Modernizing China

Post-Mao Reform And Development

A. Doak Barnett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429718083
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política asiática

Since the death of Mao, China has entered a new period in its development. Turning away from the all-encompassing emphasis on revolutionary struggle and ideological transformation that characterized the last years of the Maoist era, China's leaders under Deng Xiaoping have initiated dramatic new reform and development policies. In original essays, the contributors, all senior specialists on contemporary China, analyze the reasons for the new policies, the nature and impact of the changes now occurring, and the prospects for a continuation of these policies in the future. Specifically, they examine the Chinese polity as a "consultative authoritarian" system, the farreaching changes in China's agriculture, important shifts in foreign economic relations, the gradual modernization policy pursued by its military leaders, the relaxation of controls on cultural life, and the possibility that current social policies may well increase equality rather than inequality in Chinese society. The authors conclude that it is too early to judge the eventual, long-term outcome of current reforms, which they believe grew out of the political crises and chronic economic problems that afflicted China in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although they see some opposition and built-in limits to reform, on balance they foresee strong support for continued reform and believe it will be difficult for future leaders to reverse course.

1
Political Development in Post-Mao China

Harry Harding

Of all the reforms that have swept China since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, those in the economic realm have attracted the greatest attention abroad. The transformation of the economic systems—first of rural and then of urban China—has aroused vigorous debate among Western observers over whether China has adopted capitalism, instituted a market economy, or merely modified the ways in which a socialist system is planned and managed. Less noted, but equally significant, have been the changes in the political institutions that govern China's 1 billion people. Here, too, one can usefully ask whether China has moved toward a more liberal, pragmatic, and pluralistic political order, or whether it has simply become a routinized authoritarian system similar to the post-Stalinist Soviet Union.

The issue arises because the political evolution of post-Mao China has been riddled with contradictions. Political participation has expanded substantially, but strict limits remain on both the form and the content of political expression. Although the last decade has witnessed an erosion of the role of ideology in political and intellectual affairs, periodic campaigns have been launched against "bourgeois liberalism," "spiritual pollution," "ultraleftism," and other ideas officially defined as heterodox. Chinese leaders have placed heavy emphasis on the development of regular bureaucratic procedures and institutional processes, but they have also implemented their reforms through a party rectification campaign reminiscent of the original zhengfeng movement in Yan'an as well as through a restaffing of the bureaucracy comparable in scale, although not in method, to the Cultural Revolution. An understanding of the political development of China in the post-Mao period requires that we give attention to both aspects of these contradictions in an attempt to assess the relative balance between them.

Decayed Totalitarianism

In Chapter 2, Dwight Perkins suggests that China did not experience an acute economic crisis in 1976 but was facing instead the more subtle and chronic problems of low efficiency and restricted consumption. Economic reform in such a circumstance may be highly desirable, but, as the experience of the Soviet Union has demonstrated for so long, it is hardly inevitable.

Chinese politics, in contrast, presented a quite different situation. The Chinese political system at the time of Mao's death had a dual character. It was, on the one hand, a totalitarian system with the capability to penetrate and at least partially control all areas of social, economic, and political life. And yet, on the other hand, it was also a system in serious decay. As a result of the Cultural Revolution, it had lost a large measure of its organizational vigor, its elite unity, and its popular support. This combination of totalitarianism and decay was so unstable that it virtually compelled some kind of political reform immediately upon the death of Mao Zedong.

The totalitarianism of China at the end of Mao's life was similar in many ways to the totalitarianism that existed in the Soviet Union under Stalin.¹ Both Maoism and Stalinism reflected an attempt to achieve complete penetration and control of society and to eliminate any islands of exemption, no matter how trivial, from political intervention. Both systems justified these controls in the name of a sweeping socioeconomic transformation of society that they described as just and progressive. Both systems imposed an arbitrary reign of terror against "class enemies"—often defined on the basis of class background, political orientation, or occupation—who allegedly resisted this revolutionary change. Both Mao and Stalin emerged as charismatic leaders, casting aside established party policymaking institutions in favor of their own personal rule, assisted by impermanent and unstable groups of courtiers and favorites.

Taken by themselves, these aspects of totalitarianism were probably destined to lead to substantial change in China after Mao's death, comparable perhaps to the process of de-Stalinization that occurred in the Soviet Union after 1956, as both the bureaucratic elite and the general public pressed for greater predictability in politics and greater freedom in social affairs. But in China the impetus for change was intensified by the second characteristic of politics in the late Mao period: its serious decay and instability. It is this second factor that explains why China faced an even more serious political crisis at the time of Mao's death than did the Soviet Union upon the death of Stalin.

