Politics in China: An Introduction, Second Edition

POLITICS IN CHINA AN INTRODUCTION SECOND EDITION EDITED BY WILLIAM A JOSEPH Politics in China Politics in China An Introduction S e c o n d e d i t i o n Edited By William A Joseph 1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford It furthers the Universitys objective of excellence in research scholarship and education by publishing worldwide Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue New York NY 10016 Oxford University Press 2014 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press or as expressly permitted by law by license or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department Oxford University Press at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Politics in China an introduction Second edition edited by William A Joseph p cm Includes index ISBN 9780199339426 hardcover alk paper1 ChinaPolitics and government I Joseph William A JQ1510P655 2010 320951dc22 2009027998 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acidfree paper 1 To my Sinomentors John Wilson Lewis and Harry Harding 子曰 學而時習之不亦說乎 The Master said To learn something and then to put it into practice at the right time is this not a joy Confucius The Analects Chapter 1 Verse 1 Translated by Simon Leys Norton 1997 Contents List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi List of Contributors xiii Abbreviations xvii intRodUction 1 1 Studying Chinese Politics 3 William A Joseph PARt i tHe PoLiticAL HiStoRY oF ModeRn cHinA 2 From Empire to Peoples Republic 41 R Keith Schoppa 3 Mao Zedong in Power 19491976 72 Frederick C Teiwes 4 Deng Xiaoping and His Successors 1976 to the Present 119 Bruce Gilley PARt ii ideoLoGY GoVeRnAnce LAW And PoLiticAL econoMY 5 Ideology and Chinas Political Development 149 William A Joseph 6 Chinas Communist PartyState The Structure and Dynamics of Power 192 Cheng Li viii C o n t e n t s 7 Chinas Legal System 224 Jacques deLisle 8 Chinas Political Economy 254 David Zweig PARt iii PoLiticS And PoLicY in Action 9 Rural China Reform and Resistance 293 John James Kennedy 10 Urban China Change and Contention 320 William Hurst 11 Policy Case Study The Arts 342 Richard Curt Kraus 12 Policy Case Study The Environment 352 Katherine Morton 13 Policy Case Study Public Health 365 Joan Kaufman 14 Population Policy 380 Tyrene White PARt iV PoLiticS on cHinAS PeRiPHeRY 15 Tibet 401 Robert Barnett 16 Xinjiang 428 Gardner Bovingdon 17 Hong Kong 452 Sonny ShiuHing Lo 18 Taiwan 468 Shelley Rigger Timeline of Modern Chinese Political History 485 Glossary 491 Index 527 List of Illustrations MAPS Map of China xix Tibet Autonomous Region and Tibetan Plateau 403 Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region 431 Hong Kong 453 Taiwan 470 FiGUReS 11 Chinas Economic Growth 19802012 4 12 Administrative Divisions of the Peoples Republic of China Data 9 13 Chinese History from Imperial Times to the Present 12 61 Organization of the Chinese Communist Party 195 62 Organization of the Peoples Republic of China 200 63 CCP Membership 19492013 204 64 Occupations of CCP Members 2011 204 65 Politburo Members with Provincial Experience 19922012 207 66 Membership Turnover of Top CCP Organizations at the 18th Party Congress November 2012 214 81 Chinas Agricultural Output 19782012 annual growth 263 82 Chinas GDP by Sector of the Economy 19762012 269 83 Chinas Foreign Trade 19802012 275 84 Chinas Imports and Exports as a Percent of GDP 19782012 275 85 Chinas Going Out Strategy Annual NonFinancial Foreign Direct Investment and Number of Firms 279 x L i s t o f i L L u s t r a t i o n s 86 Chinas UrbanRural Income Gap 19782012 283 91 PartyGovernment Officials and Administrative Divisions Below the Provincial Level 296 92 Selection of Village Cadres and Town Officials 301 101 Urban Disposable Income per Capita and Employment in StateOwned Enterprises 19902010 328 121 Carbon Dioxide Emissions 19802030 355 131 Estimated Number of People Living with HIV in China 19902011 374 132 Sources of HIVAIDS Transmission in China 19852011 375 141 Chinas Population 19602012 382 142 Total Fertility Rate 19502050 384 181 Taiwans Economic Growth by Decade 473 tAbLeS 11 Chinas Economic Development in Comparative Perspective 15 31 Top Leaders of China from 1949 to 1976 76 41 Top Leaders of China since 1976 122 61 CCP Politburo Standing Committee elected November 2012 199 81 Indicators of Chinas Global Integration 19782011 259 131 Chinas Health c 19502011 367 181 Survey on The Publics Views on Current CrossStrait Relations December 2012 477 Acknowledgments In the most immediate sense this project began when Oxford University Press invited me to submit a proposal for an introductory textbook on Chinese politics more than six years ago But its true origins go back over four decades to the summer of 1966 when I took my first college course on China My interest had been piqued by events unfolding in Beijing we called it Peking then as the Red Guardsuniversity stu dents like myselfwere challenging professors about their political views and meth ods of education during the very early stages of Chinas Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution It was a tumultuous time on American and European college campuses too and the youthful rebellion against authority in China seemed to many to be part of a global generational movement The news from the Peoples Republic of China PRC we called it Communist China or Red China then reaching Western audiences in the mid1960s was at best piecemeal and sketchy because of Cold War hostilities and the PRCs increasing isolation from much of the world It would be quite a few years before the terrible destructiveness of the Cultural Revolution and the atrocities committed by the Red Guards would become widely known and welldocumented By then I was immersed in Chinese Studies I had been intellectually captivated by that summer school course taken at Berkeley with the incomparable Benjamin I Schwartz of Harvard When I returned to Cornell for my sophomore year in the fall of 1966 I took the plunge into learning Chinese I also began my study of Chinese politics with Professor John Wilson Lewis What an extraordinary time that was to be learning about Chinese politics I still vividly recall Professor Lewiss lecture on why the philosophical debate that had raged a couple of years before in China over whether one divides into two or two unites into one was cru cial to understanding Chairman Mao Zedongs ideological motives for launching the Cultural Revolution John became my undergraduate advisor and I was very fortunate to be able to continue my study of Chinese politics with him at Stanford where I completed an MA in East Asian Studies and a PhD in political science I also benefited enormously in my training at Stanford as a China Watcher political xii a C k n o w L e d g m e n t s scientist and teacher from the guidance and inspiration provided by Harry Harding I dedicate this book with deepest gratitude to my academic mentors John Wilson Lewis and Harry Harding I am especially indebted to David McBride EditorinChief Social Sciences and Alexandra Dauler Associate Editor at Oxford University Press for their encourage ment and support for this project from its inception The contributors are what make this volume unique Each is a broadly trained China scholar and practitioner in her or his discipline mostly political science but each is also a specialist in the study of the particular subject of the chapter of which he or she is the author It has been a pleasure and an honor to work closely with them and I want to thank them for being part of this venture I learned a great deal from them as I have from so many other colleagues in the China field The contributors and I are very grateful to the following China scholars for their valuable input to the first or second edition Marc Belcher Edward Friedman Thomas B Gold Merle Goldman J Megan Greene David M Lampton Kenneth Lieberthal Barrett McCormick Kevin J OBrien Michael Parks Margaret Pearson Michael Sheng Wenfang Tang Fengshi Wu and several anonymous reviewers As editor I assume full responsibility for any and all errors I invite readers to send comments or corrections directly to me at wjosephwellesleyedu William A Joseph Wellesley College March 2014 List of Contributors Robert Barnett is Director of the Modern Tibetan Studies Program at Columbia University in New York From 20002005 he was director of the joint Columbia University of Virginia summer program at Tibet University in Lhasa where he also taught in 2001 He has written on Tibetan cinema and television within Tibet women and politics in the Tibet Autonomous Region post1950 leaders in Tibet contemporary exorcism rituals and other subjects His books include Tibetan Modernities Notes from the Field with Ronald Schwartz 2008 Lhasa Streets with Memories 2006 and The Poisoned Arrow the Secret Petition of the 10th Panchen Lama 1997 Gardner Bovingdon is Associate Professor in the Departments of Central Eurasian Studies and International Studies and Adjunct Associate Professor of Political Science at Indiana University A specialist on nationalism identity politics and historiography with a geographical focus on Central Asia he has published a number of journal articles and book chapters on these topics He is the author of The Uyghurs Strangers in Their Own Land 2010 Jacques DeLisle is Stephen A Cozen Professor of Law Professor of Political Science Director of the Center for East Asian Studies and Deputy Director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Asia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute His scholarship focuses on domestic legal and legalinstitutional reform in China the relationship of legal development to economic and political change in China the roles of law in addressing crises in China Chinas engagement with the international legal order and Taiwans international status and crossStrait relations and has appeared in many international affairs journals and law reviews He is the coeditor of China Under Hu Jintao 2005 and Chinas Challenges The Road Ahead forthcoming Bruce Gilley is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Doctoral Program in Public Affairs and Policy in the Mark O Hatfield School of Government at Portland State University His research centers on the comparative and international xiv L i s t o f C o n t r i b u t o r s politics of China and Asia as well as the comparative politics of democracy and political legitimacy He is the author of Chinas Democratic Future 2004 and The Right to Rule How States Win and Lose Legitimacy 2009 He is a member of the board of directors of the Journal of Democracy and a frequent commentator and speaker on issues relating to Chinas democratization William Hurst is Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University He is the author of The Chinese Worker after Socialism 2009 and coeditor of Laidoff Workers in a Workers State Unemployment with Chinese Characteristics 2009 as well as a forthcoming volume on Chinese local governance His ongoing research focuses on the politics of legal institutions in both China and Indonesia William A Joseph is Professor of Political Science and chair of the department at Wellesley College and an Associate in Research of the John King Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University He is the author of The Critique of UltraLeftism in China 1984 and editor or coeditor of New Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution 1991 China Briefing 1991 1992 1994 1997 The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World 2nd ed 2001 Introduction to Comparative Politics Political Challenges and Changing Agendas 6th ed 2012 Joan Kaufman is the Director of Columbia Universitys Global Center for East Asia based in Beijing and Senior Lecturer at Columbia Universitys Mailman School of Public Health She was previously Lecturer on Global Health and Social Medicine Harvard Medical School Distinguished Scientist at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management Brandeis University senior fellow and founder of the AIDS Public Policy Project at Harvards Kennedy School of Government and China team leader for the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative She has worked for Ford Foundation and the UN in China was a Radcliffe fellow at Harvard and a Soros Reproductive Health and Rights Fellow Dr Kaufman teaches works and writes on AIDS gender international health infectious diseases reproductive health health sector reform and health governance issues with a focus on China John James Kennedy is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Kansas His research focuses on rural social and political development including village elections tax reform and rural education He frequently returns to China to conduct fieldwork and collaborate with Chinese colleagues at Northwest University Xian Shaanxi province Professor Kennedy has published several book chapters as well as articles in journals such as Asian Survey The China Quarterly the Journal of Chinese Political Science Journal of Contemporary China and Political Studies Richard Curt Kraus is Professor Emeritus of Political Science University of Oregon He is the author of Class Conflict in Chinese Socialism 1981 Pianos and Politics in China 1989 Brushes with Power Modern Politics and the Chinese Art of Calligraphy 1991 The Party and the Arty 2004 The Cultural Revolution A Very Short Introduction 2012 and coeditor of Urban Spaces Autonomy and Community in Contemporary China 1995 Cheng Li is Research Director and Senior Fellow of the John L Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution He is the author or the editor of Rediscovering L i s t o f C o n t r i b u t o r s xv China Dynamics and Dilemmas of Reform 1997 Chinas Leaders The New Generation 2001 Chinas Changing Political Landscape Prospects for Democracy 2008 Chinas Emerging Middle Class Beyond Economic Transformation 2010 The Political Mapping of Chinas Tobacco Industry and AntiSmoking Campaign 2012 and The Road to Zhongnanhai 2012 in Chinese He is currently completing a book manuscript on Chinese Politics in a New Era of Collective Leadership Dr Li is the principal editor of the Thornton Center Chinese Thinkers Series published by the Brookings Institution Press He is also a columnist for the Hoover Institutions online journal China Leadership Monitor Sonny ShiuHing Lo is Professor and Head in the Department of Social Sciences at the Hong Kong Institute of Education His works include The Politics of CrossBorder Crime in Greater China Case Studies of Mainland China Hong Kong and Macao 2009 The Dynamics of BeijingHong Kong Relations A Model for Taiwan 2008 and Political Change in Macao 2008 He is now completing a book on Chinese politics Katherine Morton is a Senior Fellow in the Department of International Relations at the Australian National University She is a specialist on China and International Relations with a particular focus on environmental and climate governance nontraditional security global governance and international norms She is currently involved in a major international collaborative research project on Climate Change and Water Security across the HimalayanTibetan Plateau with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and other partner institutions across the region Shelley Rigger is Brown Professor of East Asian Politics at Davidson College She is the author of Why Taiwan Matters Small Island Global Powerhouse 2011 Politics in Taiwan Voting for Democracy 1999 From Opposition to Power Taiwans Democratic Progressive Party 2001 Taiwans Rising Rationalism Generations Politics and Taiwan Nationalism monograph 2006 as well as articles on Taiwans domestic politics the national identity issue in TaiwanChina relations and related topics She has been a visiting researcher at National Chengchi University in Taiwan and a visiting professor at Fudan University and Shanghai Jiaotong University R Keith Schoppa is Doehler Chair in Asian History at Loyola University Maryland He has authored many books and articles including most recently In a Sea of Bitterness Refugees during the SinoJapanese War 2011 Blood Road The Mystery of Shen Dingyi in Revolutionary China 1996 which won the 1997 Association for Asian Studies Levenson Prize for the best book on twentiethcentury China and textbooks on modern China and East Asia He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities the American Council of Learned Societies and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Frederick C Teiwes is Emeritus Professor of Chinese Politics at the University of Sydney He is the author of numerous works on Chinese Communist elite politics during the Maoist era including Politics and Purges in China 1979 Politics at Maos Court 1990 2nd edition 1993 The Tragedy of Lin Biao 1996 Chinas Road to Disaster 1999 and The End of the Maoist Era 2007 the latter three studies coauthored xvi L i s t o f C o n t r i b u t o r s with Warren Sun He thanks the Australian Research Council for generous research support over many years Tyrene White is Professor of Political Science at Swarthmore College She is the author of Chinas Longest Campaign Birth Planning in the Peoples Republic 1949 2005 2006 and many articles on rural politics and population policy in China She is the editor of China Briefing The Continuing Transformation 2000 and coeditor of Engendering China Women Culture and the State 1994 Her current research is on the local political influence of Chinese NGOs and on the use of litigation to improve the status of Chinese women She teaches courses on contemporary China East Asia and population politics David Zweig is Chair Professor Division of Social Science and Director of the Center on Environment Energy and Resource Policy at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology He is the author of four books including Agrarian Radicalism in China 19681981 1989 Freeing Chinas Farmers 1997 and Internationalizing China Domestic Interests and Global Linkages 2002 soon to come out in Chinese from Renmin University Press He is currently a Senior Research Associate at the AsiaPacific Foundation Vancouver British Columbia Abbreviations ACWF AllChina Womens Federation AR autonomous region CC Central Committee CCP Chinese Communist Party CCRG Central Cultural Revolution Group CCTV China Central Television CCYL Chinese Communist Youth League CMC Central Military Commission CMS Cooperative Medical Scheme CPSU Communist Party of the Soviet Union DPP Democratic Progressive Party ELG ExportLed Growth HIVAIDS Human Immunodeficiency VirusAcquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome HKSAR Hong Kong Special Administrative Region HLLAPCs HigherLevel Agricultural Producer Cooperatives Collectives IMF International Monetary Fund KMT Kuomintang LegCo Legislative Council LLPAPCs LowerLevel Agricultural Producer Cooperatives Cooperatives NCNA New China News Agency Xinhua NPC National Peoples Congress PAP Peoples Armed Police PBSC Politburo Standing Committee PLA Peoples Liberation Army PRC Peoples Republic of China ROC Republic of China SAR special administrative region SARS Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome SASAC State Asset Supervision and Administration Commission xviii a b b r e v i a t i o n s SCNPC Standing Committee of the National Peoples Congress SEZ Special Economic Zone SMEs small and medium enterprises SOE stateowned enterprise TAR Tibet Autonomous Region TVE township and village enterprise USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics VRA Villager Representative Assembly WTO World Trade Organization XPCC Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps bingtuan XUAR Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region YELLOW SEA SEA OF JAPAN PACIFIC OCEAN SOUTH CHINA SEA EAST CHINA SEA Yanan Chongqing Chongqing RUSSIA MONGOLIA INDIA JAPAN AFGHANISTAN TAIWAN 0 0 500 km 300 mi N Beijing Beijing TAJIKISTAN VIETNAM LAOS THAILAND BURMA MYANMAR PAKISTAN KYRGYZSTAN KAZAKHSTAN NEPAL BANGLADESH Yel lo w Ri v e r P e a rl R i v e r HAINAN QINGHAI GANSU SHAANXI SHANXI HEBEI LIAONING JILIN HEILONGJIANG YUNNAN GUIZHOU HUNAN XINJIANG HUBEI NINGXIA TIBET GUANGXI GUANGDONG JIANGXI FUJIAN SICHUAN HENAN SHANDONG I N N E R M O N G O L I A ANHUI QINGHAI GANSU SHAANXI SHANXI HEBEI LIAONING JILIN HEILONGJIANG YUNNAN GUIZHOU HUNAN XINJIANG HUBEI NINGXIA Yan an TIBET GUANGXI GUANGDONG JIANGXI FUJIAN SICHUAN HENAN SHANDONG I N N E R M O N G O L I A ANHUI Shenzhen Shanghai Hong Kong Macao Tianjin ZHEJIANG JIANGSU NORTH KOREA SOUTH KOREA Y a n g t z e R i ver BHUTAN Disputed Border Map of China Politics in China Introduction In 1978 the Peoples Republic of China PRC was one of the worlds poorest countries and the standard of liv ing for the vast majority of the population had improved only slightly for nearly two decades China was also dip lomatically isolated barely engaged in the international economy and little more than a regional military power Today China is the worlds second largest and most dynamic economy Over the last thirtyfive years it has experienced an economic transformation that is widely hailed as a miracle1 that has produced one of the biggest improvements in human welfare anywhere at any time2 see Figure 11 The PRC is now the worlds largest trading nation and its export and import policies have an enormous impact in liter ally every corner of the globe It is a rising power that is challenging the United States for global influence and a key member of all important international organizations The Chinese military is worldclass with a formidable arsenal of nuclear weapons and a rapidly modernizing oceangoing navy But prior to the beginning of its remarkable rise to relative economic prosperity and international prominence the PRC experienced a series of national traumas In the late 1950s and early 1960s China went through the most deadly famine in human history caused largely by the actions and inactions of its political leaders Not long after that catastrophe over the decade from 1966 to 1976 there was first a collapse of central government authority that pushed the country to the brink of and in some places actually into civil war and anarchy a reign of terror that tore at the very fabric of Chinese society and a vicious and destructive assault against traditional culture followed by destabilizing power struggles among the top leadership Studying Chinese Politics Wi l l i am a Jo s e p h 1 4 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a The famine and political chaos occurred during the period when Mao Zedong was chairman of the Chinese Communist Party CCP and the undisputed and largely indisputable leader of the Peoples Republic from its founding in 1949 to his death in 1976 The Maoist era was not without its accomplishments which are discussed in this book but overwhelming scholarly opinion is that it was as a whole a disas ter for China economically politically culturally environmentally and in other ways The emergence of China as a global power that we are witnessing today did not begin until the early 1980s with the onset of the postMao economic reform era under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping who along with Mao Zedong ranks as the most influen tial Chinese political leader of modern times Deng and the other leaders who have followed Mao in power have taken the country in a very unMaoist direction with spectacular economic results and many other profound changes The political story of Chinas incredible journey from Mao to now is one of the central themes of this book But one thing about China has not changed throughout the history of the Peoples Republic from the beginning of the Maoist era to the present the CCP has never been seriously challenged as Chinas ruling party There have been sporadic protests by students and peasants labor unrest ethnic uprisings and deep pockets of dissent and discontent but all have been quelled before they could become threatening to the CCPs hold on power The party itself has been through internal purges and almost inexplicable ideological and policy turnabouts Communist rule has not only survived in China By many measures it has thrived The CCP appears to maintain a firm grip on power while most other communist regimes have long perished from this earth The hows and whys of this fundamental political continuity is another main theme of this volume One part of the answer to 0 1000 2000 3000 4000 5000 6000 7000 8000 9000 10000 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 GDP Per Capita US PPP Annual GDP Growth GDP per capita PPP current international GDP growth annual Figure 11 Chinas Economic Growth 19802012 Source World Bank World Development Indicators s t u d y i n g c h i n e s e P o l i t i c s 5 this question is that it is the Chinese Communist Party that has presided over Chinas recent economic success which has won the party a great deal of popular support reflecting a strong desire among many sectors of the population for political stability and continuity Nevertheless the prospects for continued CCP rule is a hotly debated topic among political scientists who study contemporary China There has been significant political change within the CCP with a much higher tolerance of debate than during the Mao years The party also allows much greater freedom in many parts of society which is another source of its staying power Nevertheless the PRC is still regarded by most outside observers as having one of the worlds most repressive political regimes For example The Economist a highly respected British weekly magazine ranked China at 142 out of 167 countries on its 2012 Index of Democracy which is based on measures of electoral processes and pluralism functioning of government which includes corruption political par ticipation political culture and civil liberties3 The contradiction between Chinas increasingly open society and globalized econ omy and its still closed authoritarian political system raises other fascinating ques tions for students of Chinese politics and comparative politics in general What does the Chinese experience say about the kind of government best able to promote rapid economic development Is a strong authoritarian regime required for such a task How has the CCP been able to resist the pressures for democratization that usually accompany the social economic and cultural changes that modernization brings Will it be able to continue to do so in the future These questions too are addressed directly and indirectly in many chapters in this book The next part of this introduction provides a brief overview of the land and people of China see Box 11 in order to set the geographic and demographic contexts of Chinese politics Then comes a discussion of what I call the four faces of contempo rary ChinaChina as China China as a communist partystate China as a devel oping country and China as a rising powerthat are offered as ways to frame the analysis of contemporary Chinese politics This is followed by a review of the major approaches that have been used by political scientists to study politics in China Finally the chapter concludes with a summary of the organization of the book and the content of its chapters China a geographiC and demographiC overvieW Geography is the multifaceted study of physical space on the surface of the earth and demography is the study of the size composition distribution and other aspects of human population In all countries there is a close relationship between geography and demography and both have important implications for politics and policymak ing In China as one of the worlds largest countries in terms of physical space and the largest in terms of population this is especially the case 6 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a The PRC is located in the far eastern part of the Asian continent that is usu ally referred to as East Asia which also includes Japan and the two Koreas the communist Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea North Korea and the capitalist democracy the Republic of Korea South Korea China shares land borders with fourteen countries the longest being with Russia and Mongolia in the north India in the west and Burma Myanmar and Vietnam in the south Chinas eastern bor der is made up almost entirely of an 11200milelong 18000 kilometer coastline along the western edge of the Pacific Ocean The country stretches for about 3200 miles 5200 kilometers from east to west and 3400 miles 5500 kilometers from north to south In terms of total area China 56 million square miles96 million square kilome ters is a bit smaller than the United States making it the fourth largest country in the world with Russia first and Canada second Chinas population is a little over 135 billion India is second with 124 billion people and is expected to surpass China in population in about 2025 Although China and the United States are quite similar in geographic size Chinas population is about four and half times that of the United States Therefore China with 365 people per square mile is much more densely populated than the United States which has 89 people per square mile Both countries have large areas that are sparsely populated or uninhabitable By comparison India which is only about a third the geographic size of China has 989 people per square mile and very few areas with low population density China has about 20 percent of the worlds popu lation but only 7 percent of its arable landthat is land used for planting edible crops4 Feeding its people isand long has beena central challenge for the Chinese government Like the United States China is a land of great geographic and climatic contrasts but China tends to have greater extremes One the worlds largest deserts the Gobi and the highest mountains the Himalayas which include Mount Everestor as it is Box 11 Where did china come From The first use of the name China in english in reference to the country has been traced to 1555 Ce and the term is believed to have come via persian and sanskrit in reference to the ancient Qin pronounced chin kingdom in what is now northwest China and whose capital lay at the eastern end of the silk road that connected east asia Central asia the middle east and ultimately europe The king of Qin became the founder of Chinas first imperial dynasty in 221 bCe by bringing neighboring kingdoms under his control and is therefore known as Chinas first emperor The Chinese term for China is Zhongguo which literally means middle Kingdom This name dates from the sixth century bCe several centuries prior to the unification of the Chinese empire and even then was meant to convey the idea of being the center of civilization culture and political authority The Qin emperor was the first political leader to be able to claim the title of ruler of the entire middle Kingdom The term sino is also often used to refer to China as in sinoamerican relations scholars who specialize in the study of China are called sinologists sino comes from the latin for China Sinae s t u d y i n g c h i n e s e P o l i t i c s 7 called in Chinese Chomolungma are located in the far western part of the country Climate varies from semitropical in the southeast to subarctic in the northeast which borders on Russian Siberia Most of the country is much more temperate Beijing Chinas capital city is located at about the same latitude in the Northern Hemisphere as New York One way to think about Chinas geography is to imagine a 2000mile line cutting diagonally across the country from just north of Beijing to the PRCs border with Burma in the far southwest The area to the east of this line early on became part of the Chinese empire and is referred to as China Proper or Inner China China Proper accounts for about onethird of Chinas total territory and is largely populated by the ethnic group to which the vast majority of Chinese people belong the Han a term taken from the name of Imperial Chinas second dynasty which lasted for more than four centuries 206 BCE220 CE and is considered the early golden age of Chinese civilization China Proper can itself be divided into several geographic regions The three prov inces Heilongjiang Jilin and Liaoning of the Northeast historically referred to as Manchuria have vast tracts of forestland but this region was also once the PRCs industrial heartland now much of it is considered Chinas rust belt because of the closing of aged inefficient factories and high unemployment The area that stretches from Beijing to the Yangtze River which flows into the East China Sea near Shanghai is referred to as North China Agriculturally this is a onecropayear growing area with some similarities to the American Plains states South China is the region that lies below the Yangtze and is warmer and wetter than the north and these conditions allow for rice farming and in some areas yearround cultivation Almost the entire coastal area of China Proper from north to south has become industrialized during the countrys recent economic development spurt Chinas population is also heavily concentrated along the eastern coastline and the adjacent provinces of China Proper About 90 percent of the Chinese people live in this area which is only about 30 per cent of the countrys total land area To the west of the imaginary diagonal line lies Outer China Outer China geo graphically comprises about twothirds of the country but it is very sparsely popu lated Most of the region was incorporated into the Chinese empire during its later periods particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and is home to most of Chinas nonHan ethnic minorities including Tibetans Uyghurs and Mongols The Great Wall of China was begun by Chinas first emperor more than two thousand years ago and expanded through many other dynasties largely as a fortification to keep nonHan peoples out of Chinaa strategy that failed twice in Chinese history once when the country was conquered by the Mongols in 1279 CE and again when it was conquered by the Manchus in 1644 CE Today Han make up 915 percent of the PRCs population with the other 85 percent divided among fiftyfive ethnic minor ity groups that range in size from about sixteen million the Zhuang to under four thousand the Lhoba The other major geographic and demographic divide in China is that between the urban and rural areas China developed large and for the times very advanced cities early in its imperial history When Marco Polo visited the country in the fourteenth century he marveled at the splendor of its cities and the system of canals that linked 8 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a them for commercial and other purposes From his experience there was nothing comparable in Europe5 But until very recently China had always been a largely rural society At the time of the founding of the PRC in 1949 only about 10 percent of the total population lived in urban areas At the end of the Maoist era in 1976 the country was just 20 percent urbanized Economic development since then has led to a major population shift and in January 2012 for the first time in its history more than half of the people in China were living in cities China has over 160 cities with a population of more than one million the United States has nine By 2025 that number will grow to about 221 and by 2030 over a bil lion people in China will live in urban areas Chinas largest cities are Shanghai Chinas financial center 235 million and Beijing its political capital 207 million In both of these megacities as in most urban areas in China since the 1980s there has been a massive influx of peoplemore than 260 million in 2013from the countryside in search of jobs and a better life In Beijing and Shanghai such migrantsreferred to as the floating populationmake up more than a third of the residents This is just one way in which urbanrural boundaries are shifting in the Peoples Republic which in turn reflects geographic and demographic transitions with enormous political implications Administratively the PRC is a unitary state which means that the national government has ultimate authority over all lower levels of government see Figure 12 The United Kingdom and France also have this form of government in contrast to federal systems such as the United States and Canada in which there is significant sharing of power between the national and subnational levels of government The PRC has twentytwo provinces similar to states in the United States four cit ies that are considered the equivalent of provinces and are directly administered by the central government Beijing Shanghai Tianjin and Chongqing and five autono mous regions Guangxi Inner Mongolia Ningxia Tibet and Xinjiangall located in Outer China with large concentrations of ethnic minority groups Autonomous regions do have limited autonomy when it comes to some cultural and social poli cies but are completely under the political and military control of the government in Beijing There are also two special administrative regions SAR of the PRC the former British colony of Hong Kong which reverted to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 and Macao a former Portuguese possession that became an SAR of the PRC in 1999 The SARs do have considerable political and economic autonomy although ultimate sov ereignty over their affairs lies in Beijing The island of Taiwan located a little over one hundred miles off the coast of southeast ern China is a politically contested area It became part of China in the midseventeenth century but fell under Japanese control from 1895 until 1945 When the CCP won the civil war in 1949 its rivals the Nationalist Party Kuomintang or Guomindang fled to Taiwan where with US support they were able to establish a stronghold Despite many political changes on both the mainland and the island and closer economic ties between the two in the intervening years Taiwan still remains a separate political entity although Beijing claims that it is rightfully a province of the PRC s t u d y i n g c h i n e s e P o l i t i c s 9 Four FaCes oF ConTemporary China Hopefully readers have already gotten the sense that Chinese politics is extremely important in todays world and perhaps they will also find it immensely fascinat ing But Chinese politics is quite complex and can be more than a bit confusing to someone new to the subject Not only are the stages of political change that China has gone through in modern times full of twists and turnsa very involved and Peoples Republic of China guójiā zīzhìqù sheng zhíxiáshì tèbiéxíngzhèngqū dìjíshì xiàn shìxiáqū xiāng zhèn xíngzhèngcūn zìráncūn jiēdàobànshìchù jūmínwěiyuánhùi shèqū dìqū Autonomous Regions Provinces TibetXinjiang Inner Mangolia GuangxiNingxia Directly Administered Municipalities nation Special Administrative Regions Hong Kong Macao BeijingChongqing ShanghaiTianjin Prefecturallevel Municipalities includes provincial and autonomous region capitals Prefectures Autonomous Prefectures 30 zĪzhìzhoōu Counties zìhìxiàn xiànjíshì Autonomous Countries 120 Townships Street Offices Subdistricts Urban Districts Countylevel Cities Grassroots Units Technically SelfGoverning Towns Administrative Villages Natural Villages Residents Committees Communities Figure 12 Administrative Divisions of the Peoples Republic of China Data 10 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a convoluted and somewhat unbelievable plot line one might say if we were talking about a novel and for those unfamiliar with the Chinese language the cast of char acters that have played or now plays influential roles in Chinese politics can also be somewhat bewildering Furthermore the PRC has a type of political systema com munist partystateabout which most readers will know very little in terms of its structure of power and policymaking process As readers progress through the chap ters in this book it might be helpful in order to understand Chinas unique political development and current politics to keep in mind what can be called the four faces of contemporary China China as China By China as China I mean taking note of the influence of the Chinese past and culture on politics in the PRC In the broadest and boldest strokes Chinese political history can be broken down into three periods the Imperial Period of dynastic mon archy 221 BCE1912 CE the Republican Period 19121949 characterized by weak central government powerful regional warlords several stages of civil war and the brutal invasion and occupation by Japan that started World War II in the Pacific and the Communist Period 1949 to the present that began with the victory of the CCP in the civil war and continues through the present day But Chinese cultural history dates back to well before the beginning of the impe rial period in 221 BCE Human beings have lived in the area that is now called China for more than a million years The first dynastiessystems of hereditary rule over specific geographic areasappeared as small independent kingdoms more than four thousand years ago The earliest artifacts of Chinese material culture such as exquisite bronze and jade vessels are from this period Chinese as a written language took shape in the Shang dynasty 16001046 BCE as inscriptions etched on oracle bones made from turtle shells and animal scapula for the purpose of divination and recordkeeping See Box 12 The foundation of the Chinese empireor China as a unified political entityand the start of the imperial period in Chinese history is dated from 221 BCE when a num ber of kingdoms were brought under the authority of the king of Qin who is known as the first emperor of a unified China The Qin dynasty lasted less than twenty years giving way to the muchlonger lived Han as noted above But the imperial system founded by Qin lasted for over two thousand years through the rise and fall of more than a dozen different dynasties until it was overthrown by a revolution and replaced by the Republic of China in 1912 The philosopherscholar Confucius whose ethical social and political teachings are the foundation of Chinese culture lived in 557479 BCE centuries before the founding of the Qin dynasty In fact the emperor Qin was profoundly suspicious of Confucian scholars and ordered many of them executed and their books burned He favored a school of philosophy called Legalism which advocated harsh laws rather than Confucian education and morality as the basis for maintaining the rulers authority and commanding the obedience of his subjects Later dynasties restored the prominence of Confucianism and imbedded it in the very structure of imperial s t u d y i n g c h i n e s e P o l i t i c s 11 Box 12 a Very BrieF chinese lesson Chinese is spoken by more people than any other language in the world yet Chinese really comprises many dialects some of which are so different from one another that they are mutually incomprehensible and are considered by linguists to be separate languages as different for example as French is from italian about 70 percent of Chinas popula tion speaks mandarin which is the dialect of Chinese spoken mainly in the northern central and southwestern parts of the country as their native tongue other major dia lects include Wu a subdialect of which is spoken in the area that includes Chinas largest city shanghai and Cantonese which is the dialect native to the southern coastal region adjacent to hong Kong but people who speak different Chinese dialects share the same written language For example mandarin and Cantonese speakers cannot understand each other in faceto face conversations or over the telephone but they can communicate by letter and read the same newspapers or books because written Chinese is made up of characters rather than phonetic letters These characters which have evolved over time from symbolic pictures depict meaning more than sound so that speakers of various Chinese dialects often pronounce the same written character very differently There are about 50000 dif ferent Chinese characters although basic literacy requires knowledge of only about 4000 because the vast majority of characters are archaic and have fallen out of common usage Chinese does not have an alphabet both the meaning and the pronunciation of Chinese characters can only be learned by memorization like many of the worlds other languagesincluding arabic greek hebrew Japanese and russianthat do not use the roman alphabet on which english is based Chinese characters must be romanized or transliterated if english speakers are to have any idea how to pronounce them The most common way of romanizing Chinese is the pinyin literally spell sounds system used in the prC and by the united nations but because linguists have differed about how best to approximate distinctive Chinese sounds using roman letters there are still several alternative methods of romanizing Chinese This book and most other englishlanguage publications use the pinyin romanization for Chinese names places and phrases with a few exceptions for important historical names where an alternative romanization is commonly given in most cases a word in pinyin is pronounced as it looks however there are a few pinyin letters that appear in Chinese terms in this book for which a pronunciation guide may be helpful c is pronounced ts eg Cai yuanpei x is pronounced sh eg deng Xiaoping Xi Jinping z is pronounced dz eg mao Zedong q is pronounced ch eg emperor Qin Qing dynasty zh is pronounced j eg Zhongguo the Chinese word for China a couple of important points about Chinese names in China as in Japan and Korea the family name for instance mao comes before the personal or given name for instance Zedong some people interpret this as a reflection of the priority given to the family or the group over the individual in east asian culture Chinese people who have immigrated to the united states or other countries often adapt their names to the Western order of personal names before family names For example li is the family name of one of the contributors to this volume dr Cheng li of the brookings institution in China he is known as li Cheng Chinese has relatively few family names in fact one term for the common folk is the old hundred names laobaixing which cover about 85 percent of the people in China The most common family name in China is Wang there are more than 93 million Wangs in China followed by 92 million with the family name li and 88 million Zhangs on the other hand there is an almost infinite variety of given names in Chinese which often have descrip tive meanings such as beautiful bell meiling or bright and cultivated bingwen 12 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Chinese society and government Over the millennia Legalism and other schools of thought combined with and influenced the evolution of Confucianism Today not only are the areas encompassed by Greater China the PRC Taiwan Hong Kong and Macao considered to be part of the Confucian cultural region but so too are Japan Korea Singapore and Vietnam all of which were deeply influenced by the spread of many aspects of Chinese civilization This book focuses on Chinese politics during the communist era with one chapter on the earlier periods and mostly on very recent decades From that perspective we are concentrating our attention on but a tiny slice see Figure 13 of the grand span of Chinas political history It should come as no surprise that such a long and rich history should be considered when trying to understand almost any aspect of China today including its politics But it is not just the imperial past or Confucian culture that should be taken into account when studying contemporary China The revolution that brought the CCP to power and the radicalism of the Maoist era may seem far removed from the rap idly modernizing and rising power that China is today But as one leading scholar of Chinese politics Elizabeth J Perry has observed Chinas stunning economic strides in the reform era can only be understood against the backdrop of a revolutionary history that remains highly salient in many respects6 In fact she goes further and argues that legacies of the CCPs revolutionary pastnotably its practice of the poli tics of divideandrule when dealing with opposing forcesare a significant part of the answer to the question set out earlier about the durability of communist power in China The government of the PRC places great emphasis on nationalism in its mes sages aimed to audiences both at home and abroad It expresses pride in the antiq uity greatness and uniqueness of Chinese culture and civilization as well as in as its growing stature in world affairs Chinese nationalism with its roots in the past is an important issue not only in the PRCs foreign policy but also in Chinese domestic politics7 Communist Period 1949 Republican Period 19121949 Qin 221206 BCE Han 206 BCE 220 CE Six Dyansties 220589 CE Sui 581618 CE Tang 618906 CE Five Dynasties 907960 CE Sung 960 1279 CE Yuan Mongol 12791368 CE Ming 13681644 Qing Manchu16441912 CE Imperial Period 221BCE 1912 CE Major Dynasties of the Imperial Period Figure 13 Chinese History from Imperial Times to the Present s t u d y i n g c h i n e s e P o l i t i c s 13 The CCP also bases its claim to continue ruling China in part on having rescued the country from a century of humiliation at the hands of foreign imperialism that lasted from the middle of the nineteenth century to the midtwentieth8 Beginning in the 1830s China suffered a series of devastating military defeats and other humilia tions by Western powers intent on expanding free trade to East Asia Prior to this momentous encounter with Europe and America China considered itself to be the cultural and by extension the political center of its known world able to repel or absorb any challenge to the superiority of its civilization The shattering of this worldview was one of the most important ingredients in the decline and collapse of Chinas twothousandyearold imperial system in the early twentieth century and the countrys turn toward the revolutionary process that led to the rise of the CCP and the establishment of the Peoples Republic in 1949 The CCPs claim to have been the protector of China from national sover eignty from the 1950s to the present is one of the most powerful sources of its political legitimacy Scholars disagree on the extent to and ways in which China today is shaped by its imperial history traditional culture experience of imperialism and revolution ary heritage But none would deny that the past and the knowledge memory and imagination of Chinas long history play a prominent role in contemporary Chinese politics China as a Communist partystate In the early 1980s about two dozen countries in Africa Asia Europe and Latin America with more than onethird of the worlds population were ruled by commu nist parties Today there are only five countries with an unelected ruling communist party China Cuba Laos North Korea and Vietnam9 Despite many important dif ferences past and present communist partystates have several things in common as a unique type of political system First as the term partystate implies the communist party controls the state that is the formal institutions of government at the national level and below The party and state are organizationally separatefor example there may be a prime minis ter who heads the government and a general secretary who heads the communist party But it is the party that is ultimately in charge of the state and the leader of the communist party is the most powerful individual in the country In a sense it is the party that makes policy and the state that implements the partys policies and there is a web of ways in which the communist party makes sure that it controls the state For example top state leaders such as the prime minister and the president are also always top communist party officials and the party has the final say in the appoint ment of key state leaders at all levels of the government Second the partystate proclaims at least formally adherence to some variant of ideology based on MarxismLeninism and declares it is committed to leading the country in building socialism and ultimately creating a truly egalitarian communist society This is taken to be the partystates official and exclusive ideology in guiding 14 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a policy and framing political life Competing ideologies are considered illegitimate and even subversive and are therefore vigorously suppressed Third the communist party sees itself as a vanguard party and asserts the right to exercise the leading role over society the economy culture and most other aspects of life because only the party which is made up of a relatively small ideologically advanced minority of the population is said to be able to lead the country toward socialism and communism In China less than 6 percent of the population belongs to the CCP or about 8 percent of the ageeligible over 18 population Fourth as an extension of its exclusive ideology and leading role in society the communist party claims to govern in the interests of all the people and therefore holds a monopoly on political power that precludes any meaningful opposition or contestation from other political parties or organizations The definition of which groups fit into the category of the people may shift over timeas it often has during the history of the CCP and the PRC This is important because the people are those who support socialism and the party while those who oppose them are labeled as enemies of the people One of the roles of the ruling communist party is to exercise control over these enemies through the dictatorship of the proletariat or as it is called in China today the peoples democratic dictatorship Fifth communist partystates are particularly concerned with their authority over the economy because economic growth is so critical to advancing the cause of social ism and building a strong nation There are times when communist party politics and ideology may have a negative influence on economic growth as during much of the Maoist era in China And some communist partystates may greatly reduce the role of the partystate in the economy and even introduce extensive elements of freemarket capitalism as in China today But the partys claim to a leading role in determining the countrys economic destiny remains a defining feature of a communist partystate Communist partystates have diminished greatly in number since the height of the Cold War and those few that remain other than North Korea are markedly different from the kind that Stalin and Mao themselves very different built And Chinas politi cal system is certainly in a time of transition another theme of this volume with great scholarly debate including among scholars in China about where it may be headed But Chinese politics must still be described and analyzed within the communist partystate framework as it reflects the essential structure of the PRCs political system China as a developing Country Despite its astounding economic growth over the last few decades China is still a devel oping country It may have the second largest economy in the world as measured by total Gross Domestic Product GDP but by many other measures it is much poorer In this book GDP is usually given as calculated according to purchasing power parity PPP which provides a better sense of the standard of living in a particular country by comparing what goods and services actually cost locally The other way of calculating GDP is by foreign exchange currency rates based on the US dollar The difference between the two can be quite dramatic especially when presented in per capita terms For example Chinas exchangeratebased GDP per capita in 2012 was US6091 calculated by PPP it was US9233 When PPP figures are not available GDP is given and noted as based on exchange rates Table 11 Chinas economic development in Comparative perspective China United States Russia Brazil India Nigeria World Bank Classification UpperMiddle Income Upper Income UpperMiddle Income UpperMiddle Income LowerMiddle Income Low Income Gross Domestic Product per capita PPP 9100 49800 17700 12000 3900 2700 Total Gross Domestic Product PPP 1238 trillion 1566 trillion 2504 trillion 2362 trillion 4784 trillion 4505 billion Gross Domestic Product by composition Agriculture 101 Industry 453 Services 446 Agriculture 12 Industry 191 Services 797 Agriculture 39 Industry 36 Services 601 Agriculture 54 Industry 274 Services 672 Agriculture 170 Industry 180 Services 650 agriculture 309 industry 430 services 260 Labor force by occupation Agriculture 348 Industry 295 Services 357 Agriculture 07 Industry 203 Services 780 Agriculture 79 Industry 274 Services 647 Agriculture 157 Industry 133 Services 710 Agriculture 530 Industry 190 Services 280 agriculture 70 industry 10 services 20 Life expectancy at birth in years Male 7296 years Female 7727 years Male 7619 years Female 8117 years Male 6404 years Female 7602 years male 6948 years Female 7674 years Male 6638 years Female 687 years male 4935 years female 5577 years Infant mortal itynumber of deaths per 1000 live births Male 1516 Female 1525 Male 655 Female 522 Male 804 Female 629 Male 2316 Female 1634 Male 4328 Female 4608 male 7798 female 6766 Internet use per 100 people 383 779 490 450 101 288 Note Figures are for 20122013 or most recent year available Sources CIA World Factbook World Bank World Development Indicators 16 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a and less modern than the United States Japan and countries of the European Union China was recently reclassified by the World Bank from a lowermiddleincome coun try to an uppermiddleincome one a category that includes Brazil Mexico South Africa and Turkey among others10 This was an important economic transition for the PRC but it will probably take until at least 2030 for it to join the ranks of highincome countries11 Table 11 provides an idea of Chinas level of development in comparison to some of the worlds other very large countries China faces many of the same challenges that other developing countries do rais ing the living standards and bringing health care education and other social services to its citizens more than two hundred million of whom still live in absolute or rela tive poverty overcoming the glaring inequalities between the more prosperous and the poorer regions of the country particularly between the urban and rural areas and the coastal and inland regions balancing economic growth and environmental concernsto name just a few of the dilemmas of development The PRC very much sees itself as part of the developing world and as speaking and acting on behalf of the shared interests of the less developed countries in various international forums such as the United Nations But China also has some important advantages when it comes to economic devel opment It has had for more than thirty years a variation of what political scientists refer to as a developmental state that is a government that sets its highest prior ity on and effectively uses its power to promote economic growth12 This contrasts sharply with many developing countries that are classified as predatory states where political power is used to further private rather than national interests China certainly has a very big problem with corruption as several chapters note Still the government of the PRC and the CCP have overall a remarkable record in promoting or at least presiding over economic growth and modernization since the early 1980s Chinas other development advantages include a generally welleducated and healthy labor force and abundant natural resources although its rapidly growing economy has generated a demand that exceeds domestic supplies of oil coal lumber and other commodities all of which are now imported in very large quantities There is considerable irony in the fact that the PRC has been considered as a model for Third World development at two very different times and in two very different ways since 1949 The Maoist model was much praised from the mid1960s through the early 1970s At that time China was seen as a trailblazer in areas like providing preventive health care and at least basic education to almost all its people paying attention to rural development and limiting the urban bias endemic to most other developing countries promoting gender equality creating structures for worker par ticipation in management basing policy choices on a national commitment to the common good and breaking dependency on the international economy through pro moting selfreliance This model was embraced by manyincluding China scholars in the United States and elsewhere13before the huge and tragic human cost and the less than stellar economic performance of the Maoist experiment became widely known And now in the early twentyfirst century China is once again being touted as a model for the developing world for its sustained high rate of exportled growth the rapid rise in the standards of living of most of its population and successful s t u d y i n g c h i n e s e P o l i t i c s 17 poverty reduction These achievements have been realized by stimulating ferocious economic competition among firms and individuals which generated phenomenal growth rates but has resulted in a massive rise in unemployment the appearance of large income and general welfare inequalities and a consumer culture that many see as being crassly materialistic In both means and consequences the current widely watched and admired Chinese model of development is in many ways the complete opposite of the Maoist model China as a rising power There is broad scholarly political and public opinion consensus that the rise of China to great power status is one of the most important developments in global politics over the last decade or two Chinas rise is certainly well underway as measured by its mounting global economic clout military might and diplomatic influence Chinas growing power is changing the terrain of international relations in both theory and practice A new acronym BRICS which stands for Brazil Russia India China and South Africa has made its way into the vocabulary of international rela tions to reflect the growing influence of the worlds largest emerging economies and among the BRICS countries China is widely regarded as the showcase There is also little doubt that the PRC is now the dominant power in East Asia having surpassed Americas ally Japan in influence even if Japan is a far richer country than China But the impact of Chinas rise goes far beyond the emerging economies and a shift ing regional power hierarchy in East Asia We are talking here of the very rare his torical event of the ascendancy of a new superpower The rise of the PRC is often compared to that of Britain in the nineteenth century and the United States in the twentieth and it is not uncommon to hear or read that the twentyfirst century will be the Chinese century14 Many scholars and diplomats have noted the shift from a postCold War uni polar world in which American power was unrivaled to an emerging bipolar world in which the United States is learning to share center stage with China SinoAmerican relations are considered by many knowledgeable observers to be the most important bilateral relationship in world politics today Indeed when leaders from the worlds twenty largest economiesthe Group of 20 G20met in London in early 2009 to discuss the international financial crisis particular attention was paid to the words and actions of the Group of Two or G2 the United States and Chinaas the countries most crucial to dealing with the situation Since then the term G2 and the idea behind it that the worlds most important status quo power and foremost rising power should work together to address the major issues facing the international economic system has caught on in some circles15 and been hotly contested by others who think that in an era of globalization it overemphasizes the influence of any singular bilateral relationship and exaggerates the extent of cooperation possible between China and the United States because of their vastly different economic and political systems and levels of economic development16 18 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a If there is little debate about the fact of Chinas rise as a world power there is lots of controversy among scholars politicians journalists and others about what this means to the United States East Asia and the world One side in this debate argues that the rise of China is threatening to American interests and a destabilizing factor in regional and international affairs Those who are part of the China Threat school urge the United States and other countries to be wary of Chinas intentions and pre pare for the worst even war17 They express alarm for example at the PRCs vigorous development of a blue water navy with battleships and aircraft carriers that can sail for long periods of time far from the countrys coastal waters The other side in this debate sees Chinas global ascendency as another chapter in the rise and fall of great powers that has occurred throughout much of history They understand that Chinas rise will create challenges for other countries particularly the United States but they see these as an incentive for healthy competition rather than a source of potentially disastrous conflict They see many areas of mutual inter est between the United States and the PRC and many opportunities for cooperation that could be of potential benefit to whole world and they emphasize Chinas use of soft power or noncoercive influence through means such as diplomacy and foreign aid more than its reliance on or development of the mostly military instruments of hard power18 approaChes To The sTudy oF Chinese poliTiCs Like China itself the study of Chinese politics has gone through dramatic changes since the founding of the Peoples Republic in 194919 Indeed as one might expect political changes in China have often led to changing approaches to studying Chinese politics The first generation of American scholars to focus on politics in the PRC were not permitted to travel to China and had little access to materials of academic interest due to Cold War hostilities Many of them spent time in Hong Kong which was then still a British colony conducting interviews with refugees from the China mainland and scouring valuable yet relatively meager collections of local Chinese newspapers and a hodgepodge of official documents held by research centers devoted to the study of contemporary China Although most of this pioneer generation had fairly strong Chinese language skills often honed in Taiwan they still had to rely heavily on translations of PRC radio broadcasts provided by organizations like the Central Intelligence Agency and the British Broadcasting Corporation for news about what was happening in China since very few Western reporters were permitted on the mainland Given the limits on research these firstgeneration scholars tended to study large issues in Chinese politics They produced numerous works that remain classics in the field such as Leadership in Communist China John Wilson Lewis 1963 Cadres Bureaucracy and Political Power in Communist China A Doak Barnett 1967 and The Spirit of Chinese Politics Lucian W Pye 1968 Once détente and normalization in SinoAmerican relations set in during the 1970s scholarly access to China gradually opened up Subsequent generations of spe cialists in Chinese politics have been able to carry out field research work in archives s t u d y i n g c h i n e s e P o l i t i c s 19 conduct surveys interview people in all walks of life including government and com munist party officials and engage in collaborative projects with colleagues in the PRC There is now a literal flood of research material available from the PRC such as books by Chinese academics memoirs by important political figures uncountable newspapers and journals as well as massive amounts of data and statistics There are still restrictions on scholarly activity for both Chinese as well as foreign researchers and some subjects remain taboo because of their political sensitivity Occasionally a foreign scholar is accused of crossing the line between academic work and spying and may be detained for a while before being expelled from the country The PRC has also banned American scholars whose work has been judged to be politically objec tionable from traveling to China In any case the study of Chinese politics is a rich and dynamic field of scholarship that continues to attract superb graduate students which bodes well for the future of this very important subject Not only have the methods and materials for studying politics in China changed greatly over the last six decades but so too have the approaches models and topics that scholars employ and emphasize in their analysis These can be broadly grouped into the following categories elite politics factional politics informal politics bureaucratic politics centerlocal relations political institutions and processes political development political economy political culture ideology statesociety relations policy and eventcentered studies While each of these approaches has been especially popular among scholars at cer tain times all of them are still in the mix when it comes to studying Chinese politics and most are reflected in the chapters in this book elite politics Because so much of Chinas history in the twentieth century was dominated by tow ering political figures it is not surprising that scholars have often focused on the countrys top leaders in studying Chinese politics Through much of the 1950s and 1960s a MaoinCommand model of analysis reflected the extraordinary power of the Chairman of the CCP in determining the countrys domestic and foreign policies In the 1980s and 1990s it was Deng Xiaoping who was clearly the PRCs paramount leader even though he never held the highest formal offices in the party or the gov ernment Chinas more recent leaders have had neither the personal clout nor the 20 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a historical stature of Mao and Deng They have governed more collectively and there are many more sources of influence at work in Chinas political system than in the ear lier periods Nevertheless power remains highly concentrated in the upper echelons of the CCP particularly in the two dozen or so members of the partys top organiza tions Therefore many China specialists still take an elitecentered approachsome times called Beijingologyto analyzing Chinese politics closely studying whos who in the leadership the formal documents issued by the central authorities and the debates in journals containing articles by intellectuals and policy specialists who serve as advisers to partystate leaders20 Factional politics This is really a subcategory of the elite approach to studying Chinese politics but the emphasis is on divisions or factions within the ruling communist party leadership Factions are groups of individuals who are united by some common bond and whose purpose is to maximize their power especially that of their leader Factions may be motivated by shared ideology policy preferences personal loyalties or simply the desire for power All political parties have factionalism to one degree or another In the case of the CCP highstakes factional politics has deep roots and during the Maoist era led to extensive internal purges and vicious vendettas that wracked Chinese politics from the 1950s through the mid1970s Factionalism remains an important feature of leadership politics and policymaking in the PRC although it plays out in a much more routine and institutionalized manner that may cost officials their jobs but no longer their lives nor does it engulf their entire families21 informal politics Factional politics is a type of informal politics that involves power relationships out side of the constitutional institutions and processes of the state It is not governed or regulated by formal rules or laws and is often seen as reflecting traditional rather than modern aspects of politics In fact informal politics is frequently said to be a means of resistance to or a way of overcoming the inefficiencies of the modern state Political scientists have long noted the importance of various kinds of informal poli tics in China especially in the form of guanxi or connections among individuals that are for example based on family relationships native place school ties military unit or a network of shared friends Guanxi has deep roots in Confucian culture22 A related type of informal politics studied by China scholars is patronclient rela tions which involve exchanges between a more powerful patron and a less powerful client The patron may offer resources such as land or a job or protection to the cli ent while the client provides various services including labor personal loyalty and political support to the patron Patronclient relations are particularly potent in rural China where the forces of tradition remain strong23 Kinship groups and folk religion temple associations are another source of informal politics that has been identified as very influential in Chinese villages24 s t u d y i n g c h i n e s e P o l i t i c s 21 bureaucratic politics The bureaucratic politics model of Chinese politics seeks to explain policy outcomes by looking at the interaction of officials in different and often competing government agencies who are mostly motivated by their organizations interests25 In this sense it might be considered a variant of the factional model with the common bond among members being their positions in a specific part of the bureaucracy The bureaucrats goals may include enhancing their organizations authority increasing its budget or protecting its administrative turf Whats important is that individual political behav ior is determined by the individuals place in the bureaucracy One of the first goals of the CCP when it came to power in 1949 was to rebuild the Chinese state which had been weakened and torn apart by more than a cen tury of rebellion revolution world war and civil war They did so with quite astounding speed and effectiveness They also created a state that had greater con trol over the countrys vast territory and reached deeper into the most basic levels of society particularly the rural villages than any government in Chinese history As discussed above the kind of political system they constructeda communist partystate on the Soviet modelis by definition a highly bureaucratized and centralized one that seeks to exercise authority not just over the economy but also over many or even most other areas of society This in turn requires a huge and powerful bureaucracy In such an institutional environment bureaucratic politics can become entrenched and intense Scholars who take this approach to studying Chinese politics also often point to the deep and lingering influence of the legacy of bureaucratic government that was one of the distinguishing features of Chinas imperial system26 Centerlocal relations An important variation of the bureaucratic politics model of Chinese politics focuses on the relations between national and local levels of the partystate In China local refers to any of the several levels of administration below the center based in the capital Beijing including provinces cities rural towns and villages China has a long tradition of a strong central government reaching far back into imperial times but it also has a tradition of powerful centrifugal forces due to its historical patterns of development and regional variations At times in its not so distant past the coun try has disintegrated politically most recently in the early twentieth century during the socalled Warlord Era when real power was in the hands of more than a dozen regional strongmen rather than in the central government in Beijing As noted above the PRC is a unitary state in which the national government has ultimate authority over lower levels Even so ever since the founding of the country leaders in Beijing have had to contend with recalcitrance obstruction opposition and even outright resistance from subordinate authorities when it comes to the implementation of partystate policies The market reform of the economy has led to a decentralization of both power and resources and centerlocal relations is a timely and significant topic in the study of Chinese politics27 Some scholarly work focuses explicitly on local 22 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a politics and provides a very valuable look at how the partystate operates at the level where most officials work and most citizens engage their political system28 political institutions and processes Many studies of China by political scientists focus on specific institutions of the partystate For example there are studies of the CCP of the National Peoples Congress the PRCs legislature and the Peoples Liberation Army which encom passes all branches of Chinas military29 Other studies describe and analyze specific political processes such as the mass mobilization campaigns that were a hallmark of the Maoist era and have not altogether disappeared elections for village leaders in rural China the rise of the Internet especially blogs as a form of political par ticipation by netizens in the PRC and litigation pursued by individuals who seek redress for environmental damages through the court system30 A variation on these approaches to analyzing Chinese politics can be found in stud ies that ask questions about statebuilding which is the construction of institutions and processes at the national and local levels that is designed to carry out various government functions such as taxation or the delivery of social services31 This may be most crucial in the formative years of a new nation the early 1950s for the PRC but it is also a challenging task for a country going through a period of major trans formation as is now the case with China political development In this context political development refers to the process of change within a political system or the transformation from one type of system to another within a country China has experienced particularly and perhaps uniquely dramatic political change over the last century Changes that occurred before the CCP came to power are largely but not entirely within the purview of historians rather than political scientists32 Some political development studies of the PRC analyze the evolution of the Chinese communist partystate from one form of nondemocratic regime to another At the height of Maos rule Chinas political system approximated the totalitarian model first used to describe Nazi Germany under Hitler and the Soviet Union under Stalin Totalitarianism as the name implies is a form of government that presumes the right of total control over almost every aspect of society and life including thought and reproduction and seeks to dissolve as completely as possible the autonomy of the individual There is a lot of scholarly debate about the totalitarian model and its applicabil ity to Maoist China But there is consensus that since the 1980s the PRC has devel oped a much less intrusive partystate that has been variously referred to by political scientists as revolutionary authoritarianism consultative authoritarianism soft authoritarianism and MarketLeninism33 all of which are meant to convey that the CCP while maintaining a very firm grip on political power has at the same time greatly reduced the scope of its authority particularly in economic matters s t u d y i n g c h i n e s e P o l i t i c s 23 A relatively recent trend in the study of Chinese political development concerns the progress toward and prospects for democratization in China This is another area in which there is vigorous academic and political debate that reflects divergent views about whether China is ready for democracy or even whether democracy is right for China34 political economy Political economy as a subfield of political science is concerned with the interaction between politics and the economy how one influences the other and especially with the role of the state versus the market in governing the economy35 These have been matters of great importance and contention in contemporary Chinese politics Mao Zedong used his near absolute power to steer the PRC forcefully in the direction of his radical vision of socialism and communism and away from the both the bureau cratic Soviet model and the capitalist road down which he had concluded some of his closest comrades were leading the country The results of Maos discontent about Chinas economic direction were the disastrous Great Leap Forward 19581960 and the murderous Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and its aftermath 19661976 Since the late 1970s Chinese leaders have remade the PRC economy into one that is almost the mirror opposite of that pursued by Mao although still subject to the ulti mate political authority of the CCP leadership and with a powerful statecontrolled sector Chinas spectacular economic success is a testament to the wisdom of their policy choices or at least their willingness to let go of the economy but one of the major challenges they face in the early twentyfirst centuryparticularly in light of the global recessionis to keep the economy growing not only for the sake of the live lihoods of the Chinese people but also because the partys political legitimacy now hinges heavily on its record of economic success36 political Culture Political culture refers to the attitudes values and beliefs that people have about poli tics which in turn shape their political behavior and how they perceive their rela tionship to political authority In the case of China scholars who have taken a politi cal culture approach emphasize the enduring influence of Confucianism and other traditions in contemporary Chinese politics More specifically they stress attitudes such as deference to authority the tendency toward an imperial style of rule on the part of government officials a preference for an ordered hierarchy of power and a fear of disorder or chaos the priority attached to the group rather than the individual and an emphasis on duties over rights Although influential in the 1950s and 1960s as a way to understand Chinese politics the political culture model was criticized by many scholars because of its alleged eth nocentric biases and oversimplification It fell out of favor for much of two decades but has regained adherents who apply a sophisticated and nuanced understanding of Chinese culture and history to explaining what is unique about politics in China37 24 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Some China specialists draw attention to aspects of the Confucian tradition such as reverence for education advancement by merit and the strength of community ties as a partial explanation for the PRCs economic achievements as well as those of Taiwan Hong Kong South Korea and Singapore38 which is rather ironic since in ear lier times other aspects of Confucianism were given as reasons why China fell behind the West in terms of industrialization ideology Ideology can succinctly be defined as a systematic and comprehensive set of ideas and beliefs that provide a way of looking at and understanding the world or some aspect of it A political ideology addresses fundamental questions about power such as Who should have power How should it be organized distributed and used What are the ultimate goals for which power is used In every political system leaders are guided in their actions by ideology As noted above one of the defining characteristics of a communist partystate is a formal commitment to some variant of MarxismLeninism as the countrys guiding ideology The PRC is no exception in fact the case could be made that ideology has been an especially important and virulent variable in Chinese politics Maoist campaigns such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were largely driven by ideology PostMao China is rightly seen as much less ideo logical in its politics and policymaking and the party has drastically revised what communism means in China today But ideology still matters as the foundation of the political culture of Chinas leadership and their approach to governing It also marks the formal boundaries of what is politically permissible in the PRC Some political scientists continue to study Maos ideology formally called Mao Zedong Thought both because of its uniqueness as a variant of communism and its impact on China Others examine communist ideology in China as it has evolved since Mao and its role in legitimizing the profound policy changes the country has experienced and the continuing rule of a communist party39 In fact there are those who argue that the CCPs ideological adaptability is one of the reasons it has been able to hold on to power40 statesociety relations Political science traditionally focused mainly on the formal institutions and agents of governmentthe state and state actorsas the most important units of analysis This is still an influential approach to the study of politics in general sometimes referred to as bringing the state back in or the new institutionalism41 and the stateor in the case of China the partystate42figures prominently in the work of many political scientists Some China scholars concentrate on relations between the state and various compo nents of the society over which its exercises power These may be classes such as indus trial workers and peasants noneconomic groups such as intellectuals artists and s t u d y i n g c h i n e s e P o l i t i c s 25 youth and groups defined by other forms of collective identity including religion eth nicity and gender The key questions in this statesociety approach are What impact does state pol icy have on the group in question How does the state gain compliance for those policies from members of that group How does society respond to state demands or press its own demands on the state Under what conditions is the state regarded as legitimate by various groups under its authority and under what conditions is that legitimacy challenged or rejected What forms of resistance to state power do social groups take These have been and remain big questions in the study of Chinese politics In fact they are becoming increasingly crucial as Chinese society becomes more complex through the processes of modernization and globalization which have given rise to new social groups such as private entrepreneurs and a middle class43 Citizen protests against the state have also become an important if still constrained feature of Chinas political landscape that has drawn considerable attention from scholars who take a statesociety approach to the study of the PRC44 The concept of civil society is very relevant here The term is generally taken to mean the formation and operation of private organizations and associations com posed of civilians who join together to pursue a common purpose other than the direct pursuit of political power and which operate independently of government authority Civil society can be composed of an almost infinite variety of types of associations ranging from trade unions to religious groups sororities and frater nities to professional organizations eg for medical doctors or political scien tists charities and nongovernmental organizationsand even as in one famous study bowling leagues45 Many political scientists see the vigor of civil society as an important indicator of the health of a democracy On the other hand non democratic regimes tend to be wary of too much autonomy for private associations lest they develop political aspirations The Maoist partystate managed to largely obliterate civil society in China Civil society has reemerged to a limited degree in the much more open social space of contemporary China which has led scholars to gauge and debate both the scope of its autonomy and its potential for planting the seeds of democratization46 policy and eventCentered studies There are numerous important works on Chinese politics that focus either on a par ticular policy issue or a specific event in the history of the Peoples Republic These works most often draw on one or more of the approaches or models discussed above for their analytical framework For example one study of health policy in the PRC applies the statecentered or institutional approach47 while one on population policy combines the political economy and statesociety relations approaches48 Similarly there are works on the Great Leap Forward that stress bureaucratic politics49 Maos decisive role50 or statesociety relations51 Even when there are contending approaches among scholars about how to best analyze a specific policy or event the result is most often vigorous academic debate that enhances our overall understanding of that aspect of Chinese politics 26 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a The Contribution of other disciplines Finally a word should be said about the important contributions of disciplines other than political science to the study and analysis of Chinese politics Most China schol ars have had at least some interdisciplinary training and consider themselves to be an area or countryspecialist as well as a specialist in their specific discipline China is literally too big its history too long its culture too deep and its society including its politics too complex to be analyzed with a set of tools from just a single academic dis cipline Most of the contributors to this volume are political scientists but they would readily acknowledge and many do so in their reference notes and suggested readings how much they have learned about China from colleagues in a wide variety of fields such as history sociology anthropology economics art history and language and lit erature The other contributors a historian a public health specialist and a law profes sor with some political science training would likewise recognize not only the insights they have gained from political science but from many other disciplines as well The organiZaTion oF The booK This is a rather unusual introductory textbook about Chinese politics There are sev eral superb singleauthored texts on this subject written by some of the leading schol ars in the field52 In this book each chapter was written by a China scholar who is also a specialist in the aspect of Chinese politics covered in that chapter The chapter topics are those most often taught in introductory courses on politics in China You will note that there is not a chapter on Chinas foreign policy This is of course a topic of great importance particularly in light of the emphasis we have put on the rise of China as a world power But it is usually the case that Chinese foreign policy is taught as a separate course or as part of a course on the international rela tions of East Asia It is fairly ambitious for an instructor to try to cover both Chinese domestic politics and foreign policy in a single course Imagine trying to do that for the United States Several of the chapters in this book do however touch on aspects of Chinas international relations as they bear on the topic at hand Each chapter contains boxes that are set off from the main body of the text These are meant to highlight and provide details about particularly important individuals events policies or other topics that will enhance the readers understanding of the main subject of the chapter Following the main chapters of the book there is a time line of modern Chinese political history and a glossary of key terms The key terms are printed in bold in their first appearance in the text part i The political history of modern China The first three chapters following this introduction are analytical chronologies of Chinese history from imperial times to the present Chapter 2 From Empire to Peoples Republic by R Keith Schoppa briefly discusses premodern Chinese history but focuses mostly on the period from the late eighteenth through the s t u d y i n g c h i n e s e P o l i t i c s 27 midtwentieth centuries It traces the surprisingly rapid and radical decline of as well as the ultimately futile efforts to save the last Chinese dynasty the Qing The author then turns his attention to the overthrow of the Qing dynasty and the imperial system in the Revolution of 1911 the founding of the Republic of China in 1912 the disintegra tion of the Republic in the Warlord Era 1920s and the brief period of relative stability and progress under the leadership of Chiang Kaishek and the Nationalist Party in the decade from 1927 to 1937 This is followed by a discussion of the origins of the CCP and the rise to power within the party of Mao Zedong the onset of civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists which ended in 1949 with the victory of the CCP the establishment of the Peoples Republic and the flight of the Nationalists to Taiwan In the final sec tion of the chapter the author offers an analysis of why the CCP won the civil war and why the Nationalists lostobviously very crucial questions given the impact of the outcome of the conflict not just on Chinese history but world history as well Chapter 3 Mao Zedong in Power 19491976 by Frederick C Teiwes mostly covers the period during which Chairman Mao wielded nearly absolute authority in Chinese politics from the founding of the Peoples Republic until his death But it also discusses in some detail the process by which Mao Zedong consolidated power in the CCP in the 1940s since that had such a strong influence on the way he exercised power after the founding of the PRC in 1949 The early years of communist rule in China were marked by considerable successes particularly in the areas of initial industrialization and raising health and education standards but they also saw a tightening of the partys grip on society and the first post1949 political fissures within the partys top leadership In the latter part of the 1950s Mao took a sharp leftward turn ideologically that had a profound effect on politics and policy in the PRC most notably in the Great Leap Forward 19581960 a utopian push for accelerated economic development that plunged the country into famine and depression and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that began in 1966 and led to a terribly destructive period that combined elements of a witch hunt a crusade an inquisition armed conflict and cutthroat palace politics The author not only describes what happened during this dramatic and fateful era but also why it happened as well as offering a perspective on how we should evaluate the overall influence and legacy of Mao Zedong who was surely one of the most important and complex political figures in modern times Chapter 4 Deng Xiaoping and His Successors 1976 to the Present by Bruce Gilley takes up the chronology of Chinese politics from the aftermath of Maos death through the first decade of the twentyfirst century The central theme here is the political context of the phenomenal economic transformation of China during the last three plus decades This transformation was only possible because of the improb able political resurrection and consolidation of power by Deng Xiaoping who became Chinas top leader about a year after Maos death despite the fact that he had been purged during the Cultural Revolution for allegedly opposing the Chairman Deng presided over the implementation of reforms that moved China toward a globalized market economy although one with strong state involvement Dengs greatest crisis came in the spring of 1989 when hundreds of thousands some estimated that the crowd peaked at over a million of people gathered in 28 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a and near Tiananmen Square in the center of Beijing to protest about a variety of issues including government corruption and soaring inflation as well as to ask for greater political freedom Deng and most of Chinas other key leaders decided to use massive force to end the demonstration resulting in the socalled Beijing Massacre of June 4 1989 in which a still unknown large number of civilians were killed by the Chinese army Dengs successors Deng died in 1997 Jiang Zemin in power from 19892002 Hu Jintao in power 20022012 and Xi Jinping in power since 2012 have continued the combination of economic reform and unchallenge able communist party rule that has been the basic pattern of Chinese politics in the postMao era part ii ideology governance law and political economy The second part of the book consists of four chapters that focus on broad aspects of Chinese politics that are important for understanding how the PRC has been and is governed Chapter 5 Ideology and Chinas Political Development of which I am the author discusses how communism MarxismLeninism first came to China in the early twentieth century and its growing influence in shaping the course of the Chinese revolution It explores how in the 1940s Mao Zedongs adaptation of MarxismLeninism became the ideological orthodoxy of the CCP and the essential components of Mao Zedong Thought as it is formally called The chapter exam ines how Mao Zedong Thought influenced Chinese politics and policy during the Maoist era There is a brief review of how Mao Zedong Thought is now officially evaluated and selectively embraced by the CCP in a country that has in so many ways become the obverse of what the Chairman believed should be the ideological direction of the PRC The chapter then turns to the topic of Deng Xiaoping Theory which is said by the CCP to be its guiding ideology in the current era of reform and opening to the world and is notable for the ideological justification it provides for introducing large elements of capitalism into a country still governed by a communist party Both Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao went to considerable lengths to put their personal stamps on party ideology by adapting Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Theory to changing historical circumstances and Xi Jinping is starting to do the same The chapter concludes with an exploration of contending ideologies in China today and the role of Chinese communist ideology in contemporary Chinese politics Chapter 6 Chinas Communist PartyState The Structure and Dynamics of Power by Cheng Li first provides a description of how the political system of the PRC is organized and functions in governing the Peoples Republic This chapter looks at the key institutions and offices of both the CCP the party and the PRC the state and the multiple and multifaceted connections between them that ensure that the state remains under the authority of the party It then takes up the question of the changing composition of the membership and particularly the top leadership of the CCP as it has evolved from a revolutionary organization designed to seize power and s t u d y i n g c h i n e s e P o l i t i c s 29 pursue radical objectives to a ruling party managing a complex modern state commit ted above all to economic development The author follows this with his analysis of several trends that now shape elite poli tics and policymaking in the PRC and that might provide some guidance for under standing how the partystate evolves in the near future These include in the authors view an unofficial system of political checks and balances within the CCP leadership between two informal coalitions or factions based on a combination of career paths and policy preferences that have introduced an element of bipartisanship and plu ralistic decisionmaking at least at the pinnacle of power in the PRC The chapter concludes with a discussion of possible scenarios for Chinas future political develop ment including democratization The subject of chapter 7 Chinas Legal System is new to this edition The author Jacques deLisle provides an analysis of the role of law in Chinas politics and gover nance emphasizing both the notable progress toward the establishment of a modern legal system and the limitations placed by the partystate on the development of the rule of law that would protect individual liberties and act as a check on the exercise of political power The most significant legal reform has been in the areas of economic and administrative law The former for example laws enforcing contracts has been especially important as part of Chinas move toward a market economy while the lat ter has provided some accountability for state institutions and officialsthough the CCP is not subject to such laws The author discusses several gaps in Chinas legal system that provide a way of understanding the mixed record in lawrelated reform such as the implementa tion gap reflected in the fact that many laws are not effectively enforced and the interregional gap that exists because laws are not applied consistently in different parts of the country The chapter concludes with an assessment of the forces that are working for and against deeper legal reform in the PRC Economic policymaking is one of the most crucial tasks of any government and economic performance is a major standard by which a people judge their govern ment It also influences nearly every other aspect of politics thus the topic is included in this part of the book along with the chapters on ideology the partystate and the legal system Chapter 8 Chinas Political Economy by David Zweig examines the CCPs over all development strategies and the specific economic policies made by the party lead ership and implemented by the state machinery Since this is one of the ways in which China has changed most dramatically in recent decades the author provides a brief overview of the Maoist political economy that prevailed before the beginning of the reform era in the late 1970s He then lays out the stages and strategy of economic reform begun by Deng Xiaoping followed by a discussion of a series of issues that lie at the heart of the political economy of contemporary China such as economic reform in the rural areas the decline of the public and growth of the public sector and the tension between market forces and the still heavy hand of the partystate in the economy corruption the internationalization of Chinas economy and the PRCs rapidly expanding role in the global economy The chapter concludes with observa tions about the major economic challenges facing Chinas new leadership 30 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a part iii politics and policy in action The first two chapters in Part III of the book look at Chinese politics in the geographic dimensions of rural and urban China while the following chapters present four case studies of policies that are particularly important in the political life of the PRC Chapter 9 Rural China Reform and Resistance by John James Kennedy focuses on politics in the countryside where just under 50 percent of the Chinese people more than million technically livetechnically that is because as many as 260 mil lion of those rural residents have migrated to the cities in search of work an impor tant subject that is treated in the following chapter on urban China The chapter on rural China explains the administrative organization of the Chinese countryside and how that fits into the overall partystate structure of the PRC The author pays particular attention to politics in Chinas villages of which there are about six hundred thousand In recent years village governance in China has changed dramatically with the introduction of elections for leaders and the forma tion of villager representative assemblies The chapter describes and evaluates just how democratic these trends are and the relationship between elected village officials and the village communist party leader who is still the most powerful person on the local level Finally the author takes up the issue of unrest in the Chinese countryside which has been growing significantly as rural people take action to protest against corrupt officials unscrupulous land grabs polluting factories and other matters they find harmful to their interests There are intentionally many parallels and connections between the chapter on rural China and chapter 10 Urban China Change and Contention by William Hurst This chapter looks in some depth at the situation of rural migrantsthe floating populationwho now make up a sizable portion of the inhabitants of many Chinese cities It also describes the administrative structure of Chinas urban areas and its ties to adjacent rural regions The chapter discusses the rise in urban unemployment as stateowned enterprises are shut down streamlined or privatized and in contrast the rise of a new urban upwardly mobile middle class of professionals and entrepreneurs as well as the politi cal views and career expectations of the urban youth The chapter then explores the challenges that environmental concerns growing socioeconomic inequality and the need for urban planning pose to city and national leaders in China The final four chapters in this part of the book are case studies of significant areas of public policy in the PRC Chapter 11 concerns policies toward the arts and culture by Richard Curt Kraus Although the nature and extent of censorship has changed greatly since Mao was in power and the arts are in many ways flourishing in China culture is one of the areas of life in which the CCP still claims the right to exercise a leading role enforcing limits on freedom of expression if its watchdogs feel a certain and undefined ideological or political line has been crossed The environmental desecration that has been a severe downside of Chinas eco nomic miracle is the subject of chapter 12 by Katherine Morton Maltreatment of the environment is ironically one the things that the Maoist and reform eras in China have in common The chapter discusses the causes and most egregious consequences of Chinas environmental crisis its international implications the governments s t u d y i n g c h i n e s e P o l i t i c s 31 response and the growth of grassroots environmental activism in the PRC The author also assesses the progress and the limitations of the reform of Chinas envi ronmental policy and the possibilities that the country will shift toward a model of sustainable development Chapter 13 which is on public health by Joan Kaufman takes note of the exten sion of basic health care to the vast majority of the Chinese people that counts as one of the major achievements of the Maoist era But the focus of this chapter is on the decline in primary and preventive care especially in the rural areas that has taken place due to the impact of marketization and privatization of social services in general The author stresses the impact of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome SARS crisis in 2003 in opening the eyes of the PRC leadership to the appalling condition of the countrys health care system The chapter also looks at the evolu tion of Chinas policy toward HIVAIDS which is spreading fast in the PRC and has recently been given a high priority by the government officials as has overall health care reform The issue addressed in chapter 14 is population control in particular Chinas onechild policy This is probably among the most widely known and controversial policiesboth at home and abroadof the Chinese government Among the ques tions that this chapter by Tyrene White addresses are When and why did Chinas leaders become so concerned about the rate of population increase in the country that they decided to implement the most restrictive and intrusive family planning policy in history What were the components of the onechild policy and how has it evolved over time Why was it so effective in urban areas but not in rural areas where it met with significant resistance And where it was effective did it have the positive effect on development that is claimed by Chinese leaders What have been some of the other results or consequences of that policy For example how did the onechild policy contribute to a situation in which China has an unnatural gender imbalance of more males than females in certain age groups and what are the social and political implications of that imbalance The rapid graying of Chinas population and the public policy challenges this presents to the government are also discussed part iv politics on Chinas periphery The final section of this book is called Politics on Chinas Periphery This is not meant in any sense to convey that the areas or topics covered are only of periph eral or minor importance in understanding Chinese politics They are in fact of central importance and are only peripheral in the geographic sense that they con cern places that are on the periphery or edges of the Peoples Republic Three of these areasTibet Xinjiang and Hong Kongare formally administrative parts of the PRC although Tibets and Xinjiangs status as autonomous regions is quite differ ent from that of Hong Kong as a special administrative region of the PRC The fourth areaTaiwanis not under the control of the PRC and acts in many ways as an independent country although Beijing insists that it is rightfully part of China The first two chapters 15 and 16 in this section are respectively on Tibet by Robert Barnett and Xinjiang by Gardner Bovingdon Both Tibet and Xinjiang are 32 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a autonomous regions of the PRC located in the far western part of the country As noted in the earlier discussion of geography autonomous regions are areas equiva lent in administrative status to provinces directly under the central government that have a high concentration of ethnic minority population and are allowed some leeway to adopt certain national policies to their culture and customs while remaining firmly under the political and military authority of Beijing Tibet and Xinjiang are the two largest if sparsely populated territorial units in the PRC and both lie along strategi cally important borders both regions have also been the site of substantial ethnic conflict and challenges to the central government The situation in Tibet has been particularly volatile and gained widespread international attention because of the vis ibility and prominence of the Dalai Lama the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism who has been in exile from Tibet since 1959 The majority of the population in Xinjiang is Muslim and the largest ethnic group among them is the Uyghurs who have very strong religious and cultural ties to the Islamic nationstates and peoples of Central Asia There is palpable tension between Uyghurs and Han Chinese in Xinjiang and recent incidents of violence while not as large scale as the protests in Tibet are a mat ter of urgent concern to in the government in Beijing Chapter 17 by Sonny ShuiHing Lo is about Hong Kong which was a British colony from the midnineteenth century until 1997 when it was returned through negotiations to Chinese sovereignty In contrast to Tibet and Xinjiang Hong Kong is a densely populated territorially tiny part of the PRC It is also one of the worlds great financial centers and by far the richest part of the PRCwith a very free market capitalist economy Hong Kong is officially a Special Administrative Region SAR of the PRC that does have significant degrees of selfgovernment and democracy How these are exercised in practice and the tensions this creates with Beijingwhich has the final say in matters related to the SARis a major theme of this chapter The subject of chapter 18 by Shelley Rigger is Taiwan The PRC claims sovereignty over this island which is just a bit farther from the Chinese mainland than Cuba is from the United States But in fact Taiwan has not been under the PRCs control since the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949 At that time the losing side in the conflictthe Nationalists under Chiang Kaishekwas able to retreat to Taiwan and with US support establish a viable political system and economy separate from the mainland The author describes the transition that Taiwan has made since then from an authoritarian regime to a multiparty democracy with one of the highest standards of living in East Asia After decades of hostile estrangement Taiwan and the PRC have recently developed commercial and other ties The future of TaiwanChina relations is a hot political topic on both the island and the mainlandand of strategic impor tance to the region and the United States And as the author emphasizes politics in Taiwan with a population not much smaller than Iraq and larger than Australia is interesting and important on its own terms ConClusion In 1949 a book titled China Shakes the World was published53 It was written by Jack Belden one of the very few Western journalists who was able to cover the CCP during s t u d y i n g c h i n e s e P o l i t i c s 33 the war against Japan and the civil war against the Nationalists Beldens message was that what was happening then and there in Chinathe anticipated victory of the CCPwas destined to be of global significance But the book appeared at a time when most Americans had little interest in China which they had given up for lost to chaos and communism With the onset of the Red Scare in the United States Beldens book gained hardly any attention and soon went out of print In 2006 another book with the same title China Shakes the World was published54 But it was published at a time of enormous international and American interest in the PRC The author James Kynge was also a journalist in China and his bottomline message was not that different from Beldens which each sought to capture in the title of their books Both Belden and Kynge were rightChina was shaking the world though Kynges book with the subtitle A Titans Rise and Troubled Futureand the Challenge for America was a much greater commercial success than Beldens it won the Financial Times 2006 Business Book of the Year Award But the message conveyed by the shared titles of Beldens and Kynges books and even the words they used has deeper roots It was Napoleon Bonaparte emperor of France in the early nineteenth century who is said to have remarked when looking at a map of Europe and Asia Let China sleep For when she wakes she will shake the world55 In the long run Napoleon was right too although when he died in 1821 imperial China was in decline and was about to be badly shaken by a new world order dominated by the rising powers of Western Europe Imperial Chinas decline led to more than a hundred years of tumultuous and often hugely violent change culminating in the reawakening of China that was reflected in Chairman Mao Zedongs proclamation just before the founding the PRC on October 1 1949 that the Chinese people have stood up56 China shook the world during the Maoist era but because of the Cold War and Maos own disastrous policies its global influence was limited and great pain was inflicted on the country Now a changed and changing China is again shaking the world this time with a very different impact on global affairs and the Chinese people The editor and authors of this book hope that their contributions help readers better understand Chinas modern political history and contemporary politics and why these are matters that should command the attention of anyone who wants to be an informed citizen of the twentyfirst century noTes 1 See for example Justin Yifu Lin et al Chinas Economic Miracle Development Strategy and Economic Reform rev ed Hong Kong Chinese University of Hong Kong 2013 and Susan Shirk Chinas Economic Miracle in S Shirk China Fragile Superpower How Chinas Internal Politics Could Derail Its Peaceful Rise New York Oxford University Press 2007 1333 2 When China Wakes The Economist November 28 1992 15 3 The Economist Intelligence Units Index of Democracy 2012 httpswwweiucom publictopicalreportaspxcampaignidDemocracyIndex12 4 About 12 percent of Chinas land is arable compared to 175 percent in the United States and 529 percent in India 34 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a 5 See Jonathan Spence The Chans Great Continent China in Western Minds New York W W Norton 1998 118 For an argument that Marco Polo never made it as far as China see Frances Woods Did Marco Polo Go To China Boulder CO Westview Press 1998 6 Elizabeth J Perry Studying Chinese Politics Farewell to Revolution The China Journal 57 January 2007 5 7 See for example Peter Hays Gries Chinas New Nationalism Pride Politics and Diplomacy Berkeley University of California Press 2005 and Suisheng Zhao A NationState by Construction Dynamics of Modern Chinese Nationalism Stanford CA Stanford University Press 2004 8 See Paul A Cohen Remembering and Forgetting National Humiliation in TwentiethCentury China in China Unbound Evolving Perspectives on the Chinese Past New York Routledge 2003 148184 9 In recent years Cyprus Nepal and Moldova have had ruling communist parties that were elected into power in multiparty states Communist partystates such as China do not permit free multiparty elections On Nepals communist party see the Box Maoism Outside of China in chapter 5 10 The World Bank Country and Lending Groups httpdataworldbankorgabout countryclassificationscountryandlendinggroups 11 See opening remarks by Robert B Zoellick World Bank Group President at the Conference on Chinas Challenges for 2030 Building a Modern Harmonious and Creative HighIncome Society Beijing September 3 2011 httpwwwworldbank orgennewsspeech20110903chinachallengesfor2030buildingmodernharmon iouscreativehighincomesociety 12 See for example Phil Deans The Peoples Republic of China The PostSocialist Developmental State in Developmental States Relevancy Redundancy or Reconfiguration Linda Low ed Hauppauge NY Nova Science Publishers 2004 133146 13 See for example The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars China Inside the Peoples Republic New York Bantam Books 1972 Michel Oksenberg ed Chinas Developmental Experience New York The Academy of Political Science Columbia University 1973 Victor Nee and James Peck eds Chinas Uninterrupted Revolution From 1840 to the Present New York Pantheon Books 1975 and Ross Terrill ed The China Difference New York Harper Collins 1979 14 See for example Martin Jacques When China Rules the World The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order New York Penguin Press 2009 Ted Fishman The Chinese Century The New York Times July 4 2004 and Oded Shenkar The Chinese Century The Rising Chinese Economy and Its Impact on the Global Economy the Balance of Power and Your Job Philadelphia PA Wharton School Publishing 2004 15 The idea of a G2 originated with Zbigniew Brzezinski an international relations scholar and national security advisor to President Carter in The Group of Two that could change the world Financial Times January 13 2009 httpwwwftcomintl cmss0d99369b8e17811ddafa00000779fd2achtmlaxzz2YGoTpmoI The Institute for International Economic Policy at George Washington Universitys Elliot School of International Affairs holds an annual G2 at GW conference httpwwwgwueduiiep G2atGWG2atGW2012cfm 16 For critiques of the G2 concept see Richard C Bush The United States and China A G2 in the Making The Brookings Institution October 11 2011 httpwww brookingseduresearcharticles20111011chinausg2bush and Elizabeth C Economy and Adam Segal The G2 Mirage Why the United States and China Are Not Ready to Upgrade Ties Foreign Affairs MayJune 2009 s t u d y i n g c h i n e s e P o l i t i c s 35 17 See for example Peter Navarro The Coming China Wars Where They Will Be Fought and How They Can Be Won Upper Saddle River NJ FT Press 2008 and Steven W Mosher Hegemon Chinas Plan to Dominate Asia and the World New York Encounter Books 2000 18 See for example Edward S Steinfeld Playing Our Game Why Chinas Rise Doesnt Threaten the West New York Oxford University Press 2010 and C Fred Bergsten et al Chinas Rise Challenges and Opportunities Washington DC Peterson Institute for International Economics 2008 19 For reviews of the evolution of the study of Chinese politics see Political Science and Chinese Political Studies ed Sujian Guo New York Springer 2012 Kenneth Lieberthal Reflections on the Evolution of the China Field in Political Science in Contemporary Chinese Politics New Sources Methods and Field Strategies ed Allen Carlson et al New York Cambridge University Press 2010 266278 Richard Baum Studies of Chinese Politics in the United States in China Watching Perspectives from Europe Japan and the United States eds Robert Ash David Shambaugh and Seiichiro Takagi New York Taylor Francis 2006 147168 and Lowell Dittmer and William Hurst Analysis in Limbo Contemporary Chinese Politics amid the Maturation of Reform in Chinas Deep Reform Domestic Politics in Transition eds Lowell Dittmer and Guoli Liu Lanham MD Rowman Littlefield 2006 2546 20 See for example Bo Zhiyue Chinas Elite Politics Governance and Democratization Singapore World Scientific Publishing Company 2010 and Joseph Fewsmith China since Tiananmen From Deng Xiaoping to Hu Jintao 2nd ed New York Cambridge University Press 2008 Also see many of the suggested readings about Mao in chapter 3 by Frederick C Teiwes in this volume 21 See for example Victor C Shih Factions and Finance in China Elite Conflict and Inflation New York Cambridge University Press 2003 The influence of leadership fac tions or coalitions on Chinese politics is a central theme of chapter 6 by Cheng Li in this volume 22 See for example Lucian W Pye The Dynamics of Chinese Politics Cambridge MA Oelgeschlager Gunn Hain 1981 23 See for example Jean Oi Communism and Clientelism Rural Politics in China World Politics 32 no 2 January 1985 238266 and her book State and Peasant in Contemporary Chin The Political Economy of Village Government Berkeley University of California Press 1989 24 See for example Lily L Tsai Accountability without Democracy Solidary Groups and Public Goods Provision in Rural China New York Cambridge University Press 2007 25 See for example Kenneth G Lieberthal and David M Lampton eds Bureaucracy Politics and Decision Making in PostMao China Berkeley University of California Press 1992 26 See for example Harry Harding Organizing China The Problem of Bureaucracy 19491976 Stanford CA Stanford University Press 1981 27 See for example Thomas P Bernstein and Xiaobo Lü Taxation without Representation Peasants the Central and the Local States in Reform China The China Quarterly 163 Sept 2000 742763 and their book Taxation without Representation in Contemporary Rural China New York Cambridge University Press 2003 28 See for example Joseph Fewsmith The Logic and Limits of Political Reform in China New York Cambridge University Press 2013 and Pierre Landry Decentralized Authoritarianism in China The Communist Partys Control of Local Elites in the PostMao Era New York Cambridge University Press 2012 36 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a 29 See for example David L Shambaugh Chinas Communist Party Atrophy and Adaptation Berkeley University of California Press 2008 Kevin J OBrien Reform Without Liberalization Chinas National Peoples Congress and the Politics of Institutional Change New York Cambridge University Press 1990 and David L Shambaugh Modernizing Chinas Military Progress Problems and Prospects Berkeley University of California Press 2002 30 See for example Gordon Bennett Yundong Mass Campaigns in Chinese Communist Leadership Berkeley Center for Chinese Studies University of California 1976 and Tyrene White Chinas Longest Campaign Birth Planning in the Peoples Republic 19492005 Ithaca NY Cornell University Press 2006 Baogang He Rural Democracy in China The Role of Village Elections New York Palgrave Macmillan 2007 Yongnian Zheng Technological Empowerment The Internet State and Society in China Stanford CA Stanford University Press 2007 and Rachel E Stern Environmental Litigation in China A Study in Political Ambivalence New York Cambridge University Press 2013 31 See for example Elizabeth Remick Building Local States China during the Republican and PostMao Eras Cambridge MA Harvard University Asia Center 2004 32 For an example of a study by a political scientist of political development in China in the 1920s and 1930s see Suisheng Zhao Power by Design ConstitutionMaking in Nationalist China Honolulu University of Hawaii Press 1996 33 Perry Studying Chinese Politics Farewell to Revolution 5 Harry Harding Chinas Second Revolution Reform after Mao Washington DC Brookings Institution Press 1987 200 Minxin Pei Chinas Evolution Toward Soft Authoritarianism in What if China Doesnt Democratize Implications for War and Peace eds Edward Friedman and Barrett L McCormick Armonk NY M E Sharpe 2000 7495 Marc Blecher China against the Tides Restructuring through Revolution Radicalism and Reform 3rd ed New York Continuum Books 2009 72 34 See for example Andrew J Nathan Larry Diamond and Marc F Plattner Will China Democratize Baltimore The Johns Hopkins University Press 2013 Also see the debate in Foreign Affairs JanuaryFebruary 2013 between Eric X Li The Life of the Party The PostDemocratic Future Begins in China and Yasheng Huang Democratize or Die and TED Talks and Blogs followups at httpblogtedcom20130701whydemocracystillw insacritiqueofericxlisataleoftwopoliticalsystems 35 The term comes from Peter A Hall Governing the Economy The Politics of State Intervention in Britain and France New York Oxford University Press 1986 It is also one of the four themes applied to the study of comparative politics in Mark Kesselman Joel Krieger William A Joseph eds Introduction to Comparative Politics 6th ed Boston Wadsworth Cengage 2012 36 There are numerous studies by political scientists that focus on political economy issues For a listing of some of these see the suggested readings at the end of chapter 8 by David Zweig in this volume 37 See for example Jeffrey N Wasserstrom and Elizabeth Perry eds Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China 2nd ed Boulder CO Westview Press 1994 Among the most early important works that take the political culture approach to Chinese politics are those of Lucian Pye for example Asian Power and Politics The Cultural Dimensions of Authority Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 1988 See also Peter R Moody Trends in the Study of Chinese Political Culture China Quarterly 139 September 1994 731740 38 See for example Ezra F Vogel The Four Little Dragons The Spread of Industrialization in East Asia Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 1991 and Daniel A Bell Chinas s t u d y i n g c h i n e s e P o l i t i c s 37 New Confucianism Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society Princeton NJ Princeton University Press 2008 39 For a list of suggested readings on the subject of the ideology of the CCP including Mao Zedong Thought see chapter 5 by William A Joseph in this volume 40 See for example John W Lewis and Xue Litai Social Change and Political Reform in China Meeting the Challenge of Success The China Quarterly 176 December 2003 926 942 and Bruce J Dickson Wealth into Power The Communist Partys Embrace of Chinas Private Sector New York Cambridge University Press 2008 41 Peter B Evans Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol Bringing the State Back In New York Cambridge University Press 1985 and B Guy Peters Institutional Theory in Political Science The New Institutionalism 2nd ed New York Continuum 2005 42 See for example Kjeld Erik Brodsgaard and Zheng Yongnian eds Bringing the Party Back in How China is Governed Singapore Marshall Cavendish Academic 2004 43 See for example Theresa Wright Accepting Authoritarianism StateSociety Relations in Chinas Reform Era Stanford CA Stanford University Press 2010 and Peter Hayes Gries and Stanley Rosen eds China Politics State Society and the Market New York Routledge 2010 44 See for example Kevin J OBrien ed Popular Protest in China Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 2008 and Yongshun Cai Collective Resistance in China Why Popular Protests Succeed or Fail Stanford CA Stanford University Press 2010 45 Robert D Putnam Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival of American Community New York Simon Schuster 2000 46 See for example Timothy Hildebrandt Social Organizations and the Authoritarian State in China New York Cambridge University Press 2013 and Jianxing Yu and Sujian Guo eds Civil Society and Governance in China New York Palgrave McMillan 2012 47 Jane Duckett The Chinese States Retreat from Health Policy and the Politics of Retrenchment New York Routledge 2010 Another study of Chinas health care system in the 1970s took the bureaucratic approach see David M Lampton Health Conflict and the Chinese Political System Ann Arbor Michigan Papers in Chinese Studies 1974 48 White Chinas Longest Campaign 49 David Bachman Bureaucracy Economy and Leadership in China The Institutional Origins of the Great Leap Forward New York Cambridge University Press 1991 50 Frederick C Teiwes and Warren Sun Chinas Road to Disaster Mao Central Politicians and Provincial Leaders in the Unfolding of the Great Leap Forward 19551959 Armonk NY East Gate Book 1998 51 Ralph A Thaxton Jr Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China Maos Great Leap Forward Famine and the Origins of Righteous Resistance in Da Fo Village New York Cambridge University Press 2008 52 For example Blecher China against the Tides Sujian Guo Chinese Politics and Government Power Ideology and Organization New York Routledge 2012 June Teufel Dreyer Chinas Political System 8th ed New York Longman 2011 Elizabeth Freund Larus Politics and Society in Contemporary China Boulder CO Lynne Reinner 2012 Kenneth J Lieberthal Governing China From Revolution to Reform 2nd ed New York W W Norton 2003 and Tony Saich Governance and Politics of China 3rd ed New York Palgrave Macmillan 2011 53 Jack Belden China Shakes the World New York Harper 1949 The book was repub lished in 1970 by Monthly Review Press and in 1989 by New World Press The other clas sic book from a similar time and on a similar topic is Edgar Snow Red Star Over China New York Random House 1938 reprinted by Grove Press 1994 38 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a 54 James Kynge China Shakes the World A Titans Rise and Troubled Futureand the Challenge for America Boston MA Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2006 55 Parts of the quote attributed to Napoleon have been used in numerous titles of books and articles about China since the 1980s see for example Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn China Wakes The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power New York Times Books Random House 1994 Yu Guangyuan Deng Xiaoping Shakes the World An Eyewitness Account of Chinas Party Work Conference and the Third Plenum ed Steven I Levine and Ezra F Vogel Norwalk CT EastBridge 2004 and When China Wakes The Economist November 28 1992 56 Mao Zedong The Chinese People Have Stood Up September 12 1949 in Selected Works of Mao Tsetung vol 5 Peking Foreign Languages Press 1977 1519 suggesTed readings Brown Kerry Contemporary China New York Palgrave Macmillan 2013 China Brief The Jamestown Foundation httpwwwjamestownorgprogramschinabrief China Leadership Monitor The Hoover Institution httpwwwhooverorgpublications clm Dillon Michael Contemporary China An Introduction New York Routledge 2008 Fenby Jonathan The Penguin History of Modern China The Fall and Rise of a Great Power 1850 to the Present New York Penguin Global 2013 Grasso June Jay Cornin and Michael Kort Modernization and Revolution in China From the Opium Wars to the Olympics 4th ed Armonk NY M E Sharpe 2009 Hutchings Graham Modern China A Guide to a Century of Change Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 2001 Kenley David Modern Chinese History Ann Arbor MI Association for Asian Studies 2012 Lampton David M The Three Faces of Chinese Power Might Money and Minds Berkeley University of California Press 2008 Lawrance Alan China since 1919 Revolution and Reform A Sourcebook New York Routledge 2004 MacFarquhuar Roderick ed Politics of China Sixty Years of the Peoples Republic of China 3rd ed New York Cambridge University Press 2011 Mitter Rana Modern China A Very Short Introduction New York Oxford University Press 2008 Schell Orville and John Delury Wealth and Power Chinas Long March to the Twentyfirst Century New York Random House 2013 Schoppa R Keith The Columbia Guide to Modern Chinese History New York Columbia University Press 2000 Twentieth Century China A History in Documents New York Oxford University Press 2004 Wasserstrom Jeffrey M China in the 21st Century What Everyone Needs to Know 2nd ed New York Oxford University Press 2013 Wilkinson Endymion Chinese History A Manual 3rd ed Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 2013 PART I The Political History of Modern China The Chinese empire was born amid the turmoil and wars of the second century bCe In the first two dynastic regimes the Qin 221206 bCe and the Han 202 bCe220 Ce several patterns emerged that would persist through out the empire until it was overthrown by a revolution in 1912 and beyond First when the brutal leader of the Qin state known historically as Qin Shi Huangdi literally first emperor of Qin established a centralized empire he momentarily put to rest the political centrifugal forces endemic in Chinese feudalism but relations between center and region andor local ity remained an ongoing troublesome issue throughout the empire and the Republic 19121949 Tensions between center and locality continue to be problematic in early twentyfirst century China in the wake of the economic reforms begun in the 1980s Second while Qin Shi Huangdi tried to burn all books dealing with history litera ture or philosophy the Han dynasty began to rally around the ideas and approach of Confucius Kong Fuzi who had lived in the late fifth century bCe see box 21 The Han instituted a rudimentary civil service examination system with a strong emphasis on testing mastery of Confucianism by the Song dynasty 9601279 the examination had become the jewel in the crown of the imperial Chinese govern ment It provided political social ideological and cultural unity for Chinas complex diversity of regional and local cultures Those who passed the examinations became government officials and the social elite While the Confucianbased exam was abol ished in 1905 in the early twentyfirst century the Chinese government established Confucius Institutes around the world to promote the learning of Chinese language and culture From empire to Peoples Republic R K e I Th S c ho P PA 2 42 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a A third pattern that appeared in the late Han dynasty was the continual interaction between Han Chinese within the Great Wall which began to be constructed in the Qin dynasty and nonHan peoples of the steppe beyond the WallMongols Manchus and Turkic groups especially Uyghurs Over the centuries the peoples beyond the Wall defined by their mobility in herding flocks raided and even invaded China within the Wall a more sedentary society of farmers At times of greater Chinese strength the Han Chinese pushed further into steppe lands From the late thirteenth century on the interaction between the Han and nonHan peoples became more an ongoing dialogue of power with these outsiders ruling parts of North China from Box 21 confucius on Government and Politics confucius 551479 bce was an ancient chinese philosopher whose ideas have had an enduring impact on chinese culture and history Much of his philosophy is concerned with politics and government and like other great political thinkers such as Plato confucius focuses on the good state that he believes will be the best way for society to be orga nized and governed his teachings including the following observations on political mat ters are found in The Analects of Confucius which were compiled by the philosophers disciples in the generations after his death 23 The Master said Lead them by political maneuvers restrain them with punish ments the people will become cunning and shameless Lead them by virtue restrain them with ritual they will develop a sense of shame and a sense of participation 1219 Lord Ji Kang asked Confucius about government saying Suppose I were to kill the bad to help the good how about that Confucius replied You are here to gov ern what need is there to kill If you desire what is good the people will be good The moral power of the gentleman is the wind the moral power of the common man is grass Under the wind the grass must bend 1211 Duke Jing of Qi asked Confucius about government Confucius replied Let the lord be a lord the subject a subject the father a father the son a son The Duke said excellent If indeed the lord is not a lord the subject not a subject the fa ther not a father the son not a son I could be sure of nothing anymorenot even of my daily food 127 Zigong asked about government The Master said Sufficient food sufficient weap ons and the trust of the people Zigong said If you had to do without one of these three which would you give upWeaponsIf you had to do without one of the remaining which would you give upFood after all everyone has to die eventually but without the trust of the people no government can stand 21 Someone said to Confucius Master why dont you join the government The Master said In the Documents it is said Only cultivate filial piety and be kind to your brothers and you will be contributing to the body politic This is also a form of political action one need not necessarily join the government 1313 The Master said If a man can steer his own life straight the tasks of government should be no problem for him If he cannot steer his own life straight how could he steer other people straight From The Analects of Confucius translated by Simon Leys New York W W Norton 1997 6 8 56 57 58 and 62 f r o m e m P i r e t o P e o P l e s r e P u B l i c 43 the late eleventh century on and with the Mongol Yuan dynasty 12791368 and Manchu Qing dynasty 16441912 ruling all of China The heritage of these relation ships is the early twentyfirst century Chinese governments ambivalence in its poli cies toward ethnic minorities Late imperial China reached its zenith of wealth and power during the reign of the Manchu emperor Qianlong 17361795 in a period known as High Qing Mideighteenthcentury military campaigns in central Asia brought the empire six million square miles of new territory and China made Tibet its protector ate In the foreign policy dubbed the tributary system by Western scholars South Southeast and east Asian states sent gifts and performed the kowtow ketouliterally knock head before the Chinese emperor as symbolic ritual in Chinese eyes of their superiority visàvis the tributary states subordinate sta tus exceptional government leadership created an age of economic prosperity marked by agricultural commercialization and diversification and the importa tion of crops from the New World An indication of this remarkable time was the Qianlong emperors cancellation of annual taxes four times in his reign because the government was so fiscally wealthy Prosperity brought greater elite wealth new occupational opportunities new markets and commercial relationships and from 1749 to 1790 a 70 percent increase in population to 301 million It is not sur prising that in the late eighteenth century the number of people fascinated with China Sinophiles in europe and the recently established United States grew impressed with Chinas enlightened despotism meritocracy a ruling elite based upon the examination and material culture Historians have recently focused on the Qing regime not only for its rule in China but as the leader of a multiethnic empireestablishing effective rule over Turks Tibetans and Mongols and other groups as well1 The DecLINe oF The IMPeRIAL STATe Amid the glories of High Qing in the late eighteenth century were unfortunately many signs of decline and danger Military campaigns and the suppression of rebel lions especially the religiousbased White Lotus Rebellion 17961804 eroded state wealth A weakening economy and military did not bode well for continuing suc cesses The emperors patronage of He Shen his corrupt personal favorite at the court in the 1780s and 1790s opened the floodgates to widespread venality as the court ier parleyed his position into bureaucratic influence and great wealth His corrup tion proliferated far beyond his clique to every administrative level Like a cancer on the body politic it metastasized into widespread corruption that robbed economic resources and undermined popular respect for the dynasty The population surge a sign of growing wealth ironically posed the greatest longterm danger the Chinese system of partible inheritance where inheritance was divided among a familys sons meant that land per capita shrank markedly Poverty and bankruptcies rose The increasingly fiscally strained government had difficulty providing charitable relief and public works for the people two keys for insuring respect and support for the regime 44 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a China also faced a growing threat from Western empirebuilding nations propelled by the alliterative triad of merchants missionaries and the military Chinese culture frowned on commerce with outsiders seeing itself as being the Middle Kingdom zhongguo and everything under Heaventianxia and therefore selfsufficient in all important things but pressure from the West prompted China to allow trade at the southern city of Guangzhou under a modified tributary arrangement where the Chinese government orchestrated the music to which Westerners danced Westerners bought teas and silk but because they offered nothing the Chinese wanted such as woollen textiles for a tropical climate Great britain in particular suffered from an unfavorable trade balance with Chinauntil it began to smuggle in opium Why this drug became such an addiction among the Chinese is still unclear but the number of chests of opium smuggled into China increased exponentially in the first decades of the nineteenth centuryat least as measured by the extent of drug addiction and related currency outflow and soaring inflation When the Chinese emperor sent an imperial commissioner who used strict measures to quash the smuggling Great britain saw it as a cause for war In the Opium War 18391842 Great britain exacted Chinas humiliating defeat and forced on it the Treaty of Nanjing the first of many such agreements called the unequal treaties because China gave all yet received nothing This war opened a century of aggression by Western nations against China transforming the Middle Kingdom into a semicolony subject to the demands of many foreign nations The treaties opened trading ports along the coast and along the Yangtze River where for eign settlements were carved into existing Chinese cities some Chinese then came to be ruled by foreigners These settlements installed extraterritoriality with con sular jurisdiction under which an accused foreigner would be tried for a crime in a Western not a Chinese court Though Chinese who worked with or were converted by Westerners were not covered by extraterritoriality Westerners because of their special legal status often tried to use their power to protect their Chinese business agents compradors or their religious converts In addition China lost its right to control and collect its own tariffs It could not regulate foreign ships entries into inland waterways the loss of an important right for any sovereign nation Chinas tributary system was nullified ambassadors of foreign states could now reside per manently in beijing The open propagation of Christianity was guaranteed by the unequal treaties This meant that missionaries could go anywhere could purchase property for churches and schools and could proselytize at will Though the impact of late Qing mission aries was complex on the whole it was an unhappy one The political landscape was studded with episodes of violence sparked by the actions of culturally arrogant missionaries who believed they alone had the Truth at core these episodes were spawned by the cultural imperialism of the missionaries and the tenacious cultural chauvinism of the Chinese The nineteenth century was also ravaged by domestic rebellion The Taiping Rebellion 18511864 the largest uprising in world history devastated much of east central and south China reached militarily into most provinces and killed an esti mated twenty million people Incubated in an area marked by ethnic rivalry unem ployment and poverty and forged into a utopian crusade based on a bastardized f r o m e m P i r e t o P e o P l e s r e P u B l i c 45 Christianity the rebellion turned wouldbe dynasty was a major threat to traditional Chinese culture It promised to dethrone Confucianism and the family as cultural hallmarks raise the status of women institute primitive economic communism and replace social hierarchy with equality see box 22 Though many elements caused its demise including its poor administration its inability to fulfill its promises to the people and a leadership that politically cannibalized itself its coup de grâce came from beijingauthorized provincial armies that were formed and led by Han Chinese officials who were concerned about the rebellions cultural threat The rebellions destruction is almost unfathomable in the populous and prosperous Jiangnan the Lower Yangtze region the population which stood at sixtyseven million in 1843 plummeted to fortyfive million half a century later Box 22 the taiPinG Plan for reorGanizinG chinese society from land system of the heavenly dynasty 1853 The division of land must be according to the number of individuals whether male or female calculating upon the number of individuals in a household if they be numerous then the amount of land will be larger and if few smaller All the fields in the empire are to be cultivated by all the people alike If the land is deficient in one place then the people must be removed to another Thus all the people in the empire may together enjoy the abundant happiness of the heavenly Father Supreme Lord and Great God There being fields let all cultivate them there being food let all eat there being money let us all use it so that nowhere does inequality exist and no man in not well fed and clothed All men and women every individual of sixteen years and upwards shall receive land twice as much as those of fifteen years of age and under Throughout the empire the mulberry tree is to be planted close to every wall so that all women may engage in rearing silkworms spinning the silk and making garments Throughout the empire every family should keep five hens and two sows At the time of harvest every sergeant shall direct the corporals to see to it that of the twentyfive families under his charge each individual has a sufficient supply of food and aside from the new grain each may receive the remainder must be deposited in the public granary for the whole empire is the universal family of our heavenly Father T he sergeant must keep an account of money and grain figures in a record book For every twentyfive families there must be established one public granary and one church where the sergeant must reside Whenever there are marriages or births or funerals all may go to the public granary but a limit must be observed and not a cash be used beyond what is necessary Thus every family which celebrates a marriage or a birth will be given one thousand cash and a hundred catties of grain This one rule is applicable throughout the empire In the use of all things let there be economy to provide against war and famine In every circle of twentyfive families all young boys must go to church every day where the sergeant is to teach them to read the old Testament and the New Testament as well as the book of proclamations of the true ordained Sovereign every Sabbath the corporals must lead the men and women to the church where the males and females are to sit in separate rows There they will listen to sermons sing praises and offer sacrifices to our heavenly Father the Supreme Lord and Great God From J Mason Gentzler Changing China Readings in the History of China from the Opium War to the Present New York Praeger 1977 5458 46 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a The decades of the 1850s into the 1870s saw other areas raked by rebellions as well The first phase of the Robin Hoodlike Nian rebellion in north China 1853 1868 was primarily extended guerrilla warfare Chinese scholarofficials again dealt successfully with the rebels challenges copying the rebels own strategy of employing scorched earth tactics while building fortified settlements to keep rebels away from the masses The rebellions second phase was mostly a struggle between cavalries that ranged across the North China plain Han officials sup pressed it as well Two Muslim rebellions in southwest 18551873 and northwest China 18621873 had different dynamics In the southwests Yunnan province the key struggle the Panthay rebellion was between the interloping ethnic Han Chinese who moved in to seize the mines and the Chinese Muslims called Hui who had for many years controlled mining in the province Massacre followed by countermassacre marked the bloody affair siege warfare ended in the murders of all caught inside city walls Unlike the Taiping and the Nian the Qing regime used their own military forces not those under the leadership of Han civilian officials The dynamic of the rebellion in the northwest in contrast was more religiousideological with the leaders of a new sect charting the way Like the Panthay this rebellion featured vicious and brutal siege warfare Another Han scholarofficial led in quelling the movement in a bloody fiveyear campaign To SAve AN eMPIRe One impact of these devastating foreign and domestic crises facing the Qing dynasty in the midnineteenth century was the financial exhaustion of the government Already by 1850after the Opium War but before any of the rebellionsthe Qing government was taking in only about 10 percent of what it was spending It followed that the reconstruction work after the rebellionssuch as rebuilding bridges fixing irrigation works and reclaiming devastated farmlandcould not be undertaken by the central government but that local elites had to take over any reconstruction if it was going to occur in their areas In other words the crises that were wracking the Chinese state in the end had to be solved by Han leaders of Chinese society rather than the Manchuled central state Or seen another way the center was losing power to the provinces and localities it was the old centerlocality tension that events brought once again to the fore Leaders of the socalled SelfStrengthening Movement argued that Western technology particularly armaments and ships should be used to protect Chinese traditions Under the slogan Western learning for its use Chinese Learning for its essence they argued that Western technology would serve as the techniques means by which Chinese traditions ends could be protected and preserved What they did not seem to understand is that ultimately the means always affect the ends While selfstrengthening involved a multipronged effort in the spheres of diplomacy education and technology advances in military technology were usu ally taken as a measure of successful selfstrengthening for they were most clearly related to defense In this regard the main fruits of the selfstrengtheners labor f r o m e m P i r e t o P e o P l e s r e P u B l i c 47 were an arsenal built near Shanghai and a shipyard at Fuzhou one of the first five treaty ports established by the Treaty of Nanjing These institutions were established by the same Han scholarofficials who had quelled most of the rebellions Though selfstrengtheners did not call for major institutional change in the imperial govern ment they did establish the Zongli Yamen Office for General Management a kind of foreign ministry to oversee many diplomatic educational and technological efforts The selfstrengtheners continually had to fight conservatives in the imperial court who argued that contact with the West was contaminating and that Chinese tradi tions must be revivified these were for the most part men who were overwhelmed by fears of change and what that change would portend for the traditional Chinese world and their own lives even as Chinese debated their proper actions foreign threats and crises did not abate In the twentyone years from 1874 to 1895 China lost control of the Ryukyu Islands Liuqiu in Chinese Vietnam and Korea its three most important tribu tary states that is states that most frequently dispatched missions to the Middle Kingdom Aggressive actions by Japan in the first and third instances and by France in the second pointed to a new wave of imperialism in the closing quarter of the nine teenth century The losses of Vietnam to France 18831885 and of Korea to Japan 18941895 had significant national security implications It was the SinoJapanese War that was most shocking to the Chinese the huge land empire of China had been militarily humiliated by the Japanese a people whom the Chinese had denigrated as dwarf bandits In the war with Japan China lost the island of Taiwan and if three european countries had not stepped in Liaodong Peninsula in southern Manchuria would have been lost as well In 1897 and 1898 in an even more ominous development Western nations demanded the right to lease areas of China for from twentyfive to ninetynine years Russia Great britain France and other Western powers queued up to carve up the Chinese melon by establishing spheres of influence where they could extract mineral resources build and operate rail lines and engage in many other kinds of profitable activity During this crucial period the most powerful leader in China was the empress Dowager Cixi the widow of the Xianfeng emperor reigned 18501861 who had ruled as regent for child emperors from 1861 to 1891 and after that as a meddler in the rule of her nephew the Guangxu emperor Cixi was for the most part a strong backer of conservative political forces in the imperial government In the contexts of the defeat by Japan and the leasehold mania a movement to reform state institutions emerged fullblown in the summer of 1898 after brewing for three years in the provinces The rationale for this change was set down by scholarofficial Kang Youwei who reinterpreted classical Confucian texts in a quite revolutionary wayall with a view of supporting radical institutional change Gaining support from the Guangxu emperor Kang provided the policy agenda in the summer of 1898 in what is known as the Hundred Days Reform the emperor issued over a hundred decrees calling for institutional innovations in many arenas These included revamp ing the examination system and establishing a national school system restructuring the government and abolishing sinecure posts modernizing the police military and postal systems and setting up new institutions to promote agriculture commerce and industry see box 23 However the reforms thoroughly threatened the political 48 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a establishment and the power of the empress dowager Cixi therefore opposed them and staged a coup détat putting the emperor under house arrest and executing those reformers who did not flee beijing in time Despite this failure the reforms and their ideological base were important in Chinas political development Kangs call for institutions undergirded by and infused with Western ideas began to stimulate as nothing had before an interest in Western things beyond guns and ships It might be said that Kangs work began to prime the pump of greater change Perhaps more significant Kangs reinterpretation of Box 23 memorial from KanG youwei to the GuanGxu emPeror on reform 1898 A survey of all states in the world will show that those states which undertook reforms become strong while those states which cling to the past perished The consequences of clinging to the past and the effects of opening up new ways are thus obvious If Your Majesty with your discerning brilliance observes the trends in other countries you will see that if we can change we can preserve ourselves but if we cannot change we shall perish Indeed if we can make a complete change we shall become strong but if we make only limited changes we shall still perish If Your Majesty and his ministers investi gate the source of the disease you will know that this is the right prescription our present trouble lies in our clinging to old institutions without knowing how to change In an age of competition between states to put into effect methods appropri ate to an era of universal unification and laissezfaire is like wearing heavy furs in summer or riding a high carriage across a river This can only result in having a fever or getting oneself drowned It is a principle of things that the new is strong but the old weak that new things are fresh but old things rotten that new things are active but old things static If the institu tions are old defects will develop Therefore there are no institutions that should remain unchanged for a hundred years Moreover our present institutions are but unworthy vestiges of the han Tang Yuan and Ming dynasties they are not even the institutions of the Manchu ancestors In fact they are the products of the fancy writing and corrupt dealing of the petty officials rather than the original ideas of the ancestors Furthermore institutions are for the purpose of preserving ones territories Now that the ancestral territory cannot be preserved what good is it to maintain the ancestral institutions Nowadays the court has been undertaking some reforms but the action of the emperor is obstructed by the ministers and the recommendations of the able schol ars are attacked by oldfashioned bureaucrats Rumors and scandals are rampant and people fight each other like fire and water A reform in this way is as ineffective as attempting a forward march by walking backward Your Majesty knows that under the present circumstances reforms are imperative and old institutions must be abolished As to the republican governments of the United States and France and the con stitutional governments of britain and Germany these countries are far away and their customs are different from ours consequently I beg Your Majesty to adopt the pur pose of Peter the Great of Russia as our purpose and to take the Meiji Reform of Japan as the model of our reform The time and place of Japans reform are not remote and her religion and customs are somewhat similar to ours her success is manifest her example can easily be followed From J Mason Gentzler Changing China Readings in the History of China from the Opium War to the Present New York Praeger 1977 8687 f r o m e m P i r e t o P e o P l e s r e P u B l i c 49 Confucianism was crucial in bringing China into the modern world in effect under cutting Confucianism itself before Confucianism had been the Way an unques tioned article of faith but Kang had turned it into an ideology among other ideolo gies When Confucianism became simply an ideology it could for example be seen as a tool legitimizing the elevation of certain groups fathers husbands parents elder brothers males in general and demeaning others sons wives women in general all children younger brothers Thus though it was an unintended consequence Kangs work was the first step in dethroning Confucianism as the unchallenged basis of Chinese culture It was also an important precursor to the New Policies adopted by the Qing regime in the first decade of the twentieth century in a last ditch effort to save the dynasty but sadly the Qing did not move toward reform until they were pounded by one more wretched and seemingly quite insane episode The decline of the traditional state was punctuated at centurys end by the tragic Boxer Uprising in North China These rebels were called boxers because of their martial arts rituals which allegedly brought them invulnerability The boxers mostly peasant young men and women particularly targeted Chinese Christian converts and foreign missionaries They attacked the con verts because of the special privileges that they often enjoyed and the missionaries because they refused to allow converts to participate in traditional Chinese festivals and offended Chinese customs and beliefs in other ways Alarmed Western nations pressed Cixi to suppress the boxers and made plans to intervene Instead at this time of political cultural and international crisis the empress Dowager became an active ally of the boxers China is weak she allegedly said the only thing we can depend upon is the hearts of the people2 In the end Western and Japanese forces marched on beijing to suppress the boxers and the Chinese government in what seems an episode from the theater of the absurd declared war on all eight nations Germany Russia France Japan the United States the United Kingdom Italy and AustriaHungary In the face of the Western offensive most boxers simply disappeared into the northern Chinese coun tryside while Cixi fled to the western city of Xian The foreign powers forced the Qing court to sign a peace treaty called the Boxer Protocol in September 1901 Of all the Protocols humiliating provisions the most disastrous for China was a staggering indemnity to pay the cost of the war for the foreign powers which proved a crushing burden to the imperial governments already crippled economy The 1911 RevoLUTIoN The last decade of Manchu rule in China ended with a tidal wave of reformist and rev olutionary activity the degree and rate of which varied from place to place through out much of the country The decade was marked by a surge of urban nationalism driven by fears of national dismemberment by the british in Tibet the Russians in Mongolia and the French in parts of Southwest China Chinese in various prov inces rose together to try to recover rights taken by the imperialists through the unequal treaties and other means especially their ownership and control of railroads Newspapers and magazines that focused on current developments proliferated Cities 50 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a were being paved lighted and better policed With these changes came the spiraling of wideranging reformist efforts to deal with social illsopium smoking gambling and foot binding Once subordinated social groups especially women and the youth began to emerge as social and political players Chinese living overseas still moti vated by native place loyalties played an increasingly active role in Chinas develop ments sending money for specific reformist and revolutionary goals and investing in Chinas cities In this context the empress Dowager moved to make major reforms In August 1905 after an unsuccessful attempt to create a dual educational structure that com bined modern schools with the traditional examination system she ordered the outright abolition of the civil service examinationarguably the single most rev olutionary act of twentiethcentury China The exam system had been the chief conveyor of traditional Confucian orthodoxy and the recruiting source for political and social elites for millennia With the examination system gone there was no way to promulgate an official ideology Indeed there was now no ideology of state in China Furthermore the source for the recruitment of officials and political and social elites in general was a giant question mark There was now simply no way to stop the tides of change Military reforms led to the founding of a modern army the New Army organized by longtime official Yuan Shikai with academies producing welltrained cadets inculcated with patriotic ideas The government departments called boards in place since the Tang dynasty were transformed into modern ministries Perhaps the most surprising change was Cixis championing of constitutional government in 1908 Chinese leaders had interpreted the victory of Japan over Czarist Russia in the RussoJapanese War 19041905 not only as the first victory of an Asian nation over a european nation but also as the victory of a constitu tional power over an authoritarian monarchy In 1906 the Qing court sent missions abroad to study constitutional systems in Japan europe and the United States For the court Japans constitutional monarchy seemed a relevant and advantageous system for China to emulate For one thing it would shore up the Qing regime as it structured a more modern political system While the system would set up rep resentative bodies in the provinces and localities where elites would presumably flex their political muscles such a system also potentially provided a vehicle for the Qing court to regain some of the political power that had devolved to provinces and localities in the latenineteenthcentury postrebellion reconstruction In August 1908 Cixi announced a projected constitutional calendar which would be fully realized by 1917 Representative bodies at township county and provincial levels began to be formed from 1909 to 1913 These bodies provided forums in which to debate demand and legislate Had Cixi lived she might have been able to lead China into that new system but she died in November 1908 a day after the death of the thirtysevenyearold Guangxu emperor who died without an heir She had arranged for a threeyearold member of the royal family to succeed Guangxu The regents of the child emperor seemed incapable of dealing with what became obstrep erous provincial and national assembly elites and whose own footdragging on the pace of reform antagonized many Han Chinese f r o m e m P i r e t o P e o P l e s r e P u B l i c 51 Japan was not only the model for Chinas developing constitutionalism but the rapidly modernizing nation was also a school for young Chinese intellectuals China began sending students to Japan in the late 1890s with numbers soaring from two hundred in 1899 to thirteen thousand in 1906 Students formed politi cally oriented associations many of them based on provincial native place Seeing Japans developing modernity and its role as a growing world power in the con text of Chinas weakness these students asked what was wrong with China The answer more and more frequently was the Manchus the ethnic group that had controlled China for over two and half centuries Among these students strong antiManchu feelings developed In 1905 Sun Yatsen Sun Zhongshan in pinyin a medical doctor turned fulltime revolutionary who had spent part of his youth in Hawaii established the Revolutionary Alliance in Tokyo It called for overthrow ing the Manchus and establishing a republic Other revolutionary organizations sprang up as well Motivated by antiManchu nationalism and a deep sense of things gone ter ribly wrong for the country revolutionaries rose up in October 1911 in a series of largely unplanned and uncoordinated actions that culminated in the 1911 Revolution These revolutionaries were not closely associated with Sun indeed he was fundraising in Denver Colorado at the time Fighting soon raged between the Qing and revolutionary forces Yuan Shikai the founder of the New Army emerged as power broker in the struggle A powerful dynastic official and a Han Chinese who had faithfully served the Manchu Qing dynasty Yuan had had no experience with and had not even announced support for republicanism in China but a political deal committed the presidency of the new Republic to him if he engineered the Qing abdication Part of the reason that Sun and other revolutionary leaders acquiesced to Yuan was the widespread fear that continued fighting might tempt some imperialist powers to make hay out of the unrest for their own advantage The reality was that the signs of ever more threatening imperialism were every where Two examples suggest the range of imperialist tentacles at that point in the early twentieth century In the month the revolution erupted the Chinese govern ment defaulted on its boxer indemnity payments The british Foreign Office meet ing with representatives from the Hong Kong and Shanghai banking Corporation agreed that in order to secure their loans they would have to take control of crucial institutions in the Chinese government The other example shows Western treaty rights in China as supreme because an earlier agreement had declared that China could not interfere in the soybean trade one provincial governor could not stop the export of soybeans from his province even at a time when people were dying from famine The Qing dynasty abdicated on February 12 1912 and was replaced by the Republic of China White flags were flown as a sign that Han Chinese rule had been restored in the overthrow of the ethnic outsiders but it was more than a restoration Despite the lack of major social and economic change in its aftermath this was a revolu tionfor when the revolutionaries overthrew the Manchus they also destroyed the imperial system that had existed since 221 bCe 52 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a PoSTMoRTeM WhY The eMPIRe FeLL There was nothing inevitable about the demise of the Chinese empire Along the way people parties governments and nations made countless existential choices and decisions about the direction they wanted to travel if other choices had been made the destination might well have been different If the Qing regime had been able to position itself fully in the vanguard of progres sive change as indeed it tried to do in the first decade of the twentieth century the 1911 Revolution might not have been the destination that it was The Qing dynasty and with it the empire fell for several crucial reasons Important was a mindset in late imperial society and politics that revered and valued the power of traditional cul tural tenets and processes Specifically this meant a strong sense that what had made Chinese civilization great must not be forsaken diminished or tampered with Doing so in essence would have been nothing less than forsaking diminishing and tamper ing with what it meant to be Chinese The most fundamental issue then was protect ing Chinese political social and cultural identity when various threats were seen as challenging it Change in any basic form could only be adopted if roots for it could be found in the past Thus though the two late Qing reform effortsselfstrengthening and institutional reform in the 1890sfound different kinds of roots on which to base their programs for change they were both constrained by their interpretations of Chinese civilization and culture In this sense reform was not nearly as viable an option as it was in Japan While the Japanese emperor as direct descendant of the Sun Goddess reigned he did not rule in daytoday affairs That job since the late twelfth century had been taken by the shogun the chief political and military leader of the country This duality of leader ship provided the relatively smooth transition to reform in the Meiji Restoration in 1868 Once the shoguns policies were seen to be leading Japan into dangerous straits especially in his ineffective response to the Western threat it was logical that those interested in change would look to the divine emperor as the foremost embodiment of the Japanese Way When the Meiji reformers restored the emperor to his rightful place and ended the shogunate they could advance the government toward reform in the very name of restoring the past because its emperor was truly the source of ultimate power China had no such simple choice and thus had to go though mental and spiritual agonies when entertaining any change from traditions of the past In the first decade of the twentieth century the Manchus themselves began to move away from the traditional frameworks and ways but they were saddled with questions of their own identity They could not deal effectively with Han Chinese challenges to their ethnicity In the end attacks on the Manchus became part of the arsenal of those who wanted to destroy the imperial institution and establish a republic Apart from the Chinese view of its central and special place in the world there were historical and existential realities that prevented the Chinese from responding aggressively to new challenges In the late nineteenth century the central bureaucratic state structure was still based on a Tang dynasty 618907 Ce model A bureaucracy is often weighted down with realities of inefficiency waste and delay and the Chinese bureaucratic model was no exception communications and decisionmaking could f r o m e m P i r e t o P e o P l e s r e P u B l i c 53 move at a snails pace Almost ironically however another reason for systemic inertia was that the Chinese government was minimalist in both scale and function Scholars have shown that the number of county magistrates known as fathermother offi cials for their importance in ruling and for setting the tone of governance at the lowest level of imperial administration remained almost completely the same over time from the eighteenth until the twentieth century despite huge increases in the population3 In 1700 there were 1261 counties and magistrates in the late nineteenth century 1303 The population in 1700 was about 150 million while in 1900 it was about 420 million Thus the average number of people that a magistrate served in each county was about 119000 in 1700 but was over 320000 in 1900 by contrast in China in the early twentyfirst century there are county officials for about every 2000 people In other words even had the central government been able to initiate programs of change the local government structures would have made it unlikely that they could be undertaken effectively but such programs would not have been possible in any event because the Qing government was bankrupt Already in the 1850s it was not taking in enough revenue to make ends meet The reconstruction costs for the calamitous rebellions that raked over most areas of China in the midnineteenth century and the costly challenges of Western and then Japanese imperialism in a series of wars would have required immense economic reserves and a government capable of using them but the empty coffers of the central government tied the hands of policymakers For this reason from at least the 1860s on beijing had to rely on provincial and local governments to be the agents of reconstruction a reality that saw more and more power devolving to elites in provinces and localities In the end the coming together of all these fac tors made more and more likely the collapse of the imperial order and a revolution to replace it with a republic The eARLY RePUbLIc The Republic of China got off to a rousing democratic start in the winter of 1912 1913 with elections to the National Assembly Sun Yatsen turned his Revolutionary Alliance into a political party the Kuomintang KMT4 or Nationalist Party to vie with a number of other hopeful parties Although there were gender age educa tional and economic qualifications for voting and serving in office the elections went remarkably smoothly given no history of electoral government in Chinas past They were ironically the high point of electoral democracy in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries on the Chinese mainland and in Taiwan until the 1980s The Nationalists won about 43 percent of the vote a plurality among the multiple parties with 269 of the 596 House of Representative seats and 123 of the 274 Senate seats they would control 45 percent of the seats in each house Nationalist Party leader Song Jiaoren believed to be headed to the prime ministership under President Yuan Shikai left for beijing from Shanghai in March 1913 but he was shot dead at the Shanghai train sta tion Who ordered his assassination has never been finally determined though much of the evidence points to people associated with Yuan5 54 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Conferring the presidency of the republic on Yuan Shikai turned out to have been a huge mistake Yuan was indeed concerned with modernizing the Chinese state but he thought that a republican government was too unwieldy to produce focused mod ernization Yuan targeted the republic as a system and its components for destruc tion Song was simply the first hit After republican revolutionaries rebelled against Yuan in the summer of 1913 because of his other highhanded actions the president did not slow down in his efforts to dismantle the republic In November 1913 he outlawed the Nationalist Party In February 1914 he abolished the representative assemblies established in the last decade of Qing ruleat all levels from county to province to nation Then he announced his plan to become Grand Constitutional emperor and thus reinstate the monarchy and take the throne In late 1915 a rebellion blazed up out of southwest China to move against the wouldbe emperor Yuan died suddenly in June 1916 of natural causes before he could found a new dynasty but his death plunged the young Republic into political chaos The AGoNY oF WARLoRDISM As long as Yuan Shikai was alive he was able to control the generals who had been trained under his command in the New Army With his death the destructive genie of military struggle was unloosed the struggle among these provincially based gener als now referred to as warlords produced one of the most disastrous and chaotic periods in modern Chinese history The goal of each warlord was to take control of beijing and its government institu tions in order to be recognized as president of the Republic Governmental institu tions in the 1920s became pawns in the warlords struggles The concerns of civilian politicians and bureaucrats focused increasingly on keeping their positions and main taining their own political power frequently cultivating connections with warlords In this context corruption tended to become a crucial dynamic and often decided policies and elections The most famous case was that of Cao Kun who won the presi dency in 1923 by bribing national assemblymen with 5000 each to vote for him In the decade from 1916 to 1926 referred to as the Warlord Era the Republic of China had six different presidents and twentyfive cabinets The high hopes of 1912 and early 1913 lay in shambles the hopes of establishing a republican ethoscarrying the voice of the people into the institutions of governmentwere aborted Instead it was the ethos of the military and militarization that was carrying the day There was a wide spectrum of warlord types Some probably had the abilities character and potential to lead the Chinese nation Wu Peifu for example had a traditional civil service degree was a graduate of the baoding Military Academy and was a student of the buddhist canon and the Confucian classics both Feng Yuxiang and Yan Xishan were able reformers in the areas they held the latter often called the Model Governor in Shanxi province but other warlords were simply outrageous thugs wreaking terror and havoc in the areas they controlled easiest to mock was Zhang Zongchang the DogMeat General whose Shandong troops were notorious f r o m e m P i r e t o P e o P l e s r e P u B l i c 55 for their practice of opening melonsthat is splitting skullsand for stringing human heads on telegraph poles all in order to elicit respect for their brutal power Those warlords who were serious about trying to gain national power were involved in shifting coalitions often armed by Western nations who hoped their warlord would come out on top and then offer them advantages These coalitions fought major wars in north China in 1920 1922 1924 and 1925 while many smaller conflicts erupted throughout the country These were bloody wars not merely minor skirmishes and political posturing For many Chinese the main scourge of the times was what the warlords did to pay for the weapons and supplies their armies needed One means was outright and outrageous taxation every conceivable item service or situation bore extraordinarily high taxes from consumer goods to licenses to every day situations getting married owning a pig going to a brothel Land taxes were collected far in advance in some areas up to a decade ahead The other warlord strat egy for getting needed money was to force farmers to plant opium since that crop brought in huge profits The tragic irony of this was that in the late Qing the culti vation of opium had been eliminated in most areas The acreage of cultivated land devoted to opium production was at 3 percent from 1914 to 1919 but it skyrocketed to 20 percent from 1929 to 1933 The Western powers that had first brought opium to China had long gotten out of the trade In sum the warlords who arose in the context of growing nationalism in the early twentieth century came to be the antithesis of nationalism They rendered the Republic of China an empty shell The MAY FoURTh MoveMeNT In the midst of this military and political chaos emerged an intellectual and cultural revolution that would change Chinas political destiny Though Confucianism in the political and educational realm had been dethroned it retained its stranglehold on Chinese society Confucian social bonds elevated the status and power of age over youth of males over females In one of his strongest metaphors famous writer Lu Xun argued that something had to be done to awaken the Chinese to the destructive ness of traditional culture Lu Xuns metaphor is this imagine an iron house without windows absolutely indestructible with many people fast asleep inside who will soon die of suffocation but you know since they will die in their sleep they will not feel the pain of death Now if you cry aloud to wake a few of the lighter sleepers making those unfortunate few suffer the agony of irrevocable death do you think you are doing them a good turn but if a few awake you cant say there is no hope of destroying the iron house6 During the New Culture Movement the old verities which formed the iron house slowly began to collapse Slogans like Down with Confucius and sons filled the press and echoed in street demonstrations The journal New Youth which began to be published in 1915 offered a forum for students to discuss issues and called on youths to take charge of their lives and world A language revolution was part of this New Culture Movement Written literary Chinese wenyan a difficult grammatical form that was an obstacle to increasing the rate of literacy among the people was dis carded in favor of the vernacular baihua where the written language was the same 56 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a as the spoken language a style that facilitated the spreading of public literacy beijing Universitys new chancellor Cai Yuanpei set out beginning in 1916 to make the uni versity the laboratory to shape the new culture He brought professors to campus with wideranging ideasfrom radical and liberal to conservative and reactionaryand then gave them complete academic freedom to debate all issues and possibilities for the most appropriate cultural route ahead The emphasis on individualism was greater in this period than in any of modern Chinas history its goal was to cast off ideological shackles of patriarchy and family authority Two imaginary characters Mr Democracy and Mr Science became watchwords of the cry for progress during this time The New Culture Movement took place in the larger context of the May Fourth Movement ca 19151924 which has been called both Chinas Renaissance and its enlightenment7 The movement added a powerful political dynamic to the pivotal events of the era Its name came from a student demonstration in beijing on May 4 1919 to protest the decision at the Versailles peace conference to let Japan keep the former German leasehold in Shandong province that it had taken in World War Is opening days Japans claim to this territory had been agreed to via secret treaties with the Allied powers during the war Chinas position on the matter was weakened by the fact that the government in beijing had itself in 1915 admittedly under duress agreed to Japans TwentyOne Demands which gave the Japanese empire many rights in China much like the leaseholds the Qing had given other nations in the late 1890s The beijing demonstration of May 4 1919 was the first salvo in a nationwide pro test which successfully pressured Chinas delegates at Versailles to refuse to sign the peace treaty This political victory gave rise to two alternative strategies for the remaking of Chinese culture and the nation In the struggle between the proponents of these alternatives the May Fourth Movement would come to be shattered One approach held that the new China could best be constructed through direct even vio lent political action its proponents pointed to the impact of the beijing demonstra tion and others especially in Shanghai that had direct and desired political results These proponents of political action argued that other changes for example cultural advances would follow once the political system was changed They contended that unless the foundation of the current political systemwarlords bolstered by imperi alistswas destroyed nothing would ever change in China because such conserva tive forces would always hold the balance of power and impede further progress Those who proposed the alternative approach contended that any meaningful political change could only be built upon cultural change through a process that was more evolutionary than revolutionary They argued that if the culture was not changed then even if the current cast of political powerholders was ousted simi lar groups with deep roots in traditional culture would simply take their place This group attacked various political isms like socialism Marxism and anarchism that claimed to offer overarching systemic blueprints of a holistic way out of Chinas pre dicament Instead led by pragmatists they favored solutions to specific problems in the words of USeducated scholar Hu Shi liberation means liberation from this or that institution from this or that belief for this or that individual it is liberation bit by bit drop by drop8 The results of this approach would be a long time coming which seemed to many a dangerous prospect given Chinas internal weakness and especially f r o m e m P i r e t o P e o P l e s r e P u B l i c 57 the external threats posed by imperialist nations For many Chinese the persistently urgent question after 1919 became how to build national power as quickly as possible so as to forestall deepening national humiliation and perhaps even dismemberment The bIRTh oF The chINeSe coMMUNIST PARTY As the realization of Chinas plight became more widespread the ism of MarxismLeninism received increasing attention for its potential to deal with Chinas multiple problems particularly after the successful communist revolution in Russia and the founding of the Soviet Union in 1917 Intellectuals and journalists formed Marxist study groups in Shanghai and beijing Agents from the Moscowbased Comintern Communist International made contact with these groups and for mally organized the Chinese Communist Party CCP in July 1921 because of the tiny number of CCP members only fifty to sixty in 1921 Comintern agents pushed the CCP to join with the largest and bestknown bourgeois party Sun Yatsens Nationalists which had remained in opposition to the warlorddominated Republic from its political base in the southern province of Guangdong Comintern agents also met and wooed Sun who at this point was willing to accept help from whatever source He eventually agreed to link up the KMT with the CCP in a united front through a bloc within system where the two parties would not combine organizationally but individual CCP members could also join the Nationalist Party Throughout the years of the united front the CCP was directed by the Comintern and ultimately by Soviet leader V I Lenin until his death in 1924 and then by Joseph Stalin Comintern agent Mikhail borodin who emerged as a major force in these political developments pushed to restructure the loosely organized parliamentarylike KMT on the Leninist model of democratic centralism In this model along which the CCP was already organized a façade of democraticstyle discussion in party ranks is trumped by the decisionmaking of a centralized leadership borodin was also instru mental in the establishment of a KMT army the results of a realistic recognition that attaining the partys political goals in the militarized culture of the time required armed forces of its own The party thus