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The hundred flowers come to Chinese political studies
Review Article
MARTINKING WHYTE
The Hundred
Kenneth Stanford Stanley
G. Lieberthal, Revolution and Tradition in Tientsin, 1949-1952 University Press, 1980), 231 pp. Rosen,
(Boulder:
Sharpe, Ronald
Press,
1982),
320 pp.
Organizing China (Stanford:
C. Teiwes, 1984),
(Stanford:
Red Guard Factionalism and the Cultural Revolution in Guangzhou (Canton)
Westview
Harry Harding, Frederick
Flowers Come to Chinese Political Studies
Stanford
University
Press,
1981), 418 pp.
Leadership, Legitimacy, and Conjlict in China (Armonk:
M.
E.
169 pp.
A. Morse,
ed.,
The Limits of Reform in China (Boulder:
Westview
Press,
1983),
156 pp. David S. G. Goodman,
ed., Groups and Politics in the People’s Repu~li~ of China (Armonk:
M. E. Sharpe,
1984),
Gordon
Party and Professionals (Armonk:
White,
217 pp. M. E. Sharpe,
Bill Brugger, China: Liberation and Transformation, 1942-1962 1981), 288 pp. Richard 1982),
C. Thornton,
China: A Political History, 1917-1980
1981),
361 pp.
(London:
Croom
(Boulder:
Helm,
Westview Press,
518 pp.
For many years, much scholarship on contemporary Chinese politics took two primary forms. First, there was what came to be known as ‘Pekingology’, which entailed studies to divine which leaders were up or down, how elites were linked personally, and what the shifts in elite composition implied for society. Second, there were studies of policy
VOL., XVII,No.2/3, SUMMER/AUTUMN 0039-359’218510213 0191-l 1 $3.00 0 1985 University of SouthernCalifornia STUDIESINCOMPARATIVECOMMUNISM
1985,191-201
STUDIES IN COMPARATIVECOMMUNISM
192
formulation and implementation. In this mode researchers focused on how a particular policy or campaign, be it collectivization, irrigation construction, or marriage reform, was arrived at by the leadership in Peking, how it was implemented, and what the resulting accomplishments and problems were. Although a substantial approaches, for a variety of lacked intellectual rigor and For one thing, our massive
body of useful scholarship was produced using these reasons scholars in the field began to feel that such works failed to illuminate important aspects of Chinese politics. ignorance about the personal histories and interpersonal
dynamics of Chinese elites led to some rather dubious Pekingological deductions. Not a few practitioners of this approach would like to forget committing to print characterizations of Liu Shaoqi or Deng Xiaoping as radicals or dogmatists or predictions that China was evolving into a military dictatorship. Another problem was that works on policy implementation tended to yield a misleadingly uniform view of Chinese political life. Typically in such studies press accounts from many cities and provinces were intermixed to describe events and trends, thus promoting a view of China as a monolithic system. Conclusions from such studies were usually of the nature of how well a given policy initiative succeeded in general, rather than why it did well in some locales or institutions ignorance-we China
and was stymied in others. Again, part of the problem was simply knew so little about the administrative structures and procedures in
and how they varied that to a considerable
extent it was inevitable
to imply a
‘black box’ lying between central directives and grass roots responses. In addition, both types of scholarship gave their authors an insularity and sinocentrism that many saw as undesirable. They could talk to’each other, and to some extent to those working on the politics of other communist countries, but in data, methods, and conceptual frameworks they had little to share with students of politics in other societies. In response to these concerns, and others, China scholars for the last decade or more have been searching for other approaches to the study of Chinese politics, approaches that will both yield a deeper understanding of the Chinese polity and make the study of Chinese politics less insular. 1 The books under review here illustrate a variety of approaches that have resulted from this ‘self-criticism’ within the field of Chinese politics, although by no means all of the new alternatives. To some extent it will be clear that those in the China field have been ‘reinventing the wheel’, since the reorientation of work parallels in many ways that which took place in the study of Soviet politics two decades or so ago. A primary response of students of Chinese politics to the malaise in the field in the late 1960s was to call for greater focus and depth in scholarship on China. But just how to achieve such depth remained subject to debate. One strategy that emerged and gained substantial popularity was to undertake the study of local politics, rather than of the entire system. The basic argument for this approach was that it would be possible to build an understanding of the Chinese system ‘from the ground up’. By having scholars undertake in-depth studies of local politics in widely dispersed locales, it was hoped that eventually a process of cumulation of knowledge could occur. Once enough local studies had been completed they would form the basis for judgements about uniformities and variations across the Chinese political landscape. While this enthusiasm for ‘localism’ 1. It should be noted that some high quality studies have continued to be produced using the earlier paradigms. Of particular note are Lucia Pye, The Dynamics of Chinese Politics (Cambridge: Oelgeschlager, 1981), and Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of fhe Culfural Revoludon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2 volumes, 1974 and 1983).
193
The Hundred Flowers come to Chinese Political Studies lasted, established ‘turfs’ in China, cumulation comparable
scholars and graduate students rushed to stake their claims to various and Edwin Winckler volunteered to be the handmaiden of the
process by organizing a provincial handbook project designed to produce political histories of each of China’s 29 provincial-level units. Although the
provincial handbook was never completed, still this local area enthusiasm has produced important and influential studies. Some of these have been general accounts of the post- 1949 changes in particular locales, such as Ezra Vogel’s pioneering work on Guangdong and Lynn White’s studies of Shanghai. 2 But others achieved an even sharper focus by working not just on a particular locale, but also on a delimited time period or issue. Two of the works under review here are examples local area approach has produced. Kenneth Lieberthal’s book focuses on China’s
of the best that this
third largest city, Tientsin,
and the
issue in question is how the Chinese Communist Party (hereafter CCP) managed to establish control in that former treaty port in the years 1949-52. Among the formidable obstacles the CCP confronted were their own minimal experience in urban administration, weak underground party and union organizations, an important foreign presence and influence in the city, severe economic dislocation and runaway inflation, strong secret societies and religious cults competing for popular loyalties, and a proletariat that was dispersed into many small enterprises and hard to organize. Lieberthal ably sketches the combination of military/police, labor organizing, financial control, and other strategies used to consolidate CCP rule in Tientsin. He notes the ways in which the Korean War was used to help gain control in the city, and he provides fascinating material on the battle against secret societies and religious cults. He notes in passing that the Cultural Revolution rewriting of the history of the 1950s is misleading. The Cultural Revolution conciliatory
argument was that Liu Shaoqi showed his ‘revisionist’ colors by being in his talks with Tientsin capitalists in 1949, but Lieberthal shows that Liu
was only acting in line with the moderate
line then in force in the CCP.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of the book is the concluding argument made about political campaigns. In Mao’s late years a number of Western scholars produced works stressing the virtues of the mass campaign as a social change device. Lieberthal argues, in contrast, that while campaigns make some contributions, they also cause serious problems. In particular, as campaign follows campaign, as happened even in the takeover stage in the early 195Os, popular trust in existing institutions and procedures is undermined, and people tend to seek security in kinship and personal connections. In essence he is arguing that on a small scale in the period he is dealing with one can already see what became a serious crisis in that most tumultuous campaign of them all, the Cultural Revolution -the eroding of support for the polity, and widespread resort to personal connections and ‘back door’ deals in order to get by. Thus we have a case made for the virtues of orderly bureaucratic procedures, a view that might be seen as more ‘pro-bureaucracy’ than that of two other authors in our list who deal with similar issues, Harry Harding and Bill Brugger. The volume by Stanley Rosen takes a different locale-the city of Canton in Southeastern China-and addresses a different problem-what were the sources of Red Guard activism and factional alignments in that city during the Cultural Revolution? This book was approximately a decade in gestation, but it was well worth the wait. Whereas Lieberthal’s book relies primarily on published materials, Rosen’s relies 2. See JT. Vogel, Canton m&r Communism (Cambridge: Harvard in Shanghai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).