If the totalitarian characteristics of Chinese politics in the mid-1970s reflected the similarities between Maoism and Stalinism, the decay of Chinese political institutions between 1966 and 1976 stemmed from the differences between the two political movements. In short, Stalinist totalitarianism was fundamentally conservative and elitist and thus created relatively stable political institutions, whereas the Maoist variant was radical and populist and tended therefore to undermine political stability.

More specifically, Stalin encouraged the decline of utopian thought and its replacement by a more conservative nationalism; in contrast, Maoism attempted to revive revolutionary ideology and to implement radical socioeconomic policies. Thus, where Stalin encouraged the emergence of inequalities in status and income in the name of modernization, Mao favored a greater degree of egalitarianism in the name of continued revolution. Stalin's purges removed veteran revolutionaries in favor of younger technocrats, whereas Mao's Cultural Revolution aimed to rid the party and state bureaucracies of veteran specialists and to replace them with younger revolutionaries. Most important of all, Stalinist terror was state terror, carried out under the control of a dictator through the state security apparatus. In contrast, Maoist terror, at least at the height of the Cultural Revolution, was mass terror, imposed by loosely organized Red Guard groups only partially controlled by Mao and his lieutenants.

It was these aspects of Maoism that produced the political decay of the mid-1970s. First, the Maoist preference for "redness" over "expertise," and the insistence on maintaining the "purity of class ranks," meant that recruitment to Communist party membership and to cadre positions within the party came to be based on class background and political loyalty rather than on technical training or administrative competence. At the same time, the Maoist disdain for regularized personnel procedures meant that appointments to official positions were without fixed term, subject to removal only by death, promotion, or political purge. The result was a bureaucracy that, by the mid-1970s, was woefully overaged and underskilled.

Second, during the Cultural Revolution, Mao mobilized the "masses" of urban China, particularly high-school and university students, to attack "capitalist roaders" in the party and government. But, in so doing, he stripped legitimacy from established institutions without creating any alternative organizational form for channeling the new waves of participation that he had unleashed. The result, to borrow Samuel Huntington's classic formulation, was that participation increased as the level of institutionalization decreased, thus leading to political instability approaching chaos from the fall of 1966 to the fall of 1968.²

At this point, Mao recognized the need to hold China together, but he was not prepared completely to repudiate the Cultural Revolution he had launched. Accordingly, he resorted to a series of half-measures after 1967 that ended most mass disorder but perpetuated the political decay at higher levels. He called in the army to restore order, allowed military officers to assume key positions in the party and state bureaucracies, and named the defense minister, Lin Biao, as his presumptive successor. But within two years, when Mao came to suspect that the military's involvement in civilian matters might become permanent, he launched a series of maneuvers to dislodge Lin from party leadership and to reduce the role of the PLA in civilian political life. In similar fashion, Mao sponsored the political rehabilitation of many of the victims of the Cultural Revolution in the early 1970s. But he did not permit a systematic purge of the leftists who had risen to power during the course of the movement, and he even encouraged the leftists to continue to portray the victims of the Cultural Revolution as "unrepentant capitalist roaders." As a result of Mao's ambivalence, the process of rebuilding the political system was bogged down in intense factional conflict, first between civilian cadres and military officers, and then between radicals and moderates.

This period of protracted stalemate, extending from the suppression of the Red Guard movement in 1968 to the purge of the Gang of Four after Mao's death in 1976, produced the final and most serious aspect of political decay: a severe crisis of confidence among important sectors of Chinese society, particularly intellectuals and urban youth. The crisis reflected the widespread disgust at organizational inefficiency and leadership factionalism, the anger of intellectuals at the persecution they suffered at the hands of the radicals, and the sense of betrayal among young people who had been encouraged to join the Red Guards but who were then dispatched to the countryside when their movement became unruly. The loss of confidence in the regime was exemplified by the Tiananmen Incident of April 1976, in which hundreds of thousands of people in Peking participated in an unauthorized memorial tribute to Zhou Enlai, who to them was a symbol of a more humane and stable political process.

The political crisis confronting China at the time of Mao's death led a group of reformers, under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, to conclude that political change was both essential and urgent. There has been no precise blueprint for the reforms, and they have evolved gradually and somewhat sporadically since 1977.³ Nonetheless, a retrospective examination of the evolution of Chinese politics over the last eight years suggests that the reforms fall into five broad categories: (1) encouragement of a reconciliation between the party and society by reducing the scope and arbitrariness of political intervention in daily life; (2) expansion of opportunities for popular participation in political affairs, albeit with limits on both the form and content of political expression; (3) efforts to revitalize all institutions of governance, by restaffing them with younger and better-educated officials, and by granting them greater autonomy from party control; (4) measures to restore normalcy and unity to elite politics, so as to bring to an end the chronic instability of the late Maoist period and to create a more orderly process of leadership succession; and (5) steps to redefine the content and role of China's official ideology, so as to create a new basis for authority in contemporary Chinese politics.

