Heike Holbig

Ideological Reform and Political Legitimacy in China: Challenges in the Post-Jiang Era

As a Socialist country undergoing rapid social and economic transition, China presents a revealing case study on the role of ideology in the process of institutional change. Based on Douglass Norths theory of institutional change and on David Beethams theory of political legitimation, this paper argues that recent ideological reforms have been a crucial factor in sustaining the legitimacy of Communist party rule. Ideological change is conceived as a path-dependent process which helps to stabilize the social perception of transition and to frame the partys modernization achievements. At the same time, the dominant role of ideology makes the Chinese party-state, despite its economic success, more vulnerable to legitimacy crises compared to other authoritarian regimes.

Ideology after the end of ideology. China and the quest for autocratic legitimation

In political science literature on contemporary China, ideology is mostly regarded as a dogmatic straitjacket to market reforms that has been worn out over the years of economic success, an obsolete legacy of the past waiting to be cast off in the course of the countrys transition toward capitalism. This article posits, however, that ideology still plays an indispensable role in the quest to legitimize authoritarian rule in contemporary China, and that it does so precisely due to its high degree of adaptability. Based on David Beethams theoretical model of political legitimacy, three legitimating functions of ideology that demand the constant adaptation of party theory and official language are introduced. Presenting various examples of reformulations of party theory and official language from the beginning of the reform period up to the present, the article demonstrates how the party regime relies on ideology to constantly reproduce its legitimacy, as well as the pitfalls of this reliance. It argues that ideology in contemporary China should be analysed not as a matter of belief but of playing by the rules of the official language game, and it shows how ideology is deployed as a set of practices and incentives for the proper performance of the political elite.

The Debate on Party Legitimacy in China: A Mixed Quantitative/Qualitative Analysis

We report results here from a mixed quantitative–qualitative analysis of 168 articles published in China on the question of regime and party legitimacy. We find that ideology remains a leading strategy of future legitimation for the CCP, alongside better known strategies of institution-building and social justice. We also find that liberalism, while less often proposed, remains a potent critique of regime legitimacy. We use these results to make predictions about the evolutionary path of institutional change of Chinas political system, linking up Chinese elite debate with the wider scholarly debate of authoritarian durability.

Replicating Elite Dominance in Intangible Cultural Heritage Safeguarding: The Role of Local Government–Scholar Networks in China

Since “intangible cultural heritage” (ICH) became the new focal point in the global heritage discourse, governments and scholars in many countries have begun to promote this new form of “immaterial” culture. The People’s Republic of China has been one of the most active state parties implementing the new scheme and adapting it to domestic discourses and practices. Policies formulated at the national level have become increasingly malleable to the interests of local government-scholar networks. By conducting a comparative case study of two provinces, this article aims to identify the role of local elite networks in the domestic implementation of the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, focusing on the incentives of scholars and officials to participate in ICH policy networks. It finds that the implementation of the Convention has not removed the power asymmetry between elite and popular actors but, instead, has fostered an elite-driven policy approach shaped by symbiotic, mutually legitimizing government–scholar networks.

Reclaiming Legitimacy in Postrevolutionary China: Bringing Ideology and Governance Back In

The contemporary politics of China reflects an ongoing effort by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to reclaim the right to rule in light of the consequences of economic development, international pressures, and historical change. China stands out within the Asian region for the relative success the regime has achieved in that effort. While the CCP does face challenges to its legitimacy, those challenges are for the most part defeated by regime claims. In some respects, China is a classically Asian case: a democratic opposition struggles against the rational-legal and economic performance claims of the regime.

Negative Classifications and the Symbolic Order of Social Inequality: Evidence from East Asia

ABSTRACT This article explains a cultural sociological approach to research on social inequality. “Cultural sociological” means that we do not regard social inequality as resulting only from a distributive order of goods, income and positions, but also from an evaluative order created and reproduced by the actions of social groups. Concerning the topic of this thematic issue, this means that, from a sociological perspective, we see “weakness” not only as the social vulnerability of actors and groups resulting from a lack of material resources, education and power, but also as an attribution and assessment which can have a variety of social consequences. “Weakness” can compel others to help the weak and defend their interests. But if the weak are to be protected and empowered, they must be identified as “weak” in the first place, and this act of identification can have paradoxical consequences. As we demonstrate with evidence from East Asia, the social designation as “weak” can have many adverse effects for the weak groups themselves, because it blames them for their own weaknesses and publicly condemns, disparages, or stigmatizes them. Based on an analysis of the situation of victims of the Fukushima disaster in Japan and of rural migrants and their offspring living in Chinese metropoles, we show how social designations of weakness can produce negative classifications that signal disrespect to weak actors and limit their opportunities for action.

Reflecting the Moving Target of Asia

Representatives from the social sciences and cultural studies continue to exhibit mutual reservations and sensitivities when they encounter each other in the field of Area Studies. This is particularly so with regard to research on Asia, where interdisciplinarity is often simply paid lip service rather than utilized as a serious opportunity for collaboration. Given this background, this chapter discusses various approaches to describing the sub-regions of East and Southeast Asia. It argues that the communicative construction of areas is a process subject to dialectical movements of de- and reterritorialization, which should be examined as issues of equal empirical rank. Using the term “reflexive essentialism”, the chapter aims to encourage a more systematic reflection on simultaneous entrenchments and essentialist self-assurances from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Protecting the Weak: Welfare during East Asia’s Long Twentieth Century

In 1997, R. Bin Wong, an American-educated historian of East Asia, pointed out that China’s state-sponsored granaries for famine relief during the dynastic era “represented official commitments to material welfare beyond anything imaginable, let alone achieved, in Europe. To think of state concerns for popular welfare as a very recent political practice makes sense only if we again limit ourselves to Western examples.” For Wong’s colleague Alexander Woodside, this aspect of Chinese history signifies a “lost modernity” which he observes not only in China, but also in the so-called “mandarinates” of Korea and Vietnam. While there are differences with the situation in Japan, Confucian paternalism was prevalent in the latter places as well. There certainly is no doubt that East Asian intellectual traditions paid a high degree of attention to the protection of weaker groups of society and those exposed to different kinds of calamities, and that East Asian states for centuries have gone to considerable lengths to put these ideas into practice. One actually could go one step further and include non-human interests in this observation, such as, for example, the protection of certain animals. While it would be wrong to present East Asian traditions about obligations of the strong to the weak as an idealized counter-image to a Western civilization relentlessly focusing on egoistic selfinterest, there is little doubt that by the early twentieth century the tables had decisively turned. As a “land of famine,” China – and by extension most of the Far East –was widely considered a place in which the state was incapable of providing a basic livelihood for its subjects. This view was widely shared among the elites of the West – to quite some extent responsible for the situation – as well as among East Asian elites and modernizers. Many among the latter subscribed to a worldview increasingly tainted by Social Darwinism, which had circulated in Japan, Korea, and China since the late nineteenth century. Vladimir Tikhonov’s contribution to this issue, which focuses on the reception of Social Darwinism in Korea, shows that this ideology became widely popular throughout East Asia within a very brief time, forming the main frame of reference for modernizing elites well into the twentieth century. Already during the last years of the nineteenth century it had become clear that the drive to modernization with the goal of competing in a world guided by Darwinian principles would mean a dramatic scaling down of traditional approaches to welfare. This became especially