agree that the classics of the West contain disturbing lessons. ■
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