Politics & Power Quote by William Kirby

There is a neat provocation tucked into Kirby's framing: political "development" is defined not by liberalization or rights, but by durability. By pairing "very successful" economic development with a political success measured "simply by surviving", the line turns survival into a metric - and a warning. It suggests that in the post-1979 era, China’s reforms didn’t just generate growth; they engineered legitimacy. Prosperity becomes the regime’s most persuasive argument, a substitute for contested elections or pluralist accountability.

The subtext is a critique of Western teleology. For decades, a common assumption held that market opening would drag political opening behind it. Kirby’s sentence quietly reverses that causal story: the state modernized the economy while modernizing the techniques of control - institutional competence, elite discipline, propaganda calibrated to consumer aspiration, and selective repression deployed as governance rather than panic. "Simply by surviving" is doing heavy work here; it implies that many expected collapse (or at least a Soviet-style unraveling) and that the Chinese Communist Party treated that expectation as a strategic problem to solve.

Context matters. "Since 1979" is shorthand for Deng-era reform and opening, a pivot from Maoist mobilization to performance legitimacy: deliver rising living standards, maintain order, claim historical destiny. Kirby’s phrasing also nods to a broader comparative point: in authoritarian systems, continuity itself is a political achievement, because failure tends to be abrupt and spectacular. The line’s intent isn’t to praise the model so much as to puncture the comforting idea that economic modernization naturally produces political convergence.