Rethinking China's Provinces

John Fitzgerald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134490387
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias físicas
• Subtopic: Geología y ciencias de la Tierra

This is the third volume in a series examining the political importance of China's provinces under reform. The present book provides a survey of provinces as echelons of the peoples Republic of China. It seeks to locate the province as an administrative level in the Chinese state, through an examination of history, economic, social and political developments of these units. By situating the province history, this volume identifies new developments in the territorial administration of the People's Republic over the reform era. It also charts the consequent emergence of the city as an intermediate unit, situated between the province and the country, and providing challenges to the hierarchy of the bureaucratic state. This book includes detailed analyses of Chongqing, Henan, Guangdong, Anhui, Yunnan and Heilongjiang. It contains extensively researched empirical data collected from these provinces, and user friendly maps of these regions.

1 Introduction

John Fitzgerald

This is the third in a series of volumes on “China's Provinces in Reform” produced under the auspices of the Centre for Research on Provincial China.¹ The aim of the series is to provide comprehensive narrative surveys of all provincial-level units in the People's Republic of China. While each volume has a distinctive focus, and each embraces a different cluster of provinces, every chapter in the series is intended to provide core information on each province in turn. The first volume in the series, China's Provinces in Reform: Class, Community and Political Culture (Goodman 1997), covered Guangxi, Hainan, Liaoning, Shandong, Shanghai, Sichuan and Zhejiang.² The second, The Political Economy of China's Provinces (Hendrischke and Feng 1999), focused on the issues of comparative and competitive advantage among provinces, and on aspects of provincial identity.³ It covered Guizhou, Shaanxi, Jiangsu, Hubei, Tianjin, Shanxi and Jiangxi. The present volume focuses on the institutional history and function of provinces, and extends the series’ coverage to Chongqing, Henan, Guangdong, Anhui, Yunnan and Heilongjiang.⁴ In the present series, each chapter briefly traces the history before surveying the economic, social, and political development of the relevant provincial unit. Beyond this, authors are at liberty to develop their disciplinary or thematic emphases as they deem fit for the provincial units in question.

Our volume begins with an elementary question: Why do provinces deserve our attention? The answer is not immediately apparent. Provinces are constitutionally weak institutions and geographically limited territorial units that tend to obscure, as much as they illuminate, patterns of community interaction and economic activity. For this reason, it might be argued that spatial aspects of development need to be analyzed at the level of trans-provincial activities, or through the study of formal similarities among markets and communities in adjacent sets of provinces. This insight informs a number of chapters in the present volume. Nevertheless, the question of how market-led development relates to provincial-level administrative units turns not just on the degree of conformity of market space and political space but equally on the significance of the province as a territorial unit for building and maintaining a rational, stable and predictable national state. China's history over the past century suggests that maintenance of a stable national state is a minimum condition for the predictable and efficient operation of markets. The province has played an important part in that history.

The opening chapter traces the history of the province as a major echelon of territorial administration from imperial times to the present. By locating the province within the spatial dynamics of territorial administration, it seeks to evaluate the role and status of the province as a distinctive administrative echelon relative to other echelons of the Chinese state. By locating the province in history, it seeks to identify new and possibly unprecedented developments in the territorial administration of the People's Republic over the reform era. In particular, it focuses on the emergence of the city as an intermediate echelon of territorial government located between the province and the county, noting the promises and challenges of the city to a top-down bureaucratic state grappling with an expanding market economy, and exploring the implications of the rise of the city for the future of the province as a unit of territorial administration.

The city of Chongqing is a case in point. Chongqing was formally declared a provincial-level city independent of the province of Sichuan in 1997. As Lijian Hong explains in the second chapter, the new city presents a curious anomaly. When the three regions of Wanxian City, Fuling City and Qianjiang Prefecture merged to form the new Chongqing they almost quadrupled the area of the old city and expanded its population seven-fold to thirty million. In area, Chongqing is two to three times the size of China's three existing provincial-level cities combined (Shanghai, Tianjin and Beijing) and larger in area than two of China's provinces (Hainan and Ningxia). The population of the city exceeds those of eight of China's twenty-eight provinces and autonomous regions, and is close to the mean population for all provincial-level units in the country. As Hong nicely observes, Chongqing walks like a province, quacks like a province, but calls itself a city.

