Dictatorship by Degrees: Xi Jinping in China

"This book is interesting because he introduces the concept of ‘pre-totalitarianism.’ What he sees happening in Xi Jinping’s China has tendencies of totalitarianism, but it’s not completely totalitarian yet. The way he defines totalitarianism is that it’s a political regime that has complete control over the minds of its citizens. It goes beyond dictatorship, which simply means that decision making is outside the rule of law by a leader or a group of leaders. Totalitarianism is about controlling the mind. We’ve seen the term ‘pre-totalitarianism’ before, in political science, and famously, in Hannah Arendt’s work , but she didn’t develop it. She used the term, but Steven Feldman did the difficult work of really trying to conceptualise what it is. He went to China and talked to a lot of different people at all levels: people who are more senior in politics or business, and ordinary folks. It’s an ethnographical approach to looking at pre-totalitarianism, and I thought that was interesting because I’ve never seen that before."