established a military academy at Whampoa Huangpu in pinyin near Guangzhou Its commandant was a relatively young officer Chiang Kaishek Jiang Jieshi in pinyin who at the time was not a member of Suns inner circle While the new Nationalist Party constitution and army had borodins fingerprints all over them the partys central ideology was Suns own Three Principles of the People nationalism democracy and socialism see box 24 The achievement of nationalism meant uniting the country by eliminating warlords and imperialists The attainment of democracy would come only after a period of party tutelage of the Chinese masses in the ways of democracy The specific policy aims in Suns concept of peoples livelihood were somewhat ambiguous Sun did not buy into the CCP position that Chinas central socioeconomic problem was the uneven distribution of wealth rather he argued that the central problem was the grinding poverty of the Chinese people His solution equalization of land ownership without specifics the development of governmentowned enterprises fitting the traditional model of 58 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a socialism and a tax on the increase in the value of landed property the unearned incrementsince whoever owned the land did nothing to earn the amount of the increased land value over time by the mid1920s the KMT had become increasingly polarized Rightists in the party argued that the Soviets had too much power in Chinese affairs and that the CCP bloc within should be discontinued Leftists on the other hand supported some CCP social and economic aims Sun was temporarily able to keep the lid on these differences but his death from liver cancer in March 1925 opened the floodgates of Box 24 the three PrinciPles of the PeoPle sun yatsen 1924 Nationalism In view of the ruthless exploitation of china by foreign powers china is in fact a subcolony a status that is much worse than that of a colony china has con cluded unequal treaties with many countries all of whom because of the existence of these treaties are chinas masters Today our urgent task is to restore our lost national ism and to use the combined force of our 400 million people to avenge the wrongs of the world only when imperialism is eliminated can there be peace for all mankind To achieve this goal we should first rejuvenate chinese nationalism and restore chinas position as a sovereign state Democracy There is a difference between the european and chinese concept of freedom While the europeans struggle for personal freedom we struggle for national freedom As far as we are concerned personal freedom should never be too excessive In fact in order to win national freedom we should not hesitate to sacrifice our personal freedom The revolutionaries in europe and America are fond of saying that men are born equal but is it really true that men are born equal No stretch of land is completely level nor are two flowers exactly identical Since there is no such thing as equality in the sphere of nature how can there be equality among men True equality has nothing to do with equality of achievement it merely means that all people in a democratic society should enjoy the same political rights Among the popular rights in a democracy the foremost is the right to vote besides the right to vote for officials the people should also have the right to recall them Insofar as the enactment of legislation is concerned the people should have the right of initiative as well as the right of referendum only when people have these four rights can they be said to have direct control over their government or to enjoy full democracy Peoples Livelihood The purpose of social progress cannot be more than the real ization of the utmost good for the largest number of people in the society and such realization lies in the harmonization rather than conflict between different economic interests What is the basic fact about china It is the grinding poverty of the chinese peo ple The socalled disparity in wealth is really a disparity between the poor and the extremely poor since all chinese are undeniably poor Different countries have different ways of solving their land problem The true solu tion of our land problem is to make sure that farmers own the land which they till land ownership by tillers is in fact the final goal of the principle of peoples livelihood Though china does not have great landlords in the Western sense more than 90 percent of the farmers till land they do not own This is a serious problem Unless this problem is solved it is senseless to talk about the principle of peoples livelihood From Dun Jen Li The Road to Communism China since 1912 New York van Nostrand Reinhold 1969 115125 f r o m e m P i r e t o P e o P l e s r e P u B l i c 59 factional bitterness Intraparty rivalry only worsened in the aftermath of the killings of Chinese protestors by british troops in Shanghai and Guangzhou in May and June 1925 acts that galvanized the deepening sense of national peril The country erupted in demonstrations street marches and some violence in their anger against imperi alists In August a leader of the KMT left wing was gunned down with some in the partys right wing implicated From November 1925 to January 1926 a rightwing fac tion met in beijing to disparage both the CCP and the left wing in March 1926 they held their own party congress while the CCP and KMT left wing had met separately in January The united front had disintegrated Commandant Chiang suspicious of Communist aims struck out at Communists at Whampoa in March 1926 but he only sacked a relatively small number Throughout the factional struggle Stalin continued to call for the CCP to work with the Nationalists Four months later Chiang began the Northern Expedition a longplanned twopronged military campaign one headed to Wuhan in central China the other to Shanghai on the coast to unite the country by getting rid of war lords and imperialists When armies associated with the left the CCP and leftwing KMT began to mobilize farmers and workers as they reached their initial destina tion of Wuhan Chiangs hostility to the Communists intensified He took Shanghai in late March 1927 with much help from CCPled labor unions and leftist organiza tions but in early April Chiang had his forces attack union headquarters and left ist groups In the ensuing bloodbath sometimes referred to as the White Terror hundreds were killed and thousands fled in panic even after the Terror had begun Stalin from Moscow claimed that although the purge showed Chiangs true politi cal color the CCP should continue to work with the Kuomintang left CCP General Secretary Chen Duxiu commented that these orders from Stalin were like taking a bath in a toilet9 The KMT left wing broke with the CCP in early summer 1927 with borodin and the other Comintern agents fleeing for their lives The White Terror spread over the country well into 1928 it broke the back of the CCP In the fall of 1927 there were several desperate attempts by Communists to rise up but they were all bloodily sup pressed In August 1928 Chiang Kaishek reached beijing and at least on the map had unified China for the first time since the death of Yuan Shikai in 1916 The NANJING DecADe On the verge of national victory in 1927 Chiang had declared that the capital of the Republic of China would be in the central Chinese city of Nanjing which means southern capital in order to be closer to his base of political power The period from 1927 to 1937 when the Japanese invasion forced Chiang and his government to flee and abandon the capital is known as the Nanjing Decade beijing which means northern capital was renamed beiping or northern peace even under the best conditions Chiang would have had to struggle mightily to over come or even begin to solve Chinas many problems during the Nanjing Decade but he had to confront extraordinary difficulties His power lay in three positions head of state chairman of the Nationalist Party and commander in chief of the army but 60 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a there were challenges to his control of all three Residual warlordism remained a problem during the Northern expedition Chiang had coopted rather than defeated warlords They challenged him in four wars from March 1929 to September 1930 Further the KMT itself was not unified it was split among factions vying for power disgruntled party cadres aligned themselves with residual warlords and continued to make trouble Chiang who was usually called Generalissimo because of his com mand of the national army did not firmly consolidate his power in the party until after 1935 He himself received his main backing from the Whampoa Clique men who owed him personal loyalty from the days when he was their military comman dant The active core of the clique was an organization called the Blue Shirts many of whom saw fascism the ideology chosen by Germany and Italy at the time as the way to restore China Another military challenge was a revived Communist movement in southeast China From 1931 to 1937 Japan also became an aggressive military threat in the northeastbefore its outright invasion of China proper in 1937 From October 1928 when he assumed power as head of state until October 1934 Chiangs forces were involved in or on the brink of actual warfare fortyfive of the seventytwo monthsabout 625 percent of the time In 1934 six years after he had taken power he firmly controlled just seven of the eighteen provinces when the Japanese invaded in summer 1937 fully onethird of the provinces were still beyond Chiangs control He thus faced huge obstacles in being able to reconstruct China in effec tive fashion Chiang Kaishek emerged as heir to the long line of selfstrengtheners focusing on crucial infrastructure for defense and further modernization of the Republic of China but lack of funds blocked almost all accomplishment or even significant prog ress the economic difficulties confronting the government were debilitating The worldwide depression made it especially hard to make headway in modernizing proj ects Furthermore the Republic had an insufficient and poorly structured tax base The government gave up national claims to the land tax since levying it effectively after so many years of war required a national census for which there was neither time nor money So by default national revenues came from tariff duties nonsensi cal at a time of having to import many items to build industries and from regressive excise taxes on commodities for which the poor had to pay a larger percentage of their income than the wealthy by 1937 China with a population of five hundred million had less industrial production than belgium which had eight million people China had the same mileage of modern highways as Spain onethird of the telegraph lines in France and less railroad mileage that the state of Illinois10 Like Yuan Shikai Chiang saw statebuilding as a topdown process He was deter mined to have the Kuomintang state penetrate more deeply into society than had the imperial state utilizing a system of townships wards villages and urban neighbor hoods alongside the traditional baojia system of group mutual surveillance in which households were organized to keep watch on their communities and each other but lack of effective administration and control prevented its successful realization In culture Chiang attempted a return to the past resurrecting Confucianism as part of his New Life Movement to revive traditional virtues and cultivate civic virtue The blue Shirts became his standardbearers in the campaign of the New Life Movement f r o m e m P i r e t o P e o P l e s r e P u B l i c 61 which essentially became a war against the legacy of the May Fourth Movement The Generalissimo made it clear In the last several decades we have in vain become drunk with democracy and the advocacy of free thought And what has been the result We have fallen into a chaotic and irretrievable situation11 He said it most clearly in 1932 The Chinese revolution has failed12 The RISe oF MAo ZeDoNG born in 1893 into a peasant family in the central province of Hunan Mao Zedong had been a founding member of the CCP who as a bloc within member of the KMT had been active during the Nationalist Revolution in organizing peasant asso ciations Driven underground in the cities and to southeast mountainous areas by the White Terror of 19271928 the CCP rebuilt in the countryside It was there that Mao Zedong began his rise to power within the party He worked closely with military figure Zhu De who built the Red Army even while most of the party was in the rural mountains CCP headquarters remained underground in Shanghai and was run by former students educated in the Soviet Union As traditional Marxists they believed that the revolution would be engineered by the urban industrial proletariat it made sense to them to keep the party center in the city Mao and Zhu developed a base area on the border of Jiangxi and Fujian provinces In late 1931 it became known as the Chinese Soviet Republic or the Jiangxi Soviet During this period the CCP experimented for the first time with land reform and implementing class struggle Given that 80 to 85 percent of Chinas population were peasants and that there were relatively few urban workers Mao began to see the peas ants rather than the proletariat as key to revolutionary success For land reform Mao divided peasants into rich middle and poor categories Although the largest group by far was the poor peasants what constituted each group varied according to locale and to the particular people who made the categories these groupings were not hard and fastand they were always subject to reevaluation Once people had been labeled land would be confiscated from landlords and sometimes from rich peasants and then distributed to poor and middle peasants and hired laborers Obviously the rankings turned peoples worlds upside down landlords lost all their land while poor peasants overnight received the land resource they had never had but the capriciousness of class rankings and rerankings alienated many people in the base area The category of rich peasant was a political hot potato it was defined in different ways and policies toward rich peasants varied by location In some areas rich peasants were grouped with other peasants and seen as allies of the revolution In other areas they were put in the category of exploiters along with landlords In one wave of radicalism from June to October 1933 many formerly designated middle peas ants were reclassified as landlords and had their land confiscated In another reclas sification from October to December 1933 many landlords were relabeled middle The term soviet is a Russian word literally meaning council and is used to refer to a type of political organization in which power is in the hands of the workers 62 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a peasants In one county out of 3125 households 1512 48 percent were reclassified from landlord and rich peasants to middle and even poor peasants Then early in 1934 rich peasants again fell under bitter attack With such rapid changes a peas ant might be a middle peasant in May a landlord in October and a poor peasant in Decemberall without any change in economic status whatsoever The confiscation of land and the reclassifications sparked frequent violence and unrest In the end Mao called a temporary halt to land reform partly because it was antag onizing too many people at a time when the CCP needed all the support that it could attract but also because of the lack of unity among the party elite Although the CCP center had moved from Shanghai to the Jiangxi Soviet in the 1930s the leadership remained in the hands of the USSRtrained party cadres and the Comintern represen tative assigned to China There were other smaller communist base areas in central China that had their own programs and policies the CCP at the time was thus not a monolithic movement but was diverse and polycentric The reborn CCP frightened Chiang Kaishek between 1930 and 1934 he launched five extermination campaigns against the Jiangxi Soviet Three of the first four failed because of faulty and weak military strategy the other failed when the Generalissimo had to pull out his troops in the wake of Japans invasion of Manchuria Only the fifth succeeded when his forces adopted better strategy constructing a network of roads to maintain supply lines and building blockhouses to tighten the noose around the soviet To save themselves about eightysix thousand Communists fled on a 370day forced march of about six thousand miles the fabled Long March Pursued by Jiangs troops and bombers they marched over snowcovered mountain ranges and through quicksandlike bogs About eight thousand survived to reach Yanan in Shaanxi prov ince in Chinas remote northwest en route Mao began his climb to the top as party leader Once the marchers reached Yanan Mao admitted that the Long March and what led to it were a worse defeat than the White Terror in the late 1920s but in ortho dox party history the Long March is treated as a great victory a verdict that came in part because of those heroes who survived the brutal natural and human forces even though those survivors numbered less than 10 percent of those who began For the survivors it was a story of triumph over superhuman odds and it produced among the survivors especially Mao himself a sense of mission and destiny Indeed until the late 1990s veterans of the Long March monopolized the political leadership of the Peoples Republic The WAR WITh JAPAN 19311945 In contrast to the difficulties that dogged China in its efforts to build a modernizing nation state Japan beginning in 1868 with the Meiji Restoration in which power fell to determined reformers ruling in the emperors name had seemed to be almost immediately successful industrializing rapidly and adopting a constitution in little over two decades Already in the early 1870s some Japanese leaders had begun casting lustful eyes on the Asian mainland in the beginning at Korea in particular Japan pro ceeded to open Korea with an unequal treaty in 1876 and for the next eighteen years f r o m e m P i r e t o P e o P l e s r e P u B l i c 63 the Japanese pitted themselves against China for realizing the predominant role on the Korean peninsula Korea had been Chinas closest tributary state and China did not want to give up its longstanding interests there Japan won control over Korea as a result of its defeat of China in the SinoJapanese War 18941895 between 1905 and 1910 Japan swallowed Korea piece by piece Korea became along with Taiwan another spoil of war a formal part of the Japanese empire Japan increased its inter ests on the mainland specifically in Chinese Manchuria with its war against Russia 19041905 Japan showed its determination to move more aggressively into China proper with the TwentyOne Demands in 1915 One group of those demands cut particularly deeply into Chinese sovereignty it required that the Chinese attach Japanese advisers to the key governmental executive military financial and police bodiesin effect making China a protectorate of Japan Although Yuan Shikai was compelled to sign the Demands the Japanese in the end dropped these flagrantly arrogant conditions but Japan insisted that it be allowed to hold on to parts of Shandong province after the war a decision as noted above that led to the May Fourth incident in 1919 The Japanese also pushed Koreans to move into Manchuria to increase the numbers of its people in the Chinese territory which Japan saw increasingly as its own Japans objec tives in the area were furthered in the 1910s and 1920s through collaboration with the Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin but the Japanese were not sure they could trust Zhang so the Japanese military blew up his train and killed him in June 1928 From 1928 until 1931 Chiang Kaishek tried to expand Chinese interests in Manchuria building railroads to compete with those of the Japanese A series of seemingly minor incidents over water rights and boundary disputes ratcheted up tensions between Korean and Chinese farmers in Manchuria Japanese newspapers exaggerated the importance of the incidents declaring them examples of Chinas dis respect for Japanwhich helped fuel antiChinese riots in both Japan and Korea The Japanese military command in Manchuria also magnified the situation into a towering threat to the Japanese position in the area In this frame of mind Japanese field officers without the agreement or even knowledge of the military authorities or the government in Tokyo blew up a length of track on Japans South Manchuria Railroad in September 1931 blamed it on the Chinese and in retaliation launched a fullscale military assault on the Chinese forces and quickly took full control of Manchuria The Chinese did not resist appeasement of Japan was a pattern that Chiang Kaishek would follow for six more years The irony was heavy Chiang had come to power riding the wave of nationalism And he had begun to recover some unequal treaty system rights tariff autonomy reduction of numbers of foreign concessions and negotiations over extraterritoriality finally achieved in 1943 but he was unwill ing to resist the Japanese as over the next several years Japan established a puppet state in Manchuria Manchukuo with Chinas last Manchu emperor on the throne attacked Shanghai by air for six weeks in early 1932 advanced into several provinces of Inner Mongolia and made demands seized territory and took Chinas sovereign rights in northern China Generalissimo Chiang did little except to explode verbally against his own Nineteenth Route Army when it dared to resist Japan in the Shanghai attack Chiang argued that 64 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a he did not resist the Japanese because his army was not yet strong enough and to his mind the CCP was a greater threat to China According to Chiang The Japanese are a disease of the skin the Communists are a disease of the heart13 Obviously a heart problem is more serious and needs to be treated first unless of course the skin disease was a malignant melanoma an apt analogy given Japans malevolent actions in China Chiangs appeasement stirred a loud and vigorous chorus of dissent from all across the countryfrom party leaders journalists students and average citizens Chiang responded in his White Terror mode making arrests engineering assassina tions raiding university dormitories and closing campuses A government decision in December 1935 which basically handed eastern Hebei province with the cities of beiping and Tianjin over to the Japanese gave rise to a student movement whose pro test demonstrations and rallies spread beyond cities to rural areas as well National Salvation Associations which were established across the nation called for the removal of Japanese troops and puppet governments in Manchukuo and east Hebei In this politically volatile context a bizarre episode the Xian Incident occurred in December 1936 Chiangs top general former Manchurian leader Zhang Xueliang whose main military assignment was to keep the Communists bottled up in the Yanan area kidnapped the Generalissimo while he was in the northwestern city of Xian which is not far from Yanan Zhang held Chiang until he agreed to another united front with the CCP to fend off Japan Although after he was freed Chiang claimed that he made no such commitment when Japan next directly challenged China in July 1937 he ended his policy of appeasement and at last resisted the outright Japanese invasion and formed at least in name an antiJapanese united front with the CCP In the war Chiangs government traded space for time retreating from Nanjing first to the nearby city of Wuhan then to Chongqing in the far southwestern province of Sichuan where it remained until wars end Sichuan and neighboring Yunnan prov ince came to be called Free China that is the part of China under Nationalist Party authority that was controlled by neither the Japanese nor the Communists Retreating along with the government were tens of millions of civilians schools and factories were floated into the interior on barges Though the main refugee corridor was west ward along the Yangtze River millions of others fled to the south and southwest by October 1938 much of eastern China containing the major industrial cities and much of the best cropland had fallen to the Japanese army The Japanese invasion was marked by rampant and gratuitous atrocities to terror ize the population The most infamous of these was the Rape of Nanjing in late 1937 during which the Chinese have estimated that two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand were killed and tens of thousands raped In several provinces of China the Japanese military also used chemical warfare poison gas and biological warfare spreading diseases like bubonic and pneumonic plague and cholera against the civilian population Despite the atrocities Chinese collaboration with Japanese military occupiers was common although later Chinese condemned these people as traitors those who continued to live in occupied areas had to continue with their lives in some fashion even under the Japanese sword Not all Chinese could flee to Free China the ill elderly pregnant and poor were groups that could not easily become refugees A national collaborationist regime was established at Nanjing in March f r o m e m P i r e t o P e o P l e s r e P u B l i c 65 1940 under longtime Kuomintang leader Wang Jingwei who had been a close associ ate of Sun Yatsen Wang came to be regarded as a national traitor by both the KMT and the CCP With the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 the United States became Chinas ally in the war against Japan Their joint goal was to strengthen Chiang Kaisheks position sufficiently to win back eastern China which could then be used as a base from which to bomb Japan but logistical problems were severe Chiangs regime in remote Chongqing was cut off from its supply lifelines and had to make do with supplies and armaments that were airlifted in Further bad relationships between the Generalissimo and General Joseph Stilwell the top US military com mander assigned to work with Chiang helped to thwart that strategy and Nationalist Chinese forces remained in Chongqing until the war ended in 1945 and the govern ment of the Republic of China returned to Nanjing The wars legacy for China was tragic About twenty million Chinese were killed almost sixteen million of which were civilian casualties Scorched earth policies blowing up dikes and bridges and destroying railroads and roadsused by the Chinese resistance to slow Japanese aggression destroyed much of the infrastructural gains that Chiang had accomplished during the Nanjing Decade One of the most destructive legacies of the war was a malignant inflation Whereas prices increased about 40 percent during the wars first year from the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 they shot up more than 100 percent each year Thus something that cost about 1 yuan in 1937 would have cost 2647 yuan in 1945 Nothing erodes the political support of a people for its government faster than inflation espe cially the marauding type of inflation China faced during and after the war The infla tion led to the hoarding of commodities creating scarcities and ever higher prices corruption that reached new heights and ravaged standards of living but the Chinese Communists benefited enormously from the war At wars end there were nineteen Communist base areas in North China and the CCP governed an area that spread across roughly 250000 square miles Mao claimed that there were 12 million CCP members by the end of the war Communist military forces had increased almost tenfold from 92000 in the beginning to 91000 in 1945 The war of resistance against Japan gave the Communist movement breathing room from Chiang Kaisheks obsessive efforts to exterminate it It also gave the CCP the time to expand its popular support in several ways through its own nationalistic appeal to the Chinese people by fighting the Japanese its policies of mass mobilization for economic literacy and other programs and its insistence that the eighth Route Army its main army respect and even help the masses cIvIL WAR even before Japan surrendered attention in China began to shift from the war to the postwar reality of an intensely polarized Chinese political world The united front did not work effectively especially after an incident in January 1941 when Kuomintang troops in the New Fourth Army opened fire on Communist troops killing three thousand and wounding many more During the first years of the war 66 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a against Japan thousands migrated to Yanan the CCPs base where Mao consoli dated his political and ideological domination of the party He was formally elected Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party Politburo in 1943 and of the Central Committee in 1945 While in Yanan Mao also worked to adapt MarxismLeninism to Chinas situ ation emphasizing peasants as key to the revolution At Yanan the party devised policies that would guide it for decades to come These included the mass line a leadership style of relying on and actively using input from the masses in decisionmaking The CCP under Mao also devised a strategy for the reeducation of those party cadres was who were recalcitrant to follow or who opposed the offi cial line The goal was to change their minds This involved a process called a rec tification campaign which included the cadres attending smallgroup sessions in which they studied documents the party selected writing detailed selfcriticisms being criticized in mass meetings and confessing their errors If there were no confessions the party might isolate the targeted cadres apply various psychologi cal pressures andor send the cadre to do hard labor among the peasantry Finally as part of the repertoire of partys strategic policies the revolutionary roles of art and literature were defined at a 1942 forum In the world today all culture all art and literature belong to definite classes and follow definite political lines There is no such thing as art for arts sake art which stands above classes or art which runs parallel to or remains independent of politics Proletarian art and literature are part of the whole cause of the pro letarian revolution Therefore the Partys artistic and literary activity occupies a definite and assigned position in the Partys total revolutionary work and is subordinated to the prescribed revolutionary task of the Party in any revolution ary period14 The United States attempted to mediate in the CCPKMT dispute but to no avail it was never an impartial broker for it continued to aid the Nationalists with arms and supplies When General George Marshall ended his failed mission to broker peace in China in January 1947 it was only a matter of time before the parties intransigence turned into civil war In one of the largest wars of modern times Chiang Kaisheks Nationalists held huge initial advantages in quantity of men and materiel its forces numbered about three million soldiers with roughly six thousand artillery pieces the CCP on the other hand had armies of about one million and just six hundred artil lery pieces The Nationalists did win the early battles in 1946 but the Communists regrouped in Manchuria launching a campaign to isolate the major cities Chiang then blundered badly sending half a million of his best troops to Manchuria before consolidating his control south of the Great Wall The Communists quickly trans formed the Manchuria theater into islands of isolated KMTcontrolled cities in a Communist sea Instead of pulling out Chiang began costly airlifts He used for example his entire military budget for the last half of 1948 to supply one city for two months and four days by mid1948 the numbers of Communist troops were roughly equal to those of the KMT and they had more artillery pieces many of the new troops coming through f r o m e m P i r e t o P e o P l e s r e P u B l i c 67 defection or surrender and the weapons captured from the fleeing enemy The Communist victory in Manchuria was disastrous for the KMT Chiang lost 470000 of his best troops who were killed defected to the Communists or became prisoners of war essentially the KMT had lost the civil war even before the main battles shifted to China proper The decisive battle for central China came at the battle of HuaiHai in Shandong and Jiangsu provinces from October 1948 to January 1949 Communist party leaders showed themselves to be superior strategists For leadership positions and strategic advice Chiang was partial to Whampoa graduates and downplayed the roles and views of others In this case he did not follow the advice of former militarily knowl edgeable warlords to make a stand at a more favorable place along the Huai River He chose instead to stand at the railroad center of Xuzhou where his forces were exposed on three sides Furthermore Chiang personally insisted on directing the battle even though he was two hundred miles away from the fighting Communist forces anni hilated Chiangs troops he lost half a million men and almost all of his mechanized units by early 1949 China north of the Yangtze River was mostly in Communist hands and in April they took the Nationalist capital in Nanjing Although sporadic fighting continued in the south and west until the end of the year on October 1 1949 Chairman Mao Zedong declared the founding of the Peoples Republic of China and renamed its capital beijing In December Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek and the government of the Republic of China fled to Taiwan PoSTMoRTeM WhY The coMMUNISTS WoN Although the military struggle was decisive in determining the outcome of the Chinese civil war underlying political and economic factors were crucial Chiang never attempted to reach out to nonKMT groups or to liberalize politics in areas under his authority When the opportunity came to expand his base by joining with the Democratic League a party formed by an unusual coalition of old line militarists and Westernstyle political liberals in 1944 Chiang did not even seriously consider it Instead he arrested or had assassinated many of its key figures before totally outlaw ing the Democratic League in October 1947 Chiangs government became known for its incompetence and its corruption He may not have been corrupt personally but many members of his family and close associates were deeply involved in graft and other shady dealings to enrich themselves The most crucial reason for the failure of the KMT was the ravaging inflation that undermined both the economy of the Republic and public support for Chiangs regime by 1945 the governments revenue was covering only onethird of its expenses Chiangs answer was simply to print more money a solution that added more fuel to fires of inflation The exchange rate for Chinese yuan to US dollars stood at 7000 to 1 in January 1947 and 45000 to 1 just seven months later Prices in July 1948 were three million times higher than in July 1937 Inflation itself was demoralizing to the Chinese people but even more so was having a government with neither the will nor the abil ity to do anything but watch over the deterioration of the nations urban economy15 In the end the economic collapse was total engulfing the rural economy as well 68 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a by late 1947 and 1948 the very fabric of rural society seemed to be unraveling banditry the traditional sign of feeble political control and deteriorating eco nomic conditions was pervasive Landlords fled the countryside for the rela tive security of walled towns Ordinary peasants too abandoned the farms becoming recruits to the growing ranks of the hungry and destitute many of whom died in the streets and alleyways of cities 10 million people were threat ened with starvation in 1948 48 millionabout one of every ten Chinesewere refugees The most desperate reportedly sold their wives and daughtersin 1946 the price of fifteen and sixteenyearold girls in Zhejiang was said to be 4000 yuan 16 The outcome of the Chinese civil war was not only determined by KMT failures and losses the CCP did not win the struggle simply by default The communists were obviously successful in terms of military strategy but that was only part of the equa tion that equaled victory The main elements of its success were the partys ability to mobilize the masses to join their cause and its generally pragmatic approach in deal ing with local situations The most important element of the CCPs mass mobilization strategy was class struggle used in both base areas and guerrilla zones under their control During the war against Japan class struggle was the vehicle to reduce rents taxes and interest and carry out land reform The party sent work teams to villages to mobilize peas ant associations to challenge village elites It is clear that the rise of peasant asso ciations fundamentally changed rural power relations17 and won the CCP massive popular support A second wave of mass organizing in the base areas concentrated on setting up womens and workers associations as part of mobilizing the popula tion for war Mobilizing the masses was slow and difficult work The first hurdle for a work team sent to a village was to gain the trust of the people in a culture based on personal connections If the mobilizers were from the village or had close ties to residents of the village the effort would be easier In situations in which the work team members had no connections to the village cadres had tough sometimes intractable problems Mobilizers had to have networking skills and as a matter of course had to spend a great deal of time winning the confidence of the community by cultivating new social ties and building grassroots networks Only after they had succeeded in this work could they move on to mobilizing the population in various organizations for action such as land reform The timing of the CCPs mobilization efforts varied by locale In some bases in North China the efforts were underway by 1939 and 1940 in others they were not begun until 1943 or 1944 In central China bases they started in 1941 Class struggle became most tangible in the struggle meeting which was the most intense con densed form of peasant mobilization18 These oftenviolent meetings were launched in North China against local despots by 1942 but did not begin in central China until late 1943 Party cadres targeted the village bosses and landlords and encouraged the expression often explosion of latent peasant anger against them which was not easy to do The traditional relationship between peasants and local elites where peasants f r o m e m P i r e t o P e o P l e s r e P u B l i c 69 knew their place and were careful not to antagonize those in power had to be over come Allaying peasant fears about throwing off these old relationships was a for midable task The staged struggle meetings were pivotal in shattering mass apathy and passivity and disrupting what former solidarity had existed among targets and community19 In the period from 1946 to 1948 class struggle became the means to carry out radical land reform the same policies the CCP had attempted and abandoned in the Jiangxi Soviet in the early 1930s Party leaders argued that the inauguration of land reform during the civil war was important because it was the best way to mobilize the masses against attacks by Nationalist forces When the party began the land reform campaign a main dynamic of struggle meetings was vengeance against elites and even middle and poor peasants who had collaborated with the Japanese A party directive in March 1946 instructed party cadres to stay out of the land reform process and leave it to peasant associations which could themselves expro priate and redistribute land and property it was a policy that actually encouraged extremism among the masses which often led to the killing of landlords and other violent acts by 1948 the party pulled back on the leftist excesses that had both symbolized and encouraged the extremism that had become the hallmark of the land reform process Party leaders wanted to move away from the frequent killings of land lords and rich peasants from taking land from middle peasants and from attacking commercial and industrial enterprises In the mobilization that occurred alongside land reform men formed militia units peasant associations spearheaded army recruiting womens associations managed surveillance posts local selfdefense units transported supplies and ammunition and cultural teams did propaganda work The continual CCP emphasis was on the connection between land reform and mobilization of the masses in support of party policy The process of mass mobilization brought people to the party and gave them a shared purpose with the party and its undertakings a crucial element in the partys overall success Finally an important factor in communist revolutionary success was its prag matic strategy that varied according to place and time One size did not fit all when it came to revolutionary strategies and approaches Not every attempt at mobilization succeeded sometimes the party failed Sometimes contingencies gave the CCP their success but generally when they achieved success it came because party cadres understood the specific locale its natural environment its social economic and political structures networks and relationships and its par ticular needs and grievances Then it carefully built coalitions with local leaders to mobilize the local populace on issues of significant concern and import to that particular area In the end successful military and political strategies marked by pragmatism about local situations brought communist success The trajectory from empire to a Republic to the Peoples Republic was unpredictable and violent Unfortunately most of the first thirty years of communist rule in China saw a continuation of those trends 70 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a NoTeS 1 See for example Peter C Perdue China Marches West The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 2005 and C Patterson Giersch Asian Borderlands The Transformation of Qing Chinas Yunnan Frontier Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 2006 2 Quoted in John K Fairbank edwin O Reischauer and Albert M Craig East Asia The Modern Transformation boston Houghton Mifflin 1965 397 400 3 H Lyman Miller The Late Imperial Chinese State in David Shambaugh ed The Modern Chinese State Cambridge and New York Cambridge University Press 2000 34 4 Kuomintang which literally means National Peoples Party is an older form of romanization In pinyin it is Guomindang GMD both romanizations are commonly used in scholarly writing Kuomintang KMT is used in this book to refer to the Nationalist Party founded by Sun Yatsen partly because that is how the party which is currently the govern ing party in Taiwan still refers to itself in english 5 See The death of a revolutionary The Economist Dec 22 2012 6 Lu Hsun Xun Preface to the First Collection of Short Stories Call to Arms in Lu Hsun Selected Stories of Lu Hsun beijing Foreign Languages Press 1972 5 7 See for example Jerome b Grieder Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance Liberalism in the Chinese Revolution 19171937 Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 1970 and Vera Schwarz The Chinese Enlightenment Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 berkeley CA University of California Press 1986 8 Quoted in R Keith Schoppa Revolution and Its Past Upper Saddle River NJ Pearson Prentice Hall 2006 176 9 Quoted in C Martin Wilbur The Nationalist Revolution in China 19231928 Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 1983 131 10 Schoppa 213 11 Lloyd eastman The Abortive Revolution Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 1974 42 12 eastman 1 13 Theodore H White and Annalee Jacoby Thunder Out of China Cambridge MA Da Capo Press 1980 first edition 1946 129 14 Mao Zedong Talks at the Yanan Forum on Art and Literature May 2 1942 http wwwmarxistsorgreferencearchivemaoselectedworksvolume3mswv308htm 15 Suzanne Pepper The KMTCCP Conflict 19451949 in Cambridge History of China vol 13 Republican China 19121949 part 2 ed John K Fairbank and Albert Feuerwerker Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1986 742 16 Lloyd eastman Seeds of Destruction Stanford CA Stanford University Press 1984 8182 17 Chen Yungfa Making Revolution The Communist Movement in Eastern and Central China berkeley University of California Press 1986 221 18 Chen Yungfa 220 19 Schoppa 279 SUGGeSTeD ReADINGS Averill Stephen Revolution in the Highlands Chinas Jinggangshan Base Area Lanham MD Rowman Littlefield 2005 f r o m e m P i r e t o P e o P l e s r e P u B l i c 71 Coble Parks Facing Japan Chinese Politics and Japanese Imperialism New York Cambridge University Press 1991 Cohen Paul A China Unbound Evolving Perspectives on the Chinese Past New York Routledge Curzon 2007 History in Three Keys The Boxers as Event Experience and Myth New York Columbia University Press 1997 eastman Lloyd The Abortive Revolution China under Nationalist Rule 19271937 Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 1974 Feuerwerker Albert State and Society in Late Eighteenth Century China Ann Arbor University of Michigan Press 1992 Fogel Joshua ed The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography berkeley University of California Press 2000 Lary Diana Chinas Republic New York Cambridge University Press 2007 The Chinese People at War Human Suffering and Social Transformation 19371945 New York Cambridge University Press 2010 Levine Steven Anvil of Victory The Communist Revolution in Manchuria 19451948 New York Columbia University Press 1987 Lovell Julia The Opium War Drugs Dreams and the Making of China New York Picador 2011 Mitter Rana Chinas War with Japan 19371945 The Struggle for Survival London Allen Lane 2013 Platt Stephen R Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom China The West and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War New York Knopf 2012 Preston Diana The Boxer 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1993Translated by John Lust The Hauge Mouton and Co 1968 3 Chairman Mao Zedong was the absolute ruler of China from the founding of the Peoples Republic on October 1 1949 to his death on September 9 1976 Under his leadership the communist regime achieved initial suc cesses followed by two decades of wrenching failures most notably the Great Leap Forward 19581960 and the Cultural Revolution 19661968 and periods of par tial tortured recovery During these final two decades Maos prestige was adversely affected among the public and even sections of the Chinese Communist Party CCP but his authority never wavered Despite claims during the Cultural Revolution that he had been opposed by various party leaders claims unfortunately echoed in much academic writing every clear order from the Chairman was obeyed however destructive to national party or individual leaders interests What is more remarkable than the oftnoted formulas of no Mao no Great Leap and no Mao no Cultural Revolution is that even after the disastrous effects of these movements became clear to the great majority of the CCP elite they were curbed only when Mao decided that the costs were too great equally if not more telling con tinuing if watered down aspects of Cultural Revolution radicalism persisted during the last period of Maos life from 1972 when his health was extremely fragile includ ing his final two months when he was in a virtual coma Only with the Chairmans death did his surviving colleagues turn decisively against his policies but not against his sacrosanct position as the founding father of the country Maos power derived precisely from his accepted position as the father of the nation a status culturally enhanced as the severe and brilliant founding emperor of a new dynasty1 For broad sections of the population both as a result of a genuine perception Mao Zedong in Power 19491976 FReDeRI c K c TeI W eS m a o z e d o n G i n P o w e r 73 of the new order and incessant official propaganda Mao had overturned an exploit ative social system brought peace and order launched economic construction and above all expelled the foreign powers and restored Chinas national dignity For top CCP leaders and lowerlevel officials and cadres Mao was the strategic genius whose leadership converted the partys seemingly hopeless or at best extremely marginal ized situation into the unimaginable victory of 1949 For such communists opposing Mao was simply out of the question Much more significant than any calculation of the futility of any challenge was the Chairmans moral authority whatever his errors Maos achievements could not be ignored as his brilliance in the elites view had cre ated the revolutionary success that gave meaning to their life endeavors To deny Mao would have amounted to denying themselves While Maos authority was beyond challenge the Chairman himself was jealous of his power and wary of possible threats sometimes readjusting the distribution of authority among institutions and individuals to reinforce his own dominance At worst notably during the Cultural Revolution he showed signs of paranoia but over all he evinced supreme confidence Unlike Stalin who generally stayed close to the levers of power in the Kremlin Mao toured the provinces regularly often at critical turning points returning to beijing or convening leadership councils elsewhere to enforce his views on his colleagues In the chronological discussion that follows the changing distribution of power at Maos hand and his fluctuating views of his col leagues are examined This is related to a larger issue concerning Maos method of rulehe was both the great unifier of the CCP and in his later years the figure who ripped the party apart In addition to shifting approaches to power Maos policies varied greatly Two broad tendencies can be identified the revolutionary romantic and the pragmatic Maoism is often equated with revolutionary romantic endeavors the Great Leap above all others when in fact the fleshandblood Mao had a highly pragmatic side From his earliest days as a radical intellectual in the late 1910s he promoted both sweeping visions of a powerful China and the practicality required to achieve it with pragmatism dominating for the majority of his career even in his most radical peri ods Mao intermittently adopted pragmatic rational approaches to specific issues Another aspect of Maos rule is that like any leader he had particular interests in specific policy areas with significant consequences for the sectors concerned Most broadly Mao took responsibility for the overall course of the revolution for the ide ology and goals of the regime He also believed he had a special understanding of rural China and played a direct role in overseeing the transformation of agriculture This was in sharp contrast to economic policy an area where Mao confessed a lack of understanding and apart from his disastrous Great Leap program largely stayed aloof Finally the Chairman kept an iron grip on foreign and military policy In this latter regard a crucial concern of his leadership was relations with the Soviet Union For Mao was not simply a Chinese nationalist or committed Marxist he and the CCP were part of the international communist movement headed by Moscow The devel opment of this complex and often tense relationship had an enormous impact on Peoples Republic of China PRC domestic as well as foreign policy This chapter first briefly examines the background to the establishment of the PRC Maos position within the CCP the structure of leadership power the partys policy 74 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a orientation and the resources the regimeinwaiting possessed on the eve of taking power It then analyzes five distinct periods involving different political dynamics policy programs and impacts on Chinese society before concluding with an overall assessment of Mao and his rule As the discussion unfolds readers should keep in mind the question of how and why Mao changed over these years and whether as is sometimes claimed there was an underlying causality connecting the earlier Mao with the destructiveness of his later years MAoS RISe To PoWeR 19351949 Contrary to official CCP histories Mao did not assume leadership of the party in 1935 during the Long March Instead this was a gradual process that was only completed a decade later The fundamental reason for Maos rise to power during this period was the successful political military and diplomatic policies he designed for the dual struggles against the Nationalists Kuomintang and the Japanese These poli cies contributed to CCP survival from the seemingly hopeless position of the early Long March were crucial to developing substantial communist power in base areas behind Japanese lines while outmaneuvering the Nationalists within the ostensible antiJapanese united front and then led to the stunning much quicker than expected victory in the civil war of 19461949 but the solidification of Maos power also reflected other developments Ironically given tensions soon apparent in Maos independent tendencies and his unwilling ness to sacrifice CCP forces for Soviet priorities one of the most crucial was Stalins endorsement of his leadership in late 1938 Stalins decision was apparently based on the calculation that as a strong capable leader Mao was preferred over the histori cally proMoscow but less politically successful Returned Student faction of CCP leaders Another major factor was the development of and through the rectification campaign of 19421944 the partys indoctrination in a new ideological canon Mao Zedong Thought an ideology that both supported his policy approach and sanctified his person as a significant Marxist theorist Finally a series of organizational steps completed the processnotably a 1943 decision giving Mao the authority to per sonally decide critical matters and the formation of a new Maoist leadership at the Seventh Party Congress in 1945 in Yanan the town in Shaanxi province that served as party headquarters in 19371947 The key to Maos political ascent though was the pragmatic ideology and policy that produced revolutionary success In ideological terms despite some theoreti cal pretension Mao Zedong Thought was intensely practical and oriented toward contemporary problems The focus was on concrete Chinese conditions as exem plified in Maos famous dictum that MarxismLeninism was the arrow but its significance was in hitting the target of the Chinese revolution Another seminal concept was truth from factsthat theory must never blind leaders from the reality of the situation In concrete terms this led to cautious military policies as befit the weaker forces of the CCP and flexible rural policies that pushed mild or more farreaching social reforms according to prevailing conditions and the partys needs m a o z e d o n G i n P o w e r 75 Overall as reflected in the rectification campaigns heavy criticism of the left lines of the late 1920s and early 1930s Maos cautious policies could be considered right ist in that by and large he avoided unnecessary struggles sought to maximize the united front of potential allies and bided his time until the balance of forces shifted to the CCPs favor Also significant was that notwithstanding the undercurrent of tensions with Stalin Maos theoretical claims were modest the Soviet Unions role as the leader of the communist world was never questioned and Stalins writings were part of the curriculum studied during the CCP rectification campaign Furthermore in particular areas where the CCP had little experience such as urban policy when communist forces moved into cities in the Northeast from 1946 careful attention was given to Soviet prec edent Maos pragmatism extended to both accepting the international communist order led by Moscow and utilizing what appeared to be valuable foreign experience One of Maos greatest achievements in the 19351945 decade was to fashion a uni fied party In contrast to the bitter and often violent innerparty factionalism of the early 1930s Mao created a unified leadership around his person and policies a pro cess that was not based on advancing over the broken bodies of opponents as often claimed but instead on a shrewd process of garnering broad support Apart from the crucial matter of propagating a successful revolutionary strategy Mao accomplished this by moderate treatment of former political opponents eschewing a Politburo made up of or even including his own closest supporters but instead drawing widely on talent and from representatives of different party constituencies or mountaintops to staff key positions He also presided over a flexible and consultative policy process that devolved responsibility as required by a decentralized war situation and where policies could be argued by his colleagues in a diluted form of collective leadership what has been called the Yanan roundtable even as Mao retained the final say Of particular importance was his sensitivity to the various constituencies in the party something seen in the promotions to the number two and three positions in the CCP Liu Shaoqi the leader most associated with the partys urban underground or white area forces who although closest to Mao in criticism of past leftist excesses had limited personal connection to him became the widely acknowledged successor Zhou enlai a leader of higher status in the partys early days with extensive military and political connections who had been a political opponent of Maos in the early 1930s but one careful to maintain as positive relations as possible assumed the critical political and diplomatic roles he would retain until his serious illness in the 1970s See Table 31 More extensive than specific Politburo appointments was the broad distribution of power among the mountaintops of the decentralized party structurethe top generals of various armies the leaders of base areas where the CCP had established viable governing structures and garnered popular support and leading figures of the underground struggle Thus in addition to belief in the revolutionary cause the wide sharing of the spoils of power among the party elite deepened the commitment of The Politburo or Political bureau at that time c 1945 consisted of thirteen members and was headed by Mao it was only outranked by the fiveman Secretariat also chaired by Mao In 1956 the size of the Politburo was expanded to about twenty and a new top organization the Standing Committee with six members was established again headed by Mao Although the memberships fluctuated somewhat in size over time the Politiburo and its Standing Committee remain the most powerful leadership bodies of the CCP 76 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a TAbLe 31 Top Leaders of china from 1949 to 1976 Name and BirthDeath Key Titles and Dates Comments Mao Zedong 1893 1976 CCP Chairman 19451976 PRC President 19491959 Military Commission Chairman 19491976 One of the founders of the CCP in 1921 Assumed a position among the top leadership of the CCP in 19341935 during the Long March although not elected Chairman of the Politburo until 1943 and of the Central Committee until 1945 The absolute ruler of China from the founding of the PRC in 1949 until his death in 1976 Still revered by many in China despite acknowledgement of his serious mistakes Zhou Enlai 1898 1976 PRC Premier 19491976 PRC Foreign Minister 19491958 CCP ViceChairman 19561969 19731976 Long March veteran Headed the machinery of government after the founding of the PRC Key role in détente with United States in early 1970s Valued by Mao as a skilled administrator and diplomat but not particularly respected by the Chairman Some regard Zhou as a moderating influence during the Cultural Revolution oth ers see him as an obsequious underling to Mao Nevertheless Mao became increasingly unhappy with Zhou in 19731974 Liu Shaoqi 1898 1969 PRC VicePresident 19491959 PRC President 19591966 CCP ViceChairman 19561966 Most significant leader of CCP white area forces operating in urban areas and behind enemy lines during the civil and antiJapanese wars Regarded as Maos successor from the Seventh CCP Congress in 1945 until he was purged as a capitalist roader during the Cultural Revolution Died in detention Posthumously rehabilitated in 1980 Deng Xiaoping 1904 1997 CCP General Secretary 19561966 CCP ViceChairman 19751976 19771982 VicePremier 1952 1966 19731976 19771980 Military Commission Chairman 19811989 Long March veteran One of Maos favorites in the post1949 CCP leadership until the Cultural Revolution when he was ousted as a capitalist roader but protected from physical harm by Mao Returned to leadership positions in 1973 after mak ing selfcriticism but removed a second time in 1976 for political mistakes Again returned to the leadership in mid1977 about nine months after the arrest of the Gang of Four Consolidated power as Chinas paramount leader from late 1978 See also Table 41 Chen Yun 1905 1995 CCP ViceChairman 19561966 19781982 PRC VicePremier 19491966 19791980 Veteran revolutionary who became one of Chinas leading economic planners after 1949 Architect of successful economic recovery and development policies in 19491957 Criticized by Mao as too cautious during Great Leap Forward in 1958 but called back by him in 1959 and 1962 to deal with severe economic difficulties Again criticized by Mao in 1962 as always a rightist and remained on the sidelines until late 1978 when he played a key role in altering the CCPs leadership equation Subsequently had a major influence on economic policy initially supporting reform but increasingly cautious and conservative from the mid1980s See also Table 41 Continued m a o z e d o n G i n P o w e r 77 the disciplined forces that soon defeated the larger better equipped but factional ized armies of the Kuomintang Of course this could not eliminate all perceptions of unfairness concerning the distribution of power particularly the belief of some army and base area leaders that they were the crucial actors in the CCPs success and that the underground or white area leaders were less deserving of rewards This however was a latent tension that did not become significant until the first major post1949 power struggle the Gao Gang affair in 19531954 see below for now dif ferent groups had a vested as well as an ideological interest in success and for that unity was essential A final factor to be noted in Maos unification of the party was that while it involved intense psychological pressure in indoctrinating leaders and ordinary cadres alike in Name and BirthDeath Key Titles and Dates Comments Lin Biao 1907 1971 CCP ViceChairman 19581971 PRC VicePremier 19541966 PRC Defense Minister 19591971 Long March veteran and one of the CCPs greatest military leaders during the civil and antiJapanese wars A Mao favorite he became defense minister in 1959 following the dismissal of Peng Dehuai for criticism of the Great Leap Forward Mao chose Lin as his successor at the start of the Cultural Revolution an appointment written into the 1969 CCP constitution Mao grew increasingly unhappy with Lin over a number of bizarre mat ters starting in 1970 Lin and other members of his family were killed in a plane crash while trying to flee China after an alleged but unlikely failed coup attempt against Mao Jiang Qing 1914 1991 Deputy Director Central Cultural Revolution Group 19661969 Member CCP Politburo 19691976 Former movie actress who married Mao in Yanan in 1939 Kept on the political sidelines until the early 1960s when Mao called on her to counter bourgeois influences in the arts She took on increasingly powerful roles during the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath She and three of her radical colleagues were arrested after Maos death in 1976 denounced as the Gang of Four and ac cused of plotting to seize power Sentenced to life in prison where she committed suicide in 1991 Hua Guofeng 1921 2008 CCP Chairman 19761981 PRC Premier 19761980 Military Commission Chairman 19761981 Chosen by Mao to succeed Zhou enlai as premier in January 1976 in a move that caught everyone by surprise Had worked in support of Dengs program in 1975 but was seen as a beneficiary of the Cultural Revolution Played the decisive role in the purge of the Gang of Four becoming CCP Chairman by unanimous Politburo deci sion Worked largely cooperatively with Deng in 19771978 in eliminating the influence of the Cultural Revolution but from the end of 1978 was undermined by his lack of Party seniority Removed from key posts in 19801981 See also Table 41 TAbLe 31 Continued 78 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Maos political line Maos program contained an explicit organizational line that promised a break with the violent party practices of the past in which he too had played a prominent role patient education would replace the ruthless struggles and merciless blows of the early 1930s2 Despite excesses notably the socalled rescue campaign in 1943 that under the direct leadership of Politburo security chief Kang Sheng involved the torture and imprisonment of thousands of party members accused of disloyalty or subversion and for which Mao who bore ultimate responsibility apologized by and large this approach was honored earning Mao further loyalty and resulting in deeper com mitment to the CCPs cause While future rectification movements after 1949 would cause trepidation leaders and ordinary cadres generally accepted that ideological selfexamination was an appropriate method of enforcing the partys policies and if excesses did occur they would be corrected yet again demonstrating the greatness of the party and Mao This conviction began to fray from the late 1950s but it remained surprisingly robust to the end of Maos life Two aspects of the situation in the years immediately preceding the establish ment of the PRC should be mentioned the expectation of a seamless shift from a ruralbased revolution to an urbanoriented statebuilding approach and the vast diversity of conditions facing the communists as they seized national power While hopeful Westerners regarded the communists as mere agrarian reformers a view also darkly hinted at by Stalin who doubted the Chinese party leaders communist cre dentials Mao and his colleagues were good Marxists For all their indebtedness to the rural revolution that surrounded the cities they ultimately saw the rural phase as a necessary prelude to a modernizing program to create a rich and powerful China a program that had to embrace an industrializing society As Mao put it in mid1949 The serious task of economic construction lies before us We shall soon put aside some of the things we know well and be compelled to do things we dont know well3 This transition however would have to occur in a regionally fragmented China where not only did conditions differ significantly from area to area in social eco nomic and even ethnic terms but the CCPs strength and local history varied enor mously The fundamental difference was between on the one hand the base area regions of North China where the countryside surrounded the cities that is the rural revolution that initiated the reform of village society built up the political and military forces that defeated the Nationalists on the battlefield and took over the cities of that region and the Northeast and on the other hand the vast areas south of the Yangtze River where communist forces were weak to nonexistent a straight forward military seizure of the cities took place and CCP cadres fanned out from the cities to bring the first stages of land reform to the villages Under these conditions daunting problems faced Maos new regime Chinese soci ety and polity were fragmented public order and morale had decayed a wartorn economy suffered from severe inflation and unemployment and the countrys fun damental economic and military weakness created monumental obstacles to the goal of national wealth and power Yet the CCPs revolutionary experience bequeathed the new regime some potent resources A unified leadership around an unchallenged leader a leader whose authority was being elevated to an even more imposing level as a dynastic founder promised strong nonfactionalized direction from the top The m a o z e d o n G i n P o w e r 79 pragmatic nature of Maos policies in navigating the difficult currents of political and military struggle indicated an ongoing approach of dealing in realities A disciplined party organization although small for a huge country and short in critical skills pro vided the core of an effective administration Added to this the populations positive anticipation of the prospects of peace order and economic development gave the new regime support during what would come to be regarded albeit with considerable exaggeration as the PRCs golden years MAo AS ALLPoWeRFUL chAIRMAN oF The boARD 19491956 The Golden Years This initial period of the PRC was in the partys own terms a great success The econ omy was restored more or less on schedule by 1953 before beginning rapid growth along the lines of Sovietstyle central planning All of the country except for Taiwan Hong Kong and Macau had been brought under beijings control by 1951 Through skillful diplomacy and especially by fighting the worlds foremost power to a stale mate in the Korean War Chinas national pride and international prestige had grown significantly After a period of careful reassurance to the general populace and key groups the CCP began to penetrate society and establish totalitarian control through organizational measures that reached into urban neighborhoods and villages The party also used political campaigns that embodied Marxist notions of class struggle and targeted specific groups including rural elites the bourgeoisie intellectuals and presumed counterrevolutionaries whether to attack those considered hostile to the regime often using chilling violence or to indoctrinate those who could be won over to the partys cause economic gains translated into general popular support while those who benefited from land reform such as poor peasants and activists who secured positions in the expanding industrial structure were even more supportive of the regime Land reform a priority socioeconomic program of the new regime was basically implemented from 1950 to 1952 This program which had been carried out in the base areas of North China during the revolutionary struggle was now extended to virtually the entire country notably the newly liberated areas south of the Yangtze Since the PRC was economically and socially in the presocialist stage of New Democracy the movement confiscated and redistributed landlord land to peasants on the basis of individual ownership The initial approach laid down by the agrarian reform law of June 1950 was mild its main objective was to advance the economy by freeing rural productive forces rather than aiding the village poor but the approach was radical ized by late 1950 as resistance developed in the villages Now class struggle and mass mobilization were emphasized with poor peasants assuming village leadership and landlords humiliated with perhaps one to two million alleged exploiters executed A substantial redistribution of land to poor and middle more productive but not rich peasants occurred but the most significant outcome of land reform was the destruction of the old rural power structure 80 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a From 1953 the party moved steadily toward the Marxist objective of the socialist transformation of the economy and society This process had its twists and turns producing considerable yet quite containable popular discontent during its high tide in 19551956 but the result not only achieved the ideological objective it also extended the partys political and economic control and with it the leaderships sense of a fundamental breakthrough According to Mao at the eighth CCP Congress in fall 1956 We have gained a decisive victory in the socialist revolution and our Party is now more united more consolidated than at any time in the past4 As the new emperor Maos authority was absolute but his manner of rule was less intrusive or disruptive than in any subsequent period of the PRC Although imposing his views in a small albeit crucial number of cases generally Mao served as the chairman of the board allowing his more specialist colleagues notably Premier Zhou enlai and economic czar Chen Yun to shape programs in the areas of their special competence with Mao largely acting as a synthesizer and arbiter of policy decisions Mao continued the consultative style of the 1940s acknowledged his own lack of expertise and reflected his relatively centrist position on the issues of the day In contrast to the fullblooded Maoism of the Great Leap or Cultural Revolution Maos ideological position up to 1956 was largely the orthodox Marxism that saw socialist victory in terms of seizing owner ship of the forces of production and his political task was the relatively incremental one of adjusting the pace of socialist transformation even in the relatively few cases in which he imposed his views his approach was systematic and rational the process involved considerable discussion and efforts to persuade his colleagues and although his initia tives were bold and impatient they were still in many respects moderate To a large extent Maos less intrusive role was due to the focus on economic devel opment and the broad elite consensus that China should follow the Soviet model a position Mao fully shared As Mao subsequently declared Since we had no experi ence we could only copy the Soviet Union and our own creativity was small5 This overstated the case for various areas notably rural policy where Mao oversaw con siderable adjustments from Soviet precedent but on key matters including economic strategy and methods military modernization and government institutions exten sive borrowing and even blind copying of Soviet practices occurred with the aid of Soviet experts Such excessive copying undoubtedly frustrated Mao and at the same time he endured tense relations with Stalin during negotiations in Moscow for the 1950 SinoSoviet alliance and subsequently over the Korean War Chinese entry into the Korean conflict was the first case in which Mao after some vacillation enforced his personal view overcoming fears of an apparent majority of the Politburo that getting involved would jeopardize Chinas security and economic recovery In any case in his relations with the Soviet Union Mao accepted Stalins and subsequently Moscows leadership of international communism He swallowed some bitter pills in the 1950 treaty such as the imposition of joint SinoSoviet stock companies that allowed Soviet exploitation of Chinese resources and despite some theoretical innovations he largely stayed within the Stalinist version of MarxismLeninism as graphically suggested by his nocturnal visits to the beijing residence of the Soviet ambassador for ideological tutorials Clearly any dealings with Stalin involved considerations of international politics where Mao took personal control but the acknowledgment of m a o z e d o n G i n P o w e r 81 broad Soviet ideological authority only added to the weight of Russian pronounce ments on building socialism And on core economic planning issues Maos role was relatively limited Meanwhile power was being redistributed within the CCP This involved less the rise or fall of individuals as the main power holders remained members of the Central Committee elected in 1945 with all the various mountaintops still represented than their reshuffling and the establishment of new institutions The key aspect was the centralization and civilianization of power over the 19501954 period Given the diverse conditions facing the CCP in 1949 an initial period of regional administration based on the various armies that took control of differ ent areas was logical Large regional MilitaryAdministrative Committees and subordinate military control committees were established but this was a transi tional arrangement from the first Army commanders initially playing key roles in regional governments were gradually transferred to strictly military positions Indeed from the start the key leaders in five of the six large regions were basi cally civilians including Deng Xiaoping in the Southwest6 The principle Mao demanded during the revolutionary period that the party commands the gun and the gun must never be allowed to command the party7 was again enforced Another aspect of centralization concerned Mao personally While his authority was never in question he enhanced his administrative control in 1953 by requiring that he sign off on all Central Committee documents With the new 1954 state constitution and other organizational changes a per manent institutional structure was in place the party was in overall control and primarily concerned with political movements particularly in the rural areas the State Council headed the expanding state bureaucracy and took charge of eco nomic policy and the reorganized Central Military Commission CMC oversaw the Peoples Liberation Army PLA Mao as party state and CMC chairman was at the top of all three pillars of power although significantly Zhou enlai as premier was crucial in state administration and along with Chen Yun economic policy Finally the new structure reaffirmed Maos control of the military and his now personalized principle that the party commands the gun both Liu Shaoqi Maos presumptive successor and Zhou enlai were excluded from the CMC The Chairman and his favored junior colleague Deng Xiaoping who also assumed a key role as CCP secretarygeneral charged with overseeing the partys daytoday business were the only civilians on the reorganized CMC At the same time vir tually all the leading generals promoted to the highest rank of marshal in 1955 took on strictly military responsibilities8 Although six of the ten marshals were elected to the Politburo in 1956 it is clear that in the entire period from then until the Cultural Revolution began in the mid1960s the military played a limited gener ally minimal role in civilian affairs The Central Committee of the CCP is larger but less powerful than the Politburo In 1945 there were fortyfour full members and thirtythree alternates Mao was elected Chairman of the Politburo in 1943 and of the Central Committee in 1945 hence the title Chairman Mao The Central Committee was expanded greatly in size over the years that the CCP has been in power It now has over 376 full and alternate members 82 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a At the leadership level the most important redistribution of power concerned the transfer of leading regional figures to key positions in beijing in 19521953a devel opment picturesquely referred to at the time as five horses enter the capital Deng Xiaoping was one of those horses but the leading horse was Northeast leader Gao Gang another favorite of Maos This resulted in turf battles as Gaos new assignment as head of the State Planning Commission apparently produced tension with both Zhou enlai and Chen Yun over economic policy but the main disruptive impact was a much more fundamental challenge to leader ship unity In late 1952 to early 1953 Gao had several private conversations with Mao in which the Chairman expressed dissatisfaction with Liu Shaoqi and Zhou enlai as too cautious concerning the pace of socialist transformation even more ominous according to Gaos secretary in summer 1953 Mao raised the issue of Lius possibly traitorous activities in the Northeast in the late 1920s and tasked Gao with investigat ing the matter Gao then began to lobby other key leaders including Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun with an aim to securing their support for a challenge to Liu andor Zhou He particularly argued that as a CCP leader in the socalled white areas under Kuomintang control Liu did not deserve his high position while he Gao represented the red base areas Maos attitudes and motives were opaque and other leaders did not know how to respond After some hesitation Chen and Deng approached Mao and reported on Gaos lobbying Maos reaction was to lure Gao into taking further steps in his plotting against Liu and Zhou turn on him for disrupting party unity and reaffirm Liu Shaoqis position as the Chairmans successor Gao apparently believing he had been betrayed by Mao committed suicide The end result was that the first significant challenge to party unity since the consolidation of Maos leadership had been repulsed while the Chairmans all powerful ability to determine the fate of his subordinates had been reemphasized and his ultimate aims and attitudes remained uncertain In the end Mao opted for leadership unity and stabilityon this occasion The Transition to Socialism In policy terms the key turning points in the early 1950s concerned the pace of the transition to socialism the general line for the transition in 1953 and the high tide of agricultural cooperativization in 1955 In both cases the initiatives to move faster came from Mao while Liu Shaoqi and other leaders advocated a slower pace Given the outcomes achieved Maos interventions were viewed within the CCP as successful and together with his decision on the Korean War as further proof of his unmatched strategic insight In neither case however was Maos position wildly radical Prior to the fall of 1952 the consensus CCP position was that the New Democracy period of communist rule in China which allowed multiple forms of economic ownership including private property would last for 10 to 20 years and only then would the transition to socialism begin Now however Mao pressed for a more ambitious schedule whereby the transition would start almost immediately but the process itself would be gradual When the general line was laid down by Mao unilaterally in June 1953 it stipulated that socialist transformation would be completed within a period of ten to fifteen years or a bit m a o z e d o n G i n P o w e r 83 longer and warned against errors either of left deviation or of right deviation9 In the buildup to the general line analogous to his handling of the Gao Gang affair ele ments of both Maos awesome power and reasonableness were present Mao caused individual panic in early 1953 by criticizing Finance Minister bo Yibos tax policies as beneficial to capitalism yet bo suffered only a mild career setback In the summer of 1953 moreover despite his impatience over the speed of transformation Mao backed the softer more pragmatic approach to commercial capitalists advocated by Chen Yun over the harsher preferences of Gao who urged faster movement toward the nationalization of commerce Similar phenomena can be seen concerning the implementation of the transition to socialism in the countryside Following the conclusion of land reform the party took the first major step in that direction in 19531955 by gradually establishing lowerlevel agricultural producer cooperatives made up of twentyfive to fifty families Land although still technically owned by the farmers as well as tools and draft animals were pooled agricultural production was under the direction of cooperative officials Members were paid partly on the basis of how much work they did and partly accord ing to how much property they had contributed to the cooperative After two years of fluctuating development in the cooperativization movement during which Mao again warned his comrades about going too fast left deviation or too slowly right deviation a consensus emerged at the start of 1955 with Liu Shaoqi and CCP Rural Work Department Director Deng Zihui most prominent that a limited contraction of the number of existing cooperatives was necessary after over expansion in 1954 Mao accepted this but by the spring of 1955 based on his own investigations he became concerned that this policy by loosening state control of agriculture was undermining the state procurement of grain needed to feed the cities and was contributing to class polarization in the countryside as some families were getting quite a bit richer than others This led Mao to argue for a relatively modest increase in the number of cooperatives While this was formally accepted by the party leadership in May Mao pressed for further increases in June and July which all of the highest leaders apparently accepted Deng Zihui however argued against Maos lat est proposal leaving his colleagues in the Rural Work Department astonished that he dared to offend Chairman Mao merely over hundreds of thousands of cooperatives10 Mao rejected Deng Zihuis advice and subjected him to criticism as a right devi ationist yet Deng retained his position although his career was more adversely affected than that of bo Yibo What was significant was that in turning on Deng Zihui the Chairman had raised an economic question to a political one and although his latest proposal on the cooperatives was still far from radical his rhetoric mobilized the party apparatus into an intense campaign mode This resulted in the high tide that by the end of 1956 had basically formed the whole countryside into higherlevel agricultural producers cooperatives or collectives Not only were these much larger250 familiesthan the earlier cooperatives but the collective also now owned the land and peasants were paid only according to their labor Only a small portion of the collectively owned land was set aside for private cultivation This was a far more radical outcome than Maos mid1955 plan which had only called for establishment of lowerstage less socialist cooperatives in half of Chinas villages by spring 1958 but since the achievement of agricultural collectivization was a key socialist goal Maos 84 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a intervention to speed things up was seen by his comrades as further evidence of his superior insight and inspirational leadership The practical consequence of collectivization was to entrench further party control of Chinas vast countryside In addition to the organization of individual households into collective units other measures deepening totalitarianism in the rural areas were strict controls on population movement in effect limiting peasants to their villages and the implementation in 19541955 of the state monopoly on grain and other agri cultural products This monopoly both guaranteed the food supply for the cities and thus the PRCs industrialization program and placed in the hands of the regime the food that would be sold back to the countryside to meet basic livelihood needs The misuse of this power would become a critical contributor to the Great Leap Forward famine in a few years time The high tide in agriculture was soon followed by the similarly rapid socialist transformation of industry and commerce by early 1957 the nationalization of these sectors was basically complete and private ownership largely eliminated from the urban economy At about the same time an effort had been undertaken to signifi cantly increase the pace of economic development an effort later regarded as the little leap forward but all of these programs produced dislocations in the economy and measures were taken to relax the pace of change starting in the spring of 1956 At a late April meeting of the Politburo however Mao said that he wanted to increase the already high rate of investment despite mounting evidence that the economy could not effectively absorb it Although there was an almost unanimous Politburo preference for a more restrained policy the meeting dutifully approved Maos wishes Zhou enlai however went to see Mao a few days later to argue against the decision and after a temper tantrum Mao agreed The incident not only demon strated that the Chairman responded to rational argument but that despite the earlier attacks on bo Yibo and Deng Zihui even a cautious leader like Zhou enlai was will ing to approach him believing that Maos consultative leadership style still applied Similarly pragmatic adjustments were made in other areas in 19561957 notably increasing the scope of private peasant production within the collective framework and reestablishing a limited rural free market Mao and the leadership as a whole did not regard such scaling back as defeats but rather as sensible adjustments in the context of the overwhelmingand much more quickly achieved than anticipatedvictory of socialist transformation This as previously noted was orthodox Marxism With the economic structure transformed and private property in both city and countryside largely abolished there was now not only the basis for socialist modernization but the class enemy also no longer had the wherewithal to challenge the regime To be sure there were still opposing political and ideological tendencies or contradictions in socialist society but these were nothing to worry about As Mao put it in early 1957 large scale turbulent class struggles have in the main come to an end11 In this context party priorities set by the eighth Party Congress and its aftermath were to shift to economic construction and handling nonantagonistic contradic tions among the people In other words most problems in China could be resolved through discussion debate persuasion and other noncoercive means The popu lace was believed to fundamentally support the CCP and to possess creative skills m a o z e d o n G i n P o w e r 85 that the regime should enlist but at the same time it was believed that society had legitimate grievances that the party should alleviate In this context Mao sought to encourage the expression of different opinions including complaints about regime shortcomings This was famously expressed in Maos spring 1956 slogan addressed to intellectuals in particular let a hundred flowers bloom let a hundred schools of thought contend In 1956 this by and large only produced tepid academic discussion but the following year a more determined effort by Mao set in motion a series of policy failures with ultimately catastrophic consequences for the PRC While never intended to weaken party control the policy line of the eighth Congress would have mitigated the harsh edges of totalitarianism if implemented but instead just the opposite happened exPeRIMeNTS AND DISASTeRS 19571960 The hundred Flowers Movement and the AntiRightist campaign Three major developments followed the declaration of fundamental victory at the fall 1956 eighth Party Congressthe Hundred Flowers Movement in the first half of 1957 the AntiRightist Campaign in the summer and fall and the Great Leap Forward that emerged in late 1957 and extended into 1960 These movements were interconnected Mao played an initiating role in each and the Hundred Flowers and Great Leap were virtually unique experiments in the history of international com munism drawing Soviet puzzlement and criticism as a result The AntiRightist Campaign and Great Leap in particular had dire consequences that left deep scars on society These campaigns grew out of the 1956 consensus on giving priority to economic development but the originally envisioned concessions to society of the Hundred Flowers soon gave way to increasing emphasis on class struggle against perceived enemies of the revolution Finally notwithstanding Maos decisive role in each campaign the Hundred Flowers Movement and AntiRightist Campaign both had broad support in the top leadership albeit with more reservations in the former case but even with widespread initial enthusiasm in the elite and populace the third movement was fundamentally a case of no Mao no Great Leap Leadership consensus existed on the assumption underpinning the Hundred Flowers that the party should solicit feedback from the public but encouraging open criticism of the government which was only mildly encouraged in 1956 was always fraught with difficulty and met resistance from lowerranking officials who were vul nerable to direct criticism in their work units Facing this resistance Mao began to push for a more vigorous Hundred Flowers in February 1957 The response from intel lectuals who had been subject to various ideological remolding campaigns since 1949 was cautious but under repeated official urging by May an outbreak of extensive criticism of the regime unfolded In fact much of this criticism remained guarded and was along the themes Mao himself had set but bitter attacks on lowerlevel cad res plus comparatively rare extreme statements attacking the party and even Mao himself caused deep concern within the CCP 86 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a by midMay without admitting it Mao realized he had miscalculated and began to plan for a counterattack on the critics For several weeks he waited to lure the snakes out something erroneously thought by many to have been his plan from the beginning and then in early June launched a systematic attack in the form of the AntiRightist Campaign against those who had spoken out What was significant about the AntiRightist Campaign was its intensity and scope a profound intensification of the regimes totalitarian impulse It was conducted in all official organizations it deeply touched intellectuals and other segments of the urban population in particular and it resulted in the extensive use of the rightist label that would curse people so designated for the rest of the Maoist era as well as the widespread sending of rightists to the countryside for reform through labor even more fundamentally the campaign sent a chill of fear through society something hitherto not felt on such a broad basis In the early years of the PRC although there had been many threatening movements directed at particular groups for those not directly affected there was the sense that these efforts were justified or in any case not personally relevant Now fear was much more widespread with an intimidating effect for the future For all that the AntiRightist Campaign initially seemed designed to restore the status quo ante the situation of unchallenged party dominance without major policy readjustments The broad thrust of the moderate economic policies that had pre vailed since the little leap continued into the early fall of 1957 and there were no signs of a redistribution of power either among leading institutions or individuals However various developments created pressure on existing economic policy At one level the perceived unreliability of intellectuals as a result of the Hundred Flowers called into doubt the assumption that specialists could be relied on as a key positive factor for economic development Also the assumption of societys sup port of the regime that underpinned the relaxation of 19561957 was undermined by waves of industrial strikes and substantial peasant withdrawals from poorly perform ing collectivessomething that led to socialist education efforts among workers and peasants in the summer of 1957 to bring them back in line with party policy Finally the pace of economic growth particularly in agriculture lagged behind expectations Thus there was a basis for an altered approach to development These considerations fed into Maos fundamental desire to transform China into a powerful industrializing state at the quickest possible pace Other factors also came into play in pushing policy in a more radical direction One was the eversignificant relationship with the Soviet Union At the policy level without any intention of straying from the broad parameters of the Soviet model by 1956 CCP leaders focused on the differences between Soviet and Chinese conditions and the need for appropriate policy adjustments something equally persuasive to an economic specialist like Chen Yun and to Mao who offered the most systematic statement of the need for readjustment in April 195612 Furthermore by the time Mao attended the fortieth anniversary of the bolshevik revolution in Moscow in November 1957 he had shed any latent sense of inferiority to Stalin who had died in 1953 Indeed Mao felt superior as an international com munist leader to Stalins successor Nikita Khrushchev He also believed that China had attained a new status by mediating between the Soviets and eastern europe first m a o z e d o n G i n P o w e r 87 during the Polish October that brought Poland a degree of autonomy from Moscow and then following the crushing of the Hungarian revolution in 1956 by the Soviet army Mao thought that the Russians had handled both matters badly There was also a sense of growing optimism and competitiveness in the commu nist world generated by rapid Soviet economic advances and Moscows technological breakthroughs with the Sputnik satellite and intercontinental ballistic missile in 1957 Maos reaction was to declare that internationally the east wind is prevailing over the west wind and to match Soviet boasts that they would overtake the United States economically in fifteen years with the claim that China would overtake britain in the same period In terms of international communist politics Mao strongly affirmed Soviet leadership while in Moscow which undoubtedly facilitated a Soviet promise to provide the PRC with nuclear weapons technology Subsequently despite an overlay of competing national pride and some suspicion in March 1958 Mao declared com plete support for every recent Soviet foreign policy initiative Meanwhile following the Moscow meeting the CCP called for significant increases in production and the idea of a Great Leap Forward was first propagated Yet these developments were to pale in comparison to what actually emerged in the first half of 1958 The Great Leap Forward A psychological factor was also arguably at play in the new turning point After a period of virtually unbroken success since assuming unchallenged leadership of the CCP in the 1940s Mao suffered his first notable failure with the Hundred Flowers Seemingly unable to accept personal responsibility and seeking a new success Mao undertook an unusually personal initiative in pushing the Great Leap much to the surprise and consternation of his colleagues beginning in January 1958 he convened a series of ad hoc meetings that led to drastically increased production targets includ ing a frenzy in June that doubled the national steel target over 1957s actual produc tion a process that typified the extremism of the Great Leap that led to such disas trous consequences see box 31 In this process several drastic changes took place in Maos leadership style and the distribution of power within the CCP Mao now took personal control of the econ omy the area in which he subsequently acknowledged he had no particular under standing He complained that in the past the Politburo had become a mere voting machine that simply endorsed the policies of Zhou enlai Chen Yun and others and he went on to subject these leaders to severe criticism In attacking their 19561957 policies Mao not only overlooked his own consistent approval of those policies he also made the specious assertion that those policies were responsible for the rightist onslaught during the Hundred Flowers Movement In sharp contrast to the situation in the spring of 1956 when Zhou approached Mao on the question of overinvestment the Premier was now denied the right to speak on economic matters and considered resigning The overall result was a fundamental change from the first eight years of the regime when a diluted form of collective lead ership existed Now any leader no matter how prestigious could be shunted aside 88 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Box 31 the Great leaP disaster While precise contours are not and cannot be known given incomplete and unreliable offi cial records and continuing political sensitivity the Great Leap Forward was without doubt Maos and the ccPs greatest catastrophe Demographic efforts to estimate unnatural deaths due to starvation generally place the number from around twentyfive million to as high as the midforty millions Moreover when depressed birth rates are taken into account the total lost population is estimated at between fifty and seventysix million Unnatural deaths also resulted from beatings and other forms of violence as cadres enforced Great Leap policies the numbers are unclear but significant perhaps in the hundreds of thousands Although quickly assuming the utopian goal of a rapid transition to communism the underlying objective of the Great Leap program was economic development at a rate far exceeding anything achieved in world history This goal had broad support among the populace officials down to the grassroots and highranking leaders whose doubts were mitigated by faith in the chairman but the economic strategy was deeply flawed The extreme reliance on mass mobilization devalued expert knowledge that might have moderated outlandish targets and methods A case in point was the vastly increased steel target that could only be met by backyard furnaces that melted down household implements for a crude form of steel that turned out to be useless This fit the larger strategy of walking on two legs the rapid development of all sectors simultaneously that siphoned off peasant labor to industrial projects and resulted in depressed agricul tural production Drastic decentralization to the provincial and lower levels also had a major disruptive effect With central planning agencies largely stripped of their powers a breakdown of national economic coordination resulted Incoherent economic policies notwithstanding political factors were at the core of the disaster Structurally lowerlevel officials looked upward for policy guidance and clues about the political atmosphere while always bearing in mind the rule of thumb that it was better to make leftist mistakes than those of the right In the context of the Great Leap these factors were extremely potent with Mao personally articulating wild policies at the start and the impact of the AntiRightist campaign providing a warning to officials at all levels not to appear less than fully committed to the Leap This mindset had devastating consequences With unrealistic targets laid down at the top and reck lessly increased by lower levels expressions of doubt or failure to meet the targets were often brutally punished as rightist deviations When by early 1959 it became increasingly difficult to meet state grain procurement targets this was not regarded as due to pro duction shortfalls but as the private hoarding of grain requiring a struggle campaign The tragedy accelerated in the winter of 1959 following the Lushan conference dismissal of Defense Minister Peng Dehuai as a right opportunist for criticizing the Great Leap Seeking harvests that didnt exist state procurement often became a violent process of seizing whatever grain could be found in the households of starving peasants Apart from the deadly interaction of the procurement mechanism and false under standing of the real situation in the countryside several specific policies worsened con ditions one was the continued exporting of grain as famine conditions deepened in 19591960 Part of this was due to the need to export in order to generate the foreign exchange necessary for modern inputs from abroad another was Maos insistence on meeting and even speeding up contracted exports to the Soviet Union as the SinoSoviet conflict intensified The Soviet cutoff of aid to china in 1960 was officially claimed to be partly responsible for the disaster but Maos desire not to lose face in dealing with Moscow was of much greater significance even more detrimental was favoritism to the cities a basic aspect of ccP policy since 1949 but now it resulted in deadly consequences Although malnutrition occurred in m a o z e d o n G i n P o w e r 89 at Maos whim it had truly become a situation in which no one dared challenge the Chairmans word A consequence of both Maos turn against the leaders of the State Councils eco nomic ministries and the Great Leap approach of relying on mass mobilization rather than technical expertise was that the party apparatus now assumed the key orga nizing role in economic development With this came the further elevation of one of Maos favorite colleagues Deng Xiaoping who as CCP general secretary exerted intense pressure on lowerlevel officials to meet fanciful targets Maos continuing favoritism was reflected in his spring 1959 remark at the very time of Liu Shaoqis urban areas the cities were basically spared starvation as a conscious act of official policy When the top leaders finally grasped the seriousness of food shortages from late 1959 provinces were instructed to meet their procurement quotas regardless of local condi tions in order to guarantee supplies for beijing and other major cities a policy known by mid1961 as saving the cities at the expense of the villages At its lowest ebb the regime understood that a food crisis in urban centers was a greater threat to stability than starvation in the dispersed countryside Another key to the catastrophe was the failure to report accurate information up the chain of command that would have revealed production shortfalls or exposed starvation Stringent measures were taken to prevent any information concerning famine leaking from local jurisdictions whether to relatives elsewhere or the party center in beijing but provinces did send investigation teams to gain realistic assessments and the deteriorat ing situation was increasingly known by provincial leaders from 1959 with some acting to alleviate the situation While no province was immune to starvation vast differences in suffering existed due to the action or inaction of the relevant leaders A rough estimate indicates that about 58 percent of all unnatural deaths occurred in only three provinces led by particularly extreme exponents of Maos radical policies A courageous leader could make a massive difference as in a Shandong county where no famine deaths were recorded despite the high death rate in the province as a whole What did Mao know As the depth of the crisis became understood at the party cen ter in 19601961 Mao would complain that he had been duped by lower levels Mao was correct in a limited sense only in early 1960 did reports of severe starvation reach the center Yet it was Maos Great Leap line and his warnings against rightist deviations that inhibited telling the awful truth Moreover as early as spring 1958 Mao received reports of food shortages and subsequently of a few starvation cases but these were treated as isolated and temporary and no serious efforts to address the underlying causes were undertaken As in traditional times many peasants blamed the malfeasance of local offi cials and believed the emperor would save them if he knew Mao did not know the extent of the devastation he had caused until late in the tragedy but his actions and attitudes had created the disaster The culturally resonant and since 1949 incessantly propagandized view of Mao as concerned with the peoples welfare was one reason why the Great Leap devastation did not produce widespread unrest Despite intense popular dissatisfaction smallscale rioting the appearance of counterrevolutionary organizations and even isolated armed rebellions there was no serious threat to the regime The combination of official indoc trination the legacy of past suppression campaigns the forceful involvement of public security forces the system of close social control and the contrast between a relatively modernized state apparatus and any potential opposition lacking the capacity to act outside a given locality meant resistance could not succeed The totalitarian system was strong enough to prevail in this crisis 90 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a longforeshadowed elevation to state chairmanthe position equivalent to president of the PRC that Mao had held since 1949that while he himself was the main mar shal Deng was the vice marshal13 Deng played key roles in the various stages of the Great Leap the initial escalation of targets in the first half of 1958 the extreme radicalism of the summer and fall and the cooling off phase from late 1958 until the summer of 1959 overall he bore major responsibility for some of the worst aspects of the movement In each phase Mao was the key player After forcing the dramatic escalation of steel targets in June 1958 Mao was again at the center of events at the leaderships annual summer meeting in the coastal resort city of Beidaihe that saw not only the further escalation of targets but also the nationwide launching of the peoples commune movement that virtually eliminated private property in the countryside and created larger five thousand to twentyfive thousand families and more radical forms of col lective living as well as promising a quick transition to full communism within a very few years This extremism was arguably fed by Maos newly contentious relations with the Soviet Union caused mainly by his resentment of proposals from Moscow for joint military facilities on Chinese soil that he took as disrespecting PRC sovereignty Meanwhile Moscow openly criticized claims that would have China reach commu nism not only in a ridiculously short time but also before the senior communist state Ironically it was the Chairman who was the first of the top leaders to speak out against the radical excesses of the summer and fall resulting in late 1958 in a signifi cant lowering of industrial targets moderated policy concerning the peoples com munes and the relegation of the transition to communism to a more distant future While this indicated that Mao still retained some pragmatic sensibilities more signif icantly it demonstrated that none of his colleagues was willing to risk the Chairmans ire even as excesses ran riot and the first signs of extended famine emerged until he had spoken While the policy tendency in the first half of 1959 was largely one of cooling off it was inhibited by two factors The first overarching factor was Maos ambivalence about slowing down the Leap Although he temporarily enlisted Chen Yun in mid1959 to provide some control over the economy Mao was unwilling to entertain any fun damental reconsideration of his Great Leap Related to this was the fact that with the undercutting of the role of the centralized economic ministries policy implementa tion rested with provincial party authorities and these leaders varied considerably from extreme radicalism to a more measured if still highly ambitious approach In this Mao generally sided with the more cautious local leaders but he was periodically excited by the claims of the radicals some of whom even considered Maos efforts to deflate their wild claims about their achievements in leaping forward as rightist and he never insisted on bringing them back to reality Nevertheless when the party lead ership convened in July 1959 for a meeting at Lushananother scenic spot but this one located in the high cool mountains of central ChinaMaos signals indicated an intention for a further retrenchment of the Leap and he called for an open discussion of the problems facing the regime The Lushan Conference was a truly seminal event in the history of the CCP although it can also be seen as an extension of the harsh pressures that Mao brought on his colleagues at the early 1958 meetings The hopes of many leaders for a further m a o z e d o n G i n P o w e r 91 readjustment of Leap policies were shattered when Minister of Defense Peng Dehuai wrote a letter of opinion to Mao that was highly critical of Great Leap shortcomings Although Penga Long March veteran a marshal of the PLA and the commander of Chinese forces in the Korean Warattributed errors in the Leap to the failure of others to implement the Chairmans directives correctly Mao was deeply offended Pengs effort was a clumsy misreading of Maos psychology whereas Pengs aim was to prod Mao into taking further steps in the direction of slowing the Leap that he had already signaled the Chairman interpreted it as a personal challenge Other leaders including those with difficult political relations with Peng attempted to calm the situation but to no avail as Mao insisted on Pengs dismissal and began an intense campaign against right opportunismthis time aimed at targets in the partythat frightened officials from addressing problems especially the catastrophic food situation and intensified radical policies This took matters further than in early 1958 in terms of how differences within the leadership were handled now leaders earning Maos displeasure were not merely criticized and sidelined they were sub jected to even harsher denunciation and dismissed from office More tragic was that Maos new lurch to the left at this time was a key factor in deepening the famine that would eventually account for anywhere from twentyfive to more than fortyfive mil lion peasant lives with perhaps 60 percent of them lost from winter 1959 to winter 1960 following Lushan Significantly throughout this drama and despite the militarys concern for the famines impact on the morale of peasant troops there was no PLA position on the Leap nor concerted support for Peng after Mao acted Although there was grumbling within the top leadership over Maos arbitrariness at Lushan the Chairman remained unchallenged Much as they had been in the last half of 1958 other leaders were tentative in the extreme even as evidence of much more severe disasters accumulated in late 1959 and the first half of 1960 Mao as before was ambivalent about how to respond calling for remedial measures but still endorsing high targets in mid1960 Significantly it was only in the fall of 1960 when Mao personally ordered a concerted effort to combat the Leaps excesses that a sys tematic retreat from the Great Leap began It was also the period when Mao began his own retreat to the socalled second front of leadership an arrangement whereby he concerned himself with matters of ideology and overall political direction while other leaders on the first front assumed responsibility for the daily administration of the party and state This involved no lessening of Maos authority although in the circumstances it meant leaving the task of cleaning up the mess he had created to Liu Shaoqi Zhou enlai Deng Xiaoping and others The LIMITS oF RecoveRY 19611965 The crisis created by Maos failed Great Leap Forward was the deepest in PRC history As the famine worsened widespread demoralization affected cadres and population alike the social order declined and black markets and superstitious practices multi plied Throughout 1961 a series of measures were implemented to cope with the situ ation drastic cuts in excessive investment shifting resources to agriculture and con sumer industries ending radical decentralization to enhance economic coordination 92 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a adjusting commune organization to increasingly vest authority in production teams the smallest rural unit allowing peasants private plots and free markets emphasizing material incentives in both urban and rural areas restoring the authority of factory managers and technical personnel and appealing to intellectuals by indicating that providing expertise alone rather than being red and expert was enough to dem onstrate political loyalty In key functional areas party documents laying down systematic policies were drafted each under the direction of a party leader with relevant expertise Mao approved each document but overall leadership on the first front was provided by Liu Shaoqi Maos attention was focused on the further deteriorating relations with the Soviet Union and on the broader problem of reorienting the regime from the excessive high pressure approach of the Great Leap to one emphasizing innerparty democracy and cautious policymaking the truth from facts approach of the rev olutionary period whereby careful investigation and research were required before decisions were made The depth of the crisis as well as the damage to Maos personal prestige was evi dent at the 7000 cadres conference in JanuaryFebruary 1962 An undercurrent of discontent with the Chairman was present at this massive gathering of officials from different institutions and administrative levels to the extent that Mao felt it necessary to offer a selfcriticism In many respects this was very restrained and he reasserted the correctness of the Great Leap policy line but Mao acknowledged responsibility for the current situation declared that he was subject to the will of the majority in the restricted sense that if everyone disagreed with him he would concede the point and admitted that the party had been unable to regularize a whole set of guiding principles during the Leap in contrast to the fully persuasive policies of the Soviet model period14 What was particularly striking was the fact that the leadership rallied around the Chairman Although beijing Mayor Peng Zhen suggested that even Mao had made mistakes the boldest statement of any leader in the 19491976 period but one that largely echoed Maos selfcriticism Peng had earlier emphasized that if we dont support him who can we support15 Other leaders including Deng Xiaoping went well beyond this to fulsome praise of the Chairman The most egregious cheerleader for the Chairman was another longterm Mao favorite Lin biao the PLA marshal who had replaced Peng Dehuai as minister of defense after Lushan and who would come to play a crucial role in the Cultural Revolution The most important speech to the conference was the official report by Liu Shaoqi Liu also sought to protect Mao by assuming overall responsibility as the top leader on the first front Lius report was approved by Mao who in addition encouraged Liu to supplement the report with oral remarks but the report and especially the oral remarks were a particularly systematic critique of the Great Leap and included a reference to the claims of peasants in some areas that disasters were 70 percent manmade In sharp contrast to his appreciation of Lin biaos fawning speech Mao seemingly took umbrage at the bluntness of Lius assessment claiming a number of years later that Lius performance during the rightist deviation of 1962 gave him food for thought concerning the reliability of his successor In the context of the moment given the severity of the problems facing the PRC Mao had little immediate m a o z e d o n G i n P o w e r 93 recourse and retreated further onto the second front He departed from beijing leaving Liu to organize further measures to overcome the crisis This task was undertaken at another February work conference that concluded the situation was even more dire than previously believed with the economy on the verge of collapse A series of measures followed on Lius recommendation Chen Yun was once again placed in charge of the economy new sharp cutbacks in construction and investment were enforced and most importantly with Chen Deng Zihui and Deng Xiaoping arguing for concessions to smallscale farming production quotas were assigned to individual households rather than collective units and beyond that even fullfledged private farming was tolerated in extensive areas of the country Mao had given ambiguous support to this approach at the start of this process but its underlying spirit as captured by Deng Xiaopings comment in a July 1962 speech on restoring agricultural production that it does not matter if it is a white cat or a black cat as long as it catches mice was inevitably too much for the Chairman This became clear in July as Mao regarding the measures taken since February as a sign of panic began to criticize a wide range of policies starting with the retreat from collec tive agriculture and the leaders who had backed them The Chairmans undiminished authority was clear He not only reversed policies by rescinding household responsibility systems in the countryside and calling a stop to other concessions he branded Chen Yun as always a rightist and removed Chen from any real power a situation that would last until November 1978 Maos awesome power extended beyond demoting individuals he not only dismissed Deng Zihui but also disbanded the party centers Rural Work Department even higher figures were chastened as well with Mao criticizing Liu Shaoqi for paying too much attention to Chen Yun and establishing an independent kingdom In this context Liu sud denly and drastically changed course to back Maos view while Deng Xiaoping hastily removed his cat theory from the record and emphasized the collective economy Although Mao had halted the retreat he did not provide a clear direction for future policy One thing was clear though while not disowning the Great Leap neither was he calling for a return to the radicalism of the Leap program the collective sector in the rural economy would be boosted but only in its most moderate form Maos lack of clarity about the future was most strikingly reflected in his attempt at the September 1962 Central Committee plenum to reorient the overall ideological guideline of the regime with the clarion call Never forget class struggle While Mao urged party leaders to talk of class struggle every day this was not much of a guide to concrete action As he himself put it work and class struggle were two different kinds of problems and our work must not be jeopardized just because of class struggle16 The inherent uncertainty that this indicates was reflected in vari ous ways as the economy and society gradually recovered over the next three years In the reconstruction of a more regular institutional order as the mobilization approach was abandoned the governments role in the economy was enhanced but it did not assume the same dominant role it held in the modern sector under the centralized A plenum or plenary session is a meeting of the Central Committee normally held annually between the elections to that body by the National Party Congress which now convenes every five years No plenum was convened between fall 1962 and August 1966 however 94 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Soviet model Ad hoc economic arrangements prevailed as no truly comprehensive plan emerged significantly in December 1964 Zhou enlai observed that there are still large unknown areas and a great many unfamiliar phenomena in our under standing of socialist construction17 The major mass mobilization movement of the period the rural Socialist Education Movement of 19621966 which was aimed at ideologically reinvigorating village cadres and combating corruption and other backward phenomena was not implemented universally but instead only reached about onethird of Chinas villages And the overall party line was unclear with various pragmatic and experimental eco nomic programs implemented but with more radical political themes as reflected in the ongoing national campaign to study Maos Thought proceeding on a parallel if sometimes intersecting track The net result in 19631965 was a politics of ambiguity and at the core of this ambi guity was the relationship of Mao to his colleagues on the first front As demon strated by his actions in the summer of 1962 Mao was allpowerful but he remained on the second front and his complaints and reservations concerning Liu Shaoqi notwithstanding left his putative successor in charge of the daily running of the party and state Mao was now more remote from his colleagues often outside the capital but still able to intervene decisively at any point The real problem for the collective leadership on the first front was the Chairmans ambiguous attitudes and how to be sure that they were in accord with his wishes Their response was overwhelmingly collegialrather than compete for Maos favor by exaggerating differences among themselves Liu and other leaders sought to come to a consensus position that they believed was acceptable to Mao and then present it to him This apparently worked in the overwhelming majority of cases with the Chairman signing off on even those pol icies that would be denounced as revisionista betrayal of MarxismLeninism during the Cultural Revolution but on occasion Mao astonished his colleagues by rejecting their carefully constructed proposals The most dramatic case concerned the drafting of a new FiveYear Plan for the economy in 1964 After carefully reviewing and adjusting the draft plan in accord with their perception of Maos wishes Liu Zhou enlai and the planners were dumb founded by his angry reaction that labeled their efforts as practicing Kuomintang ideology in a disparaging reference to the political party of the CCPs archenemy Chiang Kaishek In a display of raw power the Chairman not only forced changes in the document but also sidelined the State Planning Commission creating a small planning commission of more junior officials to take over the planning function A related aspect of the politics of ambiguity affecting top leaders and subordinate officials alike was that the Chairman periodically expressed unhappiness with some policy or situation and demanded action The bureaucracies always responded some times drawing Maos explicit approval sometimes his tart comments about the inad equacy of the response There was no certainty that any of these responses indicated a completely satisfied or totally disapproving Chairman however A case in point was education an area where substantial shifts to the left were made in terms of politicizing the curriculum increasing the access of workers and peasants to tertiary education and reforming teaching methods Still a major requirement of work in education meeting Chinas needs for advanced human capital also had to m a o z e d o n G i n P o w e r 95 be addressed Liu Shaoqi took personal control of the issue and came up with a two track solution that supported regular academic education but at the same time vastly expanded vocational training While Mao appeared welldisposed to the approach at the time during the Cultural Revolution it was attacked as a typical example of Lius revisionism that condemned the masses to inferior education while training a new bourgeois elite A final ambiguous aspect of the period concerned the increasing prominence of the Peoples Liberation Army The army which maintained a strong program of political indoctrination under the slogan of politics in command became a model for emulation throughout society with the learn from the PLA campaign in 1964 A feature of the PLAs political approach was lavish praise of Maos Thought with Defense Minister Lin biao pushing an early version of Quotations from Chairman Mao known in the West as The Little Red book that would become ubiquitous during the Cultural Revolution Other signs of increased military prominence were a more active role in cultural affairs and the transfer of a significant number of PLA officers to staff new militarystyle political departments in civilian institutions Yet there is little evidence that any of this involved a significant redistribution in institutional power The scope and role of the transferred officers is unclear but the limited evidence available suggests that they were absorbed into their new civilian organizations and began to adopt the perspec tives of those organizations More fundamentally there is little evidence that the PLA was interested in assuming a civilian role with Lin himself warning against usurping the power of civilian party committees The explanation and significance of the armys enhanced status lay with Maohis appreciation of the PLAs virtues as a politicized army and Lins promotion of the Mao Zedong Thought and his unhappiness with what he saw in the rest of the partystate and society as a whole Maos unhappiness went beyond dissatisfaction with bureaucratic responses to his concerns or doubts about the performance of his top colleagues Looking at the society around him that had been so deeply traumatized by the failures of the Great Leap Mao saw signs of a possibly degenerating revolution widespread corruption and selfseeking behavior significant social inequality and the emergence of what he called a new bourgeois privileged stratum that benefited disproportionately from Chinas socialist system In focusing on these developments Mao was profoundly influenced by developments in the Soviet Union Relations with Moscow had contin ued to deteriorate since the late 1950s international disagreements and an escalating ideological polemic drove the relationship to the brink of a split while the Soviets retaliated to Chinese provocations by reneging on the promised nuclear weapons assistance in 1959 and by withdrawing their experts who had long played such an important role in the PRCs modern sector during the economic crisis in 1960 With the split on the verge of being formalized Mao went beyond an analysis of Moscows revisionist foreign policies which preached peaceful coexistence with the United States to ask how a communist party could author such policies The answer was that the Soviet Union had degenerated internally due to its party leadership being usurped by a revisionist leading clique first under Stalins successor Nikita Khrushchev and then Leonid brezhnev Mao authorized a detailed polemic in 19631964 in which Deng Xiaoping played a leading role in drafting making the 96 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a point that in fact capitalism had been restored in the Soviet Union For Mao the emergence of Soviet revisionism raised the fear that if the first socialist state could degenerate what would prevent China from following suit Mao could only offer some orthodox prescriptionsfor example maintaining the dictatorship of the proletariat by which the partystate actively suppressed class enemies affirming and enforcing party leadership unfolding mass movements and conducting repeated socialist education campaigns but what if the CCPs own leading core was ideologi cally suspect by the start of 1965 Mao harbored growing doubts about Liu Shaoqi subsequently claiming that he had decided in January that Liu had to go The immediate factor according to Mao concerned differences over the conduct of the Socialist education movement something he linked to his earlier food for thought over Lius perfor mance in 1962 In fact their differences over socialist education were relatively lim ited and reflected more Maos shifting position than any major confrontation One can only speculate about Maos real motives hitherto repressed resentment over Lius speech to the 7000 cadres conference a paranoid fear that he was somehow los ing power to Liu who was exerting dynamic leadership on the first front or a latent distrust of someone who was a rough contemporary but had never been personally close to him It is ironic that Mao turned on Liu of all top leaders in this period Liu was most prone to adopting leftleaning tendencies something that distinguished him from the everfavored Deng Xiaoping who notwithstanding complete loyalty subtly distanced himself from the more radical of Maos interventions yet who would be treated much better during the Cultural Revolution In any case by 1965 Liu ranking vicechairman of the CCP chairman president of the PRC and for more than a decade the com munist leader regarded certain to be Maos successor was a marked man The main reason may have been that Mao perceived Liu as a threat believed he was promoting or allowing revisionist policies to take hold or had simply decided that as the man in charge on the first front Liu had to take responsibility for the negative trends in the regime and society Lius fate would be sealed in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution GReAT DISoRDeR AND hARSh ReTRIbUTIoN 19661971 The Great Proletarian cultural Revolution begins The Cultural Revolution which began with secretive obscure preparations in 1965 in reality only lasted for two years from mid1966 to summer 1968 despite postMao claims of a Cultural Revolution decade from 1966 to 197618 Throughout this period and into its aftermath Mao had a clearer idea of what he was against than what he envisioned would emerge from the tumult He also demonstrated a deep misunder standing of the forces he had unleashed While ostensibly seeking revolutionary purity with such Delphic instructions as fight self make revolution and destroy the old and establish the new Maos destruction of predictable authority structures left many m a o z e d o n G i n P o w e r 97 people notably rebel activists who supported him struggling to maintain their own selfinterests in fluid and threatening circumstances Through it all Mao was central and aloof He could change the direction of the movement at any point but he oper ated from Olympian heights and set no comprehensive or coherent overall policy line One of the first signs of the impending storm that was to become the Cultural Revolution was a late 1965 critique of a historical play about an intemperate emperor written by a leading cultural figure close to beijing mayor Peng Zhen and soon attacked as a thinlyveiled criticism of Mao by the spring of 1966 Peng had been implicated in this alleged smear against the Chairman and purged followed soon after by the formal launching of the movement with the issuing of the Circular of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution on May 16 1966 This document known as the May 16 Directive declared an allout struggle against those representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the party the government the army and various cultural circles and were counterrevo lutionary revisionists whose aim was to seize political power and turn the dictator ship of the proletariat into a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie A central feature of this new movement was the rupturing of the remaining lead ership unity the Yanan roundtable that even after the demise of Gao Gang and the ouster of Peng Dehuai still left the overwhelming proportion of the 1945 leadership in key positions in 1965 by 1965 moreover Mao increasingly focused on what he saw as the revisionist tendencies of Chinese society and felt the need for some kind of new revolutionary experience especially for the generation of young revolution ary successors who had not experienced the real thing He further contemplated new methods to shake up the system something reflected in Liu Shaoqis June 1966 remark that I have never in the past come across our party using this form of rectification19 Most fundamentally as the movement unfolded it became clear that at least tem porarily in order to achieve his revolutionary goals the Chairman was willing to destroy the party organization that had been the glue of the system and the vehicle of his past successes Perceptively characterized by Stuart Schram as a natural Leninist for most of his career20 Mao now cast aside tight organizational control for the great disorder that he envisioned as leading to a revolutionized regime and society During these years the movement oscillated through a number of phases alternately more radical or more constrained changes ultimately reflecting Maos judgment that dis ruption had gotten out of hand and had to be dampened down or that efforts to con trol the chaos were undermining the very purpose of the Cultural Revolution thus requiring a new upsurge of radicalism The result was a perverse form of totalitarian ism without organizational control rebellious elements would be able to attack the party but the shifting views of the supreme leader could undermine that control and drastically affect any part of society The Red Guards The first manifestation of the breakdown of Leninist order was the emergence of the Red Guards in beijing high schools and universities beginning in June 1966 98 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a see box 32 Initially guided by work teams sent by the central authorities see below student Red Guard groups formed and harshly criticized preexisting school and university authorities Adopting Maos rebellious spirit various Red Guards exercised considerable autonomy in some cases clashing with the work teams by midsummer with the work teams withdrawn Red Guards became the leading force on campuses Red Guard behavior included writing big character posters pasted on walls attacking campus officials and national figures ransacking homes to destroy traditional and bourgeois property and abusing beating and even killing teachers After millionstrong rallies in beijings Tiananmen Square in the fall Red Guards from the capital and other cities began to exchange revolutionary experiences by traveling throughout China thus placing great strain on the countrys transportation system At the same time factional conflicts developed among Red Guard organiza tions reaching violent dimensions in 19671968 that Mao would call civil wars Throughout 19661968 various forms of violence surfaced whether Red Guard beatings and killings of suspect teachers or individuals of bad class origin in the com munity armed clashes of opposing Red Guard and rebel groups or the revenge of the authorities when given license to crack down on disruption something that became even more ferocious after mid1968 The total number of deaths from this orgy of violence is unknown but a figure in excess of one million is plausible with the inevi table damage to social interaction and disruption of the economy immense During these two years there were also critical shifts in institutional authority notably the destruction of the partystate apparatus but these did not involve an unambiguous investiture of power in alternative institutions Rather all remained fluid uncertainty existed throughout and Mao stood above everything even when he refused to give clear orders In the earliest period the socalled Fifty Days of JuneJuly 1966 overall authority for conducting the Cultural Revolution remained with the Politburo leadership of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping but the waters were muddied by Maos creation in May of the Central Cultural Revolution Group CCRG with special responsibility for the movement The CCRG was effectively if not formally led by Maos wife Jiang Qing21 who had been called from the political sidelines by her husband in the early 1960s to counter bourgeois influences in the arts Most of the other members of the CCRG were like Jiang Qing ideological radicals who had been on the margins of the elite although several figures of Politburo rank notably Yanan security chief Kang Sheng and Maos former secretary Chen boda also played important roles Who better to mount a challenge to the party establishment Clearly while new Cultural Revolution organizations like the CCRG played their roles institutional power was now thoroughly eclipsed by Maos personal authority This was enhanced by Maos personality cult something dating from his consolidation of power in the 1940s but eased at the Chairmans own initiative in the early 1950s before being taken to new heights during the Great Leap Forward Now however a virulent cult emerged that greatly surpassed all previous manifestations with loyalty dances and many other quasireligious phenomena deeply penetrating everyday life A key feature of the period was that all leaders were in the dark concerning the Chairmans ultimate intentions as seen in Lius lament cited above concerning his bewilderment over Maos new form of rectification Liu had attempted to conduct the m a o z e d o n G i n P o w e r 99 Box 32 the red Guard movement The Red Guard movement was one of the best known but inadequately understood aspects of the cultural Revolution With the campaign beginning in the educational sphere high school and university students became the movements first activists later copied by revolutionary rebels in government institutions and factories These stu dents provided some of the cultural Revolutions most riveting images for example excited adoration of Mao during the summer of 1966 rallies at Tiananmen Square and the cruel abuse of campus authorities including professors and leading partystate offi cials paraded through the streets in dunce hats by 1967 the violence let loose by sig nificant numbers of Red Guards against such targets and bad class elements in society had been overtaken by brutal clashes among Red Guard factions Understanding the sources of factionalism and the larger politics of the Red Guard movement is not easy for a nationwide phenomenon involving millions of students remarkably little is known for the vast majority of the country existing studies largely focus on high schools in the southern city of Guangzhou and on the campaign in beijings universities Two broad explanations have been advanced for Red Guard factionalism a sociologi cal approach arguing that interests based on status and political networks in the pre1966 academic structure and broader society determined factional affiliation and a more politi cal interpretation emphasizing conflicts that emerged during the course of the movement itself Reflecting the tendency for two opposing factions or factional alliances to appear in organizations and localities the sociological explanation most clearly documented for Guangzhou high schools portrays a conflict of rebel Red Guards from middling class family backgrounds involving neither exploiters nor the exploited eg intellectuals professionals who were disadvantaged by ccP policies and as a consequence attacked party leaders versus conservative Red Guards from red class backgrounds eg party officials factory workers who both benefited from party policies and formed part of the school political structure as communist Youth League members and were thus more supportive of the establishment of course no Red Guard organization labeled itself conservative and proestablishment attitudes had to be tempered by the radical ethos of the cultural Revolution but according to these studies students joined Red Guard factions on the basis of interests that were present before the movement began The political interpretation which takes into account charismatic student leaders and the ideas and passions of Red Guard activists seeking to interpret and realize Maos objectives focuses on the interests created as Red Guards interacted with the environ ment of the cultural Revolution This explanation is largely based on events in beijings elite universities events necessarily unique because of the role of leading ccP figures in the unfolding of the movement there This raises the question of to what extent the movement was as many Red Guards bitterly came to believe simply the result of manip ulation by elite politicians The short answer is that the ccRG was deeply involved and sometimes determined the outcome of factional fights but the Red Guard movement also had a dynamic of its own and spun out of control contrary to Maos claim that work teams sent by the central authorities to the uni versities had suppressed the cultural Revolution during the socalled Fifty Days in JuneJuly 1966 most teams implemented their understanding of Maos wishes through harsh attacks on university authorities that gained Red Guard support regardless of social status The work teams however clashed with militant students not over cultural Revolution aims but over the teams efforts to tightly control the movement When the teams were withdrawn the majority of Red Guards who had cooperated with them became ironically the leading force on campus but the militant minority demanded reversals of the negative political labels they received from the work teams during the Fifty Days As tensions escalated the ccRG backed the militants and under cut the power of the conservative majority Continued 100 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a movement with the traditional rectification method of sending work teams to beijings high schools and universities to guide the Cultural Revolution as it unfolded on cam puses and this gained Maos approval albeit somewhat elusively The uncertainty was not limited to the established inner circle of leaders the radical members of the CCRG also defended the work teams in June although they changed their tune in July arguably because of a clearer understanding of Maos intentions In any case when Mao returned to beijing after an extended period outside the capital in late July 1966 and criticized the work teams as suppressing the Cultural Revolution rather than furthering it a new stage was set The work teams were withdrawn Liu and Deng as the central sponsors of the work teams were in trouble and the authority of the party as a whole had been damaged A Central Committee plenum in August 1966 laid down a set of guidelines for the Cultural Revolution that were inherently contradictory both asserting overall party authority and encouraging student rebellion Moreover change in the top leadership inevitably contributed to uncertainty The disgraced Liu was replaced by the loyal Lin biao as Maos designated successor The Politburo Standing Committee was sig nificantly enlarged and its internal pecking order revamped and most provocatively Mao authored a big character poster that clearly attacked Liu for adopting the reac tionary stand of the bourgeoisie Yet the future extent of the Cultural Revolutions destruction could not have been imagined The movement was to steer clear of the productive sectors of the state and society and Mao indicated it would be wound up in about three months but follow ing several months of increasing strife on campuses and student incursions into the community as well as escalating attacks on individual leaders in the late fall of 1966 the fateful decision was taken to extend the movement into factories and the country side This placed extra stress on provincial municipal and ministerial authorities that now came under intensified rebel attack Soon the entire party structure collapsed Power Seizures and Revolutionary committees The next stage of the Cultural Revolution began with the seizure of power by rebel forces in the socalled January 1967 revolution in Shanghai In fact this was a largely peaceful seizure by the leading radical figures of the emerging Shanghai power Then as the cultural Revolution extended into government organizations in January 1967 the victorious militant Red Guards linked up with revolutionary rebels in minis tries responsible for their universities before 1966 In the confusion that followed dur ing the struggle to seize power in ministries opposing citywide Red Guard alliances formed This was a struggle for political advantage and to avoid losing to bitter ene mies not over different views of the movements direction or reflecting contrasting class backgrounds As internecine violence unfolded after January in much of china the Red Guards played no further useful role for Mao eventually leading to his dismantling the movement in summer 1968 and dispatching these urban youths to temper themselves in the countryside Box 32 Continued m a o z e d o n G i n P o w e r 101 structure who significantly were also members of the CCRG The venture thus carried Maos authority from the outset something rare in the power seizures by radicals that followed in other parts of the country After a brief experiment with a radically decen tralized power structure called the Shanghai commune that Mao rejected as lack ing sufficient authority to suppress counterrevolution Revolutionary Committees emerged as the new government in Shanghai and elsewhere and in the absence of a viable party structure became the organ of local power While the unusual circumstances in Shanghai meant that civilian leadership prevailed the Revolutionary Committee model established in other municipali ties provinces lowerlevel jurisdictions and institutions of various kinds includ ing schools and factories promoted a threeway alliance of PLA representatives revolutionary cadres experienced officials from the previous regime who pos sessed necessary administrative skills and were judged sufficiently reformed and mass representatives the latter reflecting the contending rebel factions in the area or organization concerned with the military generally dominant The process of forming the Revolutionary Committees was drawn out intensely contested with top leadersnotably Zhou enlaiengaged in efforts to negotiate agreements among sharply opposed and in some cases intractable factions Indeed the final provincial Revolutionary Committees were only established in September 1968 after Mao had called a halt to the Cultural Revolution From the outset the disruption accompanying power seizures was resisted by top leaders who had not been toppled in 1966 The most famous instance was the socalled February 1967 adverse current a conflict involving seven Politburolevel vice pre miers and PLA marshals who apparently seeing an opening in Maos recent criticism of the radical excesses of the early Cultural Revolution confronted leading members of the CCRG over the accelerating chaos After a sharp argument Mao sided with the radicals warning the vice premiers and marshals that whoever opposes the CCRG will meet my resolute opposition22 Mao then suspended the Politburo as a policy making body leaving the CCRG an organization that was growing rapidly from a small group of radical party intellectuals into a substantial bureaucracy as one of the two authoritative bodies at the party center The other body established at the same time as the CCRG in May 1966 was the arguably even more powerful Central Special Case Examination Group Similar to its sister institution it grew from a small group investigating the Peng Zhen case to a large bureaucratic organization with a nationwide network seeking incriminating evidence of traitorous activity by highlevel figures It thus became the organ of an innerparty inquisition that directed the ferreting out arrest and torture of suspect Central Committee members and other officials While leading radical figures Jiang Qing and Kang Sheng played particularly notorious roles many other leaders were drawn in the everreliable Zhou enlai performed the penultimate supervisory role and Mao of course had the ultimate power to focus or curb the groups activities The institution whose domestic power grew markedly during the Cultural Revolution was the PLA The army was not only the leading force in most of the newly established Revolutionary Committees it was also the authority responsible for maintaining law and order before and after the committees were set up but the result was not a true military takeover or something the army itself welcomed In 102 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a 19671968 responsible PLA commanders who were often attacked and their armor ies raided by rebels found themselves engaged in bloody struggles with disruptive groups without clear authority from above and were sometimes rebuked or ousted as a result Most army leaders wanted the military to disengage from politics and return to national defense duties Willing or not the PLA remained at the center of the political structures that evolved from the summer of 1968 after Mao disappointed by the petty but violent factionalism of the Red Guards effectively called a halt to the Cultural Revolution by ordering a crackdown on disruptive rebel groups and the dispersal of troublesome Red Guards to the countryside with perhaps twenty million urbanbred young rebels sent down to the villages and up to the mountains to live work and learn among the peasants emphasis had thus further shifted to the resto ration of order a task that was mainly the responsibility of the PLA The Aftermath of the cultural Revolution In addition to achieving unprecedented representation on the Politburo and Central Committee at the Ninth Party Congress in April 1969 the first full party congress since 1956 the military had an even firmer grip on provincial Revolutionary Committees as prominent rebels from 19661968 were removed from power or marginalized and it equally dominated the new party committees that were restored during institutional rebuilding in the provinces and lower administrative levels in 19701971 Meanwhile PLA representatives had played a key stabilizing role in government ministries dur ing factional fighting in 19671968 and a substantial number of military officers now became leaders of party core groups as the state structure reemerged as functioning organizations in 19701973 This period also saw harsh indeed murderous campaigns targeting troublesome rebel elements or others who had earned the displeasure of local authorities during the Cultural Revolution as well as ordinary criminals imaginary counterrevolution aries and the usual suspects with bad class backgrounds The cleansing of class ranks campaign in 19681969 together with subsequent suppressions in 19701972 probably killed at least 15 million people These campaigns were clearly authorized by Mao although his available statements advocated a degree of restraint The PLA as the ultimate source of local authority in most places during this time actively partici pated in the bloodletting or stood by and watched Overall since 1966 more deaths resulted from suppression by the authorities than from Red Guard violence with its scope increasing dramatically from the second half of 1968 Somewhat paradoxically this period also saw a moderation of radical Cultural Revolution policy trends These policy adjustments were modest and mostly aimed at restoring order and predictability in the economy and administrationand there was no questioning of the central concept of the Cultural Revolution In addition there was a significant change in PRC foreign policy that had domes tic political implications In August 1968 the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia to crush yet another democratic movement proclaiming the brezhnev doctrine that asserted Moscows right to intervene in other socialist states This led to escalating tensions on the SinoSoviet border in early 1969 a result of which was that Mao not m a o z e d o n G i n P o w e r 103 only undertook feverish war preparations but also began the process of rapproche ment with the United States as a way to protect China from the Soviets The PLA still could not escape its unwanted political tasks but the focus of the institution was turning back to its basic defense function All of this took place in the context of the emergence of an unusual political lineup at the top of the CCP one marked by peculiarities that went well beyond dismantling the Yanan roundtable The new Politburo consisting of twentyone full members elected at the Ninth Party Congress in April 1969 contained less than half of the full 1956 members and of that half nearly half again were elderly leaders without any real function Liu Shaoqi had been declared a counterrevolutionary in 1968 expelled from the party and subsequently died from physical abuse Deng Xiaoping had been labeled a capitalist roader removed from all his party and government posts but with Maos protection he was not expelled from the party as the radicals undoubt edly wanted and was sent to work in a farm machinery repair shop on a rural peoples commune Meanwhile the new Politburo was filled out by CCRG radicals with marginal polit ical qualifications led by Jiang Qing regional military commanders and central mili tary leaders close to Lin biao including Lins wife A key figure in the new lineup was Zhou enlai valued but not particularly respected by Mao as a skilled administrator reliable political surrogate and diplomatic negotiator a role that became especially important in the new post1968 foreign policy context In short with this diverse group whatever capacity that previously existed for collective influence on Mao had totally dissipated Yet the election of a new Politburo and Central Committee together with the subsequent piecemeal reconstruction of a central party apparatus marked a step toward institutional regularity and the CCRG the de facto power cen ter of the last three years suspended operations in September 1969 The Fall of Lin biao The strangest aspect of the new leadership equation was the role of Lin biao Although long a Mao favorite and arguably the CCPs greatest general and widely accepted within the elite as a top Politburo leader Lin was a curious choice as Maos successor in that he was in poor health and crucially had little interest in power or domestic affairs He sought to avoid political elevation but could not refuse Maos designa tion Once installed as the successor Lin played as minimal a role as possible gen erally invisible in public after the massive Red Guard rallies in the summer of 1966 and avoiding strong advocacy within the leadership Moreover his actual views were comparatively moderate as indicated to staff and family in private and as reflected on the rare occasions when he expressed a personal preference in leadership exchanges Nevertheless to the public he was a staunch supporter of the Cultural Revolution as befit his position as the Chairmans successor a position written into the new 1969 party constitution Maos motives in selecting Lin as the successor in 1966 are unclear but probably involve some combination of having the Minister of Defense at his side to guaran tee PLA support longstanding favoritism toward Lin and appreciation for his role 104 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a in promoting the Mao cult and the fact that of all the members of the Politburo Standing Committee Lin was the only one not tarnished by the perceived revision ist tendencies of domestic policy In any case Lins modus operandi was simply to endorse whatever position Mao took and avoid any personal initiative Unfortunately for Lin this was not sufficient in part because his ambitious wife Ye Qun and central military subordinates became involved in disputes with Jiang Qing and other civilian radicals Lin was dragged into the conflict during a confrontation at the Lushan Central Committee plenum in the summer of 1970 Mao decided in favor of Jiang Qing and over the next year Mao applied pressure to Lins camp demand ing selfcriticisms of Lins associates which were invariably judged inadequate Mao did not openly disown Lin but he denied him a personal audience and eventually in the summer of 1971 indicated he wanted some kind of unspecified showdown with his successor Meanwhile Lins twentysixyearold son a highranking air force officer despite his age engaged in discussions with other young officers that may have included wild ideas concerning a military coup and possibly an assassination attempt against Mao but which do not appear to have involved Lin biao himself see box 33 With Mao returning to beijing from the south for the showdown Lin his wife and son fled toward the Soviet Union in September under still mysterious circumstances their plane crashing in the Mongolian desert killing all aboard Contrary to what would be expected following the demise of a threatening opponent Mao went into a physical and emotional tailspin seemingly unable to accept that a favored colleague even one facing criticism and uncertainty would desert him Box 33 the lin Biao affair The Lin biao affair also known as the September 13 1971 incident after the date Lins plane crashed while fleeing china remains the ccPs most mysterious leadership conflict Unlike virtually all other leaders who suffered during Maos last two decades there has been no serious official effort to reexamine Lins case much less reverse the verdict on him This is probably due to the fact that unlike other victims of the cultural Revolution decade who were attacked as revisionists Lin was a major beneficiary of the cultural Revolution despite his reluctance to play the role of Maos chosen successor and his doubts about the movement and thus he became a symbol of the excesses rejected by the postMao leadership beyond that the sheer bizarreness of the claims concerning Lin the likelihood that key evidence was fabricated and the difficulty of presenting a clear good vs evil narrative arguably contributed to a decision to ignore the case leaving the story concocted in 1972 as the official version There is little to suggest significant reservations on Maos part concerning succession arrangements in the year following the Ninth congress in 1969 In the spring of 1970 however with a new state constitution on the agenda Mao declared he did not want to serve as state chairman a position equivalent to that of PRc president which had been vacant since the purge of Liu Shaoqi but Lin biao and other leaders including Zhou enlai continued to advocate that Mao take the post presumably pandering to Maos vanity something also apparent in Lins claim that Mao was a genius bizarrely these issues fed into tensions between Lins followers in the central PLA command and Jiang Qings civil ian radicals who had meddled in military matters m a o z e d o n G i n P o w e r 105 MAoS LAST STAND 19721976 The Lin biao affair was a critical turning point in Chinese politics during the Maoist era Despite Lins private skepticism about the movement he was identified with the Cultural Revolution and with Mao as the Chairmans personally chosen and constitu tionally mandated successor When Lin was publicly denounced as a traitor doubts about the Cultural Revolution that had grown both within the populace and the party elite during the increasingly destructive course of the movement inevitably inten sified Mao was acutely aware of widespread dissatisfaction with the movement whether by people who saw it as a reign of terror by officials bent on revenge after being attacked by rebels or even by those who felt its objectives were good but that it did not have to be carried out in such a violent and chaotic manner On several occasions from 1972 to 1976 the Chairman observed that he had only accomplished two things in my life and while few would have reservations con cerning the defeat of Chiang Kaishek the other matter was to launch the Cultural Revolution that few support and many oppose23 In countering such attitudes Mao would not accept criticism of the concept of the Cultural Revolution but he acknowl edged that much had gone wrong in practice the overall assessment of the Cultural Revolution is basically correct but there are some shortcomings Now we must consider the deficient aspects It is a 7030 distinction 70 percent achievements 30 percent mistakes24 During the last years of his life Mao made concerted efforts to A confrontation erupted at the AugustSeptember 1970 Lushan plenum With radi cal leader Zhang chunqiao singled out as a target by Lins supporters intense criticism directed at Zhang came from well outside Lins group Although it was not Lins intent by venting their spleen at one of the cultural Revolutions main protagonists many par ticipants were undoubtedly expressing their true feelings about the movement This was certainly Maos perception he sided with Zhang and Jiang Qing equating opposition to Zhang chunqiao with opposition to himself that is to his cultural Revolution over the next year Mao brought increasing pressure to bear on Lins followers nota bly chen boda Maos former secretary and ccRG leader who had clashed with Jiang and Zhang before aligning with Lins camp and the four generals who led the PLAs ser vice arms Mao took organizational measures to dilute Lins military authority launched a criticism campaign against chen labeling him a phony Marxist who had pushed the genius issue and subjected the generals to extended criticism but Maos intentions were unclear and Lin seemed uneasy but resigned to his political fate in summer 1971 when news came that Mao wanted to deal with him upon the chairmans return to beijing earlier in March Lins son Lin Liguo an air force officer himself had discussed his fathers situation with other young officers discussions later represented as planning for a military coup aimed at Mao In the official version this was Lin biaos plot something doubtful given its amateurish nature and postMao investigations determined that none of the four generals had any knowledge of it Finally with Maos return imminent panic seized Lins household Lin Liguo may have initiated new wild discussions about assassinating Mao and just before midnight on September 12 Lin his wife Ye Qun and son fled by plane toward the Soviet Union According to Lins surviving daughter her father drowsy from sleeping tablets was virtually kidnapped by Ye Qun and Lin Liguo Whatever the truth Mao reportedly stopped preparations to shoot down Lins aircraft commenting that Rain has to fall girls have to marry these things are immu table let them go 106 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a correct the 30 percent mistakes so that the movement could be consolidated but the Cultural Revolution per se remained sacrosanct The Chairmans fragile health he turned 80 in December 1973 and even greater remoteness from his leading colleagues after the death of Lin biao affected the poli tics of the period Maos health was extremely poor in 1972 only improved somewhat in 19731974 and began to decline sharply in 1975 finally leaving him in a virtual coma in the summer of 1976 He was out of beijing for nine months from July 1974 to April 1975 but even when in the capital access to him was highly restricted result ing in considerable authority for those leaders who did see him and could convey his views In this regard remarkable influence was exercised by relatives who had access for most of the period his niece together with his interpreterthe two ladies and much more significantly his nephew Mao Yuanxin from the fall of 1975 figures who both conveyed information about the highest leadership to Mao and carried back his orders which were reflexively obeyed As before Maos ambiguous views compli cated the lives of those entrusted with running the state but the difficulty was magni fied by his deteriorating condition and isolation Reflecting his contradictory objectives of both correcting and defending the Cultural Revolution Mao placed contending forces on the Politburo On the one hand there were key pre1966 leaders most notably Premier Zhou enlai and Deng Xiaoping who after submitting a selfcriticism to Mao had been recalled from inter nal exile in 1973 and was reinstated in his position as vicepremier and subsequently in January 1975 as vicechairman of the CCP and effective leader of the first front On the other hand Mao gave Politburo positions to leading Cultural Revolution radicals including Jiang Qing and her CCRG associates Shanghai propaganda officials Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan they were joined in 1973 by the young Shanghai factory cadre and Cultural Revolution rebel Wang Hongwen While much of the history of this period has been written in terms of conflict between this socalled Gang of Four a term bestowed by Mao during one of his periods of displeasure with the radicals and the old guard headed by Zhou and Deng this distorts the reality in several ways Most fundamentally this interpretation paints the dynamics of the period as deter mined by the struggle between these ideologically opposed groups with Mao doing little more than intervening periodically in the conflict to tip the scale in one direction or the other In fact Mao determined every turning point during the period accord ing to his own goals and placed major restrictions on Politburo conflict by demand ing party unity While the Chairman was delusional if he believed these contentious forces could cooperate on a lasting basis to carry out his intention of rescuing key aspects of the Cultural Revolutionand he did at one point envisage a leadership team of Wang Hongwen and Deng XiaopingMao was able to enforce periods of cooperation or at least quiescent relations between the groups Finally by the time of the Lin biao affair Mao had also introduced into the higher echelons of the party elite a number of younger leaders who had served in the prov inces before the Cultural Revolution Those he promoted had been beneficiaries of the Cultural Revolution in the sense of attaining higher office than would have been possible without the movement but they were drawn from the party apparatus and acculturated in its ways Rather than being a third force between the old guard and radicals as is often assumed this group of new younger central leaders were m a o z e d o n G i n P o w e r 107 sympathetic to Zhou and Deng in political and in policy terms most fundamentally because of their respect for party seniorityone of the strongest factors holding the system together before 1966 but one shattered by the Cultural Revolution The prob lem was that this group like both the radicals and old guard had to tailor their advo cacy and actions in accord with Maos views of the moment Over the 19721976 period Chinese politics went through a number of alternating phases phases that were longer and more coherent than those during 19661968 and which crucially occurred in a more stable if still volatile and developing organizational context In 1972 while attempting to blame the excesses of the Cultural Revolution on Lin biao Mao authorized a critique of ultraleft practices that had disrupted the economy culture education and science and initiated rehabilitations of leaders dismissed during the Cultural Revolution While these moderating measures have been identified with Zhou enlai who indeed played the leading role in managing the process the political decision came from Mao as reflected in the fact that until late in the year the radicals were largely silent concerning this trend Moreover in the delicate area of leadership rehabilitations Maos direct personal imprint was clear on a casebycase basismost notably the return to office of Deng Xiaoping in early 1973 This critique of ultraleftism was an extension of the policy drift away from Cultural Revolution excesses over the previous two to three years but the measures themselves were quite limited and no overall ideological justification was provided When the radicals felt the need to speak out against this policy drift toward the end of 1972 their advocacy was tentative And even after Mao signaled in December 1972 that the critique had gone too far by declaring in a 180degree ideological turn that Lin biao was in fact an ultrarightist and a swin dler like Liu Shaoqi official policy largely continued in the new moderate direction well into 1973 In any case Mao concluded that the ideals of the Cultural Revolution had been diluted and he moved to reassert them at the Tenth CCP Congress in the summer of 1973 This could be seen in the rhetoric of the new party constitution that among other things praised the rebellious spirit of the Cultural Revolution by inserting Maos observation that going against the tide is a MarxistLeninist principle and in the astonishing elevation of model rebel Wang Hongwen as Maos successor by the start of 1974 abetted by his growing unhappiness with Zhou enlai ostensi bly over foreign affairs issues see below and concerns with the PLAs political reli ability Mao intensified his effort to reemphasize the essence of 19661968 by launch ing a second Cultural Revolution which was formally called the Criticize Lin Biao and Confucius ie oppose ultrarightism campaign This campaign targeted Zhou indirectly and the PLA and produced considerable economic social and organiza tional disruption over the first eight months of the year but this level of disruption was nowhere near the scale of the real Cultural Revolution even though Zhou was under severe stress as he battled cancer he was able to contain the movements damage to a limited degree including tentative moves to repair economic disruption Moreover independent of the Premier leading generals were reshuffled and criticized but not purged while overall very few important offi cials were actually removed from office Much more quickly than in 19661968 Mao called a halt to the campaign in August 1974 The Cultural Revolution has already 108 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a lasted eight years It is now time to establish stability The entire Party and the army should unite25 Mao had now created a new turning point that set in motion the most serious effort during this period to consolidate the Cultural Revolution by dealing with what he had acknowledged were the 30 percent mistakes of the movement Several mea sures showed clearly Maos intention One was his directive on stability and unity cited above plus a second on the priority of developing the national economy He also appointed Deng as de facto head of government replacing the ill Zhou in the fall of 1974 and aimed several pointed criticisms at the radicals in 19741975 The State Council was reorganized in January 1975 which further restored the machinery of government and placed it in a decisive position to implement the consolidation effort by mid1975 Mao had vested full authority in Deng that allowed for a much more comprehensive approach to rectifying Cultural Revolution problems than Zhou was able to implement in 1972 Yet throughout this time Deng was dependent on Maos continuing favor some thing indicated by the careful attention that some of Dengs key advisors paid to Maos worksand indeed by Dengs own study of those works at a time when he was deeply engaged in a wide range of policy issues Deng was able to dominate the Politburo in this period because he had access to Mao and had gained the Chairmans approval of his efforts This support left Deng all the more dumbfounded when in the fall of 1975 he suddenly learned of Maos discontent with his actions The central figure in turning Mao against Deng was not any member of the Gang of Four but rather his thirtyfouryearold nephew Mao Yuanxin A leading official in Liaoning one of the most radical provinces Mao Yuanxin complained to his uncle about various aspects of Dengs policies but the core complaint was that Deng funda mentally showed little support for goals of the Cultural Revolution Following a series of meetings mandated by Mao in November that criticized some of Dengs closest collaborators in the consolidation effort a campaign to beat back the right deviation ist wind to reverse correct verdicts of the Cultural Revolution in education unfolded and Deng was gradually stripped of authority despite three selfcriticisms Like Lin biao before him Dengs pleas for an audience with the Chairman fell on deaf ears The Death of Zhou enlai Deng had already been effectively removed from power before the death of Zhou enlai who had been premier of the PRC since its founding in January 1976 but the new leadership alignment was only confirmed at the start of February At that time to everyones surprise one of the relatively young and little known leaders elevated by Mao to the Politburo in 1973 Hua Guofeng was named acting premier and placed in charge of the party center meaning he had Maos support and confidence Now the campaign against right deviationist winds spread to other spheres ministry leaders were attacked and sidelined and rebel activities spread in the localities but as in 1974 despite significant economic and social disruption this was again a pale reflec tion of 19661968 with Mao advocating keeping the movement under party control and Hua managing to curb the more threatening developments m a o z e d o n G i n P o w e r 109 It was against this background in early April 1976 that an incident occurred that reflected the volatile political situation see box 34 Hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens took the occasion of the annual festival to pay respects to deceased ancestors to gather in Tiananmen Square for a remarkable and spontaneous demon stration of their affection for the recently departed Zhou enlai The Premier had a Box 34 the tiananmen incident 1976 The death of Premier Zhou enlai on January 8 1976 produced genuine grief within the chinese population of all chinese leaders Zhou had the image of a caring figure con cerned with the wellbeing of the people an image enhanced by his perceived modera tion since the outbreak of the cultural Revolution If Mao was god Zhou was the peoples friend Although Zhou received official honors following his passing the tribute in no way matched popular feelings Moreover mourning activities were restricted the mourning period was curtailed and the media shifted its emphasis to attacking right deviationist winds code words for the policies of Zhou and Deng xiaoping While the Gang of Four was prominent in these measures Mao was responsible for the relative denigration of the Premier Mao declined to attend any memorial events despite appeals from top leaders denied Zhou the accolade of great Marxist and as a result inhibited inclinations within the political elite to expand praise of the dead Premier Apart from his longstanding low opinion of Zhous politicalideological merits and jeal ousy over the Premiers high domestic and international reputation Mao believed Zhou never truly supported the cultural Revolution and that the push for mourning activities represented disapproval of the movement over the next two and a half months resentment simmered over Zhous treatment resentment amplified by the upsurge of antirightism which was also perceived as involving esoteric attacks on the Premier In late March a series of demonstrations that featured attacks on the Politburo radicals took place in Nanjing News of this develop ment reached beijing and fed into the underlying pressure that had been growing since midMarch with the approach on April 4 of Qingming the festival for honoring the dead an occasion that allowed the public to express respect for Zhou and resentment over his treatment From April 1 to Qingming hundreds of thousands of people visited Tiananmen Square exceeding one million on the day itself Large numbers of wreaths honoring Zhou were brought to the Square and beyond that posters poems and impromptu speeches lauded the Premier but many attacked the radicals with some targeting the regime and Mao although not by name The Politburo was thus in a quandary facing the conflicting pressures of managing a volatile situation on the Square allowing appropriate homage to the Premier and pro tecting Maos prestige and the sanctity of his line Moreover as a consequence of Maos rapidly deteriorating health more key decisions were taken by the Politburo independent of Mao than was ever the case in previous crises The crucial decision pushed through by Jiang Qing following reports of how strongly she was being attacked by protestors was to remove the wreaths despite an informal understanding that they could stay for several days This occurred overnight following Qingming but as news of the removal spread on April 5 several tens of thousands of outraged people gathered on the Square With the situation deteriorating the Politburo turned to Mao for instructions As conveyed by his nephew Mao called for persuasion to get people to leave the Square but force if that failed In sharp contrast to Deng xiaopings solution to the second Tiananmen incident on June 4 1989 however this was to be nonlethal force fists and clubs and the actual violence on the night of April 5 was limited in scope duration and bodily harm 110 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a rather mythologized reputation as a truly honest and selfless leader who stood with the people The Tiananmen gathering turned into a protest that reflected the popular sentiment at the failure of the partystate to properly honor Zhou enlai following his death something for which Mao bore primary responsibility and the gathering also expressed deep undercurrents of dismay at the latest resurfacing of Cultural Revolution radicalism The Politburo was particularly distressed when they learned about thinly veiled criticisms of Mao himself that appeared in the poems and posters of the masses who had gathered at Tiananmen Square Due to a clumsy decision driven by Jiang Qing to remove the wreaths that honored Zhou people rebelled overturned a police vehicle and burned an official command post on the edge of the Square The Square was finally emptied with a brief spasm of violence but despite popular belief relatively few people were injured and no one died and by the end of the year most of those imprisoned had been released In retrospect the overall restraint of the authorities in the face of what was up to then the largest spontaneous mass protest in the history of the PRC is striking Moreover the degree of initiative taken by the Politburo in handling the situation was unusual as a result of Maos fragile health but even in this situation the leadership absolutely accepted his directives when conveyed by Mao Yuanxin Two significant consequences resulted from the Tiananmen Incident of April 1976 First Hua Guofeng was promoted to premier of the State Council the acting part of title was removed and the unprecedented position of CCP first vice chairman unambiguously becoming Maos successor thereby removing any lingering claims of worker rebel Wang Hongwen Second Deng Xiaoping was blamed for instigat ing what was labeled as a counterrevolutionary incident formally stripped of all his posts and placed under house arrest Yet as he did during the Cultural Revolution Mao again protected Deng shielding him from physical threat and stipulating the retention of his party membership Arguably the most telling aspect of the entire affair was the preoccupation of the leadership with sustaining Maos prestige within the party and among the people in general even as he lay in a coma a few months later and despite real fears that the radicals would somehow use the Chairmans leg acy to seize power after his death Maos Cultural Revolution remained sacrosanct even among the more moderate leaders until his death Such was the fealty owed to the founder of the regime Paradoxically during Maos last years the institutions of the partystate were grad ually strengthened but politics was overwhelmingly shaped by the interactions of a small number of leaders looking to an increasingly frail Mao Indeed the progress Deng made in developing the consolidation program in 1975 before he lost Maos favor was not based on gathering a range of institutional or interest group backing as is sometimes argued but on Maos indications of support for his efforts Despite their clear preferences and pressing circumstances the leaders of the central economic and planning bodies moved with ultra caution until receiving some sign from Mao Also the PLA not only went back to the barracks as was undoubtedly the militarys pref erence but when ordered by the Chairman in December 1973 to rotate to different regions with virtually no personal staff before facing sharp criticism over the following months regional commanders who had ruled their areas since 1967 meekly complied m a o z e d o n G i n P o w e r 111 The key power relationships at the Center were again determined by Maos prefer ences requirements and personal attitudes The Chairmans choice of the worker rebel Wang Hongwen as his successor following the demise of Lin biao was par ticularly odd based not on close knowledge of Wang but apparently because Wang fit Maos conception of a revolutionary successor a Cultural Revolution activist young and with a background combining worker peasant and soldier experiences It would be a choice that Mao came to regret in the cold hard light of actual perfor mance and Wang eventually lost his successor status to Hua Guofeng after Zhou enlais death in January 1976 Much more personal and reflecting fortyfive to fifty years of sustained personal interaction were Maos sharply different attitudes to Zhou enlai and Deng Xiaoping Zhou was never ousted by Mao and he was valued by the Chairman for his skills loyalty and utter reliability but Mao had long looked down on Zhous political and ideological credentials and arguably felt uneasy with Zhous approximate equality in age and party seniority Also in the last period of their lives Mao resented the high regard in which Zhou was held both domestically for his policy moderation and internationally where Zhou was widely hailed for his role in United StatesChina rapprochement Thus in 1973 Mao twice launched rhetorical attacks on Zhou for foreign policy errors that were at best exaggerated at worst bogus Most cruelly in NovemberDecember of that year Mao demanded intense Politburo criticism of the seriously ill Premier attacks that all leaders dutifully participated in Deng included In contrast although twice removed from office for alleged ideological mistakes the younger Deng had always been one of Maos favorites received his highest praise and was protected when out of power Maos behavior of being bad to Premier Zhou but nice to Deng Xiaoping was graphically reflected in late 1973 when Deng as required joined in the harsh criticism of the Premier When informed of this an excited Chairman happily exclaimed I knew he would speak and wanted Deng brought to him immediately26 An even more intense relationship concerned Mao and his wife Jiang Qing although they had not lived together for many years and she had limited access to him during this last period On the one hand Jiang Qing faithfully carried out the radical edge of Maos Cultural Revolution line In addition she was entwined in his personal prestige because of their relationship that dated back to Yanan On the other hand Jiang Qings abrasive personality and policy excesses undermined her effectiveness as a member of the central leadership causing the kind of disunity that Mao repeat edly railed against in these years There are also many indications of marital tensions between the two Thus a peculiar dynamic existed when criticizing the Gang of Four Maos barbs were overwhelmingly directed at his wife for matters of her personal style rather than her political orientation which he shared to a considerable extent She was strongly protected politically by Maoa condition of Dengs return to work in 1973 was that he would not oppose Jiang Qing even when the Chairmans own criticisms of Jiang Qing created an opportunity to attack her other leaders held back Clearly Jiangs special status as Maos wife shaped and distorted leadership politics In this setting of peculiar personal judgments shifting policy preferences and a basic incompatibility between trying to save the Cultural Revolution by correcting 112 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a its excesses while affirming the rebellious essence of the movement Mao left a seri ously weakened regime when he died on September 9 1976 The Chinese commu nist partystate he had founded was contending with a new upsurge of disruption a long list of ignored national needs mounting tensions among the masses and sharply divided leadership councils Nevertheless Mao had also left the elements that would quickly right the ship including a battered but still coherent cadre force that desired order and respected discipline Most crucial was that virtually by accident Mao had designated as his final if transient successor Hua Guofeng someone who both had the legitimate authority to act by virtue of the Chairmans selection and against many expectations was prepared to take the decisive action of arresting the Gang of Four in October 1976 a bold step that paved the way for the restoration of the preCultural Revolution political system see box 35 but the larger story of the dramatic and unexpected developments of the postMao period is a matter for the next chapter Box 35 the arrest of the GanG of four The bitter divisions between the radical Gang of Four and the moderate forces led by hua Guofeng in mid1976 deepened as the chairmans life slipped away following the Tiananmen incident To a large extent the regime was paralyzed with no one willing to challenge Maos antirightist political line the Gang pushed radical ideological themes but had limited impact on concrete policies the senior revolutionaries who had largely been relegated to the sidelines fretted about possible dangers to the country and them selves personally if the radicals seized power once Mao passed away but they essentially took no action while hua deflected radical initiatives without challenging the antirightist rhetoric The deep distrust and fear intensified further following the chairmans death in early September Among moderates including those like hua who held active posts and