Assuming that there were good reasons for splitting Sichuan in twain, why was one of the new administrative territories designated a city and the other a province? Why not two provinces? In sum, why did the idea of a new city hold greater appeal than that of a new province among territorial reformers in Beijing in the 1990s? Upgrading the status of Chongqing City was certainly not the only proposal under consideration. An alternative suggestion was to divide Sichuan into two new provinces, named Chuandong and Sanxia, and to make Chongqing a prefectural-level capital of a new province.⁵ Beijing rejected this proposal on a number of grounds. If Sichuan were permitted to divide into two provinces it might be difficult preventing other provinces from doing likewise, especially those keen to cast off poverty-stricken areas. This would impede central efforts to compel provincial governments to redistribute revenue, investment and per capita income within provinces. The financial, administrative and opportunity costs of building a new province with Chongqing as its capital also weighed against the proposal. Creating a new province would involve establishing a whole set of provincial organs in addition to those of the city, draining revenue from more productive uses. Further, assigning dual responsibility to Chongqing to manage a new province while administering the city and its immediate environs might well have exhausted the administrative capacity of Chongqing, and prevented it from playing its designated role in promoting rapid development of the upper reaches of the Yangtze and the south-western region at a critical moment in the progress of the Three Gorges Project. Lijian Hong highlights as well the legitimacy value of old and familiar naming practices. Beijing has in effect created two new provincial-level territories while passing them off under the familiar names of Sichuan Province and Chongqing City. It is also tempting to interpret Bejiing's decision to create a city in place of a province as a sign of growing central concern that provinces may emerge as the major beneficiaries of state intensification and regularization in the evolving market economy, to the point of threatening the authority of the central government. Cities presumably pose a less formidable threat. Whether the experiment is intended to serve as a model for the displacement of the province as a peak site of territorial administration remains to be seen.

Why should the center be wary of provinces? In theory provinces are mere cyphers of the central government. In practice, however, even provinces noted for adhering closely to central policies have been known to waiver at critical moments. The potential for slippage between subordination and insubordination of provinces is highlighted in the chapter on Henan by Thomas Heberer and Sabine Jakobi. Through the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, the Henan provincial leadership implemented Mao Zedong's radical campaigns with exemplary enthusiasm. Henan was the site of the first people's commune, in 1958, and supplied the inspiration for Mao Zedong's famously cryptic remark that “people's communes are good.” The Henan provincial government produced exaggerated statistical reports on the achievements of the Great Leap Forward to satisfy its masters in Beijing, and subsequently took the lead in denouncing Mao's enemies in the Cultural Revolution. As far as Mao was concerned, Henan was a “model province.” But the nature of relations between province and center – even the scale of the “model” that Henan represented – underwent dramatic changes in the reform era. Once the center had proposed agricultural decollectivization, enterprise reform and wider commercial adaptations to the evolving market economy, the provincial leadership was less inclined to follow Beijing's lead.

There are a number of plausible explanations for this kind of behavior. Heberer and Jakobi argue that an apparent congruence between central and provincial policies up to the time of the Cultural Revolution was a consequence not of idealized superior–subordinate relations but of negotiated outcomes. Regional patterns of collective behavior in Henan that had long predated the founding of the People's Republic reflected central policy in the Mao era. Far from slavish imitation, Henan's behavior indicated a happy congruence of interests. The center happened to promote policies that the provincial leadership favored and supported. Another plausible explanation is that the provincial leadership has never waivered from a preferred relationship of dependency with the center. Aligning with the radical faction in Beijing during the period of the command economy paid off handsomely for the province in the form of investment, allocations and preferential treatment. Allying with central government market reformers, on the other hand, offered few comparable rewards as the scope of discretionary authority exercised by the centre was drastically reduced under market conditions. In any case, provincial calls for central patronage sounded out of tune with the do-it-yourself mantra of the new market ethic. If we credit this explanation, a pattern of patron–client dependency would appear to account for initial obedience to a powerful central patron and subsequent resistance to a weaker one.

