It has been 30 years since the Tiananmen incident. During this period, China’s economy has grown at an average annual rate of 9.3%, and it is still maintaining a relatively rapid growth trend now. However, China’s political system has not gradually changed from authoritarianism to democracy with economic growth, such as the case in South Korea and Taiwan. It is still a centralized country under the absolute leadership of the Communist Party of China. How has China achieved an organic combination of market economy and centralized politics, and how it has embarked on a unique development path? This paper argues that:
First, after the Tiananmen incident, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the upheaval of Eastern Europe, all strata of Chinese society strongly agreed on the political judgment that stability is an overriding thing, and they formed a broad consensus on the trinity of reform, development and stability. Second, in order to achieve social stability, the Chinese government has adopted a combination of hard and soft means to coordinate the interests of all social strata. Third, while strengthening the Party media’s control and guidance of public opinion, the freedom of speech in the self-media has been relaxed, and the so-called birdcage politics with both constraints and a larger free space has been formed. Fourth, the purpose of birdcage politics is to create social stability for economic growth. People’s satisfaction with the life brought about by economic growth is the main condition for birdcage politics to survive. Based on the above analysis, in the long run, birdcage politics may gradually lose its reason to exist, just as the case of the birdcage economy that once played an important role and then disappeared.
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