the old revolu tionaries who mostly lacked formal power there was a palpable fear that the Gang would indeed attempt to seize power with their administrative proposals ideological slogans and a couple of wrongly understood or imagined troop movements seen as evidence of pos sible planning for a coup In reality the radicals undertook no concrete planning for a coup either in the months before Maos death or throughout September The radicals essentially had no political strategy except to continue to push the cultural Revolution line seek to maintain a radicalized political environment and wait and see how hua as the designated successor would perform In truth this fit the larger pattern of the Gang of Fours political performance during Maos last years they never had a coherent strategy for power as their position was totally dependent on the chairmans inconstant blessing and there were suf ficient suspicions and animosities among the four to prevent a serious coordinated effort Nevertheless a possible power seizure was deeply feared by moderate leaders so they were faced with solving the Gang of Four problem even if there were no coup attempt hua realized there was a real question of how the system could function effi ciently if leadership councils were engaged in an ongoing bitter ideological dispute In the end it was hua Guofeng who decided the Gang had to be dealt with and played the decisive role throughout of the old revolutionaries Marshal Ye Jianying and vice Premier Li xiannian were brought into the planning by hua with Ye in particular playing a Mafialike consigliore role as key adviser and serving as a conduit to other elders on the sidelines more to reassure them that things were under control than to secure any active participation in measures to foil the radicals m a o z e d o n G i n P o w e r 113 MAo IN PoWeR AN ASSeSSMeNT In 1981 the CCP released a Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the Peoples Republic of China as the authori tative and still largely upheld assessment by the postMao leadership of the partys achievements and shortcomings since 1949 The resolution declared that Comrade Mao Zedong was a great proletarian revolutionary who made gross mistakes during the Cultural Revolution but on the whole his contributions far outweigh his mis takes even his mistakes during that chaotic period were allegedly those of a tragic figure who sought to advance the revolutionary cause but confused right and wrong and the people with the enemy27 Although this official assessment is grotesque given that Maos personal policy excesses cost anywhere from thirty to fifty million or more lives particularly as a result of the Great Leap Forward for which he was also assigned some blame when the statement is stripped of rhetoric and the need to make excuses for the founder of the regime in some respects it has a certain validity In particular the resolution presents a chronology not dissimilar from that provided in this chapter an initial period through 1956 of solid achievement in the regimes own terms the preCultural Revolution decade where notwithstanding some achievements serious leftist errors affected politics and the economy and Maos final decade of chaos and inad equate efforts to repair the damage What were the causes of the major turning points during the Maoist era and what do they tell us about Maos rule From early on in his career Mao was a visionary a strategic genius a realistic revo lutionary a nationalist and a dedicated Marxist From early days he also saw himself as a leader of great destiny and he was always acutely attentive to his personal power but it was power for great purposes Mao could also capture the popular and elite imagination whether for the universally approved standing up to foreign imperi alists and national unification or before everything went wrong the Great Leaps pursuit of unprecedented economic growth The issue became how to eliminate the radicals political influence and while the legal method of calling a central committee meeting to vote them off the Politburo was can vased it was considered too unpredictable given the stacking of the body with political unknowns at its last election in 1973 Instead the four were summarily arrested on the night of october 6 1976 There had been a coup but one implemented by hua Guofeng and his moderate associates not the radicals This outcome was enormously popular within the remaining leadership causing excited celebrations well into the night following the arrest and for weeks afterward It also gained broad popular support with the masses for once genuinely enthusiastic about a sudden change in leadership fortunes And it provided great support for huas temporary legitimacy as Maos successor While huas contribution was progressively obscured after 1981 in the official summary of his life upon his death in 2008 the ccP ultimately acknowledged that hua Guofeng had been the decisive leader in crushing the Gang of Four thus making possible the launching of the era of reform that led to chinas spectacular economic growth 114 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a For all his talent Maos successes before 1949 owed much to circumstances notably the Japanese invasion and incompetence of Chiang Kaisheks Nationalists He also built successfully on Marxist ideology and the organizational backbone of a Leninist party After 1949 Mao initially benefited from an already tested pro gram for statebuilding based on the Soviet model Maos great achievement was to enlarge upon these circumstances by developing broadbased party unity a form of quasicollective leadership allowing significant leadership discussion and a prag matic often cautious approach to policy Together this produced the unimaginable victory of 1949 and also sustained the partys further successes to the mid1950s Paradoxically the seeds of later disasters can be found in the victory of 1949 Most fundamentally Maos power while uncontested within the party as long as successes continued during the struggle for national power became unchallengeable upon coming to power and would remain so for rest of his life His emperorlike authority was unmistakable in the Gao Gang case and the handling of agricultural cooperativ ization even as he maintained the semblance of collective leadership In many senses leadership politics under the Chairman was like the highly personalistic court politics of imperial China that could be altered into more arbitrary forms at any time of the emperors choosing For much of the initial period up to 1956 Mao left alone certain areas notably the economy in which he recognized his limitations but his ability to intervene was clear In addition the fact of virtual nationwide success during the CCPs first period in power subtly diluted the need for pragmatism although this developed slowly given the Korean War and the residual threat from the Nationalists on Taiwan Without the threats of stronger enemies inside China by the early 1950s caution was less neces sary in the pursuit of ideologically prescribed social change and overly ambitious policies surfaced Moreover the accomplishments of these years created a sense of infinite optimism in Mao about the capacity to shape the national landscape some thing that by 1958 in the words of the CCPs official 1981 Resolution on Party History fed Maos smug and impatient arrogance as he launched the Great Leap Forward The Great Leap reflected a serious erosion of the factors that had underpinned Maos earlier successesa loss of pragmatism in demanding ever more impractical objectives personally taking over the economy despite his lack of understanding and creating so much political pressure and raising the stakes so high that no one dared say him nay This shift can be seen as a product of Maos ambition for Chinas rapid advance toward development and prosperity It was also a product of failure particu larly that of the Hundred Flowers Movement in 1957 from which Mao concluded that fulfilling his ambitions would require a new strategy The Hundred Flowers was also Maos first significant setback in two decades and the new strategy for development the Great Leap Forward held out the promise of escaping the shadow of that setback but the new strategy failed too and with even more terrible consequences The collapse of the Great Leap created a novel situation for Mao one in which he had no clear idea of what to do He relinquished daytoday control of the partystate but retained ultimate power while searching for explanations and scapegoats for what had gone wrong by the early 1960s Mao was increasingly focused on class struggle against enemies of his revolution and he began to worry that the revisionism he saw in the Soviet Union might be Chinas future Again he could not develop a coherent m a o z e d o n G i n P o w e r 115 response to this danger and approved various pragmatic proposals from his colleagues to repair the damage caused by the Great Leap He also upheld the fundamental prin ciple of party leadership and despite reservations about certain individuals left most of the Yanan roundtable leaders in placeuntil 1966 The Cultural Revolution was the result of a complex mix of policy dissatisfac tion paranoia and personal vindictiveness and a genuine desire to somehow rerevolutionize society that led Mao into totally uncharted waters The Great Leap though it had been a disaster was based on a program was carried out by the party organization and the established leadership and sought objectives that were at least comprehensible to the public None of this applied to the Cultural Revolution with the party dismantled as an institution leadership unity in ruins and an approach that did not simply lack pragmatism but barely had any coherent objectives beyond managing the chaos it had created Through all this Mao was prepared to accept enormous social economic and human costs in pursuit of a revolutionary purity he could hardly define even when he attempted in his last years to save the Cultural Revolution by correcting its shortcomings and intro ducing realistic policy objectives he refused to give up the implausible dream of a modernizing state that was authoritarian yet allowed rebellion against any signs of revisionism Moreover during the entire decade from the start of the Cultural Revolution until his death Mao broke with the principle of party seniority that had underpinned CCP rule instead introducing in idiosyncratic manner marginal figures like Wang Hongwen and Jiang Qing into the highest leading bodies a situation that could not outlast his life Indeed Maos actions during his final decade did not simply create havoc for the lives of the Chinese people they fundamentally attacked the interests of the vast majority of the communist party elite that had come to power with him in 1949 by doing this Mao created the conditions that would lead those members of that elite who survived him to thoroughly reject both the means and the ends of his Cultural Revolution even though they could not bring themselves to repudiate the Chairman himself While it is tempting to conclude with Lord Actons famous observation that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely Maos case is more com plex Although having many of the accoutrements and vices of an emperor and engag ing in personal vindictiveness even in his last decade Mao indicated however selec tively some personal remorse and protected individual old comrades none more significantly than Deng Xiaoping who would with some irony ultimately emerge as postMao Chinas dominant leader Maos sin was less corruption than hubris his belief that he was alone with the masses and had a special understanding of the needs of the revolution and the Chinese people No one and no costs should stand in the way of his pursuit of those visions and he could not accept responsibility when that pursuit led to disastrous consequences which in his view were ultimately someone elses fault Mao Zedong was only able to do this because of the absolute power he had accumulated through the combination of his record of revolutionary success the centralizing forces of the Leninist party organization that he built and the authoritarian strain in traditional Chinese political culture 116 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a In speaking of the mistakes of the Great Leap Forward the 1981 Resolution on the History of the CCP since 1949 said Although Comrade Mao Zedong must be held chiefly responsible we cannot lay the blame on him alone for all those errors In other words the entire party leadership let him do it More broadly we can conclude that Maos failures and their catastrophic consequences during the period of his rule were uniquely personal but they were also the result of the CCP regimes totalitarian essence NoTeS 1 At the time of his dismissal in 1959 Minister of Defense Peng Dehuai referred to Mao by noting that the first emperor of any dynasty was always severe and brilliant Peng Tehhuais Speech at the 8th Plenum of the 8th CCP Central Committee excerpts August 1959 in The Case of Peng Tehhuai 19591968 Kowloon Union Research Institute 1968 36 427 2 See Selected Works of Mao Tsetung vol 3 Peking Foreign Languages Press 1965 208210 3 Selected Works of Mao Tsetung vol 4 Peking Foreign Languages Press 1961 422 4 Eighth National Congress of the Communist Party of China vol 1 Documents Peking Foreign Languages Press 1956 7 5 Talk at expanded Central Committee Meeting January 1962 in Joint Publications Research Service no 52029 13 6 In the post1949 period Deng primarily performed civilian roles but he was regarded as a great military figure of the revolution who was only passed over as a marshal in 1955 because of his leading civilian functions Dengs military prestige would play a major role in his postMao authority as the partys paramount leader 7 Selected Works of Mao Tsetung vol 2 Peking Foreign Languages Press 1965 224 8 The only exception was PLA Marshal Chen Yi who served as foreign minister from 1958 to the Cultural Revolution 9 Selected Works of Mao Tsetung vol 5 Peking Foreign Languages Press 1977 9394 10 See Frederick C Teiwes and Warren Sun eds The Politics of Agricultural Cooperativization in China Mao Deng Zihui and the High Tide of 1955 Armonk NY M e Sharpe 1993 13 11 Selected Works of Mao Tsetung vol 5 395 12 On the Ten Major Relationships April 1956 in Selected Works of Mao Tsetung vol 5 284307 13 See Frederick C Teiwes with Warren Sun Chinas Road to Disaster Mao Central Politicians and Provincial Leaders in the Unfolding of the Great Leap Forward 19551959 Armonk NY M e Sharpe 1999 149 14 See Frederick C Teiwes Politics and Purges in China Rectification and the Decline of Party Norms 19501965 2nd ed Armonk NY M e Sharpe 1993 lviii 370371 15 See Teiwes Politics and Purges xxxvi and Roderick MacFarquhar The Origins of the Cultural Revolution 3 The Coming of the Cataclysm 196166 New York Columbia University Press 1997 157158 16 See Teiwes Politics and Purges 385 17 Main Documents of the First Session of the Third National Peoples Congress of the Peoples Republic of China Peking Foreign Languages Press 1965 15 m a o z e d o n G i n P o w e r 117 18 For a critical discussion of the appropriate periodization of the Cultural Revolution see Jonathan Unger The Cultural Revolution at the Grass Roots The China Journal 57 2007 113117 While the issue has been whether Cultural Revolution should apply to 19666869 or to the entire 19661976 decade as in official PRC usage three periods can be distinguished 1 19661968 when party control collapsed in the face of popular turmoil 2 19691971 which saw severe state repression in an effort to restore order and 3 19721976 when political trends alternated between moderate and radical phases but at all times with considerably less violence andor disruption compared to the preceding periods 19 See Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals Maos Last Revolution Cambridge belknap Press 2006 63 20 Stuart R Schram The Political Thought of Mao Tsetung rev ed New York Praeger Publishers 1969 55 21 For more on Jiang Qing see Ross Terrill Madame Mao The WhiteBoned Demon rev ed Stanford CA Stanford University Press 1999 22 See Frederick C Teiwes and Warren Sun The Tragedy of Lin Biao Riding the Tiger during the Cultural Revolution 19661971 London C Hurst Co 1996 76 23 See Teiwes and Sun The End of the Maoist Era 595 24 Teiwes and Sun The End of the Maoist Era 3 25 Teiwes and Sun The End of the Maoist Era 186 Here Mao rhetorically extended the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to the present but as we have seen the movement was over in mid1968 26 Teiwes and Sun The End of the Maoist Era 20 110 The statement concerning being bad to Zhou and good to Deng by Politburo member Li Xiannian was applied to the two ladies who served as Maos liaison to the leadership but clearly they were simply carrying out his wishes 27 Resolution on Questions in Party History Since 1949 Beijing Review 27 1981 29 23 The full text of the Resolution can be found online at httpwwwmarxistsorgsubject chinadocumentscpchistory01htm SUGGeSTeD ReADINGS bachman David M Bureaucracy Economy and Leadership in China The Institutional Origins of the Great Leap Forward New York Cambridge University Press 1991 Cheek Timothy ed The Cambridge Critical Introduction to Mao New York Cambridge University Press 2010 Domenach JeanLuc The Origins of the Great Leap Forward The Case of One Chinese Province boulder CO Westview Press 1995 esherick Joseph W Paul G Pickowicz and Andrew G Walder eds Chinas Cultural Revolution as History Stanford CA Stanford University Press 2006 Forster Keith Rebellion and Factionalism in a Chinese Province Zhejiang 19661976 Armonk NY Me Sharpe 1990 Gao Wenqian Zhou Enlai The Last Perfect Revolutionary New York Public Affairs 2010 Gao Yuan Born Red A Chronicle of the Cultural Revolution Stanford CA Stanford University Press 1987 Kraus Richard Curt The Cultural Revolution A Very Short Introduction New York Oxford University Press 2012 118 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Li Zhisui The Private Life of Chairman Mao The Memoirs of Maos Personal Physician London Chatto Windus 1994 Lubell Pamela The Chinese Communist Party and the Cultural Revolution The Case of the SixtyOne Renegades New York Palgrave 2002 MacFarquhar Roderick The Origins of the Cultural Revolution 3 vols New York Columbia University Press vol 1 Contradictions among the People 19561957 1974 vol 2 The Great Leap Forward 19581960 1983 vol 3 The Coming of the Cataclysm 19611966 1997 MacFarquhar Roderick Timothy Cheek and eugene Wu eds The Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao From the Hundred Flowers to the Great Leap Forward Cambridge MA Harvard Council on east Asian Studies 1989 MacFarquhar Roderick and Michael Schoenhals Maos Last Revolution Cambridge MA belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2006 Pantsov Alexander V with Steven I Levine Mao The Real Story New York Simon Schuster 2012 Perry elizabeth J and Li Xun Proletarian Power Shanghai in the Cultural Revolution boulder CO Westview Press 1997 Qiu Jin The Culture of Power The Lin Biao Incident in the Cultural Revolution Stanford CA Stanford University Press 1999 Short Philip Mao A Life New York Henry Holt 2000 Spence Jonathan Mao Zedong A Penguin Life New York Viking 1999 Teiwes Frederick C Politics at Maos Court Gao Gang and Party Factionalism in the Early 1950s Armonk NY M e Sharpe 1990 Teiwes Frederick C Politics and Purges in China Rectification and the Decline of Party Norms 19501965 2nd ed Armonk NY Me Sharpe 1993 Teiwes Frederick C and Warren Sun The End of the Maoist Era Chinese Politics during the Twilight of the Cultural Revolution 19721976 Armonk NY Me Sharpe 2007 Teiwes Frederick C and Warren Sun The Tragedy of Lin Biao Riding the Tiger during the Cultural Revolution 19661971 London C Hurst Co 1996 Teiwes Frederick C with Warren Sun Chinas Road to Disaster Mao Central Politicians and Provincial Leaders in the Unfolding of the Great Leap Forward 19551959 Armonk NY M e Sharpe 1999 Teiwes Frederick C with Warren Sun The Formation of the Maoist Leadership From the Return of Wang Ming to the Seventh Party Congress London Contemporary China Institute Research Notes and Studies 1994 Thaxton Ralph G Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China Maos Great Leap Forward Famine and the Origins of Righteous Resistance in Da Fo Village New York Cambridge University Press 2008 Walder Andrew G Fractured Rebellion The Beijing Red Guard Movement Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 2009 Yang Jisheng Tombstone The Great Chinese Famine 19581962 Translated by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian ed edward Friedman Guo Jian and Stacy Mosher New York Farrar Straus and Giroux 2012 4 The period of Chinese political history since 1976 rep resents Chinas return to its long quest for wealth and power In this period of reform China has picked up the pieces from the disastrous consequences of the Mao era and resumed a trajectory of development that had been abandoned in the early1950s China remains an authori tarian regime but it has become a more institutionalized and regularized one and one that no longer deserves the label totalitarian The Chinese Communist Party CCP remains committed to the preservation of its power but it has abandoned the aim of totally controlling and transforming Chinese society Yet it is easy to draw too sharp a distinction between the reform era and the prereform era Many things have changed in the reform era but many others have not Chinas official ideology retains its references to Mao Zedong Thought and Maos portrait remains ubiquitous in the countryon the currency in trinket shops and most notably over Tiananmen Square in beijing the large space that dominates the seat of government Party leadership remains the central and unchallengeable prin ciple of political life in the PRC And despite extensive privatization the party con tinues to view state ownership of strategic sectors of the economyairlines banks energy suppliers and even automobilesas essential Revolutionary mass mobiliza tion politics continues to be practiced by the CCP periodicallyfor example as in the post1999 crackdown on the Falun Gong religious group And most of all the cultural nationalism under Mao that characterized Chinas relations with the West and to a lesser extent with Japan remains central to Chinas foreign policy beyond these longitudinal comparisons with Chinas own history two sets of crosscountry comparisons are useful for understanding Chinas era of reform and Deng Xiaoping and His Successors 1976 to the Present b R Uce G I L Le Y 120 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a opening gaige kaifang that began under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping and con tinued with his successors The first is comparison with rapid industrialization in other Asian countries Japans Meijiera 18681912 period of wealthy country and strong arms fukokukyōhei is perhaps the earliest example of this An even more relevant parallel can be found with the post1949 Republic of China regime on Taiwan under the Nationalist Party see chapter 17 There an authoritarian state was trans formed through economic liberalization and rapid growth that eventually resulted in a political opening for democracy in the 1980s A similar economic and politi cal transformation occurred in South Korea From the perspective of culture east Asian economic success has been deeply rooted in the work ethic associated with the regions entrepreneurial spirit What was missing on the Chinese mainland before the reform era was an efficient stable and marketfriendly government to unleash that spirit There is today a great debate on how well Chinas experience fits with the developmental trajectories of other east Asian states including the links between modernization and democratization in Taiwan and Korea1 The second comparative perspective is with other communist and postcommunist states In eastern europe and the Soviet Union communist partystates began experimenting with decentralization market prices and expanded foreign trade in the 1950s and 1960s in response to the failures of highly centralized Stalinist economic policy but those changes did not save such regimes from collapse in the late 1980s and early 1990s after the threat of Soviet intervention against antiparty movements was lifted In some places such as Azerbaijan or Russia authoritari anism resurfaced after the collapse of communism often with strong nationalist dimensions From the perspective of comparative communism China is an impor tant case in which a communist party has successfully carried out and adapted to market reforms2 This success has in turn been a crucial factor in the survival of communist rule in the PRC at a time when democracy has spread throughout most other parts of the world Thus Chinas reform era fascinating in its own terms can be even more richly studied as a case of comparative east Asian development and comparative commu nist politics These comparative perspectives can be very helpful to understanding the dramatic divergence between contemporary Chinas rapid and radical economic transition and its stalled political transition toward democracy that lies at the heart of many of the most important challenges that the PRC faces today The oRIGINS oF The ReFoRM eRA At the time of Maos death in September 1976 the damaging effects of his rule were palpable in nearly every aspect of life in China Society was so weakened and frac tured by Maos repeated campaigns that the partystate remained de facto totalitar ian in spite of lessened repression in the early 1970s Government institutions had been damaged or suspended by the Cultural Revolution For example the National Peoples Congress had not met in full since 1964 The economy was literally stagnant economic growth had barely kept pace with population growth for much of the Mao era despite a brief recovery in the early 1960s An estimated 74 percent of Chinas d e n G x i a o P i n G a n d h i s s u c c e s s o r s 121 population lived in poverty in 1976 beijings streets were nearly as empty as those of modernday Pyongyang North Koreas capital The arrest of the Gang of Four orchestrated by Hua Guofeng and his political allies in October 1976 made the reform era possible by removing from power the radi cal leaders who advocated most forcefully for a strict adherence to Maoist policies In the two years between then and the landmark meeting of the party leadership in December 1978 the Third Plenum when Deng Xiaopings newly consolidated power was clearly on display and the first road map of economic reform was laid out there were in retrospect many signs of things to come In 19771978 some brave local cadres in Anhui and Sichuan provinces boldly and illegally divided the communal land among private households and contracted with them for output quotas to be turned over to the collective letting them keep or even sell anything produced above the quota These practices were condoned by the pro vincial leadership and tolerated by the central authorities though decollectivization wouldnt become official policy until the early 1980s There were also some telling signs of liberalization in culture and education in 1977 A ban on the works of beethoven was lifted to mark the 150th anniversary of the composers death allowing the Central Symphony Orchestra to perform his works for the first time since 1959 University entrance examinations were held for the first time since 1965 In October 1977 the first example of a genre of writing that would come to be known as wound literature which dealt with the sufferings under Mao appeared in the official periodical Peoples Literature Yugoslavian president and communist party leader Josip Tito visited beijing in a sign of the early postMao leaderships inter est in Titos decentralized type of market socialism that had led Yugoslavia to be excommunicated by the world communist camp by Moscow in 1948 and Tito to be denounced by beijing as a traitor to MarxismLeninism Shortly after Titos visit the influential Guangming Daily newspaper ran an editorial arguing that workers should be paid bonuses for higher output or better work while a meeting of provincial agri culture leaders made similar arguments for rural labor The key event that had profound and lasting consequences for China was the political resurrection of Deng Xiaoping see Table 41 who had been purged just the previous spring by Mao for his alleged role in the April 1976 Tiananmen Incident see chapter 3 Deng resumed his posts as PRC vice premier and CCP vice chair in mid1977 as a part of a deal brokered between the partys two ideological factions the whateverists who were loyal to whatever policy decisions Mao made and what ever instructions he gave and the pragmatists who argued that practice is the sole criterion of truth when formulating policies3 Party chairman Hua Guofeng as Maos chosen successor was affiliated with the whateverist faction although he tended to emphasize the more moderate form of Maoism Dengs return to power gave the pragmatist faction led by Long March veteran and senior economic planner Chen Yun the chance to press its case without fear of retributionasDeng was known to sympathize with that group Throughout 1978 the two factions engaged in arcane debates about topics such as rural labor management and commune accounting policies While both sides agreed with Hua Guofengs suggestion to make economic development rather than class struggle the primary task of the party they differed on how to go about it borrowing 122 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a TAbLe 41 Top Leaders of china from 1949 to 1976 Name BirthDeath Key Titles and Dates Comments Hua Guofeng 19212008 CCP Chairman 19761981 PRC Premier 19761980 Central Military Commission Chairman 19761981 Maos designated successor Hua was instrumental in the arrest of the Gang of Four unintention ally paving the way for the rise of reformers led by Deng Xiaoping Generally supportive of economic reforms in 19771978 he was pushed aside by Deng and Chen Yun and was removed from key posts in 19801981 Out of respect for Mao Hua was still givena seat on the CCPs Central Committee until 2002 See Table 31 Deng Xiaoping 19041997 CCP Vice Chairman 19771982 PRC Vice Premier 19771980 Central Military Commission Chairman 19811989 Long March veteran who over threw the weak Hua Guofeng and launched Chinas reform movement Core of the Second Generation after Mao Deng is widely revered in China for his role in steering economic reforms but his legacy is clouded by his role in ordering the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre See Table 31 Chen Yun 19051995 CCP Vice Chairman 19561969 19771982 PRC Vice Premier 1949 1966 19791980 Long March veteran who became one of Chinas leading economic planners after 1949 Regarded as an economic conservative who often tried to slow down Deng Xiaopings reform he nonethe less played a very important role in launching the reform era in the early 1980s See Table 31 Hu Yaobang 19151989 CCP Chairman 19811982 CCP General Secretary 19821987 Protégé of Deng Xiaoping Played a key role in rehabilitating Cultural Revolution victims promoting political reforms and arguing for liberal policies in Tibet His death sparked the 1989 Tiananmen Square movement Officially reha bilitated in 2005 Zhao Ziyang 19192005 PRC Premier 19801987 CCP General Secretary 19871989 Protégé of Deng Xiaoping Pioneer of marketoriented economic reforms and proponent of democ ratizing political reforms Purged after the beijing Massacre in June 1989 Zhao became even more prodemocratic in his long period under house arrest Continued d e n G x i a o P i n G a n d h i s s u c c e s s o r s 123 from the experiences of reform communism in eastern europe Chen Yuns faction worked hard to discredit the blind adherence to Maos Stalinist economic policies Drawing upon a thirtyyear repertoire of policies ideological concepts and institu tions that had been used to limit the ravages of Mao Chen effectively isolated and discredited Huas hopes of continuing even a more rational version of Maos eco nomic policies It was Chen who revived the Sichuanese adage first used by Deng to justify modest market reforms in rural areas in 1962 that got him into political trouble with Mao It doesnt matter whether a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice clearly implying that economic policies should be judged only on whether they increased production not on whether they conformed to some abstract ideological litmus test At a monthlong CCP Central Work Meeting in NovemberDecember 1978 Chen warned that commune party secretaries will lead the peasants into the cities demanding food if the party did not reform rural policies to boost production Deng who missed the opening of the conference while on a state visit to Southeast Asia returned to find that a consensus had developed between the pragmatists and the whateverists on the need for management reform international opening and abiding by objective meaning marketbased economic laws The Third Plenum of the CCP Central Committee in December was a final turning point that allowed a fundamental departure from the economic and other policies of the Cultural Revolution4 The emphasis on economic development was reiterated while rural communes were given greater autonomy and the right to experiment with Name BirthDeath Key Titles and Dates Comments Jiang Zemin b 1926 CCP General Secretary 19892002 PRC President 19932003 Central Military Commission Chairman19892004 Jiang oversaw Chinas recovery from Tiananmen by promoting economic reforms and rebuilding ties to the United States Core of the Third Generation Jiang was the first PRC leader to step down voluntarily and peacefully when he handed over power to Hu Jintao in 2002 Hu Jintao b 1942 CCP General Secretary 20022012 PRC President 20032013 Central Military Commission Chairman 20042012 Hu sought to address issues of social justice redistribution and welfare but without major politi cal reforms those efforts faced stiff opposition Core of the Fourth Generation Hu displayed little personal charisma Xi Jinping b 1953 CCP General Secretary 2012 PRC President 2013 Central Military Commission Chairman 2012 Xi is an economic reformer and competent administrator who is widely liked in the places he has served Core of the Fifth GenerationXi has attempted to overcome the sclerosis of Chinas governance system 124 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a incentive pay Political institutions were to be rebuilt Mass movements were to be abandoned Many prominent victims of Maoism were to be rehabilitated and the April 1976 Tiananmen Incident was declared patriotic rather than counterrevolutionary The pragmatists were helped by an eruption in late 1978 of political posters along a 200meter stretch of wall on Changan boulevard west of Tiananmen Square which came to be known as Democracy Wall where the mistakes of Mao and the dangers of the whateverist faction were widely debated by Chinese intellectualsOnce the posters started criticizing Deng and questioning his commitment to political reform he ordered the suppression of Democracy Wall in early 1979 and the arrest of many of the activists One of the most articulate activists Wei Jingsheng who had written an essay entitledThe Fifth Modernization that called for democracy to be added to the officially proclaimed Four Modernizations in agriculture industry science and technology and national defense5 was imprisoned for a total of eighteen years before being allowed to go to the United States for medical treatment in 1997 What ultimately tipped the balance in favor of reform was Chen Yuns effective critique in 1979 of Hua Guofengs overly ambitious tenyear plan 19761985 of eco nomic modernization which already showed signs in 19781979 of being a repeat of the Great Leap mentality of setting unreasonably high production targets Under pressure to produce more oil for instance a newly bought Japanese oil rig sank while being hastily towed into position in Chinas bohai sea in November 1979 with a loss of seventytwo lives Chens counterproposal for readjustment reform correction and improvement of the economy had sounded a decisively cautious and pragmatic tone After this Hua was gradually eased out of power first being removed from the position of PRC premier in 1980 and then as party chairman in 1981 Out of respect for Maos legacy Huanow referred to simply as Comrade Hua rather than as wise leader Chairman Huaretained a seat on the Central Committee until 2002 After all Hua had supported the arrest of the Gang of Four and endorsed the shift to eco nomic developmentaspects of his life officially recognized when he died in 2008 With his removal the balance of power in the top party organizations came to rest firmly in the hands of Deng Xiaoping Chen Yun and others strongly committed to abandoning Maoist economics The origins of the economic reforms can largely be credited to deft maneuvering of Chen Yun to discredit Hua Guofengs reform Maoism While the sharptongued Deng would be officially proclaimed the architect of economic reforms and while his imprimatur was essential for the reforms to take root the doughty Chen Yun arguably has as great a claim to being the actual founder of the PRCs reform era6 PoLITIcAL AND ecoNoMIc ReFoRM beGIN Conventional views that China reformed its economy first and its political system second are mistaken Indeed in many ways political changes preceded and were the necessary condition for important economic ones The partys repudiation of class struggle as its primary objective in late 1978 opened the door for many important political changes During the 1980s nearly 5 million people wrongfully accused and persecuted since the founding of the PRC including 16 million intellectuals were d e n G x i a o P i n G a n d h i s s u c c e s s o r s 125 politically exonerated A law passed in 1979 expanded the direct popular election of peoples congress delegates from the township to the county level Voting was rein stituted within the party and cadres were allowed to see the text of policies before being asked to approve them Village government also became more accountable with the passage in 1987 of a law allowing villages to elect their own leaders who would enjoy wide autonomy in village affairs Within a decade most of the countrys nearly one million villages would elect their own leaders see chapter 9 The term political reform was formally introduced into the modern lexi con of the PRC in a speech given by Deng in 1980 Deng slammed bureaucracy overconcentration of power patriarchal methods life tenure in leading posts and privileges of various kinds within the party leadership As discussed in chapter 3 the repudiation of the Maoist era was made most clear with the passage in 1981 of a resolution on the mistakes made by Mao and the party since the leftward turn of 1957a much kinder but similar rebuke to Khrushchevs denunciation of Stalin in 1956 It accused the chairman of smugness impatience bad judgment and being out of touch although it said his merits exceeded his faults earlier drafts had been more scathing but Deng had to tread carefully on the PRCs founder and its founding mythology As part of efforts to reinvigorate the ranks of the CCP between 1982 and 1992 Deng set up a Central Advisory Commission as an organization with little power to ease elderly senior leaders into retirement He also launched a program of fasttracking promising young cadres who had college educations and good administrative skills Among the beneficiaries of this program was an obscure foreign trade official named Jiang Zemin who was promoted to vice minister of electronic industry and member ship on the Central Committee in 1982 another was an engineer working in the hin terlands Hu Jintao who was made second secretary of the Communist Youth League and an alternate nonvoting member of the Central Committee the same year These two would go on to become successors to Deng as the top leaders of China Courts were revived as semiindependent bodies although party committees continued to make the final decision on major cases and the party retained its control of judicial appointments7 The role of the legal system in the PRC political system was boosted with the passage in 1989 of the Administrative Litigation Law which for the first time allowed citizens to sue the government Deng also cut the ranks of the Peoples Liberation Army from four million to three million The PLA was still the largest standing army in the world but henceforth it would be a professional military clearly under civilian authority and with only mar ginal participation in politics with the exception of policy toward Taiwan At the top level military members of the Politburo fell from 57 percent in 1977 to 10 percent by 1992 With the political obstacles cleared China entered upon a new era of reform of the economy and opening to the world in the early 1980s see chapter 8 In essence this boiled down to increasing the role of market forces while reducing government planning in the economy and inserting China more fully in the global economy Ideologically it was conceived of not as an abandonment of socialism but as a bet ter pathway toward achieving it The party declared that China was in the primary stage of socialism see chapter 5 under which a flourishing capitalist economy was 126 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a a prerequisite for a later move to total state ownership Mao was said to have tried to skip or compress this inevitable stage of historical development by jumping too quickly to the collectivization of agriculture and the nationalization of industry in the early to mid1950s Formally party leadership in the 1980s was under two relatively young protégés of Deng Xiaoping Zhao Ziyang who had overseen marketoriented rural experiments as party leader of Dengs native Sichuan province replaced Hua Guofeng as premier of the State Council in 1980 Hu Yaobang who had been head of the Communist Youth League prior to the Cultural Revolution succeeded Hua Guofeng as the chair man of the CCP with the title of the party leader being changed shortly thereafter to general secretary in order to disassociate the position from Chairman Maos abuses of power but Deng was clearly the power behind the throne or as he was called Chinas paramount leader The one top formal position that he did keep for himself until November1989 was chair of the Central Military Commission CMC which made him the commanderinchief of Chinas armed forces China was fortunate in seeking to unravel a planned command economy that had fewer political and bureaucratic supporters than in the Soviet Union and other com munist states A full 69 percent of Chinas labor force in 1978 was engaged in agri culture versus just 22 percent of the Soviet Unions labor force in 1975 when party leaders there were attempting unsuccessfully to loosen the powers and perquisites of industrial bureaucrats Chinese farmers hated Sovietstyle collective agriculture8 This made it easy to rapidly introduce household contracting in place of communes which were virtually eliminated by the end of 1982 One of the key innovations in this period was the spread of township and village enterprisesrural factories owned and operated by local governments that competed headon in the opening market economy with inefficient state factories and provided employment for excess rural labor The 1980s was the golden era for Chinas rural economy Per capita rural incomes increased nearly sixfold between 1980 and 1990 The success of Chinas economic reforms are often credited to Dengs policy of gradualism or stepping across the river one stone at a time in contrast to the Soviet big bang approach to economic reform In fact rural reforms were the first of many instances in which Chinas economic reforms were the result of a bold big bang rather than patient gradualism Urban and industrial reforms were a tougher nut to crackas the leaders of eastern europes disappointing attempts at market socialism had discovered The CCP leadership was particularly wary of a repeat of the worker protests in Poland in 1980 that had led to the resignation of the head of the Polish communist party and to the recognition of a new independent workers movement Solidarity which would ultimately play a major role in the collapse of Polands communist partystate in 1989 A CCP decision of 1984 provided for more autonomy for state enterprises in the areas of production marketing hiring and firing and supplies while endorsing profitbased instead of fixed taxation from the enterprises Smallscale private enter prise meanwhile was given a formal blessing Chinas strategy with stateowned enterprisesSOEs was to gradually let the small and mediumsized ones sink or swimno big bang herehoping that laidoff or underpaid workers would find jobs in a growing private sector The stateowned sectors share of national industrial d e n G x i a o P i n G a n d h i s s u c c e s s o r s 127 output fell from 78 percent in 1978 to 55 percent by 1990 bringing China to the brink of an era in which the state sector would be an archipelago of strategically controlled large state enterprises in a sea of private business Annual GDP growth between 1978 and 1988 averaged 10 percent twice the average of the previous two decades and GDP per capita doubled a remarkable feat for any country but this amazing economic progress and the social and cultural liberaliza tion that came along with it also prompted some sharp political divisions within the party leadership First Dengs choice for party general secretary Hu Yaobang was ousted in 1986 by his mentor for being a little too soft on political reform see below He was replaced by Zhao Ziyang Dengs protégé premier while the premiership passed to Li Peng the adopted son of the late Premier Zhou enlai who held an ultracautious attitude toward economic and political reforms Also by the late 1980s Chen Yun had himself became an economic conservative arguing for caution in proceeding with the next steps of reform against those including Deng who advocated faster liberalization more decentralization of economic decisionmaking and accelerated inflows of for eign investment It is ironic that one of the early heroes of postMao economic reform would later become a hindrance to further change Chen allied with Li Peng sought to deal with three ills of marketization that were rapidly emerging as political prob lems inflation corruption and unemployment After decades of virtually statefixed prices for all commodities Chinas consumer prices began creeping upwards as price reforms took hold and as the central gov ernment facing a declining tax base from state enterprises printed more money to finance its investments Urban consumer prices rose by 83 percent in the five years from 1985 to 1989 This was a new experience for many Chinese since there had been little to no inflation during the Mao years Panic buying and food shortages ensued Corruption meanwhile which had been widespread but petty and mostly invisible in the Mao era became more lucrative and more visible especially among the party elite with the market reforms Dengs own son Deng Pufang established the Kanghua Development Company whose Hong Kong subsidiary was memorably called the bring Fast Company It signed lucrative joint ventures with foreign firms and prop erty deals amidst widespread allegations of corruption As for unemployment as stateowned enterprise reforms began to take hold workers lost their jobs in growing numbersespecially in the industrial heartland of the three Northeastern provinces that had been industrialized under Japanese colonialism Chinese officials struggled to invent euphemisms to describe the plight of laidoff workersawaiting assignment daiye was the most popular Unemployment insurance was launched in 1985 but it was a pittance compared to the perquisites of the iron rice bowl of state socialism which included cradleto grave benefits as well as guaranteed lifetime employment The CCPs main news paper Peoples Daily proclaimed in 1988 that unemployment was normal and beneficial during the primary stage of socialism noting that tens of millions of state employees had spent their work days getting paid for playing poker or chess watching television or racing on bicycles Dengs reforms were clearly cracking the iron rice bowl The question was how the party would deal with the political conse quences of these dramatic changes 128 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a The LIMITS oF PoLITIcAL ReFoRM From the very beginning Deng was careful to make clear that there were limits to political reform In response to the 1979 Democracy Wall protests Deng had articu lated the socalled Four Cardinal Principles see chapter 5 These entailed a com mitment to socialism to the dictatorship of the proletariat to CCP leadership and to MarxismLeninismMao Zedong Thought In other words the CCP was determined to remain in charge What kind of democracy do the Chinese people need today It can only be socialist democracy peoples democracy not bourgeois democracy indi vidualist democracy Deng said9 This meant that there was would be a more codified rulesbased dictatorship A new constitution was promulgated in 1982 that formally reinstated the notions of equality before the law along with basic rights including religious belief speech press assembly and demonstration but it also introduced several reversals Rights were contingent on a duty to uphold the the security honor and interests of the motherland The rights to free movement and to strike were not included as they had been in earlier PRC constitutions and the radically participatory Four Big Rights speaking out freely airing views fully holding great debates and writing bigcharacter postersthat were part of the 1975 Cultural Revolution constitution were removed Yet the economic reforms political reforms and international opening launched under Deng Xiaopings leadership in the 1980s emboldened Chinese society Graphic novels rock music and action films flooded into the hands of consumers The father of Chinese rock and roll Cui Jian became the balladeer of this generation of youth with his 1986 song Nothing to My Name Yi Wu Suo You which would inspire youth with its antimaterialistic message Increased openness to the outside world along with looser controls on domestic publications gave birth to a generation of youth enamored with the West and with studying abroad between 1978 and 2007 more than one million Chinese students would go abroad to study only 30 percent of whom ever returned10 Alongside the growth of pop culture and consumerism were some serious critiques of the partystate especially in the realm of literature Author bai Huas 1981 screen play Unrequited Love Ku lian was a scathing portrayal of how intellectuals and art ists had been treated by the CCP in one scene the daughter of an artist who like bai Hua was persecuted during the AntiRightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution asks her father Dad you love our country but does this country love you Such pointed questions were too much for Deng and other top party leaders bai Hua and his screenplay were denounced and campaigns were launched first against the spiritual pollution 19831984 caused by certain mostly foreign influences and then against bourgeois liberalization 19861987 which was a way of say ing that some people had taken the reforms too far and crossed into the forbidden bourgeois zone of challenging the principle of party leadership It seemed as if the CCP had once again invoked the strict definition of socialist art that Mao had first articulated at Yanan in 1942 see chapter 11 The antibourgeois liberalization campaign had a particularly important impact on the course of Chinese politics Deng believed that party General Secretary Hu Yaobang had not dealt firmly enough with the dissent especially in handling student d e n G x i a o P i n G a n d h i s s u c c e s s o r s 129 demonstrations for faster political reform in late 1986 to early 1987 and ousted him although Hu Yaobang remained a member of the Politburo Standing Committee Deng chose Zhao Ziyang the premier to take over as party general secretary in January 1987 Zhao had been given much of the credit for the successful implementa tion of the economic reforms and up to that point had toed the correct political line even chiming in loudly in denouncing the dangers of bourgeois liberalization However Zhaos interest in political reforms went far beyond what Deng envisaged Working through a number of new think tanks in beijing universities and research institutes and more directly through an official Central Research and Discussion Group on Political Reform Zhao gave his blessing to studies of bold political changes Thus despite the ouster of Hu Chinas citizens continued to consider political liber alization and the critique of CCP autocracy as valid topics for public discussion As inflation soared in late 1988 due to leadership paralysis over price reforms the stage was set for the biggest demonstration of citizen demands in postMao China The TIANANMeN MoveMeNT AND The beIJING MASSAcRe In the spring of 1989 intellectuals in China published three open letters calling for the release of political prisoners who had been jailed following the Democracy Wall movement This was the first time since 1986 that intellectuals and other activists had come forward with organized political demands The airing of the let ters helped to create a mood of free expression and party vulnerability a mood already rising as a result of the clear split in the leadership between reformers led by Zhao and hardliners led by Premier Li Peng What lit this tinderbox was the sudden death during a Politburo meeting of Hu Yaobang in April Within hours of the announcement of Hus death students from several beijing universities began to converge on Tiananmen Square with flower wreaths and poems of condolence just as students had done in April 1976 to commemorate death of Zhou enlai in January of that year In the following two months China was shaken by the largest mass protest against the state since 1949 The Tiananmen Movement spread to 341 of Chinas cities threequarters of the total and was joined by a hundred million people a third of the urban population at the time In beijing staff associations from the National Peoples Congress China Central Television and the Navy joined in with their own banners As the movement dragged on through the end of May 1989 the beijing Autonomous Workers Federation was established with the tacit support of the official AllChina Federation of Trade Unions About the only groups that did not take part in the 1989 protest were top CCP leaders and the peasants Zhao was tolerant of the movement commenting in internal meetings that it reflected reasonable demands for stronger anticorruption measures and faster democratization but party elders like Deng and his fellow Eight Immortals including Chen Yun who had fought in the civil war and been among the leading founders of the Peoples Republic were aghast at the challenge to party authority As the protests dragged on into late May party elders and hardliners like Premier Li 130 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Peng allied against Zhao now accused of the same ideological and political mistakes as Hu Yaobang The way was paved to implement the decision to end the demonstrations by force estimates of the number of civilians killed when PLA soldiers were brought into beijing to clear the streets of protestors on the night of June 3 and the day of June 4 1989 range from a few hundred to several thousand The exact toll is unknown since the Chinese authorities have never given an accounting Party rhetoric in the months following the massacre justifying the suppression of what was and still is called counterrevolutionary political turmoil was redolent of the Maoiststyle communism that China had supposedly left behind see box 4111 Box 41 why did the tiananmen movement fail Why did the Tiananmen protests of 1989 fail to overthrow the ruling communist Party in china as had similar movements in eastern europe Many answers have been offered one is that the movement did not intend to overthrow the party in the first place advo cating only tougher anticorruption measures better living standards for students and nonsystem threatening political reform Yet virtually every democracy movement starts in this way before the logic of its own protests against an authoritarian system leads in an unplanned and haphazard way to democracy chinas 1989 protests were no different and indeed party leaders in their own discussions appeared well aware of the democratic implications of the protests Another explanation is bad luck Unlike other postrevolutionary authoritarian states for example several of communist chinas founding fathers were still alive in the form of the eight Immortals of the ccP who took charge during the crisis had they already died off Zhao Ziyang might have retained power and been allowed to initiate a process of real democratization which he would later tell a friend was his intention Also the liberal chairman of the National Peoples congress Wan Li happened to be out of the country when the protests erupted making it easier for the eight Immortals to neutralize the parliaments sympathies with the protests Yet the protests also enjoyed a lot of good luck not least the international media coverage from journalists who arrived to cover a state visit by Mikhail Gorbachev in May and then stayed on to cover the protests Luck and contingency seem to have acted both for and against the protestors Some have argued that the protests leaders misplayed their hand To some the stu dent leaders were too extreme They openly humiliated Premier Li Peng during a tele vised meeting on May 18 for instance others ironically have argued that the student leaders were too deferential Three students kneeled in confucian obeisance to the state on the steps of the Great hall of the People to present a petition on April 22 for instance Students gathered in the center of Tiananmen Square on the fateful night of June 34 sang the communist anthem The Internationale others have said the students displayed too much disdain for the nascent worker movements that sought to join them confin ing them to security duties in the square and ignoring their livelihood issues in favor of political ones Similar arguments have been made about Zhao For some his tacit admission of a leadership split on the movement when expressing sympathy for its aims in a speech to Asian Development bank governors in beijing on May 4 was an imprudent move that rankled a party that might have been more tolerant otherwise To others Zhao was too timorous Unlike boris Yeltsin who faced down an attempted hardline backlash in 1991 by mounting tanks and standing with the protestors outside the Russian parliament Zhao simply bid a teary farewell to the students in Tiananmen Square on May 19 and then sheepishly went home to live out his life in silence d e n G x i a o P i n G a n d h i s s u c c e s s o r s 131 Zhao Ziyang was formally removed as general secretary and stripped of all his offi cial positions in late June He was placed under house arrest where he remained except for a few closely escorted excursions until his death in 2005 Outrage about the beijing Massacre was widespread but could only be obliquely expressed The official logo for the Asian Games in beijing in 1990 when looked at from the back was a bloodsplattered 64 the shorthand for the June 4 massacre while the words Down With Li Peng end Peoples Rage were embedded diagonally in a poem carried in the Peoples Daily in 1991 In that same year Cui Jian the rock star whose music had captured the discontented mood of Chinas youth in the years prior to the Tiananmen demonstrations and who had sung in the Square before the massacre wrote and performed an aching ballad called Piece of Red Cloth Yi Kuai Hong Bu a scathing critique of the communist party disguised as a love song which he usually sang blindfolded by a red bandanna The fate of Zhao Ziyang and the Tiananmen Movement continue to be unhealed wounds and whatever the regime says about the protestors they continue to be remembered with sympathy both inside and outside the party In a sign that the party line on what happened in the spring of 1989 might be shifting a bit in January 2005 the New China News Agency printed a brief notice of Zhao Ziyangs death referring to him as Comrade Zhaothe first official mention of him since 1989 This was followed by a longer piece about his funeral noting that he had made useful Given that such arguments seem to work both ways more recent analysis has focused on structural explanations only a decade into postMao reforms chinas society remained relatively poor and disorganized while the state retained a hard edge of Leninist intoler ance and military might not to mention organizational effectiveness Moreover china remained largely immune to the sorts of foreign pressures that for instance had encour aged democratization in Taiwan and South Korea and it lacked the proximity to demo cratic neighbors that provided great support for the democracy movements in eastern europe In this view the cards were stacked heavily against the movements success It would have taken nearly miraculous luck and leadership to overcome those obstacles In the event Zhao and the protestors of 1989 were not up to that task Yet still another answer can be offered the Tiananmen protests did not entirely fail Tiananmen was followed by even faster economic and social liberalization and continued incremental political changes The scars of 1989 inside the party led to a new search for popular support especially in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 When alleged transcripts of the leadership were published as The Tiananmen Papers in 2001 it caused a sensation in china a reminder of the lingering widespread sympathies with the movement The fact that the memoirs of Deng Li Peng and the beijing munici pal party secretary at the time chen xitong all seek to distance themselves from the bloodshed and show their sympathy with the patriotic students reflects how far the movement shifted debate even inside the party elite As acclaimed chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke who was graduating from high school in 1989 told The New Yorker magazine in 2009 Although it failed it didnt really fail because it took freedom and democracy indi vidualism individual rights all these concepts and disseminated them to many people including me Tiananmen was a protest against a regime that was widely regarded as unresponsive and illegitimate The ccP took those lessons to heart after 1989 seeking to avoid the fate of the east european and Soviet communist parties by initiating reforms that would reestablish its legitimacy and avert a repeat movement So far it has succeeded 132 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a contributions to the party and the people while also adding that he had com mitted serious mistakes during the political turbulence of 198912 In November 2005 the ninetieth anniversary of Hu Yaobangs birth was officially marked by the CCP and his mausoleum in China Youth League City Gongqingcheng in Jiangxi province was spruced up but every year as June 4 approaches the authorities take extra precautions to ensure that no public commemorations of the Tiananmen Movement take place ecoNoMIc ReFoRM AFTeR TIANANMeN The person that Deng tapped to fill the post of party general secretary Jiang Zemin was a bona fide economic reformer but unlike Hu or Zhao without politically liberal instincts After being promoted to the fringes of the central leadership during Dengs youth drive in the early 1980s Jiang went on to become mayor and then party chief of Shanghai where he was credited with doing a good job on both the economic and political front During both the 1986 and 1989 student protests he had deployed massive but nonviolent police and military force to keep demonstrators in the city in check and had engaged the students in dialogue In 1989 he shuttered the citys leading liberal newspaper the World Economic Herald winning accolades in beijing Plucked suddenly from his perch in Shanghai in June 1989 to take on the top formal position in the party hierarchy Jiang said he felt like he was standing at the brink of a large precipice13 Deng hoped that the Tiananmen crackdown would not slow down economic reforms but the purge of Zhao Ziyang and those said to sympathize with himplus the sudden collapse of communist regimes in europe in the 19891991 periodled to the reascendance of hardliners under Premier Li Peng known abroad as the butcher of beijing since he was seen as taking a lead in the decision to crush the Tiananmen protests an image he sought to correct by having his memoirs of the event published abroad in 2010 after failing to win approval for their publication in China In 1989 1990 they engineered a wrenching reversal of the trend of economic reform through a combination of austerity tightening up on wages and prices as well as on invest ment and credit funds for business expansion recentralization all investment deci sions reverted back to the provincial or central level and attempts to rebuild state enterprises economic growth slowed to 4 percent in both years Coupled with rising bankruptcies for townshipvillage and private enterprises and resurgent unemployment the hardliners faced mounting criticism from other lead ers and grumbling from below In particular provincial and local leaders complained mightily about the slowdown most notably in the editorial pages of the Shanghai party committees Liberation Daily newspaper which enjoyed the protection of Jiang They were also supported by reformminded retired party elders in beijing Growth rebounded to 9 percent in 1991 as central controls loosened but the debate within the top leadership about how far to go with reviving the reform effort remained unsettled Deng became even more convinced that China had to press ahead with reform and opening by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the stunning success of the east Asian Miracle economies of Hong Kong Taiwan South Korea and d e n G x i a o P i n G a n d h i s s u c c e s s o r s 133 Singapore What finally turned the tables was his dramatic Southern Inspection Tour Nanxun in early 1992 in which he decamped from beijing for central and southern China where the countrys most notable economic progress had taken place14 During his tour he gave a series of speeches with ringing endorsements of the bold and successful economic reforms in the areas he visited saying bluntly Development is the absolute principle and warning the party of the danger of being overcautious in promoting reform Like a boat sailing against the cur rent he told his audience we must forge ahead or be swept downstream15 He also conveyed a barely concealed threat that those who did not support reforms should quit Party conservatives particularly Premier Li Peng fearing they would be deposed by Deng began frantically issuing documents in support of reform The signal given to provincial and local leaders was invest invest invest Growth and foreign investment surged At the national congress held in October 1992 the party formally committed itself to building a socialist market economy replacing the socialist planned com modity economy that had been touted as the official aim of economic reform since 1984a slight change in wording with momentous significance for the economic miracle to come because of the use of the word market Like his speech to the December 1978 plenum launching the reform era Dengs Southern Inspection Tour was more the culmination than the beginning of a policy battle but the very public imprimatur of his remarks had a galvanizing effect on eco nomic actors throughout the country The 1990s became the boom years for Chinas economy and the economic proceeds allowed party leaders still steeped in Stalinist traditions to launch a series of gargantuan new projects like the Shanghai Pudong eco nomic zone the Three Gorges Dam along the Yangtze River and the QinghaiTibet Railway The state sectors share of urban employment plummeted from 60 percent in 1990 to 35 percent by the year 2000 as hurried privatizations were arranged In signs of just how far reform and opening up went in the 1990s stock exchangesthe epitome of a market economywere established A new social group of shareholders gumin was created grew rapidly and even rioted on several occasions in the 1990s to protest what they saw as corruption in the selling of shares and other aspects of management of the stock exchange In 1992 official diplomatic relations were estab lished with booming capitalist South Korea Chinas sworn enemy from the Korean War South Korea quickly became one of the PRCs major trading partners Provincial governments enjoyed a degree of autonomy unprecedented in the his tory of the PRC Many provincial peoples congresses in 1993 rejected governor can didates proposed by the central government Vice Premier Zhu Rongji complained that he lost 15 pounds hammering out a tax reform package with the provinces in 1994 China also tied its fate to the future global trading system by joining the World Trade Organization in 2001 after fifteen years of negotiations as a result the PRC agreed to open its economy even more widely to international business It also began a rapid selloff of public housing in urban areasanother example of big bang tac tics in Chinas economic reforms As has historically been the case during the takeoff stage of a countrys eco nomic modernization including the industrial revolutions in europe and the United States Chinas 1990s boom created losers as well as winners As the initial gains of 134 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a decollectivization wore off agricultural incomes stagnated Antitax riots by ten thou sand farmers in Sichuans Renshou county in 1993 were the first indicator of a malaise spreading through the countryside Unemployment among former state sector work ers rose dramaticallyWestern economists estimated that Chinas urban unemploy ment rate was 115 percent in 2000 compared to the official rate of 3 percent meaning that about thirty million unemployed people languished in cities A popular joke went that Mao asked us to plunge into the countryside Deng asked us to plunge into busi ness and Jiang asked us to plunge into the ranks of the unemployed Annual deaths in coal mines soared from around one thousand in 1993 to over six thousand in 2004 Coupled with a continued erosion of the countrys education health and social secu rity systems caused in part by the weakening of local government revenues due to 1994 tax reforms Chinas levels of inequality rose dramatically a serious dilemma for a ruling party still committed to the egalitarian goals of communism between 1994 and 1997 a series of four Ten Thousand Character Letters wan yanshu critical of the direction reform was taking were issued in the form of under ground pamphlets like the samizdat used by dissidents in the Soviet Union The authors of the letters CCP writers associated with the party ideological magazine Mainstream Zhongliu complained of the decline in the state sector rising foreign and private investment and the declining hold of socialist ideology over society This group of critics was referred to as Chinas New Left Jiang Zemin successfully beat back these attacks including by shutting down Mainstream in 2001 he thus ironically came to power in part by shutting down a reformist publication the World Economic Herald in 1989 and then stayed there by shutting down an antireformist one chINeSe PoLITIcS UNDeR JIANG ZeMIN Jiang Zemin was widely dismissed as a weak transitional figure when he came to power in the wake of the Tiananmen crisis of 1989 but he more than proved his mettle in the following decade After the deaths of Chen Yun 1995 and Deng Xiaoping 1997 Jiang gradually asserted his authority through personnel reshuf fles and a few outright purges Jiangs most decisive act against protestors came in 1999 The CCPs loss of moral authority among its traditional constituents was dramatically highlighted by a protest that year around the Zhongnanhai leadership compound near Tiananmen by an estimated ten thousand adherents of a hitherto obscure buddhist meditation organization called Falun Gong literally Dharma Wheel Practice Complaining about the persecution and disparagement of the group in the nearby port city of Tianjin the protestors dispersed after just a day but the event unsettled a leadership with its eerie parallels to the religiously inspired and hugely destructive Taiping Rebellion of 18501864 see chapter 2 that had taken over half of China and was often cited as a critical factor leading to the col lapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 Jiang Zemin took the lead in getting a bare majority of the other top leaders to vote to ban the group leading to a decadelong suppression movement one of whose unintended consequences was to create by far the bestorganized and most commit ted source of opposition to CCP rule outside China itself but inside China the Falun d e n G x i a o P i n G a n d h i s s u c c e s s o r s 135 Gong crackdown was thorough and effective with many of its practitioners sent to labor camps16 Chinas middle classes rallied around the regimes persecution of the group just as Chinas nineteenthcentury gentry along with Western governments had supported the Qing armys crushing of the Taiping Rebellion Jiangs survival also owed to his steering through important economic and political changes in a mostly consensual manner Indeed Jiangs rule can be seen as ushering in the era of relatively consensual elite politics in China after the volatile strongman rule of Mao and Deng Under Jiang each leadership faction defined more by geographical base personal ties and institutional affiliation than by policy or ideological differ ences got its fair share of appointments described by a new slang word baiping or to arrange evenly and policymaking became more institutionalized The role of the military in politics already on the decline in the 1980s was further reduced under Jiang In 19921993 with Dengs consent Jiang purged PLA General Yang baibing and his cousin PRC President Yang Shangkun after they had attempted to rebuild the militarys role in politics The last military member of the partys toplevel Standing Committee retired in 1997 after which just two military delegates would remain as regular members of the next leadership level down the Politburo to consult on military matters In 1998 Jiang banned the very lucrative business activities of the PLA which ran the gamut from selling weapons to running brothels shutting off this source of independent income and forcing it in the words of a classical strata gem of rule in imperial China to rely on the emperors grain Jiangs era also accelerated the era of socialist legality in Chinas politics see chapter 7 In 1997 the state constitution was amended to say the PRC is governed according to the law and aims to build a socialist country under the rule of law The legalization of the CCP partystate under Jiang was an important part of the transi tion from the charismatic dictatorships under Mao and Deng in which the wishes and whims of the leaders had more authority than the law The PRC government promulgated one law or regulation after another that sought to create a legal frame work for both its expanding market economy but also for its most repressive policies examples of the legalization of repression included a state security law to deal with peaceful dissent 1993 a martial law act to deal with mass protests 1996 regula tions to limit and control NGOs 1998 an antisecession law to threaten Taiwan about any moves toward independence 2005 and regulations preventing Tibetans from recognizing their own living buddhas 2007 Just as economic reforms in the 1990s gave rise to a New Left in the PRC politi cal reforms gave birth to a New Right political current that borrowed from tradi tional Chinese tenets of meritocracy legalism and hierarchy to advocate a new form of party dictatorship called neoauthoritarianism The New Right to which Jiang Zemin was quite sympathetic argued for elitist rule by technocrats a strong military and continued market economics mixed with national corporate champi ons A typical representative was beijing University professor Pan Wei a University of California at berkeley PhD graduate who argued for a consultative rule of law system modeled on britishcolonial Hong Kong and Singapore Singapores staunchly anticommunist ruling Peoples Action Party was a model for emu lationa ruling party that tolerated a symbolic opposition promoted a market economy and ruled by legal edicts enforced by pliant courts For outsiders the 136 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a New Right represented something that looked more likely to result in a polarized bureaucraticauthoritarian regime such as those of Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s17 Within this main trend of legalized bureaucratic authoritarianism there were some democratizing pressures that challenged it In 1998 a China Democracy Party was established as an official and open opposition party by Tiananmenera activists and remarkably was initially given permission to register as an NGO in Zhejiang province by March 1999 the CDP boasted twentynine nationwide branches and eightythree core leaders but beijings tolerance ended as the CDP started to spread and by the end of the year the organization was banned and twentysix of its leaders were behind bars Activists at the local level also continued to press for political change In 1998 buyun township the lowest level of formal government above the village in the hier archy of rural administration in Sichuan province held the first direct election for its township governor a position that was legally supposed to be appointed by the township peoples congress This illegal direct township election was an effort to move direct electoral processes up a notch in rural China and triggered a dozen copycat experiments in the following decade see chapter 9 The political reformers of buyun consciously styled themselves after the illegal peasant economic activ ists of the early to late 1970s who on their own initiated de facto decollectivization that led the way to the dismantling of the communes They hoped that their experi ments would also eventually be endorsed by the party center and spread nationwide However the CCP has remained wary of electoral experiments After officials in Honghe prefecture in Yunnan province held direct elections for ten township gover nors in 2004 the central government forced them to recall the winners and replace them with party appointees During his final year in office Jiang codified the ideological rationale for his eco nomic program His socalled Three Represents sange daibiao theory became the partys newest guiding slogan and was inserted into the party constitution in 2002 In claiming that the CCP should represent the advanced forces of the economy modern culture and the vast majority of the Chinese people the Three Represents legitimized the partys shift away from its proletarian constituency and aims see chapter 5 The result of the Three Represents was that the CCP was no longer challenged mainly by the middle class the educated nationalistic youths and intellectuals as it had been in the 1980s These groups flourished under Jiangs rule and for the most part became staunch supporters of the regime and the partys main de facto con stituency Instead it was the poorthe urban proletariat and the rural massesalong with unreconstructed radical and Marxist intellectuals who became increasingly dis satisfied with the communist partystate Overall Jiang Zemin could fairly claim to have steered China from a period of threatened reStalinization after Tiananmen to irreversible economic liberalization and political institutionalization President bill Clinton bluntly told Jiang during a visit to the United States in 1997 that his policies with respect to human rights and democracy were on the wrong side of history Yet more than a decade and half later the regime that Jiang rescued would remain firmly in power d e n G x i a o P i n G a n d h i s s u c c e s s o r s 137 eNGAGING The WoRLD AFTeR TIANANMeN The 1980s had been a honeymoon period between China and the West Deng had toured the United States in 1979 even donning a tengallon hat at a Texas rodeo Western countries began selling small amounts of military equipment to China as part of their informal alliance against the Soviet Union A 1988 sixpart documen tary that aired on China Central Television CCTV River Elegy had been scath ing about Chinas cultural chauvinism and insularity characterized as yellow cul ture reflecting the dull yellow color of the Loess Plateau in northwestern China where Chinese civilization began and admiring of its cosmopolitan and overseas influences called blue culture in reference to the seafaring and diasporic nature of this side of Chinese culture18 The protestors in Tiananmen in 1989 had erected a statue called the Goddess of Democracy that strongly resembled the Statue of Liberty which reflected the esteem in which the United States was held by many at the time but after Tiananmen Western nations imposed sanctions on China including a ban on military sales The Tiananmen generation was effectively besmirched at home as stooges of foreign forces intent on weakening China The party fearing that the blue culture was the road to perdition consciously began promoting the yellow culture as a source of national pride and identity since socialist culture was now a nonstarter for most of the population A member of the Politburo attended the recently sanctioned annual rites at the tomb of the Yellow emperor mythical founder of Chinese civilization in Shaanxi province in 1995 The writings of Confucius were officially promoted again in 1994 and the PRC attempted to expand its influence over seas through soft power by the launching of cultural promotion agencies located in host universities in other countries called Confucius Institutes in 2004 by 2013 there were many hundreds of Confucius Institutes located on every continent including 350 in the United States alone19 Rising cultural nationalism in China coupled with postCold War American global hegemony created the conditions for rising tensions between China and the West particularly the United States A series of runinsthe inspection in Saudi Arabia of the Chinese cargo ship Yinhe in 1993 following US allegations that it was shipping chemical weapon components to Iran Western politicking in 1993 to deny China the 2000 Olympic Games China eventually won the 2008 games the US dispatch of an aircraft carrier battle group in response to PLA missile tests off Taiwan in 19951996 the accidental NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in belgrade in 1999 the col lision between an American spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet off the south coast of China in 2001 and harassment by Chinese boats of a US Navy submarine detec tion ship in waters off the PRC island province of Hainan in 2009brought national ist emotions to the fore among the Chinese public A book published in 1996 called China Can Say No argued for a gettough approach to the West echoing the title of a similar book published in Japan in 198920 Nonetheless in the end Jiang took the strategic view that beijings road to great power status ran through Washington DC He paid an official state visit to the United States in 1997 and President bill Clinton did likewise to China the fol lowing year Jiang and Clinton were attempting to build a constructive strategic 138 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a partnership between the two nations but the CCP found that it could not simul taneously encourage nationalism at home as the basis of regime legitimacy while at the same time aligning itself with the United States This led to a cooling down of SinoAmerican relations and in the view of some the beginning of a period of USChina rivalry that would shape world politics into the first decade of the twentyfirst century The eRA oF hU JINTAo Hu Jintao like Jiang Zemin had been one of the beneficiaries of Dengs plan to fasttrack the promotion of educated and competent young cadres in the early 1980s During that decade Hu served successively as party secretary of two poor western regionsGuizhou and Tibet His willingness to accept the tough assignments and to maintain order when protests erupted in Tibet in early 1989 stood him in good stead with his mentor party elder and leftconservative Song Ping one of the elders whom Deng put in charge of choosing the new Politburo that would be installed at the party congress in 1992 Aware of the dangers of a botched succession to the party leadership after Jiang particularly if Deng had died by then as turned out to be the case Song con vinced Deng to anoint a presumptive successor to Jiang at the congress This would settle the postJiang succession in advance Hu Jintao was the one who got the nod because of his fealty to party orders In the years after his 1992 appointment to the Politburo Standing Committee Hu was showered in titles to indicate his status as the successorinwaiting vice president of the PRC vice chairman of the Central Military Commission and head of the Central Party School the highestlevel institution for training CCP leaders He was designated as the core of the fourth generation of party leadership His elevation in 2002 to the position of party general secretary and in 2003 to PRC president and in 2004 to chair of the military commission was thus known a decade in advance Two fiveyear term limits established as part of the insti tutionalization of party procedures meant that it was also clear thatbarring unfore seen circumstanceshe would serve until 2012 Perhaps the single most important fact about Hu Jintao was that he was the only top leader of reform China who did not suffer under Mao Deng Xiaoping Hu Yaobang Zhao Ziyang Jiang Zemin and even the current head of the party Xi Jinping who was sent to do manual labor in the countryside all did to one degree or another During his tenyear stint in power from 2002 to 2012 Hu was thus more respon sive to the New Left critique and initiated policies to redress the questions of social justice and sustainable development Hus conception of a harmonious socialist society and commitment to putting the people first yiren weiben were writ ten into the party constitution in 2007 as part of his socalled Scientific Outlook on Developmentwhich emphasized a shift toward more equitable and sustainable growth see chapter 5 Tough new rules on industrial safety were introduced which cut annual coal mine deaths in half to 3200 in 2008 As a sign of a new seriousness in the crackdown on official graft Chen Liangyu the party chief of Shanghai Jiang Zemins political base was jailed for eighteen years for corruption involving property d e n G x i a o P i n G a n d h i s s u c c e s s o r s 139 deals and investment funds A new National bureau of Corruption Prevention was established with greater autonomy and authorityat least on paperthan its ineffec tive predecessor body In 2006 a fortyeightyearold head tax on peasant families with land under culti vation was abolished The loosening of the household registration or hukousystem which had failed to prevent rural to urban migration as the floating population rose to more than one hundred million migrants in the 1990s and which was begun under Jiang Zemin was accelerated Hu also initiated policy changes that eliminated one of the most egregious procedures used by police to detain citizens for extended peri ods without formal chargescustody and repatriation shourong qiansongand brought more procedural controls to another called reeducationthroughlabor laojiao The emphasis on sustainable and equitable development led to new forms of citizen activism In the first years of Hus rule sixtyone environmental groups in Yunnan province sought to block the planned construction of thirteen small dams along the Salween Nu river and a large one at the confluence of three rivers at Hutiaoxia Gorge21 Urban protestsagainst an ethylene plant in Chengdu against a paraxylene plant in Xiamen and against the extension of a highspeed train railway in Shanghaialso gathered steam under Hus new approach The central governments environmental watchdog was upgraded to ministerial status as the new Ministry of environmental Protection in 2008 One of the key documents of the Hu era was the 2004 resolution issued by a party plenum on strengthening the governing capacity of the party For the first time the CCP admitted that the 1949 revolution was no longer a sufficient basis on which the party could claim to be the legitimate ruler of China The partys governing status is not congenital nor is it something settled once and for all read the preamble to the document by officially raising the question of defining the CCPs legitimacy as an ongoing task rather than a historically established fact the resolution stirred an out pouring of discussion among political elites about how the CCP can continue to earn the support of Chinas people The partys rapid and relatively successful response to the global economic recession that began in 2008 see chapter 8 helped it to avert what might have been a serious challenge to its legitimacy but in all these areas Hus attempts to develop a more sustainable and equitable model of Chinese development foundered on the lack of serious efforts to disperse political power from local party organizations Hus populism did not extend to dem ocratic elections True to his Leninist sympathies Hu emphasized an improvement in innerparty democracy instead in which party members would vote on such things as policies and appointments When a group of three hundred intellectuals activists and scholars in China issued a blueprint for democratic reforms under the title Charter 08 in 2008 mimicking the ultimately successful Charter 77 democratic movement in the former Czechoslovakia its leading signatories were detained and sometimes jailed Among those imprisoned was Lu Xiaobu who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 while serving an elevenyear sentence that began in 2009 Hu also showed less interest than his predecessor in boosting Chinas place in the worldeven though that place expanded considerably on his watch especially with the exposure provided by the flawlessly executed 2008 beijing Olympics As befitted 140 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a a politician who made his career in inland areas Hus focus was on internal problems and he made no major efforts to improve relations with the United States or regional neighbors This meant that Chinas foreign policy direction seemed adrift veering between a smile diplomacy aimed at reassuring the world of beijings peace ful rise and a sometimes more aggressive posture One of Hus last acts as party chief in 2012 was to formally inaugurate Chinas first aircraft carrier the Liaoning a refurbished Soviet Union ship that had been towed rudderless and engineless from Ukraine in 1998 What was Hus legacy His pathway to powerselected for obedience and a firm hand and then groomed over a long period in which caution and consensus were keyleft him illequipped for the challenges of reform While Jiang can claim to have rescued China from the trauma of Tiananmen Hu inherited a China that needed more than mere stability In his somber final report to the party Hu admitted that Chinas development was unbalanced uncoordinated and unsustainable and that social problems had increased markedly on his watch Chinas share of the global GDP rose from 8 percent to 15 percent on his watch but the private sector shrunk as a contributor to GDP as Hu poured money into the state sector The image that many Chinese people most closely associate with the Hu Jintao era is that of work crews hastily removing twisted passenger rail cars dangling from a viaduct after a highspeed railway crash in 2011 that killed forty and symbolized the still pervasive preoccupation with often hastily implemented gargantuan projects and the censor ship of photos or discussion of the accident that lay beneath the harmonious socialist society If there was an equivalent in China to the era of faceless and ineffective lead ership in the Soviet Union under Leonid brezhnev communist party chief from 1964 to 1982 it is the era of Hu Jintao There was a wide recognition by 2012 that China needed new leadership to revitalize the country xI JINPING TAKeS ceNTeR STAGe The man chosen to succeed Hu Jintao was Xi Jinping the son of a revolutionary party elder who had been groomed for power since at least 1997 see box 42 While Xis succession in 2012 was largely a formality the handover of power was significant in several respects For one because he was not promoted to the CCPs top body the Politburo Standing Committee until 2007 he came into office as party chief in 2012 having less association with the Hu Jintao era This meant he could promote more distinctive policies In addition unlike Hu who had to wait for two years after becom ing the CCP general secretary to be given the position of chair of the Central Military Commission Xi took over as head of the CMC at the same time he became party chief further strengthening his hand A Chinese saying has it that a new leader will begin by lighting three bonfires and Xi was handed a golden opportunity to do this by the ignominious fall of his onetime rival for the top party post bo Xilai in mid2012 A charismatic and tele genic princeling son of an esteemed early member of the CCP and important PRC leader bo became Minister of Commerce in 2004 and then a Politburo member and d e n G x i a o P i n G a n d h i s s u c c e s s o r s 141 Box 42 who is xi JinPinG xi Jinping is the son of a guerrilla organizer of communist armies in china in the 1930s xi Zhongxun 19132002 The elder xi went on to join chinas post1949 leadership but like many he was purged by the paranoid Mao enduring various forms of hard labor and house arrest between 1962 and 1977 As a result xi Jinping was sent to do hard labor on a commune at the tender age of sixteen where he was known as a black gang child because of his father When the elder xi was rehabilitated after Maos death xi Jinpings career took off he graduated in chemical engineering from beijings Tsinghua University chinas premiere institution of science and technology in 1979 and took a series of assignments in local governments beginning in 1982 There he won high marks as an economic reformer with a personal touch his father was again purged from the Politburo in 1986 for defending hu Yaobangs tolerant attitude toward student protestors yet xi Jinpings career was unaffected As early as 1997 the party leadership had xi in mind when it added him onto the central committee as an overquota alternate member after he failed to secure enough votes from delegates to a party congress to win one of the 150 regular alternate seats Rising rapidly through the ranks he became governor of prosperous Fujian province in 2000 During plans for the 2002 leadership succession that brought hu Jintao to power consideration was given to promoting xi to the Politburo to indicate that he was the future leader but the plan was abandoned because it was seen as binding the partys hands too far in advance by mid2007 a consensus had developed around xi as the core of the fifth gen eration leadership that would replace hu Jintaos fourth generation in 2012 xi was appointed to the Politburo Standing committee an unusual twostep move up the ranks and later made PRc vice president a largely ceremonial post used to signal his future accession With his eventual succession in to party leader in 2012 and PRc presi dent in 2013 xi became the first ccP leader who was not chosen by an elder yuan lao of the party a term that refers to those who joined before 1949 and later rose to promi nent positions in the Mao era virtually all of whom are now dead Deng had personally chosen xis predecessors Jiang Zemin and hu Jintao In other words xi Jinping has to sink or swim on his own merits without any senior leader to protect him It is clear that xi is an avid economic reformer he was in charge of the regimes cele brations of the thirtieth anniversary of the launching of the reforms in 2008 an opponent of hardline ideological campaigns and a relatively cosmopolitan figure who mixes easily in international business and government circles his administration is more populated by economists and lawyers than the engineers and ideologues who dominated the Jiang and hu eras xi has an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from Tsinghua but was also awarded a doctorate in politics and Marxist theory with a dissertation on agricultural mechanization from the same university where he was enrolled from 1998 to 2002 in an inservice postgraduate program while concurrently serving in party and government positions in several provinces but xis views on political reform are cautious perhaps a legacy of his fathers suffering as a liberal on political issues he believes that cadres should be popular and uncor rupt but has not gone beyond official doctrine in advocating any changes to the way they are chosen he was tolerant of mass citizen protests against development projects that erupted during his brief tenures as party chief of Zhejiang province and Shanghai but he did not initiate new forms of public consultation xi Jinping is also a genuine nationalist who believes that china needs to cut a course distinctly different from other nations on a visit to Mexico in 2009 he warned that some Continued 142 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a party chief of Chongqing in 2007 where he initiated a brutal crackdown on crimi nal gangs and revived Maoist sloganeering Like the populist prime minister Thaksin Sinawatra of Thailand who espoused the idea of CeOstyle Government until being overthrown in a coup bo styled himself as a hardnosed corporate leader willing to take on entrenched interests In 2011 bos wife Gu Kailai murdered a british family friend over a personal financial dispute Asked to cover up the murder the Chongqing chief of police fled to a US consulate seeking protection a major political embarrass ment for China In August 2012 Gu was sentenced to death suspended for two years and commutable to life imprisonment depending on her behavior bo was found guilty of bribetaking embezzlement and abuse of power and sentenced to life in prison in September 2013 bos fall from power provided Xi Jinping with an opportu nity to show that the CCP took toplevel corruption and abuses of power seriously Another early boost to Xis leadership was the agreement in 2012to shrink the Standing Committee of the Politburo back down to its normal size of seven from its ninemember composition of the Hu Jintao era The upshot of this was that Xi had more control over the body a shift that was reinforced by a reduction in the number of cabinetlevel government departments in 2013 These and other early moves sug gested that the Xi Jinping era might usher in a more proactive leadership in dealing with some of Chinas most urgent problems Xis proactive stance was evident in several early decisions including new rules to control corruption by senior cadres While Hus first domestic trip was to an old Maoist revolutionary base in the poor north Xi headed to the reformist southern city of Shenzhen abutting Hong Kong echoing Dengs tideturning Southern Inspection Tour There he outlined a twopronged vision of Chinas future a flourishing mar ket economy that avoided the closed and ossified old path of socialist economics alongside a renewed commitment to communist party leadership that avoided the evil path of changing ones flag which he argued had occurred in the Soviet Union Xi put his stamp on an ambitious agenda of economic and social reforms alongside a renewed commitment to a revitalized CCP at a party plenum in 2013 Xi thus set about not only to show his commitment to reform and opening up but also reaffirmed party authority and ideological correctness Like Deng Xi is an eminently likeable figure who mixes easily with Westerners His wife Peng Liyuan is a famous singer and army general and is the PRCs most visible first lady both at home and abroad His term in office is scheduled to last until 2022 It will likely take wellfed foreigners with nothing else to do keep pointing fingers at us china he said had ceased exporting revolution as it had in the Maoist era conquered poverty at home and refrained from interfering in the affairs of other countries in the reform era What is there to criticize he wondered Shortly after becoming the party leader in 2012 xi began espousing his idea of the China Dream that seemed to embody his vision for what he hoped to accomplish dur ing his administration That vision involved a combination of a much higher standard of living and the ascent of china to greater power status Box 42 Continued d e n G x i a o P i n G a n d h i s s u c c e s s o r s 143 some time before its known whether Xi represents a change in substance as well as style as Chinas top leader coNcLUSIoN Chinas political and economic trajectory since the overthrow of Maoist forces in 1978 has reflected the twin impulses of economic dynamism and authoritarian politics How long the CCP can continue economic reform without putting itself out of business is the most widely debated topic among observers of Chinese politics There is no doubt that life has become vastly better for most Chinese during the reform era Real per capita income in purchasingpower equivalent terms rose from just 250 in 1980 to 9100 by 2012 still just nearly onefifth that of the US Hundreds of millions have been lifted from absolute poverty to at least a minimally secure standard of living Infant mortality for children under one year old probably the most reliable indicator of mate rial progress fell from fortyeight per one thousand live births in 1980 to thirteen by 2011 roughly twice as fast as the global average decline in that same indicator over the same period The reform era has brought a long period of relative stability and growth with the exception of the Tiananmen setback to China Chinese politics seems to have passed beyond the cycles of crisis and recovery that characterized the Mao era Still there are palpable signs of deep discontent as reflected in rural and urban protests as well as online discussion forums about the quality of life the commitment to public service rather than personal gain of partystate officials and the overall responsiveness of the political system Most senior Chinese leaders send their chil dren to be educated abroad including Xi Jinping whose daughter went to Harvard and keep ample stores of assets in the hands of family members abroad In order to survive in power the CCP needs to constantly reinvent itself to maintain the expecta tion that things will continue to get better for the ordinary person not just economi cally but politically as well What are the broader implications of the reform era for the study of modern China As noted in chapter 1 during the Mao era many scholars felt that politics in China was best analyzed by the use of highly statecentered models For example the theory of totalitarianism saw China as the kind of state that attempted to control all aspects of society indeed as a country where the separation of society from the state barely existed Or there was beijingology the China Watchers version of analyzing Soviet politics known as Kremlinology a focus on trying to decipher what goes on in the highly secretive top levels of leadershipa more nuanced and informed version of which is still used today to study Chinese politics More than three decades into the reform era these extreme versions of statecentered theory are no longer appropriate to explain political processes or out comes in China At the very least the state had become multifaceted if not pluralistic and its various constitutive partsincluding local governments peoples congresses judges and lawyers the military mass organizations state enterprises bureaucrats journalists public intellectuals and party membersmore openly contest for politi cal influence beyond the boundaries of the state new forms of civil associations have emerged in Chinasuch as homeowners associations independent business 144 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a associations and environmental groupswith the potential to shape political out comes As a result statesociety models that focus on the interactions between state and society can now be usefully applied to some questions about politics in China Yet the ability of independent social forces to influence policy is still deeply con strained in a system where communist party leadership remains an unchallengeable principle of political life Comparative analyses of Chinas politics continue to stress what has not changed in the political system especially in a world where many states most recently those in the Middle east and Africa have been moving in a more demo cratic direction in the same period China in the reform era in other words is a remarkable lesson in the autonomy of politicswhy politics cannot be reduced to economic conditions or changes The party created Chinas economic miracle with early political reforms managed the consequences with a judicious mixture of repression and accommodation and rebuilt its institutions and ideologies to ensure they would remain compatible with rapid socioeconomic development Maos theory of socioeconomic changepolitics in command as he called itis one part of his legacy that seems firmly embedded in reform era China NoTeS 1 See for example Jeffrey Henderson The Political Economy of East Asian Development Against the Orthodoxy New York Routledge 2010 2 For a comparison of economic reforms in China Vietnam Laos and North Korea see Peter Ferdinand and Martin Gainsborough eds Enterprise and Welfare Reform in Communist Asia New York Taylor Francis 2003 3 The full loyalty oath of the Whateverists was We will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave which was included in a joint editorial of the CCP main propaganda organs pub lished on February 7 1977 The motto of the Pragmatists Practice is the sole criterion of truth was the title of an article published in another party organ on May 11 1978 4 barry J Naughton The Chinese Economy Transitions and Growth Cambridge MA 2006 79 5 See Merle Goldman The Reassertion of Political Citizenship in the PostMao era The Democracy Wall Movement in Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China ed Merle Goldman and elizabeth J Perry Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 2002 159186 and Wei Jingsheng The Fifth Modernization httpafeeasiacolumbiaedups cupweijingshengfifthmodernizationpdf 6 For more on Chen Yun see David M bachman Chen Yun and the Chinese Political System berkeley University of California Institute of east Asian Studies 1985 and Nicholas R Lardy and Kenneth Lieberthal eds Chen Yuns Strategy for Chinas Development A NonMaoist Alternative Armonk NY M e Sharpe 1983 7 See for example Randall Peerenboom Chinas Long March Toward Rule of Law New York Cambridge University Press 2002 8 See Kate Xiao Zhou How the Farmers Changed China Power of the People boulder CO Westview Press 1996 9 See Uphold the Four Cardinal Principleshttpenglishpeopledailycomcndengxp vol2textb1290html d e n G x i a o P i n G a n d h i s s u c c e s s o r s 145 10 See David S Zweig Chinas Brain Drain to the United States berkeley CA east Asian Institute China Research Monograph 1995 11 There is a large body of scholarly and popular literature about the Tiananmen Movement and the beijing Massacre See the Suggested Readings at the end of this chapter for a few recommended titles Two books based on materials smuggled out of China reveal the innerworkings of the party leadership during the crisis One book The Tiananmen Papers New York Public Affairs 2002 is largely the minutes of meetings of the top leaders while Prisoner of the State The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang New York Simon Schuster 2009 contains transcripts of recordings made by the ousted party general secretary 12 The brief obituary can be found at httpnewsxinhuanetcomenglish20050117con tent2469618htm and the longer piece at httpnewsxinhuanetcomenglish20050129 content2522819htm 13 See bruce Gilley Tiger on the Brink Jiang Zemin and Chinas New Elite berkeley University of California Press 1998 14 See Suisheng Zhao Deng Xiaopings Southern Tour elite Politics in PostTiananmen ChinaAsian Survey 33 no 8 August 1993 739756 and the website Southern Tour Legacy at httpwwwglobaltimescnSPeCIALCOVeRAGeDengssoutherntouraspx 15 excerpts from Talks Given in Wuchang Shenzhen Zhuhai And Shanghai January 18February 21 1992 in Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping Vol III 19821992 beijing Foreign Languages Press 1994httpenglishpeopledailycomcndengxpvol3 textd1200html 16 See James Tong Revenge of the Forbidden City The Suppression of the Falungong in China 19992008 New York Oxford University Press 2009 and David Ownby Falun Gong and the Future of China New York Oxford University Press 2008 17 See for example Guillermo A ODonnell and David e Apter Modernization and BureaucraticAuthoritarianism Studies in South American Politics berkeley University of California Press 1979 18 An abridged one hour version of the film can be found at httpwwwyoutubecom watchv39j4ViRxcS8 19 See Confucius Institute Online at httpenglishchinesecn 20 On the role of nationalism in Chinese politics see Peter Hayes Gries Chinas New Nationalism Pride Politics and Diplomacy berkeley University of California Press 2004 21 See Andrew C Mertha Chinas Water Warriors Citizen Action And Policy Change Ithaca NY Cornell University Press 2008 SUGGeSTeD ReADINGS baum Richard Burying Mao Chinese Politics in the Age of Deng Xiaoping Princeton NJ Princeton University Press 1994 brooke Timothy Quelling the People The Military Suppression of the Beijing Democracy Movement New York Oxford University Press 1998 Dittmer Lowell ed Chinas Deep Reform Domestic Politics in Transition Lanham MD Rowman Littlefield 2006 Fewsmith Joseph China since Tiananmen From Deng Xiaoping to Hu Jintao New York Cambridge University Press 2008 Gilley bruce Model Rebels The Rise and Fall of Chinas Richest Village berkeley University of California Press 2001 Goldman Merle From Comrade to Citizen The Struggle for Political Rights in China Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 2007 146 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Goodman David S G Deng Xiaoping and the Chinese Revolution A Political Biography Routledge in Asia London and New York Routledge 1994 Gries Peter Hayes and Stanley Rosen State and Society in 21st Century China New York Routledge Curzon 2004 Harding Harry Chinas Second Revolution Reform after Mao Washington DC brookings Institution 1987 Heilmann Sebastian elizabeth J Perry Jae Ho Chung and Nara Dillon Maos Invisible Hand The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 2011 Lam Willy WoLap Chinese Politics in the Hu Jintao Era New Leaders New Challenges Armonk NY M e Sharpe 2006 Nathan Andrew J and bruce Gilley Chinas New Rulers The Secret Files 2nd rev ed New York New York Review of books 2003 Shen Tong Almost a Revolution The Story of a Chinese Students Journey from Boyhood to Leadership in Tiananmen Square Ann Arbor University of Michigan Press 1998 Vogel ezra Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 2011 Zhao Dingxin The Power of Tiananmen StateSociety Relations and the 1989 Beijing Student Movement Chicago University of Chicago Press 2004 PART II Ideology Governance Law and Political Economy WhAT Is Ideology And Why Is IT ImPoRTAnT One of the most influential preCultural Revolution stud ies of politics in the Peoples Republic of China PRC was Franz Schurmanns Ideology and Organization in Communist China which was published in 1966 just as the Cultural Revolution was unfolding1 As the title sug gests Schurmann identified ideology and organization and the relationship between themas the keys to understanding what was both unique and comparative especially with the Soviet Union about Chinas political system as it had evolved in the first decade and a half of communist rule Schurmanns observation is still valid despite how much has changed about Chinese politics This chapter focuses on ideology specifically what can generically be called Chinese communism while the next chapter describes and analyzes the organization of the Chinese communist partystate What is ideology and why is it still important in the study of Chinese politics Ideology is one of the most hotly contested concepts in the social sciences For our purposes a simple definition will do An ideology is a systematic or comprehensive set of values and beliefs ideas that provides a way of looking at and understanding Ideology and Chinas Political Development WI l l I Am A Jo s e P h 5 A note to instructors and readers Some might find it useful to read parts of this chapter in conjunction with other chapters in this book with which they coincide in terms of topics or the period in Chinese political history being discussed as follows What is Ideology and Why it is Important Communism and MarxismLeninism Comes to China with the latter sections of chapter 2 Mao Zedong Thought with chapter 3 and Chinese Communism after Mao and Conclusion with chapter 4 150 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a the world or some aspect of it Our concern is with political ideology which consists of ideas about power and how it should be distributed organized and used includ ing the goals to which it is directed Furthermore ideology has action consequences by shaping political behavior particularly of leaders who have the power to translate ideology into policy In this sense ideology shapes what is sometimes referred to as the operational code of decisionmaking elites2 To be sure political behavior is determined by many factors and ideology may well serve as a mask or rationalization for preserving the power and privileges of a particular group including an economic class or political party3 But to dismiss it as irrelevant to understanding how leaders use their power in shaping national agendas and formulating concrete policies is to ignore one the most central facts of politics across time and space The word ideology took on a rather negative connotation during World War II and the Cold War it came to be seen as something they our enemies have and we dont The fact is that ideology is woven into the political fabric of every soci ety To be sure in some cases including democratic capitalist countries ideology is relatively latent that is it is less publicly visible and less formally proclaimed and contestation among ideologies is permitted or even encouraged although there are always limits In other systems ideology is a much more overt part of political life As noted in chapter 1 the existence and enforcement of an official ideology based on MarxismLeninism is one of the defining characteristics of a communist partystate like the PRC the ruling party bases its claim to power largely on its role as the only rightful interpreter of the values and the beliefs that will guide the nation to its ideo logically determined goals Serious challenges to the ruling ideology are proscribed and suppressed as threats to the security of the nation and the wellbeing of the people Ideology has figured very visibly in Chinese politics throughout the history of the Chinese Communist Party CCP both before and after it came to power in 1949 It motivated the formation and shaped the victory of the revolutionary movement fueled power struggles large and small within the party from the 1920s on and guided leaders in making policies and taking initiatives that have brought both progress and disaster to the country For all the profound transformations that have taken place in China over the last three decades including the move toward a market economy the CCP still proclaims allegiance to MarxismLeninism and reaffirms its commitment to the building of socialism with the ultimate goal of reaching the truly egalitarian communist stage of human society Indeed it is the ideological adaptability and its political manifestations that help explain the remarkable longevity of the PRC as one of the worlds few remaining communist partystates4 The next two sections of this chapter discuss Marxism and Leninism the ideologi cal foundations of all forms of communism including that of the CCP Following a brief transitional discussion of how MarxismLeninism first came to China in the early twentieth century the longest section of this chapter is devoted to an analysis of the ideology of Mao Zedong and the ways in which it is a distinctive variation of com munist ideology Not only did Maoist communism have a profound impact on Chinas political development during the era of his rule in the PRC 19491976 but Chinas postMao leaders have sworn fealty to certain core principles of Maoism regardless i d e o l o g y a n d c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l d e v e l o P m e n t 151 of how unMaoist many of their policy initiatives have been The chapter concludes with an examination of ideology in China after Mao the CCPs assessment of Maoist ideology the contributions of Deng Xiaoping Jiang Zemin Hu Jintao and poten tially Xi Jinping to Chinese communism and some of the alternative ideologies that are supplementing or contending with communism in the Peoples Republic today CommunIsm marxism Marxism is one of the most complex controversial and consequential philosophies in human history The purpose here is only to highlight those points of Marxism that are most relevant for understanding the development of communist ideology in China from its introduction in the early twentieth century to the present In fact these points can be considered as common ground for all Marxists or communists although they may disagreesometimes violentlyover what these ideas mean in practice The essence of Marxism is class analysis Marxists see the worldpast present and futurethrough the lens of social classes and the economic systems that give rise to them In particular they emphasize the struggle between the rich and the poor the exploiters and the exploited and the dominant and the subordinate classes As Karl Marx 18181883 and his close collaborator Friedrich Engels 18201895 wrote in the opening line of The Communist Manifesto 1848 The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles5 Marx believed that from ancient times to his lifetime and beyond the truly major turning points in history were revolutions in which a ruling class that was hindering further human progressparticularly economic progresswas overthrown by a ris ing class that would take the lead in moving humankind forward to the next higher stage of its destined development According to Marxism history propelled by class struggle and revolution unfolds in a series of stages marked by increasing levels of economic development From the Marxist perspective this path to progress is scien tific and inevitable For example feudalism in England was followed by capitalism when the lords of the manor were displaced as the ruling class by the owners of industries and businesses capitalists in a revolutionary process that began to unfold in the sixteenth and sev enteenth centuries The same process turned peasant serfs into the industrial working class or the proletariat The timing of revolutions in any particular society is determined largely by its level of economic development and class struggle Marx concluded that the time and place in which he livedmidnineteenthcentury Western Europewas ripe for revolu tion Capitalism had been a magnificent achievement in terms of economic modern ization and other areas of human advancement But it was also a brutally exploitative system in which the capitalist owners of private property also referred to in Marxism as the bourgeoisie literally profited from the labor of the proletariat Capitalism in fact depended on the complete political cultural and economic domination and subjugation of the proletariat 152 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Marx identified the proletariat as the most oppressed class in all of human his toryand therefore the most revolutionary He concluded that by the late nine teenth century history had come down to a final lifeanddeath class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie Revolution was inevitable as was the triumph of the proletariat In this sense Marxism is a theory of proletarian revolution For Marx this was the final class struggle of history because once they came to power the proletariat would abolish private property and the capitalist class would cease to exist Indeed when all property was public property classes would cease to exist and the history of all thereafter existing society would be a history without class struggles Communisma truly classless utopiawould be achieved and humankind would enter into an era of equality cooperation and abundance These are the essen tial elements of the communist society that Marxist revolutionaries have envisioned as the ultimate goal of their actions This revolutionary transformation from capitalism to communism would not be completed in a short period of time After the political overthrow of the bourgeoi sie and the capitalist system there would have to be a transitional stage of undeter mined length Marx called this transition stage the lower stage of communism but it is more commonly referred to as socialism During the transition from capitalism to socialism proletarian political power would be used to create the conditions for moving on to the higher stage of communism But unlike any of historys previous transformations this would be an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary process The progress of evolution from socialism to communism would be measured by the increasing material wealth of society and the deepening of communist values such as selflessness and devotion to the common good among the people Marxism became a political ideology when it was adapted as the basis of the guid ing principles and program of selfproclaimed revolutionary movements The first of these was the Communist League founded in 1847 by Marx and Engels among oth ers It was for the Communist League that Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto as an accessible distillation of the Marxist analysis of historical develop ment and a call for the workers of the world to launch the proletarian revolution that would destroy capitalism and begin the transition to socialism Marxs ideas were strongly challenged in his lifetime not only by those who feared his call for communism but by many who proclaimed themselves to be revolutionar ies as well His radical writings and political activities got him expelled from France twice and Belgium before he settled in London in 1849 The strongest challenge to him came from another anticapitalist revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin 18141876 the Russian theorist who advocated a radical version of egalitarian selfgovernance called anarchism and criticized Marx for being too authoritarian in his leadership of the communist movement in Europe Marx did not live to see a proletarian revolution under the banner of Marxism come to power That wouldnt happen until the 1917 Russian Revolution and its leader V I Lenin would not only preside if briefly before his death over the first government committed to the realization of socialism and communism his theories would also become the foundation of the second and in some ways more politically influential branch of Marxism known as Leninism i d e o l o g y a n d c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l d e v e l o P m e n t 153 leninism Marxism is a theory of history that establishes the claim that the proletariat is destined to lead humankind in a revolution to overthrown capitalism and create a socialist and then a communist society Leninism is in essence a theory of revolutionary organi zation It builds on Marxism but it also adds a new more practical dimension that deals with the actual seizure and exercise of power by a revolutionary communist organization Lenin 18721924 was set on the path to becoming a revolutionary following the execution of his elder brother in 1887 for involvement in a plot to kill the czar of Russia He later became a lawyer and was introduced to Marxist theory during his student years He joined a small Marxist group in the mid1890s and his political activism got him exiled to Siberia for a few years He subsequently traveled widely in Russia and Europe He rose to a position of leadership in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party which was the most important Marxist organization in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century In 1903 Lenin led the partys more radical Bolshevik Majority faction in taking control of the organization After a failed attempt at revolution in 1905 Lenin spent the years until 1917 in Europe mostly in Geneva but remained an influential leader of the Bolshevik movement in Russia He returned to Russia a few months after a revolution in which the communists were just one of the leading parties overthrew the czar in February 1917 In October the Bolsheviks seized power from a noncommunist provisional government that had been set up after the ouster of the czar From then until his death in 1924 Lenin was the head of the government of the coun try that was renamed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics USSR or Soviet Union and the organization that became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union CPSU This brief review of Lenins life as a revolutionary is important to understanding the context of his writings that form the foundation of Leninism Leninism was not a term that Lenin used himself the same with Marx and Marxism but was coined posthumously by one of his communist comrades when his theories were elevated to join Marxism as the guiding ideology of the Soviet Union In fact what is generally described as Leninism derives as much if not more from how revolutionaries that followed him including Stalin and Mao expropriated and adapted his ideas rather than from what Lenin actually did or wrote6 Lenin wrote at length on the issue of how a communist party could best be orga nized to achieve its political objectives especially in his 1902 essay What Is to Be Done He criticized those who favored an open organization that would recruit mem bers widely particularly among the proletariat This approach Lenin argued was dangerous for two reasons First it would make the party highly vulnerable to infiltra tion and repression by the Czarist authorities Second it would dilute the ideological integrity of the party by admitting people who did not fully grasp Marxist theory or were not fully committed to the revolution Lenins solution to this dilemma was to insist that the communist organization be a vanguard party that is one composed only of professional revolutionaries many of whom would be intellectuals who had embraced Marxism It would be the 154 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a vanguardthe leading edgeof the proletarian revolution with the mission to mobi lize and lead the working class to seize political power To survive the communist organization not only had to be highly selective in its membership but also secretive and disciplined The party would operate according to the principle of democratic centralism debate and the free exchange of ideas would be encouraged while a matter was up for discussion democracy but once a decision had been reached by the leadership discussion stopped and all members were bound to follow without hesitation or dissent centralism Lower levels of the organization had to follow the orders of higher levels and the minority had to follow the majority The Leninist theory and practice of a vanguard party of the proletariat is an adap tation of or departure from Marxism in at least two major ways First it substitutes a political party claiming to represent the interests of the proletariat for the proletariat itself as the leading force of the revolution Marx and Engels had more faith that the proletariat would rise up in revolution on their own when the time was right Second Leninism reflects the idea that a largely agrarian country with relatively little industry and a small proletariat such as Russia in the late nineteenth century could in fact begin the process of a communist revolution through the agency of a vanguard party Both of these Leninist adaptations of Marxism would have great appeal to aspiring revolutionaries in nonindustrialized countries including China Lenin saw the vanguard communist party as the best type of revolutionary orga nization to seize power But it also became the standard model for all communist organizations after the seizure of power when they became the ruling party In his book State and Revolution 1917 Lenin expanded significantly on an important idea put forth by Marx the dictatorship of the proletariat This was to be the form of the political system to be put in place after the communist party took power in the coun try and that would prevail during at least the early stages of the transition to social ism The proletariat Lenin declared needs state power a centralized organization of force an organization of violence both to crush the resistance of the exploiters and to lead the enormous mass of the population in the work of organizing a socialist economy It was the communist party that was to be this centralized organization of force that would exercise the dictatorship of the proletariat Lenin stressed the need for a ruling communist party to remain vigilant against the possibility of a counterrevolution especially at a time when capitalist enemies sur rounded the country Lenin like Marx believed that the state would wither away once communism was achieved but before that time came the power of the state and the communist party would have to increase in order to protect and promote the interests of the proletariat It is this model of a vanguard party based on the prin ciple of democratic centralism and exercising some variation of the dictatorship of the proletariat that is being conveyed when a communist party such as the CCP is referred to as a Leninist party or the PRC as having a Leninist political system The other main ingredient of Leninism that we should take note of is its theory of imperialism Basically Lenins thesis on imperialism was that the most advanced capitalist countries had been able to avert proletarian revolution at home in the late nineteenth century at least temporarily by exploiting their colonies and other less developed parts of the world that were in the precapitalist stage of history These areas in turn became the weakest link in the global capitalist chain because of the i d e o l o g y a n d c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l d e v e l o P m e n t 155 extreme exploitation they suffered Communists could find fertile ground for a revo lution led by a vanguard party in these weak links even though they were far from the level of economic and class development that Marx had said was a prerequisite for building socialism Lenin had in mind Russia as the weak link most ready for revolution in the first decades of the twentieth century but his ideas on imperialism were one of the main factors in drawing nationalist leaders and intellectuals in the Third World to MarxismLeninism including the founders of the CCP and Vietnams communist leader Ho Chi Minh After coming to power the vanguard communist party would use its centralized authority to promote rapid economic development that would allow the country to achieve industrialization without capitalism As Lenin said in 1920 Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country Collected Works vol 31 496518 Lenins vanguard communist party not only substitutes itself and does the historical work for a weak proletariat class in making revolution in a preindustrial society but also takes the place of a weak capi talist class in achieving industrialization Thus Leninism allowed for the acceleration of the Marxist trajectory of history With the right degree of revolutionary conscious ness and the right kind of revolutionary organization communist power and social ist society became possible for a country without having to wait for and experience the long painful stage of capitalism to unfold This too was a powerful message to wouldbe communist revolutionaries in the lessdeveloped parts of the world In some ways these theoretical and organizational innovations by Lenin more or less turned Marxism on its head But they also became foundational pillars of MarxismLeninism as the guiding ideology of communist movements in China and elsewhere during the twentieth century mARxIsmlenInIsm Comes To ChInA Chapter 2 described the May Fourth Movement of 1919 and the founding of the CCP in 1921 It was these two events that paved the way for the introduction of MarxismLeninism into China and its emergence as the countrys dominant revolu tionary ideology Socialist ideas had been influential among many Chinese intellectuals since early in the twentieth century including not only Marxism but also nonMarxist social isms7 These schools of thought shared common ground with Marxism in the belief that society would be better if it were organized according to egalitarian principles of collective rather than private property cooperation rather than competition and power both economic and political in the hands of the producers rather than exploit ers But they differed from Marxism and particularly later with Leninism over how these lofty goals were to be achieved and what forms they would take when put into practice The May Fourth Movement steered some Chinese intellectuals toward more radi cal variations of socialism in their desperate search for solutions to Chinas internal and external crises A few inspired by the success of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the antiimperialist stand of the new Soviet government began to look more seriously at the ideological and organizational model offered by MarxismLeninism 156 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a These newly converted MarxistLeninists were guided in establishing the CCP by agents of the Moscowbased Comintern Communist International who had been sent to China to help promote revolution The CCP organization was from the beginning structured as a vanguard party along Leninist or Bolshevik lines As the party grew it enforced both ideological and political discipline on its members that soon squeezed out those advocating alternative nonMarxistLeninist versions of socialism mAo Zedong ThoughT Chapters 2 and 3 discussed the gradual rise of Mao Zedong in the hierarchy of CCP leaders during the civil war against Chiang Kaisheks Nationalist Party and his emer gence as the undisputed head of the party during the Yanan period It was in Yanan that Mao also consolidated his ideological domination of the Chinese communist movement The CCP first formally proclaimed Mao Zedong Thought as its guiding ideology in the party constitution of 1945 which was promulgated in Yanan toward the end of World War II The process of enshrining and giving official primacy to Maos theories had begun a couple of years before The Rectification Campaign of 1942 had elimi nated Maos major opponents and in the spring of 1943 he was elected chairman of the party Politburo a position he literally held until his last breath on September 9 1976 It was a conscious decision of the party leadership in 1945 to use the term Mao Zedong Thought Mao Zedong sixiang as the designation for Maos contribution to communist ideology8 They could have chosenand did considerother terms including what would be translated as Maoism Mao Zedong zhuyi but that particular rendition had a foreign connotation as in the Chinese translation for MarxismLeninism Makesi zhuyi Liening zhuyi Mao Zedong Thought was cho sen as an unmistakable statement that Maos thinking was neither derivative of nor subordinate to MarxismLeninism but embodied the successful Sinification of MarxismLeninism Sinification refers to the process of being absorbed or deeply influenced by Chinese culture society or thought In 1931 Mao had cited adapting the European ideology of MarxismLeninism to Chinas particular situation as a criti cal step in the revolutionary process After the founding of the Peoples Republic in 1949 the relationship of Mao Zedong Thought to MarxismLeninismand the true meaning of Mao Zedong Thought itselfwould become a matter of both spirited ideological contention and ferocious even violent political struggles within the CCP But the general formulation that Mao Zedong Thought is the integration of the universal truth of MarxismLeninism with the concrete practice of the Chinese revolution became the CCPs standard formu lation early in the Maoist era and remains so today The universal truth of Marxism refers to class struggle as the key to understand ing the development of human history and the belief in the inevitable downfall of capitalism and the triumph of socialismcommunism For Leninism it is the theory of the building of a vanguard proletarian party to lead the revolution and the nation i d e o l o g y a n d c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l d e v e l o P m e n t 157 It is Maos adaptation and enrichment of these universal truths to Chinese circum stances that form the essence of Mao Zedong Thought As Franz Schurmann put it MarxismLeninism is the pure ideology part of Chinese Communism while Mao Zedong Thought is the practical ideology9 There has been a very vigorous academic debate among China scholars about the extent to which Mao Zedong Thought is based on MarxismLeninism One side argues that the core of Maoism is faithful to the fundamental principles of that ideol ogy The other side concludes that Maos Thought while employing communist ter minology and rhetoric deviates so sharply from MarxismLeninism that it should be considered as an entirely different school of political thought one more deeply influenced by other sources such as Chinese philosophy and culture Some see Mao Zedong Thought as an innovative amalgamation of MarxistLeninist and Chinese characteristics Others see it as an utter betrayal or perversion of Marxist ideas Then there are those who portray Mao as having no ideology or guiding principles other than the pursuit of personal power at any cost10 What are the distinguishing features of Mao Zedong Thought which is still often referred to outside of China as Maoism and how has it influenced Chinas political development The Role of Peasants in the Revolution First and most fundamentally what is distinctive about Maoist Marxism is its des ignation of the peasants as a leading force in advancing Chinas revolution As noted above Marx saw socialism and communism as the result of a proletarian revolution that would take root in and spring from the factories and cities of advanced industrial capitalist societies Marx had little positive to say about peasants and rural society He regarded the peasantry as among the most exploited classes in capitalist society but one that history had passed by on its march toward industrialization and urbaniza tionand socialism Marx once called the peasantry a class of barbarians standing halfway outside of society a class combining all the crudeness of primitive forms of society with the anguish and misery of civilized countries Capital vol 3 part 6 Chapter 47 and compared peasant society to a sack of potatoes The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 1852 because of its lack of cohesion and class consciousness both of which he saw as prerequisites for revolutionary action The Communist Manifesto 1848 actually applauds capitalism for having subjected the country to the rule of the towns It has created enormous cities has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life Lenin was somewhat more optimistic about the revolutionary potential of the peasantry in Russia He thought rural dwellersparticularly the poorest peasants could be valuable allies of the proletariat in seizing power But like Marx he was skeptical that they could see beyond their desire for freedom and land to the ulti mate goals of socialism including the abolition of private property The Proletariat and the Peasantry 1905 158 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Mao drawing on his own rural roots went quite a bit further by identifying the peasantry as a playing a leading role in bringing the revolutionary movement to power concluding from his own investigations in his home province of Hunan in early 1927 that In a very short time in Chinas central southern and northern provinces sev eral hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm like a hurricane a force so swift and violent that no power however great will be able to hold it back They will smash all the trammels that bind them and rush forward along the road to liberation They will sweep all the imperialists warlords corrupt offi cials local tyrants and evil gentry into their graves Every revolutionary party and every revolutionary comrade will be put to the test to be accepted or rejected as they decide There are three alternatives To march at their head and lead them To trail behind them gesticulating and criticizing Or to stand in their way and oppose them Every Chinese is free to choose but events will force you to make the choice quickly Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan March 1927 Mao went on to make the case that the poorest peasants which he estimated at 70 percent of the rural population were the most revolutionary group and the van guard in the overthrow of the feudal forces by which he meant the landlord class that had dominated rural society for millennia He then put the center of gravity of Chinas struggle squarely in the countryside by claiming that to overthrow these feudal forces is the real objective of the national revolution Maos rural strategy of surrounding the cities from the countryside gradually became the dominant approach of the CCP after Chiang Kaisheks attacks against the party in the late 1920s drove them out of the urban areas into the countryside and then forced them to undertake the Long March to the hinterlands of Yanan in the mid1930s But this strategy was not without opposition both from within the CCP especially from party leaders who had been trained in more orthodox Marxism in Moscow and by Stalin who had become head of the Soviet Communist Party and the Comintern following Lenins death in 1924 Although Stalin eventually gave Mao crucial support in his bid to lead the CCP the Soviet leader was skeptical of a communist revolution based on mobilizing the rural masses He ordered the Chinese Communists to stay in the urbanbased united front with the KMT in 1927 even when it became apparent to many that Chiang Kaishek was preparing a bloody purge of the communists He later referred to Mao as a cave Marxist who hid in the countryside of Yanan rather than fighting in the cities11 China scholars have reached very different conclusions and argued with great intensity about whether Maos views of the role of the peasantry in Chinas revo lution constitute a profound break with orthodox Marxism or merely an adjust ment in strategy to accommodate circumstances that left him and the communist party no real choice There is no dispute that Mao exhibited a certain kind of political genius in recognizing that peasants would out of necessity be the lead ing force in the struggle to gain power But he never abandoned the orthodox i d e o l o g y a n d c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l d e v e l o P m e n t 159 Marxist assumption that the industrial proletariat was the leading class and the peasants a subordinate partner in the revolutionary coalition whose ultimate goal was to bring socialism and modernization to China Nevertheless Maoism is a distinctive variant of Marxism in the degree to which it puts a positive emphasis on the rural factor in influencing the revolution both before and after the acquisi tion of power Peasants and the Building of socialism After the founding of the Peoples Republic Mao at many times and in various ways continued to express and act on his ideological view that the peasantry had a spe cial role in bringing about revolutionary change The most dramaticand ultimately tragicexample was his decision to launch the Great Leap Forward in 1958 As dis cussed in chapter 3 the purpose of the Leap was to recalibrate Chinas approach to building socialism away from the Sovietstyle fiveyearplan model with its strong urban bias to a strategy of economic development that would walk on two legs in benefiting both city and countryside and promoting both industry and agriculture Furthermore the vanguard of the Leap into communism would again be the peas ants and its most revolutionary thrust would be in the rural areas with the founding of the radically egalitarian peoples communes It was also among the peasantry that the Leap took its most terrible toll in the tens of millions who perished because of famine illness and mistreatment The Cultural Revolution although it was to be a great proletarian movement and was a largely urban phenomenon in its first phases had roots in Maos con cerns in the early 1960s about the growing inequality and cadre corruption in the rural areas that had resulted from the policies sponsored by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping to promote recovery from the ravages of the Great Leap Forward And in the late 1960s when the Chairman became disenchanted with the factional ism and violence of the urban youth who made up the Red Guards he sent more than twenty million of them down to the countryside and up to the mountains where they could be reeducated by the peasants about what it really meant to make revolution Yet to a certain extent Mao was ambivalent about the role of the peasantry in the building of socialism He retained a somewhat utopian view about the revolutionary enthusiasm of the rural folk and the political purity of the countryside He was also concerned about the corrupting influences of city life But his vision of the socialist and communist future was not a pastoral one He wanted the rural areas to modern ize with the goal of overcoming what he called the Three Great Differences between industry and agriculture town and country mental and manual labor Like Marx and Lenin he believed that the ultimate objective of seizing political power and building socialism was to unleash the productive forces and usher in an era of modernization that would lead to unprecedented bounty But Mao Zedong Thought does ascribe to the rural peasants a much more vital role as a revolutionary force in achieving those ends 160 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a leninist Populismor Populist leninism The Leninist theory of revolution is based on the assumption that the masses cannot lead the revolution on their own but must be mobilized and directed by a vanguard communist party Mao was at bottom a faithful Leninist but throughout his political life both his thinking and his action reflected a deep populist streak Populism is an approach to politics one could say a kind of ideology that claims to represent the interests of ordinary people particularly against predatory elites whose own wealth and power depends on a status quo that disadvantages the vast majority12 One of Maos first important political essays written while he was just beginning to learn about MarxismLeninism was called The Great Union of the Popular Masses 1919 This essay resounds with populist themes in its call to action against all the woes that plagued China in the tumultuous decade after the fall of the Qing dynasty After observing that the decadence of the state the sufferings of humanity and the darkness of society have all reached an extreme he wrote Where is the method of improvement and reform Education industrialization strenuous efforts rapid progress destruction and construction are to be sure all right but there is a basic method for carrying out all these undertakings which is that of the great union of the popular masses If we look at the course of history as a whole we find that all the movements which have occurred throughout history of whatever type they may be have all without exception resulted from the union of a certain number of people A greater movement requires a greater union and the greatest movement requires the greatest union13 Mao rails time and again in this essay against the union of powerful people that has caused the abject misery of so much of humankind At this early time in the pre Marxist stage of his life he calls only for reform and resistance not revolution and the perspective is clearly one in which the heretofore powerless masses will on their own undertake the struggle for justice without the need for vanguard party Once he was a committed MarxistLeninist Maos faith in the masses was tem pered if not tamed by his belief in the CCP as the vanguard of the revolution But he often seemed torn between the two poles of populism and Leninism During his ascent to power in the 1930s he reminded his communist colleagues that the party had to be concerned with the wellbeing of the masses in order to win them over to their side and that if they failed in that task they would fail in making revolution The party had to think of the masses as not only foot soldiers in the revolution but also as a kind of partner in a mutual cause The people would not be swayed to join the cause by abstract ideological appeals Rather if we want to win he said in 1934 We must lead the peasants struggle for land and distribute the land to them heighten their labor enthusiasm and increase agricultural production safeguard the interests of the workers establish cooperatives develop trade with outside areas and solve the problems facing the massesfood shelter and clothing fuel rice cooking oil and salt sickness and hygiene and marriage In short all the practi cal problems in the masses everyday life should claim our attention If we attend i d e o l o g y a n d c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l d e v e l o P m e n t 161 to these problems solve them and satisfy the needs of the masses we shall really become organizers of the wellbeing of the masses and they will truly rally round us and give us their warm support Comrades will we then be able to arouse them to take part in the revolutionary war Yes indeed we will Be Concerned with the WellBeing of the Masses 1934 The enemyat that time defined as imperialism and the Kuomintangmay have superior weaponry and shield itself in iron bastions like military fortifications But if the revolutionary forces have the people on their side then the CCP had nothing to fear and victory was assured What is a true bastion of iron It is the masses the millions upon millions of people who genuinely and sincerely support the revolution That is the real iron bastion which no force can smash no force whatsoever The counterrevolution cannot smash us on the contrary we shall smash it Rallying millions upon millions of people round the revolutionary government and expanding our revolutionary war we shall wipe out all counterrevolution and take over the whole of China Be Concerned with the WellBeing of the Masses 1934 The populist impulse in Maoism often asserted itself after 1949 In the Hundred Flowers Movement 19561957 Mao called on the people to criticize the partys shortcomings during its first years in power particularly bureaucratism being out of touch with the masses At the start of the Great Leap Forward 19581960 which was in large measure a turn from an elitecentered model of socialist devel opment to a radically populist one the Chairman exclaimed that the most out standing thing about Chinas people was that for the most part they were poor and blank This gave them the desire for changes the desire for action and the desire for revolution Furthermore he said On a blank sheet of paper free from any mark the freshest and most beautiful characters can be written the freshest and most beautiful pictures can be painted Introducing a Cooperative April 15 1958 And in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution 19661968 Mao literally unleashed the masses to attack authority in all its personal and institutional manifes tations including the party Each of these episodes not only resulted in catastrophes that inflicted great suffering on the Chinese people but also ended with a firm reas sertion of Leninist authority These outcomes reflect both the perils of Maoist radical populism and Maos deep ambivalence about giving power to the people The mass line The tension between populism and Leninism in Maos thought can clearly be seen in his theory of leadership which is called the mass line Both the theory and practice of the mass line took shape during the years that the CCP spent in rural base areas from 1927 to 1945 It is a method of leadershipor work styleemphasizing that those with authority cadres must always remain in close touch with those they 162 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a lead It rejects both leaderless spontaneous action by the masses and leadership that is aloof or divorced from the masses As Mao wrote in 1943 However active the leading group may be its activity will amount to fruitless effort by a handful of people unless combined with the activity of the masses On the other hand if the masses alone are active without a strong leading group to organize their activity properly such activity cannot be sustained for long or carried forward in the right direction or raised to a high level Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership 1943 In other words cadres have to talk and listen to the people spend time among them not live at a level too high above them share their weal and woe and avoid arrogance of any kind In making decisions cadres have to put into practice the key concept of from the masses to the masses This means take the ideas of the masses scattered and unsystematic ideas and concentrate them through study turn them into concentrated and systematic ideas then go to the masses and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own hold fast to them and translate them into action and test the correctness of these ideas in such action Then once again concentrate ideas from the masses and once again go to the masses so that the ideas are persevered in and carried through And so on over and over again in an endless spiral with the ideas becoming more correct more vital and richer each time Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership 1943 The massline approach to leadership certainly does not cede all power to the people Leaders are meant to exercise authority and expect compliance But such authority is rooted in the masses not in the liberal democratic sense that the leaders are ulti mately accountable to the people they are not According to the Leninist system of democratic centralism cadres are responsible to higher levels in the partys pyramidal chain of command not to those below them But the mass line is distinctive in that it does give more emphasis and life to the democratic vein in democratic central ism than does orthodox Leninism if democratic is understood as connection and consultation by the leaders with the led In this sense the mass line might be said to be the basis of a political system with quasidemocratic characteristics but always under firm party control14 The mass line deviation and Innovation The mass line was the essence of proper cadre work style and deviation from it was one of the deadly sins of Maoism Tendencies toward elitism bureaucratism com mandism and other manifestations of a deviant work style were always to be guarded against in a vanguard party but they became a central and abiding concern to Mao after the CCP had come to power i d e o l o g y a n d c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l d e v e l o P m e n t 163 On the eve of the communist triumph in 1949 Mao warned in a speech to the party leadership that With victory certain moods may grow within the Partyarrogance the airs of a selfstyled hero inertia and unwillingness to make progress love of plea sure and distaste for continued hard living He worried that There may be some Communists who were not conquered by enemies with guns and were worthy of the name of heroes for standing up to these enemies but who cannot withstand sugarcoated bullets they will be defeated by sugarcoated bullets in the form of the prestige privileges and perquisites that power brings If the party was to achieve its goal of building a new socialist China then cadres had to remain modest pru dent and free from arrogance and rashness in their style of work and preserve the style of plain living and hard struggle that had won them the support of the masses during the civil war Report to the Second Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China March 5 1949 In the early years following the establishment of the Peoples Republic Mao came to believe that his warnings had been ignored In 1951 the ThreeAnti campaign anticorruption antiwaste antibureaucracy was launched primarily to target cadre abuses of the mass line The Hundred Flowers Movement had a similar thrust The ideological restlessness that Mao exhibited throughout the remainder of his life derived from his worriesultimately his obsessionthat China was in dire danger of veering off the socialist road to communism and might well wind up instead in the clutches of capitalism The only safeguard against this was if the vanguard party remained true to its mission and that was only possible if its leaders stayed loyal and attuned to the people through the mass line One of the institutional innovations that grew out of the Cultural Revolution was the socalled May 7th Cadre Schools which were designed in part to reinforce the mass line The name of these schools was derived from the May 7th Directive of 1966 which was a letter from Chairman Mao to Lin Biao that called on the army to be a big school in which soldiers engaged in labor and studied politics as well as fulfilling their military duties Applied to state and party cadres this Directive led to the dispatch of hundreds of thousands of officials on a rotational basis from the rela tive comfort of their urban offices to work and live among the masses mostly in rural communes while also engaging in political study and selfcriticism The May 7th Schools were an artifact of the shortlived period in which some of the radical ideas of the Cultural Revolution were actually put into practice and in practice the reality of the policy frequently fell far short of its ideals Cadres were often quartered in barracks at some distance from peasant households and worked on separate plots of land and in fact the peasants did not want the softhanded city slickers mucking up their crops Nevertheless at least the idea of the May 7th Schools embodied the centrality of the massline approach to leadership in Mao Zedong Thought Voluntarism Voluntarism is the belief that human will volition can be decisive in bringing about major historical changes It expresses supreme faith in the power of subjective 164 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a factors such as commitment faith determination and perseverance to overcome objective conditions or obstacles that stand in the way of solving a problem or achiev ing a goal Voluntarism also has a collective aspect in that it sees the power of human will magnified when people work together for a common cause Many scholars see voluntarism as one of the defining characteristics of Mao Zedong Thought and as a recurring theme in both his writings and political actions15 This voluntarist element in Maoism is also frequently cited as one of the main points separating it from orthodox Marxism which puts more emphasis on the limits that objective circumstances notably economic circumstances place on the scope of human will and activity For this reason Marxism is often said to be based on economic determinism meaning that it is the economic structure and the class system that derives from it of any given historical era that determines politics cul ture philosophy and nearly every other aspect of human society The juxtaposition of Maos voluntarism with Marxs economic determinism or materialism can be over stated Marx did not discount altogether the role of human consciousness and action in shaping important events and Mao was always an authentic Marxist in the central ity he accorded to the economic forces of production Nevertheless any discussion of Mao Zedong Thought and its impact on Chinese politics has to take account of its strong voluntarist thread The essay of Maos that is most voluntarist in its message is also one of his short est The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains The essay comes from a speech that the Chairman gave in June 1945 at a national congress of the CCP World War II was approaching its end and the likelihood that the civil war against Chiang Kaisheks Nationalists would resume was certainly on the minds of those attending this meeting In order to rally his comrades for the struggles ahead Mao inserted into his speech an ancient Chinese fable It tells the story of an old man who decides to dig away two huge mountains that are blocking his house perhaps from access to the nearest market town When a neighbor calls him foolish for attempting such an obviously impossible feat the old man replies that if he keeps digging along with his sons and their sons and so on they will eventually be able to remove the mountains since they werent growing any higher and each shovelful made them lower Mao brought the fable up to the present by saying that it was the two big mountains of imperial ism and feudalism that lie like a dead weight on the Chinese people The CCP he said was committed to digging them up We must persevere and work unceasingly he noted and if we stand up and dig together with the Chinese people why cant these two mountains be cleared away The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains 1945 Maos invocation of this fable at that critical moment of the Chinese revolution was meant to be a clarion call to party members to keep faith in their mission and themselves despite the objective fact that they would soon be fighting an army much larger better armed and supported by the United States There are also elements of Maos Leninist populism in his telling of the fable it is the combination of the Chinese people and the CCP standing up and digging together that will ensure victory Maos voluntarism is sometimes analyzed as reflecting a kind of peasant utopia nism with roots in his fascination with the fabled heroism of characters from ancient i d e o l o g y a n d c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l d e v e l o P m e n t 165 Chinese novels But it can also be traced to the series of seemingly miraculous suc cesses that he and the CCP had during their rise to power the escape from Chiangs anticommunist White Terror and extermination campaigns of the late 1920s to mid1930s their survival of the Long March of 19341935 and their ability not only to survive but also to thrive in Yanan while fighting both the Nationalists and the Japanese The lesson that Mao drew from these experiences could certainly have been a voluntarist one bolstered by the triumphs of the early years of CCP such as in the land reform campaign and particularly by fighting the United States to a stalemate in the Korean War This voluntarist element in Maoism played out most clearly in the Great Leap Forward in which the Chairman took the lead in a movement that proclaimed China would achieve economic miracles and reach the ranks of the advanced industrial nations in a decade or less And how would it do this despite the fact any objective assessment of the technology and resources available to China at that time would say that such a claim was foolish By relying on the willpower the labor and the revo lutionary enthusiasm of the Chinese people under the leadership of the CCP It was during the Leap that the slogan The spirit of the Foolish Old Man is the spirit that will transform China first became popular Maos Foolish Old Man speech of 1945 became one of his Three Constantly Read Articles that were emphasized and often memorized during the Cultural Revolution16 Even some of Maos poetry yes he was a poet and not a bad one according to many critics have lines and stanzas that carry a strong voluntarist message particu larly some written on the eve of the Cultural Revolution when he was pondering his odds of launching an ideological crusade against much of the partystate establish ment Consider the following excerpt from a poem written in 1965 Wind and thunder are stirring Flags and banners are flying Wherever men live Thirtyeight years are fled With a mere snap of the fingers We can clasp the moon in the Ninth Heaven And seize turtles deep down in the Five Seas Nothing is hard in this world If you dare to scale the heights Reascending Chingkangshan Contradiction Stuart Schram one of the foremost scholars of Mao Zedong Thought has called the theory of contradictions the philosophical core of Maos thinking17 It is also one of the more complex aspects of Maoism and one that is not easily illustrated by references to fables poems or slogans In fact the two major essays in which Mao deals most centrally with this topic On Contradiction 1937 and On the Correct 166 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Handling of Contradictions among the People 1957 are among his longest and densest writings Maos ideas about contradictions root his ideology firmly in MarxismLeninism while at the same timerather contradictorilyreflect one of his most important theoretical innovations and one that had profound conse quences for Chinese politics Mao wrote in his 1937 essay that contradiction exists in the process of development of all things and that contradiction exists universally and in all processes whether in the simple or in the complex forms of motion whether in objective phenomena or ideological phenomena On Contradiction 1937 What did he mean by contradic tion As Mao uses it contradictions refer to things that are closely connected but still fundamentally different from each other or that contradict each other But it is not just the difference but the connection that makes for a contradiction It is the continuous interaction among the aspects of a contradiction that causes the development of everythingof life nature knowledge culture society This view of the centrality of contradictions comes from an approach to philosophy called dia lectics which dates back to ancient Greece and which was adapted by Marx as the heart of his understanding of history For Marxists including Mao the most impor tant contradiction in human society before socialism and communism are reached is that between classes particularly between exploiting and exploited classes which itself reflects contradictions in the process of economic development since without exploitation development would not occur Mao again building on MarxismLeninism made the distinction between two kinds of contradictions in society nonantagonistic and antagonistic Nonantagonistic contradictions are those in which the opposing parts have some common ground despite their differences which may in fact be quite big In such cases the contradictions can be resolved through discussion debate learning and other nonviolent means Mao often pointed to the contradictions between rural peasants and urban workers as parts of the revolutionary movements as an example of a nonantagonistic contra diction both classes wanted the same fundamental thingto overthrow their exploit ers and have a better lifebut because of their vastly different circumstances they are bound to have differences about both the means and ends of the revolution There could even bein fact given the law of contradictions there had to becontradic tions within the communist party itself but these were at least as formulated in his 1937 essayalso nonantagonistic for example over whether the CCP should fol low an urban or rural strategy of revolution to reach the common goal of winning national power Mao also referred to nonantagonistic contradictions as contradictions among the peoplethe people being a broad yet vague category that included all those who were on the side of the revolution Antagonistic contradictions on the other hand are between the people and their enemies for example between poor peasants and the landlords who exploit them There is no common ground for compromise or room for debate Such contradictions can only be resolved through class struggle which requires force to defeat and suppress the enemy Responding in the late 1920s to those who claimed that the peasants were going too far in their actions against landlords Mao exclaimed i d e o l o g y a n d c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l d e v e l o P m e n t 167 A revolution is not a dinner party or writing an essay or painting a picture or doing embroidery it cannot be so refined so leisurely and gentle so temperate kind courteous restrained and magnanimous A revolution is an insurrection an act of violence by which one class overthrows another Report on an Investigation of a Peasant Movement 1927 Mao noted that if left unresolved nonantagonistic contradictions could fester and eventually turn antagonistic Therefore one of the primary tasks of a communist party leadership was to differentiate between types of contradiction decide which were the most important to tackle at any given point in time and use the correct methods in handling them Up to this point what has been presented as Maos views on contradictions is pretty standard MarxistLeninist fare But he went much further in both theory and prac tice beginning in the mid1950s Toward the end of his 1937 essay Mao approvingly quoted Lenin as follows Antagonism and contradiction are not at all one and the same Under socialism the first will disappear the second will remain That is to say antagonism is one form but not the only form of the struggle of opposites the for mula of antagonism cannot be arbitrarily applied everywhere On Contradiction 1937 In other words once the communist party had consolidated power and estab lished a socialist systemincluding the abolition of private property and exploiting classesthere would still be contradictions but they would be nonantagonistic con tradictions among the people since the economic material basis of class antago nism would have been eliminated Chairman Mao changed his mind about the validity of Lenins conclusion largely as a result of what happened following his call in 1956 to let a hundred flowers bloom let a hundred schools of thought contend As discussed in chapter 3 Mao launched the Hundred Flowers Movement in order to shake up the complacent partystate bureaucracy by inviting the people to express their thoughts about progress and problems in the first years of the PRC Because he thought China was well into the transition to socialism he expected constructive criticism and suggestionsor what he called fragrant flowersto be forthcoming but he was taken aback by the storm of condemnation of the CCP and even of himself that the movement unleashed He concluded that these were not a reflection of nonantagonistic contradictions among the people in Chinas socialist society but of poisonous weedsantagonistic con tradictionsin the form of bourgeois ideas that had to be rooted out by force before they could destroy the revolution To that end Mao implemented the AntiRightist campaign in 1957 The dire political consequences of this witchhunt for class enemies rightists are also discussed in chapter 3 Maos conclusion that antagonistic contradictions do not disappear with the advent of socialism but remain a mortal threat to the revolution requiring eternal vigilance was not only an ideological twist on MarxismLeninism but also a major turning point in Chinese politics It would preoccupy him for the rest of his life Such ideas about contradictionsseemingly abstract philosophical musings on what makes the world go roundin fact help us to understand why Mao Zedong became such an impatient revolutionary and why his use of power once he had it led to such radical ism and violence 168 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Class struggle as the Key link By definition an ideology has to have internal consistency or logic in other words the pieces have to fit together to form a coherent view of the world and guide to action If the theory of contradiction is the philosophical core of Maos ideology a number of other ideas flow directly from that core Perhaps none is more crucial in the whole construct of Mao Zedong Thought than the idea of class struggle As noted earlier the most fundamental connection between Marxism and Maoism is the class analysis approach to understanding history and society But Mao Zedong Thought takes Marxist class analysis in a much more radical direction As discussed above from the mid1950s on Mao was centrally concerned with the persistence even under socialism and after the abolition of private property of the most important of all antagonistic contradictions class struggle most especially that between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie or more precisely between proletarian and bourgeois ideology not just in Chinese society but within the CCP itself In 1953 Mao was already fretting about the corrosive influence of bourgeois ideas inside the party Combat Bourgeois Ideas in the Party 1953 His thoughts about the nature of class struggle in socialist society evolved over the next decade reflecting his experience of the Hundred Flowers Movement the AntiRightist campaign and the Great Leap Forward Maos decision to purge defense minister Peng Dehuai as a right opportunist for expressing his opinion at the Lushan Conference in mid1959 that the Great Leap should be slowed down after the first signs of famine became apparent was particularly significant it injected the specter of class struggle into the highest echelons of the CCP leadership and represented a fundamental shift in innerparty norms for handling leadership disputes With the deepening of his dissatisfaction about the direction in which China was headed during the postLeap recovery and importantly the hardening of his conclusions about the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev Maos rhetoric about the persistence of class struggle escalated and became more urgent See Box 51 At a crucial party meeting in September 1962 Mao said We can now affirm that classes do exist in socialist countries and that class struggle undoubtedly exists and told his comrades that We must raise our vigilance from now on we must talk about this every year every month every day Yet he still cautioned them to take care that the class struggle does not interfere with our work Speech at the Tenth Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee 1962 By July 1964 such caution had been jettisoned Now Mao proclaimed to his nephew Mao Yuanxin who would become one of his uncles most ardent radical supporters that Everywhere there is class struggle everywhere there are counterrevolutionary elements and We have cases where political power is in the grip of the bourgeoi sie No matter what guise they have been transformed into we must now clean them all out Talk with Mao Yuanxin 1964 When the Cultural Revolution was launched in full force in May 1966 its targets were those representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the party the government the army and all spheres of cul ture May 16 Circular 1966 In the last months of his life as the power struggle to succeed him as Chinas top leader began to heat to a feverish pitch Mao chastised those including Deng i d e o l o g y a n d c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l d e v e l o P m e n t 169 Box 51 the ideological origins of the sinosoviet sPlit The soviet union was a strong supporter of the CCP from the time of its founding in 1921 through its first decade or so in power in the PRC There certainly were tensions over revolutionary strategy between soviet and Chinese communists during the course of Chinas civil war and mao Zedong did not feel welltreated or respected by stalin when he first visited moscow in 1949 nevertheless a sinosoviet Treaty of Friendship Alliance and mutual Assistance was signed in 1950 and became the basis of massive assistance from moscow to the PRC mostly in the form of industrial designs machinery and techni cal advisors The soviets also backed the PRC in the Korean War 19501953 But relations between the two communist powers began to deteriorate in the mid 1950s after nikita Khrushchev had succeeded stalin as soviet leader by the end of the decade they had reached the point of open rupture There were a number of causes of the sinosoviet split including Chinese suspicion on soviet meddling in its internal politics soviet requests for a military presence of Chinese soil differ ences in foreign policy particularly between moscows efforts to promote peaceful coexistence with the united states and Beijings preference for confrontation with American imperialism mao was also alarmed at Khrushchevs denunciation of stalins crimes in 1956 both because it showed disunity in the communist camp and because he feared he might suf fer the same fate after his death In 1959 the soviets due to their increasing displeasure with maos taunting rhetoric and reckless policies withdrew all of their equipment and personnel from China a move that had a severe negative impact on Chinese industry during the disaster of the great leap Forward When the sinosoviet split spilled out in public in the early 1960s it took the form of an ideological debate in which each side accused the other of having betrayed marxismleninism in both theory and practice These debatescalled polemicswere carried out in print and in speeches at international meetings and pitted the Communist Party of the soviet union CPsu against the CCP in a struggle for leadership of the communist world soviet polemics denounced mao as a narrowminded nationalist and the CCP as being peasant bandits parading under the banner of communism with no understand ing of the scientific nature of building socialism The CCP portrayed Khrushchev as a political bully and an ideological lightweight who had committed the ideological crime of revisionism or altering some of most fundamental tenets of marxismleninism mao also came to the conclusion that under Khrushchev the soviet union had actu ally abandoned socialism and restored capitalism In July 1964 the CCP issued an open letter to the CPsu which was called on Khrushchevs Phony Communism and Its historical lessons for the World it declared that The revisionist Khrushchev clique are the political representatives of the soviet bourgeoisie and particularly of its privileged stratum that has gained control of the Party the government and other important organizations This privileged stratum supported its decadent lifestyle by exploiting the labor of soviet workers and farmers and was therefore behaving just like a capitalist class This dire outcome reflected the fact that the soviets had the wrong ideological perspective on crucial matters such as antagonistic contradictions and the persistence of class struggle in socialist society Those points are of course central hallmarks of mao Zedong Thought For China the most significant impact of the sinosoviet split was the influence it had on maos decision to launch the great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966 The primary purpose of the Cultural Revolution was to forestall the spread of sovietstyle revisionism to China maos main target in this struggle was liu shaoqi President of the PRC who was labeled as Chinas Khrushchev as well as the numberone party person in authority taking the capitalist road Continued 170 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Xiaoping he thought were trying to keep the country focused on its economic pri orities In the 1976 New Years Day editorial in the CCPs most important publica tions he was quoted as warning that Stability and unity do not mean writing off class struggle class struggle is the key link and everything else hinges on it18 The ways in which Mao acted on his views about the persistence and intensity of class struggle in socialist society and within the communist party had momentous consequences for Chinese politics Those views also reflect a number of important points where Mao Zedong Thought is at ideological odds withor is at least a radical elaboration oncentral elements of MarxismLeninism First consider the Maoist conclusion that a bourgeoisie could emerge within socialist society when in fact there was no longer a material basis for a capitalist class since no property was privately owned and no one worked for an owner of a private business which was the case in China by the mid1950s For Mao class the basis of all Marxist theoryno longer depended on an individuals or groups relations to the means of production but was more a matter of ideas values goals behavior and particularly the way in which they exercised authority over others19 This new bourgeoisie included those within the communist party who no longer supported the revolution but used the socialist system to enrich or empower them selves The Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas called such fallen comrades the New Class in his classic 1957 critique of the Soviet Union and similar communistparty states20 Mao went a little farther it was not just entrenched bureaucrats and party bigwigs who could fall victim to the bourgeois ideology of selfishness and individual ism everyone was at riskeven peasants factory workers and other usually stalwart supporters of the revolution Similarly in the Maoist view the term proletariat no longer applied only to industrial workers but to all thosebe they farmers intellectuals cadreswho were committed to the revolution in both thought and practice Thus the formal name of the Cultural Revolution was the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution the goal of which was to rid China of all manifestations of bourgeois ideology and replace it with a truly proletar ian culture that all of the people would embrace To Mao being proletarian reflected more of an ideological standpoint than membership in a specific economic class The second of Maos important elaborations on the idea of class struggle was his warning that if left unchallenged the newlyemerged bourgeoisie would eventu ally change China from red to whiteor from socialist to capitalist This leads to another of Maos ideological innovations the idea that socialism once established can degenerate and even retrogress back to capitalism That was in his view exactly what The ideological estrangement between Beijing and moscow persisted after Khrushchev had been ousted by leonid Brezhnev in 1964 and even reached the point of military clashes along the far eastern part of the sinosoviet border in 1969 In the 1970s the sinosoviet conflict mostly occurred in the context of rivalry for influence in the Third World It gradually dissipated after maos death and was formally ended when mikhail gorbachev visited Beijing in 1989 Today China and noncommunist Russia have gener ally friendly relations Box 51 Continued i d e o l o g y a n d c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l d e v e l o P m e n t 171 had happened in the Soviet Union and what the Cultural Revolution was designed to prevent from happening in China The notion that such ideological retrogression was possible is contrary to more conventional Marxism which saw history as inevitably and irreversibly moving in only one direction toward socialism and communism Permanent Revolution Another component of Mao Zedong Thought that logically derives from his theory of contradiction and his views on class struggle under socialism is his notion of per manent revolution21 This is also another aspect of Maoism that many scholars argue distinguishes it from mainstream Marxism In Maos view the process of revolution does not stop when the communist party seizes power and continuing the revolu tion does not just mean putting into place new institutions and policies that reflect the goals of the revolution For Mao permanent revolution meant there would have to be revolutions within the revolution if human society was going to continue to make progress At the outset of the Great Leap Forward Mao declared I stand for the theory of permanent revolution In making revolution one must strike while the iron is hotone revolution must follow another the revolution must continually advance The Hunanese often say Straw sandals have no patternthey shape themselves in the making Speech to the Supreme State Conference 1958 If the hot iron of revolution is left to cool off it would harden and become an obstacle to change rather than its instrument Maos reference to the saying from Hunan his native province about straw sandals meant that although the purpose of the revolution to build socialism and reach communism is clearas is the purpose of sandals to protect the feetthe actual process of achieving their purpose must be custommade to fit the circumstances or the feet of the wearer The revolution that worked at one historical moment will not fit the next so the revolution must be continually remade22 Much of Maos rule over China can be seen as an application of his theory of per manent revolution for example the fullsteamahead dontstoptoconsolidate approach to the collectivization of agriculture culminating in the formation of the radically egalitarian peoples communes in 1958 and the allout class warfare against the representatives of the bourgeoisie in the party during the Cultural Revolution But in theory Mao went even further with his views on permanent revolution Not only would it be a feature of socialist society but it would even continue into the era of communism Will there be revolutions in the future when all imperialists in the world are overthrown and all classes eliminated In my view there will still be a need for revolution The social system will still need to be changed and the term revolution will still be in use Speech at the Second Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee of the CCP 1956 In 1962 he wrote The transition from social ism to communism is revolutionary The transition from one stage of communism to another is also revolutionary Communism will surely have to pass through many stages and many revolutions A Critique of Soviet Economics 1962 172 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Mao conceded that revolutions in the communist era will not be of the same nature as those in the era of class struggle Speech at the Second Plenary Session 1956 How could they since communism is by definition a classless society But there would be scientific technological cultural revolutionsand even he suggests the need to overthrow many aspects of communist society when they impede fur ther progress Communism