University
Press, 1969);
L. White,
Careers
194 primarily
STUDIES IN COMPARATIVECOMMUNISM on a deep immersion
into the life of former Canton secondary
school students
obtained via hundreds of hours of interviews and informal conversations in Hong Kong. The depth and detail achieved are nothing short of astounding. Rosen is able, for instance, to locate geographically each of the 60 regular secondary schools in the city of Canton, classify each in terms of the formal school quality rankings that prevailed prior to ‘the Cultural Revolution, and describe the Red Guard factional alignments that occurred during the Cultural Revolution. The underlying argument Rosen presents is to some extent an extension of ones presented earlier by Ezra Vogel and Hong Yung Lee.3 But Rosen’s
incredibly detailed evidence enables him to elaborate the argument
in
much greater depth and subtlety. To oversimplify a great deal, Rosen argues that in the early 1960s the hierarchical ranking of schools, the increasingly competitive nature of entrance exams, and the shifting nature of selection criteria all helped to create a quasiclass struggle atmosphere in secondary schools between students from ‘petty bourgeois’ pre-1949 family backgrounds and those from ‘proletarian’ backgrounds. As political criteria and class origin labels were stressed increasingly in student selection, the ‘petty bourgeois’ students began to lose out in relation to their ‘proletarian’ competitors. When the Cultural Revolution erupted, their resentments led the former group to join radical Red Guard groups which fought against the conservative factions dominated by students in the latter group. And in the highest quality secondary schools, where university entrance was most at issue, the factional conflict was particularly While this may sound like a Marxist analysis of the Cultural Revolution,
severe. it is really
something quite different. The ‘classes’ involved in this conflict were not classes in any recognizable sense of the term, but were instead groups formed by political labels given to families based on their pre- 1949 situations. Thus Rosen’s analysis is testimony to the ability of political systems to create cleavages and ideologies that lead to conflict every bit as nasty as ‘real’ class conflict. Rosen closes this impressive volume by noting that the post-Mao restoration of a highly competitive educational system seems in many ways to be recreating the sort of conflict-inducing situation that characterized the preCultural Revolution period. While this book is an impressive piece of research, it is probably the one of those under review that will be least accessible to the non-China specialist. The incredible detail used in describing school configurations and Red Guard factions may cause the eyes of non-specialist readers to glaze over, and even some China scholars may yearn for the days when general accounts of ‘the system’ dominated
the
field. Not all scholars decided that the best route to better research on Chinese politics was to hop on the local politics bandwagon, however. Another approach to achieving greater depth and sharper focus was to treat a particular political issue, or, if one prefers the jargon of the trade, ‘issue arena’. Several of the volumes under review here result from this approach. Harry Harding’s book, Organizing China, is a revision of his doctoral thesis. The title is somewhat misleading, since the author does not attempt, as the pathbreaking studies by Schurmann, Lewis and Barnett did, to give a detailed picture of how Chinese society is organized and run. 4 The subtitle of the book, The Problem of 3. See E. Vogel, op. cit., Chap. 8; and H. Lee, The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 4. The classics in question are Franz Schurmann, Ideology and Organization in Communist China, 2nd edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); John Lewis, Leadership in Communirt China (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963); and A. Doak Barnett, with E. Vogel, Cadres, Burcaumcy, and Political Power in Communist China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967).
195
The Hundred Flowers come to Chinese Political Studies Bureaucracy, 1949-1976,
gives a clearer
study of elite politics and conflicts
idea of the book’s
surrounding
theme.
For this is really a
the nature and role of bureaucracy
in
post-1949 China. Harding starts from the ‘bureaucratic dilemma’ that Max Weber and other writers have taken as their focus: large scale bureaucratic organizations are indispensable in a modern society, but once created they develop dynamics and problems that engender animosity toward them from elites and masses alike. Harding sees much of Chinese politics up to the time of the death of Mao Zedong refracted through this bureaucratic dilemma prism. Initially he argues that there are four primary alternatives elites can use for dealing with this dilemma-perfecting bureaucracy (which he terms the rationalization approach), controlling it (external remedial), modifying it with internal non-bureaucratic elements (internal remedial), and dismantling or destroying it (the radical chronologically, as Harding
approach). The bulk of the book is then organized takes us on a tour of political debates and trends. The Gao
Gang affair of 1954, the Hundred Flowers campaign of 1957, the Great Leap Forward, and other events are all discussed in terms of their implications for alternative bureaucracy-combatting strategies. By the time we reach the end of the tour, it turns out that the initial four strategies have fragmented into nine, producing a complicated scheme that is perhaps more pleasing to the author than to those readers who might want to apply it. Nonetheless, the altered perspective on post-1949 political history that this framework gives, and Harding’s informed discussions of elite politics, are often illuminating. It may be useful to follow Harding’s lead and consider whether Chinese political personal that one resorted maladies
conflicts are more debates over alternative ways of organizing the system than rivalries or policy disputes. This framework also allows Harding to conclude approach to the bureaucratic dilemmahis internal remedialism-has been to more often than the others, and to pinpoint the particular bureaucratic that have been fostered by the various alternatives.
While this book is a major accomplishment in recasting Chinese politics in a different conceptual scheme, the results are not always fully satisfying. First, the primarily ‘topdown’ focus means that we get little view of how Chinese bureaucracies really work, or how they look to the ordinary population that has to deal with them. And in some cases the view from the top may be quite different from the view at the bottom.
For example,
Andrew Walder has argued that the radical assault against bureaucracy during the Cultural Revolution actually ended up strengthening bureaucratic controls in industrial enterprises and making workers more dependent upon their superiors.5 This sort of discrepancy raises the issue of whether elite debates about bureaucratic forms have much relation to the actual behavior of Chinese bureaucracies. Also, the timing of publication of this book is unfortunate. Since it appeared in 1981 there has been an avalanche of new materials published in China, materials that both reassess earlier eras and debates and describe bureaucratic problems today. Readers may feel that, however understandable Harding’s decision to conclude his analysis with Mao’s death in 1976, the omission of these new materials and the post-Mao period is unfortunate. Finally, while the framework used in the book is useful for sensitizing us to the ongoing bureaucratic dilemma, still the author does not provide a clear case for how useful this framework is compared to other competing ‘models’ in understanding Chinese politics. Another
volume here that displays a similar issue focus is Leadership, Legitimacy, and
5. A. Walder, ‘Some Ironies of the Maoist Legacy Transition lo Socialism in China (Armonk: M. E. Sharp,
in Industry’, 1982).
in M. Selden and V. Lippit,
eds.,
The
196
STUDIES IN COMPARATIVECOMMUNISM
Con$‘ict in China, by Frederick
Teiwes.
