‘Flexible’ versus ‘fragmented’ authoritarianism: Evidence from Chinese foreign policy during the Xi Jinping Era

Since the 1980s, a widely held view within the scholarly literature has been that China’s political system is characterised by ‘fragmented authoritarianism’ (FA). According to the FA model, the central government’s power is limited by competing interests among a diversity of actors within the Chinese state. These actors include central government ministries and bureaucracies, local governments, and corporations, which bargain for influence over policy direction, leading to incoherence and inconsistency in decision-making. In this paper, we aim to demonstrate that the FA framework is misleading in the realm of foreign policy, especially in the era of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). In its place, we characterise China’s decision-making and policy implementation system as flexible authoritarianism. Although actors such as corporations and local governments have a considerable degree of autonomy, they are responsible primarily for policy implementation, to which they can make adjustments within a set of broadly defined boundaries. Long-term strategic goals defined by the Party leadership are combined with elements of neoliberal free-market economics and applied with a remarkable degree of consistency. We illustrate the argument through evidence and case studies from Chinese foreign policy during the BRI era.