Tony Saich

Negotiating the State: The Development of Social Organizations in China

One notable feature of the reform programme sponsored by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been the expansion of social organizations. With greater social space created by the reforms and with the state unable or unwilling to carry the same wide range of services and functions as before, organizations with varying degrees of autonomy from the party-state structures have been set up. They have been allowed or have created an increased organizational sphere and social space in which to operate and to represent social interests, and to convey those interests into the policy-making process. They not only liaise between state and society but also fulfil vital welfare functions that would otherwise go unserved.

Constitution of the People's Republic of China

China is one of the countries with the longest histories in the world. The people of all nationalities in China have jointly created a splendid culture and have a glorious revolutionary tradition. Feudal China was gradually reduced after 1840 to a semi-colonial and semi-feudal country. The Chinese people waged wave upon wave of heroic struggles for national independence and liberation and for democracy and freedom. Great and earth-shaking historical changes have taken place in China in the 20th century. The Revolution of 1911, led by Dr Sun Yat-sen, abolished the feudal monarchy and gave birth to the Republic of China. But the Chinese people had yet to fulfil their historical task of overthrowing imperialism and feudalism. After waging hard, protracted and tortuous struggles, armed and otherwise, the Chinese people of all nationalities led by the Communist Party of China with Chairman Mao Zedong as its leader ultimately, in 1949, overthrew the rule of imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism, won the great victory of the new-democratic revolution and founded the Peoples Republic of China. Thereupon the Chinese people took state power into their own hands and became masters of the country.

China Urbanizes : Consequences, Strategies, and Policies

Rural-urban migration is playing an increasingly important role in shaping the economic and demographic landscape of Chinese cities. Over the past two decades, China has transformed itself from a relatively immobile society to one in which more than 10 percent of the population are migrants. Chinas mobility rate is still low compared with that of advanced industrial economies, the sheer size of the migrant flows and their dramatic economic and social consequences have already profoundly affected economic growth and urban development. Looking ahead, decision makers at all levels will need to craft policies that address issues of migration and rural-urban migrants issues that are hotly debated among scholars, Chinese policy makers, and others. This report presents recent findings that describe migration patterns and changes since the 1980s.

The Chinese Communist Party

Before looking in detail at the three main apparats it is worth devoting a few words to some of the more general issues concerning the network of power in China. Like other communist-party states, China can be studied in terms of the classic duality of the Party and the state and their interrelationship. The general view is that the Party directs the administrative state machinery, but China’s legacy from the guerrilla war has meant that the distinction between the Party and the state has been blurred and that, on occasions, the personnel of the two apparats has been identical. This has caused confusion about the division of responsibility between policy formulation and implementation. Another important inheritance is the level of military involvement in the political system — an involvement which is different from that of the military in the Soviet Union, where it acts as a pressure group pursuing ‘professional’ interests. In China, many people at the top levels in the decision-making process have held concurrent civilian and military posts, making it difficult to talk of a ‘military interest at work’. Also, unlike in the Soviet Union, the military plays a large part in the activities of the CCP at all levels, not just at the centre.1

The Fourteenth Party Congress: A Programme for Authoritarian Rule

The 14th Party Congress heralded a victory for Deng Xiaopings programme of rapid economic transformation accompanied by tight political control. His name and policies were lauded in Jiang Zemins “Work Report” to the Congress and the theory of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” became the cornerstone of the revised Party Constitution. The overhaul of leading personnel has provided a clear Politburo majority in favour of the increasing marketization of Chinas economy. Thus, the Party has created perhaps one last chance to position itself at the forefront of reform rather than appearing as an antique body engaged in increasingly irrelevant ideological polemics.x Whether it will be able to ride this newly re-released tiger of economic reform will depend on its capacity to deal with the social and political consequences of its strategy, many of which will be unpredictable. In essence, the easy part of reform was completed in the 1980s and the difficult stage will now begin. Citizens will be hit as rents and pricesrise, and the state will have to offer employment or welfare to those who lose their jobs if enterprises are forced to become genuinely efficient. It will take a trustworthy, competent and imaginative leadership to sell this programme to the Chinese people, a task made even harder by the credibility gap that has widened enormously in recent years. The mandate for change is there, but whether it will be exploited effectively remains to be seen. Past experience suggests that despite the commitment to bold changes, the Party will slow down the pace of reform once it senses potential unrest.