will be an era of uninterrupted development which will be the new form of permanent revolution A Critique of Soviet Economics 1962 In a very unMarxist mode Mao several times even mused that communism would not be the ultimate destination of human social development He did not speculate on what might lie beyond communism but said that it too at some point would come to an end Even as he was preparing in March 1958 to launch China on the Great Leap Forward with the goal of reaching communism as its objective Mao noted that There is nothing in the world that does not arise develop and disap pear Monkeys turned into humans humankind arose in the end the whole human race will disappear it will turn into something else at that time the earth itself will also cease to exist The earth must certainly be extinguished the sun too will grow cold All things must have a beginning and an end Talks at the Chengtu Conference 1958 seek Truth from Facts It may seem rather strange that a revolutionary best known for his utopian ideas and radical polices would also have a pragmatic side But that is very much the case with Mao Zedong Maos pragmatism was a key part of his operational code One of Maos most important essays is called On Practice written in 1939 in which he explores at great length the MarxistLeninist theory of knowledge episte mology or how it is that human beings come to learn about the world around them and determine truth from falsehood Mao adamantly affirms that social practice alone is the criterion of the truth and that only by constant reengagement with con crete reality can a person claim to have true knowledge of anything As he colorfully put it If you want to know the taste of a pear you must change the pear by eating it yourself He goes on to say If you want to know the theory and methods of revolu tion you must take part in revolution On Practice 1939 Not only was this one of Maos guiding principles in developing his revolutionary strategy including guerrilla warfare but in the mid1960s it would also become part of his rationale for the Cultural Revolution One of Maos goals for that move ment was to give the youth of China born after Liberation and accustomed to a rela tively easy life an opportunity to taste revolution so that they would become worthy successors to the Maoist cause after his death Mao was of course a strong believer in Lenins point that without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement What Is to Be Done 1905 But in the Chairmans view the only way to develop a correct theory was on the basis of practice and the only way to make sure that it continued to be correct was to con stantly subject it to practice and if need be adjust the theory so that it more correctly reflected reality Marxism Mao said i d e o l o g y a n d c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l d e v e l o P m e n t 173 emphasizes the importance of theory precisely and only because it can guide action If we have a correct theory but merely prate about it pigeonhole it and do not put it into practice then that theory however good is of no significance Knowledge begins with practice and theoretical knowledge is acquired through practice and must then return to practice On Practice 1939 Or in another context he pronounced simply that No investigation no right to speak Oppose Book Worship 1930 In stressing the importance of practice experience and investigation Mao was arguing against those in the party leadership who approached any problem with an absolutely fixed theory and refused to bend even if it was not working or proved counterproductive Such people were called dogmatists because they treated their interpretation of MarxismLeninism as dogma or as absolutely authoritative and not to be disputed or diverged from under any circumstances He was also refuting the empiricists in the party who thought theory was of no great importance in guid ing practice but only looked to their own experiences and the empirical facts of the immediate situation in deciding policy How then according to Mao can one strike the right balance between theory and practice Not surprisingly the right balance comes from the contradiction between the twothe unity of opposites that is the source of the development of all things During the period of the civil and antiJapanese wars 19271949 Mao seemed to come down on the side of practice being the most decisive factor In two essays written in the 1940s he used the phrase seek truth from facts shi shi qiu shi as a capsule summary of how communists are supposed to evaluate the correctness of their theories and that phrase was adopted as the motto for the school to train party leaders in Yanan23 Mao did point out that communists must be guided by the general principles of MarxismLeninism when deciding what conclusions to draw from the facts Reform Our Study 1941 But in On Practice he makes the rather bold statement that MarxismLeninism has in no way exhausted truth but ceaselessly opens up roads to the knowledge of truth in the course of practice This quote from Mao and the slogan seek truth from facts not surprisingly were cited extensively as guiding principles for the economic reforms that were introduced after Deng had consolidated power in the early 1980s In 1988 in fitting reflection of the profound shift in the partys guiding ideology after Mao the CCPs monthly ideological journal which was called Red Flag Hong Qi during the Maoist era was renamed Seeking Facts Qiu Shi in 1988 Both chapters 2 and 3 note that one key source of Maos success in the struggle for national power was his willingness to modify policies such as land reform in the communist base areas that were not working even if that meant adjusting the way in which ideology was applied In chapter 3 Frederick C Teiwes discusses the two broad tendencies of Maos approach to policy the revolutionary romantic and the pragmatic In Teiwess view it was pragmatism that characterized most of Maos career as a revolutionary but that after the Hundred Flowers and particularly with the onset of the Great Leap Forward the romanticism took over But even on the eve of the Cultural Revolution the pragmatic Mao wrote Where do correct ideas come from Do they drop from the skies No Are they innate in the 174 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a mind No They come from social practice and from it alone Where Do Correct Ideas Come From 1963 One could conclude that the latter Mao lost touch with his own good advice to seek truth from facts as he became more isolated and detached from realityin fact as will be discussed below that is exactly what his successors beginning with Deng Xiaoping did say about him ChInese CommunIsm AFTeR mAo Did Maos death and the coming to power of Deng Xiaoping bring the end of ide ology in the PRC and a complete renunciation of Maoism After all Deng and his successors have taken the country a long way down the capitalist road that the Chairman decried ideologically and fought so hard to prevent China is certainly less ideological than it was in the Maoist era but the CCP still swears allegiance to MarxismLeninismMao Zedong Thought and that ideologyalthough having been reformulated in major waysstill provides the foundation of the operational code of Chinas leaders and defines the boundaries of what is permissible in Chinese politics maoism after mao In 1956 Nikita Khrushchev the leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union gave a Secret Speech that depicted in great detail the crimes of his predecessor Joseph Stalin The speech sent shock waves throughout the world particularly the communist world It set in motion the process of deStalinization during which Stalin was literally erased from the formal history of the USSR It culminated in the removal of Stalins embalmed corpse from the Mausoleum in Moscows Red Square where it had been on display next to that of Lenin which is still there and its burial in a grave near the wall of the Kremlin Nothing so drastic has happened to Mao in postMao China Too much of the history of the CCP is bound up with the legacy of Mao Zedong for his successors no matter how far they deviate from his ideology and policies to repudiate him or his ideas completely It has been remarked that Mao was Lenin and Stalin wrapped into onemeaning that he not only led the communist party to power but that he also ruled the country for a long period Lenin died about six years after coming to power while Stalin ruled the Soviet Union for nearly thirty years The CCP cannot totally disassociate itself from the legacy of Mao without seriously undermining its legitimacy and its claim to be Chinas rightful ruling party This was particularly true for Deng Xiaoping Not only was he a veteran of the Long March but he also was among the top leaders at the founding of the regime and backed some of Maos most disastrous campaigns including the AntiRightist Campaign and the Great Leap Forward As chapter 3 documents Deng was for a long time one of Maos favorites among the top party leadership and Mao protected him from suffering even worse harm when he was purged for ideological mistakes in both 1966 and 1976 Yet it was politically critical for Deng to separate himself from Maos most radi cal ideas and particularly from the Cultural Revolution as he undertook his program i d e o l o g y a n d c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l d e v e l o P m e n t 175 of market reform and opening the Chinese economy to the world To that end he engineered a nuanced reevaluation of Mao that criticized the Chairmans errors and praised his accomplishments This reevaluation never became a deMaoification campaign As Deng put it We will not do to Chairman Mao what Khrushchev did to Stalin Answers to the Italian Journalist Oriana Fallaci 1980 The Chairmans embalmed remains are on solemn public displayand still attract huge crowdsin a Memorial Hall in the center of Tiananmen Square behind which is a souvenir store selling all sorts of Mao trinkets See Box 52 In 1981 the CCP issued a lengthy document called Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the Peoples Republic of China Chapters 3 and 4 of this book note the political significance of the Resolution The Resolution concluded that Maos achievements were much greater than his mistakes and it also spends many pages providing an assessment of Mao Zedong Thought It reaf firms that his ideology remains the valuable spiritual asset of our party and that it will be our guide to action for a long time to come The document presents an extensive cat alog of the ways in which Mao enriched and developed MarxismLeninism including Box 52 maoism outside of china In the 1960s many student activists in the united states and Western europe were enam ored with maoism The Cultural Revolution and the ideology that guided it seemed tied to a worldwide struggle against oppressive authority crass materialism and imperial ismincluding the American war in Vietnam They saw the Red guards as kindred spirits in rebellion against stuffy professors uptight administrators and outoftouch elders in general After all Chairman mao had said things like There are teachers who ramble on and on when they lecture they should let their students doze off If your lecture is no good why insist on others listening to you Rather than keeping your eyes open and lis tening to boring lectures it is better to get some refreshing sleep you dont have to listen to nonsense you can rest your brain instead Remarks at the spring Festival 1964 little did maos foreign admirers know of the terror being unleashed by the Red guards against alleged class enemies many of whom were physically or psychologi cally brutalized or the scale of cultural destruction that the young rebels caused A few maoist organizations emerged outside of China from the tumult of the 1960s most of these have remained on the fringes of politics in their respective countries including the Revolutionary Communist Party usA which was founded in 1975 or are now defunct In a handful of countries selfproclaimed maoists have engaged in armed struggle against the government the most active being in India nepal and Peru The Communist Party of India maoist and its Peoples liberation guerrilla Army have been waging an insurgency for more than twentyfive years and have recently become very active mostly in the eastern part of the country This organization is often called the naxalites after the region in the state of West Bengal where it was founded in 1967 It occasionally carries out assassinations of politicians attacks police offices to gain weapons and robs banks It is estimated to have twenty thousand members with bases in nearly half of Indias twentyeight states where it effectively controls large parts of the countryside It draws supporters largely from among the adivasis sanskrit meaning original people who are descendents of the first inhabitants of the Indian subconti nent The adivasis live mostly in densely forested areas and are among the most impov erished and discriminated against groups in Indiawhich makes them particularly the Continued 176 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a his ideas about a ruralbased revolution that involved encircling the cities from the countryside and finally winning countrywide victory his contributions to military the ory particularly guerrilla warfare and the need to develop a peoples army and some of his thoughts about guiding China through the transition to socialism The Resolution then focuses on three basic points that it says constitute the liv ing soul of Mao Zedong Thought that are particularly of continuing relevance to the CCP in how it legitimizes its rule in China The first is seek truth from facts which young receptive to the call to revolution of the naxalites Although Indias maoists have never seriously contended for power they remain a source of considerable worry for the government especially in the states where their operations are expanding In neighboring nepal a tiny nation in the himalayan mountains a maoist party actu ally won the most seats in parliamentary elections in April 2008 A coalition arrangement with two other parties gave the head of the Communist Party of nepal maoist enough votes to be elected as the countrys prime minister The maoists had been fighting a violent peoples war against nepals monarchy for ten years until 2006 when they signed a peace agreement during the war which claimed an estimated thirteen thousand lives the rebels gained widespread support in the rural areas of nepal which is one of the worlds poorest countries The partys founder is Pushpa Kumal dahal a school teacher turned guerrilla fighter better known by his revo lutionary name of Prachanda Fierce one Its ideology is officially called marxism leninismmaoismPrachanda Path which reflects its leaders adaptation of communist theory notably mao Zedongs ideas about peasant revolution to nepals particular situ ation such as the combination of class and caste oppression The CCP did not support the maoist insurrection in nepal because from Chinas perspective it was a destabilizing force in that part of the world once the nepali maoists gave up armed struggle in order to participate in the democratic process they had to tone down some of their most radical demands but the party remains committed to pursuing social and economic justice They also achieved one of their most important political aims the abolition of the monarchy In may 2008 the Kingdom of nepal was renamed the democratic Federal Republic of nepal Prachanda served as nepals prime minister for about a year before resigning in a dispute with the countrys president over who had the power to appoint the army chief of staff Prachanda drew inspiration not only from the Chinese revolution but also from another communist movement that claimed a maoist ideological lineage the shining Path Sendero Luminoso in Peru The shining Path was established in the early 1980s declaring that all of the worlds ruling communist parties at the time including China under deng xiaoping and the soviet union under gorbachev had become revisionist counterrevolutionary organizations shining Path remained loyal to the most radical variation of maoist thought and practice as developed by its founderleader philoso phy professor Abimael guzmán known as gonzalo gonzalo Thought had its roots in the writings of earlier twentiethcentury Peruvian revolutionaries and embodied elements based on the countrys Indian heritage and culture The shining Path gained some support among poor peasants but its extremely violent often brutal tactics eroded its popularity guzmán and other top leaders of the movement were captured in the 1990s The orga nization dwindled dramatically in size but remains sporadically active in remote areas of the country Box 52 Continued i d e o l o g y a n d c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l d e v e l o P m e n t 177 as noted above conveys the pragmatic side of Maoism The second is the mass line as the guiding principle of the party in all its work As the vanguard of the proletariat the party exists and fights for the interests of the people But it always constitutes only a small part of the people so that isola tion from the people will render all the partys struggles and ideals devoid of con tent and make success impossible To persevere in the revolution and advance the socialist cause our party must uphold the mass line The final basic point of the living soul of Maoism is independence and selfreliance This encompasses the idea that China must chart it own way and must always main tain our own national dignity and confidence and there must be no slavishness or submissiveness in any form in dealing with big powerful or rich countries This may sound somewhat ironic given the depth of Chinas current integration in the interna tional economy and its rise to great power status But the idea of selfreliance persists in the PRCs contemporary statements on the overall orientation of its foreign policy The Resolution also warns against adopting a dogmatic attitude towards the sayings of comrade Mao Zedong to regard whatever he said as the unalterable truth which must be mechanically applied everywhere It stresses that the CCP must acknowledge that Mao made serious blunders especially in his later years and that some of these were guided by parts of his ideology that simply were wrong Mao is chastised for enlarging the scope of class struggle and of impetuosity and rashness in economic con struction These errors were of course the basis of the three great tragedies of Maoist China from which the postMao leadership wants to cut the ideological cord the AntiRightist Campaign the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution Finally as a way to depersonalize even the positive components of Mao Zedong Thought the Resolution declares that the ideology of the CCP is a crystallization of the collective wisdom of the Chinese communist party not the product of one per son Many outstanding leaders of our party made important contributions to the scientific works of comrade Mao Zedong Maos problem was that he deviated from his own scientific ideas as well as from the collective wisdom of the party leader ship In other words we will all take credit for what has gone right since the founding of the PRC and the Chairmans good ideas what went wrong well that was his fault and the result of his faulty ideas This is still the official evaluation of Mao Zedong Thought in China By establishing the principle that the guiding ideology of the CCP is the result of collective wisdom rather than the product of any single individual the party was partly dethroning Mao but also opening up the possibilities for further important contributions to Chinese communism deng xiaoping Theory If Mao Zedong is often seen as a revolutionary romantic guided by a radical ideol ogy and impervious to practical concerns then Deng Xiaoping is in contrast viewed as the ultimate pragmatist who had little use for communist theory Both are exag gerations that distort any thorough understanding of what made these two towering 178 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a figures in modern Chinese history tick As pointed out previously Maoism has a sig nificant pragmatic element and the Chairmans dictum to seek truth from facts became an early watchword of the Deng regime and remains so today Likewise Deng Xiaoping did have a distinctive ideological bent that shaped his political choices and the way that he used his power Although he never took for himself the formal top positions in either the party or the state Deng Xiaoping was often referred to in the Chinese media while he was alive as Chinas paramount leader and as the architect of Chinas reform and open ing up After his death in 1997 Deng Xiaoping Theory was added into the CCP constitution along with MarxismLeninism and Mao Zedong Thought as the partys guiding ideology Deng Xiaoping Theory was said to be the outcome of the integration of the basic tenets of MarxismLeninism with the practice of contemporary China and the features of the times a continuation and development of Mao Zedong Thought under new historical conditions it repre sents a new stage of development of Marxism in China it is Marxism of contem porary China and it is the crystallized collective wisdom of the Communist Party of China It is guiding the socialist modernization of China from victory to victory General Program Constitution of the Communist Party of China Some of the central features of Dengs ideological contribution to the CCP are con veyed under the general rubric of Building Socialism with Chinese Characteristics Mao it is inferred successfully led the communist party to power in 1949 and for the first few years in power when he began to make serious mistakes in his policies to build socialism in China Deng picked up not where Mao had left off when he died in 1976 but where he had gone wrong beginning in the mid1950s with the AntiRightist Campaign and the Great Leap Forward Deng provided the CCP with the theory that correctly addressed the basic questions concerning the building consolidation and development of socialism in China which is precisely where Mao is said to have failed Deng Xiaoping Theory gives absolute priority to economic development under party leadership of coursewhile Mao Zedong Thought though certainly not shunning that as a goal put politics in command As Deng noted in 1984 in an offhanded slap at Mao What is socialism and what is Marxism We were not quite clear about this in the past Marxism attaches utmost importance to developing the productive forces One of our shortcomings after the founding of the Peoples Republic was that we didnt pay enough attention to developing the productive forces Socialism means eliminating poverty Pauperism is not social ism still less communism Build Socialism with Chinese Characteristics 1984 emphasis added Building Socialism with Chinese Characteristics is the partys way of explaining in ideological terms the introduction of market reforms into Chinas economy and for letting aspects of capitalism such as the profit motive and private ownership of busi nesses be the driving force for the countrys economic development It is in essence the updated version of Dengs cat theory first expounded in 1962 when he said It doesnt matter if a cat is white or black as long as it catches mice He meant that the measure of success of any economic policy should be whether it led to increased i d e o l o g y a n d c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l d e v e l o P m e n t 179 production not whether it met some abstract ideological standard He expressed this view in support of allowing farmers more economic freedom as part of the effort to recover from the Great Leap Famine Such ideas got Deng into big political trouble with Mao during the Cultural Revolution Once he had returned to power in the late 1970s Deng really let the capitalist cat loose and transformed the PRCs centrally planned economy into a mix of socialism and capitalism that since the 1990s has been called a socialist market economy The nature of that transformation and the extent of the marketization of Chinas economy is discussed in chapter 8 Deng Xiaoping Theory rationalizes the adoption of a socialist market economy by positing that China is in the primary or initial stage of socialism Based on an orthodox Marxist view that history inevitably passes through a sequence of stages of development the primary stage of socialism is that which follows immediately after the political overthrow of the capitalist system For some period of time it would be unavoidable in fact absolutely necessary to use many aspects of capitalism while building socialism And this it is implied is where Mao Zedong and his Thought got it wrong Although in the early 1950s during the first period of communist rule in China Mao said the PRC would have a mixed economy he came to believe that the transition to socialism could happen much faster and all aspects of capitalism done away with much sooner a reflection of his voluntarism and began the countrys full socialist transformation in 1954 In contrast Deng is credited with correctly recogniz ing that socialist China even in the late twentieth century and beyond would have to use capitalist means to become developed enough to move on to the next stages of the socialist transition Even more unMaoist are some of the slogans often associated with Deng Xiaoping Theory such as Let some people get rich first and To get rich is glorious Deng was adamant that China would not become capitalist even if it used many aspects of a capitalist market economy to promote development Rather he insisted that we can develop a market economy under socialism Developing a market economy does not mean practicing capitalism We Can Develop a Market Economy under Socialism 1979 The critical difference between a socialist market economy and a capitalist mar ket economy seems largely to be a matter of who has political power in the coun try In Dengs view in a capitalist country the wealthy capitalists owners of private property dominate both the economic and political systems In a socialist system political power is in the hands of the vanguard communist party that represents the interests of the people It is the party that will make sure that the socialist market economy does not lead to the kind of exploitation and inequalities that mar a truly capitalist system and that the market part of the economy ultimately serves the goal of building socialism and achieving communism The Four Cardinal Principles If Building Socialism with Chinese Characteristics conveys the economic heart of Deng Xiaoping Theory the Four Cardinal Principles express its political essence24 The phrase Four Cardinal Principles comes from a lengthy speech that Deng gave 180 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a in March 1979 at a forum on the Partys theoretical work very soon after he had con solidated his position as Chinas undisputed leader In this context cardinal means essential or fundamental The speech did not gather much attention outside of China at the time because most of the world was focused on the economic changes Deng was bringing to China He had been named Time magazines Man of the Year for 1978 in the January 1 1979 issue and was grandly feted in an official visit to the United States in late January to early February of 1979 In retrospect the speech was one of the most important Deng ever gave and the Four Cardinal Principles are as essen tial as Building Socialism with Chinese Characteristics is to understanding Deng Xiaoping Theory The purpose of the forum at which Deng gave this speech was to set the ideologi cal and political guidelines for the Partys shift in the focus of its work from the class struggle of the Cultural Revolution and late Maoist era to economic development In the speech Deng reiterated that modernization would be the Partys main task for the present and for some time to come He then laid out what he called the Four Cardinal Principles that were the basic prerequisite for achieving modernization 1 Upholding the socialist road 2 Upholding the dictatorship of the proletariat 3 Upholding the leadership of the communist party 4 Upholding MarxismLeninism and Mao Zedong Thought Deng asserted that only by following these principles in carrying out economic reform could the party be sure that it was fostering socialist modernization rather than promoting capitalism as some in the party were contending would happen if China followed Dengs path Deng also stressed that ideological reinforcement was urgently needed at that particular time which coincided with the Democracy Wall movement of the late 1970s see chapter 4 Deng warned in this speech of certain incidents incited by bad elements who raised slogans like Give us human rights and set up organizations such as the Democracy Forum Can we tolerate this kind of freedom of speech Deng asked No Party member must ever waver in the slightest on this basic stand To undermine any of the Four Cardinal Principles is to undermine the whole cause of socialism in China the whole cause of modernization Deng went into great detail about the meaning and importance of each of the four principles But they really all boil down to the principle of upholding the leadership of the communist party It is the party that will keep China on the socialist road it is the party that enforces the dictatorship of the proletariat it is the party that interprets the current meaning of MarxismLeninismMao Zedong Thought And about party leadership Deng declared In the China of today we can never dispense with leadership by the Party and extol the spontaneity of the masses Party leadership of course is not infallible and the problem of how the Party can maintain close links with the masses and exercise cor rect and effective leadership is still one that we must seriously study and try to solve i d e o l o g y a n d c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l d e v e l o P m e n t 181 But this can never be made a pretext for demanding the weakening or liquidation of the Partys leadership The Four Cardinal Principles do not reflect the kind of sharp break with Mao Zedong Thought that the makewayforcapitalism emphasis of the Building Socialism with Chinese Characteristics does In fact the principles represent one of the clearer ide ological continuities between the two leaders The Four Cardinal Principles are very similar to the six criteria that Mao laid out in the revised version of his 1957 speech On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People during the Hundred Flowers Movement Mao said that these criteria should be used to distinguish between fragrant flowers nonantagonistic contradictions and poisonous weeds antagonistic contradictions when judg ing how to treat criticism of Chinas political system and leaders The key distinc tion was whether the criticism was helpful or hurtful to six indisputable aspects of politics in the PRC including the unity of the people of all our nationalities the goal of socialist transformation and socialist construction the peoples democratic dictatorship democratic centralism the leadership of the Communist Party and international socialist unity and the unity of the peaceloving people of the world The Four Cardinal Principles is certainly a variation on a Maoist theme and as Mao emphasized Of these six criteria the most important are the two about the socialist path and the leadership of the Party During the era of his rule Deng Xiaoping often invoked the Four Cardinal Principles including in the aftermath of the Beijing Massacre in June 1989 In his Address to Officers at the Rank of General and Above in Command of the Troops Enforcing Martial Law in Beijing June 9 1989 Deng commented that It is not wrong to keep to the Four Cardinal Principles If we have made a mistake it is that we have not kept to them consistently enough and inculcated them as basic ideas in the people the students and all cadres and Party members True we have talked about keeping to those principles conducting ideological and political work and combating bourgeois liberalization and mental pollution But we have not talked about those things consistently The mistake was not in the principles themselves but in the failure to keep to them consistently enough and to do a good job in education and in ideological and political work The Four Cardinal Principles were written into the CCP constitution in 1992 at the same time Building Socialism with Chinese Characteristics was added which was a prelude to the formal inclusion of Deng Xiaoping Theory as part of the CCPs guiding ideology in 1999 The principles themselves though not the phrase Four Cardinal Principles were incorporated into the Preamble of the constitution of the PRC in 1993 which gave them the force of law25 They remain today part of the CCPs core doc trine As former party leader Hu Jintao remarked in his report to the Eighteenth Party Congress in November 2012 as he was about to hand over power to Xi Jinping Taking the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics means we must under the leader ship of the Communist Party of China and basing ourselves on Chinas realities take 182 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a economic development as the central task and adhere to the Four Cardinal Principles and the policy of reform and opening up26 Understanding these two aspects of Deng Xiaoping TheoryBuilding Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and the Four Cardinal Principlesreveals the opera tional code of Chinas communist leaders as they continue to navigate the delicate balance between promoting an increasingly open economy and keeping a firm grip on power Jiang Zemin and the Theory of the Three Represents Deng Xiaoping seems to have set intentionally or otherwise the precedent that the top leader of the CCP has the right to make an original contribution to the CCPs guiding ideology that conveys the theory behind major policy initiatives of that lead ers administration Both Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao did this each praising and build ing on the contributions of his predecessors while adapting them to the priorities of the times Jiangs ideological innovation is called the Three Represents which he first expressed during an inspection tour of Guangdong province in February 2000 He noted at the time that CCP should always represent the development trend of Chinas advanced productive forces the orientation of Chinas advanced cul ture and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people What this boiled down to was a reaffirmation of Dengs modernization program and economic reforms But there was also an important element of innovation that was made clear only through further explication and other formulations of the Three Represents and how it was actually put into practice During his last term in office 19972002 Jiang took the bold step of leading the CCP to recognize the crucial role of the socalled new social strata as the most dynamic force in Chinas economic development The new social strata includes groups that had been created during the process of market reform and internationalization most importantly private entre preneurs managers and technical staff who work for foreign enterprises as well as professionals intellectuals and others who are selfemployed or work outside the public sector of the economy The Three Represents theory was an ideological ratio nalization for allowing members of these strata to join the CCP In other words in a truly innovative and ironic adaptation of MarxismLeninism capitalistsas rep resentatives of Chinas most advanced productive forceswere welcome in the communist party At a broader ideological level Jiangs Three Represents implied that the CCP was moving to cast itself as the representative not just of the working classes but also of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people Some scholars see this as reflect ing an even more profound transformation of the CCPs selfimage of its role from being a revolutionary party committed and empowered to lead the nation toward socialism and communism to that of a governing party which implies a less ideo logical claim about its purpose and an effort to broaden its base of political support in Chinese society27 i d e o l o g y a n d c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l d e v e l o P m e n t 183 As discussed in chapter 4 when Jiang Zemin began to put forth the ideas of the Three Represents he ran into significant political opposition from conservative party leaders who were particularly unhappy with such an open embrace of private entre preneurs they are never officially referred to as capitalists by the CCP But in the end he and his supporters prevailed Jiangs theoretical contributions were inscribed in the party 2002 and state 2003 constitutions and the CCPs guiding ideology was formally dubbed MarxismLeninism Mao Zedong Thought Deng Xiaoping Theory and the important thought of the Three Represents hu Jintaos harmonious socialist society The constitutional enshrinement of the Three Represents took place at party and state congresses that were also the moments of transition in leadership from Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao Although there had been clear signs of political rivalry between Jiang and Hu Hu became effusive in his praise of his predecessor and his ideological con tributions The threevolume collection of The Selected Works of Jiang Zemin was published with great propaganda fanfare in 2006 followed by a national campaign aimed largely at party cadres to study Jiangs writings While paying due respect to the important thought of the Three Represents Hu also carved out an ideological niche of his own28 Soon after he had become CCP general secretary 2002 and PRC president 2003 Hu began to enunciate slogans and signal policy priorities with a definite populist tinge Hus brand of populism was very different from Maos which was mostly a matter of mobilizing the masses to take action in support of his agenda In contrast Hu was a populist in the sense of advocating policies that addressed some of the socioeconomic downsides of Chinas three decades of spectacular growth inequitable income distribution among people and regions unemployment and inadequate public services particularly health care Special emphasis was placed on combating rural poverty and narrowing the vast ruralurban gap The countrys very serious environmental problems and the neces sity for sustainable development were also high on Hus agenda The overall goal of these policy priorities was said to be to create a harmoni ous socialist society the underlying assumption being that unless these issues were addressed social and political instability would increase and lead to disharmony The extent of protests by displaced workers discontented farmers and citizens angered about pollution during his years in power certainly influenced Hus thinking The idea of a harmonious socialist society with its calls for social justice and putting people first was an implicit critique of Jiang Zemins growthatanycost and rather elitist economic strategy and Deng Xiaopings as well Hu faced some resis tance to his effort to shift the focus of the partys work in a more populist direction from those leaders who did not want resources diverted away from the more prosper ous coastal areas and modern sectors of the economy Critics of the Hu administra tion point to lack of progress in righting the balance of Chinas economic develop ment as proof that the resistance prevailed Nevertheless Hu Jintaos policy and ideological initiatives were formally endorsed at the Seventeenth CCP Congress in late 2007 They were written into the party 184 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a constitution with statements such as The Communist Party of China leads the peo ple in building a harmonious socialist society added to the preamble The more general formulation of Hus contribution to the CCP ideology is presented as a Scientific Outlook on Development that calls for comprehensive balanced and sustainable development The constitution goes as far as saying this is a scientific theory that is in the same line as MarxismLeninism Mao Zedong Thought Deng Xiaoping Theory and the important thought of Three Represents and keeps up with the times But it wasnt until the Eighteenth CCP Congress in November 2012 that Hus ideo logical embellishment was added to Chinese communisms pantheon of guiding theo ries with the party consititution being amended to proclaim that The Communist Party of China takes MarxismLeninism Mao Zedong Thought Deng Xiaoping Theory the important thought of Three Represents and the Scientific Outlook on Development as its guide to action A full paragraph was also added to the opening section of the constitution explaining how Hus ideas represent the latest achieve ment in adapting Marxism to Chinas conditions The path by which Jiang Zemins Three Represents and Hu Jintaos Scientific Outlook on Development became official party doctrine appears to have set a pat tern of ideological amalgamation that is part of the CCPs increasingly institutional ized leadership succession Step one is for the newly anointed party leader to signal his ideological bent in general terms give it a framing rubric and gradually expound on its practical content Then it is promoted to constitutional status genetically linked to the ideological contributions of earlier leadership generations while being touted as having blazed new theoretical ground in advancing the cause of building socialism and the march toward communism xI JInPIngs ChInA dReAm It was a few years into Hu Jintaos rule that his harmonious society stamp on CCP ideology became apparent But within two weeks of taking over as party leader Xi Jinping started touting his vision of the China Dream which likely portends how he conceives of his contribution to the partys guiding theories The media almost immediately began playing up the slogan a song with the title China Dream became a hit and the party propaganda department ordered the idea to be written into school textbooks29 His first major address after being anointed president of the PRC by the National Peoples Congress in March 2013 was given the title The China Dream The Peoples Dream30 The specific content of the China Dream and its policy implications will only become apparent as Xi gets a firmer grip on power But in its initial formulations the concept clearly has a strong element of nationalism at its core Xi has emphasized that the great renaissance of the Chinese nation and reclaiming the countrys right ful place as a great power are central goals of his administration His related talk of a strongarmy dream is meant not only to win the political support of the armed forces but also to underline his view that Chinas military might should be commen surate with it economic strength i d e o l o g y a n d c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l d e v e l o P m e n t 185 Many commentators have pointed out how the China Dream perhaps consciously evokes the American Dream which is essentially a dream of personal opportunity and prosperity In various remarks in early 2013 Xi made reference to the school dream employment dream housing dream and wealth acquisition dream 31 This aspect of the China Dream could appeal greatly to the PRCs rapidly expanding middle class another important constituency that the party wants to keep on its side But there is also strong socialist message in the Chinese Dream that in addition to working hard to improve their living standards people should also work hard for the sake of the collective good and national rejunvenation There has been little reference to political goals as part of the China Dream Xi has stated that China should aspire to become democratic as well as prosperous but he has made it abundantly clear that this is not to be Westernstyle liberal democracy He has cited as a negative example the last Soviet Communist Party leader Mikhail Gorbachev for bringing about the demise of the Soviet Union by introducing too much political reform and being ideologically lax Why did the Soviet Union disinte grate Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse Xi said in a closed party meet ing in December 2012 An important reason was that their ideals and convictions wavered32 He went on to observe The China dream is an ideal Communists should have a higher ideal and that is communism33 While the China Dream draws less on communist jargon than previous emendations of the CCP ideology it is still encased in the partys efforts to legitimize its rule ConClusIon Ideology In A ChAngIng ChInA Much has been written about the increasing irrelevance of communist ideology in the PRC Yet the ruling party with more than eighty million members still assigns a high priority to MarxismLeninism and its Chinese adaptations There is a Central Party School in Beijing which all mid and highranking party cadres must attend for a few months to a few years to study a variety of subjects including ideology The CCP often convenes theoretical work conferences especially when its ideology has been given a new wrinkle like the Three Represents and the Scientific Outlook on Development And there are campaigns to publicize ideology among the population as a whole often in a less direct MarxistLeninist guise such as the campaigns to promote vari ous types of civilization that the CCP says it is trying to create including material civilization modernization and economic reform and spiritual civilization cul tural pride patriotism ethical behavior abiding by the law34 The party is cast as the vanguard in the building of these civilizations and the only party that can lead the entire people of China toward a brighter future Not exactly the same as building socialism and reaching communism under the partys wise leadership but the idea is very similar just packaged for broader appeal The CCP has also injected a strong element of nationalism into the legitimizing ideology of the partystate Many scholars have pointed to the CCPs efforts to por tray itself not only as the manager of Chinas great economic success and the only thing standing between prosperity and great chaos but also as the guardian of the 186 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a nations sovereignty and the promoter of its international image35 At the founding of the PRC in 1949 Chairman Mao proclaimed The Chinese people have stood up after more than a century of humiliation and exploitation by foreign powers And whatever one can say about the terrible costs of Maos rule he did found a nation that has stood on its own and greatly elevated its stature in the world The CCP can still draw on that deep reservoir of nationalist legitimacy But it also can and does point to more contemporary triumphs of the Chinese nation such as the hosting of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai At times the partystate has fanned and then controlled antiJapanese or antiAmerican sentiment to arouse the patriotic spirit of the Chinese people The message is clear the CCP was the savior of the nation and remains the protector of its interests This message is supplemented by official presentations of the greatness uniqueness and antiquity of Chinese culture and civilization Appeals to patriotism nationalism and cultural pride as a way to enhance legiti macy and generate popular support are by no means unique to the CCP as a political party But the part it plays in sustaining the power of the ruling party in a oneparty state is particularly noteworthy There are also those who worry that the reliance of the CCP on nationalist appealsincluding their featured part in the China Dream might lead the PRC to a more aggressive foreign or military policy in order to enhance its image among its citizens There are also important ideological debates within the CCP Innerparty democ racymeaning tolerance and even encouragement of the expression of diverse points of viewhas become much more substantive in the postMao era and increas ingly so in recent years As chapter 7 highlights there is a measure of pluralism within the framework of communist party rule when it comes to exploring different politi cal and economic priorities The trend toward a more collective leadership versus oneperson rule as was the situation in the Mao and Deng eras has institutionalized limited ideological diversity within the CCP Party leaders and intellectuals on the socalled New Left take the position that the CCP has strayed too far from its socialist ideals particularly egalitarianism Others the New Right staunchly defend the Chinese version of neoliberalism that favors free marketfriendly policies and decries most state interventions in the economy even to ensure more equitable outcomes Then there are the conservatives who emphasize social stability morality political order and economic growth36 This ideo logical debate can sometimes get quite vigorous particularly in journal articles But the Four Cardinal Principles and the sanctity of communist party leadership are still very much in effect as limits to whatever pluralism may be emerging with in the CCP Some scholars have argued the CCP is not really a communist party anymore except in name They say that the party has moved so far from MarxismLeninism in practice that it is more accurate to analyze its ideology in an entirely different framework The case has been made for example that the prevailing ideology of the leadership in China is fascism37 an extreme rightwing ideology based on assertive even aggressive nationalism the glorification of national culture a strong state with a highly centralized leadership one dominant political party that represents all the people and a partnership between the government and the private sector to enhance the countrys economic and military power Italy under Mussolini was a fascist state i d e o l o g y a n d c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l d e v e l o P m e n t 187 the ideology of Nazi Germany national socialism was a variant of fascism with a virulent strain of racism at its core The focus of this chapter has been on the official ideology of the CCP and how that ideology has both shaped and reflected different stages in the political development of the CCP and the PRC But there are multiple other ideological influences that are also much in evidence in the PRC and some of them should be noted at least in pass ing as they are likely to play an increasingly important role in the politics of a rapidly changing China The most potent and pervasive contending ideology is probably consumerism Can the preoccupation with buying and acquiring things of value and increasing value really be considered an ideology Yes to the extent that many people take it as a guide to action and a measure of their own value Contrary as this is to any standard of Marxism it is hard to deny that this is the most prevalent ideology in China today As one scholar of Chinese culture noted the philosophical essence of contemporary China could be conveyed as I shop therefore I am38 A slew of other analyses of China from the 1990s to the present convey the same conclusion in catchall phrases such as the PRC meaning the Peoples Republic of Capitalism or other characteriza tions like From Communism to Consumerism Cashing in on Communism From MAOsim to MEism and the Great Mall of China39 to describe life and values in the PRC today But is consumerism a political ideology Not directly but it certainly has politi cal implications If many of the Chinese people and especially the growing middle class are fixated on improving their material lives and who can blame them after generations of deprivation then that is a message the ruling party has to pay heed to in order to maintain popular support which it seems to have done Opinion polls show that private entrepreneurs in general are strong supporters of the CCP and the status quo40 Religion is also remerging in China as a central focus in the lives of many citi zens Religion is not a political ideology per se but as is evident in todays world it can become highly politicized For most of the Mao era religious organizations were severely repressed or closely controlled by the partystate The constraints on reli gion have been gradually loosened during the reform era The PRC constitution has long affirmed freedom of religion but with restrictive clauses such as the state only protects normal religious activities emphasis added In 2007 the CCP constitu tion was amended to mention religion for the first time Although the party remains officially atheist the General Program of the CCP as laid out in the constitution now states The Party strives to fully implement its basic principle for its work related to religious affairs and rallies religious believers in making contributions to economic and social development41 This amendment may reflect the CCPs increasing toler ance of religion it may also be an effort to coopt believers into supporting the party If a communist party can embrace capitalists why not Christians as well Estimates of the number of religious believers in China varies widely Officially it is given as 100 million including Buddhists Muslims Taoists and Christians Unofficial figures are much higher The official number of Christians is about 20 mil lion but the real number is reliably believed to be three to five times that 42 In any case religion is growing in China and has already become an ideological rival of the 188 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a CCP The fierce repression of the quasispiritual movement Falun Gong that began in 1999 see chapter 4 clearly showed the limits of the partys tolerance for alternative belief systems that become too popular and toowell organized Religious identities also pose a challenge to the regime in Tibet and Xinjiang see chapters 15 and 16 Then theres democracy This is the one ideology that it would be hard for the com munist party to incorporate or coopt without changing its very essence To acknowl edge the rights of citizens the accountability of leaders the rule of law and the politi cal competition that are the core values of democracy are inconsistent with the CCPs claim to be the ruling party and to exercise the leading role in all aspects of Chinese society Organized public expressions of demands for democratization have been nearly nonexistent since the Tiananmen crackdown in June 1989 The one notable exception was the effort to establish a China Democracy Party in 1999 although they followed the rules for registering a new organization the leaders of the party were arrested and sent to prison for endangering state security But in recent years advocates of democ racy particularly intellectuals have been increasingly active in print and at confer ences and are allowed to do so as long as their musings remain theoretical Given the deepening of the PRCs interdependence with the global community and the rise in the living standards and educational level of its people it is quite likely that the time will come when the leadership of the communist party will again have to decide how to respond to the challenge of the democratic idea43 noTes 1 Franz Schurmann Ideology and Organization in Communist China Berkeley University of California Press 1966 2 Alexander L George The Operational Code A Neglected Approach to the Study of Political Leaders and DecisionMaking Santa Monica CA The Rand Corporation 1967 3 Id like to thank an anonymous reviewer for reminding me of this important caveat about the functions of ideology Indeed even Marx and Engels noted that the ruling ideas of any era are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relation ships the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one therefore the ideas of their dominance The German Ideology 1846 4 See John W Lewis and Xue Litai Social Change and Political Reform in China Meeting the Challenge of Success China Quarterly 176 December 2003 926942 5 All quotations from the works of Marx Engels Lenin Mao Deng et al will be cited by title and date in the text or parenthetically rather than in a reference note All of these works are easily accessible online via such web sites as The Marxist Internet Archive httpwww marxistsorg 6 See Lars T Lih Lenin Rediscovered What Is to Be Done In Context Boston Brill 2006 7 See Arif Dirlik The Origins of Chinese Communism New York Oxford University Press 1989 chap 1 8 See Raymond F Wylie The Emergence of Maoism Mao Tsetung Chen Pota and the Search for Chinese Theory 19351945 Stanford CA Stanford University Press 1980 9 Schurmann Ideology and Organization 21 i d e o l o g y a n d c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l d e v e l o P m e n t 189 10 See for example Jung Chang and Jon Halliday Mao The Unknown Story New York Knopf 2005 11 Sergeĭ Khrushchev ed trans by George Shriver Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev vol 3 Statesman 195354 College Park Pennsylvania State University Press 2007 405 12 See for example Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell Twentyfirst Century Populism The Spectre of Western European Democracy New York and London Palgrave Macmillan 2007 13 As cited in Stuart R Schram China Quarterly 49 JanMar 1972 7678 14 Brantly Womack The Party and the People Revolutionary and PostRevolutionary Politics in China and Vietnam World Politics 39 no 4 July 1987 479507 15 See for example Maurice J Meisner Marxism Maoism and Utopianism Eight Essays Madison University of Wisconsin Press 1982 16 Besides The Foolish Old Man the other two constantly read articles were Serve the People in which Mao lauds the sacrifice for the revolutionary cause of a common soldier and In Memory of Norman Bethune in which Mao praises a Canadian doctor who came to China to aid the revolution and died there as an example of proletarian internationalism 17 Stuart R Schram The Thought of Mao Tsetung New York Cambridge University Press 1989 84 18 Cited in Tang Tsou Mao Tsetung Thought the Last Struggle for Succession and the PostMao Era China Quarterly no 70 1977 518 19 See Franz Schurmann On Revolutionary Conflict Journal of International Affairs 23 no 1 1969 3653 20 Milovan Djilas The New Class An Analysis of the Communist System New York Praeger 1957 21 For excellent discussions of this topic see Nick Knight Rethinking Mao Explorations in Mao Zedong Thought Lanham MD Lexington Book 2007 225ff and Stuart R Schram Mao Tsetung and the Theory of the Permanent Revolution 195869 China Quarterly 46 June 1971 221244 22 Schram Mao Tsetung and the Theory of the Permanent Revolution 23 On the New Democracy 1940 and Reform Our Study 1941 see Deng Xiaoping Hold High The Banner of Mao Zedong Thought and Adhere to the Principle of Seeking Truth from Facts September 16 1978 24 In yet another twist of ideological phrasing Deng Xiaoping Theory is often summed up as consisting of one central task two basic points the one central task being economic development and the two basic points of upholding the Four Cardinal Principles and the policy of market reform and opening to the outside world 25 The PRC Constitution uses the phrase peoples democratic dictatorship rather than dictatorship of the proletariat This is more than semantics but essentially the two terms imply the same thing that there are those in society over whom dictatorship needs to be exercised 26 Hu Jintaos report at 18th Party Congress November 18 2012 Online Available at httpwwwglobaltimescncontent744880shtml 27 Joseph Fewsmith Studying the Three Represents China Leadership Monitor 8 Fall 2003 28 Heike Holbig Remaking the CCPs Ideology Determinants Progress and Limits under Hu Jintao Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 38 no 3 2009 3561 29 Xi Jinpings vision Chasing the Chinese Dream and Chinas future Xi Jinping and the Chinese Dream The Economist May 4 2013 190 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a 30 President Xi Jinpings speech The China Dream The Peoples Dream Chinese Elections and Governance httpchinaelectionsblognetp21282 31 Ibid 32 Chris Buckley Vows of Change in China Belie Private Warning The New York Times February 14 2013 33 Xi Jinpings vision Chasing the Chinese Dream 34 Nicholas Dynon Four Civilizations and the Evolution of PostMao Chinese Socialist Ideology The China Journal 60 July 2008 83110 35 See for example Peter Hayes Gries Chinas New Nationalism Pride Politics and Diplomacy Berkeley The University of California Press 2004 36 Peter Moody Conservative Thought in Contemporary China Lanham MD Lexington Books 2007 37 Michael Ledeen Beijing Embraces Classical Fascism Far Eastern Economic Review May 2008 A James Gregor A Place in the Sun Marxism and Fascism in Chinas Long Revolution Boulder CO Westview Press 2000 38 Geremie Barmé Soft Porn Packaged Dissent and Nationalism Notes on Chinese Culture in the 1990s Current History September 1993 584558 39 See for example the Discovery Channel TV series The Peoples Republic of Capitalism 2008 40 Jie Chen and Bruce J Dickson Allies of the State Democratic Support and Regime Support among Chinas Private Entrepreneurs The China Quarterly 196 December 2008 780804 41 This was added to the Constitution of the Communist Party of China in October 2007 42 Sons of Heaven Christianity in China The Economist October 2 2008 43 See William A Joseph China in Introduction to Comparative Politics 6th ed Boston Wadsworth Cengage Learning 2012 suggesTed ReAdIngs Brugger Bill Chinese Marxism in Flux 197884 Essays on Epistemology Ideology and Political Economy Armonk NY M E Sharpe 1985 Chun Lin The Transformation of Chinese Socialism Durham NC Duke University Press 2006 Dirlik Arif Paul Michael Healy and Nick Knight eds Critical Perspectives on Mao Zedongs Thought 2nd ed Amherst NY Humanity Books 1997 Joseph William A The Critique of UltraLeftism in China 19581981 Stanford CA Stanford University Press 1984 Knight Nick Rethinking Mao Explorations in Mao Zedongs Thought Lanham MD Lexington Books 2007 Meisner Maurice Mao Zedong A Political and Intellectual Portrait New York Polity 2007 Misra Kalpana From PostMaoism to PostMarxism The Erosion of Official Ideology in Dengs China New York Routledge 1998 Schram Stuart R The Thought of Mao Tsetung New York Cambridge University Press 1989 i d e o l o g y a n d c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l d e v e l o P m e n t 191 Sun Yan The Chinese Reassessment of Socialism 19761992 Princeton NJ Princeton University Press 1995 Wakeman Frederic Jr History and Will Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tsetungs Thought Berkeley University of California Press 1973 Womack Brantly Foundations of Mao Zedongs Political Thought 19171935 Honolulu The University Press of Hawaii 1982 Wylie Raymond F The Emergence of Maoism Mao Tsetung Chen Pota and the Search for Chinese Theory 19351945 Stanford CA Stanford University Press 1980 Ever since the founding of the Peoples Republic of China PRC in 1949 the Chinese Communist Party CCP has been the countrys only ruling party With the exception of a few tumultuous years during the early phases of the Cultural Revolution the ultimate source of political power in China has always been the Communist Party Indeed for the past six decades power struggles within the CCP leadership have been the only serious instances of political contention in the country With more than 85 million members the CCP is currently the worlds largest ruling political party and only the Korean Workers Party of North Korea has held on to power for longer The CCP has made it clear that it is not willing to give up its monopoly on politi cal power to experiment with multiparty democracy nor do Party leaders appear interested in moving toward a Westernstyle system based on a separation of power between the executive legislative and judicial branches of government This does not mean however that the CCP is a stagnant institution that has been completely resistant to political change On the contrary the CCP has experienced a number of profound transformations in terms of the recruitment of party elites institu tional reforms and ideological changes see chapter 5 for a discussion of the latter Furthermore the CCP leadership today is by no means a monolithic group whose members all share the same ideology political background and policy preferences It would also be an oversimplification to assert that there is a complete absence of checks and balances in the Chinese political system at least within the commu nist party leadership itself This chapter argues that two main leadership factions or coalitions are currently competing for power influence and control over policy Chinas Communist PartyState The Structure and Dynamics of Power C h eng lI 6 c h i n a s c o m m u n i s t P a r t y s t a t e 193 initiatives These two coalitions represent the interests of different socioeconomic classes as well as different geographical regions thus creating something approxi mating a mechanism of checks and balances in the decisionmaking process This development reflects an important transition away from the political system that existed throughout the first four decades of the PRC one that relied on the arbitrary decisionmaking power of an individual leader notably Mao Zedong and subsequently Deng Xiaoping Today Chinese politics are characterized by a system of collective lead ership or what the Chinese call innerparty democracy which functions according to commonly accepted rules and norms such as term limits and regional representa tion This experiment provides only limited political choices for the party establish ment However the gradual evolution of this new system of innerparty bipartisanship may pave the way for greater transformations within the Chinese political system in the years to come This chapter aims to highlight both the sources of continuity in Chinas longstanding partystate system and some of the more recent and profound changes in the PRCs political landscape An analysis of the structure and dynamics of power in China will not only reveal how the country is governed but will also provide an assessment of the future political trajectory of this emerging world power The sTRuCTuRe oF ChInAs CommunIsT PARTysTATe The CCP describes the history of its leadership in terms of political generations Mao Zedong is portrayed as the core of the first generation of PRC leaders Deng Xiaoping as the core of the second and Jiang Zemin as the core of the third Although he was not explicitly designated as its core Hu Jintao was the head of the fourth generation of CCP leaders and the current general secretary Xi Jinping fills that role for the fifth generation Despite the dramatic changes in ideology and policy over the course of these generations the CCP has always clearly maintained that it plays the leading role in the state and society and therefore has the right to command the government the media the legal system and the military in the interests of preserving Chinas socialist system By design the top leaders of the CCP have concurrently held the most important positions in the state or government since the establishment of the Peoples Republic including president of the PRC premier or prime minister of the State Council the government cabinet the chair of the National Peoples Congress the legislature of the PRC and chair of the Central Military Commission CMC Leading party offi cials at various levels of the stateprovincial municipal county and townshipcon currently serve as officials in local government organizations The head of the party organizationthe party secretaryat any level of administration is the real boss in local political and policy matters For example the city of Shanghai has both a party secretary and a mayor but the party secretary is the one with the greater authority although the mayor is also a highranking party member In a very real sense the institutions of party and state are intimately intertwined which is why political systems such as the PRC and previously the Soviet Union 194 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a are referred to as communist partystates The preamble to the constitution of the PRC makes several mentions of the leadership of the communist party and Article 1 describes the PRC as a socialist state under the peoples democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants but the docu ment is rather ambiguous about where supreme political power truly lies In practice the communist party is unequivocally in charge at all levels and the state operates merely as the executor of decisions made by the party Although highranking Chinese leaders have sporadically called for a greater separation between the party and the state the overwhelming trend of the last two decades has been to consolidate and revitalize the party rather than fundamentally change the communist partystate system The catchphrase of the Chinese leadership under former party leader Hu Jintao was enhance the governing capacity of the rul ing party This meant that party officials especially young rising stars at various levels of the leadership often simultaneously should serve in important positions within both the party and the government Two important observations can be made regarding the partystate structure in presentday China First the party has the power to make all of the states most impor tant personnel and policy decisions Second notwithstanding the partys leading decisionmaking role many important policy discussions as well as most activities relating to policy implementation take place in or through government institutions not CCP organizations In order to understand the complex relationship existing between the CCP and the PRC government it is essential to grasp the basic structure of both the party and the state organization of the CCP As indicated in Figure 61 party organizations exist at all administrative levels from the center in Beijing down to the 42 million primary or grassroots units which according the CCPs constitution are formed in enterprises rural areas government organs schools research institutes communities social organizations companies of the Peoples Liberation Army and other basic units where there are at least three full Party members The partys reach extends throughout the country but power is highly concentrated at the center particularly in the twentyfivemember Politburo or Political Bureau and the seven members who concurrently sit on its Standing Committee The Politburo and the Standing Committee are formally elected by the National Congress of the Communist Party of China or National Party Congress which convenes for about two weeks in the fall once every five years and is the most impor tant political convention in the country All delegates must of course be members of the communist party There were two types of delegates to the most recent party con gress which met in November 2012 regular and invited The 2268 regular delegates included representatives from Chinas thirtyone provinciallevel administrations For a discussion of a communist partystate as a type of political system see chapter 1 c h i n a s c o m m u n i s t P a r t y s t a t e 195 which includes twentytwo provinces five administrative regions and four large cities directly under central administration There was also a delegation of ethnic Taiwanese who are citizens of the PRC and members of the CCP as well as delega tions from the central departments of the party the ministries and commissions of the central government major stateowned enterprises Chinas largest banks and other financial institutions the Peoples Liberation Army PLA and the Peoples Armed Police Fiftyseven specially invited delegates who are also eligible to vote were mostly retired party elders and can be considered Chinas equivalent of the superdelegates to the Democratic Party Convention in the United States There were also 314 nonvoting observers and 147 noncommunists who were invited to attend the opening and closing sessions The party congress elects the Central Committee currently 205 full and 171 alternate members and the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection 130 members In theory the Central Committee then elects the partys most powerful General Secretary Standing Committee 7 Politburo 25 Secretariat 7 Central Committee 376 National Party Congress 2268 Central Party Organizations General Office Organization Department Propaganda Department United Front Work Department International Liaison Department Local Party Congresses Committees and Organizations at the provincial municipal county and other levels below the center Primary Party Organizations 4 million formed in enterprises rural areas government organs schools research institutes communities social organizations companies of the Peoples Liberation Army and other basic units where there are at least three full Party members Total Party Membership 85 million Leading Small Groups Central Military Commission 11 Central Commission for Discipline Inspection 130 FIguRe 61 Organization of the Chinese Community Party Note Numbers in parentheses as of 18th Party Congress November 2012 196 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a organizations the Politburo the Standing Committee and the CMC 11 members It also elects the general secretary which is the top position in the CCP In practice however the process is topdown rather than bottomup the leading organizations of the party closely guide the selection of members of the Central Committee and then present to the Central Committee for its approval of a slate of candidates for the incoming Politburo and Standing Committee The general secretary is elected for a fiveyear term and can be reelected for one additional term It is the expectation that the party leader will serve two full terms and that a leadership transition will take place every decade For example Xi Jinping took over as general secretary in 2012 from Hu Jintao who was first elected to that posi tion in 2002 and reelected in 2007 Barring unforeseen events Xi will be reelected at the Party Congress in 2017 and serve until 2022 Recent practice has been that the heir apparent is anointed at the halfway point in the current general secretarys term by being elevated to a number of preparatory positions including a seat on the CCP Standing Committee vice president of the PRC and vice chair of the CMC Thus by the fall of 2017 when the 19th Party Congress meets it should be clear who will be Chinas top leader from 2022 to 2032 although analysts in both China and abroad are increasingly doubtful that the political structure and leadership succession will remain unchanged in the coming decades The Central Committee convenes at least once per year in meetings called ple nums or plenary sessions Generally all full members and alternate members attend these sessions Top officials in CCP central organs government ministries provincial administrations and the military who are not members of the Central Committee are also invited to attend the plenary sessions as nonvoting participants Plenary sessions provide an opportunity for the announcement of new policy initiatives and major personnel appointments For example the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee held in December 1978 adopted Deng Xiaopings reform and opening proposals and this landmark meeting is often considered the turning point in CCP history from the Cultural Revolution focus on ideology and politics to an emphasis on economic reform As suggested above to call the process of choosing the Politburo and the Standing Committee by the Central Committee an election is something of a misnomer These top bodies are actually selected by the outgoing Standing Committee with consid erable influence being exercised by retired or retiring senior leaders For example Deng Xiaoping personally chose Jiang Zemin to take over the position of CCP general secretary in 1989 and Jiang Zemin played a major role in the shaping of the Standing Committee chosen in 2012 There is intraparty competition for Central Committee seats Since the 1982 National Congress of the CCP the Party has followed the method of more candi dates than available seats chae xuanju for the election of the Central Committee The 18th Party Congress in 2012 chose 205 full members from the 224 candidates on National Party Congresses are numbered in sequence beginning with the 1st Party Congress in 1921 that marked the founding of the CCP Seven congresses were held between then and the founding of the PRC in 1949 The 8th Party Congress in 1956 was the first held after the CCP came to power Because of political turmoil during the Maoist era party congresses were convened irregularly Thirteen years elapsed between the 8th and 9th Party Congress which was held in 1969 Since 1982 party congresses have been held every five years c h i n a s c o m m u n i s t P a r t y s t a t e 197 the ballot 93 percent were eliminated In the election for alternate members of the Central Committee they elected 171 leaders from a candidate pool of 190 111 percent were eliminated There is considerable speculation about whether such innerparty democracy will also be applied to the selection of the Politburo the next organization up in the partys power structure as part of the CCPs broader political reform strategy which aims to make Chinas partystate system somewhat more open competitive and representative without weakening its leading role The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection 130 members while less impor tant than the Central Committee does play a crucial role in monitoring and punishing abuses of power corruption and other wrongdoings committed by party officials The Commission primarily handles cases involving party officials Its most serious sanction is to purge senior level officials and expel them from the party in cases where it is deter mined that a crime may have been committed the matter is handed over to the state judicial system Lowerlevel party organizations including provincial municipal and countylevel bodies also have discipline inspection commissions that report directly to the commission one level above them The chiefs of the local discipline inspection com missions are usually not selected from the localities that they serve but are transferred in from elsewhere to lessen the possibility of favoritism The Secretariat 7 members is an important leadership body that handles the Partys routine business and administrative matters Secretariat members meet daily and are responsible for coordinating the countrys major events and meetings drafting impor tant documents and arranging top leaders foreign and domestic travel By comparison the more powerful organizations the Politburo and Standing Committee meet only once a month and once a week respectively Members of the Secretariat like members of the Standing Committee all live in Beijing Some Politburo members reside in other cities where they serve concurrently as provincial or municipal party chiefs Of the seven members of the current Secretariat three also serve as members of the Politburo with one of those the Executive Secretary serving on the Standing Committee The Secretariat supervises the work of the General Office of the CCP its adminis trative coordinating body as well as the partys four most important central depart mentsthe Organization Department the Propaganda or Publicity Department the United Front Work Department and the International Liaison Department The current directors of the General Office the Organization Department and the Propaganda Department also serve on the Secretariat The Organization Department determines the personnel appointments of several thousand highranking leadership or cadre positions in the party government and military as well as in large business firms key universities and other important institutions These positions are part of the nomenklatura name list system that was adopted from the Soviet communist party Control of the cadre appointment process is one of the CCPs most important sources of power The Propaganda Department is primarily responsible for spreading the partys message and controlling the media The United Front Work Department deals with noncommunist organizations including the countrys eight democratic parties ethnic and religious policy and with issues concerning Taiwan Hong Kong Chinas constitution says the PRC has a system of cooperation and political consultation led by the Communist Party of China In fact China does have eight political parties other than the CCP which are officially referred to as the democratic 198 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a and Macau The mission of the International Liaison Department is to establish con tacts with foreign political parties it was more important and active when there were more communist parties in the world Among the twentyfive members of the current Politburo eight primarily repre sent party organizations nine come from government organizations two from the military and six from provincelevel administrative units Table 61 lists some key information about the seven members of the Politburo Standing Committee the most powerful leadership body in China These individuals hold concurrently with their positions on the Politburo Standing Committee some of the most important offices in the partystate including the presidency and premiership of the PRC and the chair of Chinas legislature the National Peoples Congress Party General Secretary Xi Jinping serves simultaneously as President of the PRC and chair of the CMC In addition to these formal leadership institutions the CCP also has a number of informal interagency executive decisionmaking bodies focused on major functional issue areas which are called leading small groups Some of these leading small groups are more or less permanent and some are temporary task forces convened to deal with an immediate issue The permanent leading small groups currently cover the following areas foreign affairs national security politics and law ideology and propaganda party affairs finance and the economy rural work Taiwan Hong Kong and Macao1 The main purpose of these leading small groups is to coordinate the implementa tion of policies across top decisionmaking bodies such as the Politburo the State Council and the CMC Leading small groups report directly to the Politburo and its Standing Committee and the most important ones are normally headed by a mem ber of the Standing Committee At present for example Xi Jinping heads the leading groups on national security foreign affairs and Taiwan affairs The state structure The structure of PRC government is presented in Figure 62 Chinas constitution declares All power in the PRC belongs to the people The organs through which the people exercise state power are the National Peoples Congress and the local peoples congresses at different levels Peoples congresses operate at every administrative level in the PRC from the national at the top to rural townships and urban districts and are the legislative branch of the government But like other state organizations the congresses operate under strict party scrutiny and exercise power only as allowed by the CCP In rural areas deputies to county and township peoples congresses are directly elected by all eligible citizens in that locale as are deputies to people congresses at the lowest level of formal urban administration the district Elections at all higher levels parties These parties are made up mostly of academics scientists writers artists professionals and entrepreneurs and have a total membership of about sevenhundred thousand must swear allegiance to the CCP and do not compete with or chal lenge the CCP in any meaningful way TABle 61 CCP Politburo standing Committee elected november 2012 Name Other Key Positions Year Born Birthplace Education Provincial Leadership Other Major Experience Xi Jinping CCP General Secretary PRC President Chair Central Military Commission 1953 Beijing native of Shaanxi BA Chemical Engineering Tsinghua University 19751979 PhD in Politics and Marxist Theory Tsinghua University via parttime studies 19982002 Party Secretary Zhejiang Shanghai Governor Fujian Zhejiang Li Keqiang Premier PRC State Council 1955 Anhui BA Law 1982 Peking University PhD Economics via parttime studies Peking University Party Secretary Henan Liaoning Governor Henan Zhang Dejiang Chair National Peoples Congress 1946 Liaoning Studied Korean language at Yanbian University in Yanji City Jilin Province 19721975 BA Economics Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang North Korea 1980 Party Secretary Jilin Zhejiang Guangdong Chongqing Vice Premier Yu Zhengsheng Chair Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference 1945 Zhejiang BA Ballistic Missile Automatic Control Department of Missile Engineering at the Harbin Institute of Technology 19631968 Party Secretary Hubei Shanghai Wang Qishan Chair Central Commission for Discipline Inspection 1948 Shandong native of Shanxi BA History Northwest University in Xian City Shaanxi Province 1976 Party Secretary Hainan Mayor Beijing Executive Chair Beijing Olympics Vice Premier Liu Yunshan Executive Secretary of the Secretariat 1947 Shanxi Studied at Central Party School 1981 19891992 Deputy Party Secretary Inner Mongolia Zhang Gaoli Vice Premier PRC State Council 1946 Fujian BA Statistics Department of Economics Xiamen University 19651970 Midcareer studies Central Party School 1990 Party Secretary Shandong Tianjin Source Alice Miller The New Party Politburo Leadership China Leadership Monitor No 40 January 2013 httpwwwhooverorgpublicationschinaleadershipmonitorarticle137951 China Vitae chinavitaecom 200 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a are indirect meaning deputies are elected by the peoples congress at the next lowest level For example deputies to the National Peoples Congress NPC are elected by the peoples congresses at the provincial level Chinas 650000 villages are not con sidered to be a formal level of administration and have a different form of governance which involves direct elections as discussed in chapter 9 Deputies to the NPC are allocated according to the population of a given province The NPC recently equalized the representation of urban and rural areas Prior to this reform every 960000 rural residents and every 240000 urban residents were represented by one NPC deputy which gave Chinas cities much more clout in the National Peoples Congress Special Committees Ethnic Affairs Law Internal and Judicial Affairs Finance Economics Education Science Culture Health Foreign Affairs Overseas Chinese Affairs Environmental Resources Protection Agriculture Rural Affairs Supreme Peoples Court Supreme Peoples Procuracy Local Peoples Courts Higher Peoples Courts Province Intermediate Peoples Courts Cities Basic Peoples Courts Counties and Townships Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference Advisory Only Legislative Branch Judicial Branch Standing Committee of the National Peoples Congress Executive Branch President Vice President Premier Vice Premier State Council Premiers Vice Premiers State Councilors Ministers Auditor General Secretary General of the State Council Special Courts Military Courts Maritime Courts Railway Courts Central Military Commission Chair of the National Peoples Congress Local Peoples Governments at the provincial municipal county and other levels below the center Central Government Organizations Commissions Ministries Bureaus and Leading Small Groups Local Peoples Congresses at the provincial municipal county and other levels below the center Local Peoples Procuracies at the provincial municipal county and other levels below the center VILLAGES Village Head Village Committee Villagager Representative Assembly Chinese villages are technically selfgoverning FIguRe 62 Organization of the Peoples Republic of China c h i n a s c o m m u n i s t P a r t y s t a t e 201 legislature The province with the smallest population is guaranteed at least fifteen deputies Special administrative regions such as Hong Kong and Macau have a set quota of delegates as does the PLA The current NPC formed in 2013 has nearly three thousand deputies who were elected to fiveyear terms Deputies do not serve as fulltime lawmakers and when the NPC is not is session they return to their regu lar locations and jobs Just as the National Congress of the CCP elects party leaders every five years at its fall meeting the NPC elects a new state leadership at a meeting in the spring of the year following the party congress although those to be elected have been pre determined by the party But unlike the party congress which only meets every five years the NPC convenes in its entirety every March for a twoweek session during which deputies discuss the reports by the premier and other government leaders and approve laws and legislative regulations The NPC has increasingly served as a venue for policy debates although politically sensitive or controversial topics are off limits The work of the NPC has become more substantive in terms of drafting laws and regulations and providing a venue for policy discourse but it still basically acts as a rubber stamp for decisions made by the party leadership When the NPC is not in session the Standing Committee of the National Peoples Congress not to be confused with the much more powerful CCP Politburo Standing Committee takes responsibility for any issues that require congressional consideration The Standing Committee of the NPC which generally convenes every two months with each meeting lasting about one week is headed by a chair who is also a member of the party Politburo Standing Committee The NPC also appoints nine special committees to draft legislation in various areas such as economics edu cation energy and the environment In theory NPC delegates are not only supposed to elect the members of the Standing Committee of the NPC but are also constitutionally entitled to elect the president and vice president of the PRC the chair of the state Central Military Commission the chief justice of the Supreme Peoples Court and the chief of the Supreme Peoples Procuracy the PRCs top law enforcement official roughly equivalent to the attorney general of the United States The body is also empowered to approve the premier who is appointed by the president as well as the other members of the State Council and CMC In reality however all of the candidates for these positions are chosen by the top party leadership This formal process is hardly competitive When Xi Jinping was elected PRC president in 2013 the vote was 2952 for 1 against and 3 abstentions The election for vice president was more contested the tally was 2839 for 80 against and 37 abstentions This lack of competitiveness notwithstanding it is an interesting and fairly recent phenomenon that NPC delegates sometimes vote against some nominees for impor tant positions in the confirmation process For example the nominee to head the governments environmental protection ministry in 2013 won only twothirds of the vote which probably reflected a widespread public unhappiness with air pollution and other ecological problems The State Council is headed by the premier and its Executive Committee consists of the premier four vice premiers and five state councilors who are senior govern ment leaders with broad responsibilities one of the state councilors also concurrently serves as secretarygeneral of the State Council The State Council currently consists 202 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a of more than two dozen members including ministers or commissioners who head functional departments such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the National Health and Family Planning Commission the central bank governor and auditorgeneral who oversees the governments budget All except one of these ministerlevel lead ers are members of the CCP and the vast majority are members of the party Central Committee and their first loyalty is to the party As discussed in more detail in chapter 7 the judiciary is not a separate independent branch of government in the PRC The CCP uses the nomenklatura system and other means of control to keep a close watch on all aspects of Chinas legal system Some Chinese intellectuals who believe that the PRC should move toward a true rule of law system have spoken out against party interference One such intellectual is law professor He Weifang who has been a consistent critic of party interference in legal affairs In 2006 he bluntly criticized Zhou Yongkang Minister of Public Security who was also a member of the CCP Politburo for his heavyhanded oversight of the Supreme Peoples Court To Professor He Zhous actions exemplified the lack of a genuinely independent judicial system in the country There is no other country in the world Professor He said in which the chief justice reports to the chief of police2 Although Professor He has been harassed by the government he has continued to speak out including at a conference in Washington DC in 2012 where he spoke forcefully about the increasing consciousness of law on the part of Chinese citizens the inclination of the legal profession to look to the West for understanding how the rule of law should be effected and the need for reform3 The Party and the Army The partys control over the military has been an important principle in the long his tory of the CCP In 1938 Mao Zedong declared Every Communist must grasp the truth Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun Our principle is that the Party commands the gun and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party4 On a few occasions however the PLA has intervened in Chinese politics such as the 1971 Lin Biao incident when Minister of Defense Lin Biao pursued a failed military coup to overthrow Chairman Mao see chapter 3 and in the two years immediately following the 1989 Tiananmen crisis when the generals of the socalled Yang fam ily cliqueYang Baibing and Yang Shangkungained enormous power only to be outmaneuvered by Deng Xiaoping see chapter 4 But over the past decade Chinas military has steadily moved away from active involvement in domestic politics The chance that a military figure might serve as a kingmaker has become increasingly remote In each of the last four Politburos 19972012 there were only two representatives of the military and none served on the Politburo Standing Committee Furthermore no member of the military elite serves on the current Secretariat which signals the further retreat of the PLA from domestic affairs and foreign policy and toward a more narrow focus on military affairs The most important organizations for deciding military policy are the CCP Central Military Commission and the PRC Central Military Commission Although technically the former is a party organization and the latter is part of the state structure they are in fact c h i n a s c o m m u n i s t P a r t y s t a t e 203 different names for the same institution with identical membership This arrangement reflects the CCPs desire to exercise its power and authority at least formally through the PRCs constitutional framework In reality however the Central Military Commission reports to the Politburo and its Standing Committee In other words Chinas armed forces are under the command of the CCP not the government of the PRC The current CMC has eleven members CCP General Secretary and PRC President Xi Jinping is the chair which effectively makes him commanderinchief of Chinas armed forces The two military leaders who are on the Politburo serve as CMC vice chairmen Other members include the minister of defense the heads of the PLAs four general departments organizational headquarters political logistics and arma ment and the heads of the Navy Air Force and Second Artillery Corps which is Chinas strategic missile force Since 1992 only three civilians Jiang Zemin Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping have served on the CMC Nevertheless the norm that a civilian party leader is in charge of military affairs seems to be wellaccepted by the PLA Both Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin delayed turning over the position of CMC chair to a relatively untested successor by holding onto the seat for a few more years even after they had stepped down from their party and government posts This cre ated a rather strange situation in which the civilian commanderinchief of Chinas armed forces did not hold any other position in the party or the government In the runup to the 18th Party Congress in 2012 there was considerable speculation that retiring general secretary Hu Jintao might similarly try to stay on as head of the CMC for a transition period But Xi Jinping took over as CMC chair at the same time he was elevated to the top party position By surrendering power to Xi Hu set an example for a more institutionalized and complete political succession and strengthened the relationship among the party the state and the army The Changing Composition of the CCP While the Chinese partystate institutional structure has remained more or less the same over the past six decades the occupational and educational backgrounds of the CCPs membership and the partys leaders have changed profoundly The CCP has been transformed from a revolutionary party consisting primarily of peasants soldiers and urban workers to a ruling party that includes an increasing number of members from diverse areas of society Over the past half century the size of the CCP has increased enormously As shown in Figure 63 CCP membership has increased from about 5 million in 1949 when the party came to power to 851 million as of mid2013 Note that nearly half this growth has occurred since the end of the Maoist era in 1976 In 2011 31 million new members were admitted to the CCP out of 216 million applicants5 However the partys total membership still constitutes a very small proportion about 75 percent of the total ageeligible over 18 population Not only has the CCP grown enormously in size but its occupational composi tion has also changed in dramatic ways over the past three decades At the start of the reform era in 1981 farmers and workersthe traditional base of the communist partymade up 634 percent of the CCP6 As Figure 64 shows those two groups 204 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 1949 1956 1969 1973 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2013 Millions of Members Figures are for total party membership at the founding of the PRC at each National Party Congress between then and 2007 and as of mid2013 FIguRe 63 CCP Membership 19492013 Sources ChinaTodaycom httpwwwchinatodaycomorgcpc Chinas Communist Party membership exceeds 85 million Xinhuanet June 30 2013 httpnewsxinhuanetcomenglishchina20130630c132498982htm Workers 86 Party and government staff 85 Managerial professional and technical staff enterprises and public institutions 239 Students 34 Retirees 180 Others 77 Farmers herdsmen and fishermen 300 FIguRe 64 Occupations of CCP Members 2011 Source httpwwwchinaorgcnchina20120814content26231924htm c h i n a s c o m m u n i s t P a r t y s t a t e 205 accounted for just 386 percent of CCP members in 2011 Although farmers con tinue to constitute the largest single segment of the CCP the current occupational composition of the party reflects the impact of modernization and the ideological reorientation of the party For the last decade or so the CCP has actively sought to recruit members from groups that only came into existence with the market reforms the socalled new social strata which includes among others private entrepre neurs Red Capitalists technical personnel and managers in private firms and foreignfunded enterprises independent professionals and the selfemployed See below for a discussion of the role of private entrepreneurs in the CCP In the three decades after the establishment of the PRC elite recruitmentbring ing in new leaderswas mostly based on family background the preferred categories being peasant or worker ideological loyalty and political activism rather than on edu cational credentials andor managerial skills This politicized pattern of recruitment was expressed by the idea that it was better to be red than expert during the Mao years Reds were cadres who advanced their careers on the strength of their revolu tionary pedigree and ideological purity while experts were members of the party elite who distinguished themselves by their educational credentials and technical skills When it came to elite recruitment and promotion reds almost always prevailed over experts Thus from 1949 through the early 1980s the educational attainment of party cadres and members was extremely low In 1955 for example only 5 per cent of national leaders had a junior high school education or above7 Even in 1985 only 4 percent of CCP members were educated beyond the high school level and a majority 522 percent had received only a primary school education or were illiter ate8 These numbers reflect the low value placed on educational accomplishments and technical knowhow within the CCP before the reform era The educational level of CCP members has increased significantly in the past three decades now that expertise is much more valued than redness in the recruitment process In 1998 among the 61 million CCP members only 11 million were college graduates 178 percent by 2011 about 32 million CCP members held at minimum a twoyear college degree constituting 386 percent of the total membership9 The growth in the percentage of nationallevel party leaders with higher education has been particularly dramatic For example in 1982 no member of the Politburo had com pleted a university education in 2013 all 25 members of the Politburo had collegelevel degrees nineteen from universities one from a military academy and five from the Central Party School where the training is largely political ideological and managerial Thirteen Politburo members have advanced degrees including General SecretaryPresident Xi Jinping PhD in law and political science and Premier Li Keqiang PhD in econom ics The percentage of collegeeducated top provincial leaders party secretaries gov ernors and their deputies increased from 20 percent in 1982 to 100 percent in 2010 and twothirds had postgraduate education usually in parttime programs and several held PhD degrees Their fields of graduate education were diverse including econom ics management politics and law as well as engineering10 The 1980s1990s was a time of technocratic turnover within Chinas partystate leadership In 1982 technocratscadres with a universitylevel technical education constituted just 2 percent of the Central Committee but by 1987 they made up 25 per cent of the Central Committee By 1997 they made up over half The nine members 206 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a of the Politburo Standing Committee elected in 1997 were all engineers including the three top leaders General Secretary Jiang Zemin electrical engineer Chair of the NPC Li Peng hydroelectric engineer and Premier Zhu Rongji electrical engineer This was also true of the top three leaders elected in 2002 General Secretary Hu Jintao hydraulic engineer NPC Chair Wu Bangguo electrical engineer and Premier Wen Jiabao geological engineer The representation of technocrats also rose dramatically in other highlevel leadership categories for example in 1982 no provincial party sec retaries or governors had higherlevel technical education by 2002 74 percent of pro vincial party secretaries and 77 percent of governors were technocrats11 Beginning with the 17th Party Congress that met in 2007 the dominance of tech nocrats in the Chinese leadership began to decline and the percentage of leaders with nontechnical educations started to rise sharply The Politburo elected that year had thirteen technocrats including eleven engineers out of twentyfive members 52 per cent down from eighteen out of twentyfour 75 percent in the 2002 Politburo In the current twentyfivemember Politburo formed in 2012 in terms of highest degree obtained only four 16 percent are technocrats Others majored in economics polit ical science law and humanities Xi Jinpings undergraduate degree is in chemical engineering but he also has an advanced degree in law and political science12 Having leaders who are educated in a broader range of fields may well bring more diverse perspectives to policymaking and problemsolving The rise of technocrats and others with highereducation degrees to dominance in the Chinese leadership over the recent decades is particularly striking considering the following three facts First in 2010 only 7 percent of Chinas labor force had a college education13 Second although China was traditionally a meritocratic society in which status was largely determined by success in the imperial exams scientific knowledge and technical competence which have for centuries been esteemed in the West were always subordinate to literary and cultural achievements in the Confucian worldview Third Chinas meritocratic tradition underwent an extreme reversal during the Mao era especially during the Cultural Revolution when professionals or experts were repeatedly targeted as enemies of the people Women are very underrepresented at all levels of the CCP In 2012 women made up only 238 percent of total party membership a modest improvement from 166 per cent in 200214 They are even less wellrepresented in the top leadership organizations and positions There are thirtythree women among the 376 full and alternate mem bers of the Central Committee 165 percent but only ten of the 205 full members 48 percent are women Two out of 25 members 8 percent of the Politburo are women and no women sit on the sevenperson standing committee At the end of 2012 among the 31 provinciallevel administrative units of the PRC there was only one female party secretary in Tianjin and one woman governor in Anhui15 The Route to the Top through the Provinces An analysis of the composition of the partys top bodies reveals a significant increase in the number of leaders who have advanced their careers through experience in provin cial leadership posts Since the reform era began in 1978 the most important political c h i n a s c o m m u n i s t P a r t y s t a t e 207 credential for a top leadership position has been experience as a provinciallevel party secretary Former party leader Jiang Zemin was promoted to general secretary of the CCP in 1989 from the post of party secretary of Shanghai where he had been cred ited with the successful handling of prodemocracy demonstrations Hu Jintao had served as party secretary in both Guizhou and Tibet before being promoted to the Standing Committee in 1992 Xi Jinping has served as governor of both Fujian and Zhejiang province and as party secretary of both Zhejiang and Shanghai Six of the seven members of the current Standing Committee served as provincial party secre taries andor governors prior to their ascent to the supreme decisionmaking body and the seventh was deputy party secretary in Inner Mongolia where he worked for twentyfive years The increase in the percentage of Politburo members with experience as provincial leaders since 1992 is shown in Figure 65 The fact that over 70 percent of the Politburos elected in 2007 and 2012 have substantial experience in a top provinciallevel leader ship position speaks to the importance of this path to the pinnacle of power Since two members of both Politburos were military the percentage of civilians with major provincial experience was even higher The large representation of leaders with provincial experience in the Politburo and its Standing Committee reflects the growing power and influence of the politicians who run the countrys thirtyone provincelevel administrative units The central authorities also try to prevent the building of local power bases through the promo tion of provincial leaders to positions in Beijing and by frequent reshuffling of pro vincial leaders 50 10 591 13 667 16 76 19 76 19 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 1992 N20 1997 N22 2002 N24 2007 N25 2012 N25 FIguRe 65 Politburo Members with Provincial Experience as Party Secretary andor Governor Year refers to date of election by Central Committee Source Cheng Li A Biographical and Factional Analysis of the Post2012 Politburo China Leadership Monitor No 41 June 6 2013 httpwwwhooverorgpublicationschinaleadershipmonitorarticle148836 208 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Top CCP officials seem to be seriously concerned with ensuring regional balance in the national leadership The Politburo that was elected in 2012 has at least one cur rent member who was born andor worked extensively in each of Chinas major geo graphic regionsthe northeast north northwest east south central and southwest In addition there are six Politburo members who have previously served or currently serve as provincelevel party secretaries in the four major cities directly under central government control Beijing Shanghai Tianjin and Chongqing This concern for equal regional representation in the CCPs leadership organiza tions is even more evident in the distribution of full membership seats on the Central Committee A strong political norm in Chinese elite recruitment since the 1997 Central Committee has been that almost every provincelevel administration has two full membership seats on the Central Committee usually occupied by the party secretary and governor Although provincial leaders are sometimes promoted to the central government or transferred to other provinces this distributional norm has been strictly applied at the time the Central Committee was initially elected Local demands for an even distribution of membership seats across provinces and regions in both the Central Committee and the Politburo have become increasingly accom modated and institutionalized by the party leadership16 At the same time top national leaders still need to accumulate political capital through close ties with some of the countrys most important regions The prior ity that top party elites place on leadership experience as a party secretary in major provinces and cities serves to make such posts pivotal steppingstones for aspiring entrants into the top national leadership This further enhances the political weight of local power in presentday China But the fact that provincial leaders career pros pects depend on their superiors in Beijing speaks unambiguously to the enormous power the central partystate has over local administrations in Chinas still highly hierarchical authoritarian system Another experience at the local level shared by many of the Chinas newest gen eration of leaders is that of having been sentdown youth during the Cultural Revolution Five of the seven members of the CCP Standing Committee were among the more than twenty million students who were sent to the rural areas to do manual labor in the late 1960s and early 1970s after Mao disbanded the Red Guard move ment see chapter 3 Xi Jinping spent 19691975 working in an agricultural com mune in a very poor area of Shaanxi province and only began his university education after returning from the countryside Some observers think this experience may give the leaders a deeper understanding of the difficult conditions still faced by many of Chinas hundreds of million farmers new Players in the CCP entrepreneurs and lawyers In recent years two distinct groups entrepreneurs and lawyers have emerged as new and important players in both the socioeconomic and political life of the country Like the ascendency of welleducated leaders in the Chinese communist partystate in the 1980s the growing influence of these groups represents another major shift in the landscape of Chinese politics c h i n a s c o m m u n i s t P a r t y s t a t e 209 The upward social mobility and political role of entrepreneursowners and man agers of private businessesis particularly momentous Traditional Chinese society which was dominated by the scholargentry class tended to devalue merchants because they lived by making profits off others rather than through honest mental or manual labor The anticapitalist bias reached its extreme during the first few decades of the PRC The four million private firms and stores that had existed in China prior to 1949 had all but disappeared by the mid1950s as part of the transition to socialism During the Cultural Revolution anything to do with capitalism was branded poisonous and top leaders such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were purged for allegedly taking China down the capitalist road Smallscale private business and selfemployment wasnt possible until the end of the Mao era and private enterprises that could employ a large number of laborers did not exist in China until the late 1980s Several factors have contributed to the reemergence of entrepreneurs in the PRC Among them are the lifting of ideological taboos against privately owned businesses ruraltourban migration which created a huge number of very smallscale entrepre neurs in Chinas cities joint ventures between foreign and Chinese private companies the establishment of stock and real estate markets and the technological revolution which has given birth to a whole new private industry In 2004 there were 16 million private firms in China by 2012 that had grown to 106 million with another 40 mil lion smallscale individually owned firms that only employed a handful of people usually family members and relatives Taken together such private enterprises con tribute 60 percent of Chinas total gross domestic product and account for more than 80 percent of urban employment and over 90 percent of new jobs17 Chinese entrepreneurs are of course a diverse lot There are three distinct sub groups 1 selfmade entrepreneurs peasantsturnedindustrialists in rural areas and owners of business firms of varying size in cities 2 bureaucratic entrepre neurs officials and their relatives who made their fortunes in part by abusing power in various ways throughout the process of market reform and 3 technical entre preneurs computer and Internet specialists who became wealthy as a result of rapid technological development Selfmade entrepreneurs usually come from humble family backgrounds and received relatively little education In contrast a large num ber of bureaucratic entrepreneurs received undergraduate degrees in economics and even masters degrees in business administration usually in parttime midcareer programs Furthermore most of them were already CCP members or officials when they began to engage in private business Technical entrepreneurs may or may not have strong family ties that have helped them in business They are often seen as Chinas yuppie corps and some have received training abroad The rise of the private entrepreneurs in terms of political influence can be traced to July 2001 when thenCCP General Secretary Jiang Zemin gave an important speech on the eightieth anniversary of the Partys founding In his speech Jiang claimed that the party should be representative of three components of society the advanced social productive forces advanced culture and the interests of the overwhelming majority As discussed in chapters 4 and 5 Jiangs socalled Theory of the Three Represents was an ideological justification for the priority given to the private sec tor in Chinas economic development and for allowing entrepreneurs to be members 210 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a of the communist party the CCP still shies away from calling them capitalists A 2004 official study by the United Front Work Department of the CCP Central Committee found that 34 percent of the owners of private enterprises were mem bers of the CCP up from just 13 percent in 1993 Of that 34 percent only 94 percent had joined after Jiangs 2001 speech18 which reflects the fact that Jiangs ideologi cal embrace was mostly just formal acknowledgement that a large number of party members were already engaged in private business More recent studies suggest that the proportion of private entrepreneurs who are CCP members remains at about onethird but interestingly the larger the scale of the private enterprise the more likely it is that the owners are party members19 Entrepreneurs and their executive counterparts in stateowned industries have just begun to acquire positions in the national and locallevel political leadership Although the thirtyfour private entre preneurs who were selected to participate in the CCPs 2012 National Party Congress made up only 106 percent of the total number of delegates the media highlighted the fact this was double the number who attended the 2007 session20 A handful of tycoons serve as either full or alternate members of the Central Committee but just one of those an alternate is a private entrepreneur the CEO of Chinas Haier Group a multinational consumer electronics and home appliances manufacturer Wealthy business executives have been more visible in the lesspowerful state insti tutions the National Peoples Congress and its advisory body the Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference CPPCC At the 2013 meeting of these two bodies the deputies included eightythree billionaires21 in contrast there is not one billionaire in the US Senate or House of Representatives A few former CEOs of StateOwned Enterprise SOEs currently hold posts as provincial party secretaries or governors Clearly although private entrepreneurs play a much more significant role in the PRC than they did just a few years ago there is still a long way to go before their political clout comes anywhere near matching their economic power It is worth not ing that the children of many of the top Chinese leaders are now pursuing careers in the business sector with most working in foreign joint ventures such as investment banks rather than climbing the ladder of the CCP political hierarchy as their tech nocrat fathers did If as is likely some of them aspire to political careers it would represent a very different path to power with important implications for the future of the Chinese communist partystate Along with the economic and political rise of entrepreneurs there has also been an increase in the power and prevalence of lawyers in China see chapter 7 The Maoist system was hostile to both the legal profession and the legal system At the start of the reform era in the early 1980s there were only three thousand lawyers in a country of over one billion people22 Since then the number of registered lawyers and law school The CPPCC consists of over two thousand members who represent a wide range of constituencies including the CCP Chinas noncommunist democratic parties official mass organizations such as the AllChina Womens Federation vari ous occupational circles such as artists and writers educators medical personnel and farmers ethnic minorities and religions Although the majority of members of the CPPCC are noncommunists the organization is bound by its charter to accept the leadership of the CCP and it has always been headed by a highranking party leader The Conference meets each year for about two weeks concurrent with the annual session of the National Peoples Congress but its function is only to advise the government it has no legislative power of its own c h i n a s c o m m u n i s t P a r t y s t a t e 211 students has increased significantly In late 2012 China had a total of 220000 lawyers in about 20000 registered law firms23 This is still a tiny legal profession especially on a per capita basis when compared to the more than one million lawyers in the United States But the number of lawyers in China has increased dramatically in recent years and will become even more so in the years to come There are now more than 630 law schools and law departments in China graduate about 100000 students each year24 Some of Chinas lawyers work outside the political establishment to challenge abuses of power including rampant official corruption and seek to promote the rule of law at the grassroots level While activist lawyers are an emerging fac tor in Chinese politics they are still subject to regulation and persecution by the partystate All lawyers must be licensed by the government and the authorities often refuse to renew these licenses if the lawyer in question has been regarded as a troublemaker For example the lawyers representing the families whose chil dren were killed in poorly constructed schools during the earthquake that struck Sichuan province in May 2008 were harassed by the state The blind activist Chen Guangcheng who was selftaught in legal procedures was arrested in 2006 and then imprisoned for four years on trumped up charges after he had brought a classaction lawsuit against officials in his home province charging them with abuses in connec tion with Chinas onechild policy After his release from prison in 2010 Chen was placed under strict house arrest He escaped in April 2012 and took refuge in the American embassy in Beijing Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton negotiated his departure along with his family to the United States to pursue the formal study of the law at New York University Other lawyers work within the political or intellectual establishment and may become political leaders The rapid rise of younger leaders with legal training is an important trend in Chinese politics Three members of the Politburo including Premier Li Keqiang have some training in the legal studies An important theoretical proposition in Western studies of political elites is that the occupational identity of the leaders in a given country correlates withand sometimes has a determining effect onthe nature of the political system Political elites often want to leave their leadership legacy in the area in which they have a personal or professional interest Technocrats for example are often particularly interested in economic growth and technological development due to their own backgrounds in these subjects It will be interesting to watch whether the grow ing presence of lawyers and social scientists in the current generation of leaders will give greater attention to meaningful political and legal reform than the pre ceding generations of communist ideologues revolutionary veterans and engineer technocrats neW dynAmICs In The ChInese PolITICAl sysTem In addition to the growing diversity in educational and occupational experiences of Chinas political leaders several other trends have changed the dynamics of Chinese politics in important ways the transition from the dominance of a single charismatic leader to a more collective leadership the institutionalization of party rules and 212 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a procedures the relationship between the central partystate and local authorities and the emergence of a balance of power and informal system of checks and balances between two major leadership camps Mao Zedong wielded enormous almost unchallengeable personal power for most of the first three decades after the founding of the PRC in 1949 see chapter 3 He treated succession as if it were his own private matter discussion of the transition of power after Mao was taboo and he literally did away with two of his expected suc cessors who displeased him Liu Shaoqi in 1966 and Lin Biao in 1971 The omnipres ent slogan Long Live Chairman Mao reinforced the illusion of Maos immortality The Chairman literally held on to power until he had exhaled his dying breath in September 1976 The result was a cataclysmic succession struggle that led ironically to Deng Xiaopings rise to power and the reversal of most of the policies that charac terized Maoist China During the Deng era political succession and generational change in the Chinese leadership became a matter of public concern see chapter 4 Yet because of his legendary political career no leader seriously challenged Dengs ultimate authority Even when he did not hold any important leadership positions following the 1989 Tiananmen crisis Deng was still regarded as Chinas paramount leader For many years during the 1990s speculation by people in China and Sinologists abroad about when the elderly and ailing Deng would die often caused stock markets in Hong Kong and China to fluctuate wildly Like Mao Deng thought who took over after him was pretty much his choice alone In fact also like Mao though more gently he twice removed leaders he had tapped to succeed him Hu Yaobang in 1986 and Zhao Ziyang in 1989 because he saw both of them as being too soft on democracy protesters But unlike Mao Deng effectively handed over the reins of power to Jiang well before he died in 1997 Jiang Zemin had neither the charisma nor the revolutionary experience possessed by Mao or Deng To a large extent Jiang exercised power primarily through coalition building and political compromise Hu Jintaos generation of leaders relied even more on power sharing and finding consensus and Hu was only the first among equals in his generation of leaders As a result of this shift toward collective leadership in the CCP negotiation and compromise among competing factions has come to be a far more prominent part of Chinese elite politics than ever before The second trend is the movement toward increasing institutional restraints on the exercise of power within the Chinese partystate Nepotism of various forms eg blood ties school ties regional identities bureaucratic affiliations or patroncli ent ties continues to play an important role in the selection of leaders At the same time however institutional mechanisms including formal regulations and informal norms have been more effectively implemented to curtail various forms of favoritism and abuse of power These institutional developments include Innerparty election and decision by vote As discussed above the CCP has adopted some election methods to choose the members of the Central Committee and other highranking leaders Furthermore major personnel and policy decisions are now often decided by votes in party standing committees at various levels of leadership rather than solely by the committees head secretary c h i n a s c o m m u n i s t P a r t y s t a t e 213 Term limits With few exceptions a term limit of five years has been established for top posts in both the party and the government An individual leader cannot hold the same position for more than two terms Age limits for senior cadres Based on CCP regulations leaders above a certain level cannot exceed a set age limit For example members of the Central Committee Politburo and Standing Committee will not be considered for reentering these leadership bodies when they reach sixtyeight years of age The average age of the Politburo elected in 2012 was about sixtyone This is quite a change from even the fairly recent past when Deng Xiaoping really took charge of the party in 1982 the average age of the Politburo was seventytwo with several members in their eight ies and Chinas political system was said by some to be a gerontocracy or rule by the elderly The law of avoidance in the appointment of local top leaders Provincial party secretaries heads of the discipline commissions and police chiefs are almost always nonnative outsiders who were transferred from another province or the central administration This practice is in accordance with traditional Chinese cus tom of the law of avoidance that prohibited imperial officials from being sta tioned in their home provinces in order to reduce the possibility of favoritism and regionbased factionalism These institutional rules and norms not only generate a sense of consistency and fair ness in the selection of leaders but also make the circulation of the Chinese politi cal elite very fast The rate of change of CCP Central Committee membership for example has been remarkably high over the past thirty years with newcomers con stituting an average of 62 percent at each of the five Party Congresses held during that period The 2012 CCP Congress which had a Central Committee turnover rate of 638 percent also saw large membership turnovers in the other leading bodies of the CCP see Figure 66 Because of the mandatory retirement age it is already possible to predict that at least eleven of the twentyfive members of the current Politburo including five of the seven members of the Standing Committee will retire at the next party congress in 2017 The infusion of new blood into the leadership cannot but help the partystate adapt to changing circumstances and new challenges As a result of the fluidity of membership in these crucial leadership bodies no individual faction institution or region can dominate the power structure These developments have reinforced the norm of checks and balances in the Chinese lead ership and have affected elite behavior Leaders are now far more interested in estab lishing their legitimacy through institutional channels than were their predecessors who relied only on personal power and connections The third trend that is having a profound effect on Chinese politics is the changing relationship between the central partystate and local authorities This shift has been hastened by the emergence of local interests politically and economically empowered by the decentralization stemming from Chinas market reforms The many inequali ties eg between urban and rural coast and inland the prosperous and the poor that have also been a product of threeplus decades of economic reform have trans formed centerlocal relations into one of the countrys most daunting challenges 214 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Understandably local leaders mainly provincial and municipal leaders tend to side with the top national leaders who will protect or advance their interests Politicians in areas that have benefited from the reforms want to keep the policy orientation that favors their interests while those in disadvantaged regions favor members of the central leadership who represent a change in direction Whichever side they are on local leaders in China have a much bigger stake inand a bigger opportunity to influ enceelite politics than ever before in the history of the Peoples Republic CheCKs And BAlAnCes In An AuThoRITARIAn PARTysTATe Each of the above three recent trends in Chinese politics has shaped a fourth impor tant development the emergence within the upper reaches of the CCP of an unof ficial system of checks and balances The CCP leadership is now structured around two informal coalitions or factions that have come to check and balance each others power This is not the kind of institutionalized system of checks and balances that operates with the executive legislative and judicial branches of the American gov ernment an essential element of a truly democratic system But it is an important development in how Chinese politics works and may have farreaching implications for the future The two groups can be labeled the populist coalition or the Hu camp led by former General SecretaryPresident Hu Jintao and the elitist coalition or the 2 10 1 30 4 136 5 714 15 600 6 857 100 769 7 636 240 638 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 Standing Committee Central Committee Politburo Secrtariat CCDI CMC Returning Members New Members FIguRe 66 Membership Turnover of Top CCP Organizations at the 18th Party Congress November 2012 Note CCDI Central Commission for Discipline Inspection CMC Central Military Commission Source Cheng Li Opportunity Lost Inside Chinas Leadership Transition Foreign Policy November 16 2012 c h i n a s c o m m u n i s t P a r t y s t a t e 215 Jiang camp which was born in the Jiang Zemin era and is currently led by top offi cials including Xi Jinping with close political ties to Jiang The populist coalition gives more emphasis to addressing some of the serious problems such as vast eco nomic inequalities and environmental degradation that resulted from the growthat anycost strategy of development pursued by Jiang Zemin in the 1990s The elit ist coalition represents business interests including stateowned enterprises and Chinas more prosperous coastal regions Factional politics is of course not new in China Major events during the Mao and Deng eras such as the AntiRightist campaign the Cultural Revolution and the 1989 Tiananmen crisis were all related to factional infighting among the CCP leadership But factional politics is no longer a vicious power struggle and zerosum game in which winner takes all and those on the losing end are likely to be purged or worse Neither the elitist nor the populist coalition is capable of nor really wants to totally defeat the other Each coalition has its own strengths including different constituen cies which the other does not possess Their relationship when it comes to poli cymaking is one of both competition and cooperation This situation is sometimes referred to as the oneparty twocoalitions political mechanism25 Upon his ascension to the post of general secretary of the Party in 2002 Hu Jintao quickly sensed that his mandate was to fix the economic disparities associated with Jiangs leadership As a result Hu in partnership with Premier Wen Jiabao used his time at the helm to promote a populist strategy under new catchphrases such as sci entific development and harmonious society see chapters 4 and 5 While some refer to the HuWen years as the lost decade because of lack of significant progress in economic political and legal reform there were in addition to continuing high growth rates 105 per year important gains in areas of central concerns to the populists These included going a long way toward expanding health care insurance to the point where by 2010 more than 90 percent of both the urban and rural population had at least minimal coverage26 These leaders of the two coalitions have distinct personal careers and political asso ciations Many of the top leaders in the elitist coalition are children of revolution ary heroes or highranking officials This group of socalled princelings includes Xi Jinping whose father was a close associate of Maos who fell afoul of the Chairmans ideological wrath in the early 1960s and later emerged as a strong proponent of eco nomic reform The elitists have advanced their political careers primarily in Shanghai and are sometimes referred to as the Shanghai Gang or other major cities or coastal provinces By contrast most of the leading figures in the populist coalition for example Hu Jintao and Li Keqiang come from more humble or lessprivileged families They usu ally had substantial leadership experience in lessdeveloped inland provinces For example Hu Jintao spent most of his working life in some of the poorest provinces of Chinas inland region including fourteen years in Gansu three years in Guizhou and four years in Tibet Similarly Wen Jiabao spent fifteen years after graduating from college working in extremely arduous conditions also mainly in Gansu Many of the prominent populist leaders also advanced their political careers through the ranks of the Chinese Communist Youth League CCYL and have therefore garnered the label tuanpai literally league faction see Box 61 The 216 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a tuanpai and princelings served as the core groups in the larger competing political coalitionspopulists and elitists respectively It is very important to note that both camps share fundamental goals to ensure Chinas political and social stability promote continued economic growth enhance Chinas status as a major international player and most importantly the survival of CCP rule These common goals often push the two factions to compromise and coop erate with each other and have created a kind of bipartisanship with Chinese charac teristics at the top of the partystate To a degree leaders of the elitist coalition also recognize the need to allocate more resources to inland regions and help vulnerable social groups just as the populists understand the importance of maintaining rapid economic growth to meet the rising expectations of Chinas urban middle class Furthermore because the leaders of the factions differ in expertise credentials and experiences they understand that they need to find common ground to coexist and govern effectively The tuanpai are masters in terms of organization and pro paganda and have often had experience in rural administration especially in poor inland regions but they generally lack experience and credentials in some of the most important administrative areas and are short on skills related to the handling of foreign trade foreign investment banking and other crucial aspects of economic policymaking Therefore they have to cooperate with the elitist coalition who have Box 61 the young Pioneers and the ccyl The CCP has two organizations that bring together young people to learn about party ideology and policies and to engage in service projects and other activities that support party goals the Young Pioneers and the Chinese Communist youth league CCyl Almost all students in the PRC between the ages of 7 and 14 belong to the young Pioneers whose official purpose is to promote indoctrination of children by cultivat ing positive feelings of the Party and the socialist motherland new members make the following pledge We take our oath under the flag of young Pioneers I promise to follow the lead and teachings of the CCP to study well to work well to labor wellto prepare myself and sacrifice all my energy for Communism The CCyl is an organization for people aged fourteen to twentyeight Its main func tion is to identify and foster new Communist Party leaders In 2013 the CCyl had nearly ninety million members a staff of over 190000 fulltime cadres many of whom are older than the age limit for ordinary members and about 36 million local chapters The CCyls mission statement refers to the organization as the reserve army for the Party In addi tion to providing ideological training the league runs a variety of social service programs and operates several prominent media outlets notably the China Youth Daily newspaper membership in the CCyl does not guarantee party membership nor is participation in the youth organization required to join the CCP But being active in the CCyl can cer tainly facilitate becoming a full party member Hunter Hunt Joining the Party Youth Recruitment in the Chinese Communist Party USChina Today November 7 2011 httpuschinausceduarticleusctjoiningthepartyyouthrecruitmentinthechinese communistparty17639aspx Hunt Joining the Party c h i n a s c o m m u n i s t P a r t y s t a t e 217 strong backgrounds in economic and financial administration and have spent most of their careers in the developed coastal cities The factional power and influence of both princelings and tuanpai is not new but has been a factor in Chinese politics for the last twenty years or so It was only with Hu Jintaos rise to the top leadership however that the tuanpai really came of age in terms of power During the HuWen years the two factions maintained a moreor less equal allocation of seats in the top leadership organizations For instance in the twentyfivemember Politburo elected in 2007 the tuanpai held eight positions 32 percent the princelings held seven 28 percent The factions also rotated the drivers seat in the succession from Jiang to Hu and did so again in the succession from Hu to Xi Jinping The Politburo elected in 2012 was also quite balanced with twelve of the twentyfive members falling into the princelingelitist camp 48 percent and eleven 44 percent being identifiable as tuanpaipopulists However in the Politburo Standing Committee the Jiang camp clearly has an advantage with six out of seven members while the Hu camp has only one tuanpaipopulist Premier Li Keqiang There is balance at the very top in that General SecretaryPresident Xi Jinping is a princeling and Premier Li Keqing is a tuanpai Xi seems to be focused on the private sector market liberalization foreign investment and Shanghais role as a financial and shipping center In contrast Li emphasizes affordable housing hukou reform that helps migrant workers settle down in urban areas basic health care and clean energy But overall the princelings have apparently gained the upper hand in most key civilian and military organizations perhaps due to their powerful connections27 In any case their obvious ascendency is likely to reinforce public perceptions of the con vergence of power and wealth in the country More worryingly it might spell the end of bipartisanship and lead to a vicious power struggle potentially undermining the legitimacy of the political system and threatening the stability of the country at large The interaction between populists and elitists in the leadershipbetween the tuanpai and princeling factionsreflects a new dynamic of interdependence and powersharing through checks and balances in Chinese politics This bipartisan col lective leadership also entails a more pluralistic decisionmaking process through which political leaders can represent various social and geographic constituencies It is hard to overemphasize what a dramatic change this marks in the rules of the game for the CCPs leadership politics The dominance of Jiangs men in the new Politburo Standing Committee however does not necessarily mean that again the winner takes all in Chinese elite politics It should be noted that Hus protégés are still wellrepresented in other important lead ership bodies Many tuanpai leaders have made it onto the new 376member Central Committee Tuanpai leaders who previously worked within the CCYL national or provincial leadership when Hu Jintao or Li Keqiang was in charge of the CCYL now occupy ninetysix seats on the new Central Committee constituting 255 percent of this crucial decisionmaking body This increase is relatively steep when compared with the tuanpais eightysix seats on the previous Central Committee 232 percent of its 371 members28 Prominent tuanpai leaders who failed to obtain a seat in the Politburo Standing Committee at the 18th Party Congress such as Vice President Li Yuanchao and Vice 218 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Premier Wang Yang will still meet the age requirement for the 19th Party Congress in 2017 As the one party two coalitions dynamic appears to be a new experiment in Chinese elite politics it is possible the CCP may also experiment with a new mecha nism of factional rotation paixi lunhuan This may explain why the Hu camp qui etly acquiesced to its very disadvantageous power distribution at the 18th Politburo Standing Committee It is particularly worth noting that in each and every of the nine most important leadership organs in the PRC namely the PSC PRC presidency president and vice president State Council CMC CCP Secretariat NPC CPPCC Supreme Peoples Court and Supreme Peoples Procuracy the number one diyibashou and number two dierbashou leaders come from the two competing coalitions29 This suggests that under collective leadership in presentday China there is a deliberate effort on the part of the top leadership to maintain factional balance of power in various forms Nevertheless the CCPs innerparty bipartisanship has significant limitations in terms of further political reform The PRC is still an authoritarian communist partystate that can be brutal in repressing dissent and opposition Factional politics within the CCP although not nearly as opaque to the public as in the Mao era are not transparent The lack of an independent press means that the public mostly knows only what the party leadership wants it to know about the policymaking process and the contenders for power The seats in the most powerful bodies in the partystate are still decided by a very small number of top leaders through dealmaking not through open competition The CCPs bipartisan factional politics may provide a semblance of checks and bal ances that helps to keep the party leadership resilient and adaptable to changing cir cumstances but conflicting interests and competing policy initiatives may also make the decisionmaking process lengthier and more complicated perhaps leading to dead lock At a time when China confronts many tough choices the bipartisan leadership may find it increasingly difficult to reach a consensus on how to deal with crucial issues such as the regional redistribution of resources an inadequate public health system failing environmental protection ethnic tensions in Tibet and Xinjiang relations with Taiwan reform of the banking system disputes with the United States over foreign trade and territorial disputes in the East China Sea and the South China Sea Political paralysis over key issues could not only impede effective policymaking it could also dissolve into ruthless factional power strugglesperhaps even involving the military ConClusIon WhITheR ChInA There are two sharply contrasting and controversial perspectives on Chinas near to mediumterm political future that are now locked in mutual contention These two rival scenarios reflect fundamentally different assessments of the countrys socioeco nomic situation and likely political trajectory The first scenario envisions an abrupt bottomup revolution This assessment has recently generated much heated intellectual and political debate in the PRC In The following section is adapted from Cheng Li China at the Tipping Point TopLevel Reform or BottomUp Revolution Journal of Democracy 24 No 1 January 2013 4148 By permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press c h i n a s c o m m u n i s t P a r t y s t a t e 219 December 2011 the thirtyyearold bestselling author Han Han Chinas most popu lar blogger whose site has registered well over 580 million hits posted a nowfamous essay titled On Revolution30 Although Han argues that revolution is hardly a good option for China his intriguing view of the choice between reform and revolution has pointedly reflectedand greatly enhancedthe public awareness of the risk of revolution in the country Additionally one of the most popular books in PRC intellectual circles today is the Chinese translation of Alexis de Tocquevilles 1856 classic The Old Regime and the Revolution One frequently quoted passage is Tocquevilles argument that rev olutions usually occur not when the old regime resists change but rather when it begins to attempt reform only to find expectations outstripping any possible rate of improvement The second scenario is reform from above which CCP elites often refer to as toplevel design of reform gaige de dingceng sheji It is related to the leaders new found understanding that China is now in deep water and can no longer afford the cautious approach to reform known as crossing the river by feeling the stones mozhe shitou guohe Improvised reform in short needs to give way to a more methodical and more profound set of changes Moreover with so many of Chinas presentday socioeconomic problems growing out of impasses and obstacles within the political system basic political reform will have to be part of the agenda as well There is a case to be made that Chinese authoritarianism is resilient or strong31 But this view underestimates both the inherent vulnerability in the oneparty system and the growing resentment that the public feels over CCP leaders enormous power and wealth especially in the wake of major scandals such as the fall in 2012 of the rising political star Bo Xilai in connection with his wifes murder of a British busi nessman and charges of official malfeasance see chapter 4 as well as another aston ishing corruption case associated with the former Railway Minister Liu Zhijun who was convicted of economic crimes in 2013 and sentenced to death with a twoyear reprieveessentially life in prison without the possibility of parole32 Is there a bottomup revolution in the making in China There are many factors at work that could undermine the legitimacy of CCP to the point that its hold on power is seriously weakened After more than two decades of remarkably rapid economic growth China has recently experienced a slowdown which could reveal flaws in the PRCs authoritarian system and thus become a trigger for political crises The growing oligarchic power of SOEs especially gigantic flagship companies is widely viewed as driving massive cor ruption crowding out private investment squeezing the middle class and stalling the innovation that China must achieve if it is to make the transition from an exportled economy to one oriented toward consumption and innovation Many worry about environmental degradation health hazards and a wide range of publicinterest issues that touch on all classes Public protests large and small have been increasing in recent years and have become a source of some concern to the regime which refers to such occurrences as mass incidents quntixing shijian A Chinese sociologist estimated that in 2010 there were 180000 mass incidents a threefold increase from 200333 The main causes of this social unrest are shady land deals that enrich developers and often 220 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a cadres but in which urban residents or rural villagers get only meager compensa tion forced evictions also related to real estate development labor disputes pollu tion and corruption brutality or miscarriages of justice by local officials including the police34 Most of the protesters are farmers and workers but Chinas growing middle class has become vocal and active in expressing discontent about environmental dangers Middleclass anger at government policies has become increasingly evident in recent years An unemployment rate of about 20 percent among recent college graduates who are presumed to be members of Chinas future middle class should send an alarming signal to the Chinese government Given how hard it is to get a smallbusiness loan the opaque and poorly regulated nature of the Chinese stock market and the general lack of investment opportunities middleclass savings have flowed heavily into real estate The nightmare of a bursting property bubble is a real possibility One telling sign that even the countrys elites lack confidence in Chinas political stability is the large flow of capital leaving China in recent years From 20002011 China had the worlds highest illegal financial outflow at 38 trillion for the period from 2000 to 201135 Given the CCP leaderships determination to preserve its grip on power it is no surprise that the police have become more powerful with an influence over socio economic policy that matches their bigger budgets In 2012 the 110 billion allot ted to maintaining social stability weihu wending or weiwen for short exceeded the amount spent on national defense by four billion dollars The growing power of the police has also created a vicious circle in which the more fiercely the police sup press unrest the more violent and widespread it grows With all the sources of social resentment possible triggering factors and disturbing trends one should not be too quick to disregard the scenario of a bottomup revolution Perhaps the Chinese political structure will be able to continue its quite remarkable record of adapting to changing circumstances and new challenges and preserve the partystate into the foreseeable future What are the prospects that the CCP lead ership will act to save itself by undertaking systemic political reform As discussed above a few important institutional reforms designed to promote intraCCP democ racy have been put into place It is understandable that CCP leaders and their advisors are inclined to pursue democratic experiments within the Party or in other words to carry out political reform in a way that is incremental and manageable characterized by elite competition balance of power among factions and links to distinct interest groups in Chinese society36 Could this lead China toward democratization The path to democracy varies from nation to nation and depends largely on a countrys historical and political circumstances Chinese leaders and public intellec tuals have every right to argue that the PRCs version of democracy will and should have its own distinct or even unique features After all the democratic regimes that one finds in India Indonesia the United Kingdom and the United States are very different from one another in significant ways while also sharing fundamental values institutions and processes essential to democracy Moreover it is even pos sible for a democracyas in both Japan and Mexicoto undergo lengthy stretches of oneparty rule while preserving key features of democratic governance including vigorous political contestation fair elections a free press and a vibrant civil society c h i n a s c o m m u n i s t P a r t y s t a t e 221 A dynamic interplay of checks and balances among ruling party factions often pro vides a kind of bipartisanship in such oneparty dominant democracies37 Chinas very limited form of bipartisan elite politics within the CCP might contain the seeds of evolution toward this kind of regime The new competitive dynamics within the collective CCP leadership could have the effects of making lobbying more transparent factional politics more legitimate rules and laws more respected elec tions more genuine and elites more accountable and representative New political parties often emerge from factional divisions within existing parties Furthermore public demand for a more competitive more institutionalized more transparent political system will however only become stronger Along with a larger middle class the country has a more assertive legal profession that argues for constitutionalism and strong measures to curb corruption and abuses of power The media too are more commercialized and influential and social media have achieved a level of pervasiveness that no one could have imagined only a few years ago Democratization through a combination of topdown reform and bottomup pressure is not an impossible scenario for China But for that to happen would require a sea change in the CCPs longstanding insistence that it has the right to play the leading role in Chinese politics and that a multiparty system is not an acceptable model for China And meaningful political reform may be blocked by the strong resis tance from some conservative leaders and powerful vested interest groups such as large stateowned enterprises Over the next decade or so Chinas future will hinge on the dynamic between the fear of revolution and the hope for political reform The threat of revolution from below may push the forwardlooking political leaders to pursue incremental yet bold political reform Should reform fail however revolt may well be the upshot And the unfolding drama wherever it leads will undoubtedly have profound ramifications far beyond Chinas borders noTes 1 For more discussion of the leading small groups see Alice L Miller The CCP Central Committees Leading Small Groups China Leadership Monitor No 26 Fall 2008 121 httpwwwhooverorgpublicationschinaleadershipmonitorarticle5689 2 China Economic History Forum May 3 2006 httpwebarchiveorg web20080604234836httpeconomyguoxuecomarticlephp82912 3 Stanley Lubman The Path to Legal Reform without Revolution ChinaRealTimeReport httpblogswsjcomchinarealtime20121207heweifangandthepathto legalreformwithoutrevolution For more on Professor Hes views on legal reform in China see He Weifang In the Name of Justice Striving for the Rule of Law in China Washington DC Brookings Institution 2012 4 Mao Zedong Problems of War and Strategy Selected Works of Mao Tsetung vol 2 Beijing Foreign Languages Press 1965 224 httparchiveorgdetails SelectedWorksOfMaoTsetungVolIi 5 China Daily June 30 2012 httpwwwchinadailycomcnchina20120630con tent15538974htm 222 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a 6 Hong Yong Lee From Revolutionary Cadres to Party Technocrats in Socialist China Berkeley University of California Press 1990 291 7 Xinhua banyüe kan Xinhua bimonthly January 2 1957 89 and cited in Franz Schurmann Ideology and Organization in Communist China 2nd ed Berkeley University of California Press 1968 283 8 Lee From Revolutionary Cadres to Party Technocrats in Socialist China 302 9 Shijie ribao World Journal June 28 1999 A9 Figures CPC membership 2011 Chinaorgcn httpwwwchinaorgcnchina20120814content26231924htm 10 Alice Miller The New Party Politburo Leadership China Leadership Monitor No 40 Winter 2013 3 14 httpwwwhooverorgpublicationschinaleadershipmonitor article137951 11 Cheng Li Chinas Midterm Jockeying Gearing Up for 2012 Part 1 Provincial Chiefs China Leadership Monitor No 31 Winter 2010 12 httpwwwhooverorgpublications chinaleadershipmonitorarticle5330 12 Miller The New Party Politburo Leadership 13 Chinas Labor Force Lags behind in Higher Education Peoples Daily May 21 2010 httpenglishpeopledailycomcn90001907826994379html 14 Chinas Communist Party Membership Exceeds 85 million Xinhua June 30 2013 httpnewsxinhuanetcomenglishchina20130630c132498982htm The 2002 figure is from httpwwwchinatodaycomorgcpc 15 Data on women in the CCP from Figures CPC membership 2011 Chinaorgcn and China Vitae chinavitaecom 16 For more discussion of this development see Zhiyue Bo Chinas New Provincial Leaders Major Reshuffling before the 17th National Party Congress China An International Journal 5 no 1 March 2007 125 and Cheng Li Pivotal SteppingStone Local Leaders Representation on the 17th Central Committee China Leadership Monitor No 23 Winter 2008 113 httpwwwhooverorgpublicationschinaleadershipmonitorarticle5772 17 Chinas Individual Private Businesses Expand Fast China Daily Dec 5 2012 http wwwchinadailycomcnbusiness20121205content15986334htm 18 The United Front Department of the CCP Central Committee 2005 nian Zhongguo siying qiye diaocha baogao A survey of private enterprises in 2005 See also httpwww southcncomfinancegdmqgcgdmqyyrl200502030218htm 19 Chinese Academy of Social Sciences 2013 Social Blue Book reported at httpdai lynewssinacombgchnchnpoliticssinacn2012121913274074905html 20 CPC Delegates from Private Sector Doubled China Daily Nov 7 2012 httpwww chinadailycomcnchina2012cpc20121107content15888973htm 21 Jamil Anderlini Chinese Parliament Holds 83 Billionaires Financial Times March 7 2013 httpwwwftcomintlcmss04568598e873111e29dd700144feabdc0 htmlaxzz2QCJa8AdR 22 The Center for Chinese Legal Studies Columbia University httpswwwlawcolum biaedufocusareasasianlegalchina 23 China has 220000 Lawyers China Daily Nov 13 2012 httpusachinadailycom cnchina20121113content15924504htm 24 Law graduates face tough exam few jobs Peoples Daily Online June 14 2013 httpenglishpeopledailycomcn2036918284097html See also Carl Minzner Fordham International Law Journal Vol 36 No 2 2013 335396 25 For more detailed discussion of the one party two coalitions mechanism see Cheng Li Tongwang Zhongnanhai zhiluZhonggong shibada zhiqian gaoceng lingdao qunti The Road to Zhongnanhai HighLevel Leadership Groups on the Eve of the 18th Party Congress New York The Mirror Books 2012 c h i n a s c o m m u n i s t P a r t y s t a t e 223 26 W C Yip W C Hsiao W Chen S Hu J Ma and A Maynard Early Appraisal of Chinas Huge and Complex HealthCare Reforms Lancet March 3 2012 833842 27 For more discussion of the princelings victory at the 18th Party Congress see Cheng Li Rule of the Princelings The Cairo Review of Global Affairs No 8 Winter 2013 3447 28 Cheng Li A Biographical and Factional Analysis of the Post2012 Politburo China Leadership Monitor No 41 June 6 2013 For a similar observation also see Willy Lam Communist Youth League Clique Maintains Clout Despite Congress Setback China Brief 12 No 23 November 30 2012 29 Li A Biographical and Factional Analysis of the Post2012 Politburo 30 On Revolution was one of the three articles of Han Hans series which he wrote on the eve of 2012 the other two were On Democracy and On Freedom http blog sinacomcnsarticlearchive11912581232011121html For more discussion see Eric Abrahamsen Han Hans UTurn International Herald Tribune January 26 2012 httplatitudeblogsnytimescom20120126bloggerhanhan controversy ondemocracyinchina 31 David Shambaugh for example observed that the CCP is a reasonably strong and resilient institution Chinas Communist Party Atrophy and Adaptation Washington DC Woodrow Wilson Center Press 2008 176 See also Andrew J Nathan Chinas Changing of the Guard Authoritarian Resilience Journal of Democracy 14 January 2003 617 and Alice Miller Institutionalization and the Changing Dynamics of Chinese Leadership Politics in Cheng Li ed Chinas Changing Political Landscape Prospects for Democracy Washington DC Brookings Institution Press 2008 6179 32 For more discussion of these two scandals see Pin Ho and Wenquang Huang A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel Murder Money and an Epic Power Struggle in China New York Public Affairs 2013 Anton Wishik The Bo Xilai Crisis A Curse or a Blessing for China An Interview with Cheng Li NBR April 18 2012 httpwwwnbrorgresearch activityaspxid236UbzBOAQifQ and Evan Osnos Boss Rail The Disaster That Exposed the Underside of the Boom The New Yorker October 22 2012 33 Fang Shu A National Conundrum Peoples Daily Online February 10 2012 httpenglishpeopledailycomcn908827725198htmlhttpenglishpeopledailycom cn908827725198html 34 See Jeremy Goldkorn Legal Daily Report on Mass Incidents in China in 2012 Danwei Tracking Chinese Media and Internet January 6 2013 httpwwwdanwei comareportonmassincidentsinchinain2012 35 Dev Kar and Sarah Freitas Illicit Financial Flows from China and the Role of Trade Misinvoicing Global Financial Integrity Washington DC October 2012 36 Yu Keping Democracy Is a Good Thing Essays on Politics Society and Culture in Contemporary China Washington DC The Brookings Institution Press 2009 37 See T J Pempel Uncommon Democracies The OneParty Dominant Regimes Ithaca Cornell University Press 1990 In recent decades law and the legal system have come to play newly large and complex roles in China Yet accounts of contemporary China often suggest little role for law They depict Chinas recent history as one of marketconforming and internationally engaged eco nomic growth resilient and adaptable authoritarian poli tics and lack of rule of law or even much rule by law Nonetheless law has been a durable theme since Deng Xiaoping emerged as Chinas paramount leader after Mao Zedongs death In 1978 the reform eras founding charter the Communiqué of the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee included a directive that there must be laws that the laws must be followed and strictly enforced and that violations of law must be corrected A key slogan of the Jiang Zemin years called for ruling the country by law and building a socialist rule of law state When he came to power in 2002 Hu Jintao called the constitution the countrys fundamental and inviolable law and insisted that it was to be implemented by all state and private entities Hu mentioned law a record number of times in his 2007 political report to the 17th Party Congress In 2011 Wu Bangguo then chairman of the National Peoples Congress NPC Chinas highest lawmaking organ declared that construction of Chinas socialist legal system was basically complete Xi Jinpings ascension to Chinas top leadership posts brought renewed official insistence on laws importance In 2012 the Eighteenth Party Congress political work report directed the party to operate within Chinas Legal System JA C qu es delI sle 7 Rule by law refers to a system in which a principal means for regulating economic social political and state behavior is legal ruleswhatever their contentthat are publicly known the product of identified lawmaking processes or institu tions and applied fairly and consistently Rule of law requires more including that laws operate as a reliable constraint uponand do not serve merely as an instrument ofthe state and wielders of political power more generally andon some more restrictive definitionsmeet some more substantive standard of justice or protection of rights c h i n a s l e g a l s y s t e m 225 the limits of the constitution and the law and to uphold their authority On the thirti eth anniversary of the 1982 constitution Xi announced that we must firmly establish throughout society the authority of the constitution and the law The 60point program announced at the Eighteenth Central Committees Third Plenum in November 2013 pledged to strengthen rule of law guarantees and to constrain power within a cage of institutions and rules The Xi leadership also signaled new reliance on law to address corruption one of the gravest identified threats to stability and party rule This rhetoric has not translated fully into practice The roles of law have remained limited and uneven over time across fields of law and in different parts of China They are the subject of disagreement among observers in China and abroad Still some generalif mixedpatterns have emerged The turn to law has fallen between the regimes relatively extensive embrace of marketoriented economic development and its continued shunning of political democracy The partystate has invested many material resources and much political capital in creating laws and legal institutions Law has been expected to playand to some extent has playedsignificant roles in promoting economic development maintaining order and sustaining the partys rule Legal development remains characterized by several gaps between rule of law ide als and many of laws formal promises on one hand and the ways law functions in practice on the other Constituencies favoring greater reliance on law and functional demands for greater legality create pressure for roles for law and legal institutions that are more robust and to Western eyes more familiar But these forces face obstacles ranging from practical difficulties to popular disillusionment and frustration to elite skepticism and opposition The future trajectory of legal change in China remains uncertain and continues to be a test for global theories about laws role in supporting economic development and political order ChInAs legAl sysTem Then And noW Chinas legal system has ancient roots with the earliest legal code datingdepending on ones definitionto the Spring and Autumn Period or the Han dynasty Debates over the role of law fa as opposed to moral or social norms li originated with dis putes between Confucians and Legalists more than two millennia ago and still reso nate in Chinese legal discourse today Although laws and the legal system changed over many centuries of dynastic rule several broad features characterized law in tra ditional China Elaborate written codes focused primarily on criminal and to a lesser extent administrative matters Punishments were imposed for acts merely analogous to those proscribed by law Laws governing economic and other civil relations were sparse and civil disputes were left largely to informal resolution by social institutions Formal enforcement of law including criminal sanctions was seen as a means of gov ernance secondary to instilling Confucian norms by which people should guide their own behavior Although officials and staff at various levels specialized in legal affairs there was no formal separation of powers and very few distinctly legal institutions All legislative executive and judicial power rested in principle with the emperor At the local level the magistrate was an omnicompetent official charged with all aspects of governing including judicial functions There was no legal profession and those who offered litigation services could risk criminal punishment 226 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Late Qing and Republican reformers borrowed extensively from Western legal ideas and institutions Following the political thought of Sun Yatsen see chapter 2 the constitution of the Republic of China adopted a fivepower structure that included three Westernstyle branches legislative executive and judicial and two derived from Chinese tradition a control organ focusing on government misbehavior and a civil service exam organ It also included a formally democratic system of popular sovereignty constitutional review and a liberal list of civil liberties The basic six laws of the Republic also drew heavily from Western models They included sub stantive and procedural statutes for criminal civil and administrative law Many of these laws and legal institutions were never effective in mainland China where the Republic failed to consolidate power and suspended the constitution amid the con flict with Chinas communist revolutionaries The laws and institutions established under the Peoples Republic of China PRC adapted Soviet models The PRC adopted a constitution in 1956 based on the USSRs Stalinera constitution with principles of party rule nominal popular sovereignty communist partystate government structures and if only in name liberal individual rights The 1956 charter is broadly similar to the 1982 constitutionthe fourth in the PRCs historythat is currently in force The early PRC regime also established for mal legal institutions that remain in place today Some of the more radical phases of the Mao Zedong era especially the AntiRightist Campaign and more so the Cultural Revolution see chapter 3 dealt heavy blows to courts and other legal institutions Coming after a highpoint of socialist legality in the middle 1950s these campaigns attacked previously officially endorsed principles of respect for law and a degree of judicial independence and legal professionalism The Cultural Revolutions most radical phase largely shut down legal institutions as it did many other state organs and brought withering attacks on legal rights as a bour geois concept and law as a malevolent tool for protecting class enemies The PRC legal system is one of parliamentary supremacy with executive and judi cial institutions formally subordinate to the legislature and a unitary nonfederal state with local lawmaking power limited to that delegated by the central state Key legal institutions include the peoples courts the peoples procuracy and the public security apparatus The procuracy combines the functions of prosecution and oversight of malfeasance by other government organs The public security bureaus serve police and internal security and social monitoring functions but the latter responsibilities have been substantially reduced during the reform era and the former role has been shifted largely to a state security ministry The announcement in late 2013 of a new National Security Council to address internal as well as external security threatspartly through legal meansreflected longsimmering concerns about domestic stability and raised the possibility of further restructuring to address this policy area The peoples courts have a fourlevel structure including basic courts intermediate courts provincial high courts and the Supreme Peoples Court Different levels have initial jurisdiction over more or less difficult or important cases Each courts deci sion is subject to nondeferential reviewessentially a second trialby a higherlevel court The Supreme Peoples Court exercises bureaucratic ministrylike authority over the lower judiciary A similar multitiered and hierarchical structure character izes the procuracy headed by the Supreme Peoples Procuracy the legislative branch that is the peoples congress system where national laws and local rules are made c h i n a s l e g a l s y s t e m 227 and the executive branch central ministries which make many regulations and pro vincial and local governments which have delegated rulemaking powers Courts and other legal institutions have been kept explicitly under the leadership of the party although the extent of party intervention has declined during the reform era The party plays a central role in selecting and promoting judges and court person nel many of whom are party members Within each court an adjudication commit tee headed by the court president has authority to shape and override decisions by the panel of judges who hear a case Chinese Communist Party CCP politicallegal committees at each level have extensive power to oversee courts and other legal insti tutions Courts budgets depend on the peoples congresses and governments at the courts own level which in the reform era has contributed to a form of judicial bias and influence known as local protectionism In contrast to the Mao years reform era state legal institutions operate in an environment shaped by a much more exten sive body of laws and regulations much stronger official support for principles of legality and a much larger and more professional cohort of lawyers1 BuIldIng lAW And legAl InsTITuTIons Chinas undertakings to build law and legal institutions since the beginning of the reform era have been extensive The complete laws of the PRC from 1949 to 1985 fit in a single relatively slim volume By the early 2000s a much thicker tome could no longer contain even a years output During the reform era the NPC or its Standing Committee has enacted hundreds of major laws and more numerous lesser ones The State Council and its subordinate commissions and ministries as well as local peoples congresses and governments have adopted tens of thousands of national regulations and lowerlevel rules Many of these have been amended repeatedly to accommodate Chinas changing conditions or to conform to international norms2 In contrast to earlier periods when many rules were in internal or secret docu ments that were not to be shown to those whose behavior they governed sources of law are now generally publicly available Although ambiguity and confusion persist and for mal mechanisms for resolving conflicts among sources of law remain weak and rarely used there is now a clear hierarchy ranging from the constitution which is in principle supreme over other lawsif not party policybut which generally has no legal effect if there is no implementing legislation to legislation centrallevel regulations local rules and normative documents that do not formally have the status of law China has opened or reopened more than six hundred law schools that have trained many lawyers who now number around two hundred thousand judges who are as numerous as lawyers and staff more than ten thousand courts and others who have taken legal training into jobs in the private and public sectors The reform era has brought similarly largescale investment in rebuilding expanding and improving courts and prosecutorial offices Legislatures and regulatory bodies have enhanced their lawmaking and lawinterpreting abilities by expanding legal staffs and upgrading their skills and by turning to Chinas leading often partly foreigntrained legal scholars as advisors Both the NPC in its Legislative Affairs Commission and the State Council with its Legislative Affairs Office include specialized bodies that focus on law and legal affairs 228 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a These developments have been accompanied by vast and sustained propaganda media and outreach efforts to increase popular knowledge of law and legal rights Although such changes are hard to measure rights consciousness awareness of legal rights and expectations that they should be protected by the state or at least rules consciousness knowledge of the rules that the state has promulgated and belief that they should be followed appears to have risen markedly from low base lines among the Chinese public3 Business entities and citizens regularly turn to law firms which number roughly seventeen thousand legal assistance offices which serve the poor or individual lawyers for legal services Each year Chinese courts handle more than ten million complaints from par ties who seek redress on matters ranging from business dealings to property and intellectual property issues to accidentally and intentionally inflicted harms to employment disputes to defamation and to divorce Courts execute over two mil lion civil judgments per year Chinese courts annually handle over one hundred thousand suits against the state for actions such as improper taking of property imposition of fines or other noncriminal sanctions or denial of licenses or gov ernment benefits Although greatly reduced as a percentage from the Mao era much of the work of Chinese courts involves criminal cases The PRCs first fullfledged Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure Law were adopted in 1979 Both underwent major revisions in the mid1990s and have undergone significant additional changes since then including extensive amendments to the Criminal Procedure Law in 2012 Broadly these changes have made definitions of criminal behavior more detailed and precise removed the most obvious vestiges of politicized justice from the Mao years adopted measures to address problems arising from economic reform and other developments such as financial crimes official corruption and terrorism and brought formal law nearer to Western or international norms of procedural fairness In recent highlevel pol icy pronouncments and in court practice there have been significant moves toward greater transparency in trials and the highprofile and politically charged criminal trial of top elitemember Bo Xilai was publicized in great detail including the release of extensive transcripts of the proceedings Much of laws impact in reform era China lies outside formal legal institutions and procedures In the letters and visits xinfang petitioning process public protests and more informal appeals to state or party authorities aggrieved citizens invoke their legal rights or point to legal rules in support of their pleas for what is in the end redress that officials have discretion to grant or deny Given the complexity unevenness and rapidity of legal change since the begin ning of the reform era overall assessments of the impact of efforts to build law and the legal system are problematic but they can help put Chinas experience in con text In the World Banks Rule of Law index China scores above the fortieth per centile globally and near the median for countries in its uppermiddleincome group4 China ranks higher than might be expected given that its per capita income is near the bottom of the wide uppermiddleincome range that rule of law rankings correlate strongly with wealth and that the Chinese legal system had to be rebuilt from devastation wrought during the Cultural Revolution decade 19661976 c h i n a s l e g a l s y s t e m 229 lAW And ChInAs eConomIC deVeloPmenT The most notable role for law and legal institutions during the reform era has been to support economic developmentspecifically development of an economy that has been transitioning from Sovietstyle socialist economic planning toward the market from international isolation to global engagement and from poverty to relative pros perity5 Economic policies that support and reflect these transitions have been cast heavily and for China unprecedentedly in legal form This agenda has been reaf firmed repeatedly including in the Central Committees late 2013 pledge to establish fair open and transparent market regulations and to open ever wider ranges of eco nomic activity to all types of actors on an equal basis and according to law The Economic Contract Law of 1981 revisions and supplementary laws a unified Contract Law in 1999 and later additions to related laws have provided an elaborate legal framework for economic actors to engage in voluntary more marketbased trans actions with a widened universe of partners Parties to agreements have gained much legal freedom to make and not make contracts choose suppliers and customers negotiate terms of agreements and operate without much constraint from the state plan They have won increased discretion in selecting procedures for resolving disputes and in many international contracts even to choose which countrys law governs6 These and other laws have embodied and advanced policies to give enterprises and individuals room to pursue their own economic agendas and respond to market signals For firms that remain owned or controlled by state organs laws have sup ported greater management autonomy and insulation from intervention by govern ment overlords Laws have affirmed the legitimacy of and set forth powers for new business organizations that have faced market environments and lacked state subsi dies from their inception These entities which have proliferated during the reform era include township and village enterprises new types of collective enterprises and many forms of private and foreigninvested firms The Company Law and Securities Law of the 1990s their mid2000s revised versions and related laws and regulations authorized and encouraged more complex and flexible forms of ownership and modes of transferring ownership They created legal frameworks for corporations that issue shares including shares traded on stock exchanges that China began to establish in the 1990s Such reforms were intended to lead owners and managers to exercise their respective powers to advance firms economic interests Laws governing profits and taxation have delineated increasingly armslength and rulegoverned fiscal relationships between firms and the state For enterprises owned by the state or controlled by state organs these reforms replaced arrange ments of complete arbitrary or ad hoc negotiated payments of profits by enterprises to the state For private privatized or partly privatized entities fiscal laws applied more straightforwardly making taxation a principal form of legitimate state revenue extraction These legal changes occurred alongside shrinkage of the state share of the rapidly growing economy to less than half of the industrial and service sectors Laws on security interests banks and securities and futures markets mandated and facili tated more marketbased and less heavily political or policybased mechanisms for allocating credit and capital Compared to its 1987 predecessor the 2006 Bankruptcy Law offered more power to creditors less discretion to the state as gatekeeper to 230 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a bankruptcy and weaker protection for employees iron rice bowlsthe term for de facto permanent employment and guaranteed benefits that workers in stateowned enterprises once enjoyed A decade in the making a 2008 AntiMonopoly Law tar geted threats to markets from old and increasingly new firms with dominant posi tions or collusive practices sometimes pursued with the backing of state authorities The resolution adopted at the November 2013 Plenum envisioned giving the market a still more decisive role and promoting corporate governance and other enterprise reforms that will demand additional expansion and revision of economic laws Still reform in economic law has had its limits as a means for supporting develop ment through markets Formally laws have continued to require that contracts be consistent with vestiges of the state plan and vaguely defined public interests Some contracts and projects including many largescale undertakings by nonstateowned firms still need approval from Chinas vast and largely unaccountable bureau cracy Many large enterprises have remained wholly stateowned or effectively statecontrolled often through complex corporate structures Despite corporate gov ernance law reform the state as owner and stateselected managers face opportuni ties and pressures to steer firms to endsoften politically defined onesother than maximizing profits or shareholder value For small and nonstatelinked enterprises access to capital from banks stock markets or any legally authorized channels other than retained earnings has remained limited often relegating them to sources outside the reach of reformed laws7 Equities markets remain flawed and limited means for raising capital and disciplining listed firms Although bankruptcies have risen sharply the law still has not subjected many state firms to much financial discipline in part because statelinked firms have enjoyed preferential access to cheap capital despite legal and regulatory reforms that directed banks toward commercial lending and away from socalled policy lending Developments in other areas of economicsrelated law show similarly mixed pat terns Building on earlier changes to the 1982 constitution a 2004 amendment raised private property nearly to formal equality with state and collective property and pro vided that takings of private property would require a public purpose and compensa tion After long delays and heated criticism that it undermined socialism a Property Rights Law passed in 2007 giving clearer content and higher status to legal rights in property especially land8 Here too reform faced significant limits even in the law on the books Urban land remains owned by the state and rural land by the collective essentially the local state People and enterprises do not have full ownership but only limited contractbased usufruct rights broadly rights to use and derive profits from land and to some extent transfer their rights The public interest required for taking land is illdefined and unconstraining and there is no requirement that com pensation be fair or match market value Problems of uncertain weak and uneven rights to land have been sufficiently serious that a key policy document acknowledged in late 2013 that China still needed to complete a modern property rights system with clearer rules to allocate equalize particularly between rural and urban sectors protect and transfer rights Law has acquired new stillemerging roles in addressing economically harmful behavior including providing civil remedies Reform in this area has expanded liabil ity for producers and sellers of defective products with the framework evolving from c h i n a s l e g a l s y s t e m 231 sparse provisions in the General Principles of Civil Law 1987 through a Product Quality Law 1993 2000 and a Consumer Rights and Interests Protection Law 1993 to a scandalexpedited Food Safety Law 2009 and a fullfledged Tort Liability Law 2010laws that give victims of accidental or intentional harms rights to courtordered compensation from those responsible for their losses The growth of this and related areas of law has been limited by their newness and incompleteness continuing restric tions on class action lawsuits that have been key drivers of tort law in other systems and larger legal and institutional structures that assign much of the task of addressing socially harmful activitiesespecially in cases involving significant social harm such as defective consumer products or environmental pollutionto administrative over sight state sanctions and governmentbrokered compensation schemes9 Laws governing international economic interactions are another variation on the theme of economic legal reform In recent decades China has adopted increasingly and by large developing country standards strikingly liberal trade and investment laws New laws dismantled restrictions on enterprises foreign trading rights low ered barriers to imports and exports and pursued conformity with World Trade Organization WTO requirements as China sought to enter the international trade body and after its accession in 2001 to implement WTO obligations Laws on Chineseforeign joint ventures wholly foreignowned enterprises foreign own ership of shares inand full acquisition ofPRC companies and foreign exchange have become much more flexible and foreignerfriendly since opening to the world began in 1979 Other legal reforms have opened more regions and economic sectors to foreign investment Nonetheless China has faced criticism for laws and policies that the United States and others claim breach WTO obligations on market access intellectual property rights unfair support for exports and other matters Foreign investors complain of legal and regulatory playing fields that are tiltedin many accounts increasingly soagainst them and in favor of Chinese competitors10 Overall what marketsupporting economic developmentpromoting legal reform has wrought in practice is complicated and controversial Changes in law have occurred alongside changes in practice that have partly tracked what the laws promised Some studies have found that