Both of these explanations are confirmed, to a greater or lesser degree, by the case study of Nanjie Village, which concludes the chapter on Henan. Nanjie is a pre-fabricated model-in-miniature of the national collective economy of the Maoist era. While extolling the virtues of self-reliance, the village government supplies its residents with collective housing, education and health care, and distributes payments and rewards on the principles of fairness and need. Heberer and Jakobi report the village deputy party secretary boasting that Nanjie is the only communist village left in the world. Nevertheless, the model remains heavily indebted to the patronage of certain factions in the national capital who regularly dispatch prominent representatives to extol the virtues of the Nanjie model and who surreptitiously subsidize their model with generous handouts from Beijing.

Still, the change in scale from model province to model village is not insignificant. Dependence on the center generally worked at the level of central–provincial relations in the Mao era. Local patterns of dependence have come to operate at lower levels of administration and settlement in the reform era. Not far from Nanjie, for example, is another model village that combines aspects of the private and collective economy, and yet another that extols the virtues of private enterprise. The coexistence of apparently incompatible models some kilometers apart in Henan is an indication of increasing provincial, regional and sub-regional pluralization – as distinct from national political pluralism – that is nicely captured by Heberer and Jakobi's term “locally-fragmented authoritarianisms.”

Once Henan had been eclipsed as a model province in the reform era, Guangdong came to feature as a provincial model for national emulation. Guangdong was put forward as a pioneering exemplar of effective political leadership that apparently took advantage of the new policy environment to “open to the outside world,” to capitalize on local comparative advantages, and to lead the way in structural reform of the economy. Economic success has not been translated into comparable administrative accomplishments. Peter Cheung argues that the path to economic success pioneered in the province presents an impasse to the regularization of government and to the institutionalization of rule of law. Throughout the reform era, the state bureaucracy grew at twice the rate of overall employment growth and more than doubled in size over the period. State sprawl was accompanied by higher levies and charges rather than by higher levels of efficiency. This has had implications not only for government but also for the institutionalization of the market economy. Back-door deals, “flexible” regulations, and government by discretion may well serve to catalyze development in an under-performing economy but, Cheung suggests, a sophisticated market economy requires rule of law, predictable process, and a responsive administrative framework. Whether the province can develop a meritocratic, rule-abiding public bureaucracy with the same speed that it embraced economic reform two decades ago presents, Cheung remarks, “a daunting challenge.” Until then, it remains a flawed model.

Matching this administrative challenge, Cheung continues, is an array of social problems that have proliferated in the reform era, including growing regional inequalities, rising crime rates and frequent social conflicts in the province. In this respect Guangdong is not alone. The province may be exceptional among its neighbors as a destination for labor migration. But social and administrative problems arise on a comparable scale in provinces that export their labor. In Anhui, for example, peasant farmers have experienced the transition from a command to a market economy as a revolution from a relatively egalitarian society to an inherently unequal one. Wanning Sun highlights some of the changes in social expectations associated with market reforms in Anhui, including a move from valuing stability and rectitude to valuing change, mobility and wealth. Sun notes that economic reform in Anhui has nourished a reform-era elite born of a marriage of local power and privileged access to capital and opportunity. The new poor of Anhui appear to be persuaded that the reform-era elite profits from its political power to obtain and deploy state and private capital, to take advantage of loopholes in the system, and to engage in bribery, embezzlement, tax evasion, smuggling and the conversion of public assets into private wealth. Popular protest against randomly levied local revenues now characterize public life in Anhui as they do in Guangdong. Seen in this light, the challenges that confront provincial governments in Guangdong and Anhui seem to be embedded in wider regional patterns of social dislocation associated with the liberalization of commodity and factor markets over the past two decades.