Teiwes has for many years been one of the most
skilled practitioners of traditional Pekingology, and Chapter 3 of this work makes use of this background by describing the factional alignments of successive Politburos of the CCP. However, the author uses his data on elites and other information to address a much broader set of issues than simply ‘who’s on top’. At the heart of this slim volume, which is really three interrelated essays, one of which was published in an inaccessible publication a decade ago, is an analysis of the bases of legitimacy of the leadership of the CCP. Teiwes is quite blunt in stating that what matters is not legitimacy as conferred by the ordinary population. Rather, what counts is legitimacy within the elite itself-the approximately 800 people who dominate the levers of power in post-1949 China. In substantial measure he is concerned with how other leaders viewed and related to Mao Zedong. One might say that he is trying to provide an answer to the paradox posed by the Deng regime’s rewriting of history, which says that most of Mao’s political interventions after 1957 were wrong-headed and harmful. If this was the case, then how was Mao able to retain his dominance over the elite right up to the end, even as he led China into one crisis after another? Teiwes starts, as does Harding, with ideas drawn triumvirate of bases for authority: from Max Weber-in this case, Weber’s traditional, charismatic, and legal-rational. The author amplifies on Weber’s typology by outlining several different kinds of charismatic authority, including nationalist, revolutionary, and synthetic (the product of a manufactured personality cult). He argues that to some extent Mao’s authority after 1949 was based upon a combination of all of these bases for authority, rather than a single one. In his view Mao’s authority in the 1950s was not solely charismatic, but depended to some extent on the following of the rules and procedures stressed by the legal-rational mode. This verdict leads him to agree with Lieberthal that there was no ‘two line struggle’ in those years, but that all leaders worked within an established party decision-making framework. But after 1958 a series of disputes and crises led Mao more and more to ignore this framework and assert his personal will, and as he did so his authority came to rely more exclusively on charismatic claims, and increasingly synthetic ones at that. His success in making those claims helps explain how he was able to maintain his dominance over his colleagues to the end, but the way in which he did so destroyed much of the authority of the political institutions that he helped establish and unleashed debilitating elite conflicts that made political life in China hazardous and unpredictable. Mao’s successors are trying to regularize procedures and rebuild CCP authority by But as Humpty Dumpty is put back stressing primarily legal-rational procedures. together again it comes out as a different sort of egg. The top leader, Deng Xiaoping at the moment, is much more limited than Mao was in the initiatives he can take, while the interests of other members of the elite have to be catered to much more directly. Arbitrary personal dictatorship is gone, but the result is not necessarily a rational and efficient political system. Instead this change may lead to the victory of bureaucratic interests and rigidity that Harding described Mao as fearing. If so the ‘elite 800’ may be much more pleased with this state of affairs, as one suspects their counterparts in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union were, but it is at least an open question whether the ordinary population will view this change in the same positive light. In any case, Teiwes provides us with trenchant observations about the current period as well as the Maoist years. The study can be faulted for not making more analytical use of the comparison with the Stalin-Khrushchev-Brezhnev transitions in the USSR, although Teiwes does mention the works of T. H. Rigby and other Soviet specialists. Still, we are fortunate to have
The Hundred Flowers come to Chinese Political Studies Teiwes
displaying
his talents
on something
broader
than
197
the usual Pekingological
questions. Another volume under review here, The Limits of Reform in China, edited by Ronald Morse, might also be considered as illustrating the search for depth achieved by focusing on an issue arena. However, this is partly because it doesn’t fit under the other categories used here, for in many ways this volume follows the more traditional format of examining implementation of a particular policy. In this case the policy change is a broad one-the whole range of reforms instituted by the post-Mao leadership-and, as the title suggests, the authors are primarily concerned with the sources of resistance to implementation of the reforms. Or perhaps I should say most of the authors, because, as in many conference volumes, not all of them are marching to the same drummer. Two of the most interesting essays in the volume are John Israel’s piece on liberal education in China in the 1930s and 1940s and Vera Schwarz’s paper on how different generations of Chinese intellectuals have been trying to put their lives back together. However, neither has much relationship to the issue of resistance to reform policies. The other authors are more obedient, however. Hong Yung Lee sees the primary focus of problems in reform of the bureaucracy as resistance of aged bureaucrats to retirement. David Zweig sees resistance to decollectivization in agriculture coming primarily from rich and successful communes who see their progress threatened. James Seymour describes the alternative interpretations Chinese dissidents give for why efforts to democratize the Chinese political system have made so little headway, with the main explanations being a feudal traditional culture, Leninist institutions, and the wavering commitment of China’s leaders. Andrew Walder notes that the kinds of managerial personnel and managerial behavior developed over decades in China’s industry are such that they are not well suited to operating in a looser, quasi-market situation. When placed in this unfamiliar environment, rationality and efficiency are not likely to be the results. In general the papers in the volume are of high quality, with useful observations and insights. However, they suffer from the inevitable problems of instant scholarship, in which yesterday’s headlines become today’s footnotes (but tomorrow’s anachronisms). For example, the decollectivization of agriculture and dismantling of the commune structure have gone much further in the two years since Zweig’s analysis was published, and some considerable headway even seems to have been made on the issue of retiring aged bureaucrats. This observation raises a fundamental issue that none of the books under review here seem able to deal with: if the post-Mao leadership is so much more dependent upon bureaucratic consensus, as Teiwes argues, and faces the sorts of major obstacles to reform that the authors in the Morse volume describe, how has it been possible in some areas, particularly in the countryside, to quickly and decisively implement reforms that are much bolder than even those attempted in Eastern Europe? Certainly the dismantling of the commune system and the restoration of the family farm do not seem to indicate a timid or hemmed in leadership. One other avenue to achieving greater depth in studying Chinese politics is to select not a particular locale or issue, but a particular group. Doing so assumes that particular social groups have a political role to play in contemporary China. But that assumption raises t.he issue of whether ‘interest groups’ exist in communist political systems. That issue has, of course, been debated for years among Soviet specialists, but it is only recently making its way into the discourse of China scholars. The volume edited by David Goodman, Groups and Politics in the People’s Republic of China, is concerned with
STUDIES
198 addressing
that issue for China,
IN
COMPARATIVECOMMUNISM
and is quite consciously
modeled on the earlier volume
published by Skilling and Griffiths.‘j Many of the papers included were prepared for a session of the European Consortium for Political Research in 1981 which was devoted to the interest group issue. Several of the contributions review the origins of the interest group approach in the West and then the controversy surrounding its use in regard to the Soviet Union. Other papers move on to consider the applicability of the framework to a variety of groups in China, most, but not all, defined ocupationaliy-economists soldiers, workers, peasants, intellectuals, teachers, and first party secretaries. A number of the papers, such as those by John Burns on peasants and Tony Saich on workers, provide useful accounts of the treatment and role of particular groups since 1949, quite apart from the interest group issue. As to the applicability of the interest group framework issue in China, there is no agreement among the assembled authors. Some, such as Gerald Segal in his discussion of the army and David Goodman
in regard to first party
secretaries, argue forcefully that even those groups one might suppose are best situated and disposed to act as interest groups in China rarely show evidence of doing so. Others are not so negative on the issue, but they end up presenting what at best are quite modest claims for the interest group approach. Either the studied groups can be seen as acting to pursue their interests in limited ways locally that have no visible impact on the national political system (Burns on peasants) or they have an impact as groups only in small ways during moderate swings of the political pendulum, but are unable to do so during radical periods (e.g. Krug on economists, White on teachers). At best, then, some of the groups dealt with might be considered incipient interest groups, rather than fully formed interest groups, not to mention organized lobbies. Thus the volume serves as an interesting exercise in considering the merits of the interest group approach, the reader is led to conclude that in fact this is not that useful a way to understand
but the
Chinese political system. Such doubts are if anything reinforced by the book-length version of Gordon White’s consideration of teachers in the Goodman volume. White has been one of the ieaders in applying the group approach to Chinese politics, having elsewhere written about sentdown youths and demobilized soldiers. His book, Pare and Professionals, is subtitled ‘The Political Role of Teachers in Contemporary China’, ground as his paper in the Goodman volume. However,
and it covers much the same there is fuller treatment of some
issues and periods, including some fascinating discussion of the changing role of teachers in the 1950s. As a source of information about teachers in China this volume is certainly useful, but again it leads the reader to conclude that the interest group approach is only episodically useful. For the most part teachers have been the objects of political action, rather than autonomous actors in the process, and so we see here again a conventional study of the implementation of party policies, rather than a framework that will yield new insights. The volume is also somewhat odd in that only 110 out of its total of 360 pages are given to White’s expanded analysis of the role of teachers. The remaining pages are devoted to translations of 42 Chinese documents on education covering the entire post-1949 period, with no commentary or explanation of why particular documents were included or are important. The last two volumes in our list do not really represent new approaches to Chinese political studies. Rather, they are both efforts by political scientists to write textbooks 6. H. 1971).