especially in Chinas most developed areas businesses have come to engage in more transactions with strangers and to rely less on connections guanxi or corruption in part because of pressures from market competition and the law Other assessments however have found that economic reform has permitted or encouraged guanxi to endure as a key feature of economic transactions and that law has made only modest headway in creating reliably enforceable neutral rules that should allow parties to make business decisions solely on economic grounds11 Contractbased property rights were instrumental to the return from collectivized agriculture to household farming and the creation of urban residential homeowner ship and commercial development in the reform era Nonetheless formal legal rights to use the land but not full ownership have proved a weak defense against appro priation and transfers to developers for urban redevelopment or conversion of rural land to urban use In practice much housing construction has depended on extralegal mechanisms such as the minor property rights that have been the vehicle for devel oping land still legally consigned to agricultural and rural uses12 A labor contract law has greatly expanded employment protections for covered workers even drawing 232 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a criticism for making them too difficult to fire Yet labor law more generally has done little to alleviate wretched and dangerous conditions for many workers a problem reflected in mass industrial and mining accidents13 Studies of experiences with economic litigation are similarly ambivalent Some find that parties to ordinary commercial disputes report fairly high levels of belief that the results in their cases comported with law One rigorous study concluded that ordinary citizens were more likely to litigate if someone they knew had done soa result suggesting relatively positive experiences with the legal system On the other hand other assessments conclude that many Chineseespecially the less welloff and less educatedturn to court not because they expect a just or satisfactory result but because bringing suit offers hope of a moral victory and a sense of limited empow erment Some research depicts deepand deepeningpopular disillusionment with the legal system and the efficacy of laws Yet this disillusionment appears to be partly the result of highly optimistic views about legal remedies and low respect for out comes that are procedurally proper but appear substantively unjust14 Considerable progress has been made in building a more educated professional and capable judiciary and increasing judicial autonomy especially in relatively ordi nary cases Nonetheless scholarly and popular analyses of courts point to persisting severe problems that affect justice One issue is judicial corruption whether bribery or trading on connections Another is local protectionism courts favor local par ties especially large or statelinked firms because courts depend on the local state for their budgets and judges on the local party for career advancement and the local partystate wants to protect local companies as sources of tax revenue profits for the local state as owner growth and jobs which are key components in the development and stabilityfocused rubric for evaluating local officials or political support given widespread entanglement of local business elites and party and state cadres Some recent developments have raised concerns that trends toward legality in eco nomic affairs during the early decades of the reform era have been flattening or revers ing A pattern of the state advances and the private sector retreats guojin mintui has meant growing clout for large statelinked enterprises that are less effectively con strained by the laws and have less need to rely on law and courts to protect their inter ests A drive for formal legality associated with the Supreme Peoples Court through the mid2000s yielded to a renewed emphasis on mediation over adjudication social har mony over legal rights and political values alongside legal principles in courts work15 One possible indicator of legal reforms contribution to promoting economic devel opment is Chinas economic success As discussed in chapter 8 China has achieved remarkably high growth rates often around 10 percent annually during the reform era and extensive sectoral transformation from agriculture to industry and now to more knowledgeintensive industries and services Comparative studies including those focusing on East Asia find significant correlation between economic devel opment and the rule of law China has become a top destination for foreign invest ment Global investors are generally believed to demandand Chinas law reform agenda assumed that they demandedrelatively familiar and reliable legal frame works before they would invest Yet some accounts reject the connection and portray China as the great exception to any rule that legal development is a prerequisite or at least a strong correlate of economic development On this view Chinas success is c h i n a s l e g a l s y s t e m 233 a counterexample of impressive development despite weak law or even because of weak law with for example vulnerable property rights removing potential barriers to transferring land to more productive uses16 RegulATIng The sTATe And ITs AgenTs Chinas reform era leaders have perceived that law could help address corruption guanxi parochialism including local protectionism abuses of power or abdication of responsibility by those wielding power and the perils of failing to avoid discover or revise badly designed or poorly executed policiesall of which can undermine economic development produce social unrest and threaten political stability Such concerns about state dysfunction have grown serious in recent years Public opinion polls and top leaders alike identify as major problems corruption and increasingly public health threats from environmental degradation and dangerous food and prod ucts tolerated by lax regulation17 Well over one hundred thousand mass incidents of social unrest occur annually with many focusing on official abuse or indifference The regime has turned in part to laws and legal institutions to enhance discipline transparency and accountability in governance and in turn to sustain development and avoid disorder Laws roles in serving these public governance ends have included elements of for mally private law such as the law of contracts and property Contract suits begin ning in the 1980s included many involving peasants or entrepreneurs who profitably managed assets leased from collective or state owners and faced efforts to extract larger payments or nullify contracts Other suits over contractedout agricultural or industrial assets challenged agreements for assigning rights to cadres or other insiders on suspiciously favorable terms Commercial litigation by industrial and commercial enterprises has addressed breaches stemming from official lawlessness including mis deeds by state owners or overseers State actors sometimes diverted enterprise rev enues or issued orders preventing enterprises from fulfilling obligations Enterprises have engaged in opportunistic unlawful behavior because they could expect their state patrons to shield them from legal accountability Although Chinas courts and other institutions in such cases play conventional marketsupporting roles of upholding par ties legal rights they also perform policyimplementing and officialabusechecking roles by exposing criticizing and sanctioning behavior that violates the policies embodied in lawsbehavior that in some cases is attributable to state agents18 Enterprise and company laws have addressed broadly similar problems of staterelated behavior Early in the reform era local governments and statelinked parent companies were sometimes held liable for acts of sham enterprises that they had created but never capitalized In more recent times corporatized state enter prises that sell shares in order to raise capital increasingly have been foci of cases in which statelinked behavior underlies economic disputes Statelinked majority shareholders abuse of private minority shareholders rights have been a problem This partly prompted reforms especially in the mid2000s to the Company Law and Securities Law that authorized new types of shareholder suits articulated fidu ciary duties of controlling shareholders and managers to the company and other 234 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a shareholders and authorized piercing the corporate veil and other means to hold an enterprises owners or controllers liable for the actions of the entities they control Constitutional amendments and other laws on private property and takings regula tions on land tenure and expropriation rules on court jurisdiction over land disputes and victims of expropriation who have launched litigation and protests sometimes invoking legal rights or rules all have targeted local authorities collusion with develop ers to obtain land without adequate compensation and beyond legal and policy autho rization Although undertaken in pursuit of development projects such expropriations have faced criticism for creating costly uncertainty social unrest wasteful acquisi tion of land that sits unused or inefficient overinvestment in construction Legal and lawinvoking pushbacks have received extraordinary government media and public attention One famous and unusually successful example is the nailhouse in Chongqing where two residents resisted eviction and clung to a home and business perched atop a spire of land in a vast construction site They brought an administrative litigation claim challenging the order to leave became instant celebrities amid intense media coverage and ultimately received muchincreased compensation Another example is the widely noted challenge by several prominent legal scholars to State Council regulations on housing demolition and relocation They arguedwith some success given changes to the rules that soon followedthat the highly permissive rules were unacceptably vague and inconsistent with higher laws19 More recently the regime has promised more ambitious and systematic reforms to address these and other problems that stem from a legally bifurcated system of urban and rural property excessive financial dependence of local government on land sales and inadequately defined and protected property rights Chinas emerging tort law largely serves regulatory ends Many provisions address regulators roles and responsibilities Safety scandals born of regulatory failure have driven moves to enforce and revise laws that address the states shortcomings includ ing conflicts of interest incompetence corruption and failure to assure domestic and foreign purchasers of safety sufficiently to secure vital confidence in markets for con sumer goods Especially in cases of mass torts such as melaminetainted milk prod ucts offshore oil spills or deaths due to shoddy and inadequately inspected construc tion in earthquake zones Chinese authorities have responded with statemanaged compensation funds and criminal and administrative penalties for responsible private actors and neglectful officials For private law to play the public function of addressing wayward state behavior may seem like an odd expectation but not a surprising one in Chinas political con text Robust private law is a product of the reform era and has emerged in the shadow of a PRC pattern and a longer Chinese tradition in which public law dominated Partly because the party and state have long claimed largely unlimited authority much of the public appears to view serious social harmwhether the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome SARS epidemic in 20022003 see chapter 13 melaminepoisoned milk powder severe air pollution or earthquakecollapsed buildingsas an indica tion of the regimes failure to fulfill obligations to keep people safe Private laws record in these areas has been mixed Its limited effectiveness in pro tecting economic rights and interests also constrains its efficacy in checking costly mis uses or nonuses of state power Because so many private disputescontract tort property and the likeinvolve statelinked actors or actions litigants dissatisfaction c h i n a s l e g a l s y s t e m 235 with outcomes in civil lawsuits often leads to disappointment anger or disillusionment toward the state This tendency is reinforced by the character of other complaints about the courts delivery of justice These often are strikingly statist focusing on courts structural bias toward or subjection to influence by party or state actors and problems of local protectionism20 Among foreign and domestic observers China is often seen not as an incapable regime a problem for many developing or postsocialist countries but as a stillformidable one that presumably could more effectively address shortcom ings in its legal system if it were more committed to doing so21 In this sense unjust judi cial outcomes are interpreted as the result of failure or indifference by the partystate Reform era public lawlaw that governs the state and its powershas addressed official behavior that has threatened to undermine economic policies and the sta bility they help provide Administrative law has been a key mechanism22 Under the Administrative Litigation Law courts handle challenges to state decisions affecting citi zens and enterprises in matters such as land use business licenses fines government benefits environmental harms abuse by law enforcement authorities and so on The Administrative Reconsideration Law provides a mechanism for imploring a government agency or its superiors to reverse decisions including ones that might be addressed in litigation or to change its rules which cannot be challenged in administrative lawsuits The State Compensation Law offers a legal framework for citizens to seek damages when harmed by unlawful government actions The Administrative Licensing Law the Administrative Enforcement Law and lowerlevel rules that parallel a longanticipated Administrative Procedure Law all address ways the state imposes benefits and burdens including those that affect individuals and enterprises economic interests and in the aggregate Chinas economy and society More specific economic regulatory laws also aim at problems of official overreaching and shirking Examples include prohibitions in the AntiMonopoly Law on abuse of government power to restrain competition and in product safety and banking laws on officials failure to perform oversight duties Criminal and administrative punishments for government or party functionaries are another part of the public law repertoire for checking state behavior that threatens the success of reform policies Authorities have deployed these legal weapons with penalties ranging up to capital punishment see Box 71 most aggressively during periodic drives against official corruption that began under Deng accelerated under Jiang continued under Hu and received renewed emphasis with Xis ascension The highest officials to face prosecution for corruption include former Beijing Mayor Chen Xitong in the 1990s Shanghai Party Chief Chen Liangyu in 2007 Railway Minister Liu Zhijun in 2013 and Chongqing Party Secretary former Minister of Commerce promi nent princeling and aspiring Politburo Standing Committee member Bo Xilai in 2013 Public laws have allocated authority among institutions to make and implement rules and decisions that affect prospects for economic development and rights Examples include laws that structure and empower state agencies govern lawmak ing and regulatory processes permit lawmaking input from outside the state and so on Among such laws purposes is to increase the likelihood that prodevelopment principles relevant expertise legal and policy directives from above and the views of stakeholders shape rules governing economic and other behavior and that parochial interests bureaucratic resistance governmental ineptitude corrupt influences back room deals and other such factors have less impact 236 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Law has not resolved problems of unlawful actions and troubling behavior by the partystate and its agents How far practice has fallen short of potential or promise is difficult to assess A few examples illustrate the pattern In administrative lawsuits plaintiffs have prevailed 20 to 40 percent of the timea respectable to high rate of success for citizens suing their government by international standards But the datas significance is uncertain It is difficult to estimate the underlying rate of inappropri ate state action and the proportion of filed claims that are meritorious Some stud ies especially those focusing on Chinas most developed areas indicate relatively high trust in the administrative litigation systems fairness Some accounts hold that threatening to sue can prompt officials to reverse unlawful decisions because they fear losing and because the mere fact of being sued can count against them in Chinas complex system for evaluating officials performance Indeed recent years have wit nessed a growing phenomenon of what in the United States are called strike suits claimants bringing meritless litigation or otherwise falsely asserting violations of law by state actors in efforts to induce the authorities to buy off the complainants23 Box 71 caPital Punishment in china China executes many more convicted criminals than the rest of the world combined Although China does not provide official data human rights groups estimate that China conducts thousands of executions annually Chinas criminal law authorizes capital punish ment for a large number fiftyfive down from a list that had grown to sixtyeight before amendments in 2011 with further gradual reductions promised as of late 2013 and wide range of offenses including violent crimes such as homicide rape and kidnapping endangering public security through actions that cause significant harm and economic and financial offenses such as largescale embezzlement bribery and fraud since 2007 all death sentences are reviewed by the supreme Peoples Court Chinese authorities have publicized capital punishment in cases involving threats to public welfare examples include state Food and drug Administration chief Zhang xiaoyu convicted of taking bribes to approve possibly unsafe drugs and officers at sanlu dairy which was one among the various companies at fault for poisoning thousands with milk powder that contained melamine a toxic chemical Criminal trials in the PRC are conducted very quickly sometimes lasting only a few hours including capital punishment cases The time from conviction to appellate and supreme Peoples Court review to execution is generally quite brief In recent years China has moved toward lethal injection as the method of execution though a single gunshot to the back of the head is still used in many locales The PRC has an unusual penalty called a death sentence with reprieve After two years such sentences are usually commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole if the inmate shows good behavior Abroad and at home criticism of Chinas death penalty and calls for reform or repeal have mounted Controversial cases have intensified the critique examples include yang Jia a man who stabbed nine police officers and whose death sentence drew widespread condemnation because of public sympathy for someone who struck back after police had abused and beaten him and because many thought yangs trial was deeply flawed and his apparent mental illness made him not fully responsible and cases of false conviction such as Zhao Zuohai convicted after a dubious confession and freed a decade later when the murder victim showed up alive c h i n a s l e g a l s y s t e m 237 Other reports especially those focusing on poorer or rural areas find futility and frustration with local authorities wielding influence over unskilled or pliable courts using coercion to deter potential litigants and retaliating against victorious ones On these accounts suing the state is often an act of desperation by those who have no other hope and little chance of success in court The relatively small number of administrative litigation cases raises doubts about the laws effectiveness or perceived effectiveness Even as a formal matter much relevant state activity lies beyond this laws reach Administrative litigation can review only specific acts and decisionsnot underlying laws regulations or rules or documents that lack the formal status of law but have lawlike effect Most importantly given the nature of the PRCs political sys tem administrative law does not permit suits against the party Criminal and administrative laws targeting official corruption have drawn critical assessments Corruption is by its nature hard to measure The general perception how ever is that it is pervasive and economically costly that it has become more organized and largescale in recent years and that it is more often economically harmful in Chinas now relatively liberal and marketbased economy than it was early in the reform era when some forms of corruption could overcome inefficiencies in a system transitioning from socialist planning Skepticism regularly greets announced drives to crack down on corruption Criminal punishment for official corruption reaches only a tiny percentage of reported instances The Partys Central Commission for Discipline Inspection not the state Procuracy is the dominant institution for addressing corruption among state officials who are overwhelmingly party members and thus subject to party discipline Generally the Commission acts as gatekeeper for the small share of cases that are crimi nally prosecuted and moves to enhance and centralize its authority have been put on the agenda since Xi came to power Far more common than prosecution is the extralegal and some scholars of Chinese law argue illegalprocess of party discipline including shuanggui the dual regulation that directs suspects to submit to detention investiga tion and potentially sanctions Recent reform agendas have called for relying more on criminal law and less on party discipline and for legal measures to require officials to disclose assets so that corruption can be more easily detected24 Legal mechanisms have been a relatively unpromising means for addressing some key forms of partystate dysfunction Indiscipline or indolence in following central laws and directivesa chronic issue and an especially notable problem amid public emer gencies such as the SARS epidemic in 20022003has been only weakly targeted by legal efforts Although some laws formally address the problem of official shirking it has remained largely the purview of more traditional less formal bureaucratic checks and efforts to motivate officials to act properly through ideological appeals25 lAW And demoCRACy Law in reform era China has not done much to advance democracy nor has it been designed to do so Chinas middletier rankings on rule of law contrast with very low standings on democracy and related metrics26 Law arguably has functioned and been intended to function to help avoid preempt or coopt pressure for democ racy or more broadly political change that would significantly limit state power or 238 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a increase government accountability In facilitating marketoriented internationally open growth law has contributed to fulfilling one side of the implicit social contract that has helped sustain partystate authority during several decades of the reform era the regime delivers material wellbeing and society does not challenge its author ity In helping to limit or provide redress for official and statelinked unlawful behav ior law also may help reduce pressures for systemic reform The concern that such abuse and malfeasance left unchecked leads to discontent and demands for fun damental political change is among the reasons public outrage over corruption and imperious cadres so evidently discomfits Chinas rulers and prompts the use of law as well as other means to sanction wayward officials or silence troublesome critics Ongoing reforms to laws on criminal and administrative punishments seemingly sought and may have helped to blunt pressure for deeper political change by soft ening some of the systems harder authoritarian edges retrenching the previously pervasive reach of the partystate and enlarging private spheres Although criminal law has remained draconian and procedural protections weak greater transparency predictability depoliticization and for some behaviors leniency were incorporated first in the 1979 Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure Law and more extensively in revisions to both laws in the 1990s and the procedure law in 2012 Notable changes included replacing the provision on counterrevolutionary crime which too closely resembled thought crime with one on the stillvague crime of endangering state security pledging new limits on police and prosecutors including tighter restrictions on incommunicado detentions and new prohibitions on using confessions extracted by torture expanding defendants formal dueprocesslike rights such as access to counsel information about charges and evidence and eliminating prosecution based on ret roactive application of new laws or analogy to existing laws that did not prohibit the accuseds specific conduct27 Laws underpinning widely criticized noncriminal deprivations of liberty such as reeducation through labor laojiaoa sanction wielded by public security bureaus against political dissidents and others who anger officials without having to go through the court systemwere amended to provide shorter maximums more definite terms narrower ranges of offenses and greater judicial review28 Amid grow ing scandals over abuses and mounting criticism the Xi Jinping leadership moved to eliminate reeducation through labor see Box 72 Criminal conviction on charges of disrupting public order endangering state security or earlier in the reform era counterrevolutionary crime and lesser tech nically noncriminal sanctions have continued to serveand to be officially por trayed as servingto strike blows against the regimes perceived enemies includ ing advocates of liberal democracy or stronger legal restraints on government Examples from across the reform era include Democracy Wall activist Wei Jingsheng prominent Tiananmen Movement participants Liu Xiaobo the drafter of the 2008 liberaldemocratic Charter 08 proposal for constitutional reform rights protection weiquan or human rights lawyers civil society activists and countless others Chinese criminal justice remains deeply flawed in practice available as a political weapon and the object of countless serious human rights critiques The generally liberal criminal procedure law reforms of 2012 preserved a large loophole by allowing secret detention of those suspected of crimes of endangering national security ter rorism or largescale corruption Black jailsextralegal detention centershave c h i n a s l e g a l s y s t e m 239 proliferated in recent years to confine petitioners who travel to Beijing or provin cial capitals to press their grievances about local authorities Urban management officers chengguanassigned to address minor urban crimeand other stability maintenance organs now rival or surpass the longcriticized police as targets of com plaints about brutality toward ordinary citizens The democratic content of Chinese law remains thin The constitution contains numerous democratic elements including statements that the people are sovereign provisions that peoples congresses will be democratically elected and promises of civil and political rights similar to those that are found in liberaldemocratic con stitutions29 but these are among the least effective provisions in a document with limited impact on partystate behavior One major law with democratic content is the law governing village elections see chapter 9 The elections held under that law have allowed some public political participation monitored or provided outlets for potentially explosive peasant discontent and largely sought to strengthen the capac ity of the regime The elections have served these functions by sometimes weed ing out ineffective or despised local authorities and recruiting new cadres who can command popular support as well as their superiors confidence In one celebrated Box 72 reeducation through laBor and laBor reform in china Reeducation through labor laodong jiaoyang or laojiao is an administrative sanction Chinese public security authorities police impose without judicial process to detain people for up to four years The PRC also maintains a system of prisons which includes ordinary prisons and institutions that formerly were called reform through labor laodong gaizao or laogai camps These are used to incarcerate those convicted of crimes Laogai camps are often located in remote places living conditions are harsh and the enforced labor performed by inmates whether in fields mines or factories is hard Terms and conditions of confinement in laojiao are often indistinguishable from impris onment In the mao years laojiao was used against alleged counterrevolutionaries petty criminals and people who refused work In the reform era it has been wielded against shifting political targets including democracy activists ethnic dissidents in xinjiang and Tibet and Falun gong and underground house church adherents as well as many more people who commit a muchexpanded range of minor crimes estimates of the number of laojiao detainees range from under two hundred thousand to two million Chinese prisons house well over one million inmates Because much information about Chinas detention system is considered a state secret it is difficult to make accurate esti mates about the number of camps or prisoners Reform era changes limited previously openended laojiao terms to three years with possible extension to a fourth and gave those subjected to laojiao rightswhich have meant little in practiceto judicial review of their punishments conformity to laojiao reg ulations Calls for elimination sharpened Critics invoked longstanding concerns about political uses of laojiao and lack of judicial process newer critiques claimed laojiao was unlawful because punishments depriving citizens of liberty can be lawfully imposed only under legislation from the nPC not the mere administrative regulations that authorize laojiao Also fueling opposition were scandalous abuses for example the case of Tang hui a woman subjected to laojiao after she challenged local authorities failure to take serious action against those who forced her young daughter into prostitution In november 2013 the party announced that it would end laojiao 240 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a recent instance in Wukan Guangdong peasant discontent over subversion of an election and illegitimate land seizures combined with an accommodating provincial leadership to produce speculation about a new more democratic model of village governance under law But such dramatic developments are the exception not the rule Overall the village election law has been unevenly implemented often failed to fulfill its mandate for open and contested elections and reached only very local posts30 Modest democratic gains at the most local level have been achieved while mov ing slowly and fitfully if at all toward contested elections for higherlevel offices The electoral law for local peoples congresses is a weak instrument producing few heterodox candidates fewer victories for them and still fewer wins that survive authorities efforts to overturn them or prevent their recurrence Procedures for selection of higherlevel peoples congresses which provide for deputies to be elected by lowerlevel congresses rather than by voters in the constituency are weaker still as democratic devices Concrete discussions of democratic reform more often focus on intraparty democratization and related reforms including modest expansions of pluralism at elite levels and initial steps to expand contests at the partys grassroots31 Law plays only peripheral roles here mostly in exhortations party members and state officials to follow the law and rhetorical assertions that the rule of law ranks alongside party leadership and socialist democracy as guiding principles Legal mechanisms provide for some popular input into lawmaking but they gener ally keep public participation atomized or weakly institutionalized A law on legis lation and emerging rules on administrative procedure have provided for hearings comments and other public input on proposed laws and rules32 So too have experi ments with consultative democracy especially on budget issues at the local govern ment level But this is well short of a legal right to be heard or to influence outcomes The aims and effects of such measures also include enhancing the recipient organiza tions information about preferences and complaints among affected constituencies which can improve policymakingmaking it more scientific in the official argotor can enhance the organizations leverage in intraregime wrangling over policy Laws and rules defining the powers and responsibilities of state organs have tolerated and even encouraged a highly discretionary and heavily statemanaged process of solicit ing the input of social and economic interest groups to peoples congresses central ministries and provincial and local governments Fragmentation and noninstitutionalization of popular participation extends to other aspects of law that are broadly if less explicitly related to democracy As noted above those seeking judicial review of state action have remained limited to challenging specific acts not underlying laws and rules Continuing impedi ments to class action lawsuits limit potential for civil litigation with broad impact Prospects for constitutional review to uphold constitutional rights against infring ing state behavior emerged in the early 2000s but soon faded For example the Supreme Peoples Court in 2001 broke new ground when it said courts could directly enforce constitutional rights in a case involving Qi Yuling Qi claimed that her constitutional right to education had been violated when her exam scores were stolen by another woman with the complicity of local government officials who facilitated the theft and failed to rectify the situation33 This ruling c h i n a s l e g a l s y s t e m 241 was unceremoniously canceled in 2008 ending the effect it might have had in empowering courts to provide remedies for violations of constitutional rights More broadly the role of the party in selecting court personnel the power of the adjudication committee within each court to shape and override decisions in indi vidual cases the oversight of courts by CCP politicallegal committees and other means have kept courts from straying too far from party preferences in politically sensitive or significant cases Although calls to emphasize formal legal processes returned in the waning days of the Hu Jintao administration and in anticipation of a more sympathetic approach under Xi Jinping an approach embraced formally in the November 2013 Plenum res olution much of the Hu era was marked by official preferences for judicial mediation over adjudicationan approach that discounts formal rights and clear rules in favor of casebycase and harmonious resolutions Much the same is true of the officially promoted and widespread reliance on informal letters and visits which outnumber litigated cases avoid judicial involvement andespecially given restrictions imposed on group petitionsoften assert individual grievances rather than broader legal issues Observers both inside China and abroad have criticized the partystates reli ance on such informal means as reflecting a traditional Chinesestyle approach of a benevolent ruler dispensing justice as an act of grace and as something inconsistent with development of rule of law and constitutional rightsas well as democracy34 During the later Hu Jintao period authorities encouraged grand mediation da tiaojiean ad hoc process bringing together courts other authorities complain ing parties targets of complaints and others in the community to address issues that threatened to erupt into social conflict This came alongside a broader empha sis on social management shehui guanli to address perceived pervasive threats to order In this respect laws potential roles including broadly democratic ones faced an inhospitable environment Chinas leaders claimed to discern and perhaps genuinely did perceive existential threats to partystate rule for which law not only failed to provide adequate answers but also erected potentially dangerous barriers to the tough responses that Chinas rulers apparently believed were necessary35 When citizens have mobilized in groups to invoke their legal rights and broader interests through direct action including disruptive protests regime responses have ranged from repression to limited accommodation but not to recognition or institutionaliza tion of democratic participation36 Finally laws limited role in supporting democratic change or accommodating dem ocratic input is reflected in the complex impact on legal institutions and processes in contemporary China of forces that are in some broad sense democratic Reflecting social sentiments and resonating with the lateHuera call for the judiciary to look to public opinion mass pressurespurred on by traditional and social mediaon courts has increased Sometimes this has driven courts to follow or enforce the law At other times however it has pressed courts to decide against unpopular or vilified parties such as government officials or their children who injure others with evi dent arrogance that they can escape punishmentor in favor of popular and sym pathetic ones such as ordinary citizens who have been driven to violence by officials abuseeven where evidence and the law have provided questionable support for such outcomes37 242 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a gAPs In ChInAs legAl deVeloPmenT One way to understand laws mixed record in reformera China is to think of it in terms of several gaps First the most commonly noted and serious problem is an implementation gap38 The law on the books is too often not effectively put into practice The reasons laws are sometimes badly underenforced are many including lim ited resources a stillweak culture of legality rational decisions by parties not to pursue their rights poor training of judges and other officials cadre and popular resistance local protectionism ideological opposition conflicting or unclear man dates and corruption including in courts Weak implementation of the laws gov erning lawmaking is a problem as well The multifaceted often political processes that shape policy and the exercise of power often remain divorced from the insti tutional structures and procedures prescribed in the constitution and laws This disjunction has faded somewhat with the NPC taking on a greater role in shaping legislation with ministries and others in the state hierarchy relying more on laws and regulations to define and enhance their reach and with courts playing larger and more conventionally judicial roles Second certain aspects of the implementation gap stem from laws that do not take into account Chinese conditions sometimes due to overly ambitious or literal adop tions of external models The gap between such laws and Chinese reality produces laws that are poorer means to desired ends than less world class alternatives might have been Resulting implementation problems can weaken the stillfragile respect for law more generally Economicsrelated laws which have become similar to those of developed capitalist and especially AngloAmerican models provide examples of a broader pattern The apparent motivation has been to replicate the models promo tion of economic efficiency mobilization of foreign and domestic capital solutions to problems of corporate governance and so on In some areas of economic law includ ing especially intellectual property law Chinas quest for WTO entry has pressed in the same direction demanding extensive revisions to create laws meeting detailed inter national standards Such legal transplants face daunting challenges39 The specific legal and insti tutional contexts of AngloAmerican law such as a rich history of judicial opin ions autonomous and experienced courts expert and professional enforcement agencies and cohorts of specialized lawyers that have given important legal terms relatively clear meaning in the United States or elsewhere cannot be replicated in the PRC China does not yet have complementary economic actors such as institu tional investors nonstatelinked controlling shareholders a strong financial and business press a pool of experienced managers to serve as independent directors and the like to give legal provisions the meaning and bite they have in their places of origin In more political areas of law adoption of external models has been more modest but still significant and seems driven partly by a desire to answer foreign criticisms and expectations Examples include constitutional and legislative provisions promis ing rights that resemble international human rights norms changes to more obviously illiberal elements in criminal law and pursuit of a model of a legal system that some Chinese official and scholarly critics have denounced as excessively dangerously or c h i n a s l e g a l s y s t e m 243 unrealistically Westernstyle Here the implementation gap has been large and polit ical commitment as well as external pressure to close it has been weak40 Third significant disparities among different parts of the country underpin an interregional gap in law Levels of rule of law are generally seen as higher par ticularly in economic affairs in more developed and cosmopolitan regions41 Several factors might account for this pattern The large diversified economies of the major coastal cities reduce the problematic entanglements between local officials and a dominant local enterprise or small group of them that underlie local protection ism or the predatory state that siphons wealth into its own coffers In more fully marketized and open economies of the more advanced regions firms are pressed to compete on price and quality which may reduce some though not all opportuni ties for lawdisregarding behavior and may lessen rentseeking see Box 81 Rent Seeking and Corruption in chapter 8 by authorities who act as economic gatekeep ers In more open and prosperous areas potentially wayward officials and enter prise officers face greater scrutiny and demands for lawconforming behavior from anticorruption investigators civil or administrative lawsuits muckraking journal ists social mediausers foreigner investors and increasingly Chinese who can with draw their capital or lobby the partystate Legal and judicial talentand an accom panying legal cultureare in thicker supply in the most economically advanced areas For example almost all judges in Shanghai and similar places have college degrees and a substantial proportion at the high and intermediate court level have graduate degrees in law Their counterparts in lessdeveloped inland areas lag far behind in terms of such credentials Regional variations in educational and professional levels for judges are broadly paralleled among officials in other lawrelated roles in the party and state Lawyers and law firmsespecially elite and internationalized onesare similarly unevenly distributed For example in terms of lawyers per capita the top five provincial level units have nearly seven times the number of the bottom five Even the law on the books varies significantly from place to place with more sophisti cated marketfriendly and internationalstyle laws more common in more developed regions Intranational disparities are not necessarily bad for law and laws roles under con temporary Chinese conditions The need or demand for law is likely higher in more developed regions where the supply is greater Observers including prominent Chinese legal scholar Zhu Suli have argued that eschewing the modern Westernstyle models that have driven much of Chinas legal reform is inevitable and even advisable in the vast rural hinterland where such an approach is doomed to failure and could have perverse results42 A final gap is between a relatively narrow instrumentalism that arguably motivated the first waves of legal reform and attitudes associated with a more robust rule of law Much of the reform era legal project has seemed consistent with a broadly Leninist vision in which laws and legal institutions are among a set of coordinated means to achieve substantive ends such as rapid economic development and durable authori tarian rule and are embraced to the extent they advance those ends The question remains to be answered definitively how far Chinaand more specifically the ruling CCP elite who steer Chinas legal trajectoryhas been and will be moving beyond this toward what many would call the rule of law including acceptance in principle and 244 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a practice of legal limits to the partystates autonomy and authority even where those limits bring unwanted consequences for the economy politics or the powerful FoRCes FoR And AgAInsT gReATeR legAlITy Several factors seemingly favor ongoing movement or at least pressure toward greater legality in the PRC First reformera policies and practices have created small but expanding and increasingly influential contingents of judges lawyers and others with legal training and functions who have institutional and professional interests and intel lectual and normative preferences that support stronger more autonomous roles for law and legal institutions Agendas favoring these ends sometimes include concrete reform proposals such as judges career advancement should depend on evaluations by superiors rather than support of local party and state authorities court budgets should be moved from local governments to the central government multiprovince appellate courts should be established to undercut provincial influence burdensome regulation and intrusive oversight of law firms should be reduced legal aid pro bono work and other access to justice initiatives should be expanded to make the legal system more effective for ordinary citizens courts lawmaking and rulemaking bodies should be required to operate more transparently and deprivations of liberty should be permitted only with more judicial oversight and based on laws that have proper constitutional foundation More mundanely but more significantly daily work in Chinas courts and legal institutions has helped create nascent habits and raised aspirations of autonomy and professionalism among Chinas expanding pool of legal workers43 Several of these specific proposals received notably favorable mention and a pledge to protect lawyers professional rights was adopted in the sweeping roadmap for further reform issued after the November 2013 Central Committee Plenum Some among Chinas growing cohort of lawyers have become wellknown and forceful sources of advocacy for greater change Perhaps most striking are rights protection or human rights lawyers who represent criminal defendants and civil or administrative plaintiffs seeking to enforce rights promised in the laws44 The most internationally famous of these is Chen Guangcheng the blind selftaught legal activ ist who was arrested in 2006 and imprisoned for four years ostensibly for the crime of destroying property and disrupting traffic during a lawsuitrelated protest after he had brought a group lawsuit against officials in his home province charging them with abuses in connection with Chinas onechild policy Legal rights activists like Chen and many others who are less wellknown or less confrontational seek to pro mote implementation and enforcement of the law on the books and sometimes move beyond legal representation to political advocacy and dissent Examples of their cli ents and causes include followers of the spiritual movement or in the authorities view evil cult Falun Gong see chapter 4 and adherents to prohibited underground Before the family planning lawsuit Chen had brought cases relating to disability rights and peasant property rights After two years of postimprisonment house arrest Chen escaped in April 2012 and took refuge in the American embassy in Beijing State Department officials negotiated his and his familys departure to the United States initially for Chen to study at New York University School of Law Since leaving China Chen has been a vocal critic of the lack of rule of law and democracy in China c h i n a s l e g a l s y s t e m 245 house churches ordinary citizens resisting expropriation of their property targets of illegal coercive enforcement of family planning policies political and ethnic dis sidents and fellow rightsprotection lawyers who have faced retaliation for their activities A second source of support for greater legality comes from members of the Chinese leadership who endorseif only in spotty and possibly reversible waysmaking law and its roles more robust Reformminded legal intellectuals have increasingly gained the ears if less often the hearts and minds of top leaders They serve as counselors to key officials participants in numerous briefings and other channels for providing advice to the leadership and members of the corps of public intellectuals whose com ments become known to Chinas rulers Moreover the legally trained have increasingly entered the upper reaches of the partystate After the Eighteenth Party Congress China had its first Premier trained in law Li Keqiang and the two principal legal insti tutionsthe Supreme Peoples Procuracy and the Supreme Peoples Courtwere both headed by men with legal education and experience Zhou Qiang and Cao Jianming who were regarded as comparatively sympathetic to prolaw agendas Although elite preferences may remain ambivalent and changeable the regime may have bound itself to the mast After years of official endorsements of law and legality trying to reverse legal developments or commitments to law may risk undermining the regimes credibility with relevant audiences Also to the extent that law and legal institutions are seen as serving fundamental regime goals of promoting economic development effective governance and social stability they can be expected to enjoy at least contingent support from the leadership And in Chinas softened authoritar ian system elites can be expected to respond to some degree to social demands for law Third social demand for greater legality has been rising and is likely to continue to do so Rights consciousness or something like it has grown markedly thanks in part to political space created by the longrunning official embrace of law Social expectations for a stronger legal system have increasedas indicated by the millions of claimants who pursue litigation arbitration and mediation each year the millions more who invoke legal norms through letters and visits and other informal appeals to party and state organs and the social discontent that accompanies perceived law lessness by officials or state failures to enforce laws that promise to protect citizens health safety or livelihoods If broad crossnational comparative patterns some tra ditional social science theories and stillfragmentary evidence from contemporary urban China hold up the rising social and economic status of tens of millions enter ing Chinas burgeoning middle class portends growing demand for legal protection of rights and interests45 Those who invoke legal norms or seek legal redress also include many from lower reaches of society who turn to lawwhether out of hope or desper ationbecause some unlawful act threatens their precarious existence for example by expropriating their land polluting their environment ending their employment or taking their liberty Fourth the functional logic of reform era policies may make the standard for ade quate legality a rising target Sustaining economic growth may require more devel oped laws and legal institutions as Chinas market economy becomes more mature and complex economic integration with the outside world deepens the cost of 246 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a corruption and abuse by powerful economic actors mounts damages due to weak regulation of polluters makers of shoddy products perpetrators of financial fraud and so on accumulate and popular resentment of official failures to follow or enforce the laws festers46 Yet factors favoring laws growth face countercurrents and their ultimate impact remains uncertain Recent years have brought much discussion and promotion of a Chinese Model of developmentor a socalled Beijing Consensusthat departs from and is meant to offer an alternative to a Westernbased model including its rule of law see Box 82 The Beijing Consensus in chapter 8 The vision of the China Dream put forth by Xi Jinping see chapter 5 stresses national renewal and continued economic development with little emphasis on law Many relatively moderate proposals for legal reform have failed to gain traction The agenda for gradual reform toward lib eral constitutionalism in Charter 08 brought a long prison sentence as well as a Nobel Peace Prize for its principal author Liu Xiaobo Rights protection lawyers faced a bru tal crackdown at the beginning of the 2010s In the early months of Xi Jinpings rule one of the most prominent rights protection lawyers and cofounder of the proruleoflaw Open Constitution Initiative gongmeng Xu Zhiyong was arrested In mid2013 rule of lawrelated ideals such as separation of powers an independent judiciary and univer sal human rights made the list of seven topics reportedly banned from classroom and media discussion A law professors article condemning constitutional governance as a bourgeoiscapitalist and hollow form of democracy unsuited to China gained notori ety and a cluster of likeminded commentary appeared in official media47 The expanded access of legal scholars to Chinas leaders has been followed by dis appointment when promises and expectations for reform have not been met The top eliteparticularly those with special responsibilities for lawhave had shifting and sometimes hostile attitudes toward law In 20022008 the Supreme Peoples Court was headed by law graduate and former justice minister Xiao Yang who pro moted judicial autonomy and professionalism and reliance on formal laws But he was replaced by Wang Shengjun who had no formal legal education and whose previ ous career was almost entirely within the party bureaucracy and the public security apparatus Wang followed a very different approach that included calls on courts to decide cases according to policy and public opinion as well as law a policy dubbed the three supremes and initially articulated by Hu Jintao and renewed emphasis on mediation and harmony over litigation and legal rightsenforcement48 The replace ment of Wang Shengjun by the legally trained and experienced Zhou Qiang was taken by some law reformers as a hopeful sign of a possible return to efforts to increase procedural regularity professionalism formality and transparency in courts While Hu Jintao was in power members of the Politburo Standing Committee assigned to legalpolitical affairs expressed dim views of ruleoflawlike agendas with Luo Gan warning for example that excessive judicial independence risked a color revolution undermining communist rule in China as it had in former Soviet areas such as Ukraine and with Luos successor Zhou Yongkang for another example blaming the rise in mass incidents on peoples consciousness of legal rights out sripping their legal consciousness and leading them to resort to radical actions and illegal means Before Bo Xilais precipitous fall in 2012 see chapter 4 his Chongqing Model raised great alarm and sharp criticism among legal thinkers and c h i n a s l e g a l s y s t e m 247 commentators in China including the prominent public intellectual He Weifang see chapter 6 who wrote an open letter denouncing the deep disregard shown for the rule of law including the notorious persecution of the lawyer who dared to defend a target of Bos antimafia crackdown49 Against this background the 18th Party Congresss decision to reduce the size of the Politburo Standing Committee from nine to seven and thus return to an earlier practice of omitting the head of politicallegal affairs from the partys most powerful body created new questions about how the top elite would structure control over legal affairs Early moves by the Xi administration presented a mixed picture for law reform advocates The Bo Xilai trial dovetailed with the broader drive against official corrup tion and adopted a remarkably open process in which the accused presented a vigor ous defense But the proceedings drew significant criticism for their predictably polit ical character and their failure to grapple with the worst and most lawless excesses in Bos Chongqing and the features of Chinas political system that made them possible The problematic reeducation through labor system was finally slated for elimination The polemical attack on constitutional governance soon waned Meng Jianzhu the head of politicallegal affairs for the party expressed much more tolerance for formal legality and judicial autonomy than had his predecessors Progress on administrative law reform and some other relatively technical or not obviously political areas of legal reform appeared likely to continue and indeed received fairly detailed endorsement in the Third Plenum resolution issued in late 2013 The resolution also contemplated institutional reforms to address the underpinnings of local protectionism endorsed moves to reduce the role of courts adjudication committees relative to the judges who hear cases revived support for judicial professionalism transparency and a degree of independence and called for greater reliance on law to perform the task of social governance zhilia term that replaced the more repressivesounding and muchcriticized social management shehui guanli Yet at the same time new misgivings arose with renewed detentions of activist lawyers new limits to discus sion of major legal reform ideas and new rules threatening criminal punishment for those who used the Internet and social media to spread illdefined rumors even to relatively small audiences and even where recipients as few of 500 are reached by thirdparty retransmission of the initial rumormongers text or through 5000 or more recipients own viewing of online posts Ambitious reforms seemed likely to concentrate on the economy in the near term with legal reforms a somewhat second ary or instrumental concern and political reforms postponed to a later phase Near the beginning of what is likely to be a decade of Xi Jinpings tenure as top leader there are many big stillunanswered questions about laws place in Chinas politics economy and society It is possible that the broad if slow and uneven trend toward convergence with Western or international or developedcountry models of legality will continue It may be that elite choice constituency preferences mass public pressure functional demands foreign influences and other factors will push powerfully in that direction and that China will follow the broad path toward greater legality and the rule of law trod by other states in East Asia and elsewhere It is also possible however that Chinas leaders will reject Western or capitalist forms of legality as threats to the regimes ability to maintain social order and political control or as Trojan Horses of a peaceful evolution strategy that seeks to erode communist 248 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a rule Rejection of major change in the legal system might contribute to regime failure and more radical outcomes one of which could be democratization see chapter 6 But it might also be the case that Chinas resilient authoritarianism will find a distinc tive model that includes a role for law that sustains for a very long time high levels of economic growth and therefore relatively high levels of per capita income and stable undemocratic rule noTes 1 For an overview of institutional developments see generally Albert H Y Chen An Introduction to the Legal System of the Peoples Republic of China 4th ed New York LexisNexis 2011 and Randall Peerenboom Chinas Long March toward the Rule of Law Cambridge UK Cambridge University Press 2002 For statistical information see Zhongguo Falu Nianjian China Law Yearbook Beijing China Law Society annual Local protectionism is discussed more fully below 2 For an overview of lawmaking patterns see Zhu Jingwen and Han Dayuan eds Research Report on the Socialist Legal System with Chinese Characteristics vol 1 Singapore Enrich 2013 chapter 1 3 Elizabeth Perry A New Rights Consciousness Journal of Democracy 20 no 3 2009 1720 Lianjiang Li Rights Consciousness and Rules Consciousness in Contemporary China China Journal no 64 2010 4768 4 World Bank Worldwide Governance Indicators 2011 httpinfoworldbankorggov ernancewgiscchartasp 5 The analysis in this section and the following two sections draws upon and updates Jacques deLisle Legalization without Democratization in China under Hu Jintao in Cheng Li ed Chinas Changing Political Landscape Washington Brookings 2008 185211 6 See generally Jiang Ping Drafting the Uniform Contract Law in China Columbia Journal of Asian Law 10 1996 245258 Stephen C Hsu Xu Chuanxi Contract Law of the Peoples Republic of China Minnesota Journal of International Law 16 2007 115162 Barry Naughton Growing Out of the Plan Cambridge UK Cambridge University Press 1995 7 Guanghua Yu and Hao Zhang Adaptive Efficiency and Financial Development in China The Role of Contracts and Contractual Enforcement Journal of International Economic Law 11 2008 459494 8 Mo Zhang From Public to Private The Newly Enacted Chinese Property Law and the Protection of Property Rights in China Berkeley Business Law Journal 5 2008 317362 Gebhard M Rehm and Hinrich Julius The New Chinese Property Rights Law Columbia Journal of Asian Law 22 2009 177234 9 Jacques deLisle A Common LawLike Civil Law and a Public Face for Private Law Chinas Tort Law in Comparative Perspective in Towards a Chinese Civil Code Comparative and Historical Perspectives ed Lei Chen and C H Remco van Rhee Leiden Brill 2012 353394 Mo Zhang Tort Liabilities and Tort Law The New Frontier of Chinese Legal Horizon Richmond Journal of Global Law and Business 10 2011 415495 US Trade Representative 2012 Report to Congress on Chinas WTO Compliance http wwwustrgovwebfmsend3620 US Department of State Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs 2013 Investment Climate StatementChina httpwwwstategoveeb rlsothrics2013204621htm 10 Nicholas R Lardy Integrating China into the World Economy Washington Brookings Institution 2002 Jacques deLisle China and the WTO in China under Hu Jintao ed c h i n a s l e g a l s y s t e m 249 T J Cheng Jacques deLisle and Deborah Brown Singapore World Scientific Press 2006 229292 11 Lucie Cheng and Arthur Rosett Contract with a Chinese Face Socially Embedded Factors in the Transition from Hierarchy to Market 19781989 Journal of Chinese Law 5 1991 143244 Doug Guthrie Dragon in a Three Piece Suit Princeton NJ Princeton University Press 1999 David L Wank Commodifying Communism Cambridge UK Cambridge University Press 1999 Thomas Gold Doug Guthrie and David Wank eds Social Connections in China Institutions Culture and the Changing Nature of Guanxi Cambridge UK Cambridge University Press 2002 12 See for example Eva Pils Peasants Struggle for Land in China in Marginalized Communities and Access to Justice ed Yash Ghai and Jill Cottrell Oxon UK Routlegde 2010 136161 13 On the changing role of labor law see Mary E Gallagher Use the Law as Your Weapon Institutional Change and Legal Mobilization in China in Engaging the Law in China ed Neil J Diamant Stanley B Lubman and Kevin J OBrien Stanford CA Stanford University Press 2005 5483 14 Pierre Landry The Institutional Diffusion of Courts in China Evidence from Survey Data in Rule by Law The Politics of Courts in Authoritarian Regimes ed Tom Ginsburg and Tamir Moustafa Princeton NJ Princeton University Press 2008 207 234 Minxin Pei Zhang Guoyan Pei Fei and Chen Lixin A Survey of Commercial Litigation in Shanghai Courts in Judicial Independence in China ed Randall Peerenboom New York Cambridge University Press 2010 221233 Kevin J OBrien and Lianjiang Li Suing the State Administrative Litigation in Rural China in Engaging the Law in China ed Diamant Lubman OBrien 3153 Ethan Michelson and Benjamin L Read Public Attitudes toward Official Justice in Beijing and Rural China and Mary E Gallagher and Yuhua Wang Users and NonUsers Legal Experience and Its Effect on Legal Consciousness in Chinese Justice Civil Dispute Resolution in Contemporary China ed Margaret Y K Woo and Mary E Gallagher New York Cambridge University Press 2011 169203 204233 15 This point is discussed more fully in the final section of this chapter 16 See generally World Bank Economic Development and the Quality of Legal Institutions httpwww1worldbankorgpublicsectorlegalinstitutionalhtm Douglass C North Institutions Institutional Change and Economic Performance Cambridge UK Cambridge University Press 1990 Jeffrey D Sachs Globalization and the Rule of Law 1998 httpwww earthcolumbiaeduaboutdirectorpubsYaleLawSchool1098pdf Asian Development Bank The Role of Law and Legal Institutions in Asian Economic Development 19601995 1998 see also the empirical studies summarized in Peerenboom Chinas Long March chapter 10 Jacques deLisle Development without Democratization China Law and the East Asian Model in Democratizations Comparisons Confrontations and Contrasts ed Jose V Ciprut Cambridge MA MIT Press 2009 197232 Donald C Clarke Economic Development and the Rights Hypothesis The China Problem American Journal of Comparative Law 51 2003 89111 Franklin Allen Jun Qian and Meijun Qian Law Finance and Economic Growth in China Journal of Financial Economics 77 no 1 2005 57116 17 For pessimistic views of Chinas economic and in turn political prospects in part based on legal and related shortcomings see Minxin Pei Chinas Trapped Transition The Limits of Developmental Autocracy Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 2006 Gordon C Chang The Coming Collapse of China New York Random House 2001 On public views see Pew Global Attitudes Project Growing Concerns in China about Inequality Corruption October 2012 httpwwwpewglobalorgfiles201210 PewGlobalAttitudesChinaReportFINALOctober102012pdf 250 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a 18 On contract and commercial litigation and thus enforcement of underlying law at various points in the reform era see for example David Zweig Kathy Hartford James Feinerman and Deng Jianxu Law Contracts and Economic Modernization Lessons from the Recent Chinese Rural Reforms Stanford International Law Journal 23 1987 319 364 and Nicholas C Howson Corporate Law in the Shanghai Peoples Courts 1992 2008 Judicial Autonomy in a Contemporary Authoritarian State University of Pennsylvania East Asia Law Review 5 2010 303442 Hui Huang Piercing the Corporate Veil in China American Journal of Comparative Law 60 2012 763774 19 Steve Hess Nail Houses Land Rights and Frames of Injustice on Chinas Protest Landscape Asian Survey 50 no 5 2010 908926 Zhang Rui The Inside Investigation of the Chongqing Nail House Southern Weekend Mar 29 2007 Wang Jingqiong Scholars Bid Government to Abolish Housing Law China Daily Dec 9 2009 China Issues New Regulations on House Expropriation Peoples Daily Online English Edition Jan 22 2011 20 See for example Stanley B Lubman Bird in a Cage Legal Reform in China After Mao Stanford CA Stanford University Press 1999 21 See generally Samuel P Huntington Political Order in Changing Societies New Haven CT Yale University Press 1968 Dali L Yang Remaking the Chinese Leviathan Stanford CA Stanford University Press 2004 but compare Pei Chinas Trapped Transition 22 Pitman B Potter The Administrative Litigation Law of the PRC in Domestic Law Reforms in PostMao China ed Pitman B Potter Armonk NY M E Sharpe 1994 John Ohnesorge Chinese Administrative Law in the Northeast Asian Mirror Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems 16 2006 103164 the articles on Chinese administrative law and its future by PRC administrative law scholars Wang Xixin Zhou Hanhua He Haibo and others in the University of Pennsylvania East Asia Law Review 8 no 2 2013 23 For examples of the diverse assessment of administrative law in practice in China see Minxin Pei Citizens v Mandarins Administrative Litigation in China China Quarterly no 152 1997 832862 Veron MeiYing Hung Judicial Reform in China Lessons from Shanghai Washington Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 2005 wwwcarn egieendowmentorgfilesCP58HungFINALpdf Randall Peerenboom Globalization Path Dependency and the Limits of Law Administrative Law Reform and the Rule of Law in the Peoples Republic of China Berkeley Journal of International Law 19 no 2 2001 161264 Kevin OBrien and Li Lianjiang Suing the Local State Administrative Litigation in Rural China China Journal 51 2004 7696 He Haibo Litigations Without a Ruling The Predicament of Administrative Law in China Tsinghua China Law Review 23 2011 257281 24 Fu Hualing The Upward and Downward Spirals in Chinas AntiCorruption Enforcement in Comparative Perspectives on Criminal Justice in China ed Mike McConville and Eva Pils Cheltenham UK Edward Elgar 2013 390410 Melanie Manion Corruption by Design Building Clean Government in Mainland China and Hong Kong Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 2004 25 See for example Jacques deLisle Exceptional Powers in an Exceptional State Emergency Powers Law in China in Emergency Powers Law in Asia ed Victor V Ramraj and Arun K Thiruvengadam New York Cambridge University Press 2010 342390 26 See Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index 2012 China ranks 145 of 167 coun tries with a score of 3 on a 1 to 10 scale Polity IV Project Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions 18002012 httpwwwsystemicpeaceorgpolitypolity4htm China scores 7 on a scale where 10 to 6 is autocracy and 10 is full democracy On issues of sig nificant economic development with limited legal development and a lack of democracy in c h i n a s l e g a l s y s t e m 251 reform era China see generally Jacques deLisle Chasing the God of Wealth while Evading the Goddess of Democracy in Development and Democracy New Perspectives on an Old Debate ed Sunder Ramaswamy and Jeffrey W Cason Middlebury VT Middlebury College Press 2003 Randall Peerenboom China Modernizes Threat to the West or Model for the Rest Oxford UK Oxford University Press 2007 and Pan Wei Toward a Consultative Rule of Law Regime in China Journal of Contemporary China 12 2003 343 27 See generally Ian Dobinson The Criminal Law of the Peoples Republic of China 1997 Real Change or Rhetoric Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal 11 2002 162 Daniel Turack The New Chinese Criminal Justice System Cardozo Journal of International and Comparative Law 7 1999 4972 Carlos Winghung Lo Chinas Legal Awakening Legal Theory and Criminal Justice in Dengs China Hong Kong University of Hong Kong Press 1995 28 Fu Hualing Reeducation through Labor in Historical Perspective China Quarterly no 184 2005 811830 29 The full text of the constitution of the Peoples Republic of China can be found at httpwwwnpcgovcnenglishnpcConstitutionnode2825htm 30 Kevin J OBrien and Lianjiang Li Accommodating Democracy in a OneParty State Introducing Village Elections in China China Quarterly no 162 2000 465489 Still A Model Revisiting the Rebel Village of Wukan Wall Street Journal China Real Time Report Sep 25 2012 31 Andrew J Nathan Chinese Democracy Berkeley University of California Press 1985 chapter 10 Gang Lin Ideology and Political Institutions for a New Era in China after Jiang ed Xiaobo Hu and Gang Lin Stanford CA Stanford University Press 2003 Jacques deLisle Whats Happened to Democracy in China Elections Law and Political Reform Foreign Policy Research Institute ENote April 2010 httpwwwfpriorgenotes201004 delisledemocracyinchinahtml Cheng Li IntraParty Democracy in China Should We Take it Seriously China Leadership Monitor No 30 2009 32 See generally Laura Paler Chinas Legislation Law and the Making of a More Orderly and Representative Legislative System China Quarterly No 182 2005 301318 Wang Xixin Administrative Procedure Reforms in Chinas Rule of Law Context Columbia Journal of Asian Law 12 Fall 1998 251277 Xixin Wang Rule of Rules An Inquiry into Administrative Rules in Chinas Rule of Law Context in The Rule of Law Perspectives from the Pacific Washington Mansfield Center for Pacific Affairs 2000 2240 33 Shen Kui Is it the Beginning of the Era of the Rule of the Constitution Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal 12 2003 199231 Thomas E Kellogg The Death of Constitutional Litigation in China China Brief 9 no 7 Jamestown Foundation Apr 2009 34 Carl F Minzner Xinfang An Alternative to Formal Chinese Legal Institutions Stanford Journal of International Law 42 2006 103179 He Weifang Constitutional TrendsThe World and China October 2009 httpboxuncomnewsgb pubvp200910200910270945shtml 35 On these issues see Jieren Hu Grand Mediation in China Asian Survey 51 2011 10651089 Jacques deLisle Security First Patterns and Lessons from Chinas Use of Law to Address National Security Threats Journal of National Security Law and Policy 4 2010 397436 Frank N Pieke The Communist Party and Social Management in China China Information 26 no 2 2012 149165 Carl F Minzner Riots and CoverUps CounterProductive Control of Local Agents in China University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law 31 2009 53123 36 See for example Eva Pils Land Disputes Rights Assertion and Social Unrest in China A Case from Sichuan Columbia Journal of International Law 19 2005 235292 252 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Sarah Biddulph Responding to Industrial Unrest in China Sydney Law Review 34 2012 3563 37 Benjamin L Liebman Watchdog or Demagogue The Media in the Chinese Legal System Columbia Law Review 105 2005 1157 Benjamin L Liebman A Populist Threat to Chinas Courts in Chinese Justice ed Woo and Gallagher 269313 38 On the issues discussed in this section see Jacques deLisle Traps Gaps and Law Prospects and Challenges for Chinas Reforms in Is China Trapped in Transition Implications for Future Reforms Oxford Oxford Foundation for Law Justice and Society 2007 On issues of implementation see Implementation of Law in China eds Jianfu Chen Yuwen Li and Jean M Otto The Hague Kluwer 2002 39 On transplants and related issues in China see generally Jacques deLisle Lex Americana United States Legal Assistance American Legal Models and Legal Change in the PostCommunist World and Beyond University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Economic Law 20 1999 179308 Pitman B Potter Globalization and Economic Regulation in China Selective Adaptation of Globalized Norms and Practices Washington University Global Studies Law Review 2 2003 119150 Katharina Pistor Daniel Berkowitz and JeanFrancois Richard The Transplant Effect American Journal of Comparative Law 51 2003 163203 40 Cai Dingjian The Development of Constitutionalism in the Transition of Chinese Society Columbia Journal of Asian Law 19 2005 125 Jacques deLisle Pressing Engagement Uneven Human Rights Progress in China Modest Successes of American Policy and the Absence of Better Options Carnegie Endowment 2007 httpwwwcarnegieen dowmentorgfilesdelislepdf Joseph Kahn Chinese Official Warns Against Independence of Courts New York Times Feb 3 2007 see also the work of Zhu Suli discussed below 41 See generally Hung Judicial Reform in China Lessons from Shanghai World Bank ChinaGovernance Investment Climate and Harmonious Society Competitiveness Enhancements for 120 Cities in China Oct 8 2006 httpsiteresourcesworldbankorg INTCHINAResources3188621121421293578120citiesenpdf and compare Randall Peerenboom Show Me the Money The Dominance of Wealth in Determining Rights Performance in Asia Duke Journal of Comparative and International Law 15 2004 75152 42 Zhu Suli Political Parties in Chinas Judiciary Duke Journal of Comparative and International Law 17 2007 533560 43 See Xin He The Party Pushes Back and other chapters in Judicial Independence in China ed Peerenboom Benjamin L Liebman Chinas Courts Restricted Reform China Quarterly 191 2007 620638 Benjamin Liebman and Tim Wu Chinas Network Justice Chicago Journal of International Law 8 2007 257321 44 Hualing Fu and Richard Cullen Climbing the Weiquan ladder A Radicalizing Process for RightsProtection Lawyers The China Quarterly 205 2011 4059 Fu Hualing Challenging Authoritarianism through Law National Taiwan University Law Review 6 2011 339365 45 On aspects of the Chinese case see Rachel E Stern and Kevin J OBrien Politics at the Boundary Mixed Signals and the Chinese State Modern China 38 2012 174198 46 See generally Jacques deLisle Law and Chinas Development Model in In Search of Chinas Development Model Beyond the Beijing Consensus ed Philip Hsu Yushan Wu and Suisheng Zhao New York Routledge 2011 147165 47 JeanPhilippe Beja Fu Hualing and Eva Pils eds Liu Xiaobo Charter 08 and the Challenges of Political Reform in China Hong Kong Hong Kong University Press 2012 Eva Pils Disappearing Chinas Human Rights Lawyers in Comparative Perspectives on Criminal Justice in China ed McConville and Pils Chinese Communist Party Central c h i n a s l e g a l s y s t e m 253 Committee Document No 9 August 2013 httpwwwmingjingnewscom2013089 html Yang Xiaoqing A Comparative Study of Constitutional Governance and the Peoples Democratic System Seeking Truth May 21 2013 and Constitutional Governance is an Evasion that Negates Chinas Development Road Global Times May 22 2013 48 See generally Carl F Minzner Chinas Turn Against Law American Journal of Comparative Law 59 2011 935984 49 He Weifang A Letter to Chongqing Colleagues Apr 12 2011 httpcmphku hk2011041211481 Yawei Liu Bo Xilais Campaign for the Politburo Standing Committee and the Future of Chinese Politicking China Brief 11 no 21 Jamestown Foundation November 2011 suggesTed ReAdIngs Chen Albert H Y An Introduction to the Legal System of the Peoples Republic of China 4th ed New York LexisNexis 2011 Diamant Neil J Stanley B Lubman and Kevin J OBrien eds Engaging the Law in China Stanford CA Stanford University Press 2005 He Weifang In the Name of Justice Striving for the Rule of Law in China Washington DC Brookings Institution 2012 Peeerenboom Randall ed Judicial Independence in China New York Cambridge University Press 2010 Stern Rachel E Environmental Litigation in China A Study in Political Ambivalence New York Cambridge University Press 2013 Woo Margaret Y K and Mary E Gallagher eds Chinese Justice Civil Dispute Resolution in Contemporary China New York Cambridge University Press 2011 Few modern societies have as political an economy as the Peoples Republic of China PRC Even after thirtyfive years of market reform bureaucrats local and national leaders as well as new and old government reg ulations still have tremendous influence over the pro duction and distribution of goods and services Similarly because the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party CCP depends so heavily on continuing economic growth because expanding inequalities threaten social stability and because corruption has seeped deeply into the political system eco nomics has enormous political significance in China Chinas national leaders make a huge difference in the countrys economic fortunes as their preferences for different developmental strategies and policies have pro foundly shaped the trajectory of the PRCs economy in the decades since 1949 And leaders use their power to press their preferences Every leadership change in China including subtle shifts of power from one leader or faction to another influences pub lic policy Without Maos death in 1976 Deng Xiaoping would have been unable to introduce the reform era Similarly after coming to power in 2002 Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao established a more balanced development strategy than their predeces sors to ameliorate the inequality that had emerged in the 1990s Conversely economic problems can undermine the authority of factions or leaders When price reforms in the summer of 1988 triggered popular fears of inflation the resulting run on Shanghai banks allowed conservative leaders led by Prime Minister Li Peng to attack the then leader of reform CCP General Secretary Zhao Ziyang who was ousted from office as part of the Tiananmen turmoil in 1989 Chinas Political Economy dAVI d ZW eI g 8 c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l e c o n o m y 255 A second component of Chinas political economy is that economic deregula tion threatens the power of bureaucrats who struggle to maintain their influence Decades of economic planning and regulations empowered millions of bureaucrats from Beijing down to the villages giving them control over the allocation of wealth resources jobs and peoples right to participate in the economy PostMao reforms that decentralized control over the economy initially left local officials not the market in control over many resources No doubt decades of further reform and deregula tion in particular the requirement for joining the World Trade Organization WTO in 2001 that all laws be transparent and open to public scrutiny have undermined bureaucratic authority Yet today despite a booming private sector stateowned enterprises SOEs still account for about 40 percent of Chinas gross domestic prod uct GDP and some key sectors of the economy are almost entirely under govern ment control A countrys relationship to the global economy is also highly political since it is largely determined by government policy How tightly should economic interactions with the outside world be regulated What balance between imports exports and trade regulations is most likely to enhance national power and the pace of economic development As states open their economies to the world their leaders discover that a predetermined set of international rules norms organizations trading structures transportation networks and pricing mechanisms constrain their choices The study of these issues which falls under the purview of International Political Economy IPE illuminates Chinas transition from a relatively isolated state with a stagnant or at best slowly growing economy in the Maoist era to the economic dynamo and trading giant it is today PolITICAl eConomy In The mAo eRA The CCP came to power in 1949 planning a moderate program of economic change but with several pressing issues on its agenda In 19501952 Land Reform redistrib uted 42 percent of arable land from landlords and richer farmers to poorer villag ers The goals were to weaken the rural elite which had supported the Kuomintang KMT and to repay Chinas peasants who fought and died on behalf of the CCP Hyperinflation which had undermined KMT support in the cities during the civil war was tamed Under the slogan of thirty years without change the CCP prom ised to leave the private economy alone in the hope that Chinas small capitalist class would continue to invest in their own firms which they did Beginning in 1953 the state promoted rapid industrialization largely by adopting the Soviet model of economic development Twenty million peasants were moved into the cities to provide workers for an enormous number of new factories urban ization expanded and industrial production grew With direct Soviet assistance 156 major projects were begun including 24 electric power plants 63 machinery plants and 7 iron and steel plants At the same time the CCP began to extend its reach over other parts of the econ omy In the countryside the state took control of the rural grain markets in 1953 prohibiting private trading After Land Reform some peasants had sold their land 256 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a to local officials and former landlords leading Mao to see the emergence of a new rural ruling class Mao attacked this situation in the summer of 1955 by urging local officials to press villagers to join rural cooperatives in which the land would be owned and farmed collectively By the end of 1956 98 percent of villagers had turned their land oxen and tools over to the cooperatives and were drawing their income based largely on the work they performed for the collective Property transfer accelerated in the cities in the waning weeks of 1955 and the early part of 1956 as all capitalists small shopkeepers and professionals running their own businesses turned their firms over to state Overall economic growth during Chinas First FiveYear Plan 19531957 was robust averaging over 9 percent per year But growth rates fluctuated widely for example from 15 percent in 1956 to 5 percent in 1957 and industrial growth far out paced that of agriculture In the fall of 1957 China entered the Great Leap Forward a period of euphoric anticipation of the advent of the communist utopia The topdown bureaucratic Sovietstyle system of economic planning was largely abandoned in favor of an approach that emphasized mass mobilization and ideological appeals to achieve a dramatic breakthrough in production Mao and other leaders argued that much larger collective farms the Peoples Communes filled with peasants possessing heightened revolutionary fervor would bring unprecedented prosperity to the countryside But when production fell far short of ridiculously elevated targets local officials mostly out of fear that they would be accused of insufficient commitment to the Great Leap lied reporting highly exaggerated increases in agricultural output Central lead ers deep in the throes of selfdeception believed the false reports and demanded that communes remit their surplus grain to the state to feed the cities and for export leaving little food in the villages When the weather soured in 1959 famine struck rural China claiming tens of millions of lives in the poorer parts of the country Industry and commerce were also severely affected by the irrational policies of the Great Leap and the country plunged into an economic depression GDP growth in 1961 was 271 percent and 61 percent in 1962 This disaster led Mao Zedong to withdraw from daytoday management of the economy allowing more pragmatic leaders especially Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping to introduce reforms to repair the damage by reversing the extreme policies of the Great Leap By 1963 the economy had recovered with annual GDP growth averaging 141 in 19631965 But trouble was looming Mao convinced that the CCP was becoming a new capi talist class launched the disastrous Cultural Revolution in 1966 to keep the party and the country on what he considered to be the correct revolutionary road Moderate leaders including Liu and Deng were purged During the subsequent decade radi cal policies greatly restricted the scope of private economic activity in both city and countryside Although the economic consequences of the Cultural Revolution were not nearly as severe as those of the Great Leap Forward GDP growth averaged only 39 percent in 19671976 Because population growth was relatively high during this period 24 percent per year annual GDP growth per capita was just 15 percent During the Maoist era which ended with the Chairmans death and the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976 China made important strides toward industrialization c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l e c o n o m y 257 and improved agricultural infrastructure such as irrigation Inequalities of various kinds were limited and health and education standards significantly improved For example life expectancy which in 1949 was just 36 years had almost doubled to 66 years in 1976 and literacy had spread from onefifth of the population to about twothirds in 19801 But the PRC was still an impoverished nation with a per capita GDP of just over US630 per year in 19802 Furthermore Maos insistence that China be economically selfreliant together with the countrys selfimposed international isolation during much of the Cultural Revolution meant that when his rule came to an end the PRC had very low levels of foreign trade and almost zero foreign invest ment see Figures 81 and 83 PolITICAl eConomy oF The ReFoRm eRA China has gone through five waves of reform that have changed every aspect of both domestic and foreign economic policy since Deng Xiaoping consolidated his power early in the postMao era These waves of reform began formally with the crucial meeting of the Central Committee in NovemberDecember 1978 that redirected the national agenda from the Cultural Revolutions emphasis on politics and ideology to improving the Chinese economy and the peoples livelihood The Third Plenum as it is known introduced rural reforms established official diplomatic relations with the United States opened the economy to the outside world and ended class labels that had divided citizens into friends and enemies of the state In the early 1980s Chinas leaders took the first major step toward opening the Chinese economy to the outside world with the establishment of four Special Economic Zones SEZs in coastal areas of southern China that had links to Chinese communities overseas The SEZsShenzhen Zhuhai Xiamen and Shantouwere given great latitude to experiment with marketfriendly policies and special privileges in terms of land use and employment practices access to capital and other types of favorable treatment in order to expand exports and attract foreign investment The second wave of reforms emerged in 19841985 Fourteen more coastal cities were opened to foreign trade Scientific institutions and universities were encouraged to do business with enterprises and keep the profits Universities were allowed to link directly with universities overseas increasing the study abroad program Foreign trade controls were decentralized to city governments Efforts were made to invigo rate SOEs which were responsible for most industrial output in China Central plan ning was curtailed as long as firms fulfilled their yearly targets that stipulated what goods they had to sell to the state and at what prices they could produce more goods that they could sell at market prices This dual price system shuang jiage expanded output and efficiency but it was also wide open to corruption and arbitrage as people who could buy goods at planned prices but sell them on the free market made a killing In 19871988 a third wave of reform opened all of coastal China to the global econ omy This Coastal Development Strategy which included the establishment of over six thousand foreign trade companies FTCs really marks the beginning of Chinas exportled economic growth which continues today3 Chinas rural industrywhich 258 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a had expanded significantly after 1984became a driver of Chinas export boom For the next seven years Chinas export growth came largely from these small and mediumsized rural enterprises along the coast But in the summer of 1988 the reforms ran into trouble The further lifting of price controls on many items which had begun in 1985 triggered a run on the banks as people frightened that the cost of goods would soar withdrew their cash and bought everything off the shelves The panic had political repercussions undermining CCP General Secretary Zhao Ziyang who was directing the reform movement with Deng Xiaopings support The power struggle pitting conserva tive leaders who wanted slower marketoriented changes against Zhao and other committed reformers would play out over the next year and form the political background to the crisis in Tiananmen Square that shook China to the core in MayJune 1989 The military assault on Beijing on June 4 had economic repercussions leading to a drop in GDP growth from 116 percent in 1988 to 41 percent in 1989 Furthermore the ouster of Zhao Ziyang paved the way for the ascendency of economic conservatives in the party leadership who put a check on further reforms In the latter half of 1989 the CCP watched with horror as communist partystates across Eastern Europe were overthrown Further shock followed when the collapse of the Soviet Union occurred in August 1991 as Mikhail Gorbachevs reforms led to the dismantling of the Soviet empire These events reassured Deng Xiaoping and other leaders that they had done the right thing in taking resolute action against the Tiananmen protesters But Deng learned another lesson from communisms demise in Europe He under stood that the CCPs political survival was wedded to economic growth Gorbachevs mistake was promoting political reform without putting more food on the table of the Soviet citizens So in January 1992 Deng then well into his eighties embarked on his Southern Journey to the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone a once small vil lage along the border with Hong Kong that had been transformed into one of Chinas fastinggrowing and richest cities There he called on the people and local govern ments to move faster and take greater risks in reform Though conservative oppo nents in Beijing stifled his words for almost two months his exhortation to return to a path of reform struck a chord with the Chinese people and local leaders along the coast triggering a new phase in Chinas reform In the fall of 1992 the Fourteenth Party Congress of the CCP announced that henceforth China would establish a socialist market economy ending once and for all the ideological debate about whether China would remain a fully socialist economy or move toward a mixed economy with a large dose of capitalism This was the start of the fourth wave of reform Foreign investment soared in the 1990s see Table 81 at the end of this chapter Whereas most foreign investment in the 1980s involved overseas Chinese investors in small enterprises between 1993 and 1995 larger firms from Europe the United States and Japan poured into China and along with Taiwanese investment triggered a for eign direct investment FDI boom Local governments too dusted off plans drafted in 19871988 but tabled in 1989 and began many new local projects In the following years China privatized all but the largest SOEs including tens of thousands of collectively owned enterprises in the countryside so that by 2003 TABle 81 Indicators of Chinas global Integration 19782011 1978 1980 1984 1988 1990 1992 1994 1997 1998 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 Total foreign trade US bil 206 381 535 998 115 1655 2366 3252 324 4743 5097 6208 851 1155 1422 1760 21738 256326 220753 297399 364186 Foreign trade as of GDP current prices na 126 173 247 296 339 423 341 318 396 385 427 519 598 633 666 644 057 044 050 050 Total exports US billions 98 181 261 475 621 849 121 1828 1837 2492 2661 3256 4382 5933 762 9689 1218 143069 120161 157775 189838 Exports by foreigninvested firms US bil na na na 246 78 174 347 749 809 1194 1332 1699 2403 3386 4442 5638 6955 7904927 67207409 86222882 995227038 Exports by foreigninvested firms of total exports na na na 52 126 205 287 409 44 48 501 548 548 571 583 582 571 5525 5593 5465 5243 Inbound foreign direct invest ment US bil na na 14 32 35 11 338 453 455 407 469 527 535 606 603 63 748 924 90 1057 116 Foreign exchange reserves US bil na 13 82 34 111 194 52 140 145 166 2122 2864 4033 6099 8189 1066 15282 1946 2399 2847 3188 Cargo handled in major coastal ports mil tons 198 217 275 438 483 603 744 908 922 1256 1426 1666 2011 2461 2928 3422 3882 4296 4755 5484 6163 Deepwater berths in major ports 10000 tons 85 na 178 226 282 314 359 449 468 518 527 547 650 687 769 883 967 1076 1214 1293 1366 Number of foreign tourists 1000s 230 529 1134 1842 1747 4006 5182 7428 7108 10160 11226 13440 11403 16933 20255 22210 26110 24325 21937 26127 27112 International air routes na na 24 40 44 58 84 109 131 133 134 161 194 244 233 268 290 297 263 302 443 Number of foreigninvested Star Hotels na na na na na 9 529 734 694 833 592 686 678 531 na 585 592 561 574 572 492 Source China Statistical Yearbook Ministry of Commerce of China Note This is the number for 1985 Excluding overseas Chinese and Chinese from Hong Kong and Macau Statistical Bulletin of Star Hotels in China China National Tourism Administration foreigninvested Star Hotels also include sources from Hong Kong Macau and Taiwan 260 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a the share of workers in the public sector including rural labor was down to 4 per cent When the fifth wave of reform began in 1998 Jiang Zemin had succeeded Deng Xiaoping who died in 1997 as Chinas top leader During this wave the leadership cut the number of state bureaucrats in half and promoted the private ownership of apartmentstriggering a nationwide housing boom Final plans were made to join the World Trade Organization WTO in 2001 which entailed removing regulations that limited foreign access to Chinas domestic market deepening Chinas integration into the international economy The themes raised above and discussed in greater depth below reflect core aspects of the dramatic transformation of Chinas economy since the founding of the Peoples Republic 1 its shift from a staterun economy dominated by public property with an iron rice bowl for its working class ie guaranteed benefits no layoffs to one characterized by a stronger private sector unemployment and a weak social safety net 2 a shift from economic selfreliance to global economic interdependence as China became a trading powerhouse 3 the initial granting of property rights over land to peasants during the Land Reform of the early 1950s then forcing them into collectives and in the reform era a return to householdbased farming although without private ownership of land 4 a shift from radical egalitarianism under Mao to the growth of dramatic urbanrural interpersonal and interregional inequali ties and 5 a change from a country with a very low standard of living to one that still has pockets of deep poverty but that is now classified as middle income with a fastgrowing middle class seeking to become Westernstyle consumers RuRAl ReFoRm A crucial step toward Chinas economic transformation began in the countryside with the decollectivization of agriculture and the decision to increase the price the state paid for agricultural crops by 25 percent Those steps represent one of the few cases in modern history where a state by favoring the countryside over the cities success fully triggered a takeoff in the entire national economy To set the context for under standing this momentous change some background about Maoist era rural policy is necessary Although peasants were the base of power for the communist revolution the CCP turned on the peasantry in the mid1950s collectivizing agriculture closing all pri vate grain markets and freezing rural to urban migration through the introduction of a hukou or household registration system that legally consigned every citizen of the PRC to residence in either city or countryside At that time about 80 per cent of Chinese were rural residents Because of the restrictions it put on population movement and labor mobility and the advantages it gave urban over rural people the hukou has been called a Chinese form of apartheid4 Why employ such harsh language Because the state gave enormous benefits to urban residents that it denied its ruralbased citizens This urban bias5 included subsidized grain food and housing retirement benefits or pensions betterquality urban schools health care coverage and many social amenities that turned large SOEs into welfare units Rural residents on the other hand had to sell grain to the c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l e c o n o m y 261 state at relatively low prices build their own homes finance lowquality schools fund their own cooperative medical program and rely on their sons to support them in their old age Under the slogan of internal selfreliance the state invested little in rural China less than 8 percent of total government financial expenditure in the 1950s went into agriculture although the vast majority of Chinas citizens relied on that sec tor for their livelihood6 Although a flood of ruraltourban migrants over 260 million people as of 2013 during the reform era comprises the vast majority of workers in the export sector most of them retain their rural hukou and face many disadvantages and much discrimination Many observers both outside and inside China believe that reform or even abolition of the hukou system is essential not only as a human rights matter but also to move China to the next level of economic development Under Mao rural collectives were also forced to sell what was called surplus grainwhich in fact was just a part of the harvestto the state at below cost Also the gap between the low prices paid to farmers for agricultural products and the high prices they paid for urban industrial goodswhat is called the price scissorsmay have shifted some wealth from the countryside to the cities But while Chinese econo mists who speak for the peasants have pushed this viewpoint empirical studies sug gest that the urbanrural gap grew largely due to direct state investment in urban industry rather than because of any largescale transfer of wealth from the country side to the cities Nevertheless urban bias in economic policy took a heavy toll on Chinas rural areas during the Mao era Furthermore ideological constraints undermined villagers efforts to enhance their income through private offfarm activity Under Mao village officials were pressured to limit the tail of capitalismthat is private economic activity that might help capi talism reemerge in the countryside Between 1966 and 1978 under policies of agrarian radicalism rural markets were closed and household sideline production such as rais ing pigs and chickens for sale was frowned upon and in some places even prohibited7 Private plots comprising 5 to 7 percent of collective land which had been allocated during collectivization to villagers for their own production were sometimes banned or placed under collective controls Under a policy called taking grain as the key link yi liang wei gang the state forced collectives to forgo producing highervalued eco nomic crops such as fruit orchards horticulture oilbearing crops bamboo forestry or fish ponds in order to ensure local and national grain selfsufficiency In sum the Maoist legacy in the rural economy was mixed On the positive side village health cooperatives significantly improved rural health care and life expec tancy Capital construction projects undertaken by peasants in the peoples com munes improved irrigation in much of rural China and this embedded investment may have contributed to the dramatic growth in rural output that followed decol lectivization after 1977 On the other hand production and living standards in the countryside improved little from the mid1950s through the mid1970s And the terrible human cost of the Great Leap Forward tilts the balance sheet sharply into the negative The Great Leap left a deep reservoir of bitterness among farmers toward the regime making the countryside ripe for reform once Maos death in 1976 and Deng Xiaopings consolida tion of power in 1978 changed the political context entirely8 262 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a decollectivization Rural reform occurred in two stages Between 1977 and 1983 agricultural production was decollectivized The peoples communes were dismantled and replaced with a householdbased farming system A second phase began in 1984 which promoted industrialization commercialization specialization and marketization of the rural economy The story of decollectivization is the stuff of novels reflecting the audacity of peas ants to challenge the state Dismantling of the peoples communes began in a small village in Fengyang District Anhui Province a region rocked by very high death rates during the Great Famine of 196019629 Faced with starvation at that time peasants had divided the collective land and farmed independently While many lives had been saved by this action Mao sacked the Anhui provincial leader for undermining collec tive agriculture and admonished the CCP to never forget class struggle In 1977 about a year after Maos death peasants in Anhui and Sichuan provinces again faced famine In Anhui Fengyangs cadres and villagers signed a secret docu ment in blood saying that they would again farm the land as individual families rather than as members of the commune but this time not tell higherlevel officials Deng Xiaoping was back in power in Beijing and the two provinces were under the authority of party leaders committed to reform who did learn of the spontaneous decollectivization So when Wan Li Anhuis party secretary told Deng that peas ants were dismantling the peoples communes at their own initiative Deng reportedly told Wan to let the policy unfold By the December 1978 Central Committees Third Plenum which heralded the official beginning of the reform era decollectivization was underway in more and more parts of China The decision to reform the peoples communes faced policymakers with two big questions First should groups of peasants continue to farm together in some collec tive arrangement or was the individual household an ideologically acceptable farming unit For some leaders householdbased production equaled private farming which they saw as incompatible with the CCPs commitment to socialism The second ques tion was Should villagers keep most of their outputturning over only a small grain tax to the stateand sell the surplus on the free market Or should most of the distri bution and sale of the output be kept under collective control By the spring of 1983 rural China had adopted a system in which individual house holds contracted use rights to the land which was still owned by the village In this socalled household responsibility system families not the collective decided about crops investment savings labor allocation and marketing They paid only a small tax in grain Moreover the state increased the price for most crops by an average of 25 percent stimulating growth in output and significantly increasing rural incomes Households switched to highervalue cash crops enhancing their incomes while specialized households engaged in largerscale farming animal husbandry fishery and other forms of agricultural specialization The rural economy thrived during the first stage of reform While the average annual increase of the gross value of agricultural output GVAO between 1952 and 1978 had been 42 percent the annual growth rate of GVAO in 19791984 was 74 per cent see Figure 81 The annual output of grain had risen by only 23 percent a year c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l e c o n o m y 263 between 1952 and 1978 but this went up to 51 percent a year between 1979 and 1984 This increase was even more impressive on a per capita basis because rural popula tion growth also dropped during this period due to the onechild policy As there was no significant increase in government investment in the rural economy during this period and no technological breakthrough the major variable in explaining the boost in production is that farmers had greater incentive to work harder and more efficiently since such effort could now yield greater profit With more money Chinas peasants demanded more durable consumer goods while 31 percent of rural households owned a bicycle in 1978 by 1985 81 percent of households did Only 20 percent owned a sewing machine in 1978 by 1985 over 43 percent had one Flush with cash as many as 80 percent of rural Chinese families renovated their homes in the 1980s replacing mud walls with brick ones thatched roofs with tiled ones and dirt floors with concrete ones With rural Chinese compris ing approximately 18 percent of the worlds population and with 80 percent of them significantly upgrading their homes rural reform helped 16 percent 18 percent 80 percent of the worlds inhabitants significantly upgrade their homesthe largest housing boom in world history Between 1978 and 1984 decollectivization higher prices for farm products more offfarm business activity and clearer incentives reduced the urbanrural income gap During these years rural household income grew by 124 percent annually while urban incomes grew 68 percent The quality of food in the cities not just in the countryside improved enormously because of the rural reforms to give just one example tofu and soya milk doujiang former staples of Chinese breakfasts that had disappeared due to Chinas grain first policy returned to urban food markets The stunning successes of the first stage of rural reform led to an upsurge of support for 20 00 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 1978 1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 Annual Growth FIguRe 81 Chinas Agricultural Output 19782012 annual growth Source World Bank World Development Indicators 264 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a the CCP and its reform wing that laid a very strong base for the reform of the entire economy But the rural areas fell behind the cities after 1984 as the state turned its attention to urban industrial reform and allowed the prices of consumer and industrial goods to rise to stimulate the urban economy By 1994 the urbanrural income gap was even greater than it had been on the eve of rural reform in 1978 see Figure 86 A 1994 tax reform introduced by then Vice Premier Zhu Rongji compounded the problems of the rural areas In the 1980s the central governments share of GDP and total investment had dropped precipitously due to decentralization and decollectivization Many provinces and localities had become rich while the cen tral government had grown poor complicating any redistribution of wealth among regions of the country and aggravating regional inequality the central government also lacked the funds to have a significant impact on the direction of development across the country In response the taxes that provinces and local governments paid to the central government were increased leaving most rural counties without the finances to help the areas under their administrative authority Moreover the central government imposed new tasks on local officials such as running schools reestablishing health care programs and building new roads without giving them adequate funds to do so10 To pay for these unfunded mandates local cadres imposed arbitrary taxes and illegal fees on peasants for all kinds of activities such as slaughtering pigs or chickens or building new latrines These financial burdens were among the leading cause of the upsurge in rural protests in the decade after 1994 see chapter 9 The Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao administration which governed China from 2002 2012 raised the slogan of creating a new socialist countryside as a government pri ority To that end the state increased investment in rural China including a sizeable chunk of the 585 billion stimulus package that was implemented to deal with the 20072008 financial crisis All rural children are now guaranteed free education through the end of junior middle school and the central government has taken responsibility for teachers sala ries The state also ended all local fee and agricultural taxes increasing rural incomes by about 5 percent Figure 81 shows the volatility in the growth of Chinas agricultural output dur ing the reform era Current government policy aims to establish a more stable and sustained pattern of growth for agriculture even as more people move out of that line of work and agriculture continues to decline as a percentage of Chinas GDP see Figure 82 Another major challenge facing Chinese agriculture is the size of the average farm only about one acre and that acreage most often consists of separated parcels of land11 Such smallscale noodle strip farming12 makes mechanization and costefficient use of inputs nearly impossible Township and Village enterprises The second stage of reform in the countryside began in 1984 with a rapid expansion of rural industrialization The growth of these township and village enterprises c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l e c o n o m y 265 TVEs which were not part of the state planned economy explains much of the increase in rural incomes in China in the 1980s and the 1990s Many were funded by local governments or received loans from local credit cooperatives where peasants had put some of their newly gained disposable income while oth ers operated under contracts with urban SOEs that sought to expand outside of the statecontrolled sector of the economy In the Yangtze River Delta of central China particularly in southern Jiangsu and northern Zhejiang provinces engi neers from SOEs spent weekends upgrading production in rural firms in what was often their ancestral village Much of the surplus agricultural labor released by decollectivization as well as rural youths entering the working force for the first time found jobs in TVEs Initially TVEs competed very effectively with SOEs They were unburdened by welfare costsworkers housing medical benefits subsidized meals schooling and retirement benefitsthat saddled SOEs so their costs were lower Suddenly Chinas urban bias that had endowed urban residents with so many more perquisites than their rural cousins became a liability in a competitive market allowing TVEs to take the production of many household appliances away from SOEs TVEs also had an advantage in cheap labor relative to Taiwan Japan Hong Kong and other rapidly developing regions of East Asia leading the government to see TVEs as the basis of an exportled strategy for China As part of the 1984 urban reform the government had pushed SOEs to enter the global marketplace But they proved inflexible and unwilling to meet foreign expectations So in 1987 under his Coastal Development Strategy then Premier Zhao Ziyang gave TVEs incentives to look for markets overseas including the right to keep more of the foreign currency that they earned through exports By 1994 over 50 percent of all products purchased in China by staterun for eign trade companies for export came from TVEs13 Rural joint ventures with over seas investment also boomed as Hong Kong and Taiwanese firms moved into the Pearl River Delta in southern China the Min River region in Fujian across from Taiwan and the lower reaches of the Yangtze River In the mid1990s TVEs were the fastest growing sector of the Chinese economy expanding at rates of nearly 30 percent annually and accounting for more than twothirds of Chinas increased foreign trade14 While most TVEs had been owned by local governments a wave of privatization hit the sector beginning in 1994 TVE managers who were part of the local power elite often engaged in manager buyouts MBOs taking ownership over the firms Township and village governments supported this wave of privatization because pri vate firms generated more profits and taxes than collectively owned ones and TVEs that proved unable to make the transition from collective to private ownership were closed15 Today collectively owned TVEs have largely disappeared from Chinas economy replaced by private enterprises located in the more prosperous parts of the country Eastern China now has an industrialized countryside in much of the Pearl River Delta bordering Hong Kong in the south the Yangtze River Delta west of Shanghai and rural communities in the suburbs of most major cities in China 266 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a The struggle over Rural land Land has been a source of conflict between the state and the peasants and between urban and rural China since the founding of the Peoples Republic After giving land to poorer villagers during Land Reform 19501952 the CCP reasserted control over all rural land and its products beginning in 1956 when it transferred ownership rights from individuals to the collective economy run by local officials culminating in the creation of the peoples communes during the Great Leap Forward Once land became collective property it became unclear who actually owned it which allowed cadres to grab land for their collective unit whenever they could In fact almost every new policy or campaign focusing on the countryside since the 1950s has become an opportunity for officials to carry out a new wave of land expropriations The Great Leap Forward 19581960 involved a huge land grab by the govern ment even beyond the creation of the communes when it took land for gigantic state farms run by the central administration and for massive irrigations projects and res ervoirs16 During the Cultural Revolution local officials at the county and commune level expropriated land for rural industries and new office buildings under the slogan of building socialism in a big way da gan shehuizhuyi Land grabs have persisted and even intensified in the reform era In 1982 to pre vent rural surplus labor freed up by decollectivization from flooding into the large cit ies the central government called for the establishment of rural small towns xiao cheng zhen In one locality outside Nanjing township leaders confiscated land owned by the villages around the township center and let officials and friends from more distant villages move into the town In the early 1990s urban areas across China des ignated large swaths of suburban land that belonged to villages for building develop ment zones dedicated to industrialization and particularly export production The massive land grab that ensuedcommunities around China quickly set up over eight thousand development zonestransferred control of large amounts of suburban vil lage land to urban officials The most recent wave of land grabs began with the building boom that followed the decision to allow private ownership of housing in 1998 and has continued as the profits to be made in real estate have has increased dramatically due to scarcity A huge gap exists between the compensation that villagers receive for giving up their use rights to the land they still cannot sell it outright and the profits earned by local officials and development companies from new projects including housing estates apartment buildings shopping malls and even golf courses built on that land As the last public good in China whose value is revealed only as it is put up for sale on the market land is a battleground among citizens urban and rural residents local officials and private entrepreneurs making land grabs one of the major sources of popular protest in the PRC17 In late 2008 the CCP explored the idea that villagers should sell or subcontract their use rights to the land to agribusinesses which would benefit from economies of scale by combining small plots of land into large farms This step could increase overall agricultural production and the businesses could hire peasants at salaries far greater than what they could earn from farming as individual families It was also proposed that a more institutionalized process be set up to ensure that the farmers c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l e c o n o m y 267 are getting a fair deal when they give up their land rights and that rural residents be given urban hukous as part of the compensation for their land Legal title to the land would also give peasants collateral for bank loans something they lacked With this money they could start businesses which would generate new jobs and economic growth in poorer regions of the country Estimates are that this policy could create over 2 trillion yuanmore than US290 billionof wealth But some in the government worried that if villagers sold their land they would lose their safety net Jobs in cities or factories are nice but should peasants lose those jobs and not have land to which they can return the state would need to help them or face social unrest At that point it would be of little benefit to the state to remind the peasants that they should never have sold their land Also for leaders who remain committed to communist ideals allowing private ownership of the land is ideologi cally unpalatable and politically unacceptable In any case this new land reform was not implemented and the CCP moved away from plans for privatizing rural land This was probably fortuitous The financial global financial crisis that began in late 2007 threw approximately twentyfive million migrant workers out of work in Chinas export factories and most returned to their villages to farm the land that they had not sold Although many of those workers returned to their urban jobs once the crisis eased the experience was a cautionary one for Chinas leadership and dampened any enthusiasm for taking steps toward land privatization ChInAs ChAngIng eConomIC sTRuCTuRe In economies of countries in early stages of development the Gross Domestic Product GDP and a majority of jobs are in the primary sector which includes agriculture forestry and fishing mining and the extraction of oil and gas Economic moderniza tion expands industry services transportation and utilities it transfers labor from lowskilled to highskilled jobs and it directs investment into science technology and education While the shift from agriculture to industry forms the first stage of development the growth of services in sectors such as banking telecommunications and health care often heralds the next step in modernization of the economy These changes occur through domestic investment and government policy as well as by opening to the global economy in search of capital technology and markets for man ufactured goods In general China has followed this pattern although with some of its own unique characteristics In the early 1950s agriculture dominated the PRCs economy accounting for over 50 percent of GDP and employing 835 percent of the workforce18 Following the Soviet model of development during the First FiveYear Plan 19531957 China rap idly urbanized and industrialized Millions of rural residents went to the cities and suburban factories triggering what has been called the making of the Chinese work ing class19 In one of the largest transfers of technology in world history the Soviet Union in the 1950s helped China build 156 major infrastructure and industrial proj ects sent over eleven thousand engineers and scientists to China and trained over twentyeight thousand Chinese technical personnel in the Soviet Union20 Almost 268 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a half of Chinas industrial investment in the first half of the decade went to support these projects As a result the Chinese economy recovered swiftly from the devasta tion of the Japanese invasion and the civil war with the KMT and began down the road to industrialization Nevertheless by the end of the Maoist era in the late 1970s China still relied heav ily on agriculture which in 1980 accounted for 301 percent of GDP and 687 per cent of the work force21 An overemphasis on heavy industrial developmentsuch as chemical or steel plantsand too little investment in light industry such as textiles or electronics created a scarcity of consumer goods and too few new jobs to move more people off the land Light industry is laborintensive and it creates many more jobs for each unit of input than capitalintensive heavy industry Therefore a develop ing country with a growing population seeking rapid industrialization and increased labor productivity must expand light industry Exports particularly of light industrial goods can also facilitate rapid economic growth Exports produced by new and comparatively cheap labor that are sold abroad pay for technology imports that fuel modernization and shift the composition of GDP and the movement of labor first from agriculture to industry and then to services This is what happened in Taiwan see chapter 18 and South Korea This was not however the model of development adopted under Mao As discussed earlier one hallmark of the reform era in China has been the adoption of a very successful exportled growth ELG model This more than anything else has facilitated an accelerated transition of labor from agriculture to light industry where most of the employees are rural migrants By 2000 the share of the labor force in agriculture had dropped to 50 percent In 2011 it was 348 percent Heavy industry still dominates Chinas industrial sector in terms of employment 60 percent and total output value 70 percent But about 40 percent of industrial workers are in light industry reflecting a transition from lathes to looms22 Agriculture has also dropped significantly in its contribution to Chinas GDP In 1978 it accounted for about 35 per cent in 2012 it was just 10 percent see Figure 82 The decline of the stillPowerful Public sector Since the mid1990s the Chinese economy has undergone a dramatic decline in the public sector and an equally dramatic rise of the private sector At the start of the reform era in 1978 SOEs accounted for 78 percent of industrial output with the remainder coming almost entirely from other types of public ownership it employed about threequarters of the urban workforce as well By the mid1990s privatiza tion was taking hold so by 1996 SOEs share of industrial output had declined to 31 percent even though SOEs still employed close to 60 percent of urban workers23 However as the public sector remained burdened by overemployment as well as by welfare responsibilities for millions of retirees the entire sectors profits were close to zero serving as an enormous drag on the entire economy and government coffers To deal with this huge drain on Chinas economy the leadership decided in 1997 to privatize some small and medium enterprises SMEs c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l e c o n o m y 269 The subsequent pace of privatization was so rapid that the government tried to slow it down Particularly worrying was the pervasive tendency toward asset strip ping whereby new owners mostly former stateemployed managers sold the equip ment and pocketed the cash often leaving the workers without jobs or any share of the enterprises value The central governments call for gradualisman often noted featured of Chinas economic reformsconflicted with a hunger among local officials to pillage the public sector as it was being dismantled Commenting on this rush to privatization one scholar in reference to Russias postcommunist economic reforms which sought fast results through rapid funda mental changes has written if anything in Chinas transition counts as a big bang this was it24 In the span of less than a decade the number of SOEs has been sharply reduced and the stateemployed workforce cut by about 45 million In addition another 20 million or so rural TVE employees lost their jobs many of whom migrated to the cities in search of work becoming the first wave of the floating population Altogether 65 million Chinese workers have been displaced as a result of market oriented economic reforms The social and political impacts of this massive labor force dislocation in Chinas cities are discussed in chapter 10 Nevertheless the remaining SOEs though drastically reduced in number and made leaner and meaner by having to be more responsive to market forces retain enormous power in the Chinese economy More than 60 million workers are employed by thousands of stateowned and statecontrolled enterprises Key indus tries including telecommunications steel and iron energy and power aviation and shipping and defense are monopolized by the state and are now managed through the State Asset Supervision and Administration Commission SASAC In 2012 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 1976 1978 1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 of Total GDP Agriculture Industry Services FIguRe 82 Chinas GDP by Sector of the Economy 19762012 Source World Bank World Development Indicators 270 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a SASAC oversaw approximately 115 huge centrally administered SOEs which had combined assets of US105 trillion that represented 133 percent of Chinas total GDP The total revenue of those 177 firms US52 trillion had been about twothirds of Chinas GDP But compared with private firms these large SOEs and smaller SOEs owned by provinces and cities have much smaller profit margins making them a serious drain on the nations stateowned banks who readily give them loans that they often do not repay in a timely fashionif at all These nonperforming loans NPL threaten to bring down Chinas financial system Also because the CEOs of these SASACcontrolled SOEs are political appointees and senior CCP officials with careers within the partystate structure their ultimate loyalty is to the party line not the bottom line Private sector Rising In 1978 there were literally no private firms in China In 2004 twentysix years later there were 16 million But by 2012 that number had grown to 106 million with another 40 million small individually owned firms that only employed family mem bers Taken together such nonstate enterprises contribute 60 percent of Chinas total GDP and account for more than 80 percent of urban employment and over 90 per cent of new jobs26 The private sectors role in exports has also become far more important than that of the SOEs As one Beijingbased journalist put it Exports by privatelyinvested companies took off after 2001 the year of Chinas accession to the WTO That makes sensecompanies that do well in tradable goods must be competitive on an interna tional basis and many of Chinas private entrepreneurs have fit the bill Whats more the restrictions on investment in exportrelated industries from electronics to tex tiles have been much lower than in the domestic industries dominated by SOEs such as commodities and finance27 In fact the share of exports from private Chinese firms surpassed that of SOEs for the first time in 2006 and the gap between their levels of exports has continued to grow The foreigninvested sector still dominates but its share is decreasing year on year28 Privatization was first given formal ideological legitimization within the CCP in 1993 when Article 15 of the PRCs constitution was amended to replace the phrase The State practices economic planning on the basis of socialist public ownership with The state has put into practice a socialist market economy In 1999 the private sector was enshrined in the State constitution as a key component of the national economy overturning its previous status as a mere supplement to the staterun economy Then in 2000 Jiang opened the door to CCP membership for private entrepreneurs as part of his theory of the Three Represents which claimed that the party should incorporate the most advanced sectors of the Chinese economy The HuWen administration showed its support for the private sector by mak ing sure that most loans related to the 2009 stimulus package went to private firms including many small and medium enterprises And in a major pronouncement in May 2013 Premier Li Keqiang declared that the role of the state in the economy c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l e c o n o m y 271 would be further cut back and marketfriendly policies would be implemented as a means to open more areas of the economy to private capital Despite such encouraging signs the capitalist sector of the economy remains sub ordinate to and ultimately under the control of the state As Article 15 of the PRC constitutions says The State strengthens formulating economic laws improves macro adjustment and controls and forbids according to law any units or individuals from interfering with the social economic order Although the scope of economic planning has been greatly reduced in the reform era China still promulgates fiveyear plans the most recent being the Twelfth FiveYear Plan for 20112015 that set spe cific targets in almost all spheres of economic activity Scholars and other observers often use the phrase state capitalism to describe the current economic system of the PRC Chinas private sector still faces many obstacles Private businesses have a hard time getting loans forcing many firms to borrow from underground lenders at usuri ous interest rates29 The perils of such informal transactions were dramatized with the death sentence handed down in May 2013 to a woman in Wenzhou who defrauded investors of about US70 million in a Ponzi scheme that was purported to raise funds for loans to small private businesses30 Despite such pitfalls the private sector is likely to expand bringing farreaching implications for Chinas political economy BeTWeen PlAn And mARKeT dIlemmAs oF PARTIAl ReFoRm Chinas mix of central planning and a market economy has proven to be fertile soil for pervasive corruption in both the public and private sectors There was much corrup tion in the Mao era but it was mostly petty graft because it was difficult for individu als to gain access to large sums of money move funds abroad or use illgotten gains in any conspicuous manner But today the scope and scale of corruption in China are mindboggling In 2011 the Peoples Bank of China estimated that from the mid1990s to 2008 thousands of government officials and executives at SOEs smuggled US123 billion out of the PRC Between 2000 and 2012 Transparency International an inter national nongovernmental organization that monitors corporate and political cor ruption worldwide gave China 34 out of 10 on its 2012 Corruption Perceptions Index CPI where 0 is the most and 10 the least corrupt which ranked it eightieth out of 176 countries31 Corruption seriously undermines regime legitimacy among Chinese people and unless contained could endanger Chinas economic growth and social stability As one scholar has observed Endemic corruption steadily increases a countrys sys temic risks As a result its financial system is fragile its environment degraded and vulnerable its law enforcement establishment tainted and ineffective its infrastruc ture insecure its public health system irresponsive and its regulatory system creaky The list goes on Obviously the accumulation of systemic risks caused by corruption only increases the likelihood of a major crisis32 Chinas leadership recognizes that controlling corruption is among its highest pri orities Periodic anticorruption campaigns and highprofile executions of corrupt 272 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a public officials make for good public relations for the regime but do little to address the root causes of the problem Xi Jinping has repeatedly vowed to crack down on corruption saying at one point We must have the resolve to fight every corrupt phenomenon punish every corrupt official and constantly eliminate the soil which breeds corruption so as to earn peoples trust with actual results33 But one must wonder if he will continue his attack on high ranking tigers such as Jiang Jiemin the head of SASAC or spend most of his efforts on rooting out corruption at the middle and lower levels of society Furthermore much of the corruption in the PRC is sys temic rooted in the opaque and unaccountable structure of the partystate So there is much skepticism about how thorough the cleanup effort will be particularly in the absence of an independent judiciary or a free press A related issue is that the families of so many top leaders are enriching them selves through political connections In June 2012 Bloomberg News reported that Xi Jinpings extended family had investments worth about 600 million in rare earth real estate and hitech companies Neither Xi nor his wife or daughter held any of these assets which were mostly controlled by his sisters and their families In October of that year The New York Times published an article that revealed that the family of then Premier Wen Jiabao including his mother and wife controlled assets worth at least 27 billion in financial services construc tion real estate technology and diamonds In neither case was there any indica tion of illegal activity but both families benefited greatly from their connections with powerful people lucrative state contracts and favorable loans from govern ment organizations The newfound wealth of much of Chinas political elite reflects another serious problem in the PRCs partially reformed economy the widespread tendency toward what social scientists call rent seeking This means the use of political power to gain seek an economic advantage rent that would not occur in an open market situ ation see Box 81 Such activity can be very costly to the economy Rent seeking became a problem early in Chinas economic reform process As noted above in 1984 a dual price system was introduced to limit the negative impact of sudden price increases as the economy was deregulated This system compelled firms to sell products produced according to the state plan at fixed prices but goods pro duced beyond the plan could be sold at market prices and the firms could retain the profits The intention was to allow the real cost of goods to determine the market price through a gradual process while also continuing to make sure SOEs had access to the goods they needed at a price they could afford But distributors who purchased goods at the lower fixed prices often resold them on the market for higher prices earning rents by profiting from the price differential For example in the 1980s the dual price system triggered an explosion of socalled briefcase companiesmeaning firms with few assets and no employeesset up by exbureaucrats who used their connections to buy goods at state prices and resell them at market prices Many of todays millionaires in China made their first big pot of cash in this early transition period through such maneuvers Such distortions in the economy created significant problems and waste At one point the difference between planned and market prices for coal was so high that it became more profitable for a steel factory to take coal received under the plan and c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l e c o n o m y 273 resell it on the market rather than use it to manufacture any steel at all Similarly goods allocated to state firms on the plan often did not arrive because they had been sold off for a better market price To resolve this shortage SOEs had to pay these intermediaries a higher price a kind of bribe or turn to the private market which also meant paying more than the fixed price would have been Additionally in the 1980s TVEs competed aggressively with SOEs for many of these resources further driving up prices The result was serious inflation in 19861989which was a contrib uting factor to the Tiananmen protests in 1989 The state makes efforts to rein in rent seeking but bureaucrats resist these con straints through various evasive means Ironically some sectors of the economy may actually suffer from too little not too much regulation of the market34 For exam ple as more and more firms produce new drugs or food under minimal supervision lowquality products which can endanger public health flood the market In 2008 the Sanlu Dairy Group was discovered to have put the poisonous chemical melamine in its milk powder in order to falsify its protein levels More than 300000 Chinese children developed kidney stones and at least six died because of the tainted powder Two Sanlu executives were executed and nineteen other people were sentenced to prison terms several for life The issue raised concerns about food safety and corrup tion in China and damaged the reputation of Chinas food exports with at least eleven countries stopping all imports of Chinese dairy products Due to a sharp increase in Box 81 rent seeking and corruPtion Rent seeking is often equated with corruption but it is not quite the same thing simply put it refers to seeking monetary gains rents through political rather than economic activity The people who engage in rent seeking pursue greater wealth for themselves without creating more wealth for the economy lobbying by interest groups eg the AARP to get more benefits for their constituency is a kind of very legal rent seeking When bureaucrats and others with political power set regulations such as barriers to market competition from which they or those with whom they are closely connected may profit then rent seeking borders on or actually becomes a kind of corruption Rent seeking may be legal or illegal corruption by definition is the illegal use of public power for personal gain opportunities for bureaucratic rent seeking are particularly pervasive in a mixed economy like Chinas where the market is still subject to many forms of bureaucratic control Rent seeking is also prevalent in international trade as bureaucrats use regula tions to keep competitive foreign firms or lowerpriced or betterquality goods out of the domestic market These regulations involve tariffs which increase the cost of for eign goods to consumers quotas which prevent the importation of foreign goods or nontariff barriers which increase the cost for foreign firms of doing business in another country In the 1980s a foreign firm investing in China had to get dozens of approvals before it could establish a joint venture increasing the time needed and therefore the cost of opening the company Chinese firms which could sell their goods at a higher price because foreigners were unable to compete benefited from the regulations imposed on a foreign competitor and could be said to have profited from rent seeking If the bureau crats who made or enforced these regulations shared in these rents through payoffs bribes or other means they were engaging in corruption 274 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a the demand for imported infant formula in China smuggling milk powder especially from Hong Kong became a booming business The InTeRnATIonAlIZATIon oF The ChInese eConomy Chinas overall economic strategy since 1978 is called reform and opening mean ing first market reform and second opening the economy to the world which is generally referred to as the open policy The depth of Chinas integration into the global economy since 1978 is breathtaking For centuries China tried to limit foreign influences Before the Opium War foreign traders had to reside in Canton or other border towns and could deal only with trade officials and intermediaries designated by the imperial government From 1949 and well into the 1980s foreign merchants could only buy a very limited range of Chinese products at the twiceannual Canton Fair and only from twelve staterun foreign trade companies But since 1978 China has opened its door to the world as reflected in the variety of indicators presented in Table 81 at the end of this chapter As Chinas involvement with the international system has deepened so too has the worlds impact on China as states who choose to join the global economy must negotiate the terms of their engagement with international organizations and coun tries that dominate the worlds economic institutions States may prefer to limit exter nal influences through quotas tariffs and other barriers on imports manipulate the value of their currency to affect their trade relations or even subsidize their exports But trading partners want reciprocityfair trade prices that reflect the real cost of production free access to domestic markets and rules that prevent copying of their products Thus states entering the global economy need to conform to international rules such as those set by the World Trade Organization and the World Intellectual Property Organization which are enforced by international tribunals or courts China as a Trading State In recent decades China has become a quintessen tial trading state35 whose international commerce has dramatically increased its national power Chinas trade has grown at an annual rate of about 13 percent since 1978 more than double the growth rate for world trade and foreign trade has increased from 20 billion in 1978 to nearly 4 trillion by 2012 see Figure 83 In 2012 China 387 trillion in imports and exports eclipsed the United States 382 trillion as the worlds largest trading economy In the same year China was also the leading trading partner of 120 countries Trade is now one of the most important engines of Chinas economic growth As a share of GDP foreign trade jumped from 14 percent in 1978 to a peak of 70 percent in 2006 The 20072008 global financial crisis hit Chinese exports hard trade as a per cent of GDP tumbled to under 50 percent It has bounced back somewhat since then but many observers think that it will never again be such a dominant part of Chinas economy see Figure 84 Following the pattern set by Japan Taiwan and South Korea the composition of Chinas exports has started to shift from light industrial goods such as clothing footwear and consumer electronics to capitalintensive ones such as industrial c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l e c o n o m y 275 machinery But about half of Chinas exports involve processing tradeassembling equipment whose parts are manufactured in other countriesmeaning that Chinas exports still rely heavily on inexpensive labor rather than on product innovation Development Zones China opened its economy to the outside world under an approach I call segmented deregulation where rules controlling crossborder exchanges were lifted or deregulated in limited locations at a time when business relations between China and the rest of the world remained under tight bureaucratic 0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2008 2012 US Billions U1 trillion Total Exports Total Imports FIguRe 83 Chinas Foreign Trade 19802012 Sources USChina Business Council PRC Ministry of Commerce 2012 00 50 100 150 200 250 of Total GDP 300 350 400 1978 1985 1987 1989 1991 1993 1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 Exports Imports FIguRe 84 Chinas Imports and Exports as a Percent of GDP 19782012 Sources Trade data in 1978 are from Foreign Trade Statistics data after 1980 are from Customs Import and Export Statistics 276 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a control As discussed above the first step in this process was the opening in 1980 of four Special Economic Zones SEZs which were given significant tax breaks and other preferential treatment that would create incentives for foreign investors and stimulate the growth of the export sector This policy was followed in 1984 by grant ing similar special status to fourteen newly declared open coastal cities Twelve of those cities were also allowed to open economic and technical development zones ETDZs with further tax advantages but only for foreign and Chinese enterprises situated in those citys zones Outside the ETDZs and the open cities the planned or regulated economy still reigned Not surprisingly city and provincial leaders from across the country lobbied the central government for such privileges Concessions to more and more regions by the central government led to a zone fever whereby local governments created thou sands of export processing zones in the early 1990s Although the fever was brought under control development zones of various kinds remain an important feature of Chinas internationalized economy Foreign Direct Investment FDI In its first efforts to attract foreign investment the PRC turned to Diaspora Capitalism targeting overseas Chinese in Hong Kong Macau Taiwan and Southeast Asia who were eager to invest in the newly opened China They liked Chinas cheap labor cheap land low taxes and huge domestic mar ket They also wanted to establish projects in their families hometowns which would enhance their social status Thus most firms entering China in the 1980s were ethnic Chinese familyrun firms investing under US500000 in joint ventures with local governments For the first twenty years of the open policy China forced all foreign investors to form joint ventures with local firmsusually run by local governmentsthat could control the foreign investors behavior Nor could foreigners hold majority share in these ventures But after 1999 as China prepared to join the World Trade Organization WTO restraints eased and most new entrants to the Chinese market were totally foreign owned with no domestic partner Moreover after China joined the WTO in 2001 see below external and internal barriers to foreign investment continued to decline as China met many of its obligations under the accession agree ment Today foreign firms compete on a much more level playing field in many sec tors of the Chinese economy even though the Chinese government regularly intro duces new regulations that continue to constrain Western business activity Still ninety percent of the Fortune 500 list of the largest American firms have established a presence in China From near zero in the early 1980s FDI in China reached 469 billion in 2001 the year that the PRC joined the WTO It doubled to 924 billion by 2007 increasing by over 23 percent in that year alone but then declined to 90 billion in 2008 due to the global financial crisis only to quickly bounce back to record levels reaching 116 billion in 2011 In 2012 China surpassed the United States as the worlds top FDI destination A significant amount of FDI flowing into China comes from mainland Chinese firms whose overseas offices invest in China as foreign entities in a process referred to as round tripping Funds are sent out of China to an often fake overseas com pany which then reinvests the money back into China in order to benefit from the c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l e c o n o m y 277 preferential policies that are available only to foreign firms Two common localities for such companies are the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands which despite the small size of their economies are important sources of FDI into China as well as international tax havens used by many firms and individuals around the world Taiwanese firms seeking to evade the Taiwan governments restrictions on investment in the mainland transfer their money into China from these locations or from the United States The introduction of foreign manufacturers particularly joint ventures where the Chinese partner is a significant participant and new technologies are actually transferred has helped modernize the Chinese economy and upgrade its indigenous industrial capacity All of Chinas major auto manufacturers have established joint ventures with leading foreign car manufacturers and the foreign partner has sig nificantly improved the quality of Chinese cars While the initial Chineseproduced Santana manufactured jointly by Volkswagen and the Shanghai Automotive Industrial Works SAIW cost 180000 RMB US26000 and was of poor quality the cars have improved greatly and cost under 100000 RMB US14000 mak ing it affordable to Chinas growing middle class German and Japanese companies lead the Chinese foreign auto market with about 40 percent of the total car sales But US automakers GM and Ford fight aggressively for the China market and in 2012 GM was the single bestselling auto brand in the PRC with about 15 percent of market share slightly ahead of VW China leads the world in total auto sales having surpassed the United States in 2009 Still as an overpopulated and poor country there are only 44 passenger vehicles per 1000 people whereas in the United States the ratio is 423 per 100036 Joining the WTO No single act better reflects Chinas global economic integra tion than joining the World Trade Organization WTO in November 2001 After the Second World War leaders in the West believed that the world would get richer if each country produced more of the goods in which it had a comparative advan tagethat is what it made best and most efficientlyand then traded these goods to other states buying in turn what other countries made best But free trade was necessary if this idea were to work so the United States and its allies created the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade GATT whose goal was to stop countries from using tariffs and quotas on imports to protect their local markets But many countries still protected domestic firms through rules or regulations that favored local companies over foreign ones in the domestic market These restrictions are particularly troublesome for service sector industries such as bank ing insurance and financial markets in which the West has a comparative advan tage In 1995 the GATT was replaced by the WTO which targets these domestic or internal regulations that undermine foreign competitors within countries not just at the border China applied to join the GATT in 1986 but numerous regulations in China that constrained foreign economic activity and the crackdown in Tiananmen Square in 1989 led to long delays Even though China cut its tariffs dramatically throughout the 1990s the United States the European Union Japan and Canada still demanded enormous concessions from China in the end China made greater compromises to enter the WTO than any other country in history37 278 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Joining the WTO was a difficult decision for Chinas leaders Yielding to the West on these issues weakened Chinas sovereignty in the eyes of strongly nationalistic intellectual circles38 while the WTOs prohibition on discrimination by any mem ber country against firms from any other member country under the concept of most favored nation status its insistence that all economic regulations be made public under the concept of transparency and the rule that foreign firms must be treated just as any local firm under the concept of national treatment challenged the PRC governments control over the economy Rising nationalism in the mid1990s made such compromises politically risky for any leader Thus in spring 1999 when the concessions that Premier Zhu Rongji made to US trade negotiators to enter the WTO became public he was pilloried on Chinese blogs and attacked by domestic opponents39 But Chinas top leaders agreed to the terms and China officially became a member of the WTO two years later Joining the WTO has had enormous implications for Chinas emerging industries Wellfunded hightech foreign firms entering Chinas economy challenged newlyemerging sunrise enterprises for domestic market share threatening their survival even before they developed the wings to fly40 Similarly the entry of multinational corporations into Chinas domestic market could finish off sunset firmsthose with older technologies that cannot adjust to global competi tioncausing further job losses But overall WTO entry has had a very positive impact on Chinas political econ omy41 Under the WTO trade disputes are resolved by an impartial tribunalthe dispute resolution mechanismand not by pressure from individual countries Second by joining the WTO China traded easier access to its own market for simi lar access by Chinese firms to the rest of the worlds domestic markets Third the demand for transparency which forces national governments to publish all rules regarding trade weakened bureaucratic authority Bureaucrats cannot legally stop foreign or domestic firms from opening new companies or charge inflated fees for approving licenses based on secret rules or regulations This way the rule of law replaces the whim of bureaucrats as the guide to business practice and may even check rent seeking Similarly lower barriers to trade have decreased the amount of smuggling as corruption seems to have become a minor issue in Chinas foreign trade sector compared to other parts of the economy Still WTO has not benefited foreign firms doing business in the PRC in ways that they and foreign countries had hoped While China is far more open today than it was in 2001 some commitments to liberalization such as in the bank ing insurance or government procurement sectors have yet to be met And as a former president of the American Chamber of Commerce in China has observed a number of problems continue to plague foreigners doing business in the PRC including purposefully inconsistent and nontransparent enforcement of regula tions rampant intellectualproperty theft state penetration of multinationals through union and Communist Party organizations blatant market impediments through rigged product standards and testing politicized courts and agencies that almost always favor local companies creative and selective enforcement of WTO requirements42 c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l e c o n o m y 279 Chinas going out strategy As part of its economic development strategy China is purchasing overseas firms mines and resources and locating its own companies overseas This going out strategy zou qu chu began in the mid1990s when the State Economic and Trade Commission selected 120 national champions to lead Chinas engagement with the world As China edged toward joining the WTO large Chinese firms needed new technology internationally recognized brand names large injections of capital and modern management teams to compete in the international marketplace Also under Chinas WTO accession agreement multinational corporations MNCs could enter the Chinese market which would facilitate the transfer of technology and managerial skills to Chinese firms In order to raise capital many PRC firms were listed on global stock exchanges including the New York Stock Exchange NASDAQ and the Hang Seng Exchange in Hong Kong In 2005 Chinas leading computer company Lenovo bought the personal com puter arm of IBM making China an instant global competitor in the industry while an attempt by the China National Offshore Oil Corporation to buy the US oil com pany Unocal was blocked by the US Congress which argued that the PRC govern ment was subsidizing the US18 billion purchase These two ventures made it clear to the world that Corporate China was going on a buying spree Chinas outbound nonfinancial investment in overseas businesses manufactur ing mining etc in 19902000 averaged US22 billion per year in 2012 alone total investment abroad was 772 billion see Figure 85 This is a huge increase in out bound FDI OFDI in a little over a decade and it is expected to double again by 2015 0 2000 4000 6000 8000 10000 12000 14000 16000 18000 20000 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 Number of Firms US Billions NonFinancial Outwardinvestment US billions Number of Firms Approximate FIguRe 85 Chinas Going Out Strategy Annual NonFinancial Foreign Direct Investment and Number of Firms Sources CEIC China Economic Database Statistical Bulletin of Chinas Outward Foreign Direct Investment various years Ministry of Commerce China Statistical Yearbook various years National Bureau of Statistics 280 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a But the United States invests over 400 billion a year overseas and its total holdings stock of investments abroad was about 45 trillion in 2011 compared to Chinas 365 billion43 SOEs account for about 90 percent of Chinas OFDI although the share held by private firms more than doubled between 2010 and 201244 The PRC has investments in over 125 countries spanning the globe with the top destinations being Canada the United States Australia and Brazil Many observers see investment abroad by Chinese corporations as positive not only for China but also for the world Increased Chinese investment boosts the global economy and lets China recycle its massive foreign exchange holdings and its massive domestic savings Stiff competition will force Chinese firms to conform to global standards rather than change those standards as others worry This should be particularly beneficial to SOEs An article in The Wall Street Journal remarked on the quiet revolution under way in the Chinese state sector which has produced a new genera tion of confident companies with global ambitions45 But Chinese direct investment by stateowned firms is viewed with suspicion in some countries because these firms have access to government subsidies and other advantages that give them an unfair competitive edge sometimes too they are seen as a threat to national security46 Furthermore Chinese state firms often do not conform to global norms of corporate responsibility getting into trouble with overseas trade unions because of their lack of compliance with labor standards They also pursue opportunities in countries where Western firms have chosen not to compete for political reasons such as Sudan or Iran creating problems for China with the United States and the European Union which seek sanctions against these rogue states Chinas going out strategy was initially focused on securing energy sources to fuel its rapid economic development The Chinese economy relies too much on export manufacturing as compared to the service sector making China excessively hungry for energy and more resource dependent on the world economy than most large economies47 Investment in services finance real estate and manufacturing has increased but natural resources still account for about half of Chinas world wide investments and contracts48 China is both the worlds biggest producer and importer of coal which accounts for about 75 percent of its energy consumption49 In 1993 China became a net importer of oil and in 2012 China was the number two importer and consumer of oil in the world Chinas single biggest overseas invest ment was its purchase of the Canadian oil and gas firm Nexen for 152 billion in February 2012 Much of the increased demand for oil has followed the rapid expan sion of the auto industry which will certainly continue with the growth of Chinas urban middle class More generally as Chinas economy modernizes and its society becomes more urbanized Chinas energy hunger will rise even further While the PRC is criticized for its voracious appetite for natural resources energy demand in China is mostly driven by the manufacturing of goods sold on global markets not least in the US and its dedicated creation of infrastructurefacto ries roads and portsthat makes possible an economy that supports overseas con sumption50 Thus while many Westerners criticize Chinas high rate of energy con sumption much of that demand arises because China is responding to the needs of Western consumers c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l e c o n o m y 281 SubSaharan Africa has been a major focus of Chinas quest for energy resources51 SinoAfrican trade has risen quite quickly from US108 billion in 2001 to US1663 billion in 2011 Trade between the United States and Africa amounted to 1089 bil lion in 2012 while the total stock of Chinese OFDI in Africa admittedly far lower than EU countries or the United States has increased greatly in the past decade In 20002011 China established 1422 official projects in fifty African countries that have at least reached the formal commitment stage totaling 754 billion but the unofficial total is 2000 projects at the end of 201152 A significant share of the oil produced in Sudan Angola Congo and Guinea goes to China African and Latin American economies have grown at their fastest pace in decades thanks to Chinese demand for their resources Economic activism in Africa has not been without complications and controversy Chinese investment in the Libyan oil sector created a major human security crisis for China forcing its navy to sail to the coast of that country to pick up thirtyfive thousand Chinese workers who were at risk due to the civil war Some observers see Chinese trade and investment in Africa as a form of neocolonialism The governor of Nigerias central bank commented in 2013 China takes our primary goods and sells us manufactured ones This was also the essence of colonialism Africa is now will ingly opening itself up to a new form of imperialism53 Chinas purchases of oil from Sudan have been a particular source of concern for human rights groups because revenues from the PRC may help fund the Sudanese governments brutal repression in Darfur One Chinese scholar Zhu Feng at Beijing Universitys Centre for International and Strategic Studies has written that stateowned oil company PetroChina and other SOEs have hijacked Chinas for eign policy in Sudan ChInAs eConomIC ChAllenges Chinas economic success has been unprecedented and has led to a lot of talk about a Chinese model of development that has much to offer other countries see Box 82 But the administration of Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang faces daunting challenges during its time in office which will run until the next leadership transition in 2022 if China itself is to make the difficult transition to a sustainable model of economic growth China can no longer afford the human and economic cost of highly polluting indus tries exemplified by the pea soup smog that has settled over many towns and cities and the fouled waterways around the country see chapter 12 According to the PRC Ministry of Environmental Protections annual Green GDP report environmental degradation cost China in 2010 at least 230 billion much of which was added health costs or 35 percent of the nations GDP three times that in 200454 Environmental problems are a major source of public concern and anger and account for a large number of mass protests But factories large and small public and private are reluctant to take any serious measures to clean up production if that means raising costs or cutting profits Likewise local officials often ignore or thwart government environmental regulations as their top priority is promoting the fastest economic growth possible in the areas under their jurisdiction 282 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Box 82 the Beijing consensus a new chinese model of develoPment Chapter 1 briefly noted that the PRC during the latter part of the maoist era and again now has been viewed by many as providing an economic model for other developing countries The current Chinese model is sometimes referred to as the Beijing Consensus This name emerged from a comparison with the Washington Consensus which became the dominant model of international development starting in the early 1980s and par ticularly after the end of the Cold War Both the Beijing and Washington Consensus are informal sets of ideas and policies rather than a formal organization in any sense neither reflects a firm consensus both the Washington and Beijing variant have lots of critics at home and abroad The Washington Consensus a term coined by economist John Williamson refers to policies promoted primarily by the united states the World Bank and the International monetary Fund ImF prescribing a neoliberal approach to economic development that includes reducing the role of the state in the economy and maximizing that of the free market eliminating government subsidies privatizing government industries and public utilities and removing barriers to free trade and foreign investment The Washington Consensus was criticized for promoting economic growth over social welfare and for the stringent economic and political conditions that its proponents attached to giving aid and loans to developing countries For example under pressure from the ImF egypt cut its food subsidies in 1977 which triggered massive urban riots But this view of economic development really took a hit with the global financial crisis that began in late 2008 which many people blamed on the lack of effective government regulation of a getrichatanycost market economy Chinas spectacular economic performance had certainly been gaining attention as a model of development well before the 2008 meltdown The term Beijing Consensus was popularized by author Joshua Cooper Ramo in 2004 and embodied three main guidelines for development a commitment to innovation and experimentation contin ued growth based on sustainable and equitable development and global integration with national selfdetermination The sustainable and equitable part of these guide lines seems to embody the yettoberealized agenda of the government since eco logical degradation and gross inequalities are two of the most obvious downsides of the Chinese economic miracle to date When the PRC talks about its development model it emphasizes guidelines such as strong government the importance of regulating the market and growth with stabilityeach of which are obvious knocks on the Washington Consensus As a 2009 article in Peoples Daily exclaimed The China model has created miracles opened a unique path of development and superseded the belief in a superior America model marking its demise Critics of the Beijing Consensus say that it ignores not only the negative environmen tal and social consequences of Chinas development but also issues such as human rights abuses and the lack of independent labor unions They also point out the Chinese model is implicitly a justification for authoritarianism and a critique of democracy as inimical to economic growth and stability Analysis Why Does the China Model Fascinate the World Peoples Daily Online June 30 2009 httpeng lishpeopledailycomcn9000190780913456689725html c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l e c o n o m y 283 Growing gaps between rich and poor people among regions and between the cities and the countryside have reached dangerous levels that could damage social stability and undermine economic development see Box 83 A property bubble has priced new apartments out of the reach of young members of Chinas new middle class which could undermine support for the CCP among a key constituency Inadequate social welfare programs including health insurance and pensions means that most citizens live in fear of medical bills that could bankrupt their families and are anxious about retirement a particular concern for the sharply increasing proportion of the population over the age of sixtyfive see chapter 14 The Chinese economy grew at 78 percent in 2012 the lowest figure since 1990 and most future projections do not see it rising much above that as the economy both matures and cools down55 This is still by most standards a very enviable rate of increase but the XiLi government will have to take some bold policy initiatives in order to facilitate longterm sustainable growth High on the agenda is reform of a financial structure that still retains too many features of one designed for a centrally planned economy in 2012 stateowned institutions accounted for 90 percent of the total assets of domestic banks while joint stateforeignowned banks held 7 percent fully foreignfunded banks 2 percent and private financial institutions just 1 percent56 Chinas leadership also needs to rebalance an economy that is excessively depen dent on exports The international financial meltdown of 20072008 caused Chinese 0 5000 10000 15000 20000 25000 1978 1985 1990 1995 2000 2008 2012 Rural Income Per Capita Urban Income Per Capita US1261 US3912 RMB Per Year FIguRe 86 Chinas UrbanRural Income Gap 19782012 Source China Statistical Yearbooks for 2012 Xinhuanet httpnewsxinhuanetcomenglish china20130118c132111609htm 284 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a exports to plummet a warning that global markets are not a reliable basis for sustained economic growth Furthermore wages in China have increased significantly in recent years due to labor shortages and competition for workers leading many foreignowned export manufacturers to relocate production to Vietnam Bangladesh Cambodia Indonesia and other lowercost countries including some in Central America Box 83 the ProBlem of inequality in china The maoist model of development promoted egalitarianism as one of its major goals Although significant gaps in income services and welfare persisted throughout the maoist period 19491976 particularly between the urban and rural areas there were significant achievements in promoting equality within China through land reform the collectivization of agriculture the nationalization of industry and commerce the expan sion of literacy and education public health campaigns and other policies that were part of the PRCs socialist agenda Per capita incomes went up during these years but only modestly so that by the time mao died in 1976 it could be said that the Chinese people were both relatively poor and relatively equal Chinas economic boom during the postmao reform era has led to a spectacular growth in national wealth as well as improvement in the standards of living for the large majority of the population But it has also led to the appearance of multiple and deep inequalities in the country several of the chapters in this book touch on this problem of inequality in the contemporary Peoples Republic Figure 86 shows the rapid increase in the gap between urban and rural incomes over the last two decades There are various other ways to measure inequality within China and to compare it with other countries one measure of national inequality used by economists is called the Gini Index It measures the distribution of family income within a population and comes up with a composite number between 0 perfect equality and 1 perfect inequality for the country as a whole In other words the closer the gini number is to 0 the more evenly income is distributed the closer it is to 1 the more income goes to the rich The government of the PRC reported that in 2012 Chinas gini Index was 474 about the same as the united states 475 but considerably more unequal that India 368 less so than Brazil 519 however other studies show that Chinas gini Index in 2012 was 610 which would place it among the worlds most unequal countries such as haiti and south Africa To measure inequality within China you might consider for example the range in gross domestic Product per capita among the PRCs administrative divisions While national gdP per capita for the whole country was about 7500 in 2010 regionally it varied from nearly 23000 in shanghai to a little over 3300 in the far inland province of guizhou Public opinion surveys show that most people in China are not concerned about inequality as long as their own economic lives are improving But if there were to be a serious economic downturn that caused dashed expectations among a large segment of the population that complacency could change and the countrys extreme economic gaps could become a socially explosive issue Chinas Gini Index at 061 University Report Says CaixinOnline httpenglishcaixincom201212 10100470648html The Economist has an interactive map comparing Chinas provinciallevel administrative units on a number of variables at httpwwweconomistcomcontentchineseequivalents2 Martin King White Myth of the Social Volcano Perceptions of Inequality and Distributive Injustice in Contemporary China Stanford CA Stanford University Press 2010 c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l e c o n o m y 285 This rebalancing from a laborintensive exportdependent economy to one based on capitalintensive industries domestic consumption and innovation is crucial if China is to move up the ladder of the international division of labor and emerge as a strong global competitor among the worlds advanced economies57 Increasing domestic consumption in China not only will require industrial restruc turing but Chinese citizens also must be encouraged to spend more and save less the opposite of Americas problem Chinas personal savings rate the percentage of a persons disposable income devoted to savings rather than consumption is among the worlds highest at over 50 percent the United States averaged 36 percent in 20022012 Confucian culture is traditionally frugal and the experience of great eco nomic uncertainty especially during the Mao years makes most PRC citizens prone to save money when they have it Moreover Chinas weak health insurance and social security systems forces most Chinese to put away money for a rainy day Managing this rebalancing of the Chinese economy is one of the most important challenges facing the government of the PRC But the PRC must also rebalance its foreign economic relations Its accumulation of foreign exchange reserves largely gained through exports has become excessive At over 3 trillion in 2012 it is by far the worlds largest nearly three times that of secondplace Japan and more than twenty times the United States China has used about a trillion dollars of its reserves to buy US Treasury bills which finance Americas national debt This policy has helped the American economy keep interest rates low although China holds just 8 percent of total US debt But the perception that China owns America damages SinoAmerican relations while many Chinese feel that their economy would benefit were China to spend its foreign exchange reserves more aggressively both at home and abroad Chinas trade imbalances strain foreign economic relations especially with the United States and the European Union Overall China balances its imports and exports see Figure 83 But the United States had a trade deficit of 315 billion in 2012 while the European Unions was about 200 billion Again American and European consumers benefit from the availability of lowercost Chinese goods but such huge deficits are not only bad publicity for the PRC but could trigger protectionism against Chinese exports that would weaken Chinas economy Righting the trade imbalances would involve both increasing imports and reducing tariffs and other impediments that make it difficult for foreign companies to sell their products in China Li Keqiang installed as Prime Minister in March 2013 leads a team of govern ment officials under Xi Jinping that appears eager to take on these challenges His plan to promote the rapid urbanization of rural migrants see chapter 10 could both lessen the urbanrural gap and massively stimulate domestic consumption Reform of financial markets could slow down the hemorrhaging abroad of domestic capital in the hands of Chinas new rich by offering them investment opportunities at home Chinas top leaders seem to recognize that excessive bureaucratic interfer ence in the domestic and foreign sectors of the economy must be curtailed and that parts of the economy now dominated by SOEs must be opened up to private firms As President Xi commented to President Obama in their meeting in California in June 2013 China must deepen reforms to promote healthy and sustained economic development58 286 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Xi was able to take an important step towards this goal at the Third Plenum of the Eighteenth CCP Central Committee that met in November 2013 The Plenum issued the outline of a bold plan to restructure the Chinese economy by 2020 which recognized that the strategy that had brought unprecedented growth for 35 years was no longer sustainable The bottom line of the plan was that the market will become the decisive forcein allocating all factors capital land labor natural resources in the economy with the states main role being to maintain macroeconomic stability as in the West The reform package included a relaxation of the hukou household registration system with open migration allowed to small and mediumsized cities Farmers will get enhanced rights to contracted land though still not ownership and will for example be able to use land as collateral for loans to open businesses This should also make it more difficult for local officials to confiscate villagers land and sell it for large profits which would address one of the major causes of rural protests The governments share of stateowned enterprise profits will increase from the current 015 percent to 30 percent to fund nationwide social welfare programs This should lead to a major improvement in Chinas woefully inadequate retirement and health insurance systems There are plans for a property tax to ease the real estate bubble and make the housing market more accessible to the rapidly growing middle class There are also stronger anticorruption measures financial sector liberalization that will benefit private capital and the establishment of a new Leading Small Group to over see implementation of the reforms The 2013 plan for economic restructuring is the sixth wave of reform in China since 1978 and all five previous waves moved the country significantly down the road to marketization and globalization This one should be no different Still these muchneeded economic changes could be held hostage by powerful vested interests particularly SOEs who fear private sector competition superrich families many composed of the princeling descendants of Chinas revolutionary elites who fear disclosure of their wealth conservatives who still wield considerable influence and fear too much market reform might undercut CCP rule bureaucrats at all levels who fiercely defend their organizational turf and rentseeking opportunities Whether Xi Jinpingand Li Keqiang are able to carry out such sweeping economic reforms over the next few years will have momentous consequences for China and the world Their success or failure will certainly weigh heavily in determining the legacy of their administration and will also tell us much about the dynamics and balance of power in Chinas very political economy noTes 1 On life expectancy see for 1949 S S Kantha Nutrition and health in China 1949 to 1989 Progress in Food Nutrition Science 1990 14 23 93137 and for 1976 World Bank Development Indicators on literacy see for 1949 httpenglishpeopledailycom cn20021118eng20021118106987shtml and for 1980 wwwunescaporgstatdatastat indpdft8dec04pdf 2 Shenggen Fan Keming Qian and Xiaobo Zhang China An Unfinished Reform Agenda in Agricultural RD in the Developing World Too LittleToo Late ed Philip Pardey et al Washington DC International Food Policy Research Institute 2006 30 httpwww ifpriorgsitesdefaultfilespubspubsbooksoc51oc51ch03pdf c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l e c o n o m y 287 3 Foreign trade companies FTCs were owned by various levels of the government from the center to the county They carried out trade and monitored imports and exports for the state Before the mid1980s twelve centrally managed FTCs monopolized all aspects of Chinas foreign trade 4 See for example Sulamith Heins Potter The Position of Peasants in Modern Chinas Social Order Modern China 9 1983 465499 5 Michael Lipton shows that this urban bias occurs in most of the developing world See Michael Lipton Why Poor People Stay Poor Urban Bias in World Development Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 1976 6 David Zweig Freeing Chinas Farmers Rural Restructuring in the Reform Era Armonk NY M E Sharpe 1997 347 7 David Zweig Agrarian Radicalism in China 19681981 Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 1989 8 Dali Yang Calamity and Reform in China State Rural Society and Institutional Change since the Great Leap Famine Stanford CA Stanford University Press 1996 9 Jasper Becker Anhui Lets Talk About Fenyang in Hungry Ghosts Maos Secret Famine New York Henry Holt 1996 130149 10 Thomas P Bernstein and Xiaobo Lü Taxation without Representation in Contemporary Rural China Cambridge UK Cambridge University Press 2003 11 Farmers Slowly Cultivate a New Image China Daily May 31 2012 httpwwwchi nadailycomcnbusiness20100531content9910739htm 12 The term noodle strip farming comes from William Hinton Shenfan The Continuing Revolution in a Chinese Village New York Random House 1994 Hinton was highly critical of the decollectivization of agriculture If these communities dont again get organized if they dont in various ways relearn how to work together their problems can only get worse polarization can only accelerate and economic stagnation can only deepen Noodle strip farming is a dead end road 13 In Jiangsu Province by 1995 twothirds of all foreign trade was still dominated by official for eign trade companies at various levels and by 1996 478 percent of all of Chinas foreign exchange earnings came from TVE export earnings David Zweig Internationalizing China Domestic Interests and Global Linkages Ithaca NY Cornell University Press 2002 116118 14 Zweig Internationalizing China 122123 15 James Kaising Kung and Yimin Lin The Decline of TownshipandVillage Enterprises in Chinas Economic Transition World Development 35 no 4 2007 569584 16 Zweig Freeing Chinas Farmers 130150 17 For reports about the current struggles over land see Peter Ho Contesting Rural Spaces Land Disputes Customary Tenure and the State and David Zweig To the Courts or to the Barricades Can New Political Institutions Manage Rural Conflict in Chinese Society 3rd ed eds Elizabeth J Perry and Mark Selden London and New York Routledge 2010 101122 and 123147 respectively 18 Fan Qian and Zhang China An Unfinished Reform Agenda 30 19 Andrew G Walder Communist NeoTraditionalism Work and Authority in Chinese Industry Berkeley University of California Press 1986 20 Barry J Naughton The Pattern and Legacy of Economic Growth in the Mao Era in Perspectives on Modern China Four Anniversaries ed Kenneth Lieberthal et al Armonk NY M E Sharpe 1991 233 21 Fan Qian and Zhang China An Unfinished Reform Agenda 30 22 Dorothy Solinger From Lathes to Looms Chinas Industrial Policy in Comparative Perspective 19791982 Stanford CA Stanford University Press 1991 23 Data in this paragraph comes from China Statistical Yearbook 2000 Section 133 Beijing State Statistical Bureau 2001 httpwwwstatsgovcnenglishstatisticaldata 288 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a yearlydataYB2000eM03Ehtm and Andrew Szamosszegi and Cole Kyle An Analysis of StateOwned Enterprises and State Capitalism in China USChina Economic and Security Review Commission October 26 2011 18 httpwwwusccgovResearchanalysisstateow nedenterprisesandstatecapitalismchina 24 Naughton The Chinese Economy 184 25 Szamosszegi and Kyle An Analysis of StateOwned Enterprises 26 Chinas Individual Private Businesses Expand Fast China Daily Dec 5 2012 http wwwchinadailycomcnbusiness20121205content15986334htm 27 Valentina Romei and Rob Minto Chart of the Week Who Makes Chinas Exports Local Companies or Foreign Financial Times September 10 2012 httpblogsftcom beyondbrics20120910chartoftheweekwhoismakingchinasexports 28 Chart of the Week Who Makes Chinas ExportsLocal Companies or Foreign 29 See Kellee Tsai BackAlley Banking Private Entrepreneurs in China Ithaca NY Cornell University Press 2004 30 Dinny McMahon Investor Scheme Leads to Death Sentence The Wall Street Journal May 17 2013 httponlinewsjcomarticleSB1000142412788732339820457848883 1032664720html 31 Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index 2012 httpwwwtrans parencyorg 32 Minxin Pei Corruption Threatens Chinas Future Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Policy Brief 55 October 2007 httpcarnegieendowmentorgfiles pb55peichinacorruptionfinalpdf 33 Xi Jinping Vows Power within Cage of Regulations Xinhua January 22 2013 httpnewsxinhuanetcomenglishchina20130122c132120363htm 34 See Margaret M Pearson The Business of Governing Business in China Institutions and Norms of the Emerging Regulatory State World Politics 57 no 2 January 2005 296322 35 Richard N Rosecrance The Rise of the Trading State Commerce and Conquest in the Modern World New York Basic Books 1986 36 Data in this paragraph come from httpwwwibtimescomgmfordvwdominate chinasautoindustrywhycantchinesecompaniessaicdongfenggeelygacmake httponlinewsjcomarticleSB10001424127887324059704578472632523044590html and httpdataworldbankorgindicatorISVEHPCARP3 37 Nicholas R Lardy Integrating China into the Global Economy Washington DC Brookings Institution Press 2002 38 Di Yingqing and Zheng Gang What Does Chinas Joining the WTO Actually Imply with Regard to Chinas Longterm Interests An Analysis of the Question of Chinas Joining the WTO Gaige Neican Internal Reference Material on Reform 9 May 5 1999 3438 translated in The Chinese Economy China and the WTO Part II 33 no 2 MarchApril 2000 19 39 Margaret M Pearson The Case of Chinas Accession to GATTWTO in The Making of Chinese Foreign and Security Policy in the Era of Reform 19782000 ed David M Lampton Stanford CA Stanford University Press 2001 337370 40 Peter Nolan China and the Global Economy National Champions Industrial Policy and the Big Business Revolution New York Palgrave 2001 41 See Peter Ford How WTO Membership Made China the Workshop of