Neoauthoritarianism (China)

Neoauthoritarianism () is a current of political thought within the (PRC), and to some extent the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), that advocates a powerful centralized state to facilitate market reforms. The concept of liberal democracy led to intense debate between democratic advocates and neoauthoritarians prior to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre.
Its origin was based in reworked ideas of Samuel Huntington, who advised the post-Communist East European elite to take a gradualist approach towards market liberalization; hence, "new authoritarianism". A rejection of the optimistic views on modernization theories, it seeks faster reform of the socialist market economy Neoauthoritarianism would catch the attention of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in early 1988 when Wu Jiaxiang wrote an article in which he concluded that the British monarchy initiated modernization by "pulling down 100 castles overnight", thus developmentally linking autocracy and freedom as preceding democracy and freedom.
Persistence as Neoconservativism
Neoauthoritarianism lost favor after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre. Henry He considers that, while June 4 halted the movement for democracy, because neoauthoritarianism avoids the issue of popular involvement, it would therefore be a downfall for it and General Secretary Zhao Ziyang as well. He considers it to have transformed into a kind of "neo-conservatism" after that.
New Conservatism or neoconservatism () argued for political and economic centralization and the establishment of shared moral values. The movement has been described in the West by political scientist Joseph Fewsmith.
Prominent neoconservative theorists include Xiao Gongqin, initially a leading neoauthoritarian who promoted "gradual reform under strong rule" after 1989.
Theory
A central figure, if not principal proponent of Neoauthoritarianism, the "well-connected"
Legacy
China's measures for successful economic and political stabilization led many scholars and politicians to accept the role of an authoritarian regime in fast and stable economic growth. Although the Chinese state is seen as legitimizing democracy as a modernization goal, economic growth is seen as more important.
Chinese-Canadian sociologist Yuezhi Zhao views the neoauthoritarians as having attempted to avoid an economic crisis through dictatorship, and Barry Sautman characterizes them as reflecting the policy of "pre-revolutionary Chinese leaders" as well as "contemporary Third World strongmen", as part of ideological developments of the decade he considers more recognizable to westerners as conservative and liberal. Sautman sums its theory with a quote from Su Shaozi (1986): "What China needs today is a strong liberal leader." A criticism by Zhou Wenzhang is that neoauthoritarianism only considers problems of authority from the angle of centralization, similarly considering the main problem of authority to be whether or not it is exercised scientifically.

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