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Party-states are dictatorships. All the known ones in history have been dictatorships, and the remaining ones, including China, are dictatorships. Communist rule in China was dictatorial before the communists were in control of all of the country, established itself as a brute dictatorship nationally in 1949, and continued to be a deadly dictatorship under Mao. China today is a sophisticated dictatorship in which citizens are allowed many freedoms but only up to a point. At that point, when necessary, and often enough that no one is in doubt, the party-state clamps down, sometimes in crude and sometimes in subtle ways, and with whatever force is necessary. It bears being set down at the start and then not forgotten that the regime that presents itself to the world as reformed is one that still rules, ultimately, by fear, intimidation, violence, and death.

During the reform period, the state has consolidated itself as one dedicated to self-preservation, stability, and economic growth. The reign of Hu and Wen from 2002 to 2012 was entirely devoted to keeping the wheels moving. They did try to lift their gaze from the economic statistics and took to the flowering language of ‘harmonious society’, but there was no determination in it. They left to their successors a state that is in control and fiscally solid and that is presiding over an economically strong nation, but also one that is a bit of a bluff in strength and that maintains stability at the cost of an epidemic of organised crime. As to where the state might be moving with the post-2012–13 leadership, it is in the balance.

A welfare state is known by the services it provides to its population. Not by whether or not it delivers welfare services—under all the author’s three hypotheses we would expect to see a state that is activist in service provision—but by the kind of services it provides and how it is done. It is therefore not enough to ask if there are welfare policies, but it is necessary to look in some detail into how those policies are shaped. But services are not only provided; they also have to be paid for. The state does that by extracting taxes from its population. A part of the welfare test must be to examine how the state treats its population in taxation, in addition to how it treats it with services. The combined examination of taxes and services is the standard model of welfare-state analysis. This is the ‘narrow test’ of the welfare hypothesis which the author will pursue in the present chapter.

Today’s rulers have two main strategies of self-preservation. With one hand they purchase legitimacy in the eyes of the ruled; with the other hand they keep down anything that can threaten their hold on power. The way the regime deals with society is through an intricate good-cop, bad-cop act.

Much of what the post-Mao leaders have said and done suggest an end of ideology, and that is a plausible hypothesis. However, the party-state is a structure that craves ideology. The state has its justification from the party, but the party needs its own justification and has nowhere else to turn for it than from the realm of ideas. The party demands obedience, but if that is to make sense, it must be working for a purpose that legitimises its claim on obedience. Since the party-state claims much—an absolute right to lead and an absolute duty on others to follow—it would seem to need a purpose that is grand and imposing. Along the continuum from the death of ideology to the revival of ideology, three hypotheses present themselves, which the author calls ‘the triviality hypothesis’, ‘the welfare hypothesis’, and ‘the power hypothesis’.

The aim of this chapter is to investigate the relation between time and space in the essay “Uchinaru henkyō.” A certain inconsistency is identified in Abe’s argument, for he appears at moments to conceive of time as a pure movement that unfolds strictly prior to the intervention of space. This is shown to be impossible, and yet Abe’s text also reveals that time and space exist as fundamentally interrelated. This chapter both follows and diverges from Abe to reveal that an entity’s exposure to spatiotemporal inscription takes place from the initial moment of its appearance, and it is for this reason that entities are unable to present themselves as such. Although Abe tends to oppose the movement of time to the fixity of space, the notion of alterity he sets forth involves a generalization of movement to include within it space as well as time.