G. Skilling and F. Griff~ths, Interest Groups in
S&et Politics(Princeton:
Princeton
University
Press,
The Hundred Flowers come to Chinese Political Studies that incorporate
new ideas and findings.
199
In fact, both are revisions of earlier textbooks,
with Brugger’s original published in 1977 and Thornton’s in 1973. However, both volumes are so ‘quirky’ in different ways that most Chinese politics courses will probably be reluctant to use them. Brugger’s work, China: Liberation and Transformation, is one half of a two volume enterprise, and part of its ‘quirky’ approach is revealed in its choice of the time span from 1942 to 1962. While it is worthwhile to stress that the history of the People’s Republic did not simply begin on October 1, 1949, it may still seem odd to start the tale in 1942. The development of the CCP before that year is given a scant four pages in Brugger’s book. The choice of 1942 comes from the rectification campaign begun in that year, which the author uses to date the emergence of the ‘Yan’an model’, which involved ‘mass line’ leadership techniques and a list of other abstract characteristics (about ten are mentioned). The victory in 1949 then leads to the adoption, instead, of the Soviet model which, as argued by Brugger in his earlier work on industry, never fully took hold in the Chinese scene. The events and campaigns of the period up to 1962 are dealt with and, where possible, interpreted in terms of the fluctuating competition between the Yan’an model and the Soviet model as the basis for organizing Chinese socialism. The end-point of 1962 is again somewhat peculiar. That year was selected because Mao Zedong’s call for the revival of class struggle, embodied in the resolutions of the 10th Plenum of the 8th Central Committee of the CCP in that year, is seen by Brugger
as beginning
a new phase in Chinese
politics.
In the earlier version of this text the author followed this sort of argument in an oversimplified way, seeing a ‘two line struggle’ throughout the post-1949 period between the advocates of the two models, with the author’s sympathies clearly favoring Yan’an. To Brugger’s credit, in his revision he has taken into account the work of Teiwes and others, which show that there was no such two line struggle until some time during the 1960s. Brugger quite forthrightly tells readers when he is revising some of his earlier conclusions, and the result is a more complicated, although at times also more confusing, account of political events in the years covered. Still, the ‘Yan’an model versus the Soviet model’ framework largely survives the revision, although it is now largely devoid of individual leaders championing the rival alternatives. Readers will naturally then ask who or what was responsible for the cyclical shifts between these models, or whether, in fact, this framework is very useful for understanding the events of those years. The abstractness and occasionally traits of the models are described or are claimed policies or events did strike this reviewer as more So both in terms of time coverage and in terms of not seem to be the most useful text available.
jargon-filled way in which various to have been fostered by particular often obfuscating than illuminating. the explanatory framework this does
However, Thornton’s textbook, China: A Political History, is clearly not a preferable alternative. Its quirkiness also shows in the time span chosen. Although the end-point of 1980 is a reasonable enough. choice as ‘the present’, readers will be interested to see from the initial date that China’s revolution began in Petrograd, Russia, in 1917. This view of the matter is quite intentional. Thornton wants to stress that Chinese domestic politics have often been affected by external events. And, following his earlier research on the Comintern, it is not surprising that to Thornton external events in this book largely mean Soviet manipulations. The result is curious indeed. External events there are aplenty, but domestic politics virtually disappears. Fully half of the book is devoted to the pre-1949 period, but incidentals such as the founding of the CCP are completely
200
STUDIESIN COMPARATIVECOMMUNISM
ignored. Brugger would also be surprised to see that there is no discussion of the Yan’an model and also no treatment of land reform in the base areas, the rectification campaign of 1942, or of other events and campaigns of the pre-1949 period. When we get to the post-1949 period the story is much the same. There is not a word about the national land reform campaign of 1950-52, and readers of Thornton’s book will remain blissfully ignorant of the fact that socialist transformation and the collectivization of agriculture were carried out in China in the mid-1950s. But attention is given to Stalin’s death and to the Soviet 20th Party Congress in 1956, and several pages are devoted to the purge of Gao Gang in 1954, an event often alleged to be due to Gao’s Soviet links. For the remainder of the book one gets the same absence of information on Chinese domestic politics. The focus is on the factional struggles within the Chinese elite, struggles that Thornton sees as having much to do with personal power concerns and the machinations of foreign powers (again, particularly the Soviet Union), but apparently nothing at all to do with developments in China’s society and political system. One might argue that perhaps this is just another case of a misleading book title, and that Thornton’s
work should be seen not as a general political history, but as an attempt
to give a chronological account of Soviet influence on Chinese elite politics. But even if we adjust our expectations in this way we are poorly served by this book. Whereas Brugger revised the earlier version of his work substantially, Thornton’s revisions seem largely to consist of adding material to bring the story up to date by covering the years 1972-80. So far as I can see, without making a detailed textual comparison with the earlier edition, Thornton has not modified sections criticized by earlier reviewers as erroneous and misleading. The book remains riddled with undocumented assertions that contradict other scholarship, and the author has made no effort here to provide the missing evidence. Thus the unwary student using this text will not know that he is learning an idiosyncratic and in many ways misleading view of the events covered. Thornton has also made no real effort to make use of the avalanche of new historical and memoir materials released in recent years in the PRC which, even if examined with a critical eye, would have required him to rethink many portions of this book. So this text is even more unsatisfactory than Brugger’s as a general account of China’s recent political history. But as they sometimes say in China, whenever you have a hundred flowers blooming, you are likely to find some new weeds springing up as well. In conclustin, what can we say about the value of the new approaches to the study of Chinese politics that we have seen in the books under review? To this reviewer the types of work they report clearly represent progress, but still less than a fully satisfactory situation. The clearest gains have been achieved in the depth and focus of studies of localities and issue arenas. We now have an increasing number of studies available that treat such matters in considerable detail, and as a result we are achieving a much better sense of the complexity of the Chinese political order. But given the scale of the Chinese political system in relation to the small band of Western researchers, these studies still leave us far short from having a comprehensive sense of how the Chinese political system works. Many locales and institutions remain virtually unstudied, and at the same time we lack a new generation of works trying to tell us how ‘the system’ as a whole works. For instance, there is not even a satisfactory, up-to-date general study of the key institution in that society, the Chinese Communist Party. There has also been some progress achieved in breaking down the insularity of the field. More and more studies are earnestly trying to apply ideas drawn from classical
The Hundred Flowers come to Chinese Political Studies
201
theorists such as Weber, or are utilizing concepts drawn from contemporary research on other societies. In spite of this effort, much of the work done still has a powerful China focus and fascination somewhat ‘inscrutable’
with sinological minutiae that make many of these works to those outside the field. And some of the attempts at breaking
down the isolation, such as the use of ‘interest group theory’, turn out not to be very illuminating in the Chinese case. The move away from ‘totalitarianism’ as a conceptual framework has left the field with a theoretical vacuum that has yet to be filled. No new general conceptual framework has emerged to help us understand the Chinese political landscape. Still, these criticisms may be unnecessarily harsh, for they are based on the comparison of our present situation with some ideal state of perfect knowledge and understanding. If we use some more realistic basis of comparison, such as the state of work in the field in the past, then we can conclude on a more positive note. We have a much more sophisticated view of China than we did before, say, 1970, but on the other hand there is still lots of work to be done to improve our general understanding of the Chinese political system.