the World Christian Science Monitor December 14 2011 42 James McGregor The China Fix Time Magazine Feb 1 2010 httpwwwtime comtimemagazinearticle09171195542600html c h i n a s P o l i t i c a l e c o n o m y 289 43 Data in this paragraph come from UNCTAD STAT United Nations Conference on Trade and Development httpunctadstatunctadorg Turkish Industrial and Business Association China Business Insight February 2013 httpwwwtusiadorgrscshared fileChinaBusinessInsightFebruary2013pdf Derek Scissors Chinas Global Investment Rises The US Should Focus on Competition The Heritage Foundation January 9 2013 http wwwheritageorgresearchreports201301chinasglobalinvestmentrisestheus shouldfocusoncompetition The Heritage Foundation China Global Investment Tracker httpwwwheritageorgresearchprojectschinaglobalinvestmenttrackerinteractive map 44 Chinas Overseas Investment ODILay HeeHo The Economist January 19 2013 httpwwweconomistcomnewschina21569775expandingscaleandscopechinas outwarddirectinvestmentodilayheeho 45 Geoff Dyer and Richard McGregor Chinas Champions Why State Ownership Is No Longer Proving a Dead Hand The Wall Street Journal March 16 2008 46 Chinas Overseas Investment ODILay HeeHo 47 Barbara Stallings Chinas Economic Relations with Developing Countries Brown University December 12 2007 unpublished paper 48 China Global Investment Tracker 49 World Coal Association httpwwwworldcoalorgresourcescoalstatistics Brendan Coates and Nghi Luu Chinas Emergence in Global Commodity Markets Australian Government The Treasury Economic Roundup Issue 1 2012 May httpwww treasurygovaumediaTreasuryPublications20and20MediaPublications2012 Economic20Roundup20Issue201Downloads0120China20Commodity20 demandashx 50 International Crisis Group Chinas Thirst for Oil Asia Report no 153 June 9 2008 3 51 See Deborah Brautigam The Dragons Gift New York Oxford University Press 2011 52 Rob Minto Chart of the Week Tracking Chinas investments in Africa beyond brics Financial Times blog April 20 2103 httpblogsftcombeyondbrics20130430 chartoftheweektrackingchinasinvestmentsinafrica 53 Lamido Sanusi Africa must get real about Chinese ties Financial Times March 11 2013 httpwwwftcomintlcmss0562692b0898c11e2ad3f00144feabdc0html axzz2UFIH2XIq 54 Edward Wong Cost of Environmental Damage in China Growing Rapidly Amid Industrialization The New York Times March 29 2013 httpwwwnytimescom20130330 worldasiacostofenvironmentaldegradationinchinaisgrowinghtmlr0 55 The Conference Board Global Economic Outlook 2013 httpwwwconference boardorgdataglobaloutlookcfm 56 Breaking up Bank Monopolies Beijing Review 55 19 May 10 2012 11 See also Michael F Martin Chinas Banking System Issues for Congress Congressional Research Service February 20 2012 httpwwwfasorgsgpcrsrowR42380pdf 57 He Weiwen Chinas Economic Slowdown is Nothing to Worry About ChinaUS Focus httpwwwchinausfocuscomfinanceeconomychinaseconomic slowdownisnothingtoworryabout 58 Chris Buckley Chinas New President Sets up a Potential Showdown with Himself The New York Times June 21 2013 290 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a suggesTed ReAdIngs Brandt Loren and ThomasRawski Chinas Great Economic Transformation New York Cambridge University Press 2008 Brautigam Deborah The Dragons Gift The Real Story of China in Africa New York Oxford University Press 2011 Chen Calvin Some Assembly Required Work Community and Politics in Chinas Rural Enterprises Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 2008 Economy Elizabeth C and Michael Levi By All Means Necessary How Chinas Resource Quest is Changing the World New York Oxford University Press 2014 Huang Yasheng Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics Entrepreneurship and the State New York Cambridge University Press 2008 Lardy Nicholas R Sustaining Chinas Economic Growth after the Global Financial Crisis Washington DC Peterson Institute 2012 Li Lanqing Breaking Through The Birth of Chinas Openingup Policy New York Oxford University Press 2010 Li Shi Hiroshi Sato and Terry Sicular Rising Inequality in China Challenges to a Harmonious Society New York Cambridge University Press 2013 Naughton Barry The Chinese Economy Transitions and Growth Cambridge MA MIT Press 2007 Nee Victor and Sonja Opper Capitalism from Below Markets and Institutional Change in China Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 2012 Nolan Peter Is China Buying the World New York Polity 2013 Steinfeld Edward S Playing Our Game Why Chinas Rise Doesnt Threaten the West New York Oxford University Press 2010 Wedeman Andrew Double Paradox Rapid Growth and Rising Corruption in China Ithaca NY Cornell University Press2012 Yueh Linda Chinas Growth The Making of an Economic Superpower New York Oxford University Press 2013 The Economy of China London Edward Elgar 2011 Zweig David Freeing Chinas Farmers Rural Restructuring in the Reform Era Armonk NY M E Sharpe 1997 Internationalizing China Domestic Interests and Global Linkages Ithaca NY Cornell University Press 2002 PART III Politics and Policy in Action From spreading grassroots democracy to rising incidents of unrest rural China has witnessed dramatic politi cal change over the last quarter century New political opportunities for rural residents began with the intro duction of economic reforms in the early 1980s Market reforms and the abolition of the peoples commune sys tem eroded the political authority of local cadres who in the Maoist era had control over the rural economic and social life and fundamentally altered cadrevillager relations While the leaders control over basic resources and activities has dimin ished villagers participation in political affairs has increased With the introduction of the Organic Law of Villagers Committees in 1987 revised in 1998 villagers could directly elect and recall their local leaders The quality of village elections varies across rural China but cadre accountability by their village constituents has improved The next step was experiments of direct elections for high authorities at the town level in 1998 However the central leadership quickly ended these experiments and scaled back the direct elections for town government heads with more inclusive but less direct selection mechanisms At the same time throughout the 1990s and beyond 2000 reported incidences of rural unrest have dramatically increased The modes of resistance range from legal petitions to massive demonstrations that sometimes turn violent Yet these social disturbances do not threaten the central government or the Chinese Communist Party CCP Most incidents of rural resistance tend to be directed toward local gov ernment officials rather than the central authorities Indeed many of these resisters use national laws such as the Organic Law to protect themselves from local abusive Rural China Reform and Resistance Jo h n J Am e s K e n n e dy 9 294 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a cadres This has created a contradictory situation of rural unrest that has a relatively high level of support for the central leadership Still unrest reflects villagers discontent as well as demands for greater participa tion in the local decisionmaking process Thus in order to maintain popular support from the rural population the CCP leadership continues to slowly expand political reforms The question is whether the gradual introduction of reforms is enough to satisfy rural political demands before the incidents of rural unrest become unman ageable for the central partystate This chapter is divided into seven parts The first section is a brief introduction to the rural administration that comprises counties and town governments The sec ond part focuses on villagers and village cadres concerns such as land management local economy taxes and environmental protection This includes the change in cadrevillager relations from the 1980s to the present The third section introduces the town and township officials and how the nomenklatura system of cadre management shapes their incentives to fully implement central policies The chief question for stu dents studying the politics of rural China and political reform is this Does the central government lack the political will or capacity to influence county and town officials Section four focuses on the development of village elections and addresses the intro duction of the Organic Law of Villagers Committees and the uneven implementation of the law The fifth part addresses several experiments with direct elections for town mayors and more accountable local Peoples Congresses While the central leadership quickly ended early attempts at direct elections for government heads there have been a number of less direct election methods that broaden the public participation in the cadre selection method The sixth section focuses on rural resistance This section will look at the various methods of rural resistance legal means semilegal rightful resistance and illegal actions One key observation is that resistance and protest is associated with the uneven implementation of rural political reforms Indeed many large illegal protests started out as local legal attempts to get specific reforms such as a fee reduction regulation or village election law fully enforced in their village The final section addresses the prospects of future political reform in rural China RuRAl AdmInIsTRATIve dIvIsIons As discussed in greater detail in the next chapter China has experienced extensive urbanization in recent decades In 1980 about 81 percent of Chinas population lived in the rural areas By 2011 that percentage was down to 49 percent and for the first time in Chinese history fewer than half the people lived in the countryside Nevertheless that means over 656 million people are still classified as rural residents which is more than twice the total population of the United States Moreover there is an enormous diversity in the countryside that makes it difficult to generalize about the rural popu lation especially in terms of geography From abject poverty in remote mountain ous villages to industrialized villages near larger cities the levels of wealth access to health care and educational opportunities vary by proximity to urban centers The definition of rural residents is associated with the administrative hierarchy that dramatically changed with decollectivization and the end of the communes in R u R a l c h i n a 295 the 1980s From 1958 to 1982 the administrative division below the county was the commune and its subordinate units the production brigade and production team Rural residents were citizens who lived and worked in the communes As a result of restructuring after 1982 communes were renamed towns or townships brigades were villages and production teams became small groups In essence this was going back to the traditional precommunist names for these levels of social organization Currently the formal administrative hierarchy of the PRC includes the national provincial municipal or city county and the town or township levels of govern ment Technically rural residents are those citizens who live below the county level and whose registration hukou is in a town township or village The town or town ship is the lowest formal administrative level of state authority in China Villages are not part of the formal administrative structure of the state but according to the 1982 PRC constitution are selfgoverning units The difference between a town and a township is the percentage of registered urban population who live in a particular locale A town is more urbanized with over 10 percent of the population registered as nonagricultural while a township has more than 90 percent of the population is registered as agricultural rural Reflecting the trend toward urbanization the number of towns surpassed the number of town ships in 2002 This process is going to accelerate in the near future as the government implements a massive plan to move 250 million villagers into new housing in towns and small cities over the next ten years see chapter 10 Figure 91 displays the administrative hierarchy of the Peoples Republic below the provincial level Within every municipality there are a number of counties within every county there are towns and below the towns are villages and within every village there are a number of small groups According to the 2011 China Statistical Yearbook there are 287 large municipalities that typically have over one million peo ple these are called cities at the prefecture level1 The population of these munici palities can range from 99 million in Shijiazhuang city Hebei province to 22 million in Xining city Qinghai province Within every municipality there are about 5 to 15 counties There are over 2800 counties in China and their population varies from approximately 200000 to 500000 County population size can vary widely even within one province According to the 2000 Census for Shaanxi province Hu county near the provincial capital of Xian municipality has over 250000 residents while the geographically larger but more remote Ganquan county has only 30000 Under each county there are about ten to twenty towns and the population is usually about 20000 but can be as large as 70000 or as low as 7000 There are over 34000 towns and within every town there are about fifteen to twenty villages Rural China has about 600000 villages formally called administrative villages Village population is typically around 1000 to 2000 residents Finally within every village there are two to seven small groups or natural villages While some small groups in densely popu lated villages near urban centers can be as large as a typical village 2000 residents To simplify the discussion of rural governance in this chapter the term town will be used to refer to both towns and townships 296 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a in the more remote mountainous areas they may have no more than a dozen widely dispersed households In order to maintain CCP influence in the large and varied rural areas each town county and village has a party secretary as well as a government head The party secretary has the most political power and makes the final policy decision at his or her respective level Party secretaries connect higher authorities with the lower levels to ensure that policies are carried out and laws are enforced Therefore although the partystate is not a monolithic regime that can enforce its will at all times and in all places the CCP still retains significant authority to carry out priority policies and maintain at least a minimum level of control down to the village level vIllAgeRs And CAdRes ChAngIng soCIAl And PolITICAl RelATIonshIPs villagers Chinas villagers have a keen sense of justice Whether it is the distribution of col lective land or investment of public funds villagers expect a fair decision from their Party Administrative Divisions Government Municipalities Counties TownsTownships Villages Small Groups Natural Villages Party Secretary Deputy Secretaries Mayor Vice Mayors Party Secretary Party Secretary Deputy Secretaries Government Head Vice Heads Village Leader Small Group Leader Party Secretary Deputy Secretaries Government Head Vice Heads FIguRe 91 PartyGovernment Officials and Administrative Divisions Below the Provincial Level Note The dash line represents the lowest official administrative level the town R u R a l c h i n a 297 local leaders For example villagers do not own the land they cultivate and live on It remains collectively owned and managed by village cadres Villagers lease land and cadres decide how to allocate the collective land among households For most vil lagers this is the most crucial cadre decision because of the variation in land quality and location Each household is allocated two to four separate plots of land and the location of the plot can be a few yards from the their back door or several miles away Moreover arable land is scarce Currently less than 15 percent of land in China is cultivated In villages where arable land is less than 50 percent the local leaders tend to give every household a small portion of the good land This is because villagers prefer an allocation decision based on fairness rather than efficiency the relation ship between labor and output which would dictate that the land be allocated in larger contiguous pieces rather than in smaller dispersed segments Portions of vil lage land are still readjusted every five to ten years due to demographic changes such as births deaths and marriages Village cadres can also lease land to people outside the village Rapid industrialization and urbanization have made land a very valuable commodity and the source of profit Villagers expect leaders to protect the arable land or at least to receive fair compensation for leased land But this situation has created enormous opportunities for corruption and has been on the major causes of growing rural unrest see chapter 8 Villagers also expect fair and transparent management of public funds especially in the area of rural education For villagers the local elementary school is vital for the education of their children and grandchildren and local cadres are responsible for con struction and maintenance Villagers rely on the local cadres to spend education funds in an efficient and honest manner that will to ensure quality schooling and the safety of their children Neglecting the maintenance or cutting corners during school con struction can be disastrous For example the May 2008 earthquake in Sichuan prov ince occurred in the middle of a school day and many rural elementary and junior high schools collapsed killing thousands of children Grieving parents asked why local government buildings remained standing while most of the schools collapsed Thus the quality of education and the safety of their children remain a vital concern for villagers Villagers can also be proactive when their expectations of fairness are not met Many rural people are unafraid to meet or even confront local cadres and town offi cials Villager action can be as simple as an individual walking over to the leaders home to discuss a problem such as road maintenance or a land lease issue It may also be more complex when villagers take legal action to recall an elected leader or sue a town government official in the local courts for attempting to extract excessive fees If legal action does not resolve the problem then some rural residents may turn to public demonstrations such as a roadblock or sitin Of course not all villagers take political action but most retain a sense of justice and support resistance when expectations of fairness are not met village Cadres Village cadres are community members who have leadership positions and are responsible to both villagers and higher authorities Residents are very familiar 298 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a with local cadres since they are from families who have long lived in the village Of course this familiarity does not always reduce friction between cadres and vil lagers nor does it increase cadre authority Whether they are popularly elected or appointed from above village cadres are caught in the middle between villag ers and town officials and therefore have a delicate balancing act in carrying out their jobs Town officials depend on them to carry out national policies and local regulations Many of these are unpopular policies such as tax and fee collection or family planning In the 1980s and 1990s villagers called town and village officials the three wanting cadres they want your money grain and unborn children The last is in reference to the role that cadres play in carrying out Chinas strict onechild policy see chapter 14 Village committees were officially established as the governing body on the village level with the enactment of the 1982 state constitution The constitution does not pro vide great detail regarding the composition and functions of the village committee In fact the language combines both the rural village and urban residents committees According to Article 111 of the constitution the residents committees and villagers committees established among urban and rural residents on the basis of their place of residence are mass organizations of selfmanagement at the grassroots level The chairman vicechairmen and members of each residents or villagers committee are elected by the residents A village committee consists of three to seven members including the chair of the committee or village leader vice chairs an accountant a female member who deals with family planning and womens affairs and finally a person in change of public security Grassroots level means that the village com mittee is not an official administrative division of the partystate nevertheless com mittee members are still responsible for carrying out national policies Below the village committee are small groups or natural villages Each small group has an elected leader but no party secretary see Figure 91 The village committee assigns small group leaders with specific duties and in some cases they manage the small groups collective land Villages also have a communist party branch that is made up of a party secretary and two or three deputy party secretaries According to Article 32 of the CCP con stitution The primary Party committees in communities townships and towns and village Party branches provide leadership for the work in their localities and assist administrative departments economic institutions and selfgoverning mass organi zations in fully exercising their functions and powers The village party secretary is the most powerful political figure in the village In many cases one person serves as both the party secretary and the village head The village committee is responsible for carrying out policies but major public affairs are first approved by the party secretary This includes financial matters and village collective enterprises During the Maoist era 19491976 and into the 1980s local cadres had considerable control over the economic social and political life for most villagers In the economic arena village cadres managed the collective land and they also had administrative control over access to subsidized agricultural necessities such as chemical fertiliz ers and hybrid seeds Village cadres managed collective industries including small factories and shops they alone decided who had access to these lucrative jobs After the implementation of the onechild policy in 1980 local cadres were responsible for R u R a l c h i n a 299 reproduction education introducing contraceptive methods and birth planning in their village The village and party leaders also often act as the mediators dealing with family disputes from marriage problems to clashes between households over land In the 1970s and even into the mid1980s political campaigns were still a central part of rural life and CCP cadres were responsible for disseminating party propa ganda and educating villagers about specific policies and laws The methods for spreading CCP information were through a villagewide public address PA sys tem village assemblies and political study sessions Cadres used their considerable authority over the local economy to get villagers to attend these political meetings The 1982 constitution refers to the election of village committee leaders However town government officials had the last word in selecting the village leaders and com mittee members throughout the 1980s and for some villages even into the 1990s Likewise the town party committee had the power to appoint village party secretar ies The main reason that town party and government cadres intervened in village affairs was that they relied on village cadres to carry out national mandated policies and local regulations While village cadres in the early to mid1980s had significant authority they also owed their position to the town officials As a result both the vil lage leader and the party secretary were more accountable to the town officials than to the villagers This does not mean that village cadres were unresponsive to villagers Indeed for village cadres improving the general welfare of the entire village could satisfy the community as well as the town officials By the late 1980s and the 1990s market reforms had eroded village cadres tradi tional economic and political authority As villagers gained access to the open market they became less dependent on village cadres for agricultural necessities such as fer tilizer and farming equipment Moreover there were significant changes in offfarm employment The rise in private enterprises meant that local factories producing everything from clothing for export to small electronic goods for local retailers were built in or near the village Rural residents could get local industrial jobs without relying solely on their personal relations guanxi with the village cadre Also urban industrialization and construction meant greater employment opportunities outside the village Political campaigns and study sessions became less frequent After cadres lost most of their authority over economic opportunities they also lost their leverage to get vil lagers to attend political meetings In fact cadres frequently complained that villag ers displayed little interest in village assemblies and study sessions and begrudgingly admitted that the only reason people came to village assemblies was to vote in village elections once every three years The PA system is now used for mundane matters such as announcing a missing goat or found shoes Despite their reduced authority village cadres still retain a number of vital duties including land management family planning economic development maintenance of village schools dispute mediation and until recent reforms tax and fee collec tion The collection of taxes and fees also called villagers burdens has been one of the most contentious duties for village cadres2 Some of these fees were arbitrarily imposed on villagers by corrupt officials But others resulted when central govern ment told town and village cadres that they were responsible for implementing cer tain policies and projects without providing them with adequate funds to implement 300 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a these mandates Therefore local cadres had to collect fees from villagers in order pay for projects including family planning programs school and village road mainte nance and irrigation works The list of taxes and fees could be long and consisted of ten to twenty different items such as payments to support the family members of rev olutionary martyrs village militia family planning and electricity By the late 1990s in some places villagers were paying anywhere from 20 to 50 percent of their annual income on taxes and fees3 While most of the fees were legitimate villagers worried about how and where the money was spent For example in one village residents pointed out that their village road maintenance fee increased every year but their dirt road remained in very poor condition and impassable during the rainy season In an attempt to reduce villagers burdens the central government enacted the taxforfee reform in 2002 that eliminated all local fees at the village and town levels All fees were abolished in favor of a single agricultural tax and in 2004 the agri cultural taxes were removed altogether While villagers financial burdens have been dramatically reduced village committees and the town governments have become heavily dependent on funds from the county and it has become more difficult for local cadres to provide public services such as maintenance of local schools health clinics and irrigation projects TownleAdIng CAdRes Town governments are responsible for local economic development including agri cultural and rural industries and public services such as health education family planning water and land management and security Throughout the 1980s 1990s and after 2000 town staff ranged from twenty to eighty officials depending on the number of villages and villagers under their jurisdiction The most politically powerful individuals at the town level are the party secretary the government head and their several deputies see Figure 91 For these town cad res promotion to higher administrative levels depends on fulfilling policy obligations passed down from county government offices which have in turn received them from higherlevel provincial authorities All personnel matters are handled through the nomenklatura system of cadre management see chapter 6 which means that the appointment and promotion of leading cadres must be approved by the CCP orga nization department at the next level up the administrative hierarchy For example town officials are managed by the county organization department see Figure 92 Higher authorities at the county levels therefore have a direct influence the behav ior of townleading cadres4 In fact town party secretaries and government heads are generally more responsive to higher officials one administrative level above them rather than to central government directives or villagers under their author ity The mechanisms that these higher authorities use to control lowerlevel officials are the oneleveldown management system and the cadre exchange system In the oneleveldown management system officials at each level have the authority to appoint their own subordinates For example the head of a county government can appoint the head of the town government without seeking approval from higher authorities at the municipal or provincial levels the same is true of party secretaries R u R a l c h i n a 301 at the county and town levels The implication of this system is that promotion or reassignment depends on the ability of the subordinate to carry out policies of his or her immediate superior This can create highly personalized politics whereby the decision of the county officials can have direct influence on a town leading cadres career In the cadre exchange system leading town cadres are transferred to a different locality every three to six years Cadre exchange does not apply to the average town bureaucrats only to leading cadres such as the CCP secretary and the town head By limiting leading cadres to a short fixed term of office this system is meant to prevent cadres from developing local networks that might dilute their allegiance to higherlevel authorities or provide opportunities for corruption The cadre exchange system can have a strong influence on a leading cadres direction of accountability For instance if a town party secretary or government head does not fulfill his or her policy obligations to the county government after a fixed time he or she may receive a lateral transfer to another town rather than be promoted On the other hand lead ing town cadres who successfully complete their policy obligations may be promoted County Government County Organization Department Town Government Party Secretary Government Head Party Secretary Government Head Small Group Leader VRA Members Town Party Committee Village Party Secretary Village Leader and Committee Members Village Voters Village Party Members direct election voters make final selection indirect election voters do not make final selection appointment Town Peoples Congress Deputies FIguRe 92 Selection of Village Cadres and Town Officials 302 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a to the county government Under this system the direction of accountability leads upward to the individual cadre one administrative level above rather than downward toward villagers This combination of the oneleveldown management and the cadre exchange system ensures tight control over immediate subordinates which leads to selective policy implementation5 Subordinates selectively implement the policies that enhance their career opportunities while ignoring policies that have little influence over their prospects for promotion or transfer This partly explains the variation in local pol icy implementation in rural China especially with political reforms such as village elections vIllAge eleCTIons gRAssRooTs demoCRACy organic law of villagers Committees The Organic Law of Villagers Committees was enacted on a trial basis in 1987 and then made into a permanent law in 1998 The Organic Law allows villagers to select three to seven village committee members and the village leader in a competitive election see Figure 92 Elected cadres serve threeyear terms and there is no term limit In 2011 98 percent of Chinas 589000 village committees were formed by direct election6 Villagers can recall elected leaders if over onefifth of the eligible voters file a case to the town government for impeachment The Organic Law also covers more than elections It spells out village committee duties in greater detail than the 1982 constitution including transparency in village financial affairs and public invest ments Why would top leaders of a singleparty authoritarian regime introduce local democratic institutions and processes The central government first introduced village elections as a mechanism for citi zens to monitor the performance of village leaders and committee members and to replace those who were incompetent or corrupt7 At the time leading cadres in the villages were appointed by higherlevel town officials In the 1980s one of the great est supporters for the Organic Law was the veteran party leader and former mayor of Beijing Peng Zhen who was the chairman of the Standing Committee of the National Peoples Congress NPC from 1983 to 1988 Peng believed that relations between vil lagers and cadres were deteriorating and that rural discontent was rising Elections were seen as a way to improve cadrevillager relations and policy implementation at the grassroots level Indeed direct elections for village leaders have more to do with administrative efficiency than with democracy In 1985 China had over 940000 village committees and it was nearly impossible for authorities to keep tabs on all village cadres8 According to Peng topdown monitoring of local cadres was not enough Who supervises rural cadres Can we supervise them No not even if we had 48 hours a day9 Elections were designed to shift basic responsibility for cadre supervision from higher authorities to the villagers Despite support from some top leaders there was still opposition to direct village elections within the CCP and the R u R a l c h i n a 303 NPC A number of NPC deputies expressed their concerns that villagers were not ready to govern themselves and they did not have the democratic consciousness to manage elections Other opponents said that village elections would weaken town officials by removing their authority to select village leaders But both the supporters and the opponents agreed that some form of elections was needed to improve the political conditions in the countryside While Peng made a good case for village elections he and his supporters still had to compromise In 1987 the NPC passed the Organic Law of Villager Committees on a trial basis which meant that the policy could be reversed before the Organic Law became official In 1988 the Ministry of Civil Affairs was put in charge of car rying out the Organic Law throughout rural China and by 1993 most villages had held at least one round of village elections By 2010 most villages have had at least seven rounds of elections10 Yet from the start the Organic Law has been unevenly implemented which means that the quality of village elections has varied signifi cantly across China The trial version of the Organic Law allowed villagers to select leaders and commit tee members in a competitive election but the regulation did not specify how candi dates were to be chosen This left a large legal loophole for county and town officials to manipulate the election law to their advantage In the first round most elections were not truly competitive For example many elections had just one candidate for village leader Consequently some people referred to these elections as old wine in a new bottle meaning that the newly elected cadres were no different from the previ ously appointed ones One of the main reasons for the slow and uneven implementation of the Organic Law was the resistance of town officials who had a strong incentive to manipulate the election process This is not because town officials are inherently antidemocratic but rather as noted above their promotion depends on the fulfillment of mandated policies set forth by the county government Thus in order to ensure that village com mittee members can be trusted to fully implement policies especially unpopular poli cies such as family planning and tax collection before 2002 town officials feel they must either appoint leaders or at least be involved in the candidate selection process Competitive elections generally occurred only in villages where county authorities pressured town officials to fully implement the Organic Law nominations and voting In 1998 the trial law became an official law and was revised to include a clause that ensures a villager nomination process According to Article 14 of the Organic Law 1998 candidates shall be directly nominated by villagers However the nomina tion process which is one measure of election quality still varies greatly among vil lages across China In general an open nomination process means villagers can freely nominate candidates without town or village party branch interference That is elec tion outcomes are uncertain ie not predetermined The highestquality election process is one in which villagers nominate the candidates in a village assembly see below These are called open sea nominations Lowerquality elections involve a 304 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a nomination process in which the village party secretary or town officials select or exercise the power to approve the candidates11 even if these elections are competitive In a village where the town official selected the candidates one villager bemoaned Why even bother to vote The outcome is a foregone conclusion Nevertheless a growing number of villages have an open sea nomination process and there has been tremendous progress in the quality of elections since 1998 These improvements include increasing use of secret voting booths and limited use of proxy votes and roving ballot boxes Secret balloting is an important aspect of democratic elections and Article 14 of the Organic Law guarantees access to secret voting booths on election day In the early rounds of elections few villages employed secret ballots but since 1998 most villages have adopted the practice Proxy voting allows a single voter to cast a ballot for someone else or even for a few other people This was an adjustment to the largescale temporary migration that has led to a large number of people mostly men to leave the village to work in the city see chapter 10 However this practice can corrupt the electoral pro cess if proxy voters are dishonest in casting the ballots entrusted to them While the Organic Law does not prohibit the use of proxy votes several provinces have banned the practice and new restrictions are now in place such as limiting the number of proxy votes or requiring written authorization from the absentee voter According to the Civil Affairs Statistical Yearbook 2009 over 18 million or 7 per cent of the voters cast a proxy vote Roving ballot boxes are exactly what they suggest On election day village cadres take a ballot box in hand and go door to door to collect votes instead of having villag ers attend an election assembly with secret voting booths The idea was to accommo date rural residents who live in more remote natural villages and the elderly But the potential for stuffing ballot boxes and intimidating voters is obvious As one villager in Shaanxi complained They collect the ballots and count them in secret then they announce the winners days later Who knows who really won12 As with proxy vot ing provinces are starting to restrict the use of roving ballots Accountability and Relations with the Party secretary The evidence suggests that elected leaders are more accountable to villagers then previously appointed cadres In fact popular elections have changed the behavior of village cadres Rather than looking upward to the town authorities in order to secure their position elected cadres are more responsive to their village constituents Some studies show that even imperfect elections can curb corrupt behavior and misuse of public funds because villagers can more easily remove elected cadres13 Other stud ies demonstrate that land management decisions of elected leaders reflect villagers preferences for a fair allocation14 At times elected leaders may also place villager preferences over the demand set by town officials Indeed a noted researcher on village elections states that Much to the concern of township authorities some village heads put the villagers will before that of the township authorities when they have to make a choice15 For example in Ningxia province an elected village leader refused to collect a townwide irrigation R u R a l c h i n a 305 maintenance fee for the town officials because their village had no irrigation In an interview the town party secretary bemoaned I miss the days when we could just fire the guys who do not listen to us now we have to wait until the next election16 His comment expressed not only his frustration with noncompliant village cadres but also the hope that he would be able to influence the outcome of the next round of village elections Nevertheless elected village leaders still have to implement policies mandated by higher levels and remain dependent on the town government for investment funds Furthermore in order to best serve the village an elected leader must work well with town authorities For instance elected leaders can work with the town officials to help farmers get lowinterest loans to build a greenhouse or buy agricultural equipment The Organic Law is also changing the relationship between popularly elected vil lage leaders and the appointed or elected only by CCP members village party secre tary in those cases where one individual does not hold both offices Of course party secretaries are also village residents but their direct constituents are the minority of villagers who are members of the town party branch even though their authority extends over the whole village The role of village party organization is not spelled out in the Organic Law which leads to imprecise and overlapping areas of jurisdiction between the party secretary and the village leader The CCPs policy is that the party manages cadres and accord ing to Article 3 of the Organic Law 1998 the party organization assumes the core leadership role in the village Therefore the party secretary is considered the number one hand in the village and elected cadres must accept party leadership Yet it is well documented that many popularly elected village leaders are acting in the interest of their constituents even if it means going headtohead with the party secretary A number of elected leaders are attempting to create an equal rather than subordinate relationship between the village committee and the party branch villager Representative Assembly According to Article 21 of the Organic Law residents may establish a villager repre sentative assembly VRA to which every five to fifteen households elect one rep resentative see Figure 92 The function of the VRAs is to monitor the work of the village committee The Organic Law does not provide a list of specific VRA respon sibilities but counties towns and even villages can write up documents that detail VRA duties For example in some localities the VRA is in charge of reviewing annual village budgets investment plans and implementation of national policies During VRA meetings representatives can raise questions about villagewide problems or specific constituent issues In some cases the VRA will challenge a village leaders decision and even make motions to dismiss the leader or village committee members For example in Shaanxi province one VRA led the fight to recall the elected village leader because they believed he misappropriated funds meant to improve and remodel the outdoor toilets for the elementary school The leader said the accusations were baseless but he ended 306 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a up quitting over the toilet scandal Finally the VRA can serve as a deliberative body participating fully in policyimplementation decisions Although there are some reported cases in which VRAs seem to exert significant village authority many scholars find that VRAs are generally less effective The main criticism is that the VRAs like the peoples congresses at the town and county levels are little more than rubber stamp agencies for partystate policies One scholar who examined a number of surveys on VRAs concluded that they are largely ceremo nial and not signs of the villagers increased decisionmaking power17 The variation in VRA authority may depend on how well the Organic Law is implemented and whether the town or county officials believe that a strong VRA is necessary Some town officials view strong VRAs as an efficient mechanism to keep the village com mittee and elected leader in line while others may prefer to keep the VRAs weak and ineffective Nevertheless whether they are strong or weak VRAs have become a part of village political life women in village Politics Few women are elected as village committee members and even fewer are village leaders Women are participating in elections and in many villages there are more women voters than men However the female vote does not translate into more women elected to village committees As a result women are left underrepresented and at a political disadvantage in rural China Article 9 of the Organic Law states that Female members shall take a proper portion in the composition of villagers committees Yet the law does not make it clear what the proper portion of women should be on any given village committee According to the Civil Affairs Statistical Yearbook 2009 216 percent of elected village committee members nationwide are women yet just over 10 percent of elected village leaders nationwide are female18 Even at higher administrative levels women seem to be hitting a bamboo ceiling Elected female village committee members are usually confined to roles that are considered womens work or are just plain ignored Womens work includes check ing birth quotas and disseminating contraception material such as condoms and pam phlets on available types of contraception Indeed in many cases the work of female cadres is limited to family planning duties and not much else Many elected women feel ineffective and overpowered by the men in the village committee For example in an interview one elected female committee member said that she was proud to be elected but felt ignored at committee meetings when she demanded more funds to improve family planning duties She eventually quit before her threeyear term was up19 Without adequate representation in the village committee serious womens issues such as domestic violence the high elementary and middle school dropout rates of girls and mental health including the disturbing prevalence of suicide among young rural women are not addressed see Box 91 Traditional attitudes held by rural men and women prevent females from getting nominated and elected to leading cadre position Although the economic and politi cal reforms have altered the relationship between male cadres and villagers political R u R a l c h i n a 307 Box 91 suicide among Young Women in RuRal china most of the worlds suicides are committed by older urban males But in China until very recently young rural women accounted for most suicides in the country In the late 1990s the suicide rate for rural women was 38 per 100000 people compared to 23 per100000 for rural men and about five times the world average for female suicide Although the numbers have improved dramaticallythe overall rates of suicide for rural females is similar to that of rural males and the rural to urban ratio has dropped from 31 to 21 For reasons discussed below by world standards China still has high femaletomale and ruraltourban suicide rates while depression and other mental disorders are the main causes for over 90 per cent of suicides in western countries the majority of suicides in rural China are due to acute stress from life events just prior to the suicide or suicide attempt In fact research ers suggest that the majority of the rural women who commit or attempt suicide do not have mental illness one of the principal reasons for suicidal behavior among young rural women is family conflict and marital problems such as abusive mothersinlaw or violent husbands For many rural women with little education or independent sources of income suicide appears to be the only way out of a seemingly hopeless situation Indeed some Chinese psychologists suggest that women who sense that they have been wronged and feel powerless in life may believe that taking their own life is the best revenge or act of rebellion while the stress and suffering due to domestic violence and abusive inlaws can last for years many suicides in China are impulsive acts based on the emotions at the time The most common method of suicide among rural women is pesticide ingestion which accounts for about 60 percent of such cases Pesticides are readily available and widely used in agriculture throughout rural China The death rate from the deliberate ingestion of pesticideswhich can be quite complicated to treatis higher in more remote areas of the countryside due to inadequate training of the doctors and poor medical facilities that are unable to handle severe poisonings The high suicide rates of young rural Chinese women have not gone unnoticed by the local authorities or the central leadership some localities have tried to address the prob lem by improving medical services regulating the use of pesticides training cadres of the villagelevel womens associations in suicide prevention and increasing community aware ness of psychological problems associated with family conflict and domestic violence But the rapid urbanization of Chinese society including the migration of large num bers of rural women to the cities in search of employment is probably the biggest factor in bringing down the suicide rate of rural women to about 9 per 100000 people and making the overall femaletomale suicide ratio roughly equal still Chinese women especially young rural womentake their own lives more frequently than their peers in other parts of the world The very difficult conditions that many rural women face have not changed As one analyst observed The dropping suicide rate may mask many of the issues that continue to put pressure on rural women both in the countryside and when they branch out into the cities The root causes of Chinas high female suicide rate such as family conflict and domestic violence still need to be addressed Michael R Phillips Li Xianyan Zhang Yanping Suicide rates in China 199599 The Lancet 359 no 9309 Mar 9 2002 835840 Jie Zhang Marriage and Suicide among Chinese Rural Young Women Social Forces 89 no 1 September 2010 311326 US Department of State China Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2011 httpwwwstate govjdrlrlshrrpt Eric Fish Eating Bitterness Hardship and Opportunity for Rural Women in China The Atlantic May 17 2013 httpwwwtheatlanticcomchinaarchive201305eatingbitternesshardshipandopportunityforruralwo meninchina275978 Fish Eating Bitterness 308 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a and social relations between men and women remain unequal At issue is the perva sive belief that politics and public affairs is a mans job A traditional saying that is still widely repeated in rural China is women live inside and men live outside In many respects rural China is still a maledominated society both politically and culturally For example the burden of family planning has fallen on rural women for contracep tion sterilization and most importantly the pressure to give birth to sons Nevertheless government agencies and nongovernment organizations NGOs are breaking the impasse and promoting greater local representation for women In 2004 the Ministry of Civil Affairs published and widely disseminated the pamphlet entitled Guidebook on Womens Participation in Villagers SelfGovernance The pamphlet educates women about the Organic Law as well as realistic strategies on how to get elected and participate in villager committees The All China Womens Federation ACWF has been working to improve womens social and political standing by pro viding them with agricultural technology training and programs to reduce the female dropout rates in rural middle and high schools In addition a number of NGOs are playing a role in improving rural womens political participation The most prominent NGO that is active in this area publishes the magazine called Rural Women The goal of Rural Women is to share information stories and coping strategies This is vital for many rural women who have limited or no access to computers or the Internet vote Buying and Family Clans Villages that have an open sea nomination process and competitive elections may be free from town government and village party branch interference but there are also nonparty and nongovernment community forces that can influence local elections and political life more broadly The two common issues are vote buying and the influ ence of village family clans kinship ties When town officials or village party secretaries manipulate the election process candidates must curry favor with the officials in order to get elected In this case the election outcome is decided by officials and villagers votes are not worth buying However when the election process is free from official interference voters deter mine the outcome Then the value of the vote increases Thus candidates who are out to win at any cost will attempt to influence voters and buying votes is one way to sway the election The price of a vote can range from 7 RMB US100 to 20000 RMB US289800 and candidates have offered tshirts pens and even appliances in exchange for votes Given the fact that village leaders authority has eroded over the last two decades as the scope of the private economy has widened why would a candidate spend so much money to be a village leader The reason is land Leasing village land to developers can be hugely profitable for a village leader see chapter 7 In an interview one village committee member in Shaanxi admitted While a candidate may spend a ridiculously large sum of money to get elected he can easily get the money back after a postelection land deal Land which is still managed by local cadres is a scarce resource in rural China particularly in areas close to a city Developers are eager to acquire land for factories housing R u R a l c h i n a 309 developments shopping malls golf courses and other ventures that promise to yield high profits As the demand increases so does the leasing price Land management is one of the most contentious issues between cadres and vil lagers Due to villagers concerns over land vote buying can backfire In one southern village the incumbent leader offered about 2000 RMB about onethird of the aver age annual per capita rural income for each vote just before the election He won However soon after the election villagers discovered that the leader leased portions of the village land to local developers without giving villagers legal compensation The compensation should have been 7000 RMB per villager Upon hearing the news a group of villagers went to the leaders home and proceeded to beat him Recognizing the corrupt behavior of the incumbent leader and wanting to ease tensions town government officials paid the villagers 7000 RMB each and nullified the election results20 In the wake of postMao economic reforms some areas of rural China have expe rienced a resurgence in the role of village kinship groups Kinship groups or fam ily clans can complicate the election process or even highjack village committees In some villages with two or more competing organized kinship groups town officials have intentionally appointed one representative of a clan as party secretary and the other as village leader in order to strike a balance However an open election process can upset the balance Moreover in villages with only one dominant kinship group elections may just be a formality in which the traditional clan leadership assumes authority over the village committee as well as the party branch While some reported cases suggest that strong kinship organizations can subvert village elections and the authority of the village committee it is still unclear how family clans will influence the future development of grassroots democracy at the village level or even possible elections for town government heads A recent study of several villages in east cen tral China showed that kinship and religious groups are more important than elec tions in holding local cadres accountable for providing the kinds of public goods such as paved roads and running water that villagers want and expect from their government21 dIReCT eleCTIons FoR Town goveRnmenT heAd The nexT sTeP Although direct competitive elections have become commonplace at the village level in China partystate leaders have been much more cautious in extending such demo cratic practices to the next level of rural administration the town Peoples congresses at the town level are directly elected but not the town head or other leaders They are still mostly appointed from above see Figure 92 During the National Party Congress in late 1997 then PRC president and CCP general secretary Jiang Zemin pledged to extend the scope of democracy at the grassroots level This was viewed by many as an official nod to expand the direct elections for village leaders to the town level The first push for a more inclusive selection process for town government heads came from party leaders in Shizhong district part of Chengdu municipality in Sichuan province22 The leading reformer was a female party secretary of Shizhong 310 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a district Zhang Jinming The Shizhong party committee was having problems with town government heads and saw more open elections as a way to improve relations between villagers and town officials One particularly troubled spot was Baoshi town where the government head was dismissed for embezzling public funds Moreover the local economy was stagnant Shizhong officials knew that villagers were growing dissatisfied and the local leader ship was losing political legitimacy In an attempt to regain public confidence the Shizhong party and government leaders led by Zhang Jinming implemented a break through political reform in Baoshi town They adopted a new system known as open recommendation and selection in May 1998 The process began with an objective written civil service exam for all aspi rants to town offices Then the district CCP organizational department screened potential nominees who passed the exam The second stage was a limited vote to select the final nominees This was not a direct election in the sense that all eligible voters in the town and villages cast ballots But it did provide greater representation than purely indirect elections by allowing townlevel peoples con gress deputies village leaders and party secretaries and village small group lead ers to vote The balloting vote count and announcement of the winners occurred on the same day Once candidates were chosen townspeoples congress deputies voted for the town government head and other leading cadres in accordance with the constitution In response to positive comments about the Baoshi elections from both central leaders and villagers the Shizhong party and government leaders decided to move forward with direct elections for the government head of Buyun town Thus the combination of cues from the central leadership and villager demands from below convinced Shizhong leaders that the time was right to hold direct elections for town heads On December 30 1998 residents of villages in Buyun town went to the polls to elect the head of the town government This was the first publicized direct election for town government head in China and it attracted considerable domestic and interna tional media attention because such positions had previously always been appointed and subject to approval by the CCP organization department However the central and provincial governments swiftly put an end to the Buyun experiment with townlevel democracy They denounced the direct elec tion of town heads as unconstitutional but their political reason behind their alarm was because such elections reduced the authority of county party leaders to manage town cadres In 2001 the CCP Central Committee issued Document Number 12 which officially put the development of direct elections for town lead ing officials on hold The document stated that direct elections for town heads does not accord with the constitution and the Organic Law of Peoples Congress and Local Governments According to Article 9 of the Organic Law of Local Peoples Congresses and Local Peoples Governments and Article 101 of the state constitution the townspeoples congress deputies elect the town government head and deputy heads The county party committee has strict control over the selection of candidates for these posi tions Town government heads and party secretaries are leading cadres and they are R u R a l c h i n a 311 managed through the county CCP organizational department Typically the selec tion of candidates via the nomenklatura system see chapter 6 occurs behind closed doors and only includes top party leaders in the county Townspeoples Congresses As noted above although town government heads are not directly elected deputies to townspeoples congresses are chosen by all the voters in the area see Figure 92 Elected representatives to the local congress serve a threeyear term According to the Electoral Law of the Peoples Republic of China on the National Peoples Congress and the Local Peoples Congresses the minimum number of deputies to a town peo ples congress is 40 and the maximum is 130 The townspeoples congress convenes at least once a year for two or three days to approve policy initiatives put forward by the town government and ratify the budget They are also responsible for approving government decisions regarding matters such as education economic development and public health Between meetings peoples congress deputies may also meet indi vidually with town officials to discuss issues of concern to their constituents Despite the formidable powers and functions described on paper town congresses still play a minor role in shaping and affecting government decisions Consultative elections The end of the Buyun experiment with direct town head elections did not spell the end of the open recommendation and selection process or popular participation in selecting town officials Since 2001 a process similar to that first used in Baoshi has been adopted in other towns in Sichuan as well as other provinces Local officials have made the process more inclusive but still within the framework of the constitu tional provision that town heads be elected by the local peoples congress One particular recent innovation has moved beyond the open recommendation and selection process and it was initiated by the same reformer who led the Buyun elections Zhang Jinming Even though the partystate had denounced the direct elec tion of town government heads in 1998 Zhang received positive recognition for her innovation In 2002 she was appointed as the party organizational department head ie managing the nomenklatura system in Yaan municipality south of Chengdu Sichuan In 2004 Zhang was promoted to deputy party secretary and that same year she received the Chinese Government Trailblazer Award In 2006 Zhang introduced a selection method that includes a popular vote for nominees to the positions of town head and even the party secretary23 Dubbed the Yaan experiment it is a fourstage process First nominees must meet certain quali fications including that they have a college education are below the age of fifty and have at least three years of cadre experience Second all nominees including incum bent leaders are subject to a popular vote Third the county party committee screens the nominees and makes the final selection list Then the townspeoples congress elects candidates from the final list for town head and the town party congress selects 312 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a the party secretary The last step ensures that the process remains within constitu tional boundaries The Buyun experiment crossed the line by allowing direct election of town government heads The current system is called a consultative election because the popular vote is only one consideration when the county party committee makes the final candidate list for the townspeoples and party congresses24 The voters do not make the final decision in the election of leaders The popular vote has two functions in this system First it expands popular participation in the direct nomination process Second vil lager participation helps the county party committee spot unpopular town officials As a result the popular vote is also an efficient tool for county party leaders to moni tor town leading officials RuRAl unResT And RIghTFul ResIsTAnCe Since the 1990s researchers and journalists have closely followed reports of mounting unrest in rural China In July 2005 the Minister of Public Security Zhou Yongkang said that incidences of social disturbances such as riots and demonstrations had risen from 58000 in 2003 to 74000 in 2004 By the end of 2010 the number of reported social disturbances was estimated at over 180000 incidents25 Many of these distur bances are in response to abusive local cadres and corrupt local government practices These numbers suggest that protest and discontent may put support for the CCP at risk However rural unrest and villagers disapproval is directed toward village cadres or town officials not the national government of the CCP many demonstrations that end in violent clashes between villagers and the local police began as legitimate claims against local governments and then escalated into riots Thus so far rural unrest does not threaten the central leadership Rightful Resisters Some villagers appeal to the central government and invoke national laws when they seek redress for abuses by local cadres This type of protest in which villagers claim that local officials are breaking the law is called rightful resistance26 Rightful resist ers believe that the legal system and the national leadership are on their side The central government usually permits this kind of protest but some rightful resistance pushes the legal limits and sometimes goes beyond While many resisters take to the streets to press their claims others use the courts to sue local officials and govern ment agencies to protect their interests Rightful resisters tend to be wellinformed about specific national policies or laws when they take action They learn about specific laws and policies in various ways Of course the most prevalent source is from watching television news listening to the radio and reading newspapers and magazines The central government also provides large print easytoread legal pamphlets for specific laws such as Organic Law of Villager Committees These can be bought at most bookstores in smaller cities such R u R a l c h i n a 313 as county seats The great increase in rural to urban migration has also contributed to the flow of information Sometimes villager activists stumble across a copy of a law In one case from Hebei province a villager activist who went to the town government office to lodge a com plaint against a village cadre noticed a copy of the Organic Law After reading the law and sharing the information with other villagers he lodged a complaint against the town government for failing to allow democratic elections27 Thus resisters not only obtain information but they make the crucial connection between the published law and administrative misconduct Rightful resisters use their knowledge about specific laws and local officials unlaw ful activity to inform the village community and grab the attention of higher authori ties They may take advantage of a public event such as a Spring Festival gathering or a public performance at a village fair Sometimes resisters will literally use a soapbox and loud speakers at rural markets to denounce illegal actions of local officials In order to gain a wider audience village activists may work with local or even national journalists to publicize their discovery of official misdeeds The central partystate tolerates rightful resisters because they provide information about local corruption and illegal administrative acts Corruption reflects uneven implementation of laws and weakened political capacity of the central leadership to control officials at the county and town governments The national leadership cannot monitor all midlevel officials all the time rightful resisters act as fire alarms so that higher authorities can identify misconduct Still while national leaders allow village activists to point out fires they do not tolerate rightful resisters putting them out There are several legal and semilegal modes of resistance that activists can employ These include petitions lawsuits noncompliance and demonstrations While many reports from the Western media about rural unrest focus on relatively large demon strations that result in violent clashes with local police most acts of rural resistance take place within the legal system legal modes of Resistance The most common mode of legal resistance is petitioning higher authorities This involves visiting a county government office or an office at a higher level to submit a letter of complaint against a local cadre or organization such as the town govern ment or village committee The reasons for petitioning range from complaints about exorbitant elementary school fees and excessive irrigation charges to cadres who beat and extort villagers28 Many counties and municipalities have Letters and Visits Offices where villagers can officially lodge a complaint Rather than going through the formal court system petitioners are seeking official mediation through the Letters and Visits Offices to resolve issues involving local cadre abuse Successful mediation occurs when the higher officials directly address the complaint and confront local cadres to resolve the problem However sometimes mediators do not mediate According to Kevin OBrien and Lianjiang Li villagers and small delegations can languish for weeks waiting for an appointment with leaders who never emerge29 Other unsuccessful attempts at 314 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a mediation include complaints being treated politely at the office then ignored once the petitioners return home or authorities making decisions that are not enforced Individuals and even whole villages can register a specific grievance to these offices The State Councils Regulation Concerning Letters and Visits 1995 revised 2005 allow citizens to petition as a group but the number of representatives a group can send to the office is limited to five people If an individual or group is dissatisfied with the ruling of the mediation at the municipal level they can take their case to higher levels The highest level is the Letters and Visits Office in Beijing and a large number of citizens have taken their grievances all the way to the top In fact there are petitioners camps where individuals or group representatives wait to be heard While petitioning is the most common form of legal resistance it can be costly for villagers in term of money and their physical wellbeing For many villagers it is timeconsuming and expensive to travel to the Letters and Visits offices especially when the waiting period before one can be seen may take days or weeks Back in the village petitioners may be faced with threats of violence from the village cadres or town officials Thus rightful resistors take a huge risk to get higher authorities to hear their grievances Nevertheless million of petitions are received by Letters and Visits Offices at the county level or above nationwide each year In 2005 the 1995 State Council Regulation Concerning Letters and Visits was revised to include a clause that forbids any individual or organization from retaliating against petitioners Another form of rightful resistance is lawsuits filed against local officials or govern ment offices The Administrative Procedure Law APL allows citizens to sue local governments for unlawful acts such as the misuse of public funds see chapter 7 However the law does not allow citizens to sue any party committee or party secre tary The party has its own Central Commission for Discipline Inspection that is sup posed to investigate wrongdoing by party members or organizations See chapter 6 Although most cases do not result in full compensation the number of citizens using the APL to sue local officials continues to increase In 2003 Chinese courts accepted 87919 new administrative cases that citizens brought against government officials By 2009 there were over 120000 cases In many instances whole villages bring cases against a town government For example in 1999 5000 villagers from Shaanxi province sued the leading cadres of the Zizhou county government for imposing unfair fees and beating a number of villag ers They asked for compensation and took their case to the municipal court in Yulin City But the local government officials arrested the lawyer representing the villagers on the grounds that he was disturbing social order and the villagers did not receive compensation30 Nevertheless people continue to use APL to get their cases heard semilegal and Illegal modes of Resistance noncompliance and demonstrations Noncompliance is one mode of resistance that can easily go beyond the accepted limits of the law For example the 1993 Agricultural Law grants villagers the right to refuse to pay illegal fees Legal fees and taxes before 2002 were authorized and posted by the town peoples congresses Any fees that are not sanctioned by the local peoples R u R a l c h i n a 315 congress are considered illegal and villagers have the right to refuse payment of these illegal fees However villagers are not allowed to actively resist fee collectors they are supposed to leave resolution of their complaints to the government And they are still obligated to pay sanctioned taxes and fees Nevertheless some villagers invoked the law to justify tax strikes where they refused to pay any taxes or fees until illegal fees were eliminated In this case villagers use of the 1993 Agricultural Law went beyond the legal limits in order to stop cadres illegal actions However these tax strikes are not without consequence In some cases village cadres will try to negotiate with the resistant villagers Cadres may go door to door to cajole villagers to pay or may forc ibly take items from the home such as television sets and even beds as payment There are also incidents that ended in violent clashes with police Villager demonstrations and violent unrest are often the result of failed legal attempts to resolve grievances In 2004 a prominent researcher for the State Council made a clear connection between petitions and unrest villagers start by lodging complaints at the county level or higher and doing so at the prov ince or in Beijing is also fairly common If the petition fails they often turn to direct resistance On paper demonstrations are legal Article 35 of the PRC con stitution grants Chinese citizens freedom of speech of the press of assembly of association of procession and of demonstration However the October 1989 Law on Assembly Procession and Demonstration promulgated in the aftermath of the Tiananmen protests requires that all citizens who wish to demonstrate must first obtain police approval in advance Of course even in the United States large demonstrations require a permit But in China local police rarely grant these per mits Therefore many of the demonstrations road blocks or sitins that begin as peaceful are broken up by police and these confrontations between protesters and police can become violent Two publicized accounts provide examples of how lawful protests can end in violent clashes with local police In 2005 residents from Taishi village Guangdong province attempted to use the Organic Law to recall the incumbent village leader who they accused of misusing public funds and creating secret land deals with local developers31 Villager activists collected the necessary signa tures for a recall motion and they tried to obtain the village financial records as evidence of misappropriations This led to a standoff between cadres and villag ers Unfortunately for the villagers the town government backed the incumbent leader and the confrontation ended with a violent clash between 500 town and county police and 1500 villagers There were several arrests and injuries of vil lagers but no recall election Another example occurred in Zhejiang province when in 2005 over 3000 police clashed with 20000 villagers who were protesting against an industrial park that housed thirteen chemical factories and that had been built next to their villages32 Ever since the industrial park had opened in 2001 villagers complained of factory chemical waste that spilled into the local streams and fields It also polluted the irriga tion and drinking water After several years of petitioning the municipal provincial and even central authorities without satisfactory results thousands of villagers and village cadres blocked the entrance to the industrial park Then police were ordered to disperse the demonstration Dozens of police and villagers were injured However 316 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a in the end some of the villager demands were eventually met and six of the most pol luting factories were relocated In 2011 rural residents at Wukan village in Guangdong province staged a villagewide protest against the local village leaders who misappropriated village land Several villagers were filing complaints against the village leaders for selling village land without proper compensation to the residents To stop the complaints local police arrested several of the villagers One of them died while in police custody and this sparked a villagewide protest involving over 20000 villagers Protesters overran local government offices and the police station at the township and county police responded with hundreds of police firing tear gas and using water cannons The clash ended with the police cordoning off the village and not allowing for supplies to enter the area for days The standoff ended with provincial leaders pressuring the county and town government to peacefully resolve the crisis The previous village leaders were replaced and the former protest leader was appointed party secretary of the vil lage and new elections were held33 These examples of protests and demonstrations paint a picture of widespread rural discontent but the vast majority of villagers do not protest In 2004 about three mil lion rural residents took part in legal petitioning and lawsuits as well as in large and small demonstrations That is only 04 percent of the rural population Why arent more villagers protesting One reason may be fear Another may be poverty The economic and physical costs of resistance can be high However even if villagers do not take to the streets they still have a strong sense of justice and an expectation of fairness Thus another possible explanation is that most disputes are being resolved at the village level For instance if village elections are making elected leaders more accountable to villagers then there may be greater transparency in vil lage financial accounts and a relatively fair management of collective land This means that political reforms in Chinas countryside are helping to maintain social stability which is one major reason they were implemented by the central government in the first place The FuTuRe oF PolITICAl ReFoRm In RuRAl ChInA Political reform in rural China has made significant progress since the 1980s but it is still unclear whether the current reforms are enough to deal with villagers expectations for fairness and growing demands for greater participation in the local decisionmaking process Village elections have been a relative success but they may also contribute to rising demands for direct elections at the town level This success has even emboldened some reform minded midlevel officials at the county and municipal levels to introduce semidirect elections of town government heads Nevertheless uneven implementation and the resulting rural unrest still pose serious problems for the CCP Soon after the Eighteenth National Party Congress in 2012 newly installed CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping stressed the need for deeper political reform However this was not the first time a national leader has called for political liberalization at the local level Jiang Zemin did so in 1997 and in his political report at the Seventeenth National R u R a l c h i n a 317 Party Congress in October 2007 CCP General Secretary Hu Jintao said We need to improve institutions for democracy diversify its forms and expand its channels and we need to carry out democratic elections decisionmaking administration and oversight in accordance with the law to guarantee the peoples rights to be informed to participate to be heard and to oversee34 As Jiang Zemins and Hu Jintaos statements spurred reformers in 1997 and 2007 it is possible that reformers working at the municipal and county levels may look for democratic cues from Xi Jinping as encouragement to move forward with their efforts to democratize rural politics for example trying again to win approval for the direct election of local government heads In recent years more rural activists have also taken advantage of the legal opportunity for selfnomination in local peoples congress elections and a number have actually won seats Nevertheless the continuing dominant role of the cadre management system and the authority of the party secretary over town government heads and the local peoples congresses stand in the way of further democra tization and accountability Therefore the question remains whether the gradual introduction of reforms is enough to satisfy rural political demands before the incidents of rural unrest become unmanageable for the central government The relative success of the limited reforms suggests that the central leadership has adapted to some of the growing demands from the rural population for a greater voice in governance But the pace and depth of political change in rural China will have to speed up if the CCP is to maintain political legitimacy and social stability in the countryside noTes 1 China Statistical Yearbook 2011 Beijing National Bureau of Statistics of China 2012 httpwwwstatsgovcnenglishstatisticaldatayearlydata 2 See Thomas Bernstein and Xiaobo Lü Taxation Without Representation in Contemporary Rural China New York Cambridge University Press 2003 3 Ray Yep Can TaxforFee Reform Reduce Rural Tension in China The Process Progress and Limitations The China Quarterly 177 2004 4270 4 Kevin J OBrien and Lianjiang Li Selective Policy Implementation in Rural China Comparative Politics 31 no 2 1999 167 Maria Edin State Capacity and Local Agents Control in China CCP Cadre Management from a Township Perspective The China Quarterly 173 2003 3552 5 Kevin J OBrien and Li Lianjiang Selective Policy Implementation in Rural China 6 Democratic elections in most Chinese villages China Daily March 30 2013 http wwwchinadailycomcnchina20130313content16305244htm 7 Kevin J OBrien and Lianjiang Li Accommodating Democracy in a OneParty State Introducing Village Elections in China China Quarterly 162 2000 465 8 According to the 1986 China Statistical Yearbook the number of village committees was 940617 By 2013 the number has decreased to 640000 see OBrien and Li Lianjiang Selective Policy Implementation in Rural China This was due to urbanization and to administrative changes such as combining villages and changes from townships to towns and towns to counties 9 Kevin J OBrien and Li Lianjiang Accommodating Democracy in a OneParty State Introducing Village Elections in China 318 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a 10 Backgrounder Village committee election in China Peoples Daily Online March 30 2012 httpenglishpeoplecomcn907857774029html 11 John J Kennedy The Face of Grassroots Democracy The Substantive Difference between Real and Cosmetic Elections in Rural China Asian Survey 42 no 3 MayJune 2002 12 Author interview March 2001 13 Loren Brandt and Matthew A Turner The Usefulness of Imperfect Elections The Case of Village Elections in Rural China Economics and Politics 19 no 3 November 2007 453479 14 John J Kennedy Scott Rozelle and Yaojiang Shi Elected Leaders and Collective Land Farmers Evaluation of Village Leaders Performance in Rural China Journal of Chinese Political Science 9 no 1 Spring 2004 15 Baogang He Rural Democracy in China The Role of Village Elections 110 16 Author interview March 2001 17 Björn Alpermann The PostElection Administration of Chinese Villages The China Journal 46 July 2001 4567 See also Sylvia Chan Villagers Representative Assemblies Towards Democracy or Centralism China An International Journal 1 no 2 September 2003 179199 18 Civil Affairs Statistical Yearbook 2009 Beijing National Bureau of Statistics of China 2010 19 Baogang He Rural Democracy in China The Role of Village Elections 129 See also Tamara Jacka Increasing Womens Participation in Village Government in China Critical Asian Studies 404 2008 499529 20 Minnie Chan Local Polls Put off after Corruption Charges South China Morning Post June 7 2008 httparchivescmcomresultsphp 21 Lily T Tsai Accountability without Democracy Solidary Groups and Public Goods Provision in Rural China New York Cambridge University Press 2007 22 Lianjiang Li The Politics of Introducing Direct Township Elections in China China Quarterly 171 2002 704723 23 According to Thøgersen Elklit and Lisheng see note 24 the 2006 election experi ment involved all voters in four townships in the election of the entire township leadership including the township party secretary 68 24 Stig Thøgersen Jørgen Elklit and Dong Lisheng Consultative Elections of Township Leaders The Case of an Experiment in Yaan Sichuan China Information 22 no 1 2008 6789 25 Thomas Lum Social Unrest in China CRS Report for Congress May 8th Ni ChingChing Officials Report 39000 Protests in the First Half of 2006 Down from 05 But Still a Key Concern Los Angeles Times August 10 2006 Tony Saich China in 2005 Hus in Charge Asian Survey 46 no 1 2006 3748 Tom Orlik Unrest Grows as Economy Booms Wall Street Journal September 26 2011 26 Kevin OBrien and Lianjiang Li Rightful Resistance in Rural China Cambridge Cambridge University Press 2006 27 OBrien and Li Rightful Resistance in Rural China 39 28 For an informative and entertaining depiction of one young rural womans efforts to take legal action against a village cadre for injuring her husband see the 1992 Chinese film Qiu Ju Goes to Court or The Story of Qiu Ju See also Jerome Alan Cohen and Joan Lepold Cohen Did Qiu Jiu Get Good Legal Advice in Cinema Law and State in Asia ed Corey K Creekmur and Mark Sidel New York Palgrave Macmillan 2007 161174 29 OBrien and Li Rightful Resistance in Rural China 81 30 OBrien and Li Rightful Resistance in Rural China footnote 124 R u R a l c h i n a 319 31 Yuen Yuen Tang When Peasants Sue En Masse LargeScale Collective ALL Suits in Rural China China An International Journal 3 no 1 March 2005 2449 32 Tim Luard China Village Democracy Skin Deep BBC October 10 2005 http newsbbc coukhiasiapacific4319954stm 33 Malcolm Moore Inside Wukan The Chinese Village That Fought Back The Daily Telegraph December 13 2011 httpwwwtelegraphcouknewsworldnews asia china 8954315 InsideWukantheChinesevillagethatfoughtbackhtml Malcolm Moore Wukan Rebel Chinese Village Prepares to Hold Extraordinary Elections The Daily Telegraph January 31 2012 httpwwwtelegraphcouk news worldnews asiachina9052060WukanrebelChinesevillagepreparesto holdextraordinaryelectionshtml Peter Simpson Wukan Protest Leader Becomes Villages Communist Party Secretary The Daily Telegraph January 16 2012 httpwwwtelegraphcouknews worldnewsasiachina9017974Wukan protestleaderbecomesvillagesCommunistPartySecretaryhtml 34 Hu Jintaos Report at 17th Party Congress China Daily October 25 2007 http wwwchinadailycomcnchina20071025content62046676htm suggesTed ReAdIngs Chan Anita Richard Madsen and Jonathan Unger Chen Village Revolution to Globalization 3rd ed Berkeley University of California Press 2009 Friedman Edward Paul G Pickowicz and Mark Selden Revolution Resistance and Reform in Village China New Haven CT Yale University Press 2006 Goldman Merle and Elizabeth J Perry eds Grassroots Political Reform in Contemporary China Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 2007 He Baogang Rural Democracy in China The Role of Village Elections New York Palgrave 2007 Hessler Peter Chinas Instant Cities National Geographic June 2007 httpngmnation algeographiccomngm0706feature4indexhtml Huang Shumin The Spiral Road Change in a Chinese Village Through the Eyes of a Communist Boulder CO Westview Press 1998 Landry Pierre Decentralized Authoritarianism in China The Communist Partys Control of Local Elites in the PostMao Era New York Cambridge Univ Press 2008 OBrien Kevin J and Lianjiang Li Rightful Resistance in Rural China Cambridge Cambridge University Press 2006 OBrien Kevin J and Suisheng Zhao eds Grassroots Elections in China New York Routledge 2011 Schubert Gunter and Anna Ahlers Participation and Empowerment at the Grassroots Chinese Village Elections in Perspective Lanham MD Lexington Books 2012 Tsai Lily T Accountability Without Democracy Solidary Groups and Public Goods Provision in Rural China New York Cambridge University Press 2007 Unger Jonathan The Transformation of Rural China Armonk NY M E Sharpe 2002 Yan Yunxiang Private Life under Socialism Love Intimacy and Family Change in a Chinese Village 19491999 Stanford CA Stanford University Press 2003 Zhang Yang Local Government and Politics in China Challenges from Below Armonk NY M E Sharpe 2003 China has long been the worlds largest and most impor tant agrarian society yet it also has the largest urban population in the world and more than twice as many people live in its cities than in the entire United States China is also by many measures the worlds most rap idly urbanizing country Twenty years ago barely one quarter of Chinese citizens lived in urban areas by early 2012 more than half did This chapter will cover several facets of urban Chinese social and political life in nine sections These will focus on 1 historical background of Chinese cities 2 reform of urban administration in the postMao era 3 urban governance 4 ruraltourban migration and the shifting boundar ies between urban and rural China 5 reform of the stateowned economy and the massive unemployment it has caused 6 the rising middle class 7 the changing lives of urban university students 8 challenges for Chinas cities including pollu tion inequality and urban planning and 9 the likely dynamics and trajectories of future reform hIsToRICAl BACKgRound Chinese cities have been among the biggest in the world since the time of the Han Dynasty 206 BCE220 CE and Roman Empire 27 BCE476 CE and several cities in China were larger than almost any in Europe during the Middle Ages During the Qing Dynasty 16441911 China experienced unprecedented urbanization and Urban China Change and Contention w I llI A m h u RsT 10 u R B a n c h i n a 321 industrialization producing a number of megacities to rival the industrial hubs of Western Europe and North America Despite massive damage and destruction from World War II and the Chinese civil war Chinas urban centers recovered quickly after 1949 Today at least seven of the worlds forty largest cities are in China Though most Chinese cities were traditionally not especially wellplanned and extremely crowded the Chinese Communist Party CCP imposed its particular brand of order on them after 19491 There were three key elements of the CCPs early program for urban areas the reorganization of housing and transportation the work unit danwei system and the household registration hukou system Almost immediately upon coming to power the CCP set about remaking the urban landscape erecting new housing blocks to replace packed tenements corralling com mercial activities into regulated zones closing many markets and street stalls widen ing and straightening roads and building new highways and transit corridors These moves were made with the goal of following the model laid down earlier in the Soviet Union Soviet cities and by extension socialist cities the world over were to be ratio nal modern functional and grand Though the physical environment of Chinese cities changed much throughout the 1950s and beyond the social landscape saw an even greater transformation After 1949 and especially after the nationalization of private business in 1956 most urban ites were employed in stateowned enterprises SOEs or smaller urban collectives These along with government bureaus and state agencies operated as work units danwei that provided not simply jobs but also housing health care education day care pensions restaurants shopping and vacation resorts for their members These benefits along with permanent employment made up the iron rice bowl that was a feature of urban and to a certain extent rural life in Maoist China Work units became truly allencompassing social institutions to the extent that many came to resemble cities within cities that their residents quite literally never had to leave Though it has undergone quite fundamental change in the reform era this form of organization continues to exert an influence on Chinese urban life in the twentyfirst century especially for the millions of workers in stateowned enterprises Finally the household registration hukou system was established in order to keep rural residents out of cities in the 1950s The primary goal was to avoid the develop ment of unmanageable shantytowns or slums and to ensure that villagers and city dwellers alike could be accounted for and monitored in their places of residence Another purpose was to facilitate the expropriation of the agricultural surplus by the state to finance urban construction and industrialization Under the system all families were assigned a registration either agricultural or nonagricultural tied to their specific place of residence Moving anywhere especially from rural to urban areas was extremely difficult and often impossible These three aspects of the Maoist order altered the social and political dynamics of Chinese cities tremendously2 They became rather rigid and unchanging largely selfsufficient wellmanaged metropolises In such an environment urbanites lived stable wellprotected if somewhat restricted lives This placed city dwellers at a sub stantial advantage over their rural counterparts for whom life was still precarious and fraught with shortage and deprivation 322 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a whAT Is A CITy AdmInIsTRATIve ReFoRm And ConTInuITy In PosTmAo ChInA More so than in many countries the question of just what a city in China is comes up with astonishing regularity Some places classified as rural county towns have nearly one million residents with traffic congestion and tall buildings that would rival some of Americas larger cities Cities like Chongqing can formally include vast rural hin terlands larger than some European countries with many more farmers than there are residents in the urban core Including those rural areas Chongqing has a total population of over thirty million which would make it by far the worlds largest city but only about six million live in its urban districts Prior to the late 1980s defining urban areas as those districts where residents were allocated nonagricultural registrations was simple enough Now for a variety of rea sons including largescale ruraltourban migration it has become harder Still there are three basic levels of city in China county xian prefecture diqu and province sheng see Figure 13 in chapter 1 Countylevel cities have a status equivalent to rural counties and generally tend to be small and under the jurisdiction of a larger city nearby Prefecturelevel cities are not true cities but rather large regions encom passing a major city and a significant rural hinterland In fact since the late 1990s nearly all of China has been organized into such cities which have become the dom inant organizational unit between province and county Finally Beijing Chongqing Shanghai and Tianjin are directly administered municipalities zhixiashi that have the status of provinces with no intermediary institution between them and the central government Each class of city faces distinct issues in part because each is governed differ ently in terms of its relationship to higher levels of authority Provinciallevel directly administered municipalities have mayors and communist party secretaries of pro vincial rank who are among the most important political figures in the country They have direct links to the central government in Beijing and all the spending and revenue powers of provinces Prefecturelevel cities fall one level down the chain of governance and must bargain for resources and access doled out by provincial gov ernments Countylevel cities are at the bottom of the pile when it comes to status resources and access and often have to contend with local rural areas for attention from prefectural or provincial governments Over the past twenty years a number of changes have shaken up the administra tive hierarchy Chongqing was split off from Sichuan Province to form a new directly administered municipality in 1997 There has been talk of something similar hap pening to Guangzhou in Guangdong province or Qingdao in Shandong Such splits change the makeup and economic political and social geography of some of Chinas most important provinces and therefore encounter considerable resistance Overall the trend toward increasing central power at the expense of provinces seems to be continuing with the effect that all cities but especially those directly administered from Beijing are being drawn closer into the central governments orbit The second important change has been the rising importance of the nearly 300 prefecturelevel cities as compared to other forms of subprovincial organization u R B a n c h i n a 323 This trend has privileged urban areas locally even as it saddles cities with obligations to engage directly with and be responsible for the wellbeing of rural districts under their administrative control It also contributes to a further blurring of boundaries between city and countryside that has been underway since the 1980s Finally even at the local level the past twenty years have seen an increasing empha sis on building state capacitythat is the ability of the central government to exercise its authorityand increasing hierarchical control The central government apparatus has been taking a growing role in the local urban economy finetuning its regula tory and enforcement bureaus and trying to integrate itself more deeply into urban daily life even as citizens grow more savvy about using state actors and agencies to their own ends3 Important aspects of this especially since 2010 have been initiatives aimed at the integration of urban and rural areas chengxiang yitihua and the urban ization of villages chengzhenhua under which traditionally rural areas have been urbanized in terms of living and working spaces as well as structures and institutions of governance how ChInAs CITIes ARe goveRned Like all other administrative levels in the PRC cities in China have both a state or government structure and a communist party structure The two most powerful offi cials in a city are the mayor who presides over the municipal administration called the peoples government and the party secretary who is the head of the municipal party committee and is the real boss In most cases the mayor serves concurrently as the deputy secretary of the citys CCP committee As noted in chapter 1 China has a unitary political system in which subnational levels of administration are subordinate to the central government The mayor and other important city officials are appointed by higher levels and must be approved by the CCP organization department as part of the PRCs bianzhi or nomenklatura system The mayors and party secretaries of major cities are important national politi cal figures who frequently rise to key positions in the partystate system Former Shanghai mayor and party secretary Jiang Zemin became general secretary of the CCP in 1989 and president of China in 1993 Xi Jinping who became general secretary of the CCP in 2012 and president of China in 2013 also once served as party secretary in Shanghai Cities are divided into districts Shanghai has for example nineteen some of which are suburban or even rural Districts are in turn divided into subdistricts or street offices Shanghai has about 100 which are the lowest level of formal administration in a city However there is another level of urban organization the residents committee Shanghai has around 3000 at the grassroots like a village in the rural areas A relatively new kind of urban organization the shequ com munity is being implemented around the country to provide some of the services to residents that were once supplied by the danwei and the residents committee In some cities shequ are even starting to supplant street offices All these various 324 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a sublevels of urban administration combine service to constituents and surveillance security functions Municipal peoples governments have a variety of agencies such as education commissions and health bureaus The chief law enforcement agency in Chinese cit ies is the Public Security Bureau PSB which has offices at the city and district levels Municipal PSBs are subordinate to the central governments Ministry of Public Security This arrangement might be compared to a situation in which city police departments in the United States were under the authority of the FBI As part of the partystates emphasis on social stability maintenance weiwen see chapter 6 a new system of surveillance and social control grid management wangge has been implemented in cities throughout the country4 Under this system each neighborhood or community is to be subdivided into several grid units respon sible for a group of households and supervised by a grid captain and run by a small staff of residents The security functions of the grid units are to gather information proactively about people and events in the area under their jurisdiction coordinate as needed with higher levels of authority and provide a kind of neighborhood watch crime prevention They are also designed to provide residents with better access to social services including family planning and to facilitate and offer venues for local conflict resolution Chinas cities also have peoples congresses which are constitutionally empow ered to supervise the work of the peoples government but in fact have very little authority The citywide peoples congress is indirectly elected by members of the districtlevel peoples congresses Elections to the district congress are direct which means that all eligible citizens who live in the district are entitled to vote for their representatives These elections have become more competitive and lively in recent years although they are always carried out under the watchful eye of the CCP RuRAlTouRBAn mIgRATIon ChInAs FloATIng PoPulATIon Since the early 1980s more than 260 million villagers have streamed into Chinese cities Though it is hard to pinpoint just who is moving where what kind of life they lead in cities and with what effects a few general trends within this socalled floating population are apparent First most migrants are young and travel shorttomoderate distances to find work often returning to their villages on a weekly or even daily basis Second having reached the city migrants face significant bias and discrimination in their daily activities and mostly end up in certain lowend jobs Third many of the problems migrants encounter can be tied to the persistence of the hukou system Fourth and finally migration and the remittances that migrants send home have had significant effects on village life Though there are exceptions the floating population generally works in jobs that are largely segregated by age and gender For example young women often work in service jobs including as domestics or in sweatshop factories while men tend to find jobs in construction and building trades5 This is true to such a degree that in many cities virtually all workers employed in certain jobs are migrants u R B a n c h i n a 325 Networks have also developed to recruit migrants in their home villages for specific jobs in their destination cities and migrants from particular regions have cornered the market in certain sectors For instance there are scores of laundries in Beijing run by people from Chongqings Rongchang county Though much publicity is attracted by the millions of migrants who travel hun dreds of miles across China to work in the teeming metropolises of Beijing Shanghai and the Pearl River Delta near Hong Kong6 most stay closer to home Many even commute on a daily or weekly basis from village to city Working in the nearestor a neighboringprefecturelevel city has certain advantages But it also limits migrants earnings potential and job prospects Traveling farther afield opens up more possibili ties but also carries greater costs and risks When they do travel to major urban centers migrants are often shunted into par ticular jobs Sometimes they will even have been recruited for a specific position Work in restaurants retail and construction is common for migrants throughout China In certain cities migrant labor is also heavily represented in other sectors Perhaps the most wellknown are the export manufacturing firms in the Pearl River Delta that employ millions of migrant workers from various parts of China In other cities though sectors like transportation draw largely on migrants Most of their jobs regardless of sector come without comprehensive benefits or most forms of security and protection common to state sector or other regular urban jobs A new labor law implemented in 2008 was meant to address some of these problems It required written contracts for all employment demanded that informal employees be granted at least minimal benefits previously only afforded their formal coun terparts with urban household registrations and empowered wronged employees to sue errant employers more easily It is still too soon to evaluate the full impact of the law but its passage shows that the Chinese government had at least become acutely concerned about the issues migrants confronted The floating population also must overcome systematic disadvantages when work ing in the city These stem from lingering elements of the old hukou system Most important migrants do not have legal rights to work in permanent or formal urban jobs or even to live in the city Rather they are almost always hired off the books in a manner similar to illegal immigrants in the United States and with a similar pat tern of low wages and lack of protections They also are unable to access subsidized urban health care systems and must pay very high outofpocket costs for treatment of illness or injury even for workrelated injuries in some cases Preventive care or other routine medicine is mostly unavailable Finally migrants children are unable to enroll in urban schools without a local hukou This effectively forces migrants to leave their children behind where they attend village schools or to allow their chil dren to grow up without the benefits of an education Even though some informal private schools have been established for migrants children these are generally not accredited and cannot provide the educational credentials needed to advance to the next level in China Many migrants in China live in urban villages chengzhongcun located either near the heart of the city amidst skyscrapers and shopping malls or on the outskirts These often sit on onetime farmland that was swallowed up by urbanization The for mer farmers found that they could make good money by building apartments on their 326 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a leased land and renting them out to migrant workers who desperately needed hous ing that they could afford Much of the construction is substandard the dwellings are cramped the streets are narrow and sanitation is problematic Local govern ments see them as a source of crime and other social problems and an unsightly blight on their citys modern image One upside of the hukou system during the Maoist era was that it restrained the kind of massive ruraltourban migration that created gigantic slums in many developing world cities Urban villages are creating a new feature of Chinas cityscape that have been called slums with Chinese char acteristics7 The governments dilemma is What to do about the urban villages To tear them down would invite protests by tenants and landlords To insist that they be brought up to some kind of code would price them out of the range of those who need low cost housing For now they are fulfilling the housing needs of a vital seg ment of Chinas labor force The social bias and difficult working conditions migrants encounter are worthy of special mention Many urbanites actively discriminate against the floating population in their cities Local officials often blame spikes in criminal activity or problems of public health squarely on migrants who usually have nothing to do with them One researcher uncovered a particularly sharp articulation of this bias in a Beijing newspa per commentary praising proposals to segregate members of the floating population into separate areas of the Qingdao City public transit network because urban resi dents allegedly could not stand their foul smell8 In terms of their working environ ment migrants usually must do the most difficult or dangerous jobs while enjoying the weakest protections and lowest compensation On a more human scale Pun Ngais interviewees at a fairly typical factory in the Pearl River Delta described the daytoday health risks of their long hours working with toxic chemicals in poor conditions as headache sore throat flu and coughs stomach problems backache nausea eye strain dizziness and weakness and aggra vated menstrual pain As one worker explained The room is stuffy and the smells are worse than the smells in the hospital Those acids make me feel dizzy all the time and I cant make my mind concentrate Recently I find my head is too painful to describe Another coworker added that we all know our eyesight is becoming weaker and weaker Sometimes when I leave the factory I do not dare to glance at the sunlight I find my vision blurred and I cant walk a straight line9 The harsh working conditions faced by migrants in factories that make electronic products for Apple Samsung HP Microsoft and other hitech giants have drawn considerable international attention from human rights groups labor activists and the media Exhausting mandatory overtime brutally long shifts safety hazards highly regimented labor discipline and crowded dormitories are among the most commonly reported abuses After a series of incidents at the plants of one of the major manufacturers of iPhones and iPads Foxconn a Taiwanese company that is the largest private employer in the PRC with 12 million workers Apple agreed to enlist the Fair Labor Association a nonprofit collaboration of businesses nongovernmental organizations and universities that promotes adherence to inter national labor standards to report on and monitor the working conditions at its supplier facilities in China10 u R B a n c h i n a 327 Migration changes not only cities but also the villages left behind There are three main effects on village economic and social life from outmigration particularly in poorer more densely populated parts of China like Sichuan and Jiangxi First popu lation pressure and the village labor pool are both reduced Depopulation can have both positive and negative effects but the effects are substantial There are now many villages where only children elderly people and a very few others remain In some of these farms are mostly worked by hired hands recruited from even poorer more remote settings Second remittances sent home by migrants have helped fuel a housebuilding boom in many rural areas along with general improvements in liv ing conditions But there are additional social effects that are harder to measure11 Exposure to life in the city gives returned migrants a new perspective previously unknown in most rural areas Many migrants also form links and social ties to people from farflung regions while in the city connecting villages with one another to a much greater degree than had been previously imaginable In the long term it is difficult to say exactly what political effect such largescale ruraltourban migration will have But it is clear that the once impregnable ram parts separating city and countryside in China have been broken down The final demise of the hukou system may well cause those hallmarks of Third World urban ization most feared by the CCPshanty towns poor hygiene high crime rates severe environmental pollution and extreme inequalityto become ensconced in the social fabric of Chinese cities But it would also have a beneficial leveling effect on Chinese society by reducing the deep urbanrural divide that few other reforms could achieve In late 2013 it was announced that the hukou system would be changed to allow rural residents to move formally to smaller cities To promote such targeted migration the government is undertaking the accelerated urbanization of the Chinese country side chengzhenhua which it is hoped will open opportunities closer to home change consumption patterns and provide the benefits of urban life without the costs of exces sive and chaotic The aim is to make more than 250 million current rural residents into urbanites in less than ten years by moving them into newly constructed housing in towns and small cities In places where this has already been carried out the modern housing has not always been accompanied by better employment and even the sub sidized purchase price for new dwellings has proven to be a financial burden for the relocated population as have the higher costs of urban living for example the price of electricity13 sTATe enTeRPRIse ReFoRm And unemPloymenT For the first twenty years of reform SOEs remained largely unchanged from the Mao era Only at the Fifteenth National Party Congress in 1997 did the CCP leadership decide to implement thoroughgoing reform of the state sector and danwei system Between 1997 and 2002 China moved to close insolvent SOEs merge successful ones to create multinational corporations and reduce staff to increase efficiency jian yuan zeng xiao in underperformers The results were mixed economically but intensely disruptive in social and political terms As Figure 101 shows employment in 328 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a SOEs started to drop sharply in the late 1990s while urban incomes have skyrocketed during that same period A new urban middle class has been the main beneficiary while laidoff workers have come to constitute a large proportion of the urban poor Though a complex process see chapter 8 the gist of SOE reform can be summed up in a few key points First SOEs did not change their basic structure or practices very much from the years after the Cultural Revolution in the mid1970s until the late 1990s Second SOEs ran up tremendous debts in the 1990s as they struggled to survive in a changing economic environment Third when change did come it came quickly and harshly Fourth and finally the Chinese partystate is unwilling to give up the state sector entirely necessitating the maintenance of a large state economy in key sectors even as subsidies decline and competition increases By 1997 SOE debts and business losses convinced the top leadership that decisive action was needed to reform the state sector From that year SOEs were largely cut off from additional credit or lending many were closed or merged and all were strongly encouraged to reduce their workforces as a way of cutting costs and stemming losses Little more than fifteen years later Chinas remaining state companies are indeed in better financial shape but they also employ far fewer workers and are much less cen tral to urban society and the broader economy The greatest social impact came from the massive layoffs that SOEs implemented after 1997 Since then more than 45 million state sector jobs have been lost the major ity to layoffs the rest to attrition or voluntary departure Considering that the overall SOE labor force in 1993 was roughly 110 million this represented a 40 percent reduc tion in fifteen years pushing a population of workers out of their jobs that was larger 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 0 5000 10000 15000 20000 25000 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 Millions of Workers Annual Per Capita Income RMB SOE Employment Urban Disposible Income FIguRe 101 Urban Disposable Income per Capita and Employment in StateOwned Enterprises 19902010 Source China Statistical Yearbooks u R B a n c h i n a 329 than the combined total population of Texas and California More than any other event SOE layoffs have propelled the decline of the danwei system14 With such a large proportion of all SOE workers forced out of their work units and those that remained being offered much reduced services and benefits little remained of work unit socialism Without a comprehensive state welfare system in place millions of displaced workers who had formerly been assured a stable if Spartan livelihood suddenly found themselves in poverty without any meaningful social safety net or security Though the government has tried to help its assistance programs have not always been effective There have been three broad types of policies put forward to assist laidoff workers The first which lasted from about 1997 to 2003 was a system under which laidoff workers were termed off post xiagang rather than unemployed and were shunted to reemployment service centers RSCs rather than directly into the labor market The idea was that enterprises would continue to provide for downsized workers through RSCs for at least several years before workers moved into new private sector jobs or retired The problem was that many SOEs lacked the resources to establish RSCs or to provide adequately for their workers once they were enrolled in them Workers in turn did not find new jobs at nearly the rates the government had hoped and so chose to remain in the RSCs as long as possible Sensing that it was unrealistic to expect SOEs to keep up welfare elements of the danwei system after subsidies and planning aspects had faded away the government offered two programs to replace the old workunitbased system The first known as the dibao or minimum livelihood protection was meant to provide subsidies to all individuals with incomes below locally determined poverty lines This theoretically egalitarian program was in fact implemented in such divergent ways across regions and localities that it exacerbated existing inequalities In nearly all cities the dibao failed to provide sufficient security to keep many workers out of desperate poverty though it has been increased in recent years and now forms the backbone of a very rudimentary safety net Second the shequ or community has become the most important institution of urban governance for capturing laidoff workers and other potentially disruptive groups in a new formal state embrace see Box 101 These have had some success in reemploying and taking care of the unemployed sometimes even in roles such as longterm jurors peishenyuan sent to work in local courts Faced with a still bleak set of circumstances workers have often engaged in con tention against local authorities though the frequency of such protests has declined markedly since about 2007 The form frequency and severity of protest all vary by region but there are three basic styles In Shanghai and other central coast cities laidoff workers protest very rarely and only when welfare benefits go unpaid or when working conditions in their new jobs are unbearably poor Generally central coast workers frame their grievances in contractual terms and call upon local authorities to ensure that employers and former employers pay workers what they are legally entitled The local government most often appeases or accommodates workers either by issuing onetime payments or by leaning on firms to give workers their due In northcentral and southwestern areas the situation is quite different There workers are frequently not provided with benefits or new jobs Managers and local 330 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a officials are often palpably corrupt and malfeasance is frequently the root cause of job losses and other difficulties Despite this there are many informal avenues to subsis tence for workers in these regions Markets are large and demands for many types of goods and services often go unmet Workers therefore tend to target the allegedly corrupt officials they believe are either preventing them from finding their own way in the informal economy or flagrantly abusing them in other ways The state lacking Box 101 making neW uRBan communities After 1949 the CCP put into place a strictly hierarchical system of urban governance Below the province came prefecturelevel cities that were in turn divided into districts districts then were broken into neighborhoods managed by street committees or subdistricts that each presided over several residents committees at the very lowest level of governance see Figure 13 stateowned work units though not official organs of government frequently assumed many of the functions otherwise performed by street committees residents committees or even districtsincluding sanitation basic social services and even some elements of policing with the disintegration of Chinas work unit system and the fraying of vertical ties that had bound grassroots governmental orga nizations this framework became less workable since the late 1990s China has made a concerted effort to craft a new institution of local governance at the most basic level of urban societythe community or shequ These grassroots units were explicitly intended to take over many of the political and social functions of the work unit and other institutions of streetlevel governance They were staffed and funded directly by city and district governments often recruiting per sonnel and appropriating funds that had previously been channeled to neighborhood level organs The implication was that the shequ would become a new allencompassing social institution Individuals would be associated with their shequ as they once were with their work unit or neighborhood By 2009 shequ had directly replaced work units as neighborhoodlevel organizations in many cities and employed a few million in various positions ranging from office staff to sanitation workers and through outright featherbedding Shequ have also steadily assumed increased responsibility for reemploying laidoff workers such shequbased programs have been touted as more successful in promoting reemployment than city government labor bureaus or work units some nationallevel mass organizations like the All China womens Federation that had earlier run informal reemployment programs have worked through the shequ as a mechanism not only for that purpose but also for many other functions ranging from providing legal aid to implementing birth planning policies on the local level This has helped both to establish the new shequ model of governance and to breathe new life into tired mass organizations like the womens Federation Finally the shequ has become a mechanism of social control by the partystate that may help fill the void left by the decrepit work unit system This was especially true under the shanghai model which had social control as one of its primary goals But every model of shequ has sought to enhance the declining capacity of local governments to head off popular discontent before it turns into contention By 2013 it was clear that governments primary goal of the shequ policy was to create a new institutional basis for social welfare and notably to also provide surveillance and control in Chinas cities to replace the danwei system If it is successful this organiza tional transition could preserve or even reinvigorate many positive aspects of prereform urban China u R B a n c h i n a 331 either desire or capacity to accommodate them nearly always responds to workers protests with harsh repression as evinced for example in the governments violent response to workers protests surrounding the bankruptcy of the Chongqing Special Steel Plant in the summer and fall of 2005 Finally the Northeastthe first region of China to industrialize and the heartland of its socialist development in the Maoist period but now often referred to as Chinas rust belthas seen the highest frequency of protests In Benxi a city roughly the size of San Francisco in Liaoning Province morning traffic reports on local radio in the early 2000s used to advise drivers of which intersections were being blocked by protesting workers Many cities in the region have so many workers protests every day that they have taken on a quotidian aspectno one pays much attention any more Workers grievances are legion but usually relate to their inability to provide for their most basic necessities like food and housing Local officials are often sym pathetic but are rarely able to offer much to restive workers Instead they sometimes highlight ongoing contention in their pleas to higher authorities to release special funds to assist displaced workers By showcasing their cities troubles rather than cov ering them up they sometimes manage to convince their superiors in provincial or even central government offices of their dire need for more resources than allocated under the budget Overall there is hope for SOE workers as a group in that the new generation is not likely to face the layoffs their parents have endured In fact those lucky enough to retain SOE jobs after 2008 have seen their wages and salaries increase sharply as the Chinese government spent liberally to avert the worst effects of the global recession In many regions however the decline of the state sector will leave longterm scars Though Shanghai should fare better than most other cities with even the children of todays laidoff workers likely finding decent and stable employment places like Benxi or most other cities outside the central coast face a much more uncertain future Given the continuing lack of geographic mobility for most Chinese urbanities this could consign multiple generations to poverty and desperation Interregional and local inequalities will likely grow far worse before they get better While the state has prioritized the issue SOE reform and its nega tive effects have shaken the foundations of urban social life and threaten the stabil ity of Chinese urban politics The RIsIng mIddle ClAss The foreign media have been enthralled by the rapid development of a Chinese mid dle class But who are these tens of millions of new consumers How large a force are they in urban China These are just some of the questions that arise as a segment of Chinas urban public the size of Japans entire population over 125 million emerges as a major factor in Chinese society and potentially politics To assess their role it is necessary to understand a bit about the Chinas middle class where they have come from and what they want for themselves To be middle class in China today means having an annual income in the US1600034000 range15 Broadly speaking there are three subgroups among the 332 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a urban middle class 1 young professionals working for foreign firms or domestic private sector startups 2 former SOE managers who have converted their com panies or professional contacts into privatesector successes and 3 entrepreneurs from rural or working class backgrounds who made it big in the classic sense depicted in American popular rags to riches discourse Each subgroup has par ticular features that make it hard to lump all three together Young professionals as will be discussed further below suffer from a degree of insecurity and uncertainty that imbues many of them with strong measures of cyni cism and a focus on shortterm horizons This leads many to have little loyalty to their employers jumping from job to job in many cases several times a year As one young professional in Beijing explained I dont know if Ill have any job a year from now so Ill change jobs after only three months if the new one pays RMB 500 US60 more per month16 Some observers explain these professionals allegedly selfcentered focus by pointing to the fact that more and more rising professionals were raised in onechild families Those members of the middle class who come from the ranks of former SOE manag ers on the other hand are less numerous than young professionals in cities like Beijing or Shanghai but they form the main body of the middle class in most other cities These are mostly older usually male exbureaucrats who found a pathway to wealth that led from SOEs to the private sector Often this involved taking possession of privatized or stripped state assets see chapter 8 Other times this entailed leveraging political clout or status into capital to launch private ventures Nearly always success rested on con nections guanxi or privileged access to information capital or opportunities The smallest but most inspiring segment of the new middle class is made up of those workers and farmers who have managed to make their own way in the new market economy becoming welloff businesspeople through hard work and perse verance Many of these individuals are in trades in which state managers and yuppies take little interestfor example recycling taxi service waste removal food service religious statuary and incense production and retail In one widely publicized exam ple a man laid off from a furniture factory in Jiangsu Province used his severance pay to build fish ponds in several villages transforming himself into a goldfish king and becoming very wealthy in the process17 These selfmade success stories inspire many to believe in the opportunities available in the new market economy But most realize that they are extremely rare A second question is how the newly prosperous live their lives Many reports have stressed the tendency of the wealthiest Chinese urbanites to consume conspicuously in a manner similar to postSoviet Russian oligarchs or turn of the twentiethcentury American robber barons Such a tendency is real But for every tycoon buying frivo lous and overpriced luxuries there are many yuppies buying their first houses or cars Because personal consumption was depressed so severely for so long in China many people view bigticket purchases in the 1980s and early 1990s a television and refrig erator in the early to mid2000s a car and a condominium as markers of improved living standards There are some cities notably Shanghai Beijing and Guangzhou where the middle class has attained critical mass becoming an important force in urban society even if u R B a n c h i n a 333 its numbers still pale in comparison to the working class The overall longterm trend however is toward growth of the middle class even as millions of destitute migrants continue to enter the city and many SOE workers slip into poverty upon being laid off By 2022 Chinas middle class is expected to number 630 million or approximately 75 percent of urban households and 45 percent of the total population18 Finally most of the new middle class has not been particularly politically activeat least not in ways that have challenged the CCP or local governments Though this may be changing somewhat as issues like the environment come more to the fore it is hardly surprising in an authoritarian context such as Chinas The middle class has benefited from recent policy and development strategies They also have the most to lose from instability whether political or economic Considering the close ties between many members of the new middle class and the state and party apparatus their quiescence is even less surprising and looks set to continue for the foreseeable future As several previous chapter have noted former CCP leader Jiang Zemin made an effort under his Three Represents ideology to reach out to the private sector entrepreneurs and employees and even encourage them to join the communist party uRBAn unIveRsITy sTudenTs Dating back to the 1989 Tiananmen protests the Cultural Revolution and the May Fourth Movement urban university students have been a key actor in Chinese politics But young people in Chinese cities today do not appear as politicized as in the recent past They are still an important group however since even their apathy or selfcenteredness will influence future trends in political economic and social life Perhaps the biggest change in the lives of university students since the 1990s has been the end of the job assignment system or fenpei system From the 1950s into the 1990s university students were assigned statesector jobs upon graduation in much the same way that Chinese workers were assigned to factories at which they were obliged to remain for at least several years This was in exchange for the free university tuition and housing they had received Students had little choice over what jobs they were assigned or even where they were located They could be sent more than a thousand miles away from where they wanted to be to take up a job in which they were uninterested and for which they were unqualified but they had no rights to appeal or complain In practice given the rigidities of the danwei system initial job assignments often shaped the entire future careers of university gradu ates While this system prevented unemployment it stifled students prospects and detracted from their dignity and autonomy One perhaps unintended effect of the fenpei system was that students were heavily politicized in opposition to it This sprang not so much from some idealistic sense of civic engagement as from their desire to have more control over the course of their own lives and careers Reform of the fenpei system was a major goal of the Tiananmen protesters and their allies in 1989 and it was in the aftermath of that conflagration that the CCP leadership decided to dismantle the system 334 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a What has emerged in the past fifteen years is a China that requires university degrees for decent employment but in which university admission has become even more intensely competitive only three out of five pass the required national university entrance exam and vastly more costly and where a significant number of the seven million annual college graduates have difficulty finding employment suitable to their education Members of this group which has become known as the Ant Tribe often live in shared crowded quarters take lowpaying jobs to get by and spend a lot of time hanging out and being depressed Most of the un or underemployed college gradu ates are from lowincome rural families and have degrees from one of the multitude of relatively new and often lesser quality institutions of higher educations that have sprung up throughout China as part of the effort to expand university enrollments But one survey in 2010 found that 30 percent of the ants were graduates of prestigious uni versities and many had degrees in fields such as health sciences economics business and engineering19 This could be an increasingly serious problem as Chinas economic growth rate slows down Unemployed educated youth can become a major source of social unrest and political protest as shown most recently during the Arab Spring But young people at last have mastery of their own fates at least in the sense that no one compels them to take particular jobs The other major change is that the most lucrative and promising careers are now most often found in private or even foreign companies rather than SOEs or government bureaus These shifts have dramatically reoriented political and social life for urban Chinese people under the age of thirty The phenomenal success of books and periodicals purporting to be guides to financial and social success is a sign of this transformation One of the most popular routes to success has been studying abroad Parents are desperate to give their chil dren every advantage in attaining this type of success A book titled Harvard Girl written by the parents of a young Chinese woman who went to Harvard detailed how to raise successful academicstar children from birth it became a huge hit in China with sales of over 14 million copies20 Such parents guides to helping their children win the new rat race are a recent phenomenon in urban China though they have been around for decades in Taiwan and Hong Kong and foretell a sea change in attitudes affecting several generations While most urban youth today are best described as apathetic toward politics they are intensely concerned about their own career and life prospects Most under graduates at Beijing University Chinas most prestigious institution of higher educa tion know little and care less about the events of Tiananmen in 1989 or the Cultural Revolution both of which played out in important ways right on their campus but they are palpably fearful of graduating and not landing a job Worse those not from Beijing are often concerned that they might lose their right to reside in Beijing if they are unable to get a job with an employer capable of sponsoring them for a Beijing hukouno small feat At the same time though in part related to pressures to get ahead in the job market students have become much more internationalized and cosmopolitan than prior generations With so many plum jobs in foreign companies and with English as a mandatory examination field Chinese urban youth and students are almost compelled to take an interest in international affairs Many read foreign media sources and literature Those who work in foreign firms interact regularly with foreign coworkers In addi tion studying abroad has become extremely popular In 2012 there were about u R B a n c h i n a 335 400000 Chinese students studying abroad about half of whom were in the United States21 Those who return with advanced degrees frequently move on fast tracks into leadership positions in many sectors They also usually retain networks of contacts and friends outside China These both help them succeed in their work and ensure that they keep an eye focused on developments beyond Chinas borders The experi ence of living abroad inevitably also broadens their perspectives Knowledge of and interaction with the outside world combined with extreme insecurity and wrenching change at home help produce two negative currents among contemporary universityeducated youth in Chinadeep cynicism and antiforeign nationalism The tendency to become cynical about contemporary society is widespread across all walks of life in Chinese cities but for those with the best understanding of the outside world and the most precarious positions in urban society the trend is overwhelming One antidote for some is nationalism Nationalist sentiment is sometimes regarded as the last pure political viewpoint Nationalism is also the least risky position from which to criticize the government or the CCP22 The widespread antiJapanese protests in 20122013 in China over the barren rock islands in the East China Sea that are claimed by both the PRC and Japan are but one recent example The dangers of a new generation succumbing to either nationalist fervor or cynical anomie are not to be underestimated But all is far from lost for todays university stu dents For those who do succeed opportunities abound that earlier generations could not even imagine and even those at the margins are becoming far more cosmopolitan and globally aware than even their counterparts of a decade ago If this leads to decreased political activism it would mark another milestone in the transformation of China into a country more closely approximating many in the West where political and social mobi lization among young people has generally been on the wane since the 1970s ChAllenges FoR uRBAn ChInA Chinas cities face a number of critical challenges as urbanization continues to transform nearly every aspect of life in the country These include environmental problems inequality and city planning The environmental consequences of rapid modernization citizen protests against polluting firms and government policy are discussed in detail in chapter 12 But one example can serve to highlight the urgency of the environmental crisis in urban China Datong a city of roughly two million people in Shanxi Province is home to Chinas most productive coal mines but the everpresent visible coal dust and soot in Datongs air makes many visitors choke and would seem linked to the fact that Datong has what is said to be the highest rate of lung cancer in China At one point the govern ment presented residents with evidence that the prevalence of lung cancer was due to local residents penchant for consumption of pickled vegetables Many people in Datong have expressed outrage at the governments lack of concern about their air and water quality even as they worry that enforcement of environmental standards could put additional pressure on mining jobs The government seems to have begun to take occupational health and safety issues especially for miners more seriously which has opened the door for a nascent environmental movement in Datong and 336 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a elsewhere The city is moving towards cleaner ways to extract and burn coal less eco nomic dependence on coal and alternative sources of energy For example in August 2013 Datong hosted the first Solar Decathalon in China an international event attend by teams from more than a dozen countries Social inequality is another major issue in Chinas citiesindeed in all of China Over the last two decades the PRC has moved from being one of the most egalitar ian societies in the developing world to being one of the most unequal see Box 83 in chapter 8 The Problem of Inequality in China A prominent sociologist at Tsinghua University in Beijing Sun Liping has made much of his career writing about Chinas fractured society and the negative social implications of excessively sharp cleavages and rigid stratification23 Much of Chinas inequality is interregional for example Shanghai is much richer than Xining the capital of the far western province of Qinghai A respected Chinese sociologist observed that just as many used to speak of first second and third worlds within China there are actually four worlds Hong Kong Beijing Shanghai and Guangzhou all other cities and rural areas24 There are also grinding disparities within cities see Box 102 Just within Beijing for example there are vivid reminders of this inequality in the extreme gaps in living standards between the six million middleclass citizens and the seven million migrant workers living on the edge of subsistence These gaps con cern policymakers and ordinary citizens alike But their ultimate impact is not yet clear Many societies notably across much of Latin America have lived with even sharper levels of inequality for decades without constant or overly disruptive political upheaval But counter to Chinese longterm trends and current global tendencies the distribution of wealth in China is becoming more rather than less skewed and its current level of inequality is unprecedented for a selfproclaimed socialist society led by a communist party It seems likely that social injustice will continue to spark popular discontent and worry Chinese leaders for some time to come Beyond these two marquee issues of environmental problems and growing inequal ity is another major concern that should be highlightedcity planning that can keep pace with breakneck urbanization China is urbanizing faster and more thoroughly than almost any other society in the world today Predictions that more than half of Chinas population would live in cities by 2015 were wrong That threshold was actually passed in January 2012 This is a sea change in Chinese politics and society one that would stretch any countrys ability to cope China must balance a desire to avoid an unmanageable explosion of urban areas with the necessity of accommodating peoples inexorable drive to leave the land and look for work outside the agricultural sector So far China has kept up with urbanization in the most basic sense of providing sufficient infrastructure to withstand the deluge But in the years ahead other areas of urban politics will all be affected by massive increases in urban population The job market both for downsized state workers and newly graduated students will tighten Environmental goals will be harder to achieve rather than easier and will often be pitted against the demands of bursting new cities Inequality will likely be exacer bated before it can be curtailed While the government cannot stop urbanization it must continue to search for integrated responses One such response is a new emphasis on city planning Remaking the urban land scape has been a hallmark of CCP rule since 1949 But in recent years several new u R B a n c h i n a 337 Box 102 inequalitY in chinese cities There are four main dimensions of inequality in Chinese cities 1 the urban core of the city versus its incorporated rural areas 2 within the state sector 3 within the private sector and 4 the newly rich and middle classes versus the new urban underclass The urbanrural divide has always been one of the most salient axes of inequality in China It was exacerbated and entrenched by the imposition of the hukou house hold registration system in the 1950s As discussed earlier in this chapter cities in China often incorporate within their municipal boundaries many rural areas where the residents still hold an agricultural hukou These areas are better off than parts of the countryside far removed from a city but their residents are also on average consid erably poorer than their urban counterparts within the same municipality Those who do migrate to the city for work are paid dramatically lower wages than those with urban registrations and face many kinds of blatant discrimination because of their rural origins In prereform China most of the benefits that urban residents enjoyed were rooted in the danwei work unit system Rather than providing general public goods to all citizens through state agencies individual work units funded and administered health insurance pensions and other social protection measures This system created considerable inequality among units within the state sectorBroadly speaking work ers in favored industries including steel resourceextraction enterprises such as oil fields and coal mining and defense plants as well asthose who worked in the state or party bureaucracy enjoyed higher living standards and better benefits than those who workedin light industry the services or retail outlets These sources of inequal ity among workers in stateowned enterprises persist today despite the erosion of the danwei as a factor in urban lifeThose employed by the 100 or so companies that are directly under the control of the central government such as Baoshan Iron and steel in shanghai which is the secondlargest steel producer in the world fare muchbetter than employees of the many thousands of soes that fall under more local jurisdictions There is also a glaring divide within the private sector As noted in chapters 6 and 8 the number of private enterprises in China has skyrocketed during the last decade or so But these range in size from megamultinational corporations to momandpop stores and street vendors on the one hand most of Chinas newly rich and new middle class work in private companies on the other hand sweatshop production of lowend exports is also almost exclusively in the nonstate sector Private firms employ more migrants under worse conditions and more advanced degree holders with generous pay packages than do soes Finally along with the newly rich and the new middle class Chinas cities also are home to a new urban underclass This group which perhaps numbers more than one hundred million consists of laidoff stateowned enterprise workers who have not been able to find gainful employment most rural migrants and others who have a slim chance of escaping poverty In terms of income distribution and access to services urban China is probably the most highly stratified part of contemporary Chinese society dorothy J solinger The Creation of a new underclass in China and its Implications environment urbanization 18 1 April 2006 17793 338 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a focal points have emerged Building subway systems and other rapid transit networks in virtually every major city has been one new focus of urban planning New attention to the creation or preservation of green space and parks as well as to aspects of zon ing has also been notable Some less successful efforts have included the development of ghost cities gui chengshilarge districts or even whole cities some the geo graphic size of Chicago that remain almost completely uninhabited after being con structed at great cost One of the most famous and largest such cities Inner Mongolias Kangbashi hosted the 2012 Ms World Beauty Pageant and has served as the back drop for a skateboarding film despite being nearly devoid of residents Others such as Sichuans New Beichuan nearly empty since being reconstructed after the devastating earthquake that destroyed the old county town in 2008 have been less highprofile but equally problematic Smallerscale examplesincluding the mostly uninhabited New Zhengzhou district in Henan and one of the worlds largest shopping malls in Guangdongs Dongguan City which has yet to attract more than two or three shops Only time will tell whether the state can reconcile the push toward building infrastruc ture and social safety nets with remedies to problems of overinvestment or misdi rected investment like ghost cities FuTuRe TRAJeCToRIes FoR uRBAn ChInA Four broad trajectories are important to emphasize as Chinese cities move into the second decade of the twentyfirst century First they will continue to grow By 2030 Chinas urban population is expected to hit one billion and the country will have more than 200 cities with a million or more inhabitants25 The rapidly expanding pop ulation of Chinese cities along with the accelerating urbanization of rural areas will shape decisionmaking in all other areas Indeed there have been few examples in the history of successful management of urbanization on a scale such as China is now experiencing The stakes are high for the CCP which is now presiding over a country where the majority of the population is living in cities Second problems related to employment and the urban job market will not disap pear Rather they appear poised to intensify and draw in increasingly broad swaths of the population from laidoff SOE workers to university graduates and migrants How the Chinese government addresses these issues will be key in determining whether it has the breathing space to cope with newer challenges and opportunities If it cannot help urbanites adjust fast enough it will be forever putting out fires of discord and resistance when it could otherwise be charting a new course in other policy realms Third environmental and public health issues are likely to become primary concerns for urban leaders and citizens alike for at least the next fifteen to twenty years The These four dimensions of inequality in Chinas cities present a serious challenge not only to urban governments but also to the leaders of the PRC It will not be enough to hope that continued economic growth will alleviate the problem If major social instability is to be avoided more proactive steps will be needed to provide better opportunities and more secure livelihoods to the most disadvantaged of Chinas urban residents u R B a n c h i n a 339 2003 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome SARS and international concerns over Beijings air quality for the 2008 Olympic Games were harbingers of much larger arguments and higherstakes contests to come These problems are not just new areas of special concern for Chinese urban residents but also for the world SARS spread to every continent within weeks of its initial detection in Guangzhou see chapter 13 Traces of the mixture of sand and loess particles that chokes Beijings air during spring windstorms can be detected soon afterward in California and Oregon And the emissions of urban Chinas burgeoning fleet of automobiles and growing stable of manufacturing plants have become even larger contributors to global warming than their US counterparts see chapter 12 New strains of avian flu or new waves of air or water pollution could have even larger international implications If Chinas responses to employment and urban population growth are linchpins of its success in other pol icy areas how it deals with public health and environmental problems will profoundly affect the rest of the world as well as China Fourth there is a great opportunity for at least some key urban areas in China to join the ranks of global cities Sociologist Saskia Sassen has put forward the idea of the global city to describe metropolises that serve as critical nodes of interaction in the world economy26 The interchange of ideas capital people and goods at these commercial and financial centers is often seen as the key to advancing the agenda of international integration and globalization Hong Kong is considered a global city see chapter 17 Its tourism slogan Asias World City even echoes this theme But many say it is losing its place in the lead among Chinese cities Others notably Shanghaibut also Beijing and Guangzhouare begin ning to catch up Some imagine that these cities may challenge even New York or London for global influence in the coming decades though they have a very long way to go Cities like Paris or Tokyo may find themselves rivaled or eclipsed more quickly Mainland Chinese cities are internationalizing at a phenomenal rate with significant effects on domestic politics27 If critical obstacles such as barriers to immigration and free flows of information and capital are removed urban China may become one of the most globalized societies in the world within the next two to three decades with substantial influence beyond the countrys borders The dynamics of Chinese urban politics and society are sure to continue evolving in important and exciting ways noTes 1 That said certain important cities like Beijing were planned during the premodern era around feng shui geomancy principles 2 For more on Chinese cities during the Maoist era see John Wilson Lewis ed The City in Communist China Stanford CA Stanford University Press 1971 3 Jane Duckett The Entrepreneurial State in China London Routledge 1998 Kenneth Foster Embedded within State Agencies Business Associations in Yantai The China Journal 47 2002 4166 Benjamin L Read Democratizing the Neighborhood New Private Housing and Home Owner SelfOrganization in Urban China The China Journal 49 2003 3159 4 See China Alarming New Surveillance Security in Tibet Human Rights Watch March 20 2013 httpwwwhrworgnews20130320chinaalarmingnewsurveillancesecurity 340 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a tibet Party Paper Lists Six Errors in Chinese Social Management Human Rights Journal Dui Hua Foundation November 7 2012 httpwwwduihuahrjournalorg201211partypa perlistssixerrorsinchinesehtml 5 Pun Ngai Made in China Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace Durham NC Duke University Press 2005 6 The awardwinning documentary Last Train Home 2009 depicts the impact of this longdistance migration on one family in Sichuan when the father and mother move to Guangdong to find factory work 7 Guo Chen et al Slums with Chinese Characteristics A Comparative Study in Housing Inequality in China ed Youqin Huang and Siming Li New York Taylor and Francis 2014 8 Stanley Rosen The State of YouthYouth and the State in Early 21st Century China The Triumph of the Urban Rich in State and Society in 21st Century China eds Peter Hays Gries and Stanley Rosen London Routledge 2004 171 9 Pun Ngai Made in China 169170 172 10 See httpwwwfairlabororgaffiliateapple for the FTAs reports on Foxconn 11 Arianne Gaetano Gender and Citizenship Inequality The Story of Two Migrant Women in One Country Two Societies RuralUrban Inequality in Contemporary China ed Martin King Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 2010 265286 12 Personal communication with the communist party secretary of a prefecturelevel city in Jiangsu Province 2005 13 See Ian Johnson Chinese Hit Pitfalls Pushing Millions off Farm The New York Times July 14 2013 A1 A8 14 Lu Xiaobo and Elizabeth J Perry eds Danwei The Changing Chinese Workplace in Historical and Comparative Perspectives Armonk NY M E Sharpe 1997 15 Dominic Barton Half a Billion Chinas MiddleClass Consumers The Diplomat May 30 2013 httpthediplomatcompacificmoney20130530halfabillionchinasmiddlec lassconsumers 16 Personal communication with advertising company junior executive Beijing 2001 17 Chen Tao Cong Xiagang Zhigong Dao Jinyu Wang From Laidoff Worker to Goldfish King Yuye Zhifu Zhinan 3 2003 14 18 Dominic Barton Half a Billion Chinas MiddleClass Consumers 19 Chinas ant tribe still struggling Chinaorgcn December 14 2010 httpwww chinaorgcnchina20101214content21536966htm The term Ant Tribe was coined by Lian Si then a researcher at Peking University and now a professor at University of International Business and Economics in Beijing Lian said the unemployed college gradu ates were like ants in that They live in colonies in cramped areas Theyre intelligent and hardworking yet anonymous and underpaid see source above Lian wrote two books about the Ant Tribe 2009 and 2010 and has also published a book called Worker Bees The Life of Young University Teachers 2012 that is about the difficulties of junior faculty members in Chinese universities 20 Rosen The State of YouthYouth and the State 164 Eugenia V Levenson Harvard Girl Harvard Magazine JulyAugust 2002 httpharvardmagazinecom200207 harvardgirlhtml 21 Luo Wangshu More Students Looking Overseas China Daily June 7 2013 http wwwchinadailycomcnchina20130607content16580626htm 22 Peter Hays Gries Chinas New Nationalism Pride Politics and Diplomacy Berkeley University of California Press 2005 23 See for example Sun Liping Zhuanxing yu Duanlie Gaige yilai Zhongguo Shehui Jiegou de Biangan Transition and Cleavage Change in Chinas Social Institutions under Reform Beijing Qingghua Daxue Chubanshe 2004 u R B a n c h i n a 341 24 Personal communication with a sociologist from the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences 1998 25 McKinsey Company Preparing for Chinas Urban Billion February 2009 http wwwmckinseycominsightsurbanizationpreparingforurbanbillioninchina 26 Saskia Sassen The Global City New York London Tokyo Princeton NJ Princeton University Press 1991 27 David Zweig Internationalizing China Domestic Interests and Global Linkages Ithaca NY Cornell University Press 2002 suggesTed ReAdIngs Cai Yongshun State and Laidoff Workers in Reform China The Silence and Collective Action of the Retrenched London Routledge 2006 Chang Leslie T Factory Girls From Village to City in a Changing China New York Spiegel Grau 2008 Gold Thomas B William J Hurst Jaeyoun Won and Qiang Li LaidOff Workers in a Workers State Unemployment with Chinese Characteristics New York Palgrave Macmillan 2009 Hurst William The City as the Focus the Analysis of Contemporary Chinese Urban Politics China Information 20 no 3 November 2006 457479 The Chinese Worker after Socialism New York Cambridge University Press 2009 Lee Ching Kwan Against the Law Labor Protests in Chinas Rustbelt and Sunbelt Berkeley University of California Press 2007 Lin Yimin Between Politics and Markets Firms Competition and Institutional Change in PostMao China New York Cambridge University Press 2001 Miller Tom Chinas Urban Billion The Story Behind the Biggest Migration in Human History London Zed Books 2012 Solinger Dorothy J The New Urban Underclass and its Consciousness IS it a Class Journal of Contemporary China 21 78 2012 10111028 Walton Jonathan Intensifying Contradictions Chinese Policing Enters the 21st Century Seattle National Bureau of Asian Research 2013 Whyte Martin King ed One Country Two Societies RuralUrban Inequality in Contemporary China Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 2010 Woetzel Jonathan et al Preparing for Chinas Urban Billion McKinsey Global Institute Report March 2009 httpwwwmckinseycominsightsurbanization preparingforurbanbillioninchina Wu Weiping and Piper Gaubatz The Chinese City New York Routledge 2012 Yusuf Shahid and Tony Saich China Urbanizes Consequences Strategies and Policies Washington DC World Bank Publications 2008 Chinas arts and their political context have changed dramatically since the Maoist period The arts consti tute one of the most open and dynamic aspects of civil society in the PRC although the cultural arena remains under political scrutiny by the partystate The arts are near the frontlines of political change in China and how they fare is a measure for future progress in other areas of public discourse This section will first introduce the background for the current arts scene then discuss three topics the new relationship between art and politics the declining effectiveness of partystate censorship and the partystates new vigor in promoting culture as a sym bol of Chinese nationalism BACKgRound FoR ARTs ReFoRm Chinas recent arts policies have been fashioned by and against two great inheri tances One of these is the tradition of Confucian learning and statecraft Modern leaders look to a past in which the state was an important arbiter of defining what was art and in which great political figures were often significant poets calligraphers or connoisseurs The bond between art and power was intensified by a second legacy the communist revolution Mao and other party leaders won power by force of arms but also by harnessing the arts to mobilize mass support The victories of the Red Army were accompanied by Partysponsored songs novels dance ballads wood cuts and film Policy Case Study The Arts RI C h A Rd C u RT KRA u s 11 t h e a R t s 343 During three decades of revolution the Chinese Communist Party CCP learned to use the arts as a political weapon As discussed in chapter 3 a critical moment was the 1942 party rectification in Yanan Many sophisticated urban writers painters and musicians had joined the party in its Northwest China base Mao Zedong spoke to an arts conference demanding that these newcomers to Yanan learn new skills to produce art that would inspire an uneducated and largely rural audience Mao charged that they would remain heroes without a battlefield as long as they imagined they were producing works for Shanghai intellectuals and were unfamiliar with the needs of their new audience1 If the professional writers and artists regard themselves as masters of the masses as aristocrats on a superior level to the lower classes then no matter how talented they may be they are completely useless as far as the masses are concerned and there is no future for their work2 By the time the party came to power in 1949 it had learned to organize and discipline its arts workers No civil libertarian heritage held back party leaders from interfering with artists both the Confucian and revolutionary traditions regarded energetic cultural intervention as the responsibility of wise leadership Only a lessfrequently invoked Daoist ideal suggested that the best government was achieved by inaction The new governments statist inclinations were reinforced through its first decade by influence from the Soviet Union Chinas new cultural institutions like its politi cal system in general resembled the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics its socialist elder brother Russian oil painters lectured in Chinese arts academies as Chinese pianists trained at the Moscow Conservatory The peak of centralized control over the arts in China came during the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath 19661976 During this protracted political strug gle some arts were dismissed as feudal such as calligraphy or bourgeois such as oil painting while others were recrafted for a new era of Chinese revolution see Box 1113 After Maos death and the arrest of the Gang of Four in the fall of 1976 Chinas leaders sought initially to restore the system of the early 1950s which featured a more tolerant and looser party leadership paying Chinas intellectuals proper respect as both arts producers and consumers This initial reform period which lasted until 1989 was especially influenced by expanded exposure to foreign trade and competition in arts products and by the partys decision to reduce subsidies to arts organizations which were called upon to earn more of their own income The 1980s were filled with cultural controversies as artists pressed the limits of the postMao order and as citizens reveled in new tastes that had earlier been banned such as public dancing more variety in clothing imported television shows and recorded music The 1989 Tiananmen political crisis stalled momentum for change Many artists participated in the spring demonstrations and were shocked by the Beijing massacre of June 4 Many who were abroad at the time chose not to return to China others became cautious in their work as the harsh climate emboldened leaders who favored heavyhanded tactics in disciplining the arts 344 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Box 111 What Was cultuRal aBout the cultuRal Revolution Political scientists typically treat the Cultural Revolution as a power struggle over Chinas future It is seen primarily as a time when mao mobilized radical youth the Red guards to attack those among his fellow senior leaders he judged to have betrayed him and who were leading China down the capitalist road But over the course of the decade of chaos from 19661976 as the Chinese officially date the Cultural Revolution political conflict spilled over into nearly every aspect of life in China including every facet of the arts literature music painting drama film architecture and even fashion became ideo logical battlegrounds that had an impact on all citizens why did mao and his supporters think a Cultural Revolution in the arts was necessary maoists believed that the 1949 seizure of political power and subsequent control of the economy had not truly empowered the working class They concluded that oncestalwart veteran revolutionaries had been seduced by the attractive yet corrupting culture from Chinas feudal past or from foreign bourgeois nations The maoist prescription was to limit these sugarcoated bullets while fostering a new and potent culture that was truly proletarian in form and content schools were closed in the early period of the movement both to choke off the flow of bourgeois ideology to students and also to provide a source of Red guard activists to serve as the shock force of maos crusade when rebels toppled party leaders from power they typically included among their charges such aesthetic misdeeds as patron izing feudal operas from Chinas imperial past supporting capitalist reforms in the arts or showing an interest in foreign arts The maoist approach to revolutionizing culture encountered several problems in implementation In the course of opposing the four olds old customs culture habits and ideas Red guards destroyed many priceless artifacts of traditional Chinese culture In many cases the state and in some cases local people such as in the birthplace of Confucius intervened to protect major monuments nevertheless not only was the scale of the destruction of national treasures caused by the young rebels incalculable but many personal items including family genealogies paintings books phonograph records and religious images were also lost forever Maoist leaders enforced Cultural Revolution guidelines for the arts hypocritically while traditional operas were banned mao Zedong watched a set of specially filmed performances in his private residence lowerlevel party leaders could watch foreign movies barred to public view Kang sheng a leading mao ally was also an arts connoisseur and he added thousands of paintings seal carvings and books to his personal collection that had been seized by Red guards from bourgeois and feudal owners Radical leaders were slow to develop new and revolutionary art Maos wife Jiang Qing a onetime actress before she met mao in the 1930s made the radi cal reform of Chinese opera a personal project she commissioned new stage works with revolutionary themes such as The Red Lantern The Red Detachment of Women and Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy These works had some suc cesses but the development of new pieces progressed slowly in part because artists feared to cross Jiang Qing As a result only eight model operas and a few other artistic works gained official approval For the Chinese people it was truly a time of cultural famine Other arts reform projects only flourished late in the Cultural Revolution such as peasant painting which again went slowly in part because of the awkward need to use formally trained but ideologically discredited experts to train new peasant artists t h e a R t s 345 A new BAlAnCe BeTween PARTysTATe And mARKeT After suppressing the 1989 demonstrations Deng Xiaopings solution for the political mess he had made was to push more boldly toward marketization of the economy His 1992 initiative intensified economic changes underway in the 1980s and resulted in the dramatic remaking of Chinas cities transportation system and consumption habits as well as reuniting Hong Kong and Macao with China In contrast to Maoist policies which explicitly focused on the arts Dengs economic reforms affected the arts indirectly yet profoundly The economic reforms launched by Deng liberalized Chinese culture by weaken ing the grasp of partystate patronage encouraging artists and arts organizations to turn to the marketplace instead of relying upon automatic government subsidies In addition a new array of cultural products was introduced in the PRC not only from across China but also around the world However the reforms had significant costs both to artists and art consumers Some prominent writers singers and painters profited enormously from these changes which also removed limits on individual income Other artists fared less well especially folk musicians dancers puppeteers and traditional landscape painters Many found the process of change to be unnerving and disorienting Although there are still many government subsidies for the arts most artists had to find employment outside official circles give up subsidized housing and other benefits purchase their own materials for creating art and in general fend for themselves A broader critique of the market reforms in culture is that they have rewarded coarseness sensationalism and vulgarity at the expense of higher artistic principles In the past the Chinese communist partystate may have set political limits for what artists could produce but typically interfered little with the pursuit of artistic tech niques The exception was during political campaigns such as the Cultural Revolution when the arts were not only totally controlled by the partystate but were also actively used as a propaganda tool to mobilize the masses and send notsosubtle messages about proper communist attitudes and behavior The downfall of the preCultural Revolution arts leadership in the CCP shifted influence to new centers of power one was the army whose performing arts groups gained new prestige even nonmilitary units such as the Central Philharmonic orchestra began to perform in army uniforms as a sign of political allegiance This afforded some political protection to the musicians but it was also a sign of the loss of any artistic independence older artists and their children often became targets of the Cultural Revolution as it unfolded on the local level many of these came from highly educated families who had initially supported the CCP when it came to power in 1949 But the double blows of the 1957 AntiRightist campaign and the Cultural Revolution made it difficult for the Party to draw upon their training and enthusiasm After maos death deng xiaoping was able to tap into the deep cultural resentments of such families as he launched his effort to turn China away from the maoism in every way including the arts 346 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Artists are often quick to protest the cultural destruction associated with the sus tained construction boom that began with the economic reforms Old architecture is vanishing to make way for new housing shopping malls and buildings such as Olympic venues Cultural traditions are also collapsing before economic growth Chinese opera a national icon of traditional culture is losing its audience especially in urban areas where it cannot face the competition from more modern forms of entertainment such as video games television and pop music These trends have elicited some serious interest in cultural protection By the mid1990s some began to attempt at least to slow the replacement of distinctively Chinese buildings by new structures of no national character This has been accom panied by a broader interest in signs of older Chinese culture and art precisely as it is being destroyed Corrupt officials in cahoots with real estate speculators make preservation difficult However it would be unfair to blame the housing transfor mation on corrupt officials Chinese citizens want new clean and wellinsulated homes with adequate plumbing The politically motivated destruction of the Cultural Revolution had mostly ended by 1968 In contrast the present eras eco nomically driven destruction has had few checks since Deng Xiaoping reignited the market reforms in 1992 It would be a mistake to view these changes as a simple triumph of the market place over the partystate instead of a reconfiguration of the partystates visible role in producing art The partystate still maintains a role in overseeing and financing cultural affairs Indeed there is a whiff of the ancient Roman strategy of bread and circuses in its conscious use of the market to provide greater cultural opportunities entertainment and distraction from political controversy A weAKened CensoRshIP The distractions of popular culture are one way the CCP protects its rule The strong hand of censorship is another Yet current Chinese censorship is very different from its Maoist predecessor Arts censorship began to loosen in the 1980s gradually becoming more of a recur ring annoyance than a central feature of cultural life Censorship of news is more pervasive although it too is much looser than in the past For the arts control mecha nisms and partystate interest vary by genre Music is probably the least controlled and film and television the most supervised Fiction and painting are only loosely monitored Except for broadcasting and film China practices a postpublication cen sorship which means that a painting might be withdrawn after a show opens or a book might be cancelled but not until tens of thousands of copies have been distrib uted So writers and painters calculate the prevailing political climate as shrewdly as they know how selfcensor when necessary and plunge ahead when the country is in a relatively open period The decline of censorship has been uneven in cycles of loosening and tighten ing but generally leaving the censors with less power in the end This is in part a result of economic change as there are too many cultural products on the market for anyone to monitor them all Also China has never had a Sovietstyle corps of t h e a R t s 347 professional censors with the important exception of television and film In the Maoist years cultural controversies often began when a local activist or zealous official decided to make a fuss about a particular work As political life in China became less intense many people decided that censorship was not worth the trou ble or even a bad idea Generational change has also consolidated the process with the retirements then deaths of the old revolutionaries who founded the Peoples Republic and had held on to more conservative views of the limits of artistic freedom In the 1970s and even 1980s debates over individual songs or scenes in films would bubble up to the top of the system requiring the top party leadership to determine whether a particular work of art was permissible In the twentyfirst century the scope of censorship is much narrower and is handled at lower political levels Even so the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics was judged to be so important to Chinas national image that a top leader is said to have intervened to substitute a prettier child for the little girl whose voice was actually heard singing a prominent song4 The erratic weakening of censorship often assumes forms that Westerners may not expect For example one battleground was paintings of nude figures Figure painting is not an important theme in Chinese painting and Confucian propriety reinforced communist prudery to suppress naked images for much of the twentieth century Liu Haisu an oil painting master fled to Japan in the 1920s to escape a warlord who was outraged by his use of naked models in teaching After 1949 communist patronage of oil painting as a modern art form led again to nude modeling and to renewed attacks on the painters the models and the people who viewed the art In 1965 Mao Zedong intervened on this subject Fundamental training in drawing and sculpture requires modelsmale female old and young they are indispensable The prohibitions of feudal ideology are inappro priate It is unimportant if a few bad things emerge For the sake of art and science we must put up with some small sacrifices5 No one dared pursue his encouragement in the ensuing Cultural Revolution Yet in the postMao relaxation of cultural controls a wave of nude painting spread over the nation in the 1980s this time with success The nudes were almost all young women as the fight over gender equality was another matter In one case a painter pulled an abstract oil from his closet and labeled it a nude in order to enter it into a hast ily arranged exhibition of nude art The breakthrough of this restricted zone also produced profits for the institutions that organized the shows Conservative critics denounced the new work as pornographic but over the course of the 1990s it became another fallen aesthetic barrier and no longer inspired controversy What gets censored now In politics lots of things such as critical views of Chinas control of Tibet it is also taboo to write about the 1989 Beijing protests and mas sacre In the arts no one will satirize living political leaders But you can certainly mock corrupt or sanctimonious officials if they are suitably local and not famous Academy Award winner Brokeback Mountain Ang Lees imported movie Lust Caution 2007 had some steamy moments clipped before its mainland release Twenty Chinese writers were instructed not to attend a 2007 Hong Kong conference 348 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a of PEN an international human rights organization that focuses on support for free dom of artistic expression A recent book of biographical sketches of Beijing Opera stars was blocked apparently because its author was the daughter of a particularly controversial critic of Mao in the 1950s even though it had already been published and sold in stores A 2000 Chinese film Devils at the Doorstep was banned because it showed too nuanced a view of the Japanese occupation But the ban only applied to theatrical distribution so the film was available on DVD and its director Jiang Wen continued to work on and act in other movies China maintains some limits on foreign culture although with less success and zeal than in the past Visiting musical groups need to have their programs vetted before going onstage The partystate restricts the number of Hollywood movies that can be shown although this is more to protect Chinas film industry than to block American ideology China has both increased Hollywood imports for its own screens and pur chased onethird of the movie theatres in the United States making the once rigid barrier between the United States and China still more porous Efforts to control Internet access are contentious and Chinas government is cer tainly more activist in directly controlling unfavorable news than most Western gov ernments But the great firewall of China is erratic and porous Like many forms of Chinese censorship control of the Internet is reasonably effective toward the masses and less so toward educated or politically connected elites The party worries less about the elites who long enjoyed books performances films and news that ordi nary people could not access Computer restrictions are most easily evaded by tech nically savvy citizens who slip around the firewall and by bloggers who employ cir cumlocutions to beat censoring software Other countries attempt to create national firewalls for example Singapore Malaysia and several Middle Eastern countries In the West arts controls tend to be private enforced by the state through intellectual property lawsuits The main state interest in the West seems to be restricting pornography terrorist information and criminal access to computers China has far less efficient censorship than Westerners want to believe Many art ists have boosted their celebrity by playing the system while assuming the pose of the dissident to Westerners Book sales in the West can soar if ads claim that the text has been Banned in China even if the volume had in fact been sold to a million Chinese readers before being withdrawn Many Chinese artists sell dissident paintings that mock Mao Zedong to foreign collectors understanding full well that making fun of Mao is no longer very contro versial and that the CCP backs their success in the international art market Artist and architect Ai Weiwei an extremely wellconnected cultural leader and entrepre neur celebrated for his birdsnest conception for the Beijing Olympic Stadium tweaked the partystate with his criticism of the Olympics encouraging Western journalists to publicize him as a dissident flirting with political danger A subsequent police beating house arrest and prosecution for vague economic offenses showed this to be true6 But for most creators and performers China is less repressive than Westerners often imagine As China has become more prosperous less Maoist and more like ordinary countries its censorship issues have also become more ordinary t h e a R t s 349 A nATIonAl QuesT FoR gloBAl CulTuRAl ResPeCT While the postMao Chinese partystate leads cultural policy with a lighter hand it uses cultural symbols for its political purposes The party continues to invoke the memory of revolution but recognizes that this is no longer an adequate claim to political legitimacy Instead the party substitutes a continuously expanding economy but adds to this a sometimes deft sometimes heavyhanded manipulation of nation alist cultural symbols One sees this in the restoration of once disfavored heroes of Chinese culture such as Confucius or Sun Yatsen who can appeal across region and class Chinas new prosperity has permitted an astonishing growth in public works not just railroads highways and airports but also prominent cultural infrastructure such as concert halls and museums in nearly all provincial capitals The impact of these shining new temples of culture is probably analogous to the wave of cultural construction that swept latenineteenthcentury Europe where nationalist politics were mixed with a desire to bind citizens together in the consciousness of a newly shared national culture China wants its culture to impress not only residents of Wuhan or Shanghai but foreigners as well This desire stems in part from the tradition of Confucian statecraft by which China awed lesser nations with its arts and inventions It also flows from the sense that China has left behind the period of national humiliation when it was unable to prevent imperialist armies from plundering its temples homes and palaces In the Maoist era China enjoyed extensive artistic ties to Eastern Europe until the eve of the Cultural Revolution China then sought cultural ties with third world nations such as Algeria or Indonesia with whom China planned a counterOlympicsthe Games of the New Emerging Forcesin the early 1960s But by the end of the Cultural Revolution China was so culturally isolated that screening Albanian or North Korean films was a major act of artistic exchange Maoist leaders viewed foreign culture with suspicion as uncontrolled or con trolled by outsiders Even foreign artists sympathetic to the revolution were treated with paranoia China invited Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni to China to make a threehour film Zhongguo China 1972 which the leftist filmmaker certainly intended to be sympathetic to the PRC But Antonionis fondness for filming the picturesque the antique and the humanpowered was misunderstood by Cultural Revolutionaries as an imperialist belittling of Chinas backwardness Few Chinese saw the movie although it was the subject of a fierce nationwide campaign of criticism in 1974 Zhongguo was not shown to a Chinese audience until 2004 Now Chinese filmgoers have experienced decades of postMao Western and Japanese cultural imports and Chinese citizens have increasingly become world trav elers The sustained economic growth of the past two decades has inspired a new level of national confidence so the nations leaders are less likely to bristle at foreign criticism At the same time China wants to promote its art and artists abroad Chinese media report with special joy the accomplishments of ethnically Chinese performers and art ists such as architect I M Pei American cellist YoYo Ma American pianist Lang 350 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Lang Chinese film directors Zhang Yimou Chinese and Ang Lee Taiwanese and actors Bruce Lee Hong Kong and Jackie Chan Hong Kong whether or not they are citizens of the Peoples Republic of China There was great pride in China when the renowned Italian tenor Placido Domingo sang the lead role of Qin Shihuangdi founder of the Chinese empire in 221 BCE at New Yorks Metropolitan Opera in Tan Duns The First Emperor The fact that works by several contemporary Chinese artists are now in great demand by Western collectors and command some of the highest prices in the global arts market is another source of satisfaction Even greater national pride was felt when novelist Mo Yan won the 2012 Nobel Literature Prize Chinas intellectuals had longed for this recognition of their nations cultural prowess for nearly a century When Gao Xingjian a dissident writer resi dent in France was awarded the prize in 2000 Chinese hopes remained unsatisfied Gao was mostly unknown within China and the Communist Party dismissed him as a French writer Mo Yans often bawdy and politically