Political Order and Political Decay (60 page)

There are many things that government during the Han Dynasty didn't do that are expected of modern states. It did not provide universal education, health care, or pensions. The provision of public goods and services was still rudimentary and often did not penetrate very far into the rural hinterland. Many of its famous projects, like the Grand Canal and the Great Wall, took centuries to complete. The civil service examination system was on again, off again, and did not fully emerge until the beginning of the Ming Dynasty in the fourteenth century. Moreover, China's precociously modern system didn't last. The centralized state broke down in the third century
A.D.
and wasn't reconstituted for another three hundred years. When it was restored in the Sui and Tang Dynasties, it was dominated not by a meritocratic elite but by aristocratic families that succeeded in capturing state power. Then as now, corruption on the part of government officials was a huge problem. The cycle of political development and political decay was to repeat itself several times in subsequent years, up through the early twentieth century.

I would argue that the state that has emerged in China since the beginning of reforms in 1978 bears more resemblance to this classical Chinese state than it does to the Maoist state that preceded it, or even to the Soviet state that the Chinese tried to copy. Contemporary China has been engaged in the recovery of a long-standing historical tradition, whether or not participants in that process were aware of what they were doing.

At one level this argument seems absurd. Chinese civil servants today don't engage in the elaborate rituals of the Qing court or wear pigtails. They no longer study Confucian classics but a combination of Marxist-Leninist tracts, engineering textbooks, and Western management literature. The mentality of a Mao-era party cadre or Soviet-style bureaucrat is still evident in the behavior of party and state officials. Many of the actual institutional structures created in that period, such as the work group (
danwei
) and population registration system (
hukou
), still exist. Yet if one looks not at the surface style but at the essence of Chinese government, the continuities with the past are striking.

The changes in the nature of Chinese government after 1978 were at least as great as those that took place in economic policy. Indeed, one could argue that the massive shift from a centrally planned economy to a more open and marketized one could not have occurred without corresponding changes in the nature of government. Most observers of modern China have focused on the economic policy shifts, without paying attention to the political infrastructure that made those shifts possible.

RETREAT OF THE MAOIST STATE

Under Chairman Mao, the Chinese state was first completely politicized and subordinated to the Chinese Communist Party. It then disintegrated almost entirely during the Cultural Revolution, as did the hierarchy of the party itself.

In previous cases covered in this book, politicization of a bureaucracy has usually meant capture of a state by politicians who want to use bureaucratic positions for patronage purposes. This is what happened to the American state after the Jacksonian revolution, and to the Greek and Italian states as they democratized and opened themselves up to political competition.

In China, the state was colonized not by patronage politicians but by a disciplined Leninist party that sought to subordinate it to its own ideological purposes. Following the Bolshevik model, a Leninist party is built around an elite core whose members are recruited into a strict hierarchy on the basis of ideological loyalty, and a mass base that is used to penetrate the rest of the society. Before the Cultural Revolution, party members constituted 2.5 percent of China's total population; today they number some 86 million members, or 6 percent of the total.

The party's hierarchy replicates the hierarchy of the state itself, from local party committees to municipal- and provincial-level bodies up through the national-level Central Committee, Politburo, Politburo Standing Committee, and finally the party chairman. Control over the state is exercised through a variety of mechanisms: at the top level, the state apparatus including all of the functional ministries is headed by a party member who wears two hats; at a local level, in each urban neighborhood and rural village, the work group is overseen by a party cadre. At the height of China's “Soviet” period in the 1950s, the state had greatest autonomy from the party at the level of the higher centralized ministries. Political control increased as one went down the hierarchy to the local level.
2

One area where Chinese practice departed from the Soviet precedent was in civil-military relations. While the Soviet Red Army played an important role during the civil war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution, the military was always strictly subordinated to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This control was cemented in the bloody purges of the 1930s, when a quarter to a half of the officer corps were purged by Stalin. In China, by contrast, the party was able to come to power largely through the prolonged struggle of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) against both the Japanese and the Nationalists. Many party leaders, like Deng Xiaoping and Mao himself, were also famous and successful generals during the Chinese civil war, and thus the PLA always enjoyed a somewhat greater degree of autonomy than its Soviet counterpart.
3

This familiar party-state structure was then completely upended during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The Great Leap Forward made use of the party apparatus to organize a military-style mass campaign of workers and peasants to meet Mao's totally unrealistic production goals for industrialization. This disrupted the routine operations of the economic ministries and replaced them with a chaotic, bottom-up process of mass mobilization. The results were famine and economic disaster, but the hierarchy of the party survived. The same cannot be said of the Cultural Revolution, which undermined not just the government but the party as well. Mao launched the Cultural Revolution partly out of fear of the erosion of his personal authority and partly due to opposition to the very principle of bureaucratic government. In an effort to restore the zeal of the original revolution, Mao bypassed all intermediate levels and connected his personal authority directly to the “masses” through organization of local Revolutionary Committees. Heads of different ministries would show up for work and find out that their organizations had been taken over by their underlings. While Stalin made use of the secret police under his personal control to purge the Soviet Communist Party during the 1930s, Mao made use of the Revolutionary Committees and youthful Red Guards to purge, execute, or send to the countryside party members. The PLA was used arbitrarily in this period, sometimes to restore “discipline” and sometimes on behalf of Revolutionary Committees. The party, normally the agent of politicization, was itself controlled and purged from without, and as a result ceased any kind of normal functioning along with the government.
4

Deng Xiaoping, who was twice purged during the Cultural Revolution, saw both restoration of party discipline and reconstruction of government authority as critical parts of his reforms. Deng never contested the need for dominance of the party over the government, but he believed that both had to operate by rules, the antithesis of Mao's anarchistic approach to governance. The constitutional revision efforts described in the previous chapter were reflections of his view that the party needed to restore its own authority, and that the government's political overseer needed to retreat so that the ministries could properly manage the large changes he foresaw in the economy. It was also important for the party to reassert control over the PLA, which had emerged as something of an arbiter between competing political factions in the delicate period following Mao's death. Whether he was conscious of it or not, Deng was restoring much of the institutional legacy of traditional Chinese government. Only this time, it was the Communist Party that played the role of the emperor with his eunuch cadres supervising a vast bureaucracy.