MARTINKING WHYTE
The Hundred
Kenneth Stanford Stanley
G. Lieberthal, Revolution and Tradition in Tientsin, 1949-1952 University Press, 1980), 231 pp. Rosen,
(Boulder:
Sharpe, Ronald
Press,
1982),
320 pp.
Organizing China (Stanford:
C. Teiwes, 1984),
(Stanford:
Red Guard Factionalism and the Cultural Revolution in Guangzhou (Canton)
Westview
Harry Harding, Frederick
Flowers Come to Chinese Political Studies
Stanford
University
Press,
1981), 418 pp.
Leadership, Legitimacy, and Conjlict in China (Armonk:
M.
E.
169 pp.
A. Morse,
ed.,
The Limits of Reform in China (Boulder:
Westview
Press,
1983),
156 pp. David S. G. Goodman,
ed., Groups and Politics in the People’s Repu~li~ of China (Armonk:
M. E. Sharpe,
1984),
Gordon
Party and Professionals (Armonk:
White,
217 pp. M. E. Sharpe,
Bill Brugger, China: Liberation and Transformation, 1942-1962 1981), 288 pp. Richard 1982),
C. Thornton,
China: A Political History, 1917-1980
1981),
361 pp.
(London:
Croom
(Boulder:
Helm,
Westview Press,
518 pp.
For many years, much scholarship on contemporary Chinese politics took two primary forms. First, there was what came to be known as ‘Pekingology’, which entailed studies to divine which leaders were up or down, how elites were linked personally, and what the shifts in elite composition implied for society. Second, there were studies of policy
VOL., XVII,No.2/3, SUMMER/AUTUMN 0039-359’218510213 0191-l 1 $3.00 0 1985 University of SouthernCalifornia STUDIESINCOMPARATIVECOMMUNISM
1985,191-201
STUDIES IN COMPARATIVECOMMUNISM
192
formulation and implementation. In this mode researchers focused on how a particular policy or campaign, be it collectivization, irrigation construction, or marriage reform, was arrived at by the leadership in Peking, how it was implemented, and what the resulting accomplishments and problems were. Although a substantial approaches, for a variety of lacked intellectual rigor and For one thing, our massive
body of useful scholarship was produced using these reasons scholars in the field began to feel that such works failed to illuminate important aspects of Chinese politics. ignorance about the personal histories and interpersonal
dynamics of Chinese elites led to some rather dubious Pekingological deductions. Not a few practitioners of this approach would like to forget committing to print characterizations of Liu Shaoqi or Deng Xiaoping as radicals or dogmatists or predictions that China was evolving into a military dictatorship. Another problem was that works on policy implementation tended to yield a misleadingly uniform view of Chinese political life. Typically in such studies press accounts from many cities and provinces were intermixed to describe events and trends, thus promoting a view of China as a monolithic system. Conclusions from such studies were usually of the nature of how well a given policy initiative succeeded in general, rather than why it did well in some locales or institutions ignorance-we China
and was stymied in others. Again, part of the problem was simply knew so little about the administrative structures and procedures in
and how they varied that to a considerable
extent it was inevitable
to imply a
‘black box’ lying between central directives and grass roots responses. In addition, both types of scholarship gave their authors an insularity and sinocentrism that many saw as undesirable. They could talk to’each other, and to some extent to those working on the politics of other communist countries, but in data, methods, and conceptual frameworks they had little to share with students of politics in other societies. In response to these concerns, and others, China scholars for the last decade or more have been searching for other approaches to the study of Chinese politics, approaches that will both yield a deeper understanding of the Chinese polity and make the study of Chinese politics less insular. 1 The books under review here illustrate a variety of approaches that have resulted from this ‘self-criticism’ within the field of Chinese politics, although by no means all of the new alternatives. To some extent it will be clear that those in the China field have been ‘reinventing the wheel’, since the reorientation of work parallels in many ways that which took place in the study of Soviet politics two decades or so ago. A primary response of students of Chinese politics to the malaise in the field in the late 1960s was to call for greater focus and depth in scholarship on China. But just how to achieve such depth remained subject to debate. One strategy that emerged and gained substantial popularity was to undertake the study of local politics, rather than of the entire system. The basic argument for this approach was that it would be possible to build an understanding of the Chinese system ‘from the ground up’. By having scholars undertake in-depth studies of local politics in widely dispersed locales, it was hoped that eventually a process of cumulation of knowledge could occur. Once enough local studies had been completed they would form the basis for judgements about uniformities and variations across the Chinese political landscape. While this enthusiasm for ‘localism’ 1. It should be noted that some high quality studies have continued to be produced using the earlier paradigms. Of particular note are Lucia Pye, The Dynamics of Chinese Politics (Cambridge: Oelgeschlager, 1981), and Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of fhe Culfural Revoludon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2 volumes, 1974 and 1983).
193
The Hundred Flowers come to Chinese Political Studies lasted, established ‘turfs’ in China, cumulation comparable
scholars and graduate students rushed to stake their claims to various and Edwin Winckler volunteered to be the handmaiden of the
process by organizing a provincial handbook project designed to produce political histories of each of China’s 29 provincial-level units. Although the
provincial handbook was never completed, still this local area enthusiasm has produced important and influential studies. Some of these have been general accounts of the post- 1949 changes in particular locales, such as Ezra Vogel’s pioneering work on Guangdong and Lynn White’s studies of Shanghai. 2 But others achieved an even sharper focus by working not just on a particular locale, but also on a delimited time period or issue. Two of the works under review here are examples local area approach has produced. Kenneth Lieberthal’s book focuses on China’s
of the best that this
third largest city, Tientsin,
and the
issue in question is how the Chinese Communist Party (hereafter CCP) managed to establish control in that former treaty port in the years 1949-52. Among the formidable obstacles the CCP confronted were their own minimal experience in urban administration, weak underground party and union organizations, an important foreign presence and influence in the city, severe economic dislocation and runaway inflation, strong secret societies and religious cults competing for popular loyalties, and a proletariat that was dispersed into many small enterprises and hard to organize. Lieberthal ably sketches the combination of military/police, labor organizing, financial control, and other strategies used to consolidate CCP rule in Tientsin. He notes the ways in which the Korean War was used to help gain control in the city, and he provides fascinating material on the battle against secret societies and religious cults. He notes in passing that the Cultural Revolution rewriting of the history of the 1950s is misleading. The Cultural Revolution conciliatory
argument was that Liu Shaoqi showed his ‘revisionist’ colors by being in his talks with Tientsin capitalists in 1949, but Lieberthal shows that Liu
was only acting in line with the moderate
line then in force in the CCP.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of the book is the concluding argument made about political campaigns. In Mao’s late years a number of Western scholars produced works stressing the virtues of the mass campaign as a social change device. Lieberthal argues, in contrast, that while campaigns make some contributions, they also cause serious problems. In particular, as campaign follows campaign, as happened even in the takeover stage in the early 195Os, popular trust in existing institutions and procedures is undermined, and people tend to seek security in kinship and personal connections. In essence he is arguing that on a small scale in the period he is dealing with one can already see what became a serious crisis in that most tumultuous campaign of them all, the Cultural Revolution -the eroding of support for the polity, and widespread resort to personal connections and ‘back door’ deals in order to get by. Thus we have a case made for the virtues of orderly bureaucratic procedures, a view that might be seen as more ‘pro-bureaucracy’ than that of two other authors in our list who deal with similar issues, Harry Harding and Bill Brugger. The volume by Stanley Rosen takes a different locale-the city of Canton in Southeastern China-and addresses a different problem-what were the sources of Red Guard activism and factional alignments in that city during the Cultural Revolution? This book was approximately a decade in gestation, but it was well worth the wait. Whereas Lieberthal’s book relies primarily on published materials, Rosen’s relies 2. See JT. Vogel, Canton m&r Communism (Cambridge: Harvard in Shanghai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).
