An autocracy's dilemma

A classic difficulty for any system is control and efficiency - the more control one has the less efficient will be the system.  This is a millenia old dilema for any political system as well.  There is a tendency for a part of the society that is lucky enough to rise up to the highest political echelon to retain that control as much as and as long as possible.  A particular example is the Chinese Communist Party in the present day China.

The dilema lies in the unsolvable difficulty in maintaining control over the system and keeping up with the efficiency of the system itself.  As with other systems in general, a political system in order to survive must tackle with and solve the issue of economic efficiency of the system, i.e. the society over which it tries to maintain constant control.  Without a sufficent level of economic efficiency, the marginal return on investment will stagnate and eventually diminish.  Society as a whole will not be able to remain its productivity as a result of the lack of efficiency.

To keep up with that ellusive economic efficiency, an autocracy must loosen up its grips on the system economically at first and, subsequently up to certain point politically.  However, the process of lossening up will undermine its much treasured control of the system.  This would inevitably lead to the opening up of the political system, as in the case of Taiwan, or the demise of the antocratic regime itself.  The CCP is presently subject to the dictates of its survival instincts - that is it is trying to retain its control and stifle any discontent as much as possible.

In doing so, the system itself would gradually become less and less efficient.  The evidence for this is apparently the building up of the debt heaps.  Now that the system is becoming less efficient, the autocratic control over it will become more difficult.  The reason for this problem is - the energy of society which would have been diverted to economic activities would now be used against the very autocratic regime itself.  As a result, more resources of the society will be used by the regime to maintain its control over the system, hence worsening the efficiency even further.  A good example is the five-cents army of the CCP.

The other option for the autocrat will be to forego its control at all whatsoever.  This is truely a choice between a rock and a hard place.  The fact that the ruling echelon may continue to suck up the fats of the land is predicate upon the fact that, for example, the CCP continue to dictate the lives of billions of Chinese people.  This is simply not an option open to them.

Historically, there has been no autocratic one-party system that has succeeded in solving this dilema between control and efficiency.  The former Soviet Union is a good example.  All the Chinese dynasties have been in a sense one-party systems and have all failed in the same way spectacularly.  Therefore, at some point of its development the tension between control and efficiency would grow so severe as to break up the very fibrics of the autocrat's control once and for all.  An autocratic system is indeed a very undesirable model for progress of civilization, because it lacks any linearity for progress.  An autocratic system will inevitably make and then break and repeat the process again by another bunch of blokes.

The beauty of this dilema is so clear that it is almost as inherent in the nature of things as a physical law.  All are subject to the dictates and effect of this dilema be it democracy or autocracy.