Opinion piece by Bonnie Girard, President of China Channel Ltd., who has lived and worked in China for half of her adult life.

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For decades, modern China watchers, and certainly some large number of Chinese citizens themselves, hoped against hope that the economic transformation created by China’s industrial, manufacturing, and technological development would create the conditions for significant, representative political reform.

By the early 2000s, many Chinese, even CCP members, were optimistic. “We can’t go back” is a phrase that was often heard in those days when referring to the political and economic changes and advances underway in China. As [Dr. Minxin Pei, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in California] wrote, “Given the transformative socioeconomic changes China had experienced in the post-Mao era, such a scenario [going back] was simply unthinkable.”

But now it seems clear that the only thing needed to drag China back to the dark age of totalitarian rule was the will. And Xi provided that.

“Motives alone, however, could not explain the ease with which he [Xi] dismantled the post-Tiananmen order and reestablished a form of neo-Stalinist rule,” Pei noted. “He needed enablers – not just shrewd and ruthless henchmen, but also institutional tools – to bring back totalitarian rule.”

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