Township Elections in China: Extending Democracy or Institutional Innovation:

* Xuedong Yang conducted the fieldwork in Suining for this paper in September 2001. The authors would like to thank Zhang Jinming (former district party secretary, currently vice-mayor of Suining), Yang Huadi (deputy party secretary of Shizhong District), Ma Shengkang (director of the organisation department of Shizhong District), Liu Hui (deputy-director of the organisation department), Xiang Daoquan (former head of Baoshi Township, subsequently party secretary of Hengshan Township), Tang Kunlong (party secretary ofDongchan Township) and other local officials. They provided much information about the direct election in Buyun and about the process of ’open recommendation and selection’ (gongtui gongxuan) system. Unless otherwise noted, the information in this paper is drawn from discussions with them. However, the authors alone are responsible for the ideas expressed here. An earlier version of this paper appeared in Pacific Affairs, Summer 2003.

Political Participation and Protest

Until the reforms began in the late 1970s, China was distinctive for political participation mobilized by the party leadership to show public support for their policies. This chapter looks first at the distinctive features of sanctioned participation under Mao Zedong, such as mass campaigns and the use of role models, and how this participation has changed during the reform period. The remainder of the chapter looks at the existing mechanisms for citizen participation such as sanctioned mass organizations, electoral participation and membership in NGOs. The chapter concludes with an analysis of dissent and protest both within the party and outside.

The People’s Liberation Army

The People’s Liberation Army, unlike armies in the West, is more than a professional standing army and has a wider field of operation than that of a bureaucratic pressure group competing for scarce resources. The role of the army in the Chinese political system owes its origins to the pre-liberation struggle described in chapter 1. Apart from causing institutional and personnel overlap, the liberation struggle has affected the functions of the military since liberation. The conditions during the Long March and in Yanan, and the need to rely on the population to wage guerrilla warfare, meant that the PLA became a multi-functional body carrying out education and production tasks. This legacy of the past, and the success of the military, led Mao Zedong to have a highly favourable view not just of the military per se but also as a participant in the political system. When Mao sought to purify the ranks of the Party and state during the Cultural Revolution he turned to the army for help, because he felt that under Lin Biao’s leadership it embodied the ‘true spirit’ of the revolution. Since liberation certain sections of the leadership have tried to downgrade this ‘traditional’ role of the PLA, and have tried to ‘professionalise’ it by concentrating on its purely military functions.

Development and Choice

The chapters in this volume question many of the glib assertions made about the development trajectories of China and India. They reject the commonly expressed view of strong Chinese success and relative Indian failure and propose a more complex view of the relative success of both polities while showing that they have grappled with similar problems with more mixed results than much previous literature has suggested. Of itself this is no mean achievement and the questions raised in the various chapters should stimulate further research. One suspects that the old cliches will not slip away quickly but let us hope that we will see more nuanced research in the future. Such research is significant given that we are talking about the world’s two most populous countries and lessons about what has worked and what has failed may provide important learning experiences for other lesser-developed countries striving to get out of poverty through shifting to more sustainable economic growth.

The Chinese Communist Party and the Future

The crisis in which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) currently finds itself is the deepest and most damaging since the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. It will be a major struggle for the Party to restore its legitimacy. Already its economic mismanagement over the past three decades, and its blocking of the organic development of alternatives, created a widespread cynicism towards the Party among the population at large. The added hostility as a result of the events of June 1989 makes the Party’s attempts to rebuild its image all the more difficult. The economic program offered is insufficient to create the kind of well-