University
Press, 1969);
L. White,
Careers
194 primarily
STUDIES IN COMPARATIVECOMMUNISM on a deep immersion
into the life of former Canton secondary
school students
obtained via hundreds of hours of interviews and informal conversations in Hong Kong. The depth and detail achieved are nothing short of astounding. Rosen is able, for instance, to locate geographically each of the 60 regular secondary schools in the city of Canton, classify each in terms of the formal school quality rankings that prevailed prior to ‘the Cultural Revolution, and describe the Red Guard factional alignments that occurred during the Cultural Revolution. The underlying argument Rosen presents is to some extent an extension of ones presented earlier by Ezra Vogel and Hong Yung Lee.3 But Rosen’s
incredibly detailed evidence enables him to elaborate the argument
in
much greater depth and subtlety. To oversimplify a great deal, Rosen argues that in the early 1960s the hierarchical ranking of schools, the increasingly competitive nature of entrance exams, and the shifting nature of selection criteria all helped to create a quasiclass struggle atmosphere in secondary schools between students from ‘petty bourgeois’ pre-1949 family backgrounds and those from ‘proletarian’ backgrounds. As political criteria and class origin labels were stressed increasingly in student selection, the ‘petty bourgeois’ students began to lose out in relation to their ‘proletarian’ competitors. When the Cultural Revolution erupted, their resentments led the former group to join radical Red Guard groups which fought against the conservative factions dominated by students in the latter group. And in the highest quality secondary schools, where university entrance was most at issue, the factional conflict was particularly While this may sound like a Marxist analysis of the Cultural Revolution,
severe. it is really
something quite different. The ‘classes’ involved in this conflict were not classes in any recognizable sense of the term, but were instead groups formed by political labels given to families based on their pre- 1949 situations. Thus Rosen’s analysis is testimony to the ability of political systems to create cleavages and ideologies that lead to conflict every bit as nasty as ‘real’ class conflict. Rosen closes this impressive volume by noting that the post-Mao restoration of a highly competitive educational system seems in many ways to be recreating the sort of conflict-inducing situation that characterized the preCultural Revolution period. While this book is an impressive piece of research, it is probably the one of those under review that will be least accessible to the non-China specialist. The incredible detail used in describing school configurations and Red Guard factions may cause the eyes of non-specialist readers to glaze over, and even some China scholars may yearn for the days when general accounts of ‘the system’ dominated
the
field. Not all scholars decided that the best route to better research on Chinese politics was to hop on the local politics bandwagon, however. Another approach to achieving greater depth and sharper focus was to treat a particular political issue, or, if one prefers the jargon of the trade, ‘issue arena’. Several of the volumes under review here result from this approach. Harry Harding’s book, Organizing China, is a revision of his doctoral thesis. The title is somewhat misleading, since the author does not attempt, as the pathbreaking studies by Schurmann, Lewis and Barnett did, to give a detailed picture of how Chinese society is organized and run. 4 The subtitle of the book, The Problem of 3. See E. Vogel, op. cit., Chap. 8; and H. Lee, The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 4. The classics in question are Franz Schurmann, Ideology and Organization in Communist China, 2nd edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); John Lewis, Leadership in Communirt China (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963); and A. Doak Barnett, with E. Vogel, Cadres, Burcaumcy, and Political Power in Communist China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967).
195
The Hundred Flowers come to Chinese Political Studies Bureaucracy, 1949-1976,
gives a clearer
study of elite politics and conflicts
idea of the book’s
surrounding
theme.
For this is really a
the nature and role of bureaucracy
in
post-1949 China. Harding starts from the ‘bureaucratic dilemma’ that Max Weber and other writers have taken as their focus: large scale bureaucratic organizations are indispensable in a modern society, but once created they develop dynamics and problems that engender animosity toward them from elites and masses alike. Harding sees much of Chinese politics up to the time of the death of Mao Zedong refracted through this bureaucratic dilemma prism. Initially he argues that there are four primary alternatives elites can use for dealing with this dilemma-perfecting bureaucracy (which he terms the rationalization approach), controlling it (external remedial), modifying it with internal non-bureaucratic elements (internal remedial), and dismantling or destroying it (the radical chronologically, as Harding
approach). The bulk of the book is then organized takes us on a tour of political debates and trends. The Gao
Gang affair of 1954, the Hundred Flowers campaign of 1957, the Great Leap Forward, and other events are all discussed in terms of their implications for alternative bureaucracy-combatting strategies. By the time we reach the end of the tour, it turns out that the initial four strategies have fragmented into nine, producing a complicated scheme that is perhaps more pleasing to the author than to those readers who might want to apply it. Nonetheless, the altered perspective on post-1949 political history that this framework gives, and Harding’s informed discussions of elite politics, are often illuminating. It may be useful to follow Harding’s lead and consider whether Chinese political personal that one resorted maladies
conflicts are more debates over alternative ways of organizing the system than rivalries or policy disputes. This framework also allows Harding to conclude approach to the bureaucratic dilemmahis internal remedialism-has been to more often than the others, and to pinpoint the particular bureaucratic that have been fostered by the various alternatives.
While this book is a major accomplishment in recasting Chinese politics in a different conceptual scheme, the results are not always fully satisfying. First, the primarily ‘topdown’ focus means that we get little view of how Chinese bureaucracies really work, or how they look to the ordinary population that has to deal with them. And in some cases the view from the top may be quite different from the view at the bottom.
For example,
Andrew Walder has argued that the radical assault against bureaucracy during the Cultural Revolution actually ended up strengthening bureaucratic controls in industrial enterprises and making workers more dependent upon their superiors.5 This sort of discrepancy raises the issue of whether elite debates about bureaucratic forms have much relation to the actual behavior of Chinese bureaucracies. Also, the timing of publication of this book is unfortunate. Since it appeared in 1981 there has been an avalanche of new materials published in China, materials that both reassess earlier eras and debates and describe bureaucratic problems today. Readers may feel that, however understandable Harding’s decision to conclude his analysis with Mao’s death in 1976, the omission of these new materials and the post-Mao period is unfortunate. Finally, while the framework used in the book is useful for sensitizing us to the ongoing bureaucratic dilemma, still the author does not provide a clear case for how useful this framework is compared to other competing ‘models’ in understanding Chinese politics. Another
volume here that displays a similar issue focus is Leadership, Legitimacy, and
5. A. Walder, ‘Some Ironies of the Maoist Legacy Transition lo Socialism in China (Armonk: M. E. Sharp,
in Industry’, 1982).
in M. Selden and V. Lippit,
eds.,
The
196
STUDIES IN COMPARATIVECOMMUNISM
Con$‘ict in China, by Frederick
Teiwes.
