Once an Economy Switches from Rules to Deals, It’s Hard to Go Back
Americans of all political affiliations will miss the checks and balances that Donald Trump is trying to dispense with.
Illustration: Valentin Tkach for Bloomberg
In 1976, Mao Zedong succumbed to Parkinson’s disease and passed the torch to Deng Xiaoping. After the Mao-led disasters of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, Deng took China in a very different direction. His reforms in the 1980s are credited with helping the country achieve decades of enormously rapid growth.
A shift of that magnitude — whatever its direction — is much more common in regimes ruled by a single leader, which political scientists call personalistic political systems. Because China had few constraints on the top leader, the shift from Mao to Deng mattered a lot. The country’s fate hinged on the whims of the guy in charge.