Anhui also offers an instructive case study of provincial government responses to regional issues. A poor province adjacent to wealthier regions, Anhui has earned a reputation as “the Philippines of China.” The comparison is perhaps less accurate than suggestive. But it is suggestive on a number of counts. Anhui women are to be found working as nannies in Beijing, Shanghai and many smaller metropolitan centers along the coast. As Sun points out in her chapter, however, four times as many males as females leave Anhui each year in search of work. Again like the Philippines, Anhui is highly dependent on remittances. Total income remitted by internal migrants for expenditure back home occupies a greater portion of the provincial economy than provincial government revenues and expenditures. One further similarity easily overlooked is the extent to which the provincial government behaves like a national state. In the 1990s, the government set about disaggregating its own internal regions to take advantage of their physiographic, economic and cultural connections with adjacent areas beyond the provincial borders, while at the same time trying to reintegrate these regions back into the province around historical myths of common provincial culture and ancestry.⁶ Anhui's strategic plans for economic development display a rationality that might, in a national context, win plaudits from the World Bank, and its celebration of the indigenous culture of Hui merchants exposes a felt need to create an “imagined community” of Anhui provincials that would ground regional diversity in provincial unity.

In the case of Yunnan Province, cross-border flows of people and goods cut across national as well as provincial boundaries. Margaret Swain traces major patterns of trade, migration and infrastructure development through which Yunnan Province has developed links with the three neighboring countries of Vietnam, Laos and Burma over the reform era. Intensifying international linkages have been matched by intensifying inter-provincial networks involving flows of people and commodities (some of them illegal), and by complex inter-ethnic ties, new forms of inter-provincial institution-building, and a range of central–provincial initiatives that have given the province a measure of autonomy in its handling of cross-border issues.

In this case, interactions among overlapping local, provincial and regional networks impact on local identities not through the imagined community of the province but through “multiple modernist imaginaries” operating at every level. Local identities are negotiated and contested, Swain argues, within hierarchical relations of the regional, national and global political economies. On the provincial level, some of the post-Mao reforms taken for granted in other provinces – such as the household responsibility system – have come to be interpreted in Yunnan as one more “Confucian civilizing project” extolling the virtues of family solidarity, loyalty, diligence and thrift. At the central level, Beijing is inclined to interpret the problems that it encounters in implementing central reforms in Yunnan as evidence of the “low cultural level” of non-Han communities in the province. And at the local level, commodification of peoples and places in the political economy of national development erodes territorial integrity and cultural differentiation. In response, local communities have devised strategies to recover their unique identities, some by reinventing territorial myths, others by reviving or redefining their proprietary cultural symbols, and in either case supporting claims to particularity against the homogenizing tendencies of national development.

Similar relational hierarchies can be seen at work in Yunnan's institution-building initiatives. At a local level, cross-border links are facilitated through localized border-trading zones. At the inter-provincial and national levels, Yunnan is involved in a domestic regional network involving neighboring provinces that consult on regional issues and coordinate the south-west's approach toward Beijing. And at the global level, Yunnan Province participates in its own right, at the invitation of the Asian Development Bank, in an international forum of states that share an interest in the Mekong River. The one thing these institutional relations have in common is Yunnan's status as a province of the national state. Hence for all the fluidity of its relational identities and institutional linkages, Yunnan is more than a transitional zone situated at the hub of south-west China or between China and three neighboring states. When all is said and done, Yunnan is a territorial unit of administration to which local communities look for recognition and redress, around which other provinces form alliances, and through which the central government looks out upon the world beyond its national borders.

Heilongjiang Province presents the case of a recalcitrant provincial government that (like Henan) resisted the center's institutional reform agenda and yet happened (like Yunnan) to be located on the cusp of a potential transnational economic region. The combination produced a distinctive outcome. In a number of other provinces, local agencies were compelled, through forceful central state intervention, distant international export markets, or the cumulative effects of a growing domestic market, to undertake structural reforms. Not so in Heilongjiang, suggests Gaye Christoffersen. The center offered Heilongjiang few incentives to undertake industrial restructuring or to reform state-owned enterprises. It did, however, offer provincial actors an opportunity to open their economy to the outside world. The provincial government of Hei...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Rethinking China's Provinces
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The province in history
• 3 New Chongqing: opportunities and challenges
• 4 Henan as a model: from hegemonism to fragmentism
• 5 Guangdong under reform: social and political trends and challenges
• 6 Discourses of poverty: weakness, potential and provincial identity in Anhui
• 7 Looking south: local identities and transnational linkages in Yunnan
• 8 The political implications of Heilongjiang’s industrial structure
• 9 Why provinces?
• Index