critical novels are popular in China But his role as leader of the official writers union led to hostile criticism from some Westerners that he was a Party stooge and unworthy of international admiration Many recent artistic accomplishments were achieved without partystate support Nonetheless most of the recent Chinese stars in the international art market have enjoyed free training in Chinese arts academies And some of their breakthrough works have been subsidized by the state This is true for instance of Xu Bings cel ebrated Book of the Sky a massive installation of nonsense Chinese characters printed from thousands of blocks carved by Xu7 The hugely successful Beijing arts district the 798 Factory enables artists to exhibit to Chinese and foreign visitors yet part of its charm is that it is reconfigured from a onetime military electronics factory a foreign aid project of East Germany8 Less glamorous but economically more important is the lowend art exemplified by the painting sweatshop village of Dafen Guangdong which exports millions of cheap oil paintings Here the arts harness lowcost labor for export product much like the shoe industry ConClusIon Chinas rulers have adopted a new approach to cultural policy withdrawing from micromanagement of the arts and only intervening in what they regard as key mat ters These include limiting the flow of news critical of the PRC protecting Chinas film industry against foreign competition and promoting cultural achievements with nationalist pride They are managing culture less but better Nevertheless the arts in the PRC remain more political than in the United States which unlike most nations has no ministry of culture to promote or oversee the arts Chinas approach to the arts would still seem intrusive to many Americans Although Chinas system assures frequent friction between artists and the state it honors Chinas inherited practice of government responsibility for the arts t h e a R t s 351 noTes 1 Bonnie S McDougall ed Mao Zedongs Talks at the Yanan Conference on Literature and Art A Translation of the 1943 Text with Commentary Ann Arbor University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies 1980 61 2 McDougall 73 3 Richard Curt Kraus Art Policies of the Cultural Revolution in New Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution ed William A Joseph Christine Wong and David Zweig et al Cambridge MA Harvard University Council on East Asian Studies 1991 219249 4 Jim Yardley In Grand Olympic Show Some Sleight of Voice New York Times August 12 2008 5 Lu Xun Meishu Xueyuan huifu yong moteer jinxing renti xiesheng jiaoxue Lu Xun Fine Arts Academy resumes use of models for classes in life drawing Meishu Fine Arts 16 May 1978 46 6 See the awardwinning documentary by Alison Klayman Ai Weiwei Never Sorry 2012 httpaiweiweineversorrycom 7 See Jerome Silbergeld and Dora CY Ching eds PersistenceTransformation Text as Image in the Art of Xu Bing Princeton NJ Princeton University Press 2006 8 Huang Rui ed Beijing 798 Reflections on Art Architecture and Society in China Beijing timezone 8 Thinking Hands 2004 suggesTed ReAdIngs Andrews Julia F Painters and Politics in the Peoples Republic of China 19491979 Berkeley University of California Press 1994 Barmé Geremie In the Red On Contemporary Chinese Culture New York Columbia University Press 1999 Clark Paul The Chinese Cultural Revolution A History Cambridge Cambridge University Press 2008 Curtin Michael Playing to the Worlds Biggest Audience The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV Berkeley University of California Press 2007 Huot Claire Chinas New Cultural Scene Durham NC Duke University Press 2000 Kraus Richard Curt The Party and the Arty Chinas New Politics of Culture Lanham MD Rowman Littlefield 2004 Link Perry The Uses of Literature Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System Princeton NJ Princeton University Press 2000 Lovell Julia The Politics of Cultural Capital Chinas Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature Honolulu University of Hawaii Press 2006 Mittler Barbara A Continuous Revolution Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 2013 Mo Yan The Garlic Ballads Howard Goldblatt trans New York Arcade Publishing 2012 Silbergeld Jerome Contradictions An Artistic Life the Socialist State and the Chinese Painter Li Huasheng Seattle University of Washington Press 1993 Wang Jing Brand New China Advertising Media and Commercial Culture Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 2008 Zha Jianying China Pop How Soap Operas Tabloids and Bestsellers Are Transforming a Culture New York New Press 1995 12 In traditional Chinese philosophy wise leadership was based on achieving a balanced approach to the humannature relationship known as tian ren he yi harmony between heaven and humankind The values of moderation and adaptation meant that sustainable forms of agriculture forestry management and the protection of biodiversity were in evidence centuries ago Such prac tices however did not prevent environmental misman agement Over time Chinas ecological balance became disrupted by excessive land cultivation and the extraction of natural resources in the pursuit of state industrial and military power This reached a peak during the Mao era when ren ding sheng tianhumans must conquer naturebecame the new meta phor for understanding the relationship between humans and nature with devastat ing environmental consequences1 More recently over thirty years of rapid economic growth have placed further pressures on the natural environment The Peoples Republic of China PRC is now home to some of the most polluted cities in the world over 70 percent of its riv ers and lakes are seriously polluted and ecological degradation is widespread The scale and severity of Chinas environmental problems threaten the sustainability of its modernization drive Many commentators have warned of impending eco nomic collapse deepening social conflicts and political breakdown Opportunities to reverse negative environmental trends and transition toward a more sustainable path of development still exist but the timeframe for taking action is now shorter Consequently the new Xi Jinping leadership faces a critical policy dilemma how to meet continuing demands for economic growth while simultaneously solving a ris ing ecological debt crisis that is already undermining the health and prosperity of the Policy Case Study The Environment KATh eRI ne m oRTon t h e e n v i R o n m e n t 353 Chinese population2 The stakes are high both at home and abroad At a broader level the domestic pattern of development inevitably affects the international distribution of resources and the global environment Over the coming years the direction that China takes in responding to environmental challenges will have considerable impli cations for its own future as well as that of the rest of the world This case study will discuss Chinas contemporary environmental challenges within a broader global perspective It begins with an overview of the current environmen tal crisis and its spillover effects beyond borders This is followed by a brief review of evolving government responses and civil society initiatives at the grassroots Attention then turns to identifying the core challenges that remain especially in the poorer and more ecologically fragile regions The final part of the case study discusses the potential for a more sustainable future that takes into account the importance of leadership at both the domestic and global levels ChInAs envIRonmenTAl CRIsIs In The mAKIng Problems of landslides flooding deforestation and increased silt loads in rivers have existed in China for centuries The uniqueness of the current environmental crisis lies in its scale severity and interdependence with the outside world Most visible to the outside observer are the rising levels of pollution China is now the worlds leading emitter of sulfur dioxide SO2 emissionsin many cities exceeding World Health Organization recommendations by two to five times3 SO2 pollution is a precursor of acid rain which now covers roughly 30 percent of the total land area of China In the major cities of Shanghai Beijing and Guangzhou nitrogen oxide NOx emis sions have also risen dramatically As a result of heavy traffic pollution these cities are experiencing LosAngelesstyle photochemical smog on a regular basis The rapid rise in car ownership means that air pollution is likely to get far worse before it gets better Between 2000 and 2012 the number of cars on the roads in Beijing quadru pled to around five million On a significant number of days in the year breathing the air in Beijing is now equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes per day Severe air pollution peaked in January 2013 when a thick noxious smog blanketed the nations capital for three weeks Described by some observers as Beijings airpocalypse small airborne particulates PM 25 considered extremely hazardous to public health sur passed 500 micrograms per square meter more than twenty times the recommended government safety levels4 Water pollution has also reached record levels The industrial discharge of toxic substances such as mercury phenol chromium and cyanide is largely to blame together with untreated municipal wastewater and fertilizer runoff Over half of the monitored urban river sections in northern China do not meet the lowest ambient standard grade 5the water is officially classified as unfit even for irrigation Despite efforts to enforce regulatory controls an estimated three hundred million people almost a quarter of the Chinese population still do not have access to clean water The trends relating to ecological degradation in China are just as sobering According to official statistics 90 percent of Chinas grasslands have become degraded and desertificationthe gradual transformation of habitable land into 354 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a desertnow covers onethird of Chinas land base Forest resources are scarce 20 percent of the total land area compared to 33 percent in the United States and wetlands have been reduced by 60 percent In addition almost 40 percent of the nation suffers from soil erosion as deforestation and unsustainable farm ing practices cause 10000 square kilometers about 3900 sq mi of lost soil per annum The sediment discharge from soil erosion is filling up rivers and lakes thus contributing to the frequency of flooding At the same time water scarcity is reaching a critical threshold China holds the fourthlargest freshwater reserves in the world but they are unevenly distributed and per capita water use is only onequarter of the world average Most of the water supply to major cities depends upon groundwater pumped from aquifers geological formations that store water underground but these are drying up or becoming depleted due to the accumula tion of salts in the soil An estimated three hundred cities across China now face severe water shortages Transboundary effects The spillover effects of Chinas environmental problems began to attract attention in the early 1990s when it became apparent that a significant proportion of acid rain in Korea and Japan had its origins in China Dust and aerial pollutants are now transported as far as the United States and high levels of toxic pollution in the East China Sea Bohai Sea and Pearl River Delta are having a serious impact on regional fish stocks In 2005 the explosion of a stateowned petrochemical plant in Jilin province which released tons of toxic benzene into the Songhua River affecting water supply in Harbin as well as the Russian city of Khabarovsky placed a spot light on the need for significant improvements in information disclosure as well as monitoring systems across the SinoRussian border A year later a 106kilometer long diesel slick flowing into the Bohai Sea resulted in additional pressure on the Chinese government to establish a regulatory framework for protecting the marine environment In an era of global interdependence it is becoming increasingly difficult to apportion blame for transboundary environmental problems Foreign firms gen erate a significant portion of pollutants in China and an estimated 40 percent of Chinas total energy demand ends up in exported manufactured goods Thus con sumers in other parts of the world benefit considerably from Chinas status as a global factory and it is fair to say they are also one source of the PRCs increasing demand for energy and natural resources which in turn has an impact on the regional and global environment At the regional level it is widely known that the cascade of dams built on the Mekong River in Yunnan province poses serious risks for countries downstream Laos Burma Thailand Vietnam and Cambodia Although less than onesixth of the Mekong Rivers total water catchment is located in China changes in water flows especially during the dry season can have negative impacts on irrigation and fisheries downstream Equally worrying is the destruction of Burmas northern frontier forests by Chinese loggers Following a logging ban imposed by the Chinese government in 1998 the importation of t h e e n v i R o n m e n t 355 illegal logs from across the ChinaBurma border has increased exponentially to meet the huge demand for timber that comes largely from the almost uncontrolled building boom in the PRC Consequences of Climate Change At the global level Chinas rising contribution to global CO2 carbon dioxide emis sions from fossil fuel combustion has attracted significant attention The burning of coal in particular pumps millions of tons of chemicals into the atmosphere China is dependent upon coal to meet 78 percent of its total energy needs Efforts are now underway to invest in alternative sources and China is becoming a world leader in developing cleaner coal burning technology solar panels and wind turbines5 but energy demand is outpacing reforms thus highly polluting coal will remain the pri mary source of Chinas energy supply for the foreseeable future As a consequence in 2007 China overtook the United States with 25 percent of the worlds total CO2 emis sions to become the worlds biggest emitter see Figure 1216 Although per capita emissions are still relatively low in 2011 China emitted 72 tons of CO2 per capita compared with 19 tons in Australia and 173 tons in the United States they have already reached European Union levels Not surprisingly at the international level the Chinese government remains com mitted to the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities based on his toric cumulative emissions It points out that the developed countries did not sac rifice growth for environmental concerns during their industrial revolutions and insists that it is the responsibility of richer countries to take the lead in cutting emis sions During recent United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change 0 2000 4000 6000 8000 10000 12000 14000 1980 1990 2005 2006 2010 2015 2020 2025 2030 Million Metric Tons Carbon Dioxide United States OECD Europe Japan India China FIguRe 121 Carbon Dioxide Emissions 19802030 Source International Energy Outlook 2013 Energy Information Administration US Department of Energy httpwwweia govforecastsaeodatacfm 356 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a talks Chinas stance has softened to some degree It now supports legally binding emissions caps post2020 nationally appropriate mitigation actions contingent upon the transfer of enabling finance and technology from industrialized states and it has agreed to provide biannual reports on mitigation action as well as to submit reports on greenhouse gas emissions The Chinese government increasingly recognizes that the consequences of climate change demand an immediate response In Chinas first National Climate Change Assessment Report published in late 2006 it was predicted that the average annual temperature could increase between 13 and 21 degrees by 2020 and as much as 33 degrees by 2050 Major cities in coastal areas will face serious challenges due to rising sea levels and extreme weather patterns are likely to increase The impact of climate change on the QinghaiTibetan Plateau in Chinas far west is particularly worrying for both China and the Asia region As the largest freshwa ter reserve outside the polar ice caps the Plateau is also known as Asias water tower or the Third Pole For climate change the Plateau is the equivalent of the prover bial canary in the coalmine that stopped singing or died as a warning to miners of dangerous methane gas buildup The glaciers that feed Asias great riversthe Yellow Yangtze Mekong Salween Indus Ganges and Brahmaputrahave shrunk by at least 17 percent over the past decade While the overall trend is one of gla cial retreat melting is occurring at different rates depending upon variables such as elevation and rainfall Glacial melt has dramatic adverse effects on biodiversity people and livelihoods with longterm implications for water food and energy security Over the longer term higher temperatures will increase flooding in the rainy season and reduce water in the dry season thus affecting food production in the provinces downstream as well as the livelihoods of over a billion people in China South Asia and Southeast Asia Eventually water shortages will occur on a massive scale This is particularly troubling given that Asia already has less fresh waterabout 3920 cubic meters about 5130 cu yd per personthan any other continent outside Antarctica In effect Chinas current development trajectory represents a fragile balance between human and environmental needs that cannot be sustained over time Is an environmental catastrophe inevitable or does the potential exist to shift toward a more sustainable pattern of development Clearly much will depend upon Chinas capacity to adapt How is the Chinese government responding to the crisis And to what extent can citizen participation help to alleviate environmental problems TAKIng ACTIon goveRnmenT ResPonses Over the past two decades the Chinese government has expressed a growing com mitment toward environmental protection the regulatory and legal frameworks have expanded with a stronger emphasis upon ecological protection as well as pollution control Environmental priorities have been fully integrated into the state fiveyear plans for development culminating in the twelfth fiveyear plan 20112015 that sig nals a turning point in the shift toward a less resourceintensive model of economic growth Strategically environmental protection is now considered a pillar industry t h e e n v i R o n m e n t 357 alongside information technology and biotechnology The government plans to invest 5 trillion yuan US761 billion in the newenergy sector by 2020 The most important change to have taken place is at the attitudinal level During the early stage of economic reforms in the 1980s and early 1990s environmental issues remained low on the political agenda Rising pollution and other forms of envi ronmental degradation were seen as an inevitable consequence of modernization Environmental protection became a fundamental state policy jiben guoce in 1993 opening the way for further environmental laws and regulations There now exists a realization at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party CCP that the pursuit of economic growth at all costs is no longer environmentally or socially sus tainable At the Eighteenth National Party Congress the concept of ecological prog ress was officially incorporated into the Party Constitution and ecological imperatives now underpin the broader strategy of building socialism with Chinese characteristics As in the case of most other countries China lacks a centralized regulatory author ity capable of mainstreaming environmental concerns into development policymak ing It also experiences the familiar problem of poor interagency coordination The upgrading of the State Environmental Protection Administration to a cabinetlevel Ministry of Environmental Protection in March 2008 has not led to a significant increase in its authority at the central level and the political status of environmental agencies working at the local level still have limited power to enforce regulations Despite these problems governing the environment from above has led to some impressive results Most notably China is now leading rather than following many industrialized states in the pursuit of more efficient and cleaner energy It is on track to meet its voluntary target of reducing carbon intensity by unit of GDP between 40 to 45 percent from 2005 levels by 2020 This is largely due to the forced closure of hundreds of inefficient coalfired power plants and stateowned industries such as paper and pulp production copper smelting and cement production7 Plans are also underway to increase the share of nonfossil fuels in primary energy production to around 11 percent in 2015 China has overtaken the United States in wind energy capacity 418 GW of installed turbines in 2011 but it lags far behind in the devel opment of shale gas due to technical and legal barriers A nationwide campaign has helped to promote cleaner production methods in Chinese factories strict vehicle emissions standards have been imposed in major cities and reforestation programs are beginning to reap rewards Since the late 1990s the State Forestry Administration has planted more than four million hectares of new forest each year and further mea sures are in place to expand forest coverage by forty million hectares by 2020 from 2005 levels China is now leading the world in the conservation of carbon sinks Coinciding with the shift toward a marketbased economy topdown command and control measures are no longer seen as the only means of protecting the envi ronment To reduce pollution market incentives are slowly being used to internal ize environmental costs For example an environmentally informative labeling plan is now in place to promote green consumerism a quota system for regulating SO2 emissions has been set up in some provinces and cities and new proposals have been introduced to place a monetary value on scarce resources such as water and coal More ambitiously to initiate a market mechanism for carbon pricing new CO2 trading schemes are operating in seven provinces and cities Guangdong Hubei 358 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Beijing Chongqing Shanghai Shenzhen and Tianjin with permits issued by local exchanges envIRonmenTAlIsm FRom Below Citizen involvement in environmental protection is also expanding The Chinese print and television media play a critical role in channeling public opinion and new forms of electronic government have provided an alternative virtual means of solic iting citizen ideas for environmental improvement8 Public participation is demon strated most clearly in the emergence of environmental nongovernmental organiza tions NGOs that are seeking to bring about changes at the local level According to the NGO Center for Research at Tsinghua University over 3500 environmental NGOs are now operating across China9 They vary greatly in the scope of their activities the degree of government autonomy and access to resources What they tend to share in common is a strong desire for environmental reforms To this end many prioritize the importance of environmental education including training for government officials Others focus on advocating alternative solutions for restor ing degraded ecosystems or improving the effectiveness of pollution control mecha nisms At the community level small initiatives can gain momentum A group of environmentalists in Gansu have helped to protect the habitat of the wild camel lead ing to the construction of a new nature reserve a small NGO advocating the reduc tion of pesticide use in Yunnan has facilitated a revival in organic farming in Qinghai a grassroots organization has successfully campaigned against the use of plastic bags in areas on the Tibetan Plateau thus preempting a nationwide ban that came into effect on June 1 2008 and in Beijing many groups are working to advance energy conservation at the community level10 The problem is that these kinds of initiatives often generate considerable resis tance from local vested interests including bureaucrats and business owners who do not want to do anything that may limit economic growth or lessen profits This is exacerbated by the fact that the political status of NGOs in China remains unclear Government regulations on social organizationsfirst promulgated by the State Council following the studentled prodemocracy movement in 1989are highly restrictive The partystate is largely supportive of NGOs whose agenda coincides with its own which is the case with many aspects of environmental protection That said the Chinese authorities are intolerant of any social movement or organization that is perceived to pose a direct threat to the regime or national stability Consequently selfcensorship remains a unique characteristic of Chinese environmental activism Although this does not necessarily impede effective action it does restrict the ability of NGOs to fulfill their creative potential as advocates of environmental protection In effect bringing about reforms from below remains limited by the refusal to relin quish control from above The extent to which state controls can continue to subdue public grievances over the longer term is a serious question Social media ensures that environmen tal disastersfrom toxic algae bloom in Lake Tai that turned the water fluores cent green to thousands of dead pigs floating in Shanghais Huangpu Riverare t h e e n v i R o n m e n t 359 no longer hidden from public view Even more alarming for the party leadership is the fact that thousands of people armed with facemasks and mobile phones are now taking to the street to protest against polluting industries across China According to the conservative estimates of the Ministry of Civil Affairs there were more than eighty thousand environmental protests in 2012 alone The majority of protests are still highly localized and limited to rural areas However largescale demonstrations in urban areas facilitated by the spread of mobile communica tions are gaining momentum Mass protests against chemical factories producing paraxylenea toxic petrochemical used in the manufacture of polyester paints and plastictook place in the coastal cities of Xiamen in 2007 Dalian in 2011 and again in Ningbo in late October 2012 just before the Eighteenth Party Congress Seen by many as a victory for people power the demonstrations caught the atten tion of the central authorities in Beijing leading to production suspensions and factory relocations For those living with the consequences of environmental pollution the potential exists to seek compensation through legal means The Chinese media have reported a growing number of cases in which citizens have filed lawsuits against pollut ing enterprises often with the support of legal aid centers A 2011 landmark case involved mussel farmers in Tianjin who sought compensation via the Maritime Court for environmental harm caused by a coastal oil pipeline spill The plaintiffs received US19 million Environmental litigation is still at an early stage of development but the fact that ordinary citizens are pursing a legal means of redress suggests a rise in public confidence in Chinas legal system Equally promising is the fact that pollut ers are facing more serious punitive action In the wake of a rising tide of environ mental disasters special environmental courts have been set up in Wuxi Guiyang and Yunnan In a highprofile case in Yancheng Jiangsu the chairman of a chemical company that had discharged toxic chemicals into the citys water supply received an elevenyear prison sentence11 lImITs To envIRonmenTAl ReFoRm Taking into account Chinas level of economic development the new initiatives described above provide grounds for optimism In seeking a sense of perspective however it is important to bear in mind that the overall strategy for economic development in China is still one of progrowth with the aim of quadrupling per capita income by 2020 In addition current efforts toward protecting the environ ment are limited by three key constraints weak implementation at the local level an overreliance upon largescale engineering solutions and a highly centralized decisionmaking process The Implementation deficit It is now widely recognized that environmental policies are extremely difficult to implement in China because of weak compliance at the local level The basic problem 360 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a is that selfserving officials collude with local enterprises to pursue profits at a cost to the environment The situation is made worse by the fact that dirty factories are relocating away from large urban cities and into rural areas where regulatory con trol is weaker A sobering example is the village of Xinsi in Gansu province where more than 250 children are reported to be suffering from lead poisoningwith up to five times the bloodlead levels considered safe by the World Health Organization Local villagers were unaware of the significant health risks involved in living next to a lead factory and their children now live with the consequences of severe intellectual impairment12 It is already clear that uneven development is leading to a situation in which the richer regions can more easily adapt Given that Chinas poorest regionsincluding Tibet and Xinjiangare also the most ecologically fragile a fundamental challenge for the Chinese government is to ensure that the burden of responsibility for environ mental protection does not fall on the shoulders of those who are least able to carry it Over the longer term the risk is that sustainability will become the preserve of the rich thus exacerbating preexisting inequities The engineering Fix A second major constraint on environmental protection is the continuing reliance on largescale engineering projects that offset the benefits of alternative solutions The construction of the highly controversial Three Gorges Dam Sanxia on the Yangtze River that has achieved the goal of generating 225 GW of electricity equivalent to fifteen nuclear reactors but in the process caused significant ecological disruption and the displacement of more than 15 million people is a good example of this trend13 Equally problematic is the southnorth water transfer program nanshui beidiao gongcheng that aims to alleviate flooding in the south and water scarcity in the north by diverting water from the Yangtze to the North China Plain Three planned routes have been designed to connect the Yangtze with the Huang Huai and Hai rivers Construction is now underway Potential problems include largescale soil salinization polluted sewage water intrusion and adverse effects upon aquatic life along the route China has the highest number of large dams above fifteen meters fortynine feet high in the worldtwentythousand or almost half of the worlds total With plans to approve 140 GW of new hydropower projects by 2015 we are likely to witness a dam building frenzy in the coming years As noted by Vaclav Smil it is not the emphasis upon dam building per se that is the problem What is of concern is the obsession with scale and the inability to approach the harnessing of natural resources with an appreciation of the environmental and social costs involved14 In the case of the Three Gorges Dam the costs are already apparent The huge weight of water behind the dam is causing erosion of the riverbank leading to landslides the quality of water in the tributaries of the Yangtze has severely deteriorated and sediment accumulation is greatly reducing the dams future capacity for power generation and flood control15 From an international standpoint a major concern is the fact that Chinas infrastruc ture investments overseas are equally lax in conforming to environmental and social safeguards t h e e n v i R o n m e n t 361 A lack of openness A third constraint relates to Chinas highly centralized decisionmaking process The relevance of public accountability in the Chinese context lies in its potential to act as a vital check against political excess and as a corrective to policy interven tions that exacerbate rather than alleviate public concerns Witness the draconian measures that were taken by local officials to meet national energysavings targets in 2010 in some instances cutting off power to critical households businesses and hospitals16 At a minimum accountability can only happen within the context of an open society supported by the rule of law The free flow of information is essential for effective policymaking to take place The implementation of a national sustainability agenda relies upon learning by doing that requires high levels of transparency across the policymaking system An open public debate also plays a central role in the negotiation of the difficult tradeoffs between individual con cerns and social and environmental needs as perceived by the Chinese people who are understandably mostly concerned about raising the living standards for themselves and their family Above all a balanced assessment of the complex rela tionships between poverty alleviation energy security and environmental protec tion cannot be made if decisionmaking power is highly concentrated this inevi tably increases the risk that powerful vested interests will hold sway over broader public concerns National measures on environmental information disclosure introduced in the PRC in May 2008 are a positive step in the right direction Under these guidelines environmental agencies are required to disclose information on enterprises exceed ing discharge quotas For their part corporations are under the obligation to disclose discharge data within a certain period of time or pay a fine of up to 100000 yuan roughly US14500 It is already evident that these measures are helping to improve regulatory compliance across China but they are unlikely to provide a substitute for active public participation Is A moRe susTAInABle FuTuRe PossIBle Overall Chinas approach to environmental governance is a story of continuity and change A strong preference for topdown decisionmaking still remains but it coexists with new forms of nonstate activism that reflect greater pluralism within Chinese society In the early twentyfirst century Chinese leaders are caught between a continuing desire to control nature via largescale engineering projects and a new aspiration to chart an alternative development path that reconciles human and environmental needs Ecological civilization is the most recent metaphor employed by the Chinese partystate for understanding the relationship between humans and nature that prom ises to transform the processes of industrialization and in turn reconnect Chinese civi lization with its environmental genesis It is a key part of former PRC President and CCP General Secretary Hu Jintaos socalled scientific outlook on development and his com mitment to creating a harmonious socialist society see chapters 4 and 5 The Xi Jinping 362 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a leadership that took office in 20122013 has advanced the notion of combining socialist modernization with ecological progress How these ideas actually translate into action remains to be seen This new thinking reflects a deeper cultural aspiration that has yet to permeate through the domestic agenda For this to happen further reforms are required to support public participation in environmental efforts Ultimately redressing the bal ance between human and environmental needs is not simply a question of improving efficiency and taking corrective measures it can only be achieved if the Chinese people who stand to benefitboth rich and poorare central to the process Tipping the balance in favor of sustainability will also require greater cooperation at the international level A fundamental problem with current Chinese practice is that efforts to protect environmental and human welfare are largely concentrated within Chinas territorial boundaries This is not to suggest that China has failed to participate in relevant international treaties and regimes Rather it is to make the point that given the transboundary nature of environmental problems Chinas grow ing demands for resources from other nations see chapter 8 and its emerging role as an international donor of aid to lessdeveloped countries much more needs to be done to enhance environmental cooperation at the international level In short the internationalization of stateowned enterprises under the mandate of the govern ments go global strategy requires environmental and social safeguards Clearly leadership by the more developed countries is imperative if China is to strengthen its role in multilateral efforts to address climate change Transfers of knowledge funds and clean technologies will also remain important in the short to medium term At the same time a strong case can be made for a parallel transfer of experience and resources from the PRC to other developing countries that look to China as a model of development This kind of cooperation is long overdue and it may well help to break the unsustainable pattern of economic development that exists globally In the coming years the touchstone of the success of Chinas transi tion toward a sustainable model of development will be the extent to which it is able to reverse negative environmental trends and demonstrate an alternative vision both within and beyond its territorial boundaries noTes 1 See Judith Shapiro Maos War against Nature Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China New York Cambridge University Press 2001 2 Chinas ecological footprint measured on the basis of human demand on ecosys tems relative to their capacity to regenerate has quadrupled over the past four decades Today China has the largest biocapacity deficit amongst all nations See WWF and China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development China Ecological Footprint Report 2010 Biocapacity Cities and Development Beijing WWF and CCICED 2010 3 Unless otherwise stated the statistics used in this case study are taken from the offi cial Chinese environmental yearbooks and the website of the Ministry of Environmental Protection httpwwwmepgovcn t h e e n v i R o n m e n t 363 4 The US embassy in Beijing posts hourly air quality readings for the city at httpwww stateairnetwebpost11html 5 See Keith Bradhser China Leading Race to Make Clean Energy New York Times January 30 2010 and Worldwatch Institute China Leads Growth in Global Wind Power Capacity May 30 2012 wwwworldwatchorgchinaleadsgrowthglobalwindpo wercapacity 6 Between 1950 and 2002 Chinas cumulative CO2 emissions totaled only 93 percent of the world total Up until the turn of the twentyfirst century the Chinese economy grew without placing a significant burden on energy resources This has recently changed as a consequence of an investmentled shift back to heavy industry together with higher lev els of consumption growth Hence the rapid growth in carbon emissions is a fairly new phenomenon 7 It is however important to recognize that reducing carbon intensity does not guaran tee a reduction in overall carbon emissions Under conditions in which a structural energy mix remains constant energy intensity declines naturally with economic growth even while absolute energy consumption continues to increase 8 For example in the planning stage of the tenth fiveyear plan 20012006 the National Development and Reform Commission was reported to have received over ten thousand suggestions from citizens many of which were environmentrelated 9 Liu Sha Environmental NGOs Grow Across China But Still Struggle for Support Global Times December 6 2012 wwwglobaltimescncontent714330shtml 10 To date much of the literature on environmental activism in China has tended to focus on a small number of relatively independent organizations in Beijing such as Friends of Nature or Global Village Many organizations are also working below the radar in diverse regions of China as noted in these examples 11 Lucy Hornby Chinese Executives Sentenced for Polluting Lake Reuters June 2 2009 wwwreuterscomarticleenvironmentNewsidUSTRE5513G820090602 12 Shai Oster and Jane Spencer A Poison Spreads Amid Chinas Boom Wall Street Journal September 30 2006 13 Other concerns include silt buildup behind the dam which is highly likely to stall power generation and place the dam in jeopardy as well as block downstream regions of vital nutrients resulting in the destruction of much of Chinas finest scenery and wetlands habitat 14 Vaclav Smil Chinas Past Chinas Future Energy Food Environment London Routledge Curzon 2004 190ff 15 Serious silt buildup in the Three Gorges reservoir is encouraging further dam build ing in the tributaries of the Yangtze thus leading to a vicious cycle of ecological degradation without significantly improving energy security 16 Yuan Duanduan and Feng Jie Behind Chinas Green Goals ChinaDialogue March 24 2011 wwwchinadialoguenetarticleshowsingleen4181BehindChinasgreengoals suggesTed ReAdIngs Economy Elizabeth C The River Runs Black The Environmental Challenge to Chinas Future Ithaca NY Cornell University Press 2004 Geall Sam China and the Environment The Green Revolution London and New York Zed Books 2013 Liu Jianguo and Jared Diamond Chinas Environment in a Globalizing World How China and the Rest of the World Affect Each Other Nature 435 June 2005 11791186 364 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Ma Jun Chinas Water Crisis Translated by Nancy Yang Lin and Lawrence R Sullivan Norwalk CT EastBridge 2004 Mertha Andrew C Chinas Water Warriors Citizen Action and Policy Change Ithaca NY Cornell University Press 2008 Morton Katherine International Aid and Chinas Environment Taming the Yellow Dragon London Routledge 2005 Shapiro Judith Chinas Environmental Challenges Cambridge UK Polity Press 2012 Smil Vaclav Chinas Environmental Crisis An Inquiry into the Limits of National Development Armonk NY M E Sharpe 1993 Stern Rachel E Environmental Litigation in China A Study in Political Ambivalence New York Cambridge University Press 2013 Yang Ruby and Thomas Lennon The Warriors of Qiugong Documentary on the Struggle to Save Chinas Environment New York and Beijing Thomas Lennon Films and Chang Ai Media Project 2010 Health care provision and health care policy are impor tant themes in Chinas modern history and contemporary politics From the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries up to the time of the founding of the Peoples Republic of China PRC China was known as the sick man of Asia with high rates of death from infectious and preventable diseases In fact the blatant neglect of the publics health was a rallying cry for change at the end of the republican era One appeal of communism to Chinas vast rural population was the promise of equitable social welfare investment espe cially for health and education During the early years of the new regime attention to health and other social issues began to pay off with rapid improvements in reducing mortality rates and increasing life expectancy Health policy during the Maoist era gave priority to primary care preventive medicine and equitable access to services that made Chinas population among the healthiest in the developing world But in the 1980s and 1990s the shift to a marketized economy and fiscal decentral ization led to the breaking of the iron rice bowl that had guaranteed most Chinese free or inexpensive social services including health care By the end of the 1990s medical expenses topped the list of reasons that rural families gave for falling into poverty1 A World Health Organization WHO report in 2000 ranked the PRCs health system at number 144 out of 191 countries according to measures such as the overall level of population health health care inequalities fair financing and patient satisfaction2 In more recent years Chinas response to epidemics like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome SARS and AIDS have shown how bureaucratic governance of health Policy Case Study Public Health Jo An K AuF mAn 13 366 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a policy can both adversely affect the control of emerging infectious diseases and con tribute to positive change After the SARS debacle in 2003 the Hu Jintao admin istration 20022012 made medical care financing and reform a key part of their equityoriented political agenda under the rubric of creating a harmonious socialist society that resulted in significant improvements in areas like insurance coverage This case study reviews the main phases of public health policy in China since 1949 and highlights achievements challenges and future prospects The SARS crisis is discussed as a major turning point in Chinas approach to health policy and the governments response to HIVAIDS from 1985 to 2013 will be used as a window into how health policy is made and revised in the PRC The mAoIsT APPRoACh To PuBlIC heAlTh Control of infectious diseases rampant in China before 1949 was an initial priority for the communist government Preventable infectious diseases such as plague and cholera vaccinepreventable childhood diseases and vectorborne diseases such as schistosomiasis snail fever and intestinal parasites worms sickened and killed mil lions each year in the precommunist era3 A campaign approach to public health utilizing propaganda and mass mobilization was developed during these early years of the regime and the patriotic health campaigns have been a hallmark of Chinas approach to health policy implementation ever since One of the first actions of the new regime after 1949 was the launching of a mas sive campaign to eradicate sexually transmitted diseases involving both political and health service approaches4 Prostitutes were arrested and sent for rehabilitation and job training while medical workers diagnosed and treated their sexually transmitted diseases A mass campaign against opium use which emphasized treating addicts as victims of the old society and imperialism rather than as criminals or deviants but also made use of coercion including capital punishment for dealers had by 1952 essentially eliminated an epidemic that had plagued China for more than a hundred years5 To bring infectious diseases under control a combination of political mobilization and investment in public health projects such as improving sanitation the training and deploying of a corps of primary health care workers to staff subsidized essentially free health stations throughout the country and nutritional improvements brought about by increased agricultural production and improved food supply system set in motion a dramatic epidemiological transition during the 1960s and 1970s As a result death rates fell to levels only seen in countries with higher per capita incomes When the PRC was founded in 1949 life expectancy in China was just thirtyfive years By the mid1950s it had increased by about ten years and at the end of the Maoist era in 1976 life expectancy had risen to sixtysix Likewise there were dra matic improvements in maternal mortality death in childbirth and infant mortal ity see Table 131 due at least in part to the reduction in the number of births per woman from over six in the 1950s to a little over half that by 1976 Of course the politically induced Great Leap Famine that led to as many as fortyfive million deaths was a tragic setback to improving the health of the Chinese people P u B l i c h e a l t h 367 Chinas primary health care system became a target of the Cultural Revolution after Mao had proclaimed in 1965 The Ministry of Public Health is not a Ministry of Public Health for the people so why not change its name to the Ministry of Urban Health the Ministry of Gentlemens Health or even to Ministry of Urban Gentlemens Health In medical and health work put the emphasis on the coun tryside6 Reflecting a historical tension in China as in many other countries about the balance between investing in the urban hospital system versus rural public health the PRCs health spending pendulum shifted strongly toward the construction of a preventionfocused equityoriented public health approach for the rural poor dur ing the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath an approach that was often touted as a model for the developing world7 Because the rural economy was organized into large agricultural production units the peoples communes it was possible to allocate a portion of the commune funds to support such an approach including a rudimentary health insurance system With basic services provided at the village level by about two million minimally trained community health workers called barefoot doctors and a network of clinics and better health facilities and hospitals at higher levels of administration most rural citi zens had access to basic medical care8 In the late 1970s over 90 percent of rural citizens were covered by a health insur ance system called the Cooperative Medical Scheme CMS Since rural mobility was restricted by the household registration hukou system and insurance coverage was dependent on referral up the tiered chain from village clinic to commune hospital to county facility access to higher and more expensive levels of health care was care fully controlled The locallevel curative health system of basic care was supported by investments in preventive health through the patriotic health campaigns that carried out public projects such as insect and snail control and improving access to clean water These TABLE 131 Chinas Health c 19502011 C 1950 19781980 2000 2011 India US 2011 2011 Life Expectancy at birth years 401 660 712 735 655 786 Infant Mortality per 1000 live births 250 589 288 126 472 64 Under 5 Child Mortality per 1000 live births 260 794 350 146 613 75 Maternal Mortality per 100000 births 1500 165 57 26 200 21 Sources Dean T Jamison and World Bank 1984 China the Health Sector Washington DC World Bank Nancy E Riley Chinas Population New Trends and Challenges Population Bulletin 592 June 2004 Washington DC Population Reference Bureau httpwwwprborgSource592ChinasPopNewTrendspdf Medical and Health Services in China Xinhua December 26 20112 httpnewsxinhuanetcomenglishchina20121226c1320648362htm Gao Yanqiu Carine Ronsmans and An Lin Time Trends and Regional Differences in Maternal Mortality in China from 2000 to 2005 Bulletin of the World Health Organization August 25 2009 httpwwwwhointbulletinvolumes871208060426en China Profile httpwwwchinaprofilecomdatafigWPP20105q0Bothshtm World Bank World Development Indicators 368 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a campaigns also educated the public about disease prevention through such means as handwashing prenatal care and immunizations While few rural Chinese wish for a return to the restrictions and shared poverty of the commune system which was dismantled in the early 1980s when the country returned to family farming and a market economy and few would glorify the quality of Chinas rural medical care system in the Maoist era many long for a return to its equity and emphasis on prevention and these themes have permeated the current debates on health reform and are reflected in some of the new reform initiatives mARKeT ReFoRms And heAlTh CARe After the breakup of the commune system in the early 1980s the rural CMS was dis mantled and health care financing was delegated to provinces and local areas includ ing villages which turned to the market economy to provide the necessary funds by privatizing much of the health care system Since their village was no longer able to pay them barefoot doctors either returned to farming or became feeforservice private practitioners which was a blow to providing equitable basic health care in rural China As public financing of health care decreased the unregulated market especially for drugs and medical tests steadily increased the price of care Limited public finances were diverted to cover staff salaries at county and townshiplevel facilities Health care stations at the local level were supported by village governments but medical staff salaries had to be earned from fees for service and drug sales By 1993 only 13 percent of rural residents were still covered by rural health insurance9 Rural citi zens who could afford to do so bypassed township former commune facilities for the better countylevel care undermining the tiered referral chain and introducing high levels of health care inequality in the countryside There were also numerous indicators of the reemergence of sharp urbanrural inequalities in the distribution of health care resources and access In 1999 of total government health spending a full 25 percent occurred in just four of Chinas wealthi est cities and provinces Beijing Shanghai Zhejiang and Jiangsu In 2002 80 percent of medical services were located in cities although 60 percent of Chinas population lived in the rural areas10 It was precisely this inequitable investment and urban focus of the medical system that was the rallying cry for Mao during the Cultural Revolution While health reform is now back on the governments policy agenda reconstructing an equitable health system is a stated priority but closing the gap will not be easy The health care system that has been in place since the 1980s when the reform era began with its focus on patient feebased financing of curative rather than preven tive care has shifted attention and investments away from vital public health edu cation and public works that reduce both chronic and infectious diseases like pro viding of clean drinking water pest eradication and education for healthy lifestyles Even with recent improvements in health insurance coverage see below the focus remains on curative services This threatens the ability to control new emerging and common infectious diseases and to prevent the serious and more costly complica tions of noncommunicable diseases like diabetes heart disease and tobaccorelated P u B l i c h e a l t h 369 illnesses which now constitute 70 percent of Chinas disease burden11 The level of curative care in rural China however has greatly improved and most essential drugs are available even in remote parts of the country with staff trained in their use Prices of essential drugs have been controlled in the new health reform program addressing a major problem in access and affordability The sARs CRIsIs The outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome in 20022003 was a major wakeup call for Chinas leadership and is a key reason that the government is now giving higher priority to health care Chinas SARS epidemic signaled a new chapter in infectious disease challenges for China and the world Since animals especially pigs and chickens live in close proxim ity to humans southern China with its dense backyard farming practices has been a breeding ground for new viruses Live animal markets a long tradition in Chinese communities that seek the freshest ingredients for cooking provide an easy mecha nism for human infection from animals There had been a huge increase in Chinas ani mal population in the decades before the SARS crisis for example from 52 million to 508 million pigs between 1968 and 2005 and from 123 million to 13 billion poultry12 The transshipment of livestock from southern China to Hong Kong has the poten tial to contribute to outbreaks of avian and swine flus and the massive movement of people across the border was a major factor in the spread of the SARS epidemic SARS began in Guangdong in November 2002 but provincial authorities con cealed the gravity of the early epidemic Between then and January 2003 the outbreak gained momentum in the province but the epidemic was only reported to the World Health Organization on February 11 2003 and only after the organization initiated an inquiry based upon reports received from Hong Kongs Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network GOARN A WHO team was dispatched from Geneva to inves tigate the outbreak on February 19 but was stonewalled in Beijing The team was not granted permission to travel to Guangdong until April These failures in early acknowledgment and appropriate response during March and April set the stage for Chinas massive SARS epidemic in the following months and allowed the outbreak to spread to Hong Kong and from there to the world Through a combination of luck virus seasonality and effective persontoperson control measures the epidemic subsided by the summer of 2003 Toward the end of the worldwide epidemic of the 8422 cases and 916 deaths in thirty countries and Hong Kong 5327 cases and 349 deaths 63 percent were in China13 Only when SARS became an international embarrassment for Beijing did the cen tral government intervene In a dramatic move the Chinese government fired the minister of health and changed course instituting a rarely seen transparency and honesty in reporting and allocating over US250 million in emergency funding for stopping the spread of SARS The loss of face and the resulting policy reversal set in motion the actions that brought the epidemic under control This was an example of how political will and national mobilization are required for tackling serious threats to public health and provided lessons for Chinas response to 370 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a its AIDS epidemic and other newly emerging infectious diseases like avian influenza The outbreak in Spring 2013 of a virulent new and fatal strain of avian flu H7N9 was met with an aggressive and transparent response by the Chinese government who worked closely with both the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control to quickly identify cases close live animal markets and share viral strains for analysis These actions limited the spread of the virus which infected 137 and caused 38 deaths almost all limited to the region Shanghai Zhejiang Jiangsu where it originated The SARS epidemic was a wakeup call for Chinas government on the deteriora tion of the capacity of Chinas rural health system However the extensive if weak ened health infrastructure was still able to rise to the occasion once national leader ship provided the mandate for action along with adequate funding It is important to note that few countries in the world have as great a capacity as the PRC for national mobilization that extends to the most remote corners of a large and increasingly independent nation China was able to fall back on traditions of public health campaigns from the 1960s and 1970s During the SARS epidemic the patriotic health campaign approach was resurrected to mobilize the population to selfquarantine report fellow citizens with fevers and extol medical personnel espe cially nurses who were at the forefront of the control effort and played an important role in keeping the epidemic from spreading in Chinas rural areas14 This mobilization was precisely what was required to put in place the series of preventive measures that broke the chain of SARS transmission AIds In ChInA ePIdemIC And ResPonse The lessons China learned from its SARS experience had lasting benefits for the con trol of infectious disease threats in China China learned a hard lesson from its belated SARS response that not responding to infectious disease threats can undermine eco nomic growth and tarnish its global image Waiting in the wings after the SARS crisis died down Chinas AIDS advocates from government civil society academia and their international partners grabbed the opportunity to push forward greater action on AIDS highlighting similarities in issues of transparency media control conceal ment government leadership and the accountability of public officials AIDS is an infectious disease albeit spread less easily than SARS However the stigma and embarrassment associated with its two main routes of transmission sex and drugs makes AIDS much harder to openly discuss and address especially in Chinas morally conservative society However there is no question that if not con trolled AIDS would have serious economic and social impacts in China as tragically evidenced by several subSaharan African countries origins of the epidemic Chinas AIDS epidemic began in the early 1980s among needlesharing intravenous drug users along the southern border with Myanmar Burma Myanmar is a major P u B l i c h e a l t h 371 grower of the opium poppies that are the source of heroin At that time the disease was viewed by the Chinese authorities as a problem limited to a marginal deviant population and as a largely foreign illness associated with illicit behavior which could be controlled by testing all foreigners who entered the country The government was forced to take action when an AIDS epidemic broke out among paid blood plasma donors in central China in the mid1990s The source of the epidemic was intravenous drug users traveling through the major transportation crossroads of Henan province who earned money by selling their blood at plasma collection stations run by socalled blood headsoften with the collusion of local officialswho stood to profit by selling what they had collected to medical firms and hospitals that needed the blood for transfusions or the manufacture of drugs derived from blood products At the same time many poor farmers in Henan and bordering provinces Anhui Hunan Shanxi Hubei Hunan also sold blood at these stations where blood samples were pooled and red blood cells then reinjected into donors to allow for more frequent donations The result was widespread HIV infections which were then transmitted to sexual partners and through pregnancy and delivery to newborns A retired doctor Gao Yaojie was the first to investigate and expose the severity of the epidemic caused by these tainted blood donation practices Dr Gaos inves tigations were widely reported in the Chinese and international press and led to the exposure of a government coverup by Henan provincial authorities15 As the plight of the affected victims in Henan was publicized it created a flood of sympathy among Chinas citizens Previously there had been little public sympathy for sufferers of AIDS who mainly tended to be heroin users or commercial sex workers both highly stigmatized and illegal groups The fact that Henans farmers and their affected children and elderly parents were innocent victims helped the AIDS crisis gain public awareness and led to a demand for action The pressure on government to respond along with existing concern about the potential for a political crisis generated by demands for justice by infected farm ers pushed the government to act16 The government Responds To address the plight of central Chinas AIDSinfected farmers in September 2003 the government announced a free national AIDS treatment program one of the few countries in the world to do so at that time This important and expen sive step was the first of many that moved China out of denial in its response to its AIDS epidemic Mainly focused on the predicted eighty thousand infected persons mostly in central China requiring immediate treatment the program entitled The Four Frees and the One Care provided free domestically produced antiretroviral drugs to all rural residents and poor urban residents with HIV AIDS free voluntary counseling and testing free drugs to pregnant women liv ing with HIVAIDS to prevent mothertochild transmission and HIV testing of newborn babies free schooling for children orphaned by HIVAIDS and care and economic assistance to affected families affected by HIVAIDS17 With this policy 372 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a the government squarely recognized the need for treatment and care not only as a means of improving the lives of people and functioning of communities affected by HIV and AIDS These actions and the greater transparency that has accompanied them were initiated by the administration of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao which defined itself as giving higher priority to helping the poor and being more concerned with equity than their predecessors A State Council AIDS Working Committee SCAWCO was established in early 2004 chaired by Vice Premier Wu Yi who had successfully steered the SARS response in 2003 elevating the importance of the AIDS issue at the national level Following similar moves put in place during the SARS epidemic the government clearly stated its intention to hold all government officials account able for their honesty in dealing with AIDS and for ensuring heightened attention surveillance and resources for infectious disease control A strong fiveyear action plan for dealing with AIDS was published in 2006 and the State Council issued a decree the same year signaling its determination to fight AIDS Premier Wen Jiabao met publicly with AIDS patients and orphans including in Henan villages affected by the blood scandal an unprecedented step for such a highlevel official and one meant to show the governments commitment to confronting the problem Trends and developments in AIds Policy There have been many other positive developments in Chinas AIDS response As part of both outside funding requirements and donor calls for greater participation of peo ple living with AIDS in the global AIDS response some urban hospitals have set up patient groups that routinely participate in meetings and workshops on AIDS Chinese leaders have also acknowledged that there is a need for NGOs to play a major role in Chinas AIDS response and there are now nearly a thousand such groups including AIDS orphan charities patient support groups and groups that work with victims who shun government services programs such as sex workers drug users and gay men For example in Chengdu a mostly volunteer group of gay men the Chengdu Gay Community Care Organization provides AIDS education outreach and condoms in bars and bathhouses and has been working with the provincial and municipal health bureaus and foreign donors in their efforts to provide care for infected gay people Homosexuality was only decriminalized in PRC a short time ago and the growing tolerance for gay persons has made it easier to involve that community in the fight against HIVAIDS This is providing a model for other NGOs working on sensitive issues in China The Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang administration have signaled their support for increasing civil societys place at the table by reducing the red tape for registering an NGO which is an important step for expanding the reach of Chinas AIDS response18 In November 2012 then vicepremier Li and head of the governments Commission on the Prevention and Treatment of AIDS said that HIVAIDS was not only a medi cal issue but also a social challenge that required close collaboration between gov ernment organization and greater participation of NGOs19 P u B l i c h e a l t h 373 There have been other signs that Chinas new leaders are serious about stepping up the battle against AIDS Peng Liyuan a very popular singer in addition to being Chinas first lady became the WHO Goodwill Ambassador for Tuberculosis and HIVAIDS in 2011 and has been an advocate for children affected by AIDS including recording a music video with AIDS orphans for the 25th World AIDS Day in December 201220 The following January China had its first successful AIDS discrimination case when a court awarded compensation to a man who was denied employment as a teacher after he tested positive for HIV21 However even with the national will to tackle AIDS the changes wrought by more than three decades of fiscal and political decentralization have made the pro vincial governments increasingly independent of Beijing even within the context of Chinas unitary political system Chinas national ministries may set policy and pro gram guidelines but real control over decisions and budgets rests with provincial and local governments Sometime provincial governments may actually be ahead of the national curve as when the Guangdong Department of Education removed restrictions against people living with HIV from serving as teachers in September 201322 In contrast officials in Henan where the blood head scandal occurred and which still has one of the highest concentrations of AIDS infected population have blocked accurate reporting on the disease as well as some research and prevention efforts and have been accused of not providing adequate treatment or compensation as required by law to some victims In August 2012 three hundred AIDS patients pro tested outside the headquarters of the provincial government23 and ninety of them took their protest to the Ministry of Civil Affairs in Beijing the following February24 The Henan government has denied any official responsibility in the 1990s scandal and there has never been a full investigation or report Because Li Keqiang was the provincial governor and then party secretary in Henan shortly after the crisis took place some activists blame him for the coverup and police harassment of those who wanted to expose the truth and are skeptical that there will be an honest accounting during his tenure as premier25 Continuing the Fight China now has an AIDS prevention and treatment policy that endorses many best practices and is promoted by the countrys top leadership and praised by international observers While many factors contributed to this turnaround the major impetus for change resulted from the SARS epidemic and response in 2003 as discussed above The number of people living with HIV PLHIV in China has risen steadily from about 26000 in 1990 to 410000 in 2000 to 780000 in 2011 see Figure 131 The number of PLHIV in the US is 11 million On a per capita basis the HIVAIDS prevalence rate percentage of adults living with the disease is relatively low at 058 percent compared to for example South Africa at 18 percent The largest annual increases were in the late 1990s and early 2000s with the rate of increase slowing considerably as the government became more open and proactive in dealing with the 374 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a epidemic There were 48000 reported new cases of HIVAIDS about a 65 percent increase The proportion of infections in women is increasing from 194 percent in 2000 to 286 percent in 2011 As shown in Figure 132 the source of new infections has also shifted quite dramatically Until recently the largest source of infection was from injecting drug use IDU specifically shared needles by heroin users 443 percent in 2005 In 2011 639 percent of new infections came from sexual transmission with 465 percent from heterosexual transmission and 174 percent from homosex ual transmission 84 percent were through IDU 66 percent through contaminated blood transfusion and 11 percent through mothertochild transmission Those infected through heterosexual transmission are mostly female commercial sex work ers and their clients The epidemic continues to spread and some of the challenges to controlling it include the substantial size of Chinas young and sexually active population chang ing sexual behaviors and norms massive internal migration insufficient knowledge about HIV along with inadequate perceptions of risk among the general population and the expanding epidemic among hardtoreach gay men The development of Chinas AIDS policy has been shaped by a combination of both internal and external events Domestic advocacy from within government and from NGO activists medical professionals and academic scholars spurred govern ment action following the SARS crisis But external pressure from the international 0 100000 200000 300000 400000 500000 600000 700000 800000 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2007 2009 2011 FIguRe 131 Estimated Number of People Living with HIV in China 19902011 Note These are for the medium estimates for people living with HIV in China For 2011 the low estimate was 620000 and the high estimate was 940000 Sources The data on HIVAIDS in China in this and the following paragraph comes from the following sources 2012 China AIDS Response Progress Report PRC Ministry of Health March 31 2012 httpunaidsorgcnpics20120614140133pdf AIDS Data Hub Evidence to Action httpwwwaidsdatahuborgencountryprofileschina Estimated number of people living with HIV by country 19902007 2008 Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic UNAIDSWHO July 2008 P u B l i c h e a l t h 375 community has also been an important factor in pushing for greater attention to AIDS in China As with many other issues the international perception of denial inaction human rights abuses and coverup have threatened Chinas selfimage and spurred internal debate and response which has often been positive Combined with a realization that economic growth and participation in the fruits of globalization depend on good global citizenship these forces have propelled an uncustomary government accountability on the AIDS issue The overdue and more proactive government AIDS response also points out clearly however that the mus tering of the partystates highlevel political commitment is the essential requirement in China for implementing responsive national policies and mobilizing locallevel action The leaderships pragmatic approach to dealing with AIDS has helped push Chinas government toward increasing tolerance and support for the role of civil society and is an important public policy development But this tolerance has not always extended to the local level where officials often distrust or feel threatened by nongovernmental actors and limit their actions And it is ultimately at the local level where healthcare personnel need access to the most atrisk populations that the success or failure of Chinas response to AIDS response will be determined 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 19852005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 of New Cases Hetersexual Homosexual IDU Blood MTCT Unknown FIguRe 132 Sources of HIVAIDS Transmission in China 198520002011 Intravenous Drug Use MothertoChild Transmission Source PRC Ministry of Health 2012 China AIDS Response Progress Report Beijing 2013 25 376 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a ConClusIon Building on the foundation laid by the Maoist eras emphasis on preventative health care and equitable access China today has generally excellent basic health statistics when compared with other developing countries see Table 131 For example recent figures 20092011 show life expectancy in China at 735 years while in India it is 655 Chinas infant mortality rate is 126 deaths per 1000 lives birth Indias is 472 and the comparative maternal mortality rates are 37 deaths per 100000 births in China versus 200 in India reflecting in part the sharp difference between the percent of births attended by skilled health personnel 963 percent in China 577 percent in India26 But thirty years of privatization decentralization and benign neglect of the rural health system coupled with new threats from emerging or resurgent infectious dis eases finally pushed the central government to begin the arduous process of fix ing a very broken health care system Moreover with economic development and increased wealth has come the challenge of addressing chronic disease problems and improving health behaviors such as tobacco use and diet Cancer is now the leading cause of death in China and much of this is smokingrelated although pollution is also a major contributor Hypertension and obesity have become major health concerns Chinas leadership is now engaged in a massive new health reform effort that was formally launched in 2009 The government has committed 130 billion to the reform effort that includes a new and more generous medical insurance program an effort to reign in the overuse of drugs and tests as moneyearning ploys regulation of drug costs instituting rational drug prescribing and revitalization of a basic prevention approach to public health By 2011 health insurance covered more than 92 percent of the population gradually extending from only hospitalization covering about 50 per cent of costs to outpatient services covering 6070 percent of costs and almost fully covering hospitalbased childbirth deliveries27 This is a huge achievement but still insufficient to avoid substantial outofpocket payment in an increasingly expensive health system where medical tests and drugs are overprescribed and contribute to high health care costs Moreover Chinas has a rapidly aging population see chapter 14 which is largely due to its achievements in health care but that brings with it new health challenges particularly those related to chronic diseases such as diabetes heart disease and can cer Twelve percent of Chinas population was over 60 years of age in 2012 and the per centage will increase to 30 percent in 205028 Chronic diseases noncommunicable diseases already constitute nearly 70 percent of Chinas disease burden and because of population aging this number will increase29 The costs of treating unprevented or early treated chronic illnesses will add to the burden and costs of health care espe cially as the population ages Added to this is the rapid pace of urbanization with 60 percent of Chinas popu lation predicted to be living in cities by 2030 with the accompanying challenges of urban health risks such as air pollution and automobile accidents30 The PRCs very serious environmental problems see chapter 12 also pose major threats to public P u B l i c h e a l t h 377 health Food safety scandals related to overuse of pesticides and unsafe food additives such as the melaminetainted milk powder that sickened several hundred thousand Chinese children and killed six in 2008 are frequent As the SARS and AIDS cases illustrate nationallevel solutions to health cri ses are hard to carry out without the political will to overcome bureaucratic and financial barriers The Health Ministry is an especially weak player on the national provincial and local stage where other priorities especially economic are of greater perceived importance The recent merging in early 2013 at the annual National Peoples Congress NPC of the Health Ministry and the National Population and Family Planning Commission into the National Health and Family Planning Commission may further dilute the influence of health officials in com ing years as a result of streamlining of personnel and functions Notably the minister of the newly merged ministry level commission Ms Li Bin is a former director of the National Population and Family Planning Commission not the Health Ministry The SARS epidemic was an alarm bell for the problems of an inequitable and poorly functioning health care system This led first to greater transparency and better international cooperation on infectious disease reporting then to a strengthened and more open response to HIVAIDS and now to a major overhaul of the entire health care system The next few years will be a crucial test for the reform effort and China could again be a model for the world on how to achieve health for all noTes 1 Li Changming Chinas Rural Health in Economic Transition Consultative Meeting of the China Health Development Forum April 2002 Beijing and Tony Saich and Joan Kaufman Financial Reform Poverty and the Impact on Reproductive Health Provision Evidence from Three Rural Townships in Financial Sector Reform in China ed Yasheng Huang Anthony Saich and Edward Steinfeld Cambridge MA Harvard Asia Center Publications 2005 2 The World Health Report 2000 Health Systems Improving Performance Geneva World Health Organization 2000 httpwwwwhointwhr2000enindexhtml 3 Wang Longde et al Emergence and Control of Infectious Diseases in China Lancet 372 no 9649 2008 15981605 and Victor Sidel and Ruth Sidel Serve the People Observations on Medicine in the Peoples Republic of China Boston Beacon Press 1974 4 Henderson Cohen and Aiello Zheng Successful Eradication of Sexually Transmitted Diseases in the Peoples Republic of China Journal of Infectious Diseases 174 supp 2 October 1996 223229 5 See Zhou Yongming AntiDrug Crusades in TwentiethCentury China Nationalism History and State Building Lanham MD Rowman Littlefield 1999 6 Directive On Public Health June 26 1965 httpwwwmarxistsorgreferencearchive maoselectedworksvolume9mswv941htm 7 See for example Victor W Sidel Medicine and Health Michel Oksenberg ed Chinas Developmental Experience New York Academy of Political Science 1973 378 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a 8 Victor W Sidel The Barefoot Doctors of the Peoples Republic of China New England Journal of Medicine 286 no 24 June 15 1972 12921300 W C Hsiao Transformation of Health Care in China New England Journal of Medicine 310 1984 932936 the 1975 documentary film The Barefoot Doctors of Rural China httparchiveorgdetailsgov archivesarc46549 9 Yuanli Liu and Keqin Rao Providing Health Insurance in Rural China From Research to Policy Journal of Health Politics Policy and Law 31 no 1 2006 7192 10 Health Care Reform Targets at 900m Rural Residents Peoples Daily November 21 2002 httpenglishpeopledailycomcn20021121eng20021121107213shtml 11 World Bank Toward a Healthy and Harmonious Life in China Stemming the Rising Tide of NonCommunicable Diseases Human Development Unit East Asia and Pacific Region Washington DC 2012 httpwwwworldbankorgcontentdamWorldbank documentNCDreportenpdf 12 Michael T Osterholm Preparing for the Next Pandemic New England Journal of Medicine 352 no 18 May 5 2005 18391842 13 Joan Kaufman Infectious Disease Challenges in China in Xiaoqing Lu ed Chinas Capacity to Manage Infectious Diseases Global Implications Washington DC Center for Strategic and International Studies 2009 14 Joan Kaufman SARS and Chinas Health Care Response Better to Be Both Red and Expert and Anthony Saich Is SARS Chinas Chernobyl or Much Ado about Nothing in SARS Prelude to Pandemic ed Arthur Kleinman and James L Waston Stanford CA Stanford University Press 2006 15 Gao Yaojie has been recognized and won several prestigious awards both abroad and in China for her courageous work associated with HIVAIDS Ironically she was also placed under house arrest harassed by police and refused permission to travel abroad at various times by Chinese authorities who worried about her outspokenness In 2007 bowing to international pressure the government allowed her to leave for the United States where she now lives 16 Jun Jing The Social Origins of AIDS Panics in China in AIDS and Social Policy in China ed Joan Kaufman Arthur Kleinman Anthony Saich Cambridge MA Harvard University Asia Center Publications 2006 152169 17 State Council AIDS Working Committee SCAWCO and UN Theme Group on HIV AIDS in China A Joint Assessment of HIVAIDS Prevention Treatment and Care in China December 2004 18 He Dan New Rules for NGOs to Improve Operations Xinhua April 17 2013 http wwwchinadailycomcncndy20130417content16413536htm 19 Chinas NGOs Praised for Role in Fighting HIVAIDS Xinhua Nov 29 2012 http newsxinhuanetcomenglishbilingual20121129c132007520htm 20 Peng Liyuan Stars in Video for Kids Stricken with AIDS httpenglishsinacom video20121202533411html 21 Chinas First Successful AIDS Discrimination Claim Xinhua January 25 2013 ews xinhuanetcomenglishchina20130125c132128163htm 22 Chinas Guangdong Province to Lift HIV Restrictions on Teacher Recruitment httpwwwunaidsorgenresourcespresscentrefeaturestories2013june20130613china teachers 23 AIDS Patients Protest in Henan Radio Free Asia August 29 2012 httpwwwrfa orgenglishnewschinaaids08292012150012html 24 Bai Tiantian Henan AIDS Group Comes to Beijing to Demonstrate Global Times February 28 2013 httpwwwglobaltimescncontent764752shtml P u B l i c h e a l t h 379 25 AIDS activism Bad Blood The Economist September 8 2012 26 World Bank World Development Indicators httpdatabankworldbankorg 27 Winnie ChiMan Yip William C Hsiao Wen Chen Shanlian Hu Jin Ma Alan Maynard Early Appraisal of Chinas Huge and Complex HealthCare Reforms Lancet 379 March 3 2012 833842 28 Bradley Yao Chinas Elderly Masses US China Today httpuschinausceduarti cleusctchinaselderlymasses14584aspx httpwwwncbinlmnihgovpmcarticles PMC2704564 29 World Bank Toward a Healthy and Harmonious Life in China 2012 30 World Bank Toward a Healthy and Harmonious Life in China 2012 suggesTed ReAdIngs Duckett Jane The Chinese States Retreat from Health Policy and the Politics of Retrenchment New York Routledge 2010 French Paul and Matthew Crabbe Fat China How Expanding Waistlines are Changing a Nation New York Anthem Press 2010 Henderson Gail and Myron Cohen The Chinese Hospital A Socialist Work Unit New Haven CT Yale University Press 1984 Horn Joshua Away with All Pests An English Surgeon in Peoples China 19541969 New York Monthly Review Press 1969 Huang Yangzhong Governing Health in Contemporary China New York Routledge 2012 Kaufman Joan Arthur Kleinman and Tony Saich eds AIDS and Social Policy in China Cambridge MA Harvard University Asia Center Publications 2006 Kleinman Arthur and James L Watson eds SARS in China Prelude to Pandemic Stanford CA Stanford University Press 2006 Lu Xiaoqing ed Chinas Capacity to Manage Infectious Diseases Global Implications Washington DC Center for Strategic and International Studies 2009 Sidel Victor and Ruth Sidel Serve the People Observations on Medicine in the Peoples Republic of China Boston Beacon Press 1973 Wagstaff Adam et al Reforming Chinas Rural Health System Washington DC World Bank Publications 2009 14 When the Peoples Republic was established in 1949 Chinas population was more than 500 million By way of comparison that figure was roughly the same as the total population of Europe at that time and more than three times the population of the United States The country passed the demographic milestone of one billion people in July 1980 Chinas population in 2013 was about 135 billion roughly double the population of Europe and 45 times the population of the United States The popu lation increase alone over the last quarter centuryapproximately 350 millionis about the same as the combined population of the United States and Canada Looked at another way Chinas primary school enrollment of about 100 million is larger than the population of all but a dozen countries It is numbers like these that led Chinese leaders to implement the socalled onechild policy in 1979 and made them reluctant to fully repeal it more than three decades later despite the dramatic economic changes that occurred in China in the interim The annual increase in population has declined greatly dropping from a peak of around 23 million per year in the 1980s to a low of 6 million today Chinas total population size will not stop increasing until around 2050 when Chinas popula tion is forecast to top off at 15 billion Despite its undesirable consequences which included skewed sex ratios and a rapidly aging population these staggering numbers made Chinas leaders very cautious about policy reform and delayed major changes to the policy until 2013 Population control remains a high priority for the Chinese government but by late 2013 the onechild policy had been pushed into retirement Population Policy TyRene w h I Te P o P u l a t i o n P o l i c Y 381 how dId They geT heRe If you ask mainland Chinese how China got into this predicament they will likely blame Mao Zedong the leader of the Chinese Communist Party CCP who ruled the Peoples Republic from 1949 until his death in 1976 His pronatalist stance and oppo sition to family planning they will say resulted in high rates of population growth for more than two decades When the Maoist era ended Chinas population stood at 930 million not quite double what it had been at the founding of the PRC By the time the postMao regime began to enforce a serious birth limitation policy Chinas population had grown so much that even a radical program like the onechild birth limit could not prevent its continued increase for decades to come There is some validity to this view Maos pronatalist views certainly slowed the implementation of birth control programs and contributed to the more accelerated growth of the population after 1949 Chinas demographic challenge did not begin in 1949 however nor was Maos view as crude and simplistic as it is usually portrayed When the CCP came to power in 1949 they inherited an empire that had experi enced a fivefold increase in population over the previous three centuries Around 1650 Chinas population size topped 100 million for the first time From that point it only took another 250 years to pass the 400 million mark circa 1900 and just 50 more to top 500 million From the creation of the Peoples Republic in 1949 then population pressures received the attention of Chinese Communist party CCP leaders During the first two decades of the Maoist era however the proper approach to demographic issues was hotly debated and contested Initially Mao and the CCP resisted any suggestion that a large population constituted a problem They argued that what appeared to be overpopulation was actually the result of the exploitative system of capitalism and would disappear as capitalism was replaced by socialism and unprecedented wealth was created by the liberated masses It did not take long however for top officials in the CCP to begin to worry about the population pressures Some began to speak in more practical ways about the burden of population growth and to recommend that China amend its population policy to provide more support for family planning edu cation and allow the import of condoms and other contraceptive supplies Before these first steps could yield any meaningful results however the radicaliza tion of domestic politics interrupted the effort and advocates of family planning were branded as rightists or enemies of the revolution At the same time however the second half of the 1950s was a period of intensified state planning All institutions and bureaucracies were mobilized to put into place annual and fiveyear performance plans that would help China achieve its goal of becoming an advanced socialist econ omy and society In this context it was Mao who suggested in 1957 that China should attempt to plan reproduction in the same way it aspired to plan material production At the time birth planning jihua shengyu that is the attempt to regulate population growth so as to keep it in balance with levels of economic production and growth was only a goal to be reached at some more advanced stage of socialist development As Chinas population continued to grow rapidly in the 1960s see Figure 141 how ever key leaders such as Premier Zhou Enlai came to believe that birth planning could 382 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a no longer be postponed In 1965 Zhou proposed the first national population control targetreducing the annual rate of population growth to 1 percent by the end of the century and by 1972 he had authorized the creation of an extensive family planning bureaucracy to oversee implementation provide free access to contraceptives abor tions and sterilizations and monitor the enforcement of local birth targets Socialist planning thus came to embrace human reproduction in much the same way that it embraced agricultural and industrial production Local officials who were responsible for meeting grain and steel production quotas now began to receive quotas for babies In the early and mid1970s the campaign focus was later longer fewer that is promoting later marriage longer spacing between births three to five years and fewer births a twochild ideal and a threechild limit By middecade the childbearing norm began to tighten the new slogan was one is not too few two is enough three is too many In the cities young couples began to feel pressure to have only one child In the countryside they were urged to have no more than two In 1979 a group of Chinas top scientists announced that if China were to achieve its economic goals by the year 2000a goal that the new Deng regime had expressed as achieving a per capita exchangerate based gross domestic product of 1000 by the year 2000 subsequently reduced to 800 per capita population had to be contained within 12 billion In turn this meant that the official birth limit had to be lowered to one child per couple with some exceptions for special circumstances In an extraordinary Open Letter to CCP members that was published in all newspapers in September 1980 Chinas leaders defended the new policy and made it clear the high level of priority they attached to it They argued that the twodecade delay after 1949 was a fateful mistake By the time the state began to 15 10 05 00 05 10 15 20 25 30 0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600 1960 1962 1964 1966 1968 1970 1972 1974 1976 1978 1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 Annual Growth annual Total Population hundred million Total Population Population Growth annual Impact of Great Leap Famine 1 Billion FIguRe 141 Chinas Population 19602012 Source World Bank World Development Indicators P o P u l a t i o n P o l i c Y 383 encourage fertility control a huge new generation of young people had already been born and was approaching its childbearing age years As a result even with declining fertility levels ie the average number of children born to a woman dur ing her reproductive years demographic momentum meant continued growth of total population size see Figures 141 and 142 That growth which threatened to reach 15 billion by centurys end if no action was taken could doom China to poverty and economic backwardness through another generation or more if urgent action was not taken by this generation ImPlemenTIng The oneChIld PolICy The onechild policy was inaugurated just as the Deng regime was about to embark on a farreaching reform program that gradually transformed Chinas economy polity and society As previous chapters have described the socialist economy was decollec tivized and marketized politics was deradicalized and political institutions revived society was granted some relief from the allintrusive partystate that had permeated every aspect of public and private life Change came in fits and stops with periods of dramatic change often followed by a partial retreat to safer political ground This pattern gave Chinese politics a cyclical or wavelike pattern not unlike the high tides and low tides of the mass campaigns of the Mao era Through all of these changes and fluctuations in political atmosphere the insis tence on strict birth control never faltered It was a constant in an otherwise vola tile situation That does not mean however that the content and enforcement of the policy were static On the contrary officials at all levels struggled to adapt to a rapidly changing situation to unintended consequences of the policy and to a lesser degree international scrutiny and criticism This translated into several different stages of implementation Phase one Collectivism and Coercion 19791983 In the early years of the program as the Deng regime fought against the lingering influ ences of the Cultural Revolution it was possible to use the tools and institutions of the Maoist era to press for strict enforcement of birth quotas that were handed down to each city county neighborhood and village Thirty years of Maoism had taught Chinese citizens to be wary of voicing opposition to the latest campaign taught offi cials that they could intimidate and coerce anyone who dared to defy them and taught party leaders at all levels that the failure to meet campaign quotas was one of the most deadly sins of Chinese politics A poor campaign performance could spell the end of a promising career All childbearingage couples urban and rural had to receive official permits from the state in order to give birth legally In addition provinces and local governments drafted regulations offering economic incentives to encourage pol icy compliance and imposing stiff sanctions on policy violators All childbearingage women were required to undergo periodic gynecological exams to ensure they were not carrying an unplanned pregnancy and if they were they were pressed to undergo 384 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a an abortion immediately In addition all CCP members were urged to take the lead in implementing the onechild policy by accepting it themselves urging family mem bers to do so and in every respect setting a good example for others to follow Gaining compliance from those under their jurisdiction took much more than set ting a good example however In Chinas cities and towns growing acceptance of the smallfamily norm free access to contraceptives and tight administrative control in workplaces and neighborhoods had brought the urban total fertility rate down from 33 in 1970 to about 15 by 1978 a remarkably low level for a developing country as was the total fertility rate With a large cohort of women about to enter their peak childbearing years how ever the state deemed even this low level inadequate To further suppress fertility and prevent more second births state monitoring intensified in workplaces and neigh borhoods Monthly gynecological examinations for childbearing age women plus a system of marriage and birth permits provided by the work unit ensured that anyone attempting to have a second child was caught in a tight surveillance net Those who escaped the net faced severe penalties including fines loss of employment and per haps even ones coveted urban household registration hukou If changing childbearing preferences and strong mechanisms of state control worked together to induce compliance with the onechild policy in urban China rural China posed a far more difficult challenge Like rural populations in other places and times life in the countryside encouraged higher levels of fertility Agricultural 700 China India USA Nigeria 600 Average number of children bron per woman 500 400 300 200 100 000 19501955 19751980 19952000 20102015 20452050 FIguRe 142 Total Fertility Rate 19502050 Total Fertility Rate TFR is the average number of births per woman of childbearing age 1549 Source United Nations Population Division World Population Prospects The 2012 Revision Population Database Data available online at httpesaunorgwppExcelDatafertilityhtm Data for 20452050 are projections based on the medium variant model P o P u l a t i o n P o l i c Y 385 work requires household labor and unlike their urban counterparts even very young children can be put to work in the service of family income Moreover while many urban couples could rely on a state pension for retirement support rural families had no such welfare net Children were the only guarantee of oldage support and the most destitute villagers were inevitably those who were alone and childless Only a son could assure a couple that they would be spared such a fate Daughters usually married out of the village transportation links were often poor and upon marriage a daughters first obligation transferred to her husbands family Even the most devoted daughter could not be counted on to provide either income or assistance In addition to these practical considerations the traditional emphasis on bearing sons to carry on the ancestral line remained deeply entrenched in the countryside As a result although rural fertility levels were cut in half between 1971 and 1979 declin ing from approximately 6 to 3 much of rural China remained hostile to a two or onechild limit including the rural cadres who would have to enforce the policy When the rural reforms implemented after 1978 began to relax the states administra tive grip on the peasantry the launching of the onechild policy set the stage for a prolonged and intense struggle over the control of childbearing The struggle took a variety of forms and evolved over time as the unfolding rural reforms altered the local context In some villages women who refused to abort an unplanned birth were subjected to meetings where they were berated intimidated and threatened into cooperation In others medical teams and party cadres swooped in unexpectedly in an effort to catch women who were eluding them At worst women were forced onto trucks and taken directly to the township headquarters where med ical personnel would perform an abortion a sterilization or insert an intrauterine device IUD or some combination of these The use of some form of birth control after the first or second child became mandatory and in the countryside the preferred method was the IUD since it was not easily removed Rural villagers responded with a wide variety of resistance strategies Enraged fam ily members who came home from a day outside the village to discover that the birth control team had performed abortions on their wives or daughters sometimes beat or killed those responsible Others bribed local officials to accept their stories when they returned to the village after an absence with an adopted child Subterfuges of this sort were acceptable to rural officials as long as they did not need to register the new infant as a birth in their jurisdiction Others used their standing in the village to avoid compliance many rural officials or their family members expected the compliance of others while flaunting the policy themselves Some officials colluded with village families to hide unauthorized pregnancies particularly for couples with no sons Worst of all the intense pressure to limit births led to many cases of female infan ticide Absent the onechild policy most families welcomed the arrival of daughters and sons though a daughter was described as a small happiness and a son as a big happiness If only one child was to be allowed however many villagersmale and female young and oldfelt it was imperative to have a son so much so that female infanticide was frequently the result There were two possible responses to this volatile rural situation One was to relax the onechild policy hoping that more education and support for rural women and children would hold birth rates down and improve cadremass relations The other 386 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a was to intensify enforcement for a short time but use widespread sterilization to guarantee that those who already had two or more children would never have another In the short run the latter option won out and a massive sterilization campaign was launched The key campaign target was to eliminate all third and higherorder births Once that problem was solved more pressure could be brought to bear on those who were having a second child without state permission The result of this massive campaign was a fourfold increase in the number of tubal ligations performed in 1983 as compared with the previous years and large increases across every category of birth control procedures So severe were the local pressures to meet sterilization targets that many women who had long since completed their intended childbearing and had been effectively utilizing some form of birth control were forced to undergo sterilization Phase Two Policy Relaxation 19841989 As the campaign began to play itself out and elite politics took a more liberal turn in the mid1980s a decision was made to modify the onechild policy to allow for more exceptions Fearful of a breakdown of authority in the countryside and wide spread anger over the onechild limit and the often brutal tactics used to enforce it leaders in Beijing decided to simply concede the need for a son in the countryside Henceforth the rural policy became a oneson or twochild policy Village couples whose first child was a daughter would be allowed to have a second child allowed to try again for a son This concession was made in the hopes of pacifying restless villag ers and improving enforcement but over a period of several years the net effect of this and other rural reforms was to encourage local governments to unduly relax their enforcement efforts Village officials who themselves were subject to the birth control policies often colluded with their neighbors to avoid enforcement efforts undertaken by outside teams As the agricultural reforms destroyed the instruments of control and power that officials had enjoyed in the past they found it difficult to enforce birth limits and found it easier to report false numbers than fight with neighbors and kin The net effect of this policy slippage was to weaken central control over the levers of enforcement and to provide support for experts and birth planning officials who argued that the policy should be more flexible across different regions of China allowing those in the most impoverished areas with difficult hilly terrain to have two children allowing those in average circumstances to have one son or two children and limiting those in more prosperous areas to only one child They believed that the same results could be achieved with less effort and more compliance than if policy did not respond to the nuances of family need and economic circumstance Phase Three Another Cycle unfolds 19891995 This more differentiated policy was put into place in the latter half of the 1980s only to be upset by the events of MayJune 1989 which ended in a military crackdown on Tiananmen protesters and their supporters in Beijing and in other cities around P o P u l a t i o n P o l i c Y 387 the country The martial atmosphere that returned to Chinese politics for the next two to three years made it possible to once again tighten local enforcement and to carry out another population control campaign As in 19821983 fear about a poor performance justified the revival of campaign methods Cadres who had been warned off those methods in the mid1980s were now instructed to use crack troops and shock attacks to break through resistance and meet the new goals of the 19911995 plan period The campaign was justified by the results of the fiveyear plan that ended in 1990 It showed that Chinas population control targets had been exceeded by a very substantial margin giving fuel to those who believed that it was acceptable to use coercion in service of the higher goal of achieving the per capita economic goals that had been set for the year 2000 It was also justified by the preliminary results of the 1990 census which indicated that Chinas population had grown more quickly to 113 billion than planned or expected Even worse despite the massive effort that went into the censustaking process it was clear that rural offi cials were manipulating local data in ways that hid excess births that should have been registered in their jurisdiction They had a strong incentive to do this since failure on their part would also reflect badly on their immediate superiors Even when fraud was suspected therefore it was rarely investigated by those higher in the political command These numbers prompted the conservative leadership to tighten enforcement returning to a strict formula that limited all urban couples to only one child and all rural couples to one son or two children Exceptions were granted only to some of Chinas smaller minority nationalities and to parents whose first child was mentally or physically handicapped to such a degree that they would be unable to function as a healthy working adult Local officials were put on notice that they were liable for strict enforcement and that failure to achieve their performance targets for birth planning would result in economic penalties administrative sanctions and even demotions They were to assume that meeting population targets was just as impor tant to their future career success as meeting key economic goals Population growth rates which had been creeping up in the late 1980s began to dropped steadily in the 1990s see Figure 141 This success came at a price however Evidence of intimidation and coercion was widespread particularly in areas that had done poorly prior to 1990 Cadres destroyed crops homes and property to force compliance or punish policy viola tors Relatives particularly the elder members of the family were detained indefi nitely until they paid their fines aborted an unplanned pregnancy or agreed to sterilization Rural cadres who sided with their fellow villagers did what was neces sary to give the appearance of compliance but also behaved as they had in the past like during the Great Leap Forward when the work was hard and the campaign targets too ambitiousby lying exaggerating and dodging or finding other ways to manipulate the system On the one hand data for the period between 1990 and 1995 indicate a significant improvement in enforcement as well as a further reduction of the fertility level see Figure 142 With greater pressure on local officials to report impressive results how ever came greater pressure on grassroots personnel to submit fraudulent data When 388 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a official reports based on these data claimed that Chinas fertility level had dropped to an unusually low 14 many Chinese demographers were skeptical reporting their concerns in scholarly journals and other reports Phase Four moving Towards Reform In 1989 when the Deng regime crushed the prodemocracy movement China still inhabited a world defined by the contours of the Cold War By 1992 that world had disappeared and the CCP now faced the problem of how to survive in a postLeninist postsocialist world Responding to the new challenges the postTiananmen politics of conservatism gave way to a new wave of reform and opening that rapidly trans formed the political economic and social landscape of the PRC It was in this context that many of Chinas population specialists began again to challenge the wisdom of the administrative and punitive approach to population con trol that had been relied on since the 1970s Leading figures in Chinas new generation of highly trained demographers and sociologists criticized the assumption that fewer births is everything arguing that it led to shortsighted actions such as surprise raids on pregnant women Frankly acknowledging that Chinas fertility decline had been induced through the widespread use of coercion they insisted on the need for a broader and more complex view of population dynamics and a population policy better suited to an overall strategy of sustainable development Writing that the curtain is gradually closing on the era of monolithic population control these critics went on to discuss the disturbing consequences of that approach including sex ratio imbalances and a rapidly aging population and the necessity of shifting to a devel opmental approach that emphasized improvements and investments in the quality of the population1 In short they argued that development was the best route to fertility decline rejecting in the process the sort of population determinism fewer births is everything that was so deeply embedded in Chinas family planning strategy This open revolt against the theory and practice of birth planning was unprecedented and it proved to be the leading edge of a push to reform Chinas population control pro gram Like the critique of excess coercion that emerged in 1984 the timely convergence of multiple political developments both domestic and international helped to advance the reform agenda in population policy Domestically the problem of rural unrest and instability was again preoccupying the leadership and one of the major complaints of villagers was the use of coercive birth control tactics to collect burdensome and exces sive taxes Not only did new documents on rural taxation explicitly forbid the use of those measures a family planning document issued in 1995 codified them as seven types of prohibited behaviors 1 illegally detaining beating or humiliating an offender or a relative 2 destroying property crops or houses 3 raising mortgages without legal authorization 4 the imposition of unreasonable fines or the confiscation of goods 5 implicating relatives or neighbors of offenders or retaliating against those who report cadre misbehavior 6 prohibiting childbirths permitted by the local plan in order to fulfill population targets 7 organizing pregnancy checkups for unmarried women2 When China began to implement its onechild policy in 1979 it was widely lauded by leaders in the international family planning community who subscribed to the P o P u l a t i o n P o l i c Y 389 The name of the State Family Planning Commission was changed to the National Population and Family Planning Commission NPFPC in 2003 and in 2013 the NPFPC was combined with the Ministry of Health into a National Health and Family Planning Commission dominant theory that population growth was a primary if not the primary impedi ment to economic growth By the mid1990s another school of thought began to dominate the discourse on population and development This alternative approach which focused on womens reproductive health and rights was crystallized in Cairo at the 1994 United Nations International Conference on Population and Development It emphasized the organic relationship between the elevation of the status of women especially through increased education and employment outside the home the elimination of poverty and declining fertility levels The substance of the conference was reported in some detail in the Chinese media and in population journals and shortly thereafter the influence of the new interna tional approach on Chinese policy became clear In Chinas Outline Plan for Family Planning Work in 19952000 for example stress was placed on the impact of the socialist market economy on population control and on the necessity of linking population control to economic development In addition the plan placed special emphasis on the role of education and urged aggressive efforts to increase womens educational level in order to promote lower fertility If the Cairo conference was influential in China it was because there was a con stituency in China ready to seize the opportunity to press home similar views In the early 1970s Chinas leaders while publicly condemning the orthodox view on limiting population growth had quietly embraced it Though framed in Marxist terms the logic of Chinas policy was the samethat reducing population growth was a prereq uisite for socioeconomic development and that China could not afford to wait for a developmentinduced demographic transition like that which occurred in Europe and North America In the postMao era this rationale legitimated the regimes insis tence that population control was the linchpin of the modernization strategy even as it came under increased international criticism The new language of Cairoprotecting womens rights and taking a more holistic approach to achieving demographic goalsbuttressed the position of Chinese popula tion policy reformers It also provided institutional contacts and resources they could use to experiment with a softer approach to enforcement The UNs Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995 strongly reinforced the Cairo mes sage provoking a new wave of feminist thinking and action further encouraging State Family Planning Commission officials to consider a more clientcentered approach that gave greater consideration to womens needs and their reproductive health Predictably however reform came slowly and remained highly controversial Faced with the reality of a rapidly aging population at one end of the demographic pyra mid a bulging workforce in the middle that even the fastgrowing Chinese economy could not absorb and at the bottom sex ratios so skewed that they posed a threat to social stability family planning professionals were persuaded that the costs of Chinas onechild policy had become too high Other experts however especially economists placed less importance on the costs than on the economic benefits of low fertility 390 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a After some internal debate China officially reaffirmed the onechild policy in 2000 and in 2001 passed a longdebated Population and Family Planning Law that upheld the existing policy and gave compliance the force of law3 Although the law included provisions that echoed the Cairo and Beijing conference agendas calling for an informed choice of safe effective and appropriate contraceptive methods and one provision prohibiting officials from infringing on personal rights property rights or other legitimate rights and interests it reiterated Chinas basic approach to population control Nevertheless after thirty years of a strict birthplanning regime the chorus for reform appeared to be growing louder That chorus was reinforced by several parallel developments in Chinese politics and public policy during the first decade of the twentyfirst century First the year 2000 had come and gone and although Chinas population had exceeded the original target number of 12 billion the rate of economic growth after 1980 had also exceeded all expectations suggesting that population growth was no longer a critical threat to Chinas continued development Second young couples entering their childbearing years in the twentyfirst century were far more likely than their predecessors in 1980 to desire only one or two children to prefer to delay childbirth or in the case of some professional women to forgo childbearing altogether Traditional norms and expectations regarding marriage and child birth had been altered by twenty years of rapid economic development and by the relent less education they had received about the individual and societal costs of childbearing With acceptance of the one or twochild norm on the rise some argued the regula tion of childbirth could be relaxed without fear of a rise in birth rates And as China began to take a more active role in international institutions after 2000 developing strong links to the global community of nongovernmental organizations NGOs the overt use of coercion in enforcing birth planning became an embarrassment to the now highly professionalized state family planning bureaucracy Many were convinced that it was time for China to shift more decidedly toward a system of education rewards and support for those who chose to have no more than two children and who were willing to space those children four or five years apart An important adjustment of the policy was made to allow a second child if both parents were themselves only children What the demographic experts were unable to do however was to convince Chinas top leaders that it was safe to formally abandon the onechild policy Fears of a fertility rebound remained and the necessity of keeping the numbers of births in check continued to outweigh the opinion of specialists that Chinas population goals could be better achieved and at a lower social and economic cost by moving to a universal twochild policy that gave rewards for compliance rather than penalties for violations Only in late 2013 when the leadership recognized the full gravity of Chinas new population challengea rapidly aging population and a rapidly shrink ing work forcedid they relent CosTs And BeneFITs oF The oneChIld PolICy The internal debate over the merits of continuing the onechild policy has been one that weighs the costs of the program against the gains Some scholars focus on P o P u l a t i o n P o l i c Y 391 economic data that they insist demonstrate how vital it was that China suppress childbearing when it did They contend that unconstrained population growth would have been a severe drag on the countrys ability to raise living standards a problem that has plagued many developing nations Compared to other countries at its level of development China was able to achieve a remarkably fast drop in the population growth rate At its 2012 annual rate of growth 49 percent the PRCs population will take 145 years to double whereas Indias population 126 percent annual growth will double in 55 years and Nigerias 279 percent annual growth population will take just 25 years to double On the other hand those who argued for some degree of relaxation of the policy point to disturbing side effects that they believe offset or exceed policy benefits The two side effects they discuss most frequently are the skewed sex ratio that suggests widespread use of sexselective abortion by those who feel they must have a son to continue the family line or to pacify their elders who demand it of them and the rapid aging of Chinese society sexselective Abortion and sex Ratio Imbalance Over time and across many different human populations sex ratios at birththat is the number of males born during a given time period compared to the number of femaleshover around 105 boys for every 100 girls On occasion for a limited period of time this ratio may vary naturally with a few more or a few less boys for each 100 girls Data from Chinas 2000 census however revealed that the sex ratio at birth was approximately 119 boys for every 100 girls and a 2005 demographic survey reaffirmed that number In some provinces and localities the sex ratio was substantially higher climbing to over 130 boys per 100 girls From the beginning of the onechild policy there was concern that it might result in an imbalanced sex ratio at birth In the September 1980 Open Letter on the onechild policy for example several of the most common objections to the policy were aired including fears that it would lead to female infanticide and abandonment and consequently to an imbalance in the sex ratio These fears were initially dis counted but they proved to be warranted In the early 1980s senior officials became alarmed about the many reports of female infanticide and female abandonment on the part of couples desperate to have a son The infanticide reports produced a firestorm of controversy at home and abroad leading the regime to respond in two contradictory ways First it denied that there was a widespread problem census and survey data were used to show that Chinas sex ratio at birth was well within what was considered to be the normal range and in keeping with Chinas own population history Though conceding that incidents of infanticide and abandonment did occur it was insisted that such cases were rare and that they occurred only in the most backward regions of the countryside where the feudal mentality remained entrenched The solution proposed was an education campaign to uproot such backward ideas but education alone was of little use given the social and economic realities that privileged male offspring 392 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a By 1984 as reports of female infanticide multiplied and the AllChina Womens Federation ACWF began to insist that the problem be faced and addressed the state changed tack Rather than address the underlying causes of gender bias it made con cessions to rural sensibilities and adjusted the onechild policy to allow singledaughter households to try againfor a son In the countryside the state conceded women were socially inferior and worth less economically Sonless couples were disadvan taged the potential prey of stronger families and kin groups and they were forever disgraced by their failure to continue the male ancestral line Singledaughter house holds should therefore be given special consideration just as the parents of invalids were given special consideration Although the intent of the 1984 policy change was merely to legitimize what was already the de facto rural policy in many areas it also had the effect of underscor ing the unequal status of males and female especially in the countryside A woman with a single daughter and no sons might be applauded by local officials but in the real world of the village she was likely subject to a lifetime of pity social ridicule and blame much of it heaped upon her by other rural women who had themselves endured such pressures Faced with intense demands from the state on the one hand and their peers and elders on the other some took the desperate course of female infanticide to preserve the chance to have a son As the 1980s progressed however two alternative strategies emerged The first was infant abandonment which increased substantially in the late 1980s and 1990s in response to a tightening of the birth control policies There is no official figure for the number of abandoned children but it likely exceeded 150000 annually for several years and may have been much higher Also disturbing is the escalating incidence of sexselective abortion and its impact on Chinas sex ratio By the early 1990s all county hospitals and clinics and most township clinics and family planning stations had ultrasound equipment capable of fetal sex determination As private clinics proliferated in the 1990s they too were equipped with ultrasound technology providing easy access for a fee Despite repeated condemnations of sexselective abortion and attempts to out law the use of ultrasound technology for fetal sex identification easy access to the technology combined with the lure of lucrative bribes and consultation fees made ultrasound use very popular4 This was especially true in newly prosper ous county towns and rural townships where higher incomes made ultrasound diagnosis possible but where modest degrees of upward mobility had done noth ing to undermine the cultural prejudice and practical logic that favored male offspring The impact of female infanticide and sexselective abortion on Chinas gender ratio became increasingly clear in the 1990s In December 1990 Nobel laureate Amartya Sen published a groundbreaking and attention grabbing article called More than 100 Million Women Are Missing that focused on the dramatic gender imbalance in China and India that could only be explained by unnatural interven tions that produced skewed sex ratios at birth5 His research showed that there were many tens of millions fewer females than there should be in those countries given natural sex balance ratios In 1981 the Chinese sex ratio at birth 1085 males for P o P u l a t i o n P o l i c Y 393 every 100 females had already been slightly in excess of the norm Over the next twenty years the sex ratio in favor of males at birth rose dramatically to approxi mately 111 in 1985 116 in 1992 peaking at about 120 in 2008 By 2011 it had declined slightly to 1186 While the sex ratio for firstborn children is badly skewed the skew is far worse when one looks only at secondborn children or third or higherorder children Since most couples who have a second child already have a daughter and since they are risking steep fines or worse by violating the policy they are determined that a second or third child will be a boy For example in 2000 the sex ratio for third births was 160 males per 100 females and evidence suggests that this trend has continued7 India which does not have strict birth limits imposed by the gov ernment however also suffers from a skewed sex ratio at birth that gets worse at higher birth orders8 Close analyses of both cases have led scholars to conclude that the arrival of increasingly affordable and accessible ultrasound technology in the late 1980s was a key factor in both countries in the sharp rise in imbalanced sex ratios at birth Some of this gap can be accounted for by the underreporting of female births by families and local officials who have incentives to ignore them Underreporting was certainly widespread leading to the emergence of a new social category of children whose birth went unregistered and who became known as black chil dren hei haizi In the early 1990s Chinese experts attributed most of the skew in the sex ratio to underreporting of female births implying that the actual sex ratio at birth remained within or close to acceptable norms By the late 1990s however more candid assess ments concluded that sexselective abortion was widespread and was the main cause of the distorted sex ratio Moreover accumulating data indicated that the phenom enon was not just a rural problem nor was it concentrated in the least educated seg ment of the population In other words son preference was not confined to the rural or backward elements of society Instead the combined effect of the onechild birth limit traditional son preference and easy access to a technology that allowed couples to make sure they had a son was to tempt people from a wide variety of socioeco nomic backgrounds to choose sons over daughters The head of the United Nations office in China estimated in 2004 that by 2014 there would be 4060 million missing women in China9 The resulting skew in the sex ratio has raised alarms over the army of bachelors or as they are referred to in Chinese bare branches guang guner who will be unable to find wives as adults Although this problem has already begun to appear among those born after 1980 it will get much worse before it gets better Officials with the Womens Federation for example estimate a shortfall of 30 to 40 million females and worry openly about the unsavory social consequences that may result Recent stud ies have warned of the prospect of growing violence instability and warfare noting that historically societies with large numbers of unemployed transient unmarried young men have been prone to these forms of unrest and upheaval10 Others link the shortage of women to the disturbing increase in the abduction and sale of women and young girls as brides or prostitutes 394 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a ChInAs gRAyIng PoPulATIon The second major concern for those who argue for an end to the onechild policy is the problem of population aging Persons aged sixty or older comprised 88 per cent of Chinas population in 1990 reached 10 percent by the end of the century and was at 137 percent in 2013 Though this figure did not yet place China among those countries with the highest percentages of elderly population the raw numbers were breathtaking especially considering Chinas woefully inadequate pension welfare and health care systems By the year 2013 the elderly population numbered approxi mately 185 million on its way up to an estimated 284 million by 2025 and 440 mil lion by 205011 This trajectory of rapidly increasing numbers of elderly persons as a proportion of the total population resulted from the sharp decline in fertility rates after 1970 a decline induced by strict birth limitation policies So far Chinas dependency ratio that is the workingage population expressed as a proportion of the total population has been manageable The workingage population has been large and young enough to ensure an adequate labor force and to provide essential care for dependents young and old As the workingage population declines relative to the elderly however their ability to maintain current levels of support will be strained Looking ahead however this will change dramatically In 2012 China experienced its first ever natural absolute decrease in its labor force with 345 million fewer work ers than the previous year and a projected decline of about 29 million by the end of the decade12 In 2009 there were thirteen workingage adults for each elderly person by 2050 there will be only two This will place tremendous pressure on the working adult population as their labor will be expected to generate much of the national wealth needed to care for their elders and their children This is compounded by the fact that the current mandatory retirement age in China is sixty for men fiftyfive for female civil servants and fifty for other female workers although there are serious discussions underway about raising it to sixtyfive for everyone Chinas dependency ratio challenge is often summarized as the 421 dilemma in which a workingage married couple2 who are both only children have to care for their one child 1 and their four parents 413 Although many coun tries will face similar challenges or are already facing them eg Italy and Japan Chinas per capita income is quite low for a nation with such a rapidly graying population As The Economist put it China is unusual because it is getting old before getting rich 14 ConClusIon There has long been vigorous debate in China about whether to continue amend or abandon the onechild policy In 2008 the government announced that couples who were both only children would be allowed to have two children In November 2013 reformers won more ground announing that couples would be allowed to have two children if either the mother or the father was an only child The most compelling fac tor in the change seems to have been the looming problem of the aging population and P o P u l a t i o n P o l i c Y 395 the beginning of a decline in the size of the labor force But widespread resentment of those with enough wealth to pay enormous fines and those who used their influence and connections to bypass the onechild rule without penalty was also significant Even as they amended the policy however the partystate reaffirmed its adherence the basic state policy of family planning in order to promote longterm balanced development of the population in China15 Onechild families will still receive bonuses and other benefits The goal is to stabilize Chinas total population at 15 billion and the fertility rate at about 18 births per woman up from the current level of 16 Chinas onechild policy has been lauded for its contribution to slowing world pop ulation growth and its contribution to Chinas rapid economic development Given the costs and negative consequences of the policy however it is important to ask if a similar result could have been achieved by different means Chinas approach to population control was set in motion prior to the era of reform that began in 1978 and while nearly every other policy arena underwent a transformation in the decades that followed population control policy essentially remained static until very recently The policy has been tinkered with and sometimes relaxed on the margins but the possibility of changing Chinas entire approach to population issues has never gained traction with Chinas leaders The claim made by Chinese authorities is that the birth limitation program has prevented 400 million births since the mid1970s but they offer no explanation for how this number is calculated It appears that it is derived by subtracting Chinas actual population today from a calculation of what it would have been if the fer tility levels of the early 1970sbefore the birth limitation program began to be implementedhad remained relatively stable at those levels The problem with this formula is that it fails to consider the independent impact of reform and mod ernization on population growth There is abundant historical evidence that fertil ity rates drop in response to rapid urbanization increasing costs of childbearing the commercialization of agriculture and improved educational opportunities especially for women Changes like these all of which occurred in China after 1978 may not have been enough to bring down fertility rates as far and as fast as Chinese leaders desired but it is at best misleading to suggest that the strict enforcement of birth limits prevented the growth of the population by an additional 400 million The impact of the onechild policy on population numbers then has most cer tainly been more modest that what is claimed by the regime A more sophisticated assessment of its impact must revisit that calculation and take into consideration the full range of costs and benefitseconomic human and socialthat have accompa nied Chinas onechild policy even as the tinkering continues noTes 1 Gu Baochang and Mu Guangzong A New Understanding of Chinas Population Problem Renkou yanjiu Population Research 5 1994 210 2 See Tyrene White Chinas Longest Campaign Birth Planning in the Peoples Republic Ithaca NY Cornell University Press 2006 232 396 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a 3 For the full text of Chinas Population and Family Planning Law see Population and Development Review 28 no 3 September 2002 579585 4 For a report on an such business see Boys Preferred Lucrative Trade Remains in Illegal Fetus Gender Identification Global Times March 31 2013 httpwwwglobaltimes cncontent769754shtmlUdswj54Z0M 5 Amartya Sen More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing The New York Review of Books 37 20 December 20 1990 httpwwwnybookscomarticles34081 and A Sen Development as Freedom New York Alfred A Knopf 1999 204226 6 Chinas Total Population and Structural Changes in 2011 National Bureau of Statistics of China January 20 2012 httpwwwstatsgovcnenglishnewsandcomingevents t20120120402780233htm 7 Wei Xingzhu Li Hu and Theresa Hesketh Chinas Excess Males Sex Selective Abortion and One Child Policy Analysis of Data from 2005 National Intercensus Survey BMJ British Medical Journal 2009 338 b1211 April 9 2009 httpwwwbmjcomcon tent338bmjb1211 8 Carl Haub and O P Sharma Indias Population Reality Reconciling Change and Tradition Population Bulletin 61 no 3 September 2006 9 China Grapples with Legacy of Its Missing Girls China Daily September 15 2004 httpwwwchinadailycomcnenglishdoc20040915content374629htm 10 Valerie M Hudson and Andrea M den Boer Bare Branches The Security Implications of Asias Surplus Male Population Cambridge MA MIT Press 2004 11 Mark W Frazier No Country for Old Age The New York Times February 18 2013 httpwwwnytimescom20130219opinionnocountryforoldagehtml Chinas Population The Most Surprising Demographic Crisis The Economist May 5 2011 http wwweconomistcomnode18651512 12 China to ease onechild policy httpnewsxinhuanetcomenglishchina2013 1115c132891920html 13 See Young Chinese Couples Face Pressure from 421 Family Structure Peoples Daily August 25 2010 httpenglishpeoplecomcn90001907827117246html 14 Chinas Predicament Getting Old before Getting Rich The Economist June 25 2009 httpwwweconomistcomnode13888069 15 Xinhua China to ease onechild policy Online Available at httpnewsxinhuanet comenglishchina20131115c132891920html suggesTed ReAdIngs Banister Judith Chinas Changing Population Stanford CA Stanford University Press 1987 Banister Judith David E Bloom and Larry Rosenberg Population Aging and Economic Growth in China Harvard School of Public Health Working Paper March 2010 Croll Elisabeth Cultivating Global Citizens Population in the Rise of China Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 2010 Endangered Daughters Discrimination and Development in Asia New York Routledge 2000 Greenhalgh Susan Just One Child Science and Policy in Dengs China Berkeley University of California Press 2008 Greenhalgh Susan and Edwin Winckler Governing Chinas Population From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics Berkeley University of California Press 2005 P o P u l a t i o n P o l i c Y 397 Hudson Valerie and Andrea den Boer Bare Branches The Security Implications of Asias Surplus Male Population Cambridge MA MIT Press 2004 Johnson Kay Ann Wanting a Daughter Needing a Son Abandonment Adoption and Orphanage Care in China St Paul MN Yeong Yeong 2004 Lee James and Wang Feng One Quarter of Humanity Malthusian Mythologies and Chinese Realities Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 1999 White Tyrene Chinas Longest Campaign Birth Planning in the Peoples Republic 1949 2005 Ithaca NY Cornell University Press 2006 Zhao Zhongwei and Fei Guo Transition and Challenge Chinas Population at the Beginning of the 21st Century New York Oxford University Press 2007 PART IV Politics on Chinas Periphery The display and pageantry of the Beijing Olympics in 2008 demonstrated a notion common to most nations that the capital city represents what is most important about a country The focus on a nations capital is usually accom panied by a presumption that the actions decisions and views of the metropolitan élite define a countrys politics and drive its future while events and opinions in the hin terland diminish in significance according to their dis tance from the center From that perspective Tibetans a group of 62 million people living on average some 14000 feet above sea level and up to 2500 miles from Beijing with some 80 percent of them living in rural areas on semiarid grassland or in high altitude valleys are marginal to Chinas politics But the most telling challenge to the success of the Beijing Olympics came from Tibet after over a hundred protests erupted there in the spring of 2008 These did more than capture the attention of the worlds media they led the PRC to cut off one quarter of its territory from the outside world for several months as troops were put in place and reprisals carried out As of 2013 much of that area remains closed to foreigners Why did the unrest in Tibet have such a dramatic effect when the hundred thousand or more protests known to have occurred in other parts of China that year did not The response of the Chinese state is hard to explain if the protests were isolated instances of antiChina agitation instigated by foreigners and exiles or economic opportunism by Tibetans jealous of the wealth among the ethnic Chinese as the Beijing media insisted at the time Rather it suggests that Tibetans who represent just 04 percent of Chinas total population have a significance as political actors within China that is disproportionate to their numbers Indeed if we set aside the small proportion of the Tibetan population in China the size location and history of Tibet R o b e RT b AR n e T T 15 402 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Tibet should lead us to expect that the area will be politically important Tibetused here in its broadest sense to describe the entire Tibetan Plateau the area tradition ally inhabited by Tibetanscovers some 970000 square miles making it roughly equivalent in size to Western Europe minus Scandinavia In China the Chinese word for Tibet Xizang is used to refer only to the western half 472000 square miles of the plateau the part directly administered by the Dalai Lamas government in the 1940s taken over by the Peoples Liberation Army in 1950 and officially renamed the Tibet Autonomous Region or TAR in 1965 The Tibetan Plateau represents 26 percent of current Chinese territory while the areas traditionally inhabited by Uyghurs and Mongols two other peoples with long histories of resistance to Chinese rule cover another third of the PRC The impor tance of the area is not just a question of size the headwaters of many of Asias most important rivers flow from the Tibetan Plateau including the Yangtze the Yellow the Brahmaputra the Salween the Mekong the Irrawaddy and the Indus In military terms the Tibetan Plateau is the strategic high ground where Central South and East Asia converge It includes 2300 miles of international borders with four countries of which one that with India is still disputed and highly militarized while another the border with Bhutan has yet to be settled The most serious armed challenge that the CCP has faced within its territory since it took over China came from Tibetans in the late 1950s The only sustained guerrilla attacks it has faced since 1949 were those staged by Tibetans from 1959 to 1974 and Chinas only war that remains unresolved was with India in 1962 a result of a dispute over the Tibetan borders The growing prominence of Tibet as a factor in Chinas international relations particularly those with the United States is reflected in the fact that since 1987 Beijing has not allowed any nation to open diplomatic relations with it unless that nation states publicly its recognition of Chinas sovereignty over not just Taiwan but Tibet as well Since the late 1980s Tibet has come to play a new role in Chinas internal politics too it has emerged as a proving ground for some of Chinas highest leaders Hu Jintao the leader of the Chinese Communist Party from 2002 to 2012 and Chinas president from 2003 to 2013 was promoted to the top positions in the nation after he had proved his abilities by serving as the party secretary of the TAR from 1988 to 1992 crushing protests and overseeing the imposition of martial law in the region for a thirteenmonth period that began in March 1989 The current party secretary and for mer mayor of Beijing Guo Jinlong was promoted to that position after working as the party secretary of the TAR and Hu Chunhua the official expected by many observers to be Chinas ruler after 2020 worked for twenty years as a leader in Tibet Nor are these the only signs that Tibet is viewed by Chinas leaders in a different way from other areas The fiftyfive nationalities that are not ethnically Chinese or Han to use the word pre ferred by officials in China since it implies that Tibetans and other nationalities are also Chinese are in theory governed according to a single policy but of the eightyseven The CCP party secretary is the most powerful person in the TAR as in each of the PRCs autonomous regions prov inces and other administrative units By law the head of the government in each autonomous region known as the zhushi or chairman has to be a member of the ethnic minority that traditionally was the largest in the region but this regulation applies only to the leader of the government in such regions not to the leader of the party there The CCP party secretary in the TAR has never been a Tibetan t i b e t 403 M a p A r e a Disputed Border Disputed Borders Kathmandu Lhasa Ürümci Chengdu Shigatse Kunming Chamdo A M D O U T S A N G K H A M T I B E T AU T O N O M O U S R E G I O N N 0 0 200 300 400 500 km 100 100 200 300 mi Q I N G H A I G A N S U X I N J I A N G S I C H UA N Y U N N A N V I ETNA M L A O S NEPAL M O N G O L I A I N D I A B U R M A M YA N M A R BANGLADESH I N N E R M O N G O L I A Xining B HU TA N The Tibet Autonomous Region and the areas known in Tibetan as Kham and Amdo comprising the Tibetan Plateau 404 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a White Papers released by the Chinese government since 1992 ten have been on Tibet or Tibetans1 with only two others devoted to policy towards a specific nationality In 2005 Tibetans became the only nationality to have their own bureau No 7 within the United Front the department of the CCP that runs all nationality and religious affairs in China and the TAR remains the only part of China that foreign tourists journalists and officials are required to have a special permit to enter These factors suggest that although many people in China and the international community think of Tibet as geographically peripheral and politically marginal Tibet and Tibetans have an important role perhaps even a critical one in Chinese poli tics This may be why Chinas leaders respond to Tibetan issues with their complex historical legacies more nervously than they do to such issues as economic growth development urbanization international relations ideological shifts or social unrest in China properand why their responses to Tibetan problems meet with less suc cess than those in almost any other policy domain The standard formulation used by Chinese leaders since 1990 to describe their Tibet policy indicates that the Tibet issue is anything but marginal to them From a strategic height and an overall point of view goes the formula the PRCs policy in Tibet is crucial to the success of reforms development and stability throughout the country2 In 2006 Tibet was for the first time declared publicly by China to be one of the nations core interests and in 2008 Hu Jintao said in his annual statement on Tibet that the stability in Tibet concerns the stability of the country3 major protests erupted in Lhasa four days later These statements repeated in all Chinas recent major policy documents on Tibet may well mean exactly what they say Tibet is a crucial political concern for the PRC SInoTIbeTAn RelATIonS And The Role of The GIfT When Xi Jinping visited Lhasa in July 2011 a year before he became Chinas new leader he was greeted by floral arrangements laid out in the main square of the city a hundred feet or more across that spelled out in Tibetan the words We thank the Central Party Authorities tang krung dbyang thugs rje che shu Three months later as if to ensure that the slogan had been accurate 21000 cadres were gathered in the same square and told that they would spend the next three years living in teams of four or more in every village in the TAR where they were to educate the villagers on Feeling Grateful to the Party for its Generosity Each team was instructed to use vivid teaching materials to explain to the villagers that their happy and peaceful life today is because of the leadership of the Communist Party and to bring them to consciously love the Party love patriotism and love socialism The teams were given 100000 yuan about US16000 each to spend on gifts for each village such as new roads facilities and meeting halls as well as one million national flags and post ers bearing the portrait of Mao Zedong and other leaders which were then given to Tibetan villagers and others to put up in their homes Tellingly the cadres were told that Feeling Grateful to the Party education was a higher priority than dispensing the money to the villagers4 This cultivation of Tibetan gratitude which was a key part of Chinas longterm response to the protests in Tibet in 2008 has deep historical roots in Chinas relations t i b e t 405 with Tibet and Tibetans If we try to envisage the perspective of Chinese officials and the CCP toward Tibet over the last sixty years what we see for the most part is not an effort to destroy or attack Tibetan culture as some critics have alleged but the opposite a long series of gifts interrupted only by what the Party now describes as the errors of the Cultural Revolution The nature of these gifts changed according to shifts in political conditions and ideology in China as did the explanations that went with them The initial gift to Tibetans was that of liberation in 1950 this was followed by the gift of land to the peasantry in 1959 Other gifts were to come regional auton omy in 1965 a classless society in 1966 the household economy in 1980 stability in 1990 the market economy in 1992 and comfortable housing for villagers in 2006 Some of these giftsland distribution in 1959 the end of class difference in 1966 and the household economy in the early 1980swere aimed at winning over the masses while others such as permission to continue traditional social relations in 1951 and the marketization policy in 1992 were carried out at times when the Party needed to make an alliance with local élites All of these gifts from the perspective of the Party were forms of generosity The many uprisings rebellions protests and forms of resistance that have taken place in Tibet over the last sixty years have been interpreted particularly among for eigners and exiles as indications that these gifts have been seen by many Tibetans as impositions oppression or at best flawed policies Chinese officials and writers on the other hand have tended to write about the negative response of many Tibetans to these displays of largesse as signs of backwardness opportunism foreign agitation or in the final analysis ingratitude Either view reflects the influence of ideologies whether Marxism modernism or liberal humanism that train us to assume that cer tain values will necessarily be shared by others and that gifts exemplifying those val ues will be welcomed It is such perspectives that have scripted the cycles of repeated pride and anxiety generosity and resentment in Chinas policies toward Tibet TibetanChinese relations have long been governed by gifts In the traditional Tibetan viewat least from the midseventeenth century when the Dalai Lamas spiritual leaders regarded as the reincarnations of a fifteenthcentury Buddhist master see Box 151 became the political rulers of Tibet and created something like a stateTibets political relations were with particular emperors who ruled China rather than with China as a nation and during the Yuan 12711368 and Qing 16441912 dynasties those emperors were in any case not Chinese but were Mongols or Manchus respectively and were viewed as Buddhist kings or Dharmaprotectors an important concept in Buddhist societies The relation ship between them and the Dalai Lamas was described in Tibetan texts at the time as that between a patron and a lama with the emperors giving patronage and pro tection in return for religious teachings and spiritual empowerment The emper ors patronage was expressed by their recognition of the Dalai Lamas title and by their willingness to send troops when the Tibetans asked for them Material gifts were an important expression of this relationship functioning both as religious offerings and as signs of wealth respect and commitment The importance with which they were viewed can be seen from the fact that the autobiography of the Fifth Dalai Lama 16171682 the most important of his line includes details of each gift presented to him by the Qing Emperors and other potentates When the 406 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Emperors wrote to Tibetan rulers their letters were always accompanied by gifts with each one itemized so as to emphasize its value With this decree wrote the Emperor Daoguang to the Tenth Dalai Lama in 1823 I am presenting you with a 60liang goldplated silver container for tealeaves a goldplated silver vase a large goblet 30 rolls of assorted silk in addition to a jade figure of Buddha a set of bells and sticks a jade ruyi a chaplet of coral beads a pythonpatterned robe two boxes of fragrant cakes and a pair of padded mattresses5 These were just half of the twentyfour offerings listed in the letter which like many of its kind had no specific purpose other than to convey respect and to record the extent of the Emperors offerings to the Lama As the anthropologist Marcel Mauss famously pointed out gifts are social trans actions that are always invested with unstated meanings known to the giver and expected of the recipient In theory he wrote an act of giving is voluntary dis interested and spontaneous and the form usually taken is that of the gift gener ously offered This is he argued a pretence and social deception because behind the formal transaction are notions of obligation and economic selfinterest6 Whatever we say to others or tell ourselves according to Mauss when we give box 151 Dalai lamas anD Panchen lamas Although all forms of buddhism recognize reincarnation only the Tibetans developed a theory that certain highlyachieved spiritual masters or lamas voluntarily renounce nirvana so that they can be reborn as a human in order to help others The Tibetans also developed techniques such as visions in divination lakes ways of testing childrens previouslife memories and prayers which are believed to enable the previous lamas fol lowers to identify the right child as the reincarnation of that trulku or reincarnated lama Such children inherit their predecessors position and estate The longest continuous trulku lineage is that of the Karmapa first recognized in the thirteenth century and now in his seventeenth body There are at least a thousand trulku or lama lineages at least four of which are or were composed only of women The most famous and influential is that of the dalai lamas which began in the late fourteenth cen tury The Third dalai lama 15431588 was a leading spiritual master within the Gelugpa school of Tibetan buddhism and became well known in Mongolia as the teacher of Altan Khan ruler of the Tumed Mongols When a Mongol army invaded Tibet in 1642 its leader appointed the fifth dalai lama 16171682 as the ruler of Tibet with the Potala Palace in lhasa as his seat The Great fifth as he was called was able to create a unified nation and a governmental system that was presided over by his successors or by their regents when they were young for the next three hundred years The Panchen lamas first recognized as a trulku lineage by the fifth dalai lama in the seventeenth century were based in Tashilhunpo monastery in Tibets second largest town Shigatse and became the secondmost famous teachers in the Gelugpa school The Panchen lamas and the dalai lamas were sometimes tutors to each other depend ing on who was older at the time In Tibetan the word lama is only used to describe a highly regarded spiritual teacher but in Chinese it is used incorrectly to refer to any Tibetan monk english terms like lamaism living buddha living God God King or Soul boy have no equivalent in Tibetan there is no creator God in buddhism and no belief in the soul and are considered derogatory by many Tibetans t i b e t 407 we expect something in return This appears to be even more the case with politi cal gifts and still more so with those given by one nation or one ruler to another The Tibetans certainly understood that they should give something in return for the satin and the silk and so gave religious respect charismatic status and lim ited forms of obedience to the Qing Emperors In particular the Fifth Dalai Lama declaredthough only after first receiving gifts from the new dynasty in Beijing that the Qing Emperor was an emanation of the Bodhisattva Jampeyang known in Sanskrit as Manjushri If we use the concept of tribute to describe Chinas relations with its peripheries and neighbors we could call the Tibetans response to these imperial gifts soft tribute since it consisted mostly of intangibles like titles spiri tual empowerments and deference of a sort These were of great symbolic value to the Manchu Qing emperors in their quest for legitimacy especially in their deal ings with Buddhist Inner Asia MAnChu VIeWS of TIbeT When China had been at the center of the vast landbased empires run by the Mongol Yuan dynasty or the Manchu Qing dynasty Tibet had been seen as both a part of those empires and at the same time as a distinct political entity There had been no flattening of space or persons that conceived of all the people within those empires as coequal or equivalent as happens with citizens in a modern nationstate Traditional leaders in Tibet received imperial orders from time to time mainly confirmations of appointments but largely were left to rule as they saw fit while the Ming Emperors 13681644 did not include Tibet in their official maps and seem not to have con sidered it a part of their domain From the 1720s the Manchu Qing Emperors sent ambans or imperial commissioners with a small detachment of troops to Lhasa where they were kept informed of certain kinds of local decisions such as official appointments and interactions with foreign states But otherwise the role of these officials from Beijing who until the twentieth century were always Mongols or Manchus never Han Chinese was somewhat limited and there was no idea among Tibetans that Tibet and China were a single country7 The Manchu rulers in Beijing did not refer to the status of Tibet in modern terms until just before the twentieth century Prior to that time they described it as a bar barian fan region that was part of their outer dominions and administered it until 1861 through a special office the Lifanyuan sometimes translated as the Court of Colonial Affairs while the areas that had been part of China under the Ming were administered directly as provinces8 The Manchus were obliged to change this loose premodern terminology when a British army led by Francis Younghusband invaded Tibet in 1903 to 1904 supposedly in order to guarantee British trade rights and avert a rumored buildup of Russian weapons in Tibet after massacring some three to four thousand Tibetans the British found just three Russianmade rifles in the country Younghusband and other Western officials defined Tibet as a protectorate a depen dency or a territory under the authority of a suzerain state or overlord indicating that while not a fully independent state they considered it a distinct nation of some kind9 Younghusband returned with his troops to India within six months having 408 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a forced the Tibetans to sign a humiliating surrender agreement but his escapade had momentous results it impelled the Qing court to formalize its relationship with Tibet In 1910 the court which had determined that Tibet should be considered part of Chinas sovereign territory sent an army to invade Lhasa planning to disband the Tibetan government and to make Tibet into a Chinese province The Tibetan army was able to rout the Qing troops and reclaim control a year later when the collapse of the Qing dynasty left its soldiers with no money and no supplies But the die had been cast a century of wars invasions and protests leading to tens of thousands of deaths would follow as successive Chinese governments sought to enforce their new interpretation of Tibets relationship with China The failure of the Qing attempt at full annexation in turn led the Thirteenth Dalai Lama 18761933 once he had returned to Lhasa from refuge in British India to redefine Tibets status in modern terms The Chinese intention of colonizing Tibet under the priest lamapatron relationship has faded like a rainbow in the sky he wrote to the Tibetan people in 191310 He described Tibet as independent asserting that the relationship between Tibet and China had not been based on the subordina tion of one to the other but on personal ties between the imperial patrons and the Tibetan lamas All remaining Chinese officials and their dependents were expelled from Lhasa and Tibet or at least those parts of it that the Dalai Lamas government controlled became a de facto independent country The government of the Republic of China 19121949 asserted similar claims over Tibet based on modern notions such as sovereignty and ownership but was unable to gain entry to the region for its officials until 1934 let alone to exercise authority From then until 1950 a few Chinese officials were allowed to reside in Lhasa but with the same status as the representatives of Nepal Bhutan and Britain It was only when the CCP came to power in China in 1949 that a government in Beijing had the military resources to enforce the Chinese claim to sovereignty over Tibet and one year and a week after the CCP took over China some forty thousand troops of the Peoples Liberation Army PLA invaded Tibet taking only a few days to overwhelm the seven thousand or so Tibetan forces stationed at Chamdo near the current border with Sichuan province The SeVenTeen PoInT AGReeMenT of 1951 The GIfT of exCePTIonAlISM Even before 1949 echoes of the historical gift relationship between China and Tibet can be detected in the CCPs statements and policies In its Jiangxi Constitution of 1931 the new party had spelled out its policy toward Tibetans and other nonChinese nationalities promising them the ultimate gift the right to complete separation from China and the formation of an independent state once the party obtained power This commitment which emulated Lenins accommodationist approach to nation alities in the Soviet Union11 was quietly withdrawn some ten years later before it could be implemented Recollections of this early undelivered gift had important consequences particularly among the first Tibetan communists like Baba Phuntsog Wanggyal once the highest placed Tibetan in the CCP who was to spend eighteen t i b e t 409 years in prison for having tried to remind his comrades in 1957 of Leninist princi ples and the Jiangxi promise some ten years after these had been removed from the Partys list of allowed policies12 But the principle of the gift remained paramount in CCP thinking about Tibet Following the military victory of the PLA in 1950 the Party faced the reality of ruling over a people who had had almost no contact with anything Chinese let alone com munist and yet were being told by their new rulers that they were not only part of China but were themselves Chinese At that moment Mao made a bold decision that reflected the legacy he had inherited from the Qing he decided to give Tibetans almost everything they wanted short of independence In May 1951 the Tibetan govern ment which had been rebuffed in its efforts to obtain support from Britain India or the United Nations signed a surrender document in Beijing entitled The Agreement Between the Central Government and the Local Government of Tibet on Measures for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet known more usually as the Seventeen Point Agreement The agreement stated that although Tibet was now part of China the central authorities will not alter the existing political system in Tibet or the estab lished status functions and powers of the Dalai Lama Article 4 As for reforms in Tibet there will be no compulsion on the part of the central authorities Article 11 Tibetan officials were to remain in position and religious beliefs customs and hab its of the Tibetan people would be respected and the lamaseries shall be protected Article 7 The Chinese Communist Party was not mentioned in the Agreement and its representatives were to take only an advisory role in Tibet This was a policy of exceptionalism according to which Tibet was to be treated quite differently from the rest of China and given the gift of continuing unreformed governance and society with a treatylike document to confirm its status It was unlike anything else in Chinese Communist history until the arrangement with Hong Kong thirty years later In return the Tibetans gave China soft tribute in the strongest form recognition for the first time of Chinas sovereignty over their territory Mao had several reasons for treating Tibet so differently from the rest of Chinathere were no roads to move supplies and troops no party members or cells in place few translators no experience of working with Tibetans or Tibetan Buddhism and almost no indigenous calls for social reform let alone for occupa tion He was also cautious because of the international dimensions of the Tibetan issue The British had had a diplomatic presence in Lhasa from 1936 to 1947 as had Nepal Sikkim Bhutan and later India and American interest in Tibet had begun to increase following a mission sent in 1943 by the Office of Strategic Services the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency CIA Although initial offers of American military support in 1951 had been rejected by the advisers to the Fourteenth Dalai Lama who was then in his late teens as too tentative and unre liable from 1956 the newly formed CIA began to give covert support to Tibetan resistance forces in Eastern Tibet Munitions were parachuted into the region and 250 Tibetans were given military training first on the Pacific island of Saipan and later in the Colorado Rockies with about 50 of them dropped into Tibet After 1959 the agency equipped some two thousand Tibetan guerrilla fighters operating from a base in Nepal reportedly without the knowledge of the Dalai Lama who contin ued sending sorties into Tibet until 1974 The degree of international involvement 410 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a in Tibet was thus one of several reasons why the new Chinese rulers of Tibet ini tially chose to avoid alienating the existing élite and the middle class in Lhasa and to treat the region much as the Qing had done a half century earlier they offered gifts and demanded respect or acquiescence in return but did not interfere in internal affairs At least on the surface Mao initially followed imperial traditions in his approach to ruling Tibet 1959 The PolICy of exCePTIonAlISM unRAVelS From the outset the annexation of Tibet was explained by Chinese officials at least to its domestic audience not as noninterference or exceptionalism but as liberation At the time this term referred not to the freeing of Tibetans from feudal serfdom the phrase the Chinese used after 1959 to describe traditional Tibetan society but to freeing them from imperialism by which was meant British or American intervention The CCPs first substantive dealings with Tibet were thus presented publicly as the gift of being freed from the threat of foreign domination The Tibetans had no reason to consider that they faced any such threatthere were just six Westerners in the country in 1950 and no nation had offered substantive support to the Tibetans at that time The only significant request from a Tibetan for China to take over Tibet had come from the Panchen Lama one of the most important Tibetan religious leaders in 1949 but he was then living in exile in China estranged from the Tibetan government and desperate for Chinese sup port in his dispute with Lhasa and in any case was just eleven years old at the time Such rhetoric was probably not of much importance to Tibetans at the time what was persuasive and significant to them was the promise in the Seventeen Point Agreement that their government and religious institutions would remain intact That promise was not however sustainable coming as it did from a political party committed to bringing radical change throughout society13 The monasteries and the aristocrats that were the foundation of the traditional Tibetan order would be allowed to survive in the short term but it was only a matter of time before they would be displaced once the inevitable socialist transformation began There was another contradiction within Chinas 1950s policy toward Tibet Maos policy of exceptionalism was not offered to Tibetans but only to Tibet a place name that in Chinese usage refers only to the 472000 or so square miles in the western half of the Tibetan Plateau that were formerly administered directly by Lhasa The majority of Tibetans live in the eastern part of the Tibetan Plateau referred to by the Chinese authorities as the QinghaiTibetan Plateau Those areas some 628000 square miles lying to the east of the upper Yangtze River are called Kham and Amdo in Tibetan and are now within the provinces of Qinghai southern Gansu western Sichuan and the northern tip of Yunnan14 The Seventeen Point Agreement had never been intended by Mao to apply to Tibetans who lived in those areas and there were only short delays before the imposition of radical socialist changes there By 1955 a land reform campaignin effect violent attacks on the landholding classes includ ing the monasterieshad begun in the eastern Tibetan areas leading to widespread resistance uprisings and military conflict across the eastern plateau which reached a climax in 1958 t i b e t 411 Most of these Tibetan areas had been separate domains or small principalities and the majority of these had not been directly ruled by the government of the Dalai Lamas for decades if not centuries But Tibetans there had strong cultural and reli gious links to Lhasa and it was to that city that thousands fled to avoid the fighting and destruction in the east The refugees brought with them accounts of the suppression of religion and the bombing of major monasteries particularly in the Tibetan areas of Sichuanproof in Tibetan eyes that the gift promised to the western Tibetans had been a trick and was not going to last This news helped trigger the Lhasa uprising of March 10 1959 It was an armed rebellion with widespread popular support but it was suppressed within a few days by the PLA which had been expecting such a con frontation for several months The failed uprising led to the flight of the Dalai Lama and some eighty thousand refugees to India where for several years they struggled to survive in desperate conditions until Indian and Western financial support gradually enabled the exile Tibetan administration to set up orphanages schools and agricul tural settlements The GIfT of deMoCRATIC RefoRM Inside Tibet the Party immediately introduced new policies in March 1959 that marked an end to exceptionalism It renounced the Seventeen Point Agreement as did the exiles and began imposing radical social leveling which it referred to as democratic reform minzhu gaige It seized land from landlords and monas teries ended all debts and disbanded the traditional social system as it had done some four years earlier in Kham and Amdo and in the rest of China Its primary allies in Tibet were no longer the élite but the peasantry This allowed it to pres ent a much stronger argument to explain its mission in Tibet and provided it with credible evidence of Tibetan enthusiasm for the changes official newsreel foot age at the time shows thousands of farmers burning their debt documents and denouncing their former landlords The mass ceremonies were largely staged but there were certainly many people who had good reason to feel deeply grateful for the chance to have their own land and to speak out against whatever suffering they had endured under the previous system This footage and fictional reconstruc tions of it in popular Chinese filmsmost famously the 1963 epic Nongnu The Serf the story of a Tibetan orphan who is freed by PLA soldiers from endless oppression by lamas and landlordsbecame extremely influential in China and other developing countries providing powerful images of mass Tibetan gratitude to the CCP for its reforms The word used by the Chinese authorities to describe this gift was again liberation but it now referred to the freeing of the Tibetan peasants from the alleged brutality of feudalism and serfdom rather than to free dom from imperialism The new gift land for the farmers and herders and an end to class privilege had a hard side too it was combined with ruthless punishment for those who had rejected or undermined the previous gift of liberation from the invisible foreign threat In a campaign called the Elimination of the Rebellion the Chinese military began a sweep across Central Tibet it was already carrying out armed reprisals in Kham and 412 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Amdo holding mass struggle sessions to denounce alleged traitors and counterrevo lutionaries and killing or imprisoning those suspected of sympathy for the uprisings the previous system Tibetan independence or opposition to socialism The Chinese military historian Ji Youquan wrote that some ninety thousand Tibetans were killed or wounded in the campaign in Central Tibet alone15 Thousands of others who had not been able to reach the safety of India and were suspected of dissent were sent to labor camps where many died of starvation or abuse of those who survived many were not released until twenty years later Years afterwards the Tenth Panchen Lama 19381989 the highestranking lama to have remained in Tibet after the Dalai Lama fled said that 10 to 15 percent of the Tibetans in Qinghai province had been impris oned for involvement in the rebellions there of whom half had died in prison16 Only a handful of these he said had had any involvement in the resistance movement of the 1950s In 1962 the Panchen Lama sent an internal petition 120 pages long to Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai begging them to end the extreme abuses that he had witnessed on a tour of the Tibetan Plateau the previous winter In his appeal he described the effect on Tibetans in Qinghai of the famines created by the Great Leap Forward There has been an evident and severe reduction in the presentday Tibetan population presenting a great threat to the continued existence of the Tibetan nationality which is sinking into a state close to death he wrote17 He went on to describe local policies that were decimating Tibetan society and religion so that he doubted they could survive He reported that 97 percent of the monasteries in the TAR had been shut down and 93 percent of monks and nuns had been forced to leave their institutions and probably made to shed their robes18 The report was written four years before the Cultural Revolution began making it impossible that policies of cultural and religious destruction in Tibet were limited to that episode as most accounts published in China and elsewhere have assumed The petition led to the Panchen Lama himself being subjected to struggle sessions in Lhasa every day for two and a half months in 1964 and then to fourteen years in prison or under house arrest By the early 1960s the increases in agricultural production that had resulted from the new techniques introduced by the Chinese were being offset by increasing tax demands on the Tibetan farmers partly a result of Chinas loss of aid from the Soviet Union and partly a result of the introduction of the commune system For some farmers this meant that the gift of land they had received in 1959 now seemed to have been taken away from them In this climate Beijing made another gift to Tibetans in 1965 local autonomy Tibet was renamed the Tibet Autonomous Region and declared to be autonomous as had already been done with twelve prefectures and counties in the eastern Tibetan areas This meant that these areas had to appoint a Tibetan as their governor or chairman and that they would have a local legislature This sys tem remains a major element of Chinas policies toward Tibetans and other minority nationalities today but it applies only to governmental bodies not to the CCP Since all governmental decisions policies and appointments are ultimately made by party officials who at the more senior levels are generally ethnic Chinese the gift of auton omy has remained largely nominal t i b e t 413 The CulTuRAl ReVoluTIon In TIbeT The Cultural Revolution which began in May 1966 made relatively little difference to the former élite in Tibet most of whom had already been held under actual or effective imprisonment since 1959 but it caused extraordinary damage to cultural intellectual and religious life in the rest of the society Again it was presented as a gift to the people a term which at that time referred only to peasants workers and sol diers On this occasion the gift was freedom from the Four Oldsold customs old culture old habits and old ideasthat were then seen as a form of oppression This campaign is now regarded as having been in large part a pretext for a factional attack by Maos supporters on leaders within the party who were suspected of disloyalty to the Chairman It led to a period of radical social leveling that is recalled by some as refreshing but it came at a huge cost disrobed clerics who were supposed to be celibate were forced to marry disgraced aristocrats and intellectuals were paraded through the streets and pilloried the empty monasteries were pillaged and the build ings wrecked teachers were paraded in the streets and denounced in ritualistic dis plays of mass political violence schools were disbanded and almost all literature art and film production ceased for ten years except for a short list of ideologically acceptable items Only thirteen out of more than a thousand monasteries are said to have been left standing in the TAR by the time the violence was over No one had the option of remaining uninvolved in these activities and much of the destruction and violence of this period was carried out by Tibetans under the leadership of Red Guard teams sent to Tibet from different parts of China19 Within a year the situation had deteriorated into civil war between two Red Guard factions both led by Chinese known in Tibet as Nyamdrel the Cooperative and Gyenlok the Rebels Several small rebellions took place in 1969 leading to kill ings and fighting in at least a quarter of the rural counties in the TAR The most famous of these was the Nyemo revolt led by a charismatic village oracle the nun Thrinley Choedron The nun inspired by visions of Tibetan warriors from ancient epics called on villagers to ransack local government offices in neighboring villages which resulted in the slaughtering of some fifty Chinese officials and soldiers and the mutilation of Tibetans deemed to be sympathetic to them Historians disagree over whether the revolt was a nationalist movement against the Chinese presence in Tibet a dispute over the failure of officials to distribute resources or a conflict deliberately incited by Chinese leaders in the Gyenlok faction against their oppo nents the last two explanations are given in official documents from the time20 As in the rest of China the army had to be brought in to regain control and thirtyfour leaders of the Nyemo rebellion including Thrinley Choedron were captured and executed During the Cultural Revolution the Chinese promoted a new kind of leadership among Tibetans former serfsnot so different in their background from Thrinley Choedron except that they espoused atheismwere promoted to leading positions throughout the region There were few other Tibetans whose loyalty to Beijing could be relied upon as no one else benefited from the gift of revolutionary violence and cultural destruction then on offer Although leaders of this type were purged from 414 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a their positions throughout China in 1978 or shortly afterwards in the TAR some of these leaders were allowed to remain in office until 2000 or even later The TuRnInG PoInT The most violent phase of the Cultural Revolution ended in 1969 but many of its radi cal policies remained in force throughout China until the death of Mao in 1976 and for some three years longer in Tibet A turning point came on May 23 1980 when Hu Yaobang then general secretary of the CCP and an appointee of Deng Xiaoping gave a speech in Lhasa that was unique in CCP history Rather than accusing Tibetans of ingratitude or foreigners of interference Hu declared that party policy had failed in the TAR Accusing the Chinese cadres stationed there of having thrown the money entrusted to them by Beijing into the Lhasa river Hu declared that Tibetans should be allowed to run their own region and to practice their own cultural traditions Most of the Chinese living in the TAR at that timemainly party or government cadres were told to hand over their positions to local people and leave the region Former aristocrats and intellectuals were rehabilitated and local people were encouraged to wear traditional clothes again Within a few years people gradually discovered that they were allowed to rebuild monasteries and temples that had been desecrated or destroyed and by the next decade over a thousand of these had been restored Hu delivered his speech on the anniversary of the signing of the Seventeen Point Agreement in 1951 signaling that Beijing wished to recall the exceptionalist policies of the early 1950s when Tibet had been treated as if it were truly an autonomous area This time the gift from Beijing was much more limited than it had been in the 1950s it consisted of cultural tolerance and a token measure of Tibetan participa tion in the government of the TAR But the beneficiaries included almost the entire society aristocrats were released from prison the communes were disbanded pri vate management of land and herds was allowed again monasteries and temples were gradually reconstructed and internal travel and pilgrimage became possible Tibetanlanguage education was reintroduced in primary schools and for the first time since the Chinese takeover individual foreign tourists were allowed to visit the capital and certain other areas In the summer of 1985 several thousand Tibetans were even permitted to travel to India to attend an important Buddhist ceremony known as the Kalachakra conducted by the Dalai Lama The eastern Tibetans who had suf fered even longer and rebelled more ferociously than those in the TAR benefited from similar policy relaxations which were implemented with more commitment and tenacity than in Lhasa and were to last much longer there than in the TAR Even before Hu Yaobang made his historic apology in Lhasa Deng Xiaoping had opened talks with the Tibetan exiles for the first time since 1959 He met with the Dalai Lamas elder brother in Beijing in February 1979 and allowed the first of three delegations of exile Tibetans to visit Tibet to see conditions later that year This led to formal talks between the two sides in 1982 and 1984 Tens of thousands of Tibetans turned out to try to meet the exile delegates one of whom was able to film the crowd capturing scenes of abject poverty desperation and anguish that were beyond any thing outsiders could have envisaged They were almost certainly beyond anything t i b e t 415 that Deng could have imagined either Beijing probably had little idea of the actual conditions of life on the periphery consistently misinformed by local satraps there But the introduction of the household responsibility system and the restoration of some elements of religious freedom meant that the situation improved extremely rap idly across the entire plateau after 1980economically culturally and politically just as it did in China proper The CollAPSe of The 1980S exCePTIonAlISM As economic and cultural conditions improved in Tibet pressure on Beijing to nego tiate with the exiles diminished and talks between the two sides collapsed in 1984 with the Chinese side saying that it would only discuss the return of the Dalai Lama to Tibet while the exiles reportedly wanted the Chinese to recognize Tibet as having a special status of some kind By the summer of 1987 there had been no sign of any thaw in relations between the two sides and SinoIndian relations had also worsened leading to serious tensions between India and China along the Tibetan border That September the Dalai Lama turned to the West for open international support In what was his first political speech in the West at the Capitol in Washington DC he pre sented the Tibet issue for the first time in terms of human rights abuses rather than as a call for independence In Lhasa the party responded with strident antiDalai Lama rhetoric and a public sentencing rally in which two Tibetans were sentenced to death This triggered the first street protests by Tibetans ever seen by foreign tourists lead ing to Tibet becoming headline news around the world The protestors in Tibet called for independence and for the Chinese to leave Tibet although by this time the Dalai Lama was already signaling his willingness to accept a settlement with China that would give Tibet a status short of independence The official response in China to the protests was that they had been instigated by the exiles But some peopleincluding the Tenth Panchen Lama who had been released from prison in 1978 and had been reinstated as once again the most impor tant Tibetan lama and official remaining in Tibetsaid that the protests had been provoked by leftist policies introduced in Tibet by hardliners in the CCP who angered by Hu Yaobangs liberalization in 1980 wanted to see a tougher policy on religion and nationalities The death of the Panchen Lama at the age of fifty in January 1989 left Tibetans without any leading figure with the stature to openly challenge hardliners within the Chinese policy élite It also left China without any respected intermediary who could speak on its behalf to Tibetans Street protests and mass arrests continued in Lhasa off and on for nearly a decade with almost all protestors detained and many of them tortured whilst in prison At least 150 street protests calling for independence took place in or near Lhasa during those years most of them broken up by police within five or ten minutes The participants received sen tences averaging six and a half years in prison Four small demonstrations spiraled into major incidents involving hundreds and sometimes thousands of laypeople and in March 1989 one of these continued for three days it was in response to this event that Hu Jintao imposed martial law on the region the first time this had hap pened in China since the PRC had been established An estimated seventyfive to 416 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a one hundred Tibetans were shot dead during these protests and about three to four thousand were arrested From the perspective of a CCP hardliner these developments were similar to what had happened in the 1950s within eight years of a major gift in the form of excep tional political and cultural concessions Tibetans had rejected Beijings generosity by rising up and calling for independence again with vocal support from the Western world This appeared to show that cultural and religious concessions to Tibetans plus foreign instigation had led on both occasions to an upsurge in nationalism and unrest that seemed designed to threaten Chinas unity This perception become a major force in Chinese nationality policy after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 which was viewed by analysts in the CCP as a result of overrelaxed Soviet policies toward nonRussian nationalities during the Gorbachev era This led in Tibet to a systematic effort by Beijing in the 1990s to reverse the liberalization policies of the previous decade The GIfT of eConoMIC deVeloPMenT In 1992 a new party secretary was appointed to run the TAR and to introduce these new policiesChen Kuiyuan formerly a deputy party leader in Inner Mongolia Chen set out to identify and