Teiwes has for many years been one of the most
skilled practitioners of traditional Pekingology, and Chapter 3 of this work makes use of this background by describing the factional alignments of successive Politburos of the CCP. However, the author uses his data on elites and other information to address a much broader set of issues than simply ‘who’s on top’. At the heart of this slim volume, which is really three interrelated essays, one of which was published in an inaccessible publication a decade ago, is an analysis of the bases of legitimacy of the leadership of the CCP. Teiwes is quite blunt in stating that what matters is not legitimacy as conferred by the ordinary population. Rather, what counts is legitimacy within the elite itself-the approximately 800 people who dominate the levers of power in post-1949 China. In substantial measure he is concerned with how other leaders viewed and related to Mao Zedong. One might say that he is trying to provide an answer to the paradox posed by the Deng regime’s rewriting of history, which says that most of Mao’s political interventions after 1957 were wrong-headed and harmful. If this was the case, then how was Mao able to retain his dominance over the elite right up to the end, even as he led China into one crisis after another? Teiwes starts, as does Harding, with ideas drawn triumvirate of bases for authority: from Max Weber-in this case, Weber’s traditional, charismatic, and legal-rational. The author amplifies on Weber’s typology by outlining several different kinds of charismatic authority, including nationalist, revolutionary, and synthetic (the product of a manufactured personality cult). He argues that to some extent Mao’s authority after 1949 was based upon a combination of all of these bases for authority, rather than a single one. In his view Mao’s authority in the 1950s was not solely charismatic, but depended to some extent on the following of the rules and procedures stressed by the legal-rational mode. This verdict leads him to agree with Lieberthal that there was no ‘two line struggle’ in those years, but that all leaders worked within an established party decision-making framework. But after 1958 a series of disputes and crises led Mao more and more to ignore this framework and assert his personal will, and as he did so his authority came to rely more exclusively on charismatic claims, and increasingly synthetic ones at that. His success in making those claims helps explain how he was able to maintain his dominance over his colleagues to the end, but the way in which he did so destroyed much of the authority of the political institutions that he helped establish and unleashed debilitating elite conflicts that made political life in China hazardous and unpredictable. Mao’s successors are trying to regularize procedures and rebuild CCP authority by But as Humpty Dumpty is put back stressing primarily legal-rational procedures. together again it comes out as a different sort of egg. The top leader, Deng Xiaoping at the moment, is much more limited than Mao was in the initiatives he can take, while the interests of other members of the elite have to be catered to much more directly. Arbitrary personal dictatorship is gone, but the result is not necessarily a rational and efficient political system. Instead this change may lead to the victory of bureaucratic interests and rigidity that Harding described Mao as fearing. If so the ‘elite 800’ may be much more pleased with this state of affairs, as one suspects their counterparts in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union were, but it is at least an open question whether the ordinary population will view this change in the same positive light. In any case, Teiwes provides us with trenchant observations about the current period as well as the Maoist years. The study can be faulted for not making more analytical use of the comparison with the Stalin-Khrushchev-Brezhnev transitions in the USSR, although Teiwes does mention the works of T. H. Rigby and other Soviet specialists. Still, we are fortunate to have
The Hundred Flowers come to Chinese Political Studies Teiwes
displaying
his talents
on something
broader
than
197
the usual Pekingological
questions. Another volume under review here, The Limits of Reform in China, edited by Ronald Morse, might also be considered as illustrating the search for depth achieved by focusing on an issue arena. However, this is partly because it doesn’t fit under the other categories used here, for in many ways this volume follows the more traditional format of examining implementation of a particular policy. In this case the policy change is a broad one-the whole range of reforms instituted by the post-Mao leadership-and, as the title suggests, the authors are primarily concerned with the sources of resistance to implementation of the reforms. Or perhaps I should say most of the authors, because, as in many conference volumes, not all of them are marching to the same drummer. Two of the most interesting essays in the volume are John Israel’s piece on liberal education in China in the 1930s and 1940s and Vera Schwarz’s paper on how different generations of Chinese intellectuals have been trying to put their lives back together. However, neither has much relationship to the issue of resistance to reform policies. The other authors are more obedient, however. Hong Yung Lee sees the primary focus of problems in reform of the bureaucracy as resistance of aged bureaucrats to retirement. David Zweig sees resistance to decollectivization in agriculture coming primarily from rich and successful communes who see their progress threatened. James Seymour describes the alternative interpretations Chinese dissidents give for why efforts to democratize the Chinese political system have made so little headway, with the main explanations being a feudal traditional culture, Leninist institutions, and the wavering commitment of China’s leaders. Andrew Walder notes that the kinds of managerial personnel and managerial behavior developed over decades in China’s industry are such that they are not well suited to operating in a looser, quasi-market situation. When placed in this unfamiliar environment, rationality and efficiency are not likely to be the results. In general the papers in the volume are of high quality, with useful observations and insights. However, they suffer from the inevitable problems of instant scholarship, in which yesterday’s headlines become today’s footnotes (but tomorrow’s anachronisms). For example, the decollectivization of agriculture and dismantling of the commune structure have gone much further in the two years since Zweig’s analysis was published, and some considerable headway even seems to have been made on the issue of retiring aged bureaucrats. This observation raises a fundamental issue that none of the books under review here seem able to deal with: if the post-Mao leadership is so much more dependent upon bureaucratic consensus, as Teiwes argues, and faces the sorts of major obstacles to reform that the authors in the Morse volume describe, how has it been possible in some areas, particularly in the countryside, to quickly and decisively implement reforms that are much bolder than even those attempted in Eastern Europe? Certainly the dismantling of the commune system and the restoration of the family farm do not seem to indicate a timid or hemmed in leadership. One other avenue to achieving greater depth in studying Chinese politics is to select not a particular locale or issue, but a particular group. Doing so assumes that particular social groups have a political role to play in contemporary China. But that assumption raises t.he issue of whether ‘interest groups’ exist in communist political systems. That issue has, of course, been debated for years among Soviet specialists, but it is only recently making its way into the discourse of China scholars. The volume edited by David Goodman, Groups and Politics in the People’s Republic of China, is concerned with
STUDIES
198 addressing
that issue for China,
IN
COMPARATIVECOMMUNISM
and is quite consciously
modeled on the earlier volume
published by Skilling and Griffiths.‘j Many of the papers included were prepared for a session of the European Consortium for Political Research in 1981 which was devoted to the interest group issue. Several of the contributions review the origins of the interest group approach in the West and then the controversy surrounding its use in regard to the Soviet Union. Other papers move on to consider the applicability of the framework to a variety of groups in China, most, but not all, defined ocupationaliy-economists soldiers, workers, peasants, intellectuals, teachers, and first party secretaries. A number of the papers, such as those by John Burns on peasants and Tony Saich on workers, provide useful accounts of the treatment and role of particular groups since 1949, quite apart from the interest group issue. As to the applicability of the interest group framework issue in China, there is no agreement among the assembled authors. Some, such as Gerald Segal in his discussion of the army and David Goodman
in regard to first party
secretaries, argue forcefully that even those groups one might suppose are best situated and disposed to act as interest groups in China rarely show evidence of doing so. Others are not so negative on the issue, but they end up presenting what at best are quite modest claims for the interest group approach. Either the studied groups can be seen as acting to pursue their interests in limited ways locally that have no visible impact on the national political system (Burns on peasants) or they have an impact as groups only in small ways during moderate swings of the political pendulum, but are unable to do so during radical periods (e.g. Krug on economists, White on teachers). At best, then, some of the groups dealt with might be considered incipient interest groups, rather than fully formed interest groups, not to mention organized lobbies. Thus the volume serves as an interesting exercise in considering the merits of the interest group approach, the reader is led to conclude that in fact this is not that useful a way to understand
but the
Chinese political system. Such doubts are if anything reinforced by the book-length version of Gordon White’s consideration of teachers in the Goodman volume. White has been one of the ieaders in applying the group approach to Chinese politics, having elsewhere written about sentdown youths and demobilized soldiers. His book, Pare and Professionals, is subtitled ‘The Political Role of Teachers in Contemporary China’, ground as his paper in the Goodman volume. However,
and it covers much the same there is fuller treatment of some
issues and periods, including some fascinating discussion of the changing role of teachers in the 1950s. As a source of information about teachers in China this volume is certainly useful, but again it leads the reader to conclude that the interest group approach is only episodically useful. For the most part teachers have been the objects of political action, rather than autonomous actors in the process, and so we see here again a conventional study of the implementation of party policies, rather than a framework that will yield new insights. The volume is also somewhat odd in that only 110 out of its total of 360 pages are given to White’s expanded analysis of the role of teachers. The remaining pages are devoted to translations of 42 Chinese documents on education covering the entire post-1949 period, with no commentary or explanation of why particular documents were included or are important. The last two volumes in our list do not really represent new approaches to Chinese political studies. Rather, they are both efforts by political scientists to write textbooks 6. H. 1971).