The kind of government that emerged bears little resemblance to its Maoist predecessor. It is far more professionalized. China reintroduced a merit-based civil service examination system after the 1978 reforms. The political scientist Dali Yang has pointed to a series of reforms taking place in the late 1990s and early 2000s that increased competition for merit-based civil service positions and disciplined large numbers of officials who failed to make the grade.
5
In 2012, 1.12 million people across China competed for twenty-one thousand positions in the civil service.
6
China also restored its university system and instituted competitive entrance requirements for admission (something that many continental European countries have failed to do).
7
The reformers were deliberately seeking to establish a Western-style Weberian bureaucracy, but in doing so they inadvertently recovered some of their own traditions.

The contemporary Chinese government is centralized, massive, and extraordinarily complex. The party remains in control of the government, duplicating its bureaucratic structure from top to bottom and overseeing activities at every level. Nonetheless, party control began to retreat in the 1990s, and the nature of that control has itself changed substantially.

One of the first problems that any centralized bureaucracy faces is that of delegation. Dynastic China was nominally ruled by a bureaucracy in the capital, but the difficulties in managing so large and populous a country in an age of poor communications technology meant that authority had to be delegated to subordinate units at a province or county level. Oftentimes the central government in Chang'an, Luoyang, Kaifeng, or Beijing had no idea what was going on in other parts of the country and would issue orders only to find months or years later that they had not been implemented. The post-Mao leadership early on recognized the importance of delegation. While China remains a unitary rather than a federal state, provinces and cities have been delegated substantial powers to implement directives from the center in ways that they see fit. Thus there is considerable variation in policies across China's different regions. Southern provinces like Guangdong and cities like Shenzhen are far more market-friendly than is, say, Beijing. Shenzhen has, for example, privatized much of its municipal water supply to some twenty-six companies, while municipal water in Beijing is still controlled by a single state-owned company.
8

In China, many individual provinces are larger than major European countries. Guangdong and Jiangsu both have nearly eighty million permanent residents, plus tens of millions more migrants. The city of Chongqing, which was split off from Sichuan Province as a separate administrative unit in 1997, by itself has a population of almost thirty million. As a result, the bureaucratic structure of the central government is replicated at the provincial and municipal levels, with each having the same functional division of offices and party oversight agencies.

The overall size of the Chinese bureaucracy is correspondingly huge, and it has been growing rapidly. Political scientist Minxin Pei puts the number at over forty million officials in the year 2000, though he notes that accurate statistics are hard to come by. Each of China's subordinate levels of government replicates the division of labor of the higher levels, which leads to a highly complex system in which lines of authority are often in conflict. For example, management of municipal water resources is the primary responsibility of the municipality, but a regional agency managing the watershed that supplies the city's water also has authority, as does the national water ministry.
9
In addition, the Communist Party maintains a smaller, parallel hierarchy that oversees the work of the government agencies.

THE AUTONOMY OF THE CHINESE STATE

If there is a single quality that would seem to distinguish the Chinese party-state from those of other developing countries, it is its degree of autonomy. The Chinese government has not acted as a simple transmission belt for powerful societal interest groups, but has been able to set an independent policy agenda by its own lights. This autonomy is evident at the level of the senior leadership of the Communist Party, which sets overall policy directions, and at the level of implementation, where lower-ranking cadres have considerable discretion in the way that they fulfill directives from above. I will consider each of these in turn.

A high degree of state autonomy free of any form of democratic accountability and unencumbered by a rule of law is a very dangerous thing. This was the story of China during the Maoist period, when a single leader with unlimited policy discretion could unleash untold suffering and cause the deaths of tens of millions of people through willful innovations like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. But that same degree of autonomy in the hands of a wiser and less crazed leader like Deng Xiaoping could bring about transformations for the better that would be scarcely conceivable in a liberal democracy. Chinese-style autonomy frees the state of many of the interest group pressures, lobbyists, and formal procedural constraints that prevent liberal democracies from acting quickly and weaken the quality of decisions ultimately made. In the hands of a competent leadership that wants to serve public purposes, such autonomy allows the government to move much more quickly and dramatically on policy issues than its democratic counterparts.

This is not to say that interest groups do not exist in China. While there were no K Street lobbyists in China representing powerful private interests, the party-state had powerful factions and entrenched interests that were committed to some version of the Maoist status quo. Deng's early reforms had spurred a rapid rise in expectations, especially among the urban intelligentsia and students. The contemporaneous Gorbachev reforms in the former Soviet Union inspired the Tiananmen protest movement and the government's bloody crackdown in June 1989. The killing of student protesters undermined hopes for an early democratic transition and was widely condemned around the world. It also gave comfort to leftists in the party who hoped for a return to greater Communist orthodoxy. Deng himself, however, realized that the party's survival would be undermined by such a conservative reaction. Following his famous “southern tour” in 1992, he returned to a reformist agenda that liberalized prices, privatized a number of state-owned enterprises, and openly promoted transition to a market economy. So even though Deng's ultimate victory was never assured, the fact that he was able to shift policy so massively remains a testament to the autonomy of the Chinese state in this period.