As we shall see, impressive achievements have been scored in each of these areas. The result has been that Chinese politics today is much more institutionalized, much less decayed, and much less totalitarian than it was in 1976. In that sense, the immediate political crisis engendered by the late Maoist period has been resolved. And yet there have been limits on what has been sought, and what has been achieved, in all five aspects of reform. As a consequence, although China has passed from totalitarianism into a form of consultative authoritarianism, it has not yet become a truly pluralistic political order. The issue for the future is whether social and economic modernization will create pressures for further liberalization that, in turn, may produce another crisis of political development in post-Mao China.

Reconciliation Between Party and Society

The most pressing political problem to be addressed in the post-Mao period was the alienation of large sectors of urban China from the leadership of the Communist party as a result of the totalitarian features of the late Maoist period. The reconciliation forged between party and society has involved a series of measures designed to reduce the scope and arbitrariness of political intervention in social life.

The reduction of the scope of political interference in society has been evident in artistic matters, intellectual affairs, and daily life. In the arts, the authorities now allow greater room for creative expression; indeed, they have sanctioned the revival of traditional styles, the reintroduction of both classic and contemporary foreign works, and some experimentation with indigenous modern techniques. In intellectual matters, as well, there is greater freedom of academic inquiry, with fewer restrictions on the questions that can be researched and the views that can be expressed, even in areas with policy implications. In daily life, the party tolerates a wider degree of individual choice in matters of clothing, hobbies, personal appearance, and religious practice.

The results of this reform are apparent everywhere. As one casually strolls through any of China's major coastal cities, the eye is struck by the popularity of blue jeans and T-shirts among Chinese youth, and the ear is bombarded by the sounds of disco music coming from both public places and private homes. Discussions of political and academic issues in Chinese publications are more candid than in the past, with differences of opinion more openly expressed and acknowledged.

Less immediately obvious to the casual observer, but equally important to ordinary Chinese, has been the reduction of the power of basic-level economic enterprises over the daily affairs of the average peasant and worker. Before the reforms, factories provided their employees not only with a place of work but also with access to housing, medical treatment, day care, subsidized meals, recreation, and consumer goods that would not be readily available through other channels. In similar fashion, rural leaders exercised broad control over the economic fortunes of peasants, regulating their work assignments, their access to loans, their opportunities for outside employment, and often the size and location of their private plots. In each case, factory and commune officials had ample opportunity to distribute more goods and services to workers and peasants who stood in their good graces while giving less to those who had behaved less compliantly. But recent changes in economic policy are limiting both the control of factories over social services and the power of the collective over rural economic life. In so doing, the reforms are significantly reducing—although not completely eliminating—the ability of basic-level leaders to exercise arbitrary authority over their subordinates.⁴

The deregulation of these aspects of Chinese life has been accompanied by efforts to increase the predictability and regularity of those state controls that remain in effect. The degree to which the party and the state can exercise arbitrary power over society has been restricted by the creation of a legal framework specifying the substantive and procedural rights of Chinese citizens.⁵ The state constitution of 1982, for example, contains more extensive and explicit statements of such rights as freedom of religious belief, the inviolability of the home, and privacy of correspondence than did any previous constitution. The criminal law and the code of criminal procedure provide guarantees against arbitrary arrest, arbitrary detention, and torture; more restrictive definitions of what constitute "counter-revolutionary acts"; and rights to a trial with a courtroom defense. Discriminatory political labels, assigned during the great political movements of the late Maoist period, have been removed from about 3 million "rightists" and "counter-revolutionaries," and pejorative class labels have been lifted from virtually all former landlords, rich peasants, and capitalists.⁶

Nonetheless, although the changes have been impressive, the reduction of the arbitrariness and scope of political controls remains limited. The revised legal system, for instance, still lacks key provisions considered crucial in much of Western law—notably, the presumption of innocence, guarantees against self-incrimination, and the acknowledgment that defense attorneys might actively attempt to discredit the case presented by the prosecution rather than merely plead for leniency in behalf of their clients. Furthermore, prominent political dissidents have occasionally been subjected to lengthy periods of detention without trial and to severe punishment for loosely defined offenses, thus suggesting that the state is willing to violate, in certain cases at least, even those rights and guarantees that have been granted to Chinese citizens ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• About the Book and Editors
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Political Development in Post-Mao China
• 2 The Prospects for China's Economic Reforms
• 3 The Chinese Defense Establishment in Transition: The Passing of a Revolutionary Army?
• 4 Intellectuals and Cultural Policy After Mao
• 5 Social Trends in China: The Triumph of Inequality?
• About the Contributors
• Index