G. Skilling and F. Griff~ths, Interest Groups in
S&et Politics(Princeton:
Princeton
University
Press,
The Hundred Flowers come to Chinese Political Studies that incorporate
new ideas and findings.
199
In fact, both are revisions of earlier textbooks,
with Brugger’s original published in 1977 and Thornton’s in 1973. However, both volumes are so ‘quirky’ in different ways that most Chinese politics courses will probably be reluctant to use them. Brugger’s work, China: Liberation and Transformation, is one half of a two volume enterprise, and part of its ‘quirky’ approach is revealed in its choice of the time span from 1942 to 1962. While it is worthwhile to stress that the history of the People’s Republic did not simply begin on October 1, 1949, it may still seem odd to start the tale in 1942. The development of the CCP before that year is given a scant four pages in Brugger’s book. The choice of 1942 comes from the rectification campaign begun in that year, which the author uses to date the emergence of the ‘Yan’an model’, which involved ‘mass line’ leadership techniques and a list of other abstract characteristics (about ten are mentioned). The victory in 1949 then leads to the adoption, instead, of the Soviet model which, as argued by Brugger in his earlier work on industry, never fully took hold in the Chinese scene. The events and campaigns of the period up to 1962 are dealt with and, where possible, interpreted in terms of the fluctuating competition between the Yan’an model and the Soviet model as the basis for organizing Chinese socialism. The end-point of 1962 is again somewhat peculiar. That year was selected because Mao Zedong’s call for the revival of class struggle, embodied in the resolutions of the 10th Plenum of the 8th Central Committee of the CCP in that year, is seen by Brugger
as beginning
a new phase in Chinese
politics.
In the earlier version of this text the author followed this sort of argument in an oversimplified way, seeing a ‘two line struggle’ throughout the post-1949 period between the advocates of the two models, with the author’s sympathies clearly favoring Yan’an. To Brugger’s credit, in his revision he has taken into account the work of Teiwes and others, which show that there was no such two line struggle until some time during the 1960s. Brugger quite forthrightly tells readers when he is revising some of his earlier conclusions, and the result is a more complicated, although at times also more confusing, account of political events in the years covered. Still, the ‘Yan’an model versus the Soviet model’ framework largely survives the revision, although it is now largely devoid of individual leaders championing the rival alternatives. Readers will naturally then ask who or what was responsible for the cyclical shifts between these models, or whether, in fact, this framework is very useful for understanding the events of those years. The abstractness and occasionally traits of the models are described or are claimed policies or events did strike this reviewer as more So both in terms of time coverage and in terms of not seem to be the most useful text available.
jargon-filled way in which various to have been fostered by particular often obfuscating than illuminating. the explanatory framework this does
However, Thornton’s textbook, China: A Political History, is clearly not a preferable alternative. Its quirkiness also shows in the time span chosen. Although the end-point of 1980 is a reasonable enough. choice as ‘the present’, readers will be interested to see from the initial date that China’s revolution began in Petrograd, Russia, in 1917. This view of the matter is quite intentional. Thornton wants to stress that Chinese domestic politics have often been affected by external events. And, following his earlier research on the Comintern, it is not surprising that to Thornton external events in this book largely mean Soviet manipulations. The result is curious indeed. External events there are aplenty, but domestic politics virtually disappears. Fully half of the book is devoted to the pre-1949 period, but incidentals such as the founding of the CCP are completely
200
STUDIESIN COMPARATIVECOMMUNISM
ignored. Brugger would also be surprised to see that there is no discussion of the Yan’an model and also no treatment of land reform in the base areas, the rectification campaign of 1942, or of other events and campaigns of the pre-1949 period. When we get to the post-1949 period the story is much the same. There is not a word about the national land reform campaign of 1950-52, and readers of Thornton’s book will remain blissfully ignorant of the fact that socialist transformation and the collectivization of agriculture were carried out in China in the mid-1950s. But attention is given to Stalin’s death and to the Soviet 20th Party Congress in 1956, and several pages are devoted to the purge of Gao Gang in 1954, an event often alleged to be due to Gao’s Soviet links. For the remainder of the book one gets the same absence of information on Chinese domestic politics. The focus is on the factional struggles within the Chinese elite, struggles that Thornton sees as having much to do with personal power concerns and the machinations of foreign powers (again, particularly the Soviet Union), but apparently nothing at all to do with developments in China’s society and political system. One might argue that perhaps this is just another case of a misleading book title, and that Thornton’s
work should be seen not as a general political history, but as an attempt
to give a chronological account of Soviet influence on Chinese elite politics. But even if we adjust our expectations in this way we are poorly served by this book. Whereas Brugger revised the earlier version of his work substantially, Thornton’s revisions seem largely to consist of adding material to bring the story up to date by covering the years 1972-80. So far as I can see, without making a detailed textual comparison with the earlier edition, Thornton has not modified sections criticized by earlier reviewers as erroneous and misleading. The book remains riddled with undocumented assertions that contradict other scholarship, and the author has made no effort here to provide the missing evidence. Thus the unwary student using this text will not know that he is learning an idiosyncratic and in many ways misleading view of the events covered. Thornton has also made no real effort to make use of the avalanche of new historical and memoir materials released in recent years in the PRC which, even if examined with a critical eye, would have required him to rethink many portions of this book. So this text is even more unsatisfactory than Brugger’s as a general account of China’s recent political history. But as they sometimes say in China, whenever you have a hundred flowers blooming, you are likely to find some new weeds springing up as well. In conclustin, what can we say about the value of the new approaches to the study of Chinese politics that we have seen in the books under review? To this reviewer the types of work they report clearly represent progress, but still less than a fully satisfactory situation. The clearest gains have been achieved in the depth and focus of studies of localities and issue arenas. We now have an increasing number of studies available that treat such matters in considerable detail, and as a result we are achieving a much better sense of the complexity of the Chinese political order. But given the scale of the Chinese political system in relation to the small band of Western researchers, these studies still leave us far short from having a comprehensive sense of how the Chinese political system works. Many locales and institutions remain virtually unstudied, and at the same time we lack a new generation of works trying to tell us how ‘the system’ as a whole works. For instance, there is not even a satisfactory, up-to-date general study of the key institution in that society, the Chinese Communist Party. There has also been some progress achieved in breaking down the insularity of the field. More and more studies are earnestly trying to apply ideas drawn from classical
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theorists such as Weber, or are utilizing concepts drawn from contemporary research on other societies. In spite of this effort, much of the work done still has a powerful China focus and fascination somewhat ‘inscrutable’
with sinological minutiae that make many of these works to those outside the field. And some of the attempts at breaking
down the isolation, such as the use of ‘interest group theory’, turn out not to be very illuminating in the Chinese case. The move away from ‘totalitarianism’ as a conceptual framework has left the field with a theoretical vacuum that has yet to be filled. No new general conceptual framework has emerged to help us understand the Chinese political landscape. Still, these criticisms may be unnecessarily harsh, for they are based on the comparison of our present situation with some ideal state of perfect knowledge and understanding. If we use some more realistic basis of comparison, such as the state of work in the field in the past, then we can conclude on a more positive note. We have a much more sophisticated view of China than we did before, say, 1970, but on the other hand there is still lots of work to be done to improve our general understanding of the Chinese political system.