ABSTRACT
One of the more commonly and widely held beliefs outside the People’s Republic of China (PRC) about the changes wrought by the reform era during the three decades since 1978 is that there has been no political change. The noted Washington commentator James Mann made this the central theme of his address to the US China Economic and Security Review Commission in early 2007 (Mann 2007b; also Mann 2007a). The equally well-established US China scholar Elizabeth Perry published an article around the same time, arguing that the PRC has seen no fundamental political change in the last three decades, particularly because it remains dominated by the discourses of revolutionary authoritarianism (Perry 2007). While one must be careful not to take these and other comments out of
context, so strongly is the general argument often made that observers sometimes like to contrast the PRC’s transition from state socialism with that which has, or probably more accurately has not, occurred in the former Soviet Union. It is often said that the PRC’s economic success has come because the government of that country prioritised economic reform over political change, in contrast to the Soviet Union’s successor Russian Federation, which emphasised the move towards political pluralism (White 1994; McFaul 1997). Certainly there can be no doubt that the PRC remains a Party-state
dominated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Certainly too there is no institutionalised open national-level political competition in the PRC. At the same time, these rather bald statements mask as much as they reveal. Most significantly, the state itself has changed its own view of the relationship between state and society. From the mid-1950s until the end of 1978 the state saw itself in something akin to a totalitarian perspective. It had a holistic view of state and society in which the state directly managed the economy and society, and was the initiator of social and economic change. Since the end of 1978 the PRC has become a more recognisably authoritarian regime where the state regulates society and the economy indirectly, and intervenes directly in social and economic increasingly less. One of the results is necessarily that state and society are in some senses
now more clearly differentiated, at least to the extent that the government
increasingly comes to recognise certain activities as not its responsibility and even possibly not even in its purview. A whole range of institutions have moved into the political space created by these changes, including chambers of commerce; non-governmental organisations (NGOs); and even loose organisations which might loosely be described as ‘rights organisations’ protecting either self-interest (for example in disputes over land usage) or more altruistic concerns (as, for example, domestic violence.) Necessarily, given the PRC’s founding principles and methods of operation (however much these may be changing) the boundaries between state and society remain not clearly defined, are constantly changing and are in any case hotly contested. At the same time, in this context the ‘state’ is a difficult concept to oper-
ationalise, not least because it is not strictly comparable to a situation where a system of governance (the regime) can be clearly differentiated from that particular expression of authority currently responsible for leadership or government, as is more usually the case in a multi-party democracy. This lack of operational distinction between a specific government and the regime is of course a common feature of party-states. It is virtually impossible to regard any move away from one-party dominance as anything less than a fundamental change in the state, and one-party states have always had a tendency in practice (though not in principle) to avoid governance-government distinctions, not least because they are teleologically driven (Ionescu 1967). The contributions to this volume clearly and convincingly demonstrate
that the state and politics in China have changed considerably since the beginning of the 1980s. Decentralisation was discussed before, and even partially implemented during the mid-1950s and the early 1960s (Solinger 1993), but not in such far-reaching, system-altering ways. In that process the separation of government from much economic administration is as fundamental as the devolution of decision-making from the centre to the provinces to the localities within the territorial administrative hierarchy (Montinola et al. 1995). Moreover, it is a far cry from the politics of the Mao-dominated years to a China where a discourse of corruption plays such a large role (as highlighted by Ting Gong) or a China where there is a public movement to counter violence against women, let alone one in which part of the PRC state apparatus (the Women’s Federation) is involved (as Louise Edwards details in Chapter 6). The attention of the outside world focuses inevitably on Beijing and
national-level politics. Nonetheless, it may actually be at the more local levels that changes in politics and the state are most obviously made manifest. Decentralisation over economic decision-making has placed discretion over resource allocation, licensing and taxation at the local levels, and in the hands of officials who may well see themselves more as local leaders than as agents of the central state. Indeed, these are central and common themes of the chapters in this volume by Ting Gong on the emergence of corruption
(Chapter 4); of You-tien Hsing on property allocation (Chapter 5); of James Lee and Yapeng Zhu on housing reform (Chapter 2); of Linda Chelan Li on tax reform (Chapter 3); and of Tim Oakes on the management of culture (Chapter 1). Local change is explicitly described and analysed, yet possibly the most
far-reaching conclusion from this volume is one that is far more implicit: the need and the means to further conceptualise the ‘state’ in China. All the chapters are centrally concerned with the state in transition, yet its definition is unclear. This is neither undesirable nor not a viable strategy for explaining change. The ‘state’ generally can of course be, and is, understood in many different ways. It is sometimes equated with a society’s political structure and the exercise of sovereign authority in the territory of that society, and sometimes with specific governments in that area. For political scientists the notion of the state is usually more specifically some definition of the system of governance within which politics occurs; for economists, it is more usually a black box of regulatory decision-making or an economic actor. A definition of the state in China which goes little beyond the description
of one-party rule and the hegemony of the Chinese Communist Party’s once revolutionary authoritarianism says something fundamental about the PRC but is at the same time too static: it is in danger of failing to identify let alone even to interpret the dynamic aspects of change. Like the concept of the nation, with which it is often associated and sometimes confused, the state is most usefully understood as a project, constructed by social interaction (Migdal 2001). Of necessity this entails that the state is not static but is in a constant process of change. Not all change is the violent and dramatic change usually described as revolution, but nonetheless change remains a constant (Wertheim 1974). The chapters in this volume highlight six different dimensions of the state
in transition. While each is presented and considered separately, they are necessarily overlapping and mutually reinforcing in presenting a model of the state, which while imperfect provides a sound working hypothesis on which further research can be based. Moreover and more immediately, in the process recognising the different dimensions of the state also assists in explaining the extent of change. The starting point is the system of governance: the formal and informal
rules and regulations for the operation of the political system (regime). One way in which the state has started to change in the reform era is that, even allowing for earlier comments about the difficulties of distinguishing government from governance in a party-state, as the system has become more institutionalised after Mao authoritative decision-makers (government) have become conceptually distinct. One might even argue that separating government from governance was in some sense a primary goal of the reforms overseen by Deng Xiaoping. In turn, both governance and government are to be distinguished from the administrative structures (bureaucracy) that implement policy and the decisions of government.
