Reform And Development In China: After 40 Years. Группа авторов
flow on the Internet — instant, interactive and boundless — has undermined the effectiveness of traditional methods of propaganda.
To be fair, Chinese want the Western style of freedom and human rights. But China takes a long-term view in terms of the realization of human rights. The leadership does not believe that radical democratization will help China realize freedom and human rights. In this sense, the country is a part of the East Asian model. In East Asia, particularly the four little dragons, namely, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan, freedom and human rights have been realized in an incremental way, the economic rights first, then the social rights and finally the political rights. Of course, no one is sure whether the CCP will be able to realize these rights via an orderly and incremental process.
Democracy has many advantages. The Economist emphasizes and I quote:
“Democracies are on average richer than non-democracies, are less likely to go to war and have a better record of fighting corruption. More fundamentally, democracy lets people speak their minds and shape their own and their children’s future. That so many people in so many different parts of the world are prepared to risk so much for this idea is testimony to its enduring appeal” (ibid, p. 47). Unquote.
The attractiveness of democracy expressed by this quote is certainly true. But democracy does not fall from the sky. One can cite The Economist again and I quote:
“building the institutions needed to sustain democracy is very slow work indeed, and has dispelled the once-popular notion that democracy will blossom rapidly and spontaneously once the seed is planted. Western countries almost all extended the right to vote long after the establishment of sophisticated political systems, with powerful civil services and entrenched constitutional rights, in societies that cherished the notions of individual rights and independent judiciaries” (p. 49). Unquote.
This is exactly what China has learned from successful stories of democracies in the West and tragedies of democracies in the developing world. In the post-Mao era, China has been regarded as a “learning state.” “Learning from other countries” has been the major source of China’s progress. Equally important is that China has also learned from the failure of other countries. China’s economic reform has been market oriented, but the country does not want the market to dominate the whole economy. The state has used the market to ruthlessly push economic development, but the market is still under the state control. From a Western perspective, China’s state sector is a symbol of the country’s low level of productivity, and worst, an abhorrence that should be quickly done away with. But from a Chinese perspective, the state sector is a powerful tool for the government to promote growth, balance the market and cope with economic crisis. China has learned from the West how to develop a set of social policies. However, it does not want a Western style welfare state. Also, as already mentioned, China is incorporating some democratic mechanisms, but it does not wish to give up its long tradition of meritocracy. China’s selective importation of Western state parts and their integration with its own tradition have made it stronger than the West.
As a “learning state,” China has actually been quite innovative in reforming its political institutions. Drastic social and economic changes must be accompanied by similar drastic political changes. Marx is still right. And I think we cannot deny that China has a right to explore its own political path. It is good not only for China itself, but also for other countries, particularly the developing world. In an age of democratic crisis in both the developed West and the developing world, China’s institutional experiment is becoming particularly meaningful. Its experiment may shed useful lessons for other countries.
Finally, in my view, there is no need to perceive China’s experiment as an attempt at undermining political systems practiced elsewhere. As mentioned above, China itself has learnt from the best practices as well as lessons of the political systems of the West and combined it with its own traditions. This act of learning and adaptation is primarily driven by the need to devise a political entity that works for China in line with changing conditions. That is the ultimate goal of China’s political innovations. China is not out to change the world.
And it is in the interest of the world to have a China that succeeds in this experiment. A China that fails in this experiment is likely to unleash strong negative repercussions on the rest of the world. On the other hand, a China that evolves its own path forward is likely to produce a stable, prosperous and peaceful China. This will in turn provide many opportunities for other countries to grow and benefit alongside China.
Chapter
2
A Turning Point (Maybe) in Reform and Opening Up
Joseph FEWSMITH
Boston University, Boston, MA, USA
1.Introduction
In this chapter, I focus on one turning point in reform and opening up because I think that it raises questions of theory and understanding that remain relevant today. The turning point I mean is the opening of the period we refer to as “reform and opening.”
There are, of course, many aspects of the inauguration of reform and opening up, including the power dynamics involved in the arrest of the Gang of Four, the return of veteran cadres such as Deng Xiaoping and the ideological turning point marked by the discussion on practice as the sole criterion of truth. All these aspects are interesting and important, but the one that interests me is the organizational turning point — the reform of the cadre system. The cultural revolution unleashed violence and chaos across China, but it most threatened the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) through its disruption of the cadre system. Senior cadres were harshly criticized and often jailed while younger cadres rose to power through “helicopter” promotions, an expression that points to the disruption of bureaucratic regimes and the lack of predictability in official careers.
One of the major effects of China’s turn toward reform and opening was the “regularization” of the cadre system. Hu Yaobang, in his 12 months, as the head of the Organization Department, had much to do with this. He tackled the 61-persons case, bringing Bo Yibo back into power (much to Hu’s later regret — Bo would, in 1987, preside over the “party life meeting” that removed Hu as General Secretary of the party) and oversaw the remaking of the party hierarchy. In 1980, after Hu Yaobang had left the Organization Department, the party would promulgate the Regulations Governing cadres. And soon after that, the retirement system was inaugurated, moving old and often hostile (to reform and opening) cadres out of positions, opening up opportunities for younger and better-educated cadres. Writers on China often refer to this as the “normalization” or “regularization” of the cadre system, and for years we tracked how each party congress brought in younger and better-educated cadres.
Hong-yung Lee wrote one of the books to trace this transition. Lee was optimistic about this transition from revolutionary cadres to party technocrats, believing that technocrats, by temperament and training are inclined toward compromise and bargaining. Moreover, the lack of informal ties among cadres, Lee hoped, would “compel the new leaders to rely more on formal procedural rules when making decisions and thereby facilitate the institutionalization of the Chinese political process.”1 In the years since, the idea that China’s political process has become institutionalized has become widespread. Bo Zhiyue has discussed the “institutionalization of elite management,” and Alice Miller has argued that Deng Xiaoping and his reform coalition favored institutionalization of political processes as a response to the cultural revolution, both to prevent the over-concentration of power and to promote the modernization that was deemed the party’s primary task.
As these quotes suggest, there has been an argument that politics has become institutionalized at both the elite level and at the bureaucratic level. I do not think either of these arguments is correct, but here I want to concentrate on the bureaucratic level. The idea that China’s political system, the cadre system, has become institutionalized suggests that China has developed, or is well on the way to developing, a reasonable approximation of a Weberian bureaucracy, that party cadres