State and Society in the Mao Era

In some ways the Communist victory in 1949 represented the launching of a dramatic effort to transform the relationship between state and society in China. Yet in very basic respects 1949 symbolizes the failure of attempts to transform that relationship in even more fundamental ways, and the formation of a system that had strong echoes in China's imperial past. The contest between Western-oriented reformers and revolutionaries during the early decades of the twentieth century, a contest eventually won by revolutionaries in the CCP, is usually portrayed as a debate over how thoroughly to change the nature of the Chinese social order, with revolutionaries determined to go much further. Yet the events and trends of the post-1949 period, and particularly those of the post-Mao reform era, force us to rethink our ideas and categories. The reformers who lost the contest advocated ideas and institutions that posed a more fundamental threat than did those of the CCP to the basic operating principles that had governed the state-society relationship in China for centuries. ¹