truncate the elements of Tibetan culture and religion that he thought fueled splittism as Chinese officials term efforts to separate Tibet from China This led to two fundamental shifts in policy announced at a meeting in Beijing in July 1994 called the Third National Forum on Work in Tibet chaired by the party secretary of the CCP Jiang Zemin The first was a series of decisions that led to an effective ban on worship of the Dalai Lama He had been attacked repeatedly for his political views but his religious status and personal standing had not been questioned since the Cultural Revolution Initially the display of photo graphs of the Dalai Lama was stopped then possession of the photographs was banned and soon after all prayers to him were ruled unacceptable All officials in the TAR had to repeat four slogans deriding him while all monks and nuns were required to undergo three months of patriotic education that concluded with them having to formally denounce him in writing as a religious leader Other more controversial policies were conveyed orally rather than in writing such as the ban on all Tibetan employees of the TAR government from any form of Buddhist prac tice no matter whether they were janitors or bureau chiefs The same ban was imposed on their family members too as well as on all Tibetan students in the TAR who were Buddhists Older scholars with traditional training were retired early university textbooks on Tibetan history were rewritten to reduce references to reli gion Tibetans who had travelled secretly to India for their education were banned from working in governmentowned companies and Tibetanmedium education in middle schools in the TAR was brought to an end The second much more visible shift after Chen came to power in Lhasa was the decision to marketize the economy and to boost central investment to the region a response to Deng Xiaopings call in 1992 to switch to the market system The number of individually run businesses in the TAR soared from 489 in 1980 to 41830 in 1993 t i b e t 417 and led to an explosion of shops malls luxury housing developments leisure zones and toprate transportation facilities in Lhasa and other Tibetan towns The TAR was given large subsidies in order to develop infrastructure and stimulate urban growth with the Central Government investing 486 billion yuan over US670 million in sixtytwo projects in the TAR from 1994 to 2001 while other Chinese provinces gave 316 billion yuan over US450 million to support construction in the region Subsidies from the Central Government as a proportion of Tibets gross domestic product GDP rose from 465 percent in 2000 to 71 percent by the close of 200121 This growthbased strategy emphasized infrastructural and commercial expan sion rather than enhancing local education capacity or occupational skills which would have signaled an intention to provide longterm benefit to local residents It also encouraged migration of nonTibetans to the region In December 1992 all intraprovincial checkpoints on roads leading to the TAR were removed signaling that the region welcomed jobseekers from outside cheap business loans were announced business licenses were made easily accessible all government offices in towns were required to convert streetside frontage into rental units for shopkeepers and plans were begun to increase the number of towns in the TAR from 31 to 105 by 201022 The thousands of nonTibetans attracted to Tibet by these measures lived mainly in towns or along major roads and stayed for only five to ten years unlike the much larger number of permanent agricultural Chinese settlers who have repopulated Xinjiang and Mongolia But the economic and cultural impact of the temporary migrants in Tibetan towns was still significant According to the national census in 2000 of the 223000 registered inhabitants in the inner Lhasa urban area the cheng guanqu 46 percent of people of peak working age between twentyfive and forty years old and a fifth of those under fifteen were nonTibetans by 2010 31 percent of all urban residents in the TAR were nonTibetans In 2007 the regional government though saying officially that there was no migration to the region announced the construction of a new suburb in Lhasa in 2009 to house 110000 people representing an expected 25 percent increase in the citys population23 Even more significant were the political dimensions of the new economic poli cies until 1992 moderate Tibetan leaders in the CCP had been able to argue publicly for alternate Tibetancentred approaches to development in their area But in May 1994 the national newspaper of the CCP the Peoples Daily made it clear that criticism of the rapid growth or migration policies was henceforth politically unacceptable Can Tibet remain special forever and continue to depend on the states longterm blood transfusions Is Tibet willing to accept the label of being special and stand at the rear of reform and opening up Backwardness is not terrifying Being geographically closed is not terrifying What is terrifying is rigid and conservative thinking and the psychology of idleness24 The 1994 decisions defined Tibet policy for the following decade and beyond Once Hu Jintao believed to have masterminded these new policies became the leader of the CCP in 2002 their principles could not be questioned Tibet may have been granted autonomy but it was clear that its policies at that time were to be set by Chinese lead ers in Beijing and implemented largely by Chinese officials in Lhasa 418 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a In the decade following the Third Forum further subsidies were given to the TAR In 1999 the Open Up the West also known as the Great Western Development25 drive was announced leading to major construction in western China including the US42 billion QinghaiTibetan railway Completed in 2006 this sparked a major expansion of tourism in Tibet almost all of it domestic followed by a surge in min ing with the environmental hazards that go with it Investment by the central gov ernment in the region reached a total of 310 billion yuan about US456 billion between 2001 and 2010 leading to doubledigit GDP growth in the TAR for nineteen years from 1993 The quality of urban infrastructure and commodities soared along with the salaries of government employees in the TAR most of whom are Tibetans These went from 3448 yuan a little over US500 a year in 1992 to 54397 yuan about US8862 in 201026 to become the highest of any province or region in China except Beijing and Shanghai A new and wealthy urban Tibetan middle class had been created Although the per capita income of rural residents increased from 653 yuan under US100 in 1992 to 4139 US674 in 201027 the focus on urban growth led to a sharp widening in the gap between urban and rural incomes In 2005 a new party sec retary for the TAR Zhang Qingli was sent to Lhasa to carry out programs on an unprecedented scale that aimed to rectify this imbalance between 2006 and 2012 he had 21 million Tibetan villagers rebuild their houses alongside major roads in order to improve their access to the modern economy and thus boost their incomes In Qinghai and Gansu provinces officials set in motion plans to settle one million Tibetan nomads permanently in villages or towns without their animals suppos edly to protect grasslands from being overgrazed In 2008 the Sichuan government announced that the half a million Tibetan herders in Sichuan province were listed for permanent settlement by 2014 The former herders receive an initial cash handout but it has remained unclear how they will be able to generate income in the future From Beijings perspective this was being done to help Tibetans Their economy was being developed their environment was being protected the rural poor were being moved closer to commercial opportunities in towns new houses were being provided and rural children were being brought closer to schools and hospitals Encouraging migrants to come to work in Tibet was beneficial because the Tibetan people learn the skills to earn money when a hinterlander makes money in Tibet28 and providing Chinesemedium education at an earlier age improved work prospects These benefits indeed improved material conditions in significant ways for many Tibetans in the region not unlike the silk and satin sent by former Chinese emperors to the Dalai Lamas But the partys gifts were accompanied by threats of force and were more controversial and less culturally attuned than those of its predecessors TIbeT eRuPTS On March 10 2008 the anniversary of the 1959 uprising three to four hundred monks from Drepung monastery near Lhasa set out to stage a march the first public political protest in the city for nearly a decade Four days later amid rumors that some of the monks had been illtreated in prison gangs of Tibetans beat up Chinese migrants in t i b e t 419 the streets of Lhasa and burned down about a thousand Chineseowned shops kill ing nineteen people of whom eighteen were ethnic Chinese Troops with armored vehicles later took over the city and a number of Tibetans died in the aftermaththe Chinese government admits to three accidental deaths while the exile Tibetan gov ernment claims that up to eighty people were shot dead Within a week over a hundred protests had taken place across the Tibetan Plateau Beijing insisted that these were coordinated by exiles but it seems just as likely that they were a result of people hearing news of events in Lhasa by cell phone or from Tibetanlanguage radio broadcasts by the United Statesfunded stations Voice of America and Radio Free Asia Eighteen or so of these incidents after March 14 involved violence by protestors though it was aimed at Chinese government build ings not at civilians In at least eleven cases protestors took over villages and hoisted the forbidden Tibetan national flag suggesting support for independence But most protestors called for the Dalai Lama to be allowed to return a more moderate demand since his objective has since the 1990s been genuine autonomy in Tibet rather than independence The PRC media focusing only on the antiChinese violence in Lhasa on March 14 presented Tibetans as hooligans who jealous at the success of Chinese traders had been stirred up by exile instigators and foreigners and praised the arrest of the thousand or more Tibetans accused of involvement in unrest Western media reports focused on the hundred or so other incidents rather than the single riot in Lhasa and so saw the incidents as responses by Tibetans of various social sectors and regions to attacks by the state on their culture and religion such as policies of stateencouraged immigration and the repeated antiDalai Lama campaigns by Beijing Reports of this kind were met with furious condemnation of Western bias by many Chinese critics the Tibetan areas were closed to foreign tourists and journalists and armed troops were posted in major towns That spring across Europe the United States Australia and other countries the Olympic torch relay was marred by protests against Chinas crackdown in Tibet as the torch made its way to Beijing for the 2008 games that autumn This in turn led to a wave of nationalistic anger among the Chinese public including counterprotests Internet campaigns shopboycotts and other measures opposed to Western criticisms of Chinas actions in Tibet Since then the Chinese public has moved on to other issues focusing more on ter ritorial disputes with Japan than on western criticisms of Chinas role in Tibet But paramilitary troops remained in position on every street corner in the Tibetan quar ter of the city as well as in many Tibetan towns across the plateau for five years after the 2008 protests foreign tourists are still allowed entry to the TAR only in accom panied tour groups and foreign journalists are rarely permitted to visit the area and then only in large groups with fixed itineraries No officials are known to have been criticized or replaced because of their policies in Tibet and Chinas leaders continued to say that the unrest was a result of exile instigation unrelated to its policies In late 2011 those policies were tightened as major changes were introduced in the administration of Tibetan society in the TAR Besides the gratefulness educa tion that had to be carried out by the cadre teams sent to every village party com mittees and security teams were established in each village teams of cadres were stationed permanently in each monastery 670 new convenience policeposts were 420 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a constructed in towns offices called grid units see chapter 10 were planned for every street or block in urban areas and every group of households was ordered to appoint a leader with responsibility for the political behavior of the residents29 These measuresall of them unprecedentedwere a Tibetspecific version of the Chinawide drive to achieve weiwen or stability maintenance and were designed to identify and incapacitate support for the Dalai Lama and for Tibetan independence This meant that the Chinese understanding of support for the Dalai Lama no longer saw it as limited to a handful of splittists as had been claimed in the past but as present throughout the rural population as well as among the grassroots residents of Tibetan towns Not long before these administrative changes began confirmation of the spread of dissent to the grassroots became vividly apparent Between March 2011 and February 2012 seemingly frustrated by the failure of the authorities to respond constructively to the grievances raised by the protests of 2008 a number of monks and nuns in a Tibetan area of Sichuan began a new form of political protest one which could not be dismissed as an attack against Chinese citizens or government property twentyone set themselves on fire in public Over the eighteen months from March 2012 a hun dred other Tibetans mainly laypeople from small towns villages or former herder communities did the same calling as the first group had done for the Dalai Lama to be allowed to return and for Tibetan language religion culture and education to be given full respect One hundred out of those who selfimmolated are believed to have died from their wounds Most of the incidents occurred in Tibetan areas of Sichuan Qinghai and Gansu leading the authorities in Lhasa to ban eastern Tibetans from entry into the TAR without special permits and to expel almost all eastern Tibetan businessmen visitors and traders from Lhasa The authorities in Beijing initially referred to immolators as innocents misled or encouraged by the Dalai Lama and his followers but from December 2012 took a more aggressive position accusing the exiles of organizing paying or persuading individuals to set themselves on fire The PRC government began a series of denun ciations arrests life sentences and threats of executions for any Tibetans suspected of supporting the immolations The Dalai Lama had formally retired from politics in May 2011 handing the running of the exile administration over to an elected secu lar leader and refused to call for the immolations to stop claiming that this was no longer his responsibility or that the situation was too delicate for him to intervene Meanwhile talks between Beijing and the exile leadership ground to a halt after January 2010 the new exile leader wanted talks to take place with his staff rather than with representatives of the nowretired Dalai Lama an option which Beijing had always rejected and China had its own reasons for delaying talks The two sides had no channel to resolve the crisis and made seemingly little effort to create one Internationally Chinas posture became more assertive foreign leaders who planned or held meetings with the Dalai Lama came under increasingly pointed pressure from Beijing a strategy that succeeded in making Western leaders even more divided over how to respond to Chinas growing clout and status But the wave of selfimmolations indicated that the Tibetan issue was being driven not by exiles foreign concern or the Dalai Lama but by deepseated passionate concerns among ordinary farmers villagers monks and townspeople within greater Tibet t i b e t 421 ConCluSIon unReSolVed QueSTIonS PeRSISTInG TenSIonS The story of modern Chinas interactions with Tibetans is threaded through with instances of violence by the state and aggressive policies but also with traces of Chinese deference to history exceptionalism and the practice of giving gifts The Cultural Revolution and much of the decade before it saw a sustained attempt to destroy or suppress cultural identity tradition and religion but the CCP did not otherwise attempt the total assimilation of Tibetans that the Qing modernizers had planned in 1910 In other contested areas on Chinas periphery the CCP and earlier Chinese governments used mass migration to staunch challenges to their rulein Inner Mongolia only 22 percent of the inhabitants are now Mongolians and Uyghurs or other minorities constitute only 61 percent of the population in Xinjiangbut so far proposals by Mao to arrange the permanent settlement of mil lions of Chinese in Tibet have not been carried out at least according to official figures about 90 percent of the registered population of the TAR remains Tibetan The uprisings of the 1950s may have made some CCP leaders reluctant to rely on population transfer or military force alone to control Tibetans and at times sev eral have tried to secure Tibetan loyalty through beneficence such as the offer of regional autonomy though that is widely regarded as an empty promise This pat tern of intermittent concessions and crackdowns is an index of the strategic and political importance of the Tibetan areas to modern China and of an unstated deep anxiety about the major challenge presented by Tibetans memories of their separate history Chinas efforts at winning over its Tibetan subjects seem thus far to have failed despite a view among many Chinese that their government has been exceptionally generous to Tibetans The partys gifts are certainly everywhere evident in Tibetan areas since the 1990smodern buildings highways private wealth and lavish infrastructureand at times have succeeded in getting the support or acquiescence of the targeted beneficiaries But unlike imperialera gifts to Tibet which had indi cated Chinas respect for the Tibetans religious leader and had been accompanied by minimal interference in Tibetan life or governance the more recent gifts from Beijing have been premised on a notion of the backwardness of the recipients and accompanied by attacks on their religious leader and elements of their culture whilst encouraging Chinese traders to move into Tibetan areas in significant num bers Each phase of giftgiving in the modern era has been followed by periods of punishment and at times the two functions have been carried out simultaneously as in the post1996 policy of providing lavish salaries and housing for Tibetan gov ernment employees in the TAR whilst at the same time banning them from any form of Buddhist practice Apart from the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution which were Chinawide phenomena rather than responses to events in Tibet most of the puni tive campaigns were Tibetspecific Some were a response to rebellions or street pro tests but others such as those of 1994 and 2006 were imposed at times when there were few if any demonstrations These crackdowns increased during the later 1990s with some targeting Tibetans in general and others aimed at Tibetan Buddhists in 422 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a particular largely separate in nature if not name from those directed at Chinese citi zens as a whole They may have been partly due to anxieties in Beijing arising from the Soviet collapse or from the democratic movements in Georgia Ukraine and else where and to fears about the impact of successful exile activism abroad but for the most part they were reactions to an indistinct sense often without much evidence that Tibetans harbored splittist plans to divide the state Behind these moves can be detected a culture of distrust or resentment among Chinese officials fuelled by the perceived failure of Tibetans to recognize the generosity of Chinas gifts Should Chinas policy toward Tibet be considered to be a type of colonialism the term that the Thirteenth Dalai Lama had used in 1913 to describe Qing rule Some have argued that colonialism only exists where nations are geographically separate or where the colonizer is a traditional imperial power that has not itself been colonized in the past or where a nation extracts more resources from a place than it puts in none of which can be said with confidence to apply to Tibet The most frequently encountered arguments in China are that Tibet cannot be a colony because it is a region within the single Chinese state or that Tibetans are part of the broader Chinese race or culture and so are linked by blood or history to the Chinese people From this perspective the disparities in power and wealth between Tibet and China are seen as accidents of uneven development Chinas East is said to have advanced earlier and faster than its West and the East thus compensates the West when possible so that over time the latter will catch up and enjoy the same benefits and lifestyle that the East has created Critics of these views argue that Chinas administration of Tibet has many of the typical features of colonial rule there is a permanent military garrison in the subject areas with soldiers of one ethnicity ruling subjects of another restric tions on local religion culture and discussion are much stricter than in the homeland areas rules and practices apply to members of the subject ethnicity that do not apply to those of the ruling nationality public explanations by the motherstate stress the benefit brought to the local population by its policies the presence of migrants and officials from the ruling ethnic group is considered beneficial to local people presum ably because the ruling group is assumed to be more advanced in some way local culture and religion are reassessed with the motherstate deciding which cultural practices are unacceptable and which should be allowed The difference between these two views of the TibetChina relationship is related to a profound divergence over the primary role of the nationstate The general Chinese view can be described as statistit is centered on the preeminent importance in peo ples lives of the modern state viewed as an impersonal machinelike institution that strives to benefit the majority of its citizens by maximizing production distributing goods enforcing security and ensuring international prominence for the nation thus producing for the PRC what from 2004 was described in China as the harmonious society and since 2012 is sometimes referred to as the China dream see chapter 5 The other view which is currently found among many Tibetans and foreigners can be described as a national view It sees the nation as the primary representative and source of identity for its people imagining it as an organic exclusive collectivity that sustains communality through shared culture language memory and religion In this view as Ernest Renan put it a nation is a soul a spiritual principle30 This view has no necessary relation to ideas of independence or separate statehood it tends to t i b e t 423 harden into such a position only if it is repressed or ignored The holder of the statist view thinks typically in terms of numbersthings that can be measured majorities social norms and lawswhile the national view places value primarily on intangibles such as heritage perceptions and specialness or difference In the Tibetan case a test of where people place themselves on this spectrum is to ask who should participate in a referendum on the future of Tibet something the current Dalai Lama has called for unsuccessfully several times The nationalists would say that participants should be Tibetans defined by birth language culture or a similar shared feature while the statists will say that all citizens of China should vote since it concerns a part of the state of which they are all equal members Which criterion is used to decide participationethnicity or citizenshipwill determine the outcome of any consulta tion exercise on this issue The same division underlies debates concerning Tibet over policy and history too The eightyear series of talks between Beijing and the Tibetan exiles from 2002 to 2010 failed in large part because of these clashing perspectives the Tibetans with their nationbased vision saw an entitlement to special treatment for largely cultural and religious reasons while the statists saw Tibetans as having finally been brought by China to higher levels of prosperity and therefore not needing any kind of change Additionally the statists are considering the welfare and sustainability of the larger unit and are fearful of making concessions toward real autonomy in Tibet that could then be claimed by other groups in China such as the Uyghurs in Xinjiang Chinese statists also find it hard to reconcile themselves to accommodating Tibetan religion or at least the Dalai Lama either because the idea of a religious leader having politi cal influence is inherently abhorrent to them or perhaps because it recalls threats to the state posed by religiously inspired rebels such as the Taiping and the Boxers in the late Qing era or supposedly by the Falun Gong in the late 1990s Tibetan exiles in turn antagonize many Chinese by accusing their government of such heinous offenses as cultural genocide even though Chinas policies in Tibet have been nothing like those of the Cultural Revolution for some thirty years In addition the exiles strategy of arranging for Western leaders to meet the Dalai Lama is seen as provocative and humiliating for China given his public criticisms of Beijing The Dalai Lama has nevertheless made repeated concessions to Beijings demands In a formal declaration in 1988 he indicated that his objective was to achieve associa tion status for Tibetessentially an indirect way of retaining independence as the Chinese were quick to point outbut from 1992 onwards he made major concessions to Chinas demands explicitly renouncing the pursuit of independence and changing his demand to genuine autonomy or a high degree of autonomy for Tibet within China In 2010 he went much further conceding that this genuine autonomy should operate within the terms allowed by the current Chinese constitution and within the current political system in China This leads us to the central anomaly of the Tibetan issue it should be relatively easy to resolve yet is rapidly deteriorating Although it has lasted for a century and from the 1950s to the 1970s encompassed military combat innumerable violent and unnecessary deaths and cultural destruction on an imaginable scale the conflict has seen minimal violence in the last three decades with little evidence of ethnic vio lence other than in one incident in 2008 The Tibetans leader has been begging for a 424 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a diplomatic resolution for thirty years has conceded to most Chinese demands and has no military resources or obvious alternatives besides a negotiated settlement Chinas strategists have increasingly acknowledged that the achievement of stability in Tibet is central to Chinas national interests and as recently as the early 1980s its own policies in Tibet came close to meeting many of the Tibetans current demands But as of 2013 the two sides had not met for talks in three years and hopes for a nego tiated settlement are ebbing fast Those hopes depend on the health and survival of the current Dalai Lama who was born in 1935 No Tibetan leader in the future is likely to have anything like the status among Tibetans that this Dalai Lama has achieved and so could not guarantee broad Tibetan support for any future settlement with Beijing In any case unless the issue is resolved there will be two Dalai Lamas after this one dies since China and the exiles have already said that they will each choose their own successors as they did in the dispute over the selection of the Eleventh Panchen Lama in 1995 In terms of simple logic therefore one would expect China to seek a settlement before the current Dalai Lama dies But political realities do not follow the clean lines of simple logic not even those of national interests Beijing faces innumerable forms of internal resistance to change in its approach to Tibet bureaucratic inertia embed ded interest groups rising public nationalism a consensus leadership and a political culture fiercely opposed to any appearance of concession among others But an even greater obstacle may lie in the long divergent histories of belief and ideology between the two sides with one perceiving its policies as examples of state generosity and the other seeing them as impositions in which they had no say and for which their nation was made to pay heavily Until the cycles of gift and retribution in its relations with Tibet are reconfigured by Chinese leaders in a way that takes into account Tibetan memories of a distinct history and a different view of nationhood China is unlikely to receive the soft tributeloyalty to the Chinese statethat it wants from Tibetans Meanwhile Beijings policies in Tibet remain contradictory and inconclusive fueling the very nationalism among Tibetans that Chinas leaders have tried for decades to extinguish noTeS 1 The most recent White Paper on Tibet entitled White Paper Development and Progress of Tibet was issued in October 2013 httpwwwchinaorgcnchinese20131022 content303682753htm 2 Milestone in Tibets Reform Development and Stability Renmin Ribao Peoples Daily July 19 2001 httpwwwchinahoustonorgnews2001719071430html At the Third Forum in 1994 Jiang underscored the regions importance to all of China and observed that maintaining stability in Tibet was crucial to the success of reforms development and stabil ity throughout the country Allen Carlson Beijings Tibet Policy Securing Sovereignty and Legitimacy Policy Studies 4 Washington DC EastWest Center 2004 citing Jiang Zemin on Stability in Tibet Xinhua July 26 1994 3 Chinese President Stresses Stability Social Harmony in Tibet Xinhua March 6 2008 httpwwwnyconsulateprchinaorgengxwt412955htm The struggle against sep aratism is also one of the three primary objectives in Chinas relations with the Central Asian t i b e t 425 states through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Statements on Xinjiang are some what similar As the countrys front line in battling terrorism and separatism Xinjiangs antiterrorism fight is of crucial importance to the stability of the whole country No Letup in Fight against Forces of Terror China Daily March 3 2008 4 Mobilization meeting for the Solidifying Foundations and Benefiting the Masses Campaign Xizang Ribao Tibet Daily October 11 2011 httpcxzypeoplecomcn GB19430715863333html 5 Huang Wenkun Liu Xiaodai and the Editorial Committee eds A Collection of Historical Archives of Tibet compiled by the Archives of the Tibet Autonomous Region Beijing Cultural Relics Publishing House 1995 item 595 6 Marcel Mauss The Gift New York Norton 1967 1923 1 7 In Tibetan the words Rgya China and Bod Tibet have always denoted sepa rate countries There was no word that described a China that included Tibet and in 1951 the Chinese translators at the negotiations over the Seventeen Point Agreement invented a new Tibetan word Krung go a Tibetanized rendering of the Chinese word for China Zhongguo to refer to this and the use of this term for China has since been obligatory in Tibetanlanguage publications within China 8 Evelyn Rawski Presidential Address Reenvisioning the Qing The Significance of the Qing Period in Chinese History Journal of Asian Studies 55 no 4 1996 829850 9 Until it announced unilateral recognition of Chinas sovereignty claim to Tibet in October 2008 the British governments position was that Tibet is autonomous and China has a special position there a variation of its recognition of Chinas suzerainty meaning that it did not have absolute sovereignty over Tibet in the 1914 Simla Convention and other agreements 10 Melvyn C Goldstein A History of Modern Tibet 19131951 The Demise of the Lamaist State Berkeley University of California Press 1989 60 11 Minglang Zhou Multilingualism in China The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages 19492002 Berlin and New York Mouton de Gruyter 2003 3738 12 See Melvyn C Goldstein Dawei Sherap and William R Siebenschuh A Tibetan Revolutionary The Political Life and Times of Bapa Phüntso Wangye Berkeley University of California Press 2004 13 See Chen Jian The Tibetan Rebellion of 1959 and Chinas Changing Relations with India and the Soviet Union Journal of Cold War Studies 8 no 3 2006 54101 14 The western half of the former Tibetan province of Kham is now in the TAR The eastern part of Kham which is now the western part of Sichuan was recognized by China as a separate province Xikang from 1935 to 1955 15 Ji Youquan Xizang pingpan jishi Factual Record of Rebellion Suppression in Tibet Lhasa Xizang Renmin Chubanshe 1993 16 The Panchen Lamas Address to the TAR Standing Committee Meeting of the National Peoples Congress 28th March 1987 in The Panchen Lama Speaks Dharamsala India Department of Information and International Relations of the Central Tibetan Administration in exile 17 Robert Barnett ed A Poisoned Arrow The Secret Petition of the 10th Panchen Lama London Tibet Information Network 1998 103 18 Barnett A Poisoned Arrow 52 19 For photographs of Tibet during the Cultural Revolution see When Tibet Loved China Rare photos of the Cultural Revolution in the Land of Snows at httpwwwforeign policycomarticles20130122whentibetlovedchinaculturalrevolution 20 See Melvyn C Goldstein Ben Jiao and Tanzen Lhundrup On the Cultural Revolution in Tibet The Nyemo Incident of 1969 Berkeley University of California Press 2009 426 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a 21 Nearly 95 percent of this investment was directed into stateowned enterprises Andrew Martin Fischer State Growth and Social Exclusion in Tibet Copenhagen Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Press 2005 59 71 22 Ninth FiveYear Plan TAR Government Lhasa published in English translation by the BBC Summary of World Broadcasts August 5 1996 23 Lhasa Plans Homes for 110000 Xinhua November 20 2007 This article gives the 2007 population of downtown Lhasa as around 480000 about four times the figure in the 2000 census for the inner urban area of the city 24 Liu Wei and He Guanghua Looking at Tibet in a New Light Peoples Daily Beijing in Chinese May 16 1994 1 published in translation by the BBC Summary of World Broadcasts May 31 1994 25 See David S G Goodman ed Chinas Campaign to Open up the West National Provincial and Local Perspectives New York Cambridge University Press 2004 26 Tibet Statistical Yearbook 2011 Beijing National Bureau of Statistics 2012 27 Tibet Statistical Yearbook 2011 28 Speech by Chen Kuiyuan Tibet Peoples Broadcasting Station Lhasa November 28 1994 published in translation as Tibet Chen Kuiyuan in Qamdo Says Prosperity Will Drive Out Religion BBC Summary of World Broadcasts December 5 1994 29 China Alarming New Surveillance Security in Tibet Human Rights Watch March 20 2013 httpwwwhrworgnews20130320chinaalarmingnewsurveillancesecurity tibet 30 Ernest Renan What Is a Nation 1882 in Becoming National A Reader ed Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny New York Oxford University Press 1996 4155 SuGGeSTed ReAdInGS Barnett Robert Lhasa Streets with Memories New York Columbia University Press 2006 Fischer Andrew Martin State Growth and Social Exclusion in Tibet Copenhagen NIAS Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Press 2005 Goldstein Melvyn C A History of Modern Tibet 3 vols Vol 1 19131951 The Demise of the Lamaist State 1991 vol 2 The Calm before the Storm 19511955 2009 vol 3 The Storm Clouds Descend 19551957 2013 Berkeley University of California Press Goldstein Melvyn C and Cynthia M Beall Nomads of Western Tibet The Survival of a Way of Life Berkeley University of California 1990 Goldstein Melvyn C Dawei Sherap and William R Siebenschuh A Tibetan Revolutionary The Political Life and Times of Bapa Phüntso Wangye Berkeley University of California Press 2004 Gyatso Janet and Hanna Havnevik eds Women in Tibet Past and Present New York Columbia University Press 2005 Kapstein Matthew T The Tibetans Malden MA and Oxford Blackwell Publishing 2006 Khétsun Tubten Memories of Life in Lhasa under Chinese Rule An Autobiography Translated by Matthew Akester New York Columbia University Press 2007 Knaus John Kenneth Orphans of the Cold War America and the Tibetan Struggle for Survival New York Public Affairs 1999 Rabgey Tashi and Tseten Wangchuk Sharlo SinoTibetan Dialogue in the PostMao Era Lessons and Prospects Policy Studies 12 Washington DC EastWest Center 2004 t i b e t 427 Sautman Barry and June Teufel Dreyer Contemporary Tibet Politics Development and Society in a Disputed Region Armonk NY M E Sharpe 2005 Shakya Tsering The Dragon in the Land of Snows A History of Modern Tibet since 1947 New York Columbia University Press 1999 Schwartz Ronald D Circle of Protest Political Ritual in the Tibetan Uprising New York Columbia University Press 1994 van Schaik Sam Tibet A History New Haven CT Yale University Press 2011 Virtanen Riika J ed trans A Blighted Flower and Other Stories Portraits of Women in Modern Tibetan Literature Dharamsala Library of Tibetan Works and Archives 2000 Wang Lixiong and Tsering Shakya The Struggle for Tibet London Verso 2006 Yeh Emily T Taming Tibet Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development Ithaca and London Cornell University Press 2013 Once all but unknown to outsiders Xinjiang has recently come to be seen by many as Chinas second Tibet The ethnic protests and violence of early July 2009 brought the region located in the far northwestern part of China bordering on Central Asia and home to most of Chinas eleven million Muslim Uyghurs unprecedented coverage in international media But Xinjiang began to claim international attention nearly two decades earlier Sympathetic stories about large protests violently sup pressed by the government splashed across US newspaper pages in the 1990s Those stories were followed in the 2000s by news of largescale Han Chinese immigration into Xinjiang forced linguistic assimilation and the razing of Uyghur neighborhoods A second set of stories focused on a spate of bombings and assassinations beginning in the 1990s the nearly two dozen Uyghurs imprisoned by the US government as suspected terrorists in Guantanamo after 911 and the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement ETIM a small Uyghur separatist group supposedly affiliated with alQaeda that the US Government declared to be a terrorist organization in August 2002 see Box 161 A reader of both kinds of coverage could be forgiven puzzle ment Were Uyghurs freedom fighters like Tibetans but without a Dalai Lama to lead them Or were they religious extremists and terrorists participants in a global jihad Chinese officials and most Han people believe that Xinjiang is part of China and that Uyghurs are part of the Chinese nation They are confident that Uyghurs strug gling for independence constitute a tiny fraction of the population and lack popular support Uyghur activists abroad and many inside Xinjiang believe that most if not all Uyghurs desire independence and that Uyghurs constitute a nation of their own rather than a part of the Chinese nation Many see Xinjiang as a colony of China that must and one day shall be an independent state Xinjiang GA RdneR boVI nGdon 16 x i n j i a n g 429 box 161 eastern turkistan islamic movement The eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement eTIM is a small militant organization based in xinjiang that is seeking an independent uyghur state called east Turkistan The eTIM was virtually unknown to the outside world before August 2002 when uS deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage announced in beijing that Washington had labeled it a terrorist organization The united nations quickly followed with a similar designation Critics observed that the timing of the designation was strangely convenient since Washington was at the time seeking beijings support for or at least acquiescence to a military offensive against Iraq as part of the war on terrorism furthermore most of the published information about eTIM seemed to come from Chinese government sources about which neutral observers raised serious doubts The uS government claimed to have independent information that two eTIM members had plotted to blow up the uS embassy in bishkek the capital of Kyrgyzstan outside experts raised con cerns about this claim as well since the united States appeared to be the uyghurs sole hope for outside support of any kind American officials claimed that some of the twentytwo uyghurs apprehended in Afghanistan in 2001 and detained in Guantanamo had belonged to eTIM though the assertion is controversial The revelation that the uS military had allowed Chinese interrogators into Guantanamo to question the uyghur detainees raised strong criticism from members of Congress and also elicited fresh doubts about the quality of any information the questioning might have elicited Since then the remaining seventeen have been released to the Pacific island nation of Palau 2009 bermuda 2009 Switzerland 2010 el Salvador 2012 and Slovakia 2013 Journalists later lent credence to the claim by the united States and Chinese govern ments that eTIM had received support from alQaeda in Afghanistan in the mid1990s and that some members met with osama bin laden in 1997 and 1999 At the same time they reported that bin laden and other alQaeda fighters had focused attention on the struggles of Muslims in various Middle eastern countries and Chechnya saying nothing about xinjiang eTIM members reportedly left these meetings chagrined and discouraged Soon after the uS designation of eTIM Chinese officials began to imply in domestic media that Washington regarded all groups seeking an independent eastern Turkistan terrorists despite American officials insistence that the government was identifying only the one organization When in december 2003 beijing promulgated a list of four uyghur organizations and ten individuals it considered terrorist other governments declined to designate them as such In the same month of 2003 eTIM leader hasan Makhsum was killed by Pakistani sol diers in Wazirstan a mountainous region of northwest Pakistan bordering Afghanistan Internationally verified evidence of the organizations activities dried up after that yet when several uyghurs drove a truck into a phalanx of han policemen in Kashgar in sum mer 2008 beijing claimed that the attack had been orchestrated by eTIM although that was never proven Chinese officials also later asserted that eTIM had plotted several attacks on the olympics all thwarted Some analysts regarded the eastern Turkistan Islamic Party TIP as a splinter group that had emerged from the moribund eTIM as more of a terror ist threat The selfstyled leader of TIP Commander Abdullah Mansour promulgated a video in summer 2008 claiming responsibility for several explosions in China a claim denied by beijing and issued another video in May 2009 warning governments against extraditing TIP members to China There was no way to establish the origins of the vid eos the validity of the threat or how substantial an organization Abdullah actually rep resents In 2010 a Chinese uyghur associated with the TIP was among those arrested in norway in conjunction with a bomb plot linked to alQaeda 430 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a GeoGRAPhy And deMoGRAPhy To understand the political economy of Xinjiang since 1949 it is essential to first note the importance of its geography and cultural diversity The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region XUAR as it has been called since 1955 is the largest provinciallevel unit in the PRC with onesixth of the countrys total land mass 640930 square miles equal to twothirds of continental Europe and just a bit smaller than Alaska The regions vastness is compounded by its geological and climatic extremes It includes two large cold deserts and four mountain ranges Summer and winter temperatures can vary by more than one hundred degrees and annual rainfall in much of the region is a scant six inches Xinjiangs great size scarce waterways and rugged terrain have made transportation unusually difficult for most of its history But the region is rich in natural resources which includes 25 percent of the national total of oil and natural gas and 38 percent of the countrys coal1 Furthermore the region has strikingly few inhabitants given Chinas enormous population Roughly twentyone million people currently inhabit Xinjiang giving the region a population density of roughly twelve people per square kilometer about thirtyone per square mile onetenth the density of China as a whole But just as Chinas population density differs widely across the country with some 90 percent of the citizens living on less than 40 percent of the land human habitation in Xinjiang is very unevenly distributed Most of the people in southern Xinjiang are crowded into a string of oases ringing the Taklamakan desert which are as densely peopled as almost any region in China2 Any wouldbe ruler seeking to control Xinjiang from afar has faced a fundamental political economic challenge how to generate enough revenue from a region that is huge largely desert sparsely populated encircled and crisscrossed by high moun tains and remote from any coast to pay for local administration and satisfy the mate rial wants of its inhabitants The ethnic and cultural characteristics of those inhabit ants have compounded the difficulty for Chinese governors from the Qing dynasty to the present For centuries prior to the Qing conquest in the mideighteenth century the vast majority of the population of Xinjiang was Turkicspeaking and Muslim While members of this majority differed among themselves in lifestyles customary dress and dialect they did not divide themselves or others into ethnonational categories instead they identified themselves as inhabitants of particular oases as settled peo ple or as herders and as Muslims Hence it is conventional to refer to the settled Turkicspeaking population of the region prior to the twentieth century simply as Turki As discussed below the name Uyghur did not come into common use until the late nineteenth century to refer to one part of the regions Turkic population The InCoRPoRATIon of xInJIAnG InTo QInG ChInA The Qing dynasty Emperor Qianlong conquered the region now known as Xinjiang in 1759 at great expense and after a long bloody campaign He did so not principally out of territorial ambition but in order to rid the Qing empire of threatening Mongol x i n j i a n g 431 N 0 0 200 300 400 500 km 100 100 200 300 mi Q I N G H A I X I N J I A N G T I B E T A U T O N O M O U S R E G I O N RUSSIA PAKISTAN TAJIKISTAN AFGH KYRGYZSTAN K A Z A K H S TA N NEPAL MONGOLIA INDIA RUSSIA PAKISTAN TAJIKISTAN AFGH KYRGYZSTAN K A Z A K H S TA N NEPAL MONGOLIA INDIA G A N S U AQSU KHOTÄN ILI KASHGAR QARAMAY QIZILSU QUMUL Ürümchi Shihezi Ghulja Kashgar Aqto Almaty Bishkek Khotän Map Area Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region 432 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a neighbors Ruling the new colony proved costly and difficult as will be described in more detail below In the nineteenth century prominent Chinese intellectuals urged that the Qing government wash its hands of the region focusing instead on the empires vulnerable coast A competing group of intellectuals persuaded the emperor instead to commit further resources to ruling and colonizing the region arguing that it was a crucial bulwark against the loss of Mongolia and in turn the imperial capital Beijing The Qing government began to promote Han migration into the region from the late eighteenth century to fill out the borders of its colony and help sustain the mili tary garrisons needed to rule the vast territory By the early 1800s Hans comprised nearly onethird of the total population of half a million though they were mainly concentrated in the area north of the Tianshan Mountains while more than three hundred thousand Turkis lived mainly in the Tarim Basin south of the mountains Fearing friction between groups the Qing initially discouraged Han migration to the Tarim Basin though after a series of uprisings in the south in the 1830s Qing admin istrators came to regard the Muslim population with suspicion and reversed the prior policy actively encouraging Han farmers to move into the Basin Although they added to the tax rolls and produced crops to feed the garrisons the Han migrants could not fundamentally alter the regions desert economy The huge colony with its legions of imperial soldiers and network of administrators required considerable annual subsi dies from the central government Despite the soldiers and the sustained largesse Beijing could not maintain a firm grip on the region In 1864 a warlord named Yaqub Beg from Kokand in what today is Uzbekistan led a Turki uprising that wrested nearly all of the area from Qing control for more than a decade Russian generals took advantage of the ensu ing chaos to occupy and claim for the Russian empire a strategic swath of terri torys northwest Qing General Zuo Zongtang immortalized in the General Tsos Chicken found in many Chinese restaurants mounted an expensive expedition in the mid1870s that reconquered most of the territory but it took several more years of careful diplomacy to persuade the Russians to return the region it had claimed3 In 1884 the Qing government transformed the colony into a formal province which they named Xinjiang meaning New Frontier with the hope of placing it beyond the claims and aspirations of the Russian empire Beijing committed to spon soring new migrants to rebuild the wartorn province and add to its tax base But the cost of the reconquest and the late Qings financial difficulties left the court with out resources to promote further immigration Instead increasing taxes in Xinjiang actually drove some Han immigrants to return to China proper One unintended and significant consequence was that substantial numbers of Turkis moved into parts of northern Xinjiang where they had not previously had large settlements4 xInJIAnG undeR The RePublIC In the chaos following the fall of the Qing dynasty and the founding of the Republic of China ROC in 1912 Tibet lay beyond Chinese influence and outer Mongolia was lost to formal independence though it was in reality under Russian then Soviet x i n j i a n g 433 control Xinjiang fell under the sway of a series of autocratic Han warlords the last being General Sheng Shicai who formed much closer ties in the 1930s with the Soviet Union than with the ROC government During that decade many Chinese officials and intellectuals alike argued that it was desperately important for China not to lose Xinjiang With so much of the former Qing territory gone already they feared the weakening and even the ultimate disappearance of the country a worry considerably exacerbated by increasing Japanese encroachment The Republican government led by Chiang Kaishek and the Kuomintang KMT or Nationalist party lacked the capacity to stimulate substantial Han immigration to the region and attempts by several of Xinjiangs Han warlords to lure migrants by forc ing Turkis off farmland and offering it taxfree to Han farmers proved both politically explosive and unsuccessful By 1940 there were only about 190000 Han Chinese in Xinjiang scarcely more than the number in the early 1800s By contrast the popula tion of Turkis had grown tenfold to around three million The cultural identity of that population had also grown more politicized in the inter vening decades As an assertion of cultural pride some Turki intellectuals in the late nineteenth century began to refer to themselves by the traditional term Uyghur and in the mid1930s the government of Sheng Shicai granted the name official recognition along with different names for other Turkic groups in the province Shengs gesture of recognizing distinct groups must have seemed magnanimous to many particularly in contrast to Chiang Kaisheks assertion that all the peoples of China came from the same root stock looking and sounding different only because of regional differences in water and soil but Sheng made the choice under Soviet influence and clearly intended to avert the emergence of PanTurkism the specter of which had alarmed Russians for decades It was no coincidence that the names of the major Turkic groups Sheng recognized in Xinjiang had exact counterparts in Soviet Central Asia5 In the decade before the communist victory in China Uyghurs settled in the Tarim basin in southern Xinjiang and the Ili River valley in the northwest made up 80 per cent of the provincial population another four hundred thousand Turkicspeaking pastoralists now known as Kazakh and Qirghiz Kyrgyz roved the grasslands of the Zunghar Basin in the north and the foothills of the Tianshan and Pamirs Only 5 percent of Xinjiangs inhabitants were Han still concentrated mostly in the cities of the North6 When Turkis declared an independent Eastern Turkistan Republic ETR in north western Xinjiang in 1944 it rattled Kuomintang and Communist leaders alike Chiang Kaishek sent one of his ablest generals Zhang Zhizhong to negotiate a coalition between ETR leaders and the KMT administration in the provincial capital Dihua todays Ürümchi or Urumqi Five years later as the civil war was drawing to a close Mao Zedong dispatched a trusted subordinate to parley with ETR officials he also sent the First Field Army to occupy strategic points in the huge province and ensure it not evade the grasp of the Chinese Communist Party CCP once it had won national power xInJIAnG In The PeoPleS RePublIC of ChInA PRC Many Uyghurs had reason to hope that they would enjoy political independence in part or all of Xinjiang after the Chinese civil war In the late 1940s Xinjiangs last 434 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Han governor under the KMT Zhang Zhizhong had speculated publicly about its eventual decolonization citing the examples of India and the Philippines7 Seeking to outbid the Nationalists and win support among nonHans for the antiJapanese war Mao promised Mongols and Muslims several times in the 1930s that they would be able to decide freely whether to join a federal China under the CCP explicitly modeled on the Soviet Union or declare independence8 Yet Mao stopped speaking about selfdetermination in the 1940s and after the founding of the PRC CCP leaders expected Uyghurs to be satisfied with limited regional autonomy under a unitary Chinese state This proved particularly unpalatable to individuals who had lived in the Eastern Turkistan Republic ETR during the lat ter half of the 1940s As the prospect of true autonomy faded protests in Xinjiang became increas ingly strident At a 1951 conference in Ghulja the former seat of government of the ETR a group of Uyghur leaders proposed the establishment of a Republic of Uyghurstan with the capacity to regulate all its internal affairs Local party officials on instructions from Beijing hastily convened a meeting to condemn the proposal and ensure that this incorrect idea was not spread widely9 It gradually became clear that the premise of the system of autonomy proposed by the CCP had never been the protection of regional political rights but rather maintaining national unity10 This fact was amply demonstrated in the organization of the government the distribution of power and the nature of the legal system in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region which was officially established on October 1 1955 By law members of local minorities were to hold the top government positions of all autonomous units from the regional level to the county Government personnel were to be recruited from the several ethnic nationalities in proportion to their weight in the units total population though generally slightly favoring nonHans over Hans In the first decades of the PRC tens of thousands of Uyghurs and other nonHans were recruited into Xinjiangs government But no corresponding laws mandated proportional representation of groups in the party and the continued appointment of Hans to the most powerful position in the CCP organizations called the first sec retary of the party committee at all levels in the region came to appear over time not as a temporary aberration but as Beijings longterm plan As the reality of strong party control and continued Han dominance set in many Uyghurs became deeply and increasingly dissatisfied with their lack of political power It seemed to them that the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region was neither truly Uyghur nor autonomous hAn IMMIGRATIon To xInJIAnG The leaders of the PRC clearly intended to increase the Han presence in Xinjiang shortly after the CCP came to power in 1949 But the crowded oases settlements could not easily accommodate new colonists and there was worry in Beijing that Uyghurs mistrust of Han Chinese would be exacerbated if the two groups were forced to live side by side Uyghurs had come to resent the intrusion of outsiders who did not speak their language or share their faith and who moreover regarded them with suspicion or disdain x i n j i a n g 435 Beginning in 1949 on orders from Chairman Mao the top party and military offi cial in Xinjiang Wang Zhen demobilized over one hundred thousand soldiers and settled them on a network of paramilitary farms and in smallscale industrial proj ects throughout the province The demobilized soldiers were still under the com mand of the PRCs Peoples Liberation Army and military training and prepara tion were important parts of their routine In 1954 this network was christened the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps XPCC or as it is commonly called the Bingtuan from the transliteration of the Chinese for the XPCC11 The Bingtuan was charged with both protecting the region from external incursions and guarding against internal rebellion by nationalist Uyghurs As the organization grew Wang Zhen chose new sites at strategic points throughout Xinjiang often outside existing cities or on marginal land The aim was to implant millions of Han Chinese and at the same time avoid arousing suspicion The immigrants farmed and worked in isolated overwhelmingly Han communities so their presence even in large numbers did not immediately compound tensions with Turkic groups But frictions developed despite the geographic isolation of the respective communities In 1980 a conflict between Han XPCC members and local Uyghurs precipitated a major riot in the city of Aqsu12 The party also openly encouraged urban youths in Shanghai and other major coastal cities to move to Xinjiang and help build the borderlands The millions of Hans who answered the partys call flowed not only to the Bingtuan but also into the cities of northern Xinjiang fundamentally altering the regions demography over time In 2009 the capital city Ürümchi was over 72 percent Han and the nearly 84 million Hans in Xinjiang constituted 39 percent of the autonomous regions total population of roughly twentyone million while the 98 million Uyghurs were 46 percent of the total13 In light of the contentiousness of Han immigration it is significant that the official 2011 statistical yearbook for Xinjiang broke with the practice of all previous yearbooks in not providing population breakdowns by minzu category for the regions prefectures cities and towns14 xInJIAnGS eConoMIC deVeloPMenT Since the founding of the PRC Beijing has consistently directed economic devel opment in Xinjiang with an eye to integrating it more fully into the national terri tory Investment or distributive decisions have generally been linked to central goals rather than local needs In the first decades of the new state the party steadily weak ened Xinjiangs connections with Central Asia while simultaneously strengthening the regions links to China Proper The three pillars of Beijings economic policy for Xinjiang have been industrial development expansion of agriculture and sustained support for the largescale Bingtuan farms In the Mao era the central government funded factory construction to give Xinjiang a modest complement of industrial capacities Yet considering the region tactically expendable if strategically useful the government declined to create any thing either too vulnerable or too useful should the region fall under Soviet control There were reasons to worry that the Soviet Union might covet the region First Stalin had supported the Eastern Turkistan Republic in the 1940s which Mao saw as 436 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a a plot to make Xinjiang a nominally independent Soviet client state after the model of outer Mongolia The doubling of Soviet forces along the Xinjiang border in the 1960s and a series of Red Army incursions over that decade only increased this concern Second Chinese scientists were working to build the PRCs first atomic bomb in Lop Nor a remote area in southwestern Xinjiang from the early 1960s15 Khrushchev had originally offered to help China build a bomb but later reneged on the offer as rela tions between Moscow and Beijing soured There were credible reports in the late 1960s that the Soviets considered launching an air strike against Lop Nor in order to destroy Chinas nuclear weapons program16 The economic priorities of the Mao era brought considerable benefits to Xinjiang Boons to the region included significant growth in gross domestic product GDP nascent industrialization and infrastructural improvements Planners set up facto ries for vehicle repair machinery cement and textiles as well as facilities for exploit ing the areas rich natural resources especially oil and coal Agricultural output and particularly the production of commercial crops such as cotton increased as a con sequence of land reclamation and investment in irrigation fertilizer and mechaniza tion Moreover the party placed an emphasis on hiring large numbers of Uyghurs Kazakhs and other nonHans To integrate Xinjiang more tightly with China proper the government expanded the network of roads rail and airports Economic growth also brought general if modest improvement in living standards Stateowned enterprises provided industrial and service jobs in unprecedented numbers Annual GDP per capita rose from 170 RMB in 1952 to 314 in 1960 though it had fallen to 229 by the end of the Mao era in the mid1970s17 All of this development was underwrit ten by enormous subsidies from Beijing The drawbacks of Maoist economic policies in Xinjiang included distorted devel opment and the inefficient use of capital as with the rest of PRC Illplanned and breakneck development also caused environmental degradation This included soil deterioration desertification that often outpaced land reclamation by the XPCC and a drop in the water table There is some evidence that nuclear fallout from the testing at Lop Nor contaminated groundwater Also in emphasizing economic integration with China proper and attempting to guard against Soviet aggression by sealing the border the government kept Xinjiang isolated from natural markets in Central Asia In the postMao reform era the PRC government has invested in industrial concerns that directly serve national interests and reflect Xinjiangs comparative advantage in serving the countrys needs In the 1990s planners began to speak of Xinjiangs economic future in terms of a strategy of one black one white the black stood for oil the white for cotton Thus oil production and petroleum pro cessing have received considerable support with the goal of exporting the resource to parts of the country where economic expansion has generated almost insatiable demands for energy Cotton cultivation in Xinjiang has consistently received both policy and financial support from the central government In 1998 for instance Beijing extended a sub sidy of 55 billion RMB to the government of the autonomous region to purchase locally grown cotton at belowmarket prices which it could then sell for the market price and reap a considerable profit the 1998 subsidy was equal to Xinjiangs entire revenue in 199718 Xinjiang became the largest cotton producer in the country in the x i n j i a n g 437 1990s As part of the ninth fiveyear Plan 19962000 the government sponsored the movement of hundreds of thousands of spindles used in cotton production from cities on the coast such as Shanghai Guangdong and Tianjin to Xinjiang seeking at once to unite cotton production and weaving in Chinas northwest and help enter prises on the coast to shift to producing more capitalintensive and hightechnology goods At the same time the focus on cotton production and textile manufacture in Xinjiang suits the governments regional political goals The ultimate explanation for the CCPs emphasis on cotton and the development of commercial agriculture one expert writes is that it helps sustain the influx of enormous numbers of Han immigrants to reinforce territorial consolidation19 Beijing has also continued to support the Bingtuan an organization that simulta neously serves the developmental militarystrategic and immigration goals of the central government In the late 1990s the Bingtuan was separated from any super vision by the Peoples Liberation Army and was formally designated as a corpora tion directly accountable to the CCP and to Beijing rather than to the government of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region20 As of mid2009 there were more than 25 million Bingtuan soldiers in Xinjiang farms working on nearly two hundred farms and running a vast array of industrial and commercial enterprises as well as media educational and medical institutions21 The Bingtuan has become the single largest producer of cotton in Xinjiang and the fourthlargest producer of tomato paste in the world22 The transformation of this massive Maoera highly militarized socialist entity into a profitmaking business enterprise in recent decades has been nothing short of astonishing By maintaining one face to the outside world and another domesticallythat is by operating as a commercial business internationally under the name China Xinjian Group China New Construction Group while continuing to sustain some armed militias and large farmsthe Bingtuan has served the twin aims of Han colo nization and regional security much less expensively than the operation of separate selfdirected farms and fully military units would have In the unvarnished language of a selfstyled veteran warrior in the Bingtuan the purpose of the organization is to ensure that the whole of Xinjiangs territory is forever surnamed Zhong meaning that it remains eternally part of Zhongguo the Chinese term for China23 All in all the reform era has brought mixed benefits to Xinjiang The region gained an industrial base and basic transportation network and saw a substantial rise in GDP Economic growth also brought about a general improvement in living stan dards These were underwritten by enormous continuing subsidies from Beijing which have regularly provided half of Xinjiangs annual expenditures and reached more than eighteen billion RMB about US22 billion in 200124 Agricultural reforms have allowed some Uyghurs and many Hans to prosper through specialization Uyghurs in Turpan and nearby regions profited by cultivating melons and grapes Uyghur traders prospered first from internal trade then from transborder activities Domestic traders traveled to Chinas major cities to sell fruits raisins walnuts and shish kebabs After the borders with Central Asia were reopened in the 1980s many merchants embarked on the shuttle trade sending textiles and housewares west and importing steel and other industrial commodities in return Per capita GDP in Xinjiang has been remarkably high given the regions geographic and 438 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a climatic disadvantages In 2000 it was twelfth among the thirtyone provinciallevel units falling behind only the coastal provinces25 by 2012 it stood at eighteenth a bit below the national average but still far ahead of all of its inland neighbors except heav ily industrialized Inner Mongolia26 At the same time reform policies have exacted costs for Xinjiang Reforms of state owned enterprises SOEs eliminated at least six hundred thousand jobs between 1995 and 200027 In many cases Uyghurs appear to have been fired before Hans in those enterprises Hiring patterns in key state industries have been at best discrimi natory and often exclusionary28 The workforce in Xinjiangs booming oil industry is overwhelmingly Han Uyghurs have long felt intentionally excluded from the indus try In 1993 Xinjiang Party Secretary Wang Lequan dismissed the charge of bias by claiming dubiously that all workers came from oil fields elsewhere in the country so no locals of any sort were hired29 The following year an official in the industry said more candidly that nonHan employees were scarce because most cant meet the basic standards30 due to low levels of education Though the state sector has continued to contribute a disproportionate share of regional GDP private enterprise has expanded dramatically Uyghurs and other nonHans have much greater difficulty than Hans in finding jobs in the private sector Preferential policies still officially in effect have no sway over private organizations In fact job advertisements convey the message explicitly or tacitly that Uyghurs are not wanted For example some ads call for people natively fluent in Chinese which excludes most Uyghurs Staff at university job fairs in the early 1990s made clear to Uyghurs they were not welcome with a curt We dont want Uyghurs An official told a foreign researcher in the late 1990s that the Law on Regional Autonomy was no use because it put no pressure on private firms to hire nonHans The ratio of nonHans among factory workers in Turpan fell as a consequence31 Only days before the July 2009 riots in Ürümchi the Post Office Hotel in Kashgar still a predomi nantly Uyghur city posted a recruitment sign for various jobs from service workers to administrators all open only to Hans32 No publicly available statistics on unemployment indicate what proportion of the jobless belong to each ethnonational group but a Chinese study in 1998 found that one in three rural Uyghurs was underemployed and that half of the population had left many villages in search of work Other evidence suggests urban Uyghurs face even greater problems finding jobs33 Uyghur immigrants to Xinjiangs major cities such as Ürümchi Kashgar and Turpan often live in poverty and great uncertainty Official reports on the July 2009 riots in Ürümchi concluded that many of the Uyghur participants were migrants from southern Xinjiang34 As in the rest of China economic growth has been accompanied by growing inequalities in Xinjiang For example in 2007 the oilproducing center of Karamay boasted 98000 RMB about US14000 per capita and the capital city of Ürümchi 31000 RMB about US4500 The Khotän region in the southwest however earned on average only oneninth of that 3400 RMB just under US500 The ruralurban divide in Xinjiang is conspicuous as well in the same year urban dwell ers had a per capita disposable income of 10313 RMB US1500 while the dispos able income of the rural population stood at only onethird of that or 3183 RMB US467 x i n j i a n g 439 Although it is difficult to establish with accurate figures there are clearly system atic differences in living standards between Hans and Uyghurs There are shelves full of published statistical works comparing Uyghur Han and other populations on urbanization gender ratios age profiles female fertility birth and death rates sec toral employment and educational attainment There is not a single statistic com paring incomes among groups This appears to be a premeditated state policy rather than an inadvertent omission35 Officials might well be seeking to avoid publicizing negative information that could be used to criticize the government and the system of autonomy While statesponsored reports do acknowledge that real inequalities persist despite the establishment of absolute legal equality they studiously avoid putting numbers to those gaps On the other hand it is easy to find statistics on living standards divided by region and then to correlate them with population distributions Uyghurs predominate in the south and are mostly farmers Hans are the majority population in the north and a significant proportion of them live in citiesthey comprise roughly threequarters of Ürümchis population of about two million and 94 percent of the population in Shihezi a Bingtuan settlement than has been transformed into a city of over three hundred thousand people The visitor to Xinjiang can see immediately that Uyghur farmers in the south live much simpler lives than do Han oil workers or agroindustrial combine workers in the north and several scholars have remarked on the strong correlation of high incomes and high concentrations of Hans and low incomes and Uyghur predominance36 Despite the lack of official figures an economist used regression analysis to tease out systematic differences in incomes from a detailed 1998 sample finding that each 1 per cent increase in Han population in a district added an increment of 44 RMB to per cap ita income Thus in two localities with the same ratio of agricultural to nonagricultural production one that was threequarters Han had a per capita income of roughly 7300 RMB US1070 while in one that was only onequarter Han the figure fell to 5100 RMB US748 The overall economic difference is actually greater since areas where nonHans predominate depend more heavily on agriculture which generates less income than industry or commerce37 Furthermore the pattern of state investment in energy exploitation and commercial crop production shows a clear orientation to national rather than regional concerns that certainly has ethnic consequences The economic priorities set by officials in the last decade notably the one white one black approach appear certain to have left Uyghurs and much of southern Xinjiang further behind With state subsidies growing cotton is profitable for large mechanized Bingtuan farms where Hans predominate while smallscale Uyghur cul tivators have ended up worse off Those farmers confront very high prices for inputs such as seeds fertilizer and fuel and face volatile market demand and prices In some cases it costs more to grow cotton than farmers take in from selling it Furthermore cotton is an extraordinarily thirsty crop Xinjiangs water table has already dropped sixty meters nearly two hundred feet over the last thirty years and increasing cot ton monoculture will almost certainly cause further damage Farmers have had to dig deeper and deeper wells and conflicts over water use have increased Since so many Bingtuan units are situated at the sources of the regions major rivers the organiza tion has effective control of Xinjiangs surface water38 440 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Uyghurs have also complained that Beijing simply carts off the mineral wealth of Xinjiang without adequate compensation and rumors abound that even a small sur tax on the oil sent inland would make every Uyghur rich It has been suggested that the huge subsidies Beijing has provided Xinjiang for decades are really a disguised form of payment for mineral exploitation at below world market rates set by the cen tral government In any case it appears that despite the subsidies and other measures most of the profits from energy and mineral exploitation in Xinjiang enrich Beijing rather than the region39 It is widely recognized that Uyghurs are as a group less educated than Hans and that this is a serious disadvantage to finding employment in the modernizing economy There are numerous reasons for the comparatively low rates of educa tional attainment and high rates of unemployment among Uyghurs Many Uyghur families who make a living through farming feel compelled by economic necessity to keep schoolage children home to work in the fields40 As school fees have risen in the reform era poorer families may be financially unable to keep their children in school Poorly funded schools in southern Xinjiang often lack adequate equip ment and are unable to attract and retain good teachers The strong and increasing emphasis on Chineselanguage instruction even in schools with nonHan majori ties may also have deterred parents who hoped their children would grow up with a strong basis in Uyghur language and culture and may also have discouraged students with little or no facility in Chinese Finally the high Uyghur unemploy ment rate has clearly sent the dispiriting message to many students that even if they work hard their prospects are poor leading many to question the ultimate value of education Uyghur families particularly those in predominantly agrarian southern Xinjiang may place less emphasis on education than their Han counterparts In addition some Uyghurs are by their own account not interested in jobs with long hours and rigid work discipline as required in factories and other sectors of the modern economy41 Yet differences in educational attainment and motivation to work do not entirely account for disparities in income between Uyghurs and Hans Recent research has suggested that despite being better educated as a group than their elders young Uyghurs still pay a measurable cost of being Uyghurs earning less than Hans in their age cohort owing to employment discrimination in private enterprises and a smaller proportion of jobs in the state sector42 It is important to acknowledge both the systemic factors and the individual choices here because many Uyghur dissidents and international observers attribute all Uyghur problems to discrimination unfairly suggesting that the Chinese government has the capacity to change everything with a few policy adjustments In sum there is clear evidence that Uyghurs have fallen behind Hans economically in the reform era and every reason to believe the gap will widen43 While publicly billed as a way to reduce regional and intergroup inequalities44 the central govern ments Open the West campaign in the 1990s did not close income gaps and instead of narrowing the differences between Uyghurs or nonHans more generally and Hans the initiative appears to have directed most of the benefits of Xinjiangs con spicuous economic growth to Hans One analyst has argued that the developmental policies applied to Xinjiang can only be seen as Han economic imperialism45 x i n j i a n g 441 PolITICAl deVeloPMenTS In The 1980S And 1990S When then CCP General Secretary Hu Yaobang visited Tibet in May 1980 he was horrified to find many Tibetans living in dire poverty and profoundly alienated from the government despite decades of substantial financial support from Beijing Hu proposed to remedy both problems by enacting ample autonomy as a first step he ordered that twothirds of the cadre positions there be filled with Tibetans and a large number of Han cadres be retired or transferred to China proper46 After convening a meeting with members of the Xinjiang Party Committee in July 1980 Hu approved a proposal along similar lines mandating that the party appoint nonHans as first party secretaries at various levels and stipulating that the ratio of minority cadres in Xinjiang be raised to over 60 percent47 Hu pushed these changes through despite ferocious resistance from Han officials In Xinjiang more than seven thousand Han cadres were transferred to China proper in 1981 alone and in the early part of the decade all topranked Han cadres in the villages of southern Xinjiang reportedly moved to cities or other administrative positions Some two hundred thousand Hans left Xinjiang between 1979 and 1993 though new immigration more than replaced that number At the same time despite the substantial nativization of party and government in Xinjiang and Tibet in the wake of Hu Yaobangs directives Beijing continued to select only trusted Han offi cials as first secretaries of the regional party committees as it had done with very few exceptions in prior decades The liberalization of cultural policies and nativization of administrative ranks under Hu Yaobang pleased many Tibetans and Uyghurs even if those changes did not extin guish criticism of Beijing A sizable number of Tibetans reportedly said they had never had it so good and Uyghur peasants and traders avowed a satisfaction with the party disconcerting to Uyghur nationalist intellectuals At the same time Han cadres in both Xinjiang and Tibet deeply resented Hu feeling that his policies called their political contributions into question rewarded local antiHan prejudice and threatened the very security of Hans living in the regions48 One Han official in Xinjiang reportedly fulminated that the author of these proposals was a traitor aiming to create an East Turkestan surrendering Xinjiang to the Soviet Union and Turkey49 When a series of major protests rocked Xinjiang in the midtolate 1980s Hus policies were held responsible Hu was removed as CCP general secretary in 1987 by paramount leader Deng Xiaoping although the burgeoning democracy movement figured more prominently in his dismissal than the unrest in Xinjiang The generally peaceful demonstrations of the 1980s gave way to more violent ones in the following decade possibly as a consequence of the prior harsh reprisals Nearly one hundred Uyghurs staged an armed uprising in Baren southwestern Xinjiang in April 1990 In 1992 several buses were bombed in one day in Ürümchi five Uyghurs were executed for the attack In 1997 large numbers of Uyghurs marched in the streets of Ghulja to protest against religious and political repression and after the police responded harshly the protests turned violent and the police in turn suppressed them with brutal force Shortly afterward more bus bombings occurred in the regions capital Hardliners in Beijing and Ürümchi pointed to violent events in the 1990s as further evidence that the liberal policies had been a mistake Many of those hardliners or 442 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a their successors maintain the same perspective todayone reason that Beijing has refused to negotiate with external parties or accommodate local demands After Hus ouster Xinjiangs leaders reversed the nativization initiative and again promoted the recruitment and retention of Han cadres The party stepped up calls for Han cadres to work in Xinjiang beginning in the late 1990s50 In 1996 the CCP promulgated Document Number 7 a top secret order for authorities in Ürümchi to train a number of minority cadres who can determinedly defend the nation At the same time train a large number of Han cadres who love Xinjiang and then relo cate them to Xinjiang It also instructed the Autonomous Regions Party Committee to place greater restrictions on religious practices insist that nonHan officials dem onstrate loyalty to country and party or face dismissal and extend the Bingtuan meaning targeted Han immigration into Xinjiangs south51 The document set the tone for policies in the region for following decade which combined strong support for economic growth with rigorous political control and intolerance for dissent The July 2009 CRISIS And ITS AfTeRMATh The frequency of protests fell dramatically in the early 2000s and the economy con tinued to grow at a rapid clip Nevertheless Xinjiang remained a contentious place and a political headache for Beijing The most obvious concern for Chinas leaders has been to avert the emergence of widespread sustained ethnic violence A second concern with the situation of Tibet in mind has been to prevent the international ization of the Xinjiang problem Both of these concerns became a reality with the outbreak of the riots in Ürümchi in July 2009 The violence erupted shortly after the first edition of this book went to press and at the time many details of what had happened were not yet clear Almost four years later important questions about the episode remain why an estimated one thousand Uyghurs took to the streets on July 5 why what began as a peaceful protest turned violent and whether the governments heavily armed response followed or provoked the violence and how many people were killed and wounded52 These questions mat ter because in the absence of reliable information about the causes scope and quell ing of the protest turned riot it is very difficult to evaluate the policies Beijing later proposed to address it Most observers agree that the riot was touched off by a brawl that took place in late June in Guangdong province some two thousand miles distant from Ürümchi where substantial numbers of young Uyghur men and women had gone to take factory jobs beginning in 200653 On June 25 responding to a rumor that several Uyghur men had raped two Han women at the Xuri Toy Factory in the city of Shaoguana story later repudiated by one of the women supposedly involvedHan workers stormed a dormitory where Uyghur workers lived Armed with crude weapons such as iron bars and long knives the Han workers attacked the occupants indiscriminately and a huge brawl ensued several videos of the violence that surfaced on the Internet showed no evidence of a police response Two Uyghurs were killed and hundreds injured accord ing to official reports though some Uyghur and Han workers at the factory believed the death toll was higher In the days following only one person was arrested the man held responsible for spreading the false rumors of the rape54 x i n j i a n g 443 Within days Uyghur blogs and websites published news of the violence and what many regarded as an inadequate government response some also argued that the labor recruitment system was compulsory rather than voluntary focused on rural Uyghur women and aimed at inducing Uyghurs to assimilate In the first days of July Uyghurs in Urumchi used text messages and the Web to disseminate plans for a peaceful demonstration On July 5 roughly one thousand Uyghurs several waving PRC flags marched through the streets of Ürümchi to Peoples Square to protest the killings and the governments handling of the Shaoguan episode Party officials in Beijing and Ürümchi responded to the demonstration with police action as they had to previous such protests first mobilizing police with riot gear and later after some delay paramilitary Peoples Armed Police PAP forces armed with automatic weapons Still at issue is when where and to whom they responded Official accounts later described police and PAP forces patrolling the streets to stop violent attacks by Uyghurs on Han civilians Uyghur expatriate organizations and eyewitnesses claimed by contrast that the police had used lethal force against peace ful protestors and even children By the next morning the government had promul gated news of a curfew from 9 PM to 8 AM shut down Internet and cell phone service ostensibly to prevent the spread of rumors and further violence and continued to bring PAP forces into Ürümchi In the wake of the 2008 protests in Tibet see chapter 15 Beijing had enforced a media blackout and refused to allow foreign journalists to travel to the TAR That choice later came to be regarded both inside and outside China as a poor one invit ing suspicions that the government had much to hide and preventing it from making a plausible case that police had responded appropriately In a striking departure from the previous years strategy on July 6 Beijing invited a group of foreign reporters to Ürümchi to investigate and report on events there firsthand They were all housed in the Hoi Tak Hotel which reportedly had the only working Internet connection in the XUAR at the time At one point a group of journalists walking down a street were accosted by roughly two hundred women who demanded that the government release their male relatives detained after the protests International journalists wrote numerous stories from Ürümchi investigating the extent of the violence and trying to clarify the causes These reports praised the government for being more open to journalists but also produced graphic evidence of police handling unarmed protes tors very roughly kicking them striking them with batons and even punching them in the face Unexpectedly on July 7 the second day of the reporters visit bands of Han citizens armed with homemade weapons organized to patrol the streets The Han vigilan tes drew considerable attention international media reported their complaints that they did not trust Beijing or local police forces to protect Han residents The vigilan tes are said to have attacked Uyghurs they found on the streets in several locations though no casualty figures were released Foreign journalists took note that police were conspicuously scarce as the citizens roamed indeed Ürümchi Party Secretary Li Zhi was observed standing on a police car leading a group in chants of down with Rebiya Kadeer the Washington DCbased president of the World Uyghur Congress WUC an international organization headquartered in Germany whom the authori ties blamed for organizing and triggering the riot via a series of phone calls to relatives in Ürümchi see Box 16255 444 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a box 162 rebiya kaDeer A shopkeeper turned millionaire the mother of eleven children a delegate to a nationallevel advisory body to the government of the PRC later imprisoned in China for revealing state secrets a businesswoman and philanthropist turned independence movement leader a human rights activist accused by beijing of supporting terrorism Rebiya Kadeer Rabiyä Qadir is a complex and controversial figure born in 1947 into a poor uyghur family in Altay in northern xinjiang Rebiya entered business in the in late 1970s with a single laundromat Through a series of increasingly bold ventures she managed to build an international trading company that made her one of the richest people in China by the early 1990s She used some of her wealth to help other uyghur women get a start in business through her foundation the 1000 families Mothers Project In recognition of her achievement she was appointed to the govern ment advisory body in 1993 and in 1995 was a representative of China at the united nations Conference on Women in beijing following largescale uyghur protests of early february1997 her husband Sidik Rozi haji who had emigrated to the united States heaped criticism on Chinese policies in xinjiang The Communist Party subsequently stripped her of her passport and prevented her from conducting international trade Rabiyä also spoke critically about beijings rule in xinjiang in her capacity as a delegate in the national advisory body and was summar ily removed from her position She later sent newspaper clippings to Sidik in the united States As she prepared to hand a file on uyghur political prisoners to a uS congressio nal delegation in 1999 police took her into custody and she was subsequently charged with revealing state secrets Sentenced to ten years in prison she was released and deported in 2005 after strong pressure from Washington for years uyghurs in diaspora had lamented the lack of a leader with the charisma or international stature of the dalai lama When Rabiyä arrived in Washington in 2005 she was quickly touted as the uyghurs great new hope Twice nominated for the nobel Peace Prize awarded the norwegian Rafto Prize often taken as a harbinger of a future nobel winner in 2004 energetic and articulate she has done much to raise the profile of uyghur organizations and concerns outside xinjiang In 2006 she was elected president of the World uyghur Congress WuC an international organization that claims to repre sent the interests of uyghurs in xinjiang and elsewhere She has also met with many world leaders including President George W bush the head of the european Parliament and un Secretary Kofi Annan At the same time she has made some embarrassing gaffes and leveled exagger ated charges against beijing that have damaged her credibility and that of the organiza tions she heads After the July 2009 riot she held a press conference during which she presented a picture supposedly showing police cracking down on uyghur demonstra tors within hours it was revealed to have been an image from an unrelated protest in south China Given that the dalai lama has been unable to wrest political concessions from beijing in years of trying despite his fame and international support it seems unlikely that Rabiyä will have much impact on politics in xinjiang however if China by its actions continues to bring her international attention and sympathy as it did when it tried unsuccessfully to persuade Australia and Japan to refuse her permission to visit in August 2009 it will only enhance her influence among xinjiang uyghurs and globally x i n j i a n g 445 The violence and tension were serious enough that on July 8 President Hu Jintao returned early from Italy where he had been scheduled to take part in the G8 sum mit By Friday July 10 the violence had stopped but in the name of avoiding fur ther conflict the government posted placards announcing that all Ürümchi mosques would be closed for Friday prayers and ordering men to pray at home Groups of Uyghurs gathered angrily before a number of mosques and the government relented allowing several to open On the same day a smaller group of Uyghur protestors took to the streets to demand the release of those who had been detained Though the protestors were marching peacefully riot police set upon them with truncheons and fists an episode captured memorably by BBC video cameras56 By July 11 there were no further reports of violence though the government announced that over fourteen hundred people had been detained in connection with the events With the heavy police presence the city became quiet but would remain extremely tense throughout the summer A month later the government announced the trials of some two hundred suspects in connection with the riots and said that there would be a drastic increase in security in preparation for the trials57 Even after having invited foreign journalists to investigate the riot Beijing attempted to maintain control of the narrative pronouncing officially that 197 people had died and over 1700 been wounded in the violence of July 558 Officials also quickly moved to assign blame taking two different and seemingly contradictory tacks On one hand they attributed the riot to outside agitators like Rebiya Kadeer for meddling in an otherwise peaceful region They also asserted that Rebiya and the WUC had ties to the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement ETIM the group linked to alQaeda by the United States though this claim faded over time Officials later asserted that simultaneous eruption of violence in fifty different sites in the city proved it had been premeditated They also announced that women in long Islamic robes and head cov erings had directed the rioters and that one even distributed clubs59propositions hard to square with the several PRC flags carried by the marchers and the absence of obviously Islamic dress in the videos of the protest or episodes of violence caught on surveillance cameras While Beijing publicly continued to blame Rebiya on July 8 police in Beijing also detained Ilham Tohti a charismatic Uyghur professor at Minzu University after Xinjiangs governor Nur Bekri publicly blamed Tohtis blog Uyghur Online for con tributing to the riot Tohti an economist had long voiced sharp yet carefully rea soned criticisms of Chinese policies in his lectures and on his blog His most famous was a 2005 lecture delivered at Minzu University and later widely disseminated via his blog in which Tohti noted that some of the regions most powerful economic inter ests the petroleum and mining companies guided by Beijing undervalued resources extracted in Xinjiang and therefore paid very little in local taxes in the service of national economic objectives Further instead of contributing to regional economic development as the Xinjiang government had claimed the companies actually segre gated their enterprises from the local economy and effectively provided Beijing with hidden transfer payments at the expense of locals To remedy this Tohti explicitly pleaded for official recognition of Uyghurs rights to a share of the proceeds from mineral exploitation as well as constitutionally granted rights to political autonomy to safeguard their collective interests but lamented that Uyghurs would receive 446 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a neither because the current division of power and resources advantaged those pow erful interest groups Though Tohti had been speaking to packed lecture halls for years at Minzu University his blog was shut down for a time in 2008 and he was detained in March 2009 for giving an interview to Radio Free Asia that Beijing regarded as inflammatory In this light in early July 2009 both the condemnation of Rebiya and Tohtis deten tion implicitly acknowledged that dissatisfaction inside Xinjiang and not just foreign agitation had been a factor in the protest After all neither an outspoken expatriate leader in Washington nor a professor in Beijing could simply will large numbers of Uyghurs into the streets of Urumchi particularly given the official response to previ ous protests60 But a fresh spate of violence in late summer 2009 and Beijings responses to it revealed the power of another discontented constituency in Xinjiang the mil lions of Hans who called the region home Rumors of Uyghurs leaping out of shad ows and stabbing Hans with syringes began to circulate in August and by early September nearhysterical concern about syringe attacks quite out of propor tion with the tiny number of verified episodes was rife throughout Xinjiang and even as far away as Xian61 On September 3 there was another march on Peoples Square this time by some ten thousand Hans shouting that the Xinjiang govern ment was incapable of protecting the population and demanding that Xinjiang Party Secretary Wang Lequan resign The demonstration unquestionably caught Beijings attention and Urumchis Party Secretary and police chief were fired two days later Wang Lequan who had served an extraordinary fifteen years in the Autonomous Regions top party position on the strength of having maintained stability with a firm hand had clearly lost the confidence of Hu Jintao and the Central Committee Wang was transferred to a party post in Beijing in April 2010 and replaced by Hunan party secretary Zhang Chunxian an official known not for crackdowns but for his media savvy62 In May 2010 Hu Jintao convened a Xinjiang Work Group in Beijing The Work Group handed Zhang Chunxian a set of policies ostensibly aimed at resolving the economic and security problems in Xinjiang These included pairing provinces in eastern China with various locales in Xinjiang for the provision of technical assis tance and fiscal grants totaling 10 billion RMB US14 billion the declaration of a Special Economic Zone in Kashgar massive infrastructural investments in roads and airports a substantial increase in the taxes on local mining and petroleum produc tion to direct more of the benefits of resource exploitation to the regions inhabitants and increased subsidies to the salaries of cadres and other noncommercial workers financed by those increased taxes63 There is little doubt that Xinjiangs economy has been growing Per capita urban incomes rose from 13600 RMB US2200 to nearly 18000 RMB 2900 and rural incomes from 4600 RMB US750 to 6400 US1040 between 2010 and 2012 while average staff and worker wages in modern sectors of the economy increased from 27700 RMB US4500 to almost 39000 US6360 between 2009 and 201164 There are of course no statistics comparing average Han and Uyghur incomes over the period but given that the former predominate in salaried jobs and urban areas it x i n j i a n g 447 is safe to conclude that most of the benefits of growth have continued to flow to Hans While one scholar has mocked Beijings post2009 Xinjiang policies as an economic bandaid incapable of winning over disaffected Uyghurs another has argued that this was never their primary purpose Instead the policies were intended to address Xinjiangs Han problem the problem of convincing longtime Han residents unset tled by July 2009 to stay and also of drawing more human capitalmeaning edu cated and skilled Han migrantsto the region65 The announcement of a plan for leapfrog development focused on four cities in XPCCcontrolled areas and the cel ebration of a mass wedding for 50 XPCC couples lured to Xinjiang to realize their dreams all lend credence to this conclusion66 The fuTuRe of xInJIAnG Chinese leaders have several reasons for wanting to keep Xinjiang part of the PRC First Xinjiang represents a large piece of Chinese territory and the government of the PRC worries that the growth of a separatist movement there might encourage similar trends in Tibet or Taiwan Second the region has some of the countrys largest remaining reserves of coal oil and natural gas Third Xinjiang provides a vital link to Central Asia and territories beyond An oil pipeline connects Xinjiang to the even richer deposits of Chinas neighbor Kazakhstan and Beijing has begun construction of a pipeline from Turkmenistan to tap that countrys rich natural gas holdings From the time of SinoSoviet split of the 1960s and 1970s until 1991 Xinjiang had an additional kind of importance for Beijing as a buffer protecting China from the Soviet Union With the collapse of the Soviet Union and Beijings successful negotiation of friendly relations with the Central Asian successor states the fear of a military threat from the region disappeared although given geopoliti cal realities in that part of the world Xinjiang remains a strategically important part of the PRC In sum China would not willingly relinquish control of Xinjiang and the coun try has developed sufficient economic political and military capacity that neither Uyghurs nor any outside power could force it to do so Nevertheless despite the cen tral governments overwhelming tactical advantage it would be unwise to ignore the signs of deep and pervasive discontent among nonHans in Chinas West For even though they have little chance of gaining independence these populations can still cause Beijing difficulties This was dramatically demonstrated by the largescale vio lence in Tibet in March 2008 and Xinjiang in July 2009 and since then reiterated by the more than one hundred selfimmolations by Tibetans and sporadic reports of ethnic clashes between Uyghurs and Hans including clashes in April and June 2013 that left more than fifty people dead and led to another tight security clampdown However much party leaders might wish it economic growth will not eliminate the discontent nor will more rigorous political control eliminate the ability of Uyghurs or Tibetans to express it Unfortunately there is little evidence that Chinas current leadership has contemplated serious alternatives 448 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a noTeS 1 Xinjiangs Natural Resources httpwwwchinaorgcnenglishMATERIAL139230 htm 2 Stanley W Toops The Demography of Xinjiang in Xinjiang Chinas Muslim Borderland ed S Frederick Starr Armonk NY M E Sharpe 2004 241263 3 James A Millward Beyond the Pass Economy Ethnicity and Empire in Qing Central Asia 17591864 Stanford CA Stanford University Press 1998 197 4 James A Millward and Nabijan Tursun Political History and Strategies of Control 18841997 in Starr Xinjiang 6567 5 James A Millward Eurasian Crossroads A History of Xinjiang New York Columbia University Press 2007 206210 6 Toops The Demography of Xinjiang 244245 7 Gardner Bovingdon The History of the History of Xinjiang Twentieth Century China 26 no 2 2001 95139 8 Walker Connor The National Question in MarxistLeninist Theory and Strategy Princeton NJ Princeton University Press 1984 8081 and chap 4 passim 9 Zhu Peimin Ershi shiji Xinjiang shi yanjiu Research on the History of Xinjiang in the Twentieth Century Urumci Xinjiang renmin chubanshe 2000 335 10 Baogang He Minority Rights with Chinese Characteristics in Multiculturalism in Asia ed Will Kymlicka Oxford Oxford University Press 2005 68 11 On the XPCC Bingtuan see Donald H McMillen Xinjiang and the Production and Construction Corps A Han Organization in a NonHan Region Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 1981 6596 James D Seymour Xinjiangs Production and Construction Corps and the Sinification of Eastern Turkestan Inner Asia 2 2000 171193 Nicholas Becquelin Xinjiang in the Nineties The China Journal 44 2000 6590 Thomas Matthew James Cliff Neo Oasis The Xinjiang Bingtuan in the Twentyfirst Century Asian Studies Review 33 2009 33 83106 12 Michael Dillon Xinjiang Chinas Muslim Far Northwest London RoutledgeCurzo n 2004 13 Xinjiang 2010 Statistical Yearbook 14 Xinjiang 2011 Statistical Yearbook 15 See John W Lewis and Xue Litai China Builds the Bomb Stanford CA Stanford University Press 1991 16 See various documents at The SinoSoviet Border Conflict 1969 US Reactions and Diplomatic Maneuvers A National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book William Burr ed June 12 2001 httpwwwgwuedu percent7EnsarchivNSAEBBNSAEBB49 Decades later it also emerged that in 1964 US president John F Kennedy had proposed to Khrushchev that the US and the USSR send two bombers to Xinjiang and jointly destroy the nuclear outpost but Khrushchev declined see Gordon H Chang JFK China and the Bomb The Journal of American History 74 1988 12871310 17 Calla Weimer The Economy of Xinjiang in Xinjiang Chinas Muslim Borderland 169 18 Becquelin Xinjiang in the Nineties 8283 19 Becquelin Xinjiang in the Nineties 83 20 Cliff Neo Oasis 8789 21 XPCC Transforms Future of Northwest China Daily Online July 6 2009 http wwwchinadailycomcnbw20090706content8380510htm 22 Millward Eurasian Crossroads 287 23 Wang Lixiong Wode Xiyu nide Dong Tu My Western Regions Your Eastern Turkistan Taibei Dakuai wenhua chuban gu fen you xian gong si 2007 21 x i n j i a n g 449 24 David Bachman Making Xinjiang Safe for the Han Contradictions and Ironies of Chinese Governance in Chinas Northwest in Governing Chinas Multiethnic Frontiers ed Morris Rossabi Seattle University of Washington Press 2004 172 History and Development of Xinjiang PRC Government White Paper May 2003 httpwwwchina orgcnewhite20030526indexhtm 25 Weimer 164 26 For 2012 figures on Xinjiang see httpwwwtjcnorgplusviewphpaid26311 27 Weimer 179 28 Becquelin Xinjiang in the Nineties 85 90 29 Barry Sautman Preferential Policies for Ethnic Minorities in China The Case of Xinjiang Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 4 1998 97 The author met a number of workers in the oil industry between 1995 and 2002 who had grown up in Xinjiang 30 K Chen Muslims in China Hate Beijing a Bit LessRecent Economic Gains Temper Calls for Revolt Wall Street Journal October 21 1994 A10 31 Sautman 97 Government and PCC job advertisements have often noted straightfor wardly that most positions were reserved for Han Chinese see eg httpwwwceccgov pagesvirtualAcadindexphpdshowsingle122703 32 James Fallows No Uighurs Need Apply httpjamesfallowstheatlanticcom archives200907nouighursneedapplyphp 33 Nicholas Becquelin Staged Development in Xinjiang The China Quarterly 2004 372 34 Charles Hutzler Income Gaps Corruption Fuel China riots Seattle Times July 15 2009 35 Such statistics are closely guarded even in the most peaceful and least politicized of the autonomous regions such as the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in south ern China Guangxi officials told a foreign researcher in the 1990s that they were forbid den even to study differences in Han and Zhuang incomes as the topic was too sensitive Katherine Palmer Kaup Creating the Zhuang Ethnic Politics in China Boulder CO Lynne Rienner 2000 36 Toops The Demography of Xinjiang 261262 37 Weimer 177 38 Cliff Neo Oasis 272277 Figure on dropping water table from Eric Hagt Chinas Water Policies Implications for Xinjiang and Kazakhstan Central AsiaCaucasus Analyst 2004 httpwwwcacianalystorgqnode1358 39 Comment on subsidies as disguised payments from Minxin Pei SelfAdministration and Local Autonomy Reconciling Conflicting Interests in China in The SelfDetermination of Peoples Community Nation and State in an Interdependent World ed Wolfgang F Danspeckgruber Boulder CO Lynne Rienner 2002 315332 For analysis of relative benefits to Xinjiang and Beijing see Weimer 174 40 An official government report acknowledged this problem in 2001 See Guanyu zhengque renshi he chuli xin xingshi xia Xinjiang minzu wenti de diaocha baogao Makesi zhuyi yu xianshi February 2001 3438 Cited in Becquelin Staged Development in Xinjiang 358378 41 Authors field notes 1997 2002 The Uyghur economist and Minzu University pro fessor Ilham Tohti conceded in a 2005 lecture published in 2006 that many Uyghurs are held back economically by limited technical skills conservative thinking shortsightedness an emphasis on manual labor unsuited to the modern market economy weak competitive spirit and fatalism See his Xinjiang Jingji Fazhan Yu Minzu Guanxi Xinjiangs Economic Development and Relations among Minzu Weiwuer zai xian Uyghur online 2006 http wwwuighurbiznetarchives3650 450 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a 42 Xiaowei Zang Age and the Cost of Being Uyghurs in Ürümchi The China Quarterly 2102012 UyghurHan Earnings Differentials in Ürümchi The China Journal no 65 2011 43 Hannum and Xie came to the same conclusion by studying the data from the 1982 and 1990 PRC censuses They found that compared with Hans Uyghurs were overrepre sented in agriculture and underrepresented in industry and service sectors and that these imbalances grew more pronounced over the interval Given the increasing importance of education to financial success and continuing differences in educational levels across the same period they projected that inequalities would persist See Emily Hannum and Yu Xie Ethnic Stratification in Northwest China Occupational Differences between Han Chinese and National Minorities in Xinjiang 19821990 Demography 35 1998 323333 44 Qunjian Tian China Develops Its West Motivation Strategy and Prospect Journal of Contemporary China 13 2004 611636 45 Bachman 156 46 Melyn C Goldstein The Snow Lion and the Dragon China Tibet and the Dalai Lama Berkeley University of California Press 1997 65 47 Zhu Xiaomin Jiefang hou zhi 20 shiji 80 niandai Xinjiang Yily fan fenlie douzheng jiaoxun qianxi A Preliminary Analysis of the Lessons from the Struggle against Separatism in Xinjiangs Ili from the Revolution through the 1980s Zhonggong Yili zhou wei dangxiao xuebao 2006 6163 48 Zhu Xiaomin 6163 Information about Tibet from Tsering W Shakya The Dragon in the Land of Snows A History of Modern Tibet since 1947 New York Columbia University Press 1999 400 410 49 Cited in Dillon Xinjiang Chinas Muslim Far Northwest 36 50 Deng Liqun Deng Liqun zishu shier ge Chunqiu Deng Liqun in His Own Words Twelve Seasons 19751987 Hong Kong Da Feng chubanshe 2006 205208 51 CCP Central Committee Document 7 Record of the Meeting of the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party Concerning the Maintenance of Stability in Xinjiang English translation published by Human Rights Watch 1996 52 For an account of the violence largely sympathetic to the governments view and sharply critical of foreign media see Jiao Yuliu Xinjiang Zhi Luan Meiyou Jieshu De Chongtu The Chaos in Xinjiang Conflict without End ed Ho Pin Carle Place NY Mirror Books 2009 For a brief but very different firsthand version of the July 5 events see Sakine Zulang My Own Personal Holocaust A Young Girl Describes Her Experience in China CBC News 20091020 httpwwwcbccanewscitizenbytes200910 myownpersonalholocaustayohtml 53 A concise chronology of events can be found on the BBC website httpnewsbbc couk2hiasiapacific8138866stm The best Englishlanguage account of the events is James Millwards Introduction Does the 2009 Urumchi Violence Mark a Turning Point Central Asian Survey 28 no 4 2009 347360 The following paragraphs largely follow that account 54 See James A Millward Introduction Does the 2009 Urumchi Violence Mark a Turning Point Central Asian Survey 28 no 4 2009 55 Millward Introduction Does the 2009 Urumchi Violence Mark a Turning Point Central Asian Survey 28 no 4 2009 354 56 Video available at httpnewsbbccouk2hiasiapacific8141657stm 57 Cai Ke and Lei Xiaoxun 200 to Face Trial for Day of Carnage China Daily August 24 2009 httpwwwchinadailycomcnchina2009xinjiangriot20090824con tent8605477htm x i n j i a n g 451 58 Chinas official Xinhua News Service also set up an Englishlanguage Urumqi Riot website to promulgate its version of events abroad httpwwwchinaviewcnurumqiriot 59 Barbara Demick China Says It Has Evidence Deadly Uighur Uprisings Were Coordinated Los Angeles Times July 21 2009 60 Tohtis lecture was originally posted at httpwwwuighurbiznethtml2008 03248137html cited 7292009 link now defunct On Tohtis influence on his stu dents see Ananth Krishnan The Road to a Better Life in Chinese Characters Profiles of FastChanging Lives in a FastChanging Land ed Angilee Shah and Jeffrey Wasserstrom Berkeley University of California Press 2012 133144 On his July 2009 detention see Edward Wong Intellectuals Call for Release of Uighur Economist The New York Times 715 2009 Radio Free Asia Uyghur service reported Tohtis detention and the closure of his website on July 9 2009 httpwwwrfaorguyghurxewerlertepsilixewerilhamto htinezerbentte03252009051627htmlencodinglatin Tohti was quietly released along with two prominent Chinese democracy activists in August 2009 apparently as a goodwill gesture in advance of President Obamas first trip to China later that year 61 Thomas Cliff The Partnership of Stability in Xinjiang StateSociety Interactions Following the July 2009 Unrest China Journal no 68 2012 96 62 Cliff The Partnership of Stability in Xinjiang 80 87 90 63 Cliff The Partnership of Stability in Xinjiang 100105 64 Figures from China Yearly Provincial MacroEconomy Statistics Xinjiang China Data Online 65 Liu Yong An Economic BandAid Beijings New Approach to Xinjiang China Security 6 no 2 2010 4155 Cliff The Partnership of Stability in Xinjiang 8386 66 Mao Weihua and Shao Wei Three Goals to Realize Leapfrog Development China Daily httpwwwchinadailycomcncndy20110601content12621481htm Circling the Wagons The Economist 20130525 Li Laifang Zhang Hongchi and Pan Yin Graduates Lured to Xinjiang to Realize Dreams Peoples Daily Online 6112013 httpenglishpeople dailycomcn2036918280757html SuGGeSTed ReAdInGS Bovingdon Gardner The Uyghurs Strangers in Their Own Land New York Columbia University Press 2010 Dillon Michael Xinjiang Chinas Muslim Far Northwest London RoutledgeCurzon 2004 Gladney Dru C Dislocating China Reflections on Muslims Minorities and Other Subaltern Subjects Chicago University of Chicago Press 2005 Goodman David S G Chinas Campaign to Open up the West National Provincial and Local Perspectives New York Cambridge University Press 2004 Kaltman Brian Under the Heel of the Dragon Islam Racism Crime and the Uighur in China Athens OH Ohio University Press 2007 Lipman Jonathan N Familiar Strangers A History of Muslims in Northwest China Seattle University of Washington Press 1997 Millward James A Eurasian Crossroads A History of Xinjiang New York Columbia University Press 2007 Rossabi Morris ed Governing Chinas Multiethnic Frontiers Seattle University of Washington Press 2005 Starr S Frederick ed Xinjiang Chinas Muslim Borderland Armonk NY M E Sharpe 2004 fRoM bRITISh CRoWn Colony To SPeCIAl AdMInISTRATIVe ReGIon of ChInA Hong Kong with a total area of a little over 420 square miles less than a quarter the size of Rhode Island and a population of about seven million became a special administrative region SAR of the Peoples Republic of China PRC on July 1 1997 For about 150 years prior to that it was a colony of Great Britain The territory became a British possession in three phases after the first Opium War between United Kingdom and the Qing dynasty in 18391842 The first phase included Hong Kong Island about fifty square miles which was ceded to Great Britain in perpetuity according to the terms of the Treaty of Nanjing Britain also took control in perpetuity of Kowloon eighteen square miles in 1860 as part of the Convention of Peking Beijing that ended the Second Opium War In 1898 the largest part of Hong Kong the New Territories 368 square miles was leased for ninetynine years from Qing China to the United Kingdom in the Second Convention of Peking The Convention for the Extension of Hong Kong Territory For more than a century the British government directly governed Hong Kong by sending governors and expatriate civil servants from London and indirectly ruled the territory through the cooptation of local elites in both the urban and rural areas The cooptation of Hong Kong elites took the form of appointing them to various consul tative bodies and conferring upon them honors and titles such as the Members of the British Empire MBE and Order of the British Empire OBE A Legislative Council LegCo was established in colonial Hong Kong in 1843 but it always played a subor dinate role in the executivedominant system Prior to 1985 the governor appointed all members of the Legislative Council Hong Kong Sonny Sh I u h I nG lo 17 h o n g k o n g 453 In 1979 when the British governor of Hong Kong Sir Murray MacLehose vis ited Beijing the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping told him that the PRC would take back Hong Kong by 1997 when UKs lease on the New Territories was set to expire MacLehose did not inform the people of Hong Kong of this message but he conveyed Dengs remark that the Hong Kong people should put their hearts at ease about their future C H I N A Deep Bay Mirs Bay LANTAU ISLAND HONG KONG ISLAND S O U T H C H I N A S E A NEW TERRITORIES KOWLOON N 0 0 10 15 km 5 5 10 mi Note Te Macao Special Administrative Region is about 38 miles west of Hong Kong Map Area Area 422 sq mi Population 7 182 700 Total GDP at purchasing power parity 3755 billion GDP per capita at purchasing power parity 52300 GDP by sector services 928 industry 71 agriculture 0 Life expectancy at birth 822 years Infant mortality per 1000 live births 29 Data from 201213 Hong Kong Hong Kong 454 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a box 171 macao the other sar Many people do not realize that there is another former colony besides hong Kong that was returned to Chinese sovereignty and became a special administrative region SAR of the Peoples Republic of China in the late 1990s Macao a onetime colony of Portugal on the coast of China about thirtyseven miles southwest of hong Kong returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1999 Macao is only eleven square miles in area and has a popula tion of a little over half a million but it is one of the most densely populated places in the world Macao has some similarities to the hKSAR but also many fundamental historical political and economic differences The Portuguese first established a presence in Macao in the sixteenth century as a haven for shipwrecked sailors and then as base for trading with imperial China Portugal gradu ally extended its activities in and control over Macao and from the early seventeenth to the midnineteenth centuries Portugals relations with China were tense and fluctuating with both sides claiming sovereignty over Macao In the 1840s Portugal was able to assert full colonial control over Macao as the Qing dynasty was in its period of rapid decline After Portugal became a democracy in 1974 it began to renounce its claims on its colonies In 1976 China and Portugal agreed that Macao was a Chinese territory under Portuguese administration The two countries reached agreement in April 1987 on the return of Macao to Chinese sovereignty which formally took place on december 20 1999 beijing wanted to settle the question of hong Kongs sovereignty before that of Macao like hong Kong the Macao SAR has a basic law as a miniconstitution that grants it a great deal of autonomy except in defense and foreign affairs In all matters the government of Macao headed by a chief executive is subordinate to that of the PRC despite one very highprofile corruption case in which a former senior government official was arrested in 2007 and sentenced to a long prison term the Macao government has been relatively clean The SARs first chief executive edmund ho hauwah a former banker remained quite popular through his second term which ended in late 2009 however there was a mis match between hos ability to lead Macao and the bureaucratic structure underneath him Although there are signs of improvement the Macao bureaucracy has been traditionally In 1982 British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher visited Beijing and began nego tiations with the PRC on Hong Kongs sovereignty The negotiations got off to a rocky start but eventually Thatcher made an important concession by exchanging sover eignty over Hong Kong for Beijings promise of a high degree of autonomy for the territory after the British departure The SinoBritish Joint Declaration formally the Joint Declaration of the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Government of the Peoples Republic of China on the Question of Hong Kong was signed in Beijing in December 1984 and set out the terms for the formal transfer of sovereignty on July 1 1997 The Joint Declaration was based on the principle of One Country Two Systems for Hong Kong which was to become a special administrative region SAR of the Peoples Republic of China This principle meant that although Chinese sovereignty over Hong Kong would be recognized Beijing promised that it would not impose socialism or direct communist partyrule on the SAR and the capitalist system and way of life would not be changed for at least fifty years A similar formula was applied to the nearby Portuguese colony of Macao in its return to Chinese sovereignty in 1999 see Box 171 h o n g k o n g 455 hierarchical unresponsive and slow to react to socioeconomic and political change reflect ing perhaps the persistence of the legacy of Portuguese rather than british colonialism but in many ways Macaos undemocratic but consultative and overwhelmingly proestablishment political system is more akin to that of the PRC than to its hong Kong counterpart like the hKSAR the Macao Special Administrative Region MSAR has an executiveled administration that dominates the legislature which also has a majority of progovernment and probeijing members Political parties only operate before an election and are disbanded afterward Interest groups are mainly dominated by probeijing trade unions and neighborhood associations Although there have been some workingclass protests civil society in Macao is relatively weak compared to hong Kong and its democracy movement is small and ineffective There is also a lack of an independent mass media critical of the administration In March 2009 a tough national security law took effect in Macao after it was approved by an overwhelming majority of members of the legislative Assembly Civil society did not rise up against the bill unlike the hong Kong case with Article 23 of the basic law In fact many legal scholars in Macao supported the law Critics argue that it outlaws ambigu ous preparatory acts of treason secession and subversionoffenses that can bring a minimum of three years and a maximum of twentyfive years of imprisonment Some hong Kong democracy supporters fear that the enactment of the law is an attempt by the PRC to pave the way for Macaonizing the hKSAR in the future To beijing however its smooth enactment was one of the major achievements of the edmund ho administration in Macao The most unique thing about Macao is the importance of casino capitalism in its economyand therefore in its politics as well Macao developed as one of the main gambling havens in east Asia during the Portuguese colonial era but Macaos casino sec tor has undergone significant expansion and transformation since the 1990s because of the growth of tourism in South China and the influx of foreign investment in the gambling industry including huge sums by las Vegas companies The Macao SAR is now home to the worlds largest casinos and its gambling revenue now exceeds those of las Vegas and Atlantic City new Jersey combined during the 1990s gang warfare between underground triad organizations over access to casino turf particularly the VIP rooms where rich businesspeople gambled became commonplace The arrest in november 1999 and imprisonment of one of the most flam boyant triad bosses helped to decrease the gang violence by sending a strong message that China intended to crack down hard after Macao reverted to Chinese sovereignty In mid2008 beijing suddenly tightened the number of mainland visitors who were allowed to gamble in Macao partly because of the need to control money laundering crossborder crime and illegal immigration The central government was also concerned about the vicious competition among casino operators and the danger of an overgrown industry The retrenchment policy initiated by beijing and followed by the ho administra tion has not really seriously affected gambling proceeds since Macaos casino sector relies much more on gamblers from hong Kong and elsewhere than on those from the PRC In July 2009 fernando Chui Saion was elected as the Chief executive of Macao receiving 297 out of 300 votes from the Chief executive election Committee As with edmund ho Chui has emphasized Macaos need to focus on economic development rather than political reform while forging ahead with the scheme of integrating with the mainland economically Chui had been the secretary for social affairs and culture for ten years As an experienced leader Chui has realized the importance of improving the liveli hood of the Macao people and maintaining Macaos casino capitalism as a driving force that brings about employment and economic prosperity Although he vowed to increase the transparency of his government it remains to be seen how different government departments handle their transparency especially as more citizens are demanding for more information and better responsiveness from the Macao government 456 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a one CounTRy TWo SySTeMS In 1990 the Chinese government promulgated the Basic Lawa miniconstitution for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region HKSAR based on the One Country Two Systems principle The Basic Law provided a blueprint for maintain ing Hong Kongs legislative administrative judicial social and economic autonomy under Chinese sovereignty But it also empowered the Standing Committee of the PRCs National Peoples Congress to interpret the provisions of the Basic Law thus giving China final say on all matters related to Hong Kong In fact final decisions about such matters rests with the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party which has a special Leading Small Group on Hong KongMacao Affairs that is headed by a member of the partys Politburo Standing Committee see chapter 6 for more on Leading Small Groups After the British became aware of the Chinese plan to take back the sovereignty of Hong Kong they decided rather belatedly in the view of many to implement politi cal reform in the territory by introducing direct elections to some of the seats in the local advisory bodies called District Boards In 1985 the British introduced functional constituency elections to the Legislative Council This meant that certain occupa tional or interest groups such as business law finance health care education labor and engineering were to select representatives to the lawmaking chamber The main objectives of these elections were to introduce an element of democracy into the Hong Kong legislative process and to encourage political participation by important functional groups The British attempted to accelerate democratization in Hong Kong by toying with the idea of introducing directly elected seats from geographical constituen cies to LegCo in 1987 This would have given all citizens of Hong Kong not just the members of the designated functional constituencies at least one vote for a legisla tor But because of Beijings opposition this was postponed to 1991 As a result of these changes between 1991 and1997 more prodemocracy supporters were directly elected to the legislature Although they did not constitute a majority in LegCo the PRC government viewed them as a political menace and therefore attempted to apply the brake on democratic reforms in Hong Kong However when the last British governor of Hong Kong Christopher Patten arrived in 1992 he was determined to accelerate the pace and scope of democratic reform Patten also adopted a confrontational approach to dealing with Beijing concerning the issue of political change in Hong Kong Although his political reform package was approved narrowly by LegCo in 1993 Beijing was determined to thwart his plans To do so in 1996 it replaced LegCo with a handpicked Provisional Legislative Council that would handle transitional matters straddling the period from the July 1 1997 turnover until new elections were held in 1998 Despite the efforts of local supporters of greater democracy as well as Governor Patten to reform the legislature the top policymaking body in Hong Kong the Executive Council was still composed of nonelected elites including businesspeo ple and senior civil servants In the 1980s the British proposed that some Executive Council members be elected from among LegCo members This bold idea was as h o n g k o n g 457 expected rejected by the PRC which wanted to maintain a powerful executiveled government in Hong Kong Beijings bottom line was clear Hong Kong democrats would not be allowed to capture a majority of the seats in LegCo and LegCo would remain less powerful than the Executive Council The judiciary in Hong Kong under British rule was basically independent of any control or interference from the executive and equality before the law was a strictly observed norm Moreover the colonial government was constantly checked by the Independent Commission Against Corruption which was set up in 1974 to tackle the serious problem of corruption within the bureaucracy and by the Audit Commission whose findings were often critical of departmental misuse of government funds Although Hong Kong was not a Westernstyle democracy where the chief executive was directly elected by citizens through universal suffrage or chosen by a directly elected legislature it had some of the trappings of a democratic system including freedom of speech press and assembly judicial independence the rule of law and internal checks and balances on public maladministration Political parties did not emerge in Hong Kong until shortly after the Tiananmen tragedy in China in June 1989 A wide range of parties mostly split along proBeijing or prodemocracy lines have been formed since then but none have been able to capture a majority of seats in the Legislative Council1 which following the 2012 elec tion has representatives from eighteen different political groups and ten indepen dents among its seventy members The major proBeijing parties are the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong DAB and the probusiness Liberal Party The main prodemocracy parties are the centrist Democratic Party and the professionaloriented Civic Party The Chinese Communist Party CCP has traditionally operated in Hong Kong in a secretive manner An underground CCP organization was established in colonial Hong Kong and was under the local supervision of the PRCs New China News Agency Xinhua which acted as the public cover for communist activities in the territory The New China News Agency conducted activities beyond its media functions It also engaged in intelligence gathering and united front work ie building support for the PRC targeted at the business political professional grassroots and religious sectors of Hong Kong society After sovereignty over Hong Kong reverted to China an official PRC Liaison Office was established to oversee Beijings interests in the SAR The Basic Law gives responsibility for Hong Kongs defense to the government of the PRC A sixthousandtroop strong garrison of the Peoples Liberation Army PLA is stationed in the SAR It plays no active role in local police or security func tions although it does engage in joint exercises and liaison work with the Hong Kong police for example on matters relating to terrorism The PLA Hong Kong garrison also has a public relations function for the PRC as an important symbol of Chinese sovereignty Hong Kong prospered economically under British rule It was and still is consid ered to have one of the freestmarket economies in the world In 2012 it had a gross domestic product GDP per capita at purchasing power parity of 50700 com pared with 49800 in the United States and 36200 in Japan It is one of the worlds great financial and commercial centers and one of the PRCs main concerns in exer cising its sovereignty over the HKSAR is to preserve its economic vitality 458 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a fRoM TunG To leunG The hKSARS fIRST ThRee ChIef exeCuTIVeS The Basic Law of the HKSAR established the position of chief executive to be the head of the government The chief executive must be a Chinese citizen at least forty years old and have lived in Hong Kong for twenty years or more He or she is elected for a fiveyear term by an Election Committee that currently consists of eight hun dred members elected or appointed from various sectors of society such as com merce finance labor the professions religion and government The composition of the Election Committee is closely controlled by Beijing and the candidate elected has to be approved by the government of the PRC The first chief executive of the HKSAR was Tung Chee Hwa who served from 19972005 Tung was a very wealthy shipping industry tycoon with strong ties to the PRC when he was tapped by Beijing to run Hong Kong Although he was popular when he first took office his term was quite politically turbulent Tung implemented civil service and housing reforms that antagonized many career bureaucrats and the middle class His civil service reforms included cuts in the number and salaries of civil servants an increase in the number of principal officials directly appointed by the chief executive and changes in how government contracts were given to the private sector Many civil servants who had a vested interest in the status quo inherited from the colonial administration strongly opposed Tungs reform plans Tungs housing reforms embraced the idea of expanding the number of residen tial units built each year intentionally driving down the skyhigh prices on the Hong Kong housing market but unintentionally affecting the interests of the many in the middle class who had speculated heavily in the property sector Tungs reforms also coincided with the start of the Asian financial crisis in 19971998 which hit Hong Kong hard and plunged many middleclass citizens into economic difficulties as their assets declined drastically in value2 The controversies stirred by Tungs civil service and housing reforms were com pounded by his effort with Beijing support in September 2002 to pass and imple ment a tough antisubversion law under the terms of Article 23 of the Basic Law which deals with the security of the HKSAR Many SAR citizens felt that security was adequately protected by existing Hong Kong laws governing treason subversion and the theft of state secrets they feared that the new antisubversion law if enacted would be used to undermine civil liberties in Hong Kong Other Hong Kong people believed that additional measures were needed to prevent espionage and subversion aimed against the PRC from occurring in the SAR Not surprisingly opposition to the antisubversion law was strongest among those who identified themselves most closely with Hong Kong while support for the law was strongest among those who identified with China see Box 172 The heated political controversy over Article 23 lasted until September 2003 when Tung announced that the socalled National Security Legislative Provisions Bill would be withdrawn and not reintroduced until public consultations were held No timetable for reintroduction of the bill was mentioned The bills withdrawal was clearly due to strong public opposition that culminated in protests by half a mil lion citizens on July 1 2003 Shocked by the massive and unexpected public outcry h o n g k o n g 459 against the bill Beijing moved to calm the crisis by setting up a committee led by CCP Politburo member Zeng Qinghong to look into the situation Nothing further has happened with regard to this matter since then To rescue Tungs declining popularity Beijing decided to introduce two policies that would be beneficial to Hong Kong One was the Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement CEPA which gave preferential treatment to Hong Kong companies box 172 national iDentity in hong kong Although almost all hong Kong people culturally identify themselves as Chinese their political identities are divided between those who see themselves primarily as Chinese or hong Kong nationals According to a survey taken by hong Kong university in June 2013 625 percent of the respondents said they considered themselves either as a hong Kong citizen or hong Kong Chinese citizen and 349 percent as Chinese citizen or Chinese hong Kong citizen with the remainder saying other or didnt Know7 Identity is a very important factor in hong Kong politics and is reflected in different views on political reform in the SAR Those citizens who tend to support the democrats are more likely to identify themselves as hong Kong persons whereas those who tend to vote for the probeijing party in elections are more likely to be Chinese identifiers Similarly those people who strongly oppose the SCnPC interpretations of the basic law tend to be hong Kong identifiers while those who support the SCnPC interpretation tend to have more Chinese identifiers Moreover those citizens who tend to support the double direct electionsuniversal suffrage of the chief executive and the direct election of the whole legislatureare more likely to be hong Kong identifiers whereas those who side with a more gradual and piecemeal approach to political reform tend to be Chinese identifiers In the recent years the expression of local identity in hong Kong has taken the forms of antigovernment protests and nativism The hKSAR governments plan to implement a beijing backed moral and national education secondary school curriculum starting in 2012 met fierce resistance from students teachers and parents as well as prodemocracy groups who accused the government of attempting to brainwash the younger gen eration Students formed an interest group named Scholarism which helped orga nize a series of large public rallies and held a threeday hunger strike just prior to the September 2012 legCo elections In the fact of such visible opposition the government decided to delay the implementation of the controversial curriculum The rise of student activism in hong Kong is a testimony to the heightened gen erations political awareness and strong hong Kong identity of the younger generation This new activist nativism has been on display when young people have carried the flag of britishcontrolled hong Kong at public rallies and parades The probeijing media accused these young people of harboring procolonial and proindependence sen timents Indeed some hong Kong people do have nostalgia for certain aspects of the british era including the high degree of civil liberties but many more are worried about the mainlandization of hong Kong particularly the gradual erosion of freedom plural ism respect for human rights and the rule of law but it has also taken the form of resent ment towards the many mainland women giving birth in hong Kong to avoid the PRCs onechild policy and mainland tourists flocking to hong Kong to buy powdered milk for their kids that they know is safe nativism is an extreme form of local hong Kong identity expressed in a mixture of antimainland sentiment antigovernmental activism and colonial nostalgia It remains to be seen if it leads young people to become part of the larger social and political move ment for democratic reform in the hKSAR 460 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a that conducted business in the mainland The other was the Individual Visit Scheme This allowed individuals from mainland China to visit Hong Kong whereas previ ously they had to be part of a tour group It was hoped that this would stimulate the tourism industry in the HKSAR Both policies were designed to offset the political alienation toward the PRC that many Hong Kong people were feeling in the early 2000s The measures apparently worked well since public attitudes toward the gov ernment and Chief Executive Tung improved after they were implemented Nevertheless in March 2005 Tung tendered his resignation to the central govern ment in Beijing citing health reasons Rumors were rife that he had lost the support of Chinas new leaders including CCP general secretary and PRC president Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao Tung had been supported by the former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin With the gradual retirement of Jiang from the Chinese political arena in 20022003 Tung lost his main patron in Beijing Patronclient relations between the Chinese leaders and the HKSAR chief execu tive persist and in fact are very much a part of Hong Kongs overall political culture The chief executive is the client who needs the endorsement and support of patrons in Beijing which confers legitimacy and authority on the Hong Kong leader3 Under the chief executive there are in turn a whole range of clients including the mem bers of the top policymaking body the Executive Council the appointed members of various advisory and consultative committees and influential business and other proestablishment elites Friends and followers of the chief executive are rewarded for their support with various favors and preferential treatment After Tung Chee Hwas resignation Beijing endorsed the Americantrained civil servant Donald Tsang Tsang Yamkuen as the new chief executive to serve out the remainder of Tungs term Tsang had served in a sequence of highlevel posts deal ing with finance and administration in both the colonial and SAR governments He was elected to a full fiveyear term as chief executive by the Election Committee on March 25 2007 with 649 votes compared to 123 for his rival Alan Leong of the prodemocracy Civic Party This was the first time in the history of the HKSAR that the chief executive election had a candidate with political party affiliation Leongs electoral participation was supported by moderate and mainstream demo crats The more radical democrats opposed the highly restricted small circle elec tion and regarded Leongs participation as legitimizing an undemocratic electoral process In his first term of office Donald Tsang steered clear of controversial matters But after his reelection in 2007 some of his initiatives became more contentious The most notable example was his expansion of the Principal Officials Accountability System POAS first established by the Tung administration to appoint loyal politi cal supporters as the secretaries in change of important policy areas in the Hong Kong government The POAS was designed in part to protect the chief executive from being directly criticized for policy mistakes The appointees also formed a loose coalition that could strengthen the systems legitimacy among important sectors of Hong Kong society Tungs POAS system handled appointment to all the key posi tions in the HKSAR government such as the chief secretary for administration the second most powerful office and the secretaries of finance justice commerce indus try and manpower economic development education and the environment health h o n g k o n g 461 and welfare4 These principal officials were hired on contractual terms unlike civil servants who had permanent employment and the length of their contract could not exceed the term in office of the chief executive who nominated them for appointment In other words they were political rather than professional appointments In the summer of 2008 Donald Tsang expanded the POAS by adding seventeen undersecretaries and political assistants to the list of positions under its author ity But the fact that some of Tsangs appointees held foreign passports including Singaporean British and Canadian as well as their exorbitant salaries aroused imme diate public disapproval Those undersecretaries who had foreign passports quickly renounced their nonChinese citizenships But the high salaries of the POAS appoin tees remained a source of public anger Overall the POAS became a patronclient mechanism for rewarding Tsangs supporters rather than a system of appointing HKSAR principal officials on the basis of their merits and talents Tsangs expanded POAS proved to be as controversial as Tungs initial civil service reforms Toward the end of his term in 2012 Tsangs image was tarnished by a scandal involv ing a businessman who had reportedly offered him a luxurious apartment across the border in Shenzhen As a result of the scandal Tsang was not appointed as a vice chair man of the Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference CPPCC an honor that had been bestowed on Tung Chee Hwa soon after he stepped down in 2005 On March 25 2012 the HSKAR had its most hotly contested chief executive elec tion The two top votegetters were both proBeijing and proestablishment Leung Chunying or C Y Leung won 689 out of 1050 valid votes cast by members of the Election Committee Henry Tang got just 285 votes even though had been staunchly supported by many important and wealthy business people The third candidate Albert Ho from the prodemocracy Democratic Party managed to get only 76 votes The electoral result was significant in several aspects The central government in Beijing originally supported Tang but later changed its position to favor Leung on March 14 after Tang was plagued by a series of scandals including extramarital affairs and illegal construction at his house It was revealed that Leung too had had illegal work done on his home and there were accusations of involvement of Hong Kong gang triad members in his campaign During an election forum Tang let it be known that in mid2003 when the Executive Council was debating the proposed antisubversion law Leung had spoken of the need to take strong measures against protestors who demonstrated outside the Legislative Council Tangs remark shocked many Hong Kong people who already had suspicions about Leung Some of his critics claimed he was an underground member of the Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong Leung adamantly denied that he was a member of any political party but deep distrust toward him had already been sown among a public that did not have the right to vote for their chief execu tive and could only watch the scandals and controversies swirling around the two proestablishment candidates Leungs administration got off to a rocky start His appointee as secretary for devel opment Mak Chaikwong resigned after just twelve days in office following charges of financial fraud and this came after the departure of two Executive Council mem bers one due to potential conflicts of interest and the other because of a police inves tigation into the failure of a commodities exchange he had founded 462 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Rumors were rife in the Hong Kong media that China planned to replace Leung with someone more competent Although Beijing denied that it had such a plan it is certainly concerned about the increasing unhappiness of Hong Kong people with the HKSAR government A poll taken in June 2013 show that only 133 percent of those surveyed were satisfied with the political situation in Hong Kong down from a high of nearly 60 percent on the eve of the 1997 takeover5 Beijing must see the 2012 Chief Executive election as a negative phenomenon that split the proestablishment camp while giving a golden opportunity for the political opposition in Hong Kong to under mine the legitimacy of the HKSAR government If so the hope of the prodemocracy forces in Hong Kong that the next Chief Executive election in 2017 see below will be based on universal suffrage may be in vain InTeRPReTInG The bASIC lAW Three specific interpretations of the Basic Law by the Standing Committee of the National Peoples Congress SCNPC were particularly controversial during the Tung and Tsang administrations The first concerned the Basic Laws stipulation on the right of abode of mainland Chinese nationals in Hong Kong which says that PRC citizens are allowed to live work and vote in Hong Kong under certain circumstances In January 1999 the Court of Final Appeal the highest judicial authority in Hong Kong ruled that the right of abode also applied to children of Chinese nationals residing in the SAR After the ruling the HKSAR government estimated that 167 million mainlanders would flood into the territory and asked the SCNPC to review the matter6 In June 1999 the SCNPC overturned the decision of the Court of Final Appeals and allowed the HKSAR to invoke more restrictive measures on the right of abode Supporters of the SCNPC interpretation believed that it was necessary to stabi lize Hong Kong by stemming the influx of a large number of mainland Chinese a position according the public opinion polls favored by a majority of HKSAR resi dents Opponents of the SCNPC ruling argued that it amounted to political inter ference with judicial independence of the Court of Final Appeal and that the size of the projected influx of Chinese nationals was an exaggeration They were most con cerned about the implications for the preservation of the rule of law in Hong Kong The second interpretation of the Basic Law by the SCNPC that proved controver sial in Hong Kong occurred in April 2004 nine months after five thousand protesters had earlier taken to the streets to protest the Tung administrations effort to pass the antisubversion law In the aftermath of the success of those protests Hong Kong democrats began to press for the direct election by universal suffrage of the chief executive in 2007 and of the entire legislature in 2008 The SCNPC settled the matter by ruling that such elections would violate the Basic Law This hardline interpretation of the Basic Law coincided with the reelection in Taiwan of President Chen Shuibian of the proindependence Democratic Progressive Party see chapter 18 Clearly the SCNPC interpretation of the Hong Kong Basic Law reflected Beijings determination to prevent the Taiwanization of HKSAR politics through the introduction of more democratic elections procedures for either the executive or the legislature h o n g k o n g 463 The third controversial SCNPC interpretation of the Basic Law took place in April 2005 a month after Chief Executive Tungs resignation Some members of the Hong Kong legal community pointed to Article 46 of the Basic Law which states that the chief executives term of office is five years and therefore argued that Tungs succes sor should serve a full fiveyear term Originally the HKSAR government adopted this legal interpretation nevertheless after the HKSAR Secretary for Justice Elsie Leung visited Beijing the Hong Kong government sided with Beijings view that Tungs suc cessor should serve only the remainder of his term before standing for reelection for a full fiveyear term which is how the SCNPC ruled The PRC was eager to establish the precedent that in the event of any sudden resignation of the chief executive they would have time to assess the new leaders performance before committing to a fiveyear term Opponents of each of these three interpretations of the Basic Law by the SCNPC believed they were based more on political considerations than on purely legal grounds They saw them as a reflection of a worrisome trend away from the legal tradition inherited from the British that emphasized the rule of law over politics and toward the PRCs legal system in which politics can trump the rule of law see chapter 7 The clash between these two fundamentally different legal cultures remains a source of tension and controversy in Hong Kong politics PolITICAl RefoRM In honG KonG In November 2005 the Tsang government published a document on political reform in the HKSAR The governments proposals included an expansion in 2007 of the Election Committee that selects the chief executive from 800 to 1600 members It also proposed that LegCo be expanded to from 60 to 70 members in 2008 with 6 elected by Hong Kongs local advisory boards called District Councils which are made up of both elected and appointed members But the reform package did not gain the required twothirds support of Legislative Councilors when it was presented to LegCo on December 21 2005 It was rejected by a 34 to 24 vote with one absten tion Prodemocracy legislators opposed the reform proposals because they did not address their demand for the direct election of the chief executive by universal suf frage in 2012 The HKSAR government tried to lessen the democrats opposition to its reform package by proposing that the appointed District Councilors would gradually be phased out and replaced by elected members The democrats rejected this conces sion however This tussle over political reform further deepened the mutual distrust between the democrats and both the Tsang administration and Beijing In order to demonstrate to the public that the HKSAR government had not aban doned political reform in mid2007 the Tsang administration began a threemonth public consultation process on the question of constitutional development in Hong Kong In December 2007 Tsang submitted a report to Beijing saying that the Hong Kong public generally supported democratization of the electoral process with the eventual goal of universal suffrage in choosing the chief executive and the members of the Legislative Council Many in Hong Kong wanted this to be implemented in 2012 but others wanted to move more slowly Tsang concluded that these political reforms 464 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a would have a greater chance of being accepted by the majority of Hong Kong people if they were set for 2017 In response to the report the SCNPC reached a decision on December 29 2007 stating that the chief executive and the Legislative Council would not be returned by universal suffrage in 2012 that LegCo would retain the halfandhalf ratio of members returned from geographical constituencies and functional constituencies in the 2012 elections and that any amendment to the method of electing the chief executive must be reported to the SCNPC for a approval This decision appeared to pave the way for the possibility of directly electing the chief executive by 2017 and the legislature by 2020 Whether this actually happens depends on how the Xi Jinping administration assesses the political situation in Hong Kong and the rela tionship between the PRC and the HKSAR Xi was the director of the CCPs Leading Small Group on Hong KongMacao Affairs while also serving as vice president of the PRC from 2008 to 2013 so he is very familiar with the situation in both Special Administrative Regions In 2010 key elements of Tsangs 2005 reform package were implemented LegCo was to be expanded to 70 members and the Election Committee that chooses the chief executive to 1200 members Radical democrats again rejected the reforms as not going far enough But the changes were approved by LegCo because of a split within the prodemocracy parties with the centrist Democratic Party back ing the government and Beijingapproved proposal During the campaign waged by both supporters and opponents of the reforms there was an unprecedented televised debate between Chief Executive Tsang and Audrey Eu the head of the Civic Party PolITICAl PARTIeS In honG KonG And The 2012 leGCo eleCTIonS Political parties remain relatively small and weak in the HKSAR The largest party is the proBeijing Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong DAB The conservative probusiness Liberal Party is widely regarded as politically opportunistic siding with the government strategically on some policy issues but opposing it at times to polish its image to voters Beijing views the DAB as its closest ally and the Liberal Party as available for political cooptation on some issues The major prodemocracy Democratic Party has suffered a decline in its popu larity since the early 2000s partly because of internal bickering and partly due to the rise of other prodemocracy parties notably the Civic Party after the 2003 protests against the proposed antisubversion law In the 2012 LegCo election the pandemocrats managed to win twentyseven out of seventy seats in the legisla ture Although the mass media portrayed this as a failure for the prodemocracy parties the reality was that the pandemocrats succeeded in winning more than onethird of the seats in the Legislative Council Given that government bills need the endorsement of twothirds of LegCo members the democratic front can block the passage of legislation including political reform bills it regards as too conserva tive In this sense the pandemocratic front in Hong Kong constitutes a negative h o n g k o n g 465 veto inside the Legislative Council against the power and influence of the gov ernment Most importantly a radical democratic coalitionPeople Powerwon 98 percent of the votes and three directly elected seats The radical democrats are supported by many young Hong Kong people with a very strong sense of local identity As such the pandemocrats in the HKSAR are far more politically influ ential and powerful than the local mass media have portrayed The proBeijing forces did not perform well in the voting for the direct elected LegCo seats winning just 34 percent of the votes The fact that their allies got well below half of the total votes in direct elections probably makes Beijing more than a bit nervous about allowing the HKSAR to have a fully directly elected legislature not to mention a chief executive chosen by universal suffrage In 2013 the former Democratic Party chairman Martin Lee proposed that the 1200member Election Committee be turned into a Nominating Committee that would screen chief executive candidates who would then be placed on a ballot open to all eligible Hong Kong in 2017 His proposal was widely seen as too conservative and was quickly retracted Beijing made it clear that there were limits to even such a conservative nominating process Qiao Xiaoyang the chair of the law committee of Chinas National Peoples Congress reiterated that candidates running for the Hong Kong Chief Executive election should be patriotic implying that there must be strict screening mechanism to eliminate those candidates deemed to be politically unac ceptable to the central government in Beijing On the other hand the democrats in the HKSAR especially the radical democrats who gained in the 2012 Legislative Council direct elections have insisted that there should be no screening mechanism in the next chief executive election setting what will be an important and likely dra matic political battleground for 2017 honG KonG SeMIColony oR SeMIdeMoCRACy Under the prevailing situation in which the interpretation of the Basic Law is under the final jurisdiction of the SCNPC and political reform ultimately depends on the will of the central government in Beijing it could be said that the Hong Kong political system remains largely semicolonial The executive branch is more powerful than the legislature and even in LegCo progovernment and proBeijing elites can check the influence of the prodemocracy legislators Advisory bodies and consultative com mittees are filled through political appointments with people who favor the goslow status quo whereas prodemocracy voices are politically excluded or marginalized But democratic parties are visible vocal and increasingly successful in electoral politics There are also important nonparty democratic elements in Hong Kong Interest groups and the mass media both of which are part of the SARs strong civil society are active and influential In general business interest groups tend to be far more powerful than the workingclass groups because of the nature of the admin istration Nevertheless workers are wellorganized and have their interests repre sented by two rival unions the proBeijing Federation of Trade Unions FTU and the prodemocracy Confederation of Trade Unions CTU The FTU usually forms an alliance with the proBeijing DAB party in Legislative Council and other elections 466 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a whereas the CTU constantly supports the democratic camp in elections Both trade unions compete fiercely for labor support whenever issues affecting workingclass rights and interests surface The CTU tends to mobilize disgruntled workers to pro test against the government but the FTU tries to moderate protests in order to avoid undermining the HKSAR authorities All in all Hong Kong has maintained its long tradition of a lively independent press There are some concerns about media selfcensorship in Hong Kong when it comes to reporting about political issues especially by those outlets whose owners eye the lucrative China market and whose editors are the targets of political cooptation or pressure by PRC officials in the HKSAR But many newspapers and other media sources often voice strong criticism of both the HKSAR and the PRC governments Public oversight of the government remains strong in some important regards perhaps due to the British legacy of having a robust and respected Independent Commission Against Corruption ICAC Although the ICAC was plagued by internal management problems before the handover of Hong Kong its performance remains relatively stable and commands the support of an overwhelming majority of the Hong Kong people Other mechanisms that provide checks and balances against the abuse of power within the HKSAR political system include the Office of the Ombudsman and the Audit Commission The ombudsman who is appointed by the chief execu tive serves as a public watchdog and handles complaints by individuals or organiza tions concerning maladministration by government departments and agencies it also has some investigative powers of its own The Audit Commission checks the budgets and expenditures of government departments The HKSAR civil service remains rela tively honest capable competent and politically neutral Although Tungs civil ser vice reform negatively affected the morale of many public servants Tsang as a former senior bureaucrat himself understood the need for stabilizing the civil service and maintaining the confidence of its members In 2013 some academics and others launched an Occupy Central District Movement with the aim of promoting democracy and political justice in the HKSAR Although proBeijing sources in the HKSAR denounced this as an unacceptable attempt to disrupt law and order and undermine the legitimacy of the Hong Kong government and denounced it as an action that would violate the law and order in the HKSAR no direct action was taken to suppress the movement And there is probably no more vibrant symbol of the democratic spirit in Hong Kong than the annual candlelight vigil held in Victoria Park every June 4 to commem orate what happened in Beijing on that date in 1989 Although official and organizer estimates vary the event draws tens of thousands participants every year Overall it may be said that Hong Kong has elements of both a semicolonial and a semidemocratic political system Beijings strong hand in the executiveled system and the PRCs insistence on exercising its sovereignty over Hong Kong particularly on matters concerning political reform certainly limits the SARs autonomy On the other hand there are significant degrees of civil liberties media freedom and the rule of law in the HKSAR Furthermore there are also some elections that are highly com petitive and perhaps most importantly Hong Kongs civil society remains vibrant and assertive It will be interesting and important to watch how semicolonialism and semidemocracy interact in the future to shape Hong Kongs political development h o n g k o n g 467 noTeS 1 Suzanne Pepper Keeping Democracy at Bay Hong Kong and the Challenge of Chinese Political Reform Lanham Rowman Littlefield 2008 chapter 12 2 Lo ShiuHing Governing Hong Kong Legitimacy Communication and Political Decay New York Nova Science 2001 3 Bruce Kwong PatronClient Politics in Hong Kong A Study of the 2002 and 2005 Chief Executive Elections Journal of Contemporary China 16 no 52 2007 4 Christine Loh and Richard Cullen Political Reform in Hong Kong The Principal Officials Accountability System The First Year 20022003 Journal of Contemporary China 14 no 42 February 2005 5 Hong Kong University Public Opinion Programme httphkupophkuhkenglish 6 Sonny Lo The Dynamics of BeijingHong Kong Relations A Model for Taiwan Hong Kong Hong Kong University Press 2008 chapter 3 7 Hong Kong University Public Opinion Programme httphkupophkuhkenglish popexpressethniceidentitypolldatatableshtml SuGGeSTed ReAdInGS Kwong Bruce Kamkwan PatronClient Politics and Elections in Hong Kong New York Routledge 2010 Lam Wai Contemporary Hong Kong Government and Politics 2nd ed Hong Kong Hong Kong University Press 2012 Lee Leo Oufan City between Worlds My Hong Kong Cambridge MA Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2008 Lo ShiuHing Governing Hong Kong Legitimacy Communication and Political Decay New York Nova Science 2001 Lo Sonny Casino Capitalism and Its Legitimacy Impact on the Politicoadministrative State in Macao Journal of Current Chinese Affairs China Aktuell 18 no 1 2009 1749 Lo Sonny The Dynamics of BeijingHong Kong Relations A Model for Taiwan Hong Kong Hong Kong University Press 2008 Lo Sonny ShiuHing Political Change in Macao London Routledge 2008 Manion Melanie Corruption by Design Building Clean Government in Mainland China and Hong Kong Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 2004 Pepper Suzanne Keeping Democracy at Bay Hong Kong and the Challenge of Chinese Political Reform Lanham MD Rowman Littlefield 2008 Tsang Steve A Modern History of Hong Kong London I B Tauris 2007 Yee Herbert Macao in Transition From Colony to Autonomous Region London Palgrave 1999 18 In the summer of 2007 young people in Taiwan discov ered an online game called Click Click Click The game is simple visit a website wwwclickclickclickcom and click a button The site credits your click to your coun try the winner is the country with the largest number of clicks when the game ends In the first round of the game netizens from eightyfour countries outclicked Taiwanese in the next three rounds Taiwan inched up to fiftyeighth place Then in round six Taiwan caught fire Taiwans cyberspace lit up with websites and online videos exhorting young people to get on the site and Click Click Click for Taiwan Taiwan leapt to third place then second then in round seven to first Taiwanese logged 13 billion clicks in seven days Taiwan is an island of twentythree million people the winning total represented fiftyfive clicks for every man woman and child in the countryin a game that few Taiwanese over thirty had ever heard of How did Taiwan pull off this remarkable feat And why The how is straightforward once Taiwanese decided to get into the game to win they launched an allout assault They used every available technologyword of mouth viral video email text messagingto promote the game They blanketed the Web with videos and graphics that urged clickers on In the virtual world of the Internet Click Click Click became a war fought by animestyle cartoon girls dressed barely in the national flags of the leading countriesTaiwan Japan and Hungary As the competition heated up amateur programmers built robot programs to run up vast numbers of clicks When the game sponsor changed its software to stop the bots Taiwans programmers developed new ones Winning the game turned out to be a matter of human mobilization and technical skilltwo things Taiwan is very good at But why did so many people devote so many hours to an activity that most people would consider utterly pointless Taiwan Sh elley RI GGeR t a i w a n 469 The Click Click Click craze is a testament to the power of fads no doubt and a tribute to the technical savvy of Taiwanese youth But it also reveals a deep desire for international recognition that permeates Taiwans society Taiwan is different from other countries it is controversial even to call it a country It has a governmentdemocratically elected in free fair competitive electionsthat makes and enforces laws collects taxes and sustains a modern military but it does not have a seat in the United Nations or an embassy in a major world capital Newspapers in mainland China refer to its government as the Taiwan authorities and put scare quotes around its leaders titles president Ma Yingjeou and premier Jiang Yihuah Although it is small geographically and demographically Taiwan is one of the worlds largest economiesit ranks in the top twenty in both gross domestic product GDP per capita and total trade and has the worlds fourthlargest foreign exchange reservesbut Taiwans national economic statistics are not reported by the World Bank It was not until 2009 that it gained participantnot memberstatus in the World Health Organization under the name Chinese Taipei and it is forbidden to join international agreements it complies voluntarily with many conventions even though it is denied the benefits of participation The leading US hightech compa nies depend on Taiwanese firms for engineering and manufacturing services but a Taiwanese political leader can set foot in the United States only if he or she is on an approved stopover en route to another destination Even the CIA World Factbook lists Taiwan in a special category alongside the European Union Isolation makes Taiwanese work overtime to remind the world that we are here Their efforts range from the Click Click Click wars to the Taiwan governments quixotic campaign to participate in United Nationsrelated groupsan effort that is now entering its third fruitless decade Taiwans exclusion from the world community is a product of history but it is sustained and reinforced by the PRC governments unrelenting determination to deny the island international recognition Beijings position is that Taiwan is part of China and since the Peoples Republic of China PRC is the legal government of China Taiwans international representation should be channeled through Beijing Although the PRC partystate has never governed Taiwan its National Peoples Congress includes deputies claiming to represent the island and Beijing requires international organizations to secure its permission before conducting any business regarding Taiwan China calls this exercising sovereignty Taiwanese call it diplo matic strangulation Taiwans unique international position makes it a fascinating place to study while its complex relationships with the worlds major powers make it an important geostrategic player It also is an economic powerhouse whose influence far exceeds its size And it is an intriguing case for students of politics a culturally Chinese society that overcame colonization and authoritarianism to create a freewheeling liberal democracy TAIWAn To 1945 Taiwan is a volcanic island about 120 kilometers 75 miles off the coast of south eastern China At just under 36000 square kilometers 13892 square miles in area it is larger than Belgium but smaller than Switzerland From the perspective 470 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a of comparative islands Taiwan is about 15 percent the size of Britain The island is mountainous with peaks up to 4000 meters 13100 feet Most of Taiwans popula tion lives on a broad plain on the west coast and in the northwestern basin where the capital Taipei is located On the northeast coast the mountains plunge straight into the sea the southeastern plain is narrow and remote With high mountains occupy ing most of the island Taiwans inhabited area is one of the most densely populated places in the world Map Area Ta i w a n S t r a i t C H I N A 0 0 40 60 20 80 km 10 20 30 40 50 mi N PACIFIC OCEAN Kaohsiung Penghu Islands South China Sea Tainan Taipei Hualien Changhua Taichung Keelung Taitung Area 13892 sq mi Population 23 299 000 Total GDP at purchasing power parity 9183 billion GDP per capita at purchasing power parity 39400 GDP by sector services 682 industry 298 agriculture 2 Life expectancy at birth 797 years Infant mortality per 1000 live births 46 Data from 201213 Taiwan Taiwan t a i w a n 471 Four thousand years ago Austronesianspeaking settlers from other Western Pacific islands began living in Taiwan Their descendants who belong to more than a dozen distinct groups are collectively referred to as Taiwans Aboriginal people There are about 450000 Aboriginal people living in Taiwan today Beginning in the sixteenth century the Aboriginal people were joined by settlers from mainland China Most came from Fujian the Chinese province directly across the Taiwan Strait the part of the Pacific Ocean that separates the island from the mainland Eventually the Aboriginal people living along the western plain were either assimilated or displaced and the region sprouted stable communities of Chinese migrants In the mid1500s a passenger on a Portuguese ship passing by Taiwan called the island Ilha Formosa or beautiful island giving it a name Europeans used for centuries In 1623 Dutch traders established a commercial colony in southwestern Taiwan In the north Spanish colonists launched a parallel operation with forts at Tamsui and Keelung The local Chinese called the Spanish fort of San Domingo the Red Hair Fort in recognition of the Europeans extraordinary hairiness and odd coloration In the early 1600s the pirate Zheng Zhilong operated a large fleet in the Taiwan Strait When the Dutch expelled him from his base in Taiwan Zheng put his pirate armada in the service of the Ming empire The Ming was overthrown and replaced by the Qing dynasty in 1644 but Zheng Zhilongs son Zheng Chenggong remained loyal to the Ming Acting in the name of the Ming Zheng Chenggong drove the Dutch out of Taiwan He used his naval forces to keep Taiwan out of Qing hands for two more decades but in 1683 forces led by Zheng Chenggongs grandson fell to defeat at the hands of the Qing admiral Shi Lang This historical episode bears uncanny parallels to events four hundred years later In 1945 forces of the Republic of China ROC under Chiang Kaishek took the island from a foreign colonizer Japan Within a few years a new government the PRC came to power in mainland China but Taiwans leaders remained faithful to the ROC Under the Chiang family dynasty until the late 1980s ROC loyalists struggled to recapture the mainland while resisting Communist efforts to bring Taiwan under PRC control Where the twentieth century diverges from the seventeenth is in the absence to date of a modernday Shi Lang who brings the island back under the control of the mainland government Between these episodes of change and resistance Chinese settlements on Taiwan expanded first under the Qing then under Japanese colonial rule Japan seized Taiwan as war booty after it defeated China in the SinoJapanese War in 1895 It used the island to demonstrate its prowess as a colonial power building an extensive trans portation infrastructure and agricultural processing industries In the 1930s at the height of its expansionist ambition the colonial authorities launched a campaign to assimilate Taiwanese into the Japanese nation Although the effort failed Japans influence on Taiwan was profound and can be seen today in everything from cuisine to fashion from literary tastes to law enforcement At the end of World War II in 1945 Taiwan was ceded to the ROC which was still in power on the mainland The ROCs ruling party was the Kuomintang KMT and its leader was Chiang Kaishek Chiang and the KMT had been engaged in a civil war with Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party CCP more or less continuously 472 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a since 1927 though the attention of both sides had been diverted to the war against Japan from 1937 to 1945 At first Taiwanese were glad to see the era of Japanese colo nialism end but the ROC administration and military forces were exhausted by years of war and acutely aware of the islanders long subjection to Chinas enemy They treated the Taiwanese more as a conquered people than as liberated compatriots Relations between the longtime residents called Taiwanese and the new arrivals called Mainlanders soon deteriorated In February 1947 tensions between the two groups erupted into violence when protests over police violence in Taipei mushroomed into riots that engulfed the island When ROC forces returned a few weeks later to reestablish control they rounded up thousands of suspected rioters including much of Taiwans political elite Thousands were killed1 The uprisingwhich is known today as the 228 Incident it began on February 28set in place the themes that dominated Taiwan politics for the next four decades a highly repressive singleparty authoritarian regime under the Kuomintang disproportionate political influence for the Mainlander minority and a singleminded focus on reinstating the ROC on the mainland The needs and preferences of Taiwans people were set aside their energies and talents were to be harnessed to a grand mis sion rescuing China from the communist bandits gongfei as the CCP was called Two years after the 228 Incident ROC forces on the mainland lost to Maos Red Army With the PRC newly declared on the mainland only Taiwan and a handful of outlying islands remained under ROC control Nonetheless the ROC government with massive economic aid and strong security guarantees from the United States set to work building Taiwan into an economic and military powerhouse that it imagined would one day be strong enough to battle back and reclaim mainland China TAIWAn undeR AuThoRITARIAn Rule In its heydayroughly 1950 to 1980KMT rule was a unique mixture of authori tarianism rapid economic development and popular mobilization The ROC based its legitimacy on a democratic claim its constitution established a fivebranch dualexecutive electoral democracy with a full complement of civil liberties To avoid implementing this system in Taiwan the KMT invoked martial law and suspended the constitution National elections too were postponed because the ongoing com munist rebellion made it impossible for Chinese living on the mainland to partici pate and it would be unfair to have the whole ROC governed by people living in a single province Taiwan National representatives who were elected in mainland China in the 1940s and had followed Chiang and the KMT to Taiwanincluding the National Assembly members who chose the ROC presidentwere to remain in office until elections could be held in their home provinces Challenging this restrictive political system was risky The 228 Incident had shat tered Taiwans nativeborn leadership when it was over few Taiwanese dared to oppose the KMT openly Because the slightest whiff of antigovernment activism could result in a long prison term the KMTs most vocal opponents were Taiwanese exiled to Japan and the United States Nor were Mainlanders exempt from political repression The KMT had been fighting communism in its ranks for decades and t a i w a n 473 the purges continued even after the party moved to Taiwan Civil liberties including freedom of speech were minimal Intense repression in the 1950s and 1960s earned those decades the nickname White Terror as Chiang Kaisheks purge of the CCP in the late 1920s was also called see chapter 2 but politics remained closed well into the 1980s It was not until 1984 that a leading scholar raised the possibility that Taiwan might be shifting from hard to soft authoritarianism2 Retaking mainland China was too great a task for Taiwans Mainlanders about 15 percent of the islands population to accomplish alone The mission would require active support and participation from the Taiwanese majority To win over the Taiwanese the KMT used both economic and political means In the early 1950s it carried out a thorough nonviolent land reform program that paved the way for economic progress in the rural areas It encouraged competitive local elections as a way of legitimating local government and identifying talented leaders It encouraged exportoriented industrialization by promoting statesponsored heavy industries and small and mediumsized family firms The combination of successful policies a welldeveloped prewar infrastructure hardworking and nimble entrepreneurs and ready access to the US market drove doubledigit economic growth and rapidly rising living standards and inspired the phrase Taiwans economic miracle3 see Figure 181 In 2012 Taiwan had a GDP per capita at purchasing power parity of 38500 comparable to that of Canada Germany and Japan The Taiwan model of development is also noted for policies that promoted relatively high levels of socioeconomic equality 82 92 101 63 41 00 20 40 60 80 100 120 195259 196069 197079 198089 199099 200011 Average Annual GDP Growth 1952 GDP per capita US213 1970 GDP per capita US393 1980 GDP per capita US2385 1990 GDP per capita US8124 2000 GDP per capita US14704 2011 GDP per capita US20122 77 fIGuRe 181 Taiwans Economic Growth by Decade The GDP per capita figures are based on foreign currency exchange rates At purchasing power parity Taiwans GDP per capita in 2011 was US38300 Source Taiwan Statistical Data Book 2012 Council for Economic Planning and Development Executive Yuan Republic of China httpwwwcepdgovtwencontentm1aspxsNo0001453 474 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a As Taiwans economy began to soar the KMTs political might began to wane By the mid1970s recovering the mainland was a distant dream not least because many countries were recognizing Beijing as the legitimate government of China In 1971 Taiwan lost its seat in the UN a year later US President Richard Nixon visited China In 1979 the ROC lost its most important diplomatic partner when the United States decided to recognize the PRC The United States said it would not challenge Beijings view that Taiwan is part of China although it did not express agreement either Washington has continued to support Taiwan in unofficial wayseven selling weap ons to the ROC military and maintaining a quasidiplomatic presence in the form of the American Institute in Taiwanbut the loss of US formal diplomatic recognition reinforced the growing sense that the KMTled state was losing legitimacy As the idea of retaking the mainland faded so too did the justification for suspend ing the ROC constitution Seeing the change in the international climateand feeling their growing economic cloutTaiwanese citizens began challenging the authoritar ian system The TRAnSITIon To deMoCRACy In 1975 Chiang Kaishek died and power passed to his son Chiang Chingkuo The young Chiang had the foresight to recognize that history was turning against the ROC and he launched a controlled unraveling of the authoritarian system aimed at rebuilding the KMTs battered legitimacy4 Chiang Chingkuo expanded the number of Taiwanese in the party leadership and opened some seats in the national legislative bodies to direct election Opposition activists probing the ruling partys tolerance for dissent found the boundaries expanding While some ideas remained out of bounds including communism and Taiwan independence calls for democracy and justice for the Taiwanese majority met with an increasingly permissive reaction The reform process snowballed in the 1980s after an attempt to shut down the opposition in 1979 failed Opposition politicians began running coordinated cam paigns for local and national elected officeand winning In 1984 Lee Tenghui a nativeborn Taiwanese politician educated in Japan and the United States became Chiang Chingkuos vice president When Chiang died four years later Lee became the ROCs first Taiwanborn president In the early stages of democratization the formation of opposition political par ties was still banned under the terms of martial law The KMTs opponents operated under the informal rubric of dangwai or outside the party In 1986 dangwai politi cians took the next step and founded the Democratic Progressive Party DPP Although the move technically violated martial law the event went unpunished and only ten months later Chiang Chingkuo terminated martial law Within a few years national legislative bodies were subjected to complete reelection bringing into office a new generation of politicians elected by the people of Taiwan In 1996 Lee Tenghui added first directly elected president to his list of breakthroughs In 2000 the DPP candidate won the presidential election ending the era of KMT rule Singleparty authoritarianism was gone replaced by a fully functioning liberal democracy Taiwanese today enjoy extensive civil liberties and officials at all levels t a i w a n 475 Yuan which literally means board as in executive board is adopted from the imperial Chinese system of govern ment The imperial government had a number of boards such as the Board of Rites and the Board of Punishments which advised the emperor Sun Yatsen adapted the terminology to the institutions of the constitutional republic established after the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912 are accountable to the public through competitive regular elections Taiwan has been called the First Chinese Democracy5 both to make a comparison with the persis tence of authoritarian rule on the mainland and to make the point that Confucian culture is not incompatible with democracy as some scholars claim Taiwans democratic transition reinvigorated its domestic politics and it also attracted international support Taiwans transformation into a democracy reinforced Americas commitment to protect the island from being absorbed against its will into a communistled PRC TAIWAn PolITICS TodAy The ROC constitution adopted in 1947 is still the blueprint for Taiwans political system A directly elected president heads the national government and appoints a premier who in turn names the Executive Yuan cabinet The Executive Yuan is responsible for implementing the decisions of Taiwans 113member national lawmak ing body the Legislative Yuan There is also a Judicial Yuan to manage the courts a Control Yuan to supervise public officials and an Examination Yuan to run civil service examinations Taiwans political institutions are a hybrid of presidential and parliamentary fea tures and recent amendments have added an additional layer of complexity In the ory Taiwans constitution divides power between the president and premier with the president in charge of international affairs including relations with the PRC and the premier responsible for domestic matters In practice however Taiwans presidents have played the dominant role leaving premiers authority limited Another perplexing feature of the system is the relationship between the premier and the legislature In parliamentary systems a prime minister or premier heads the government he or she ordinarily is the head of the party that holds the parliamen tary majority If the prime minister loses parliaments support the government is dis solved and new elections are held In Taiwan the premier is not subject to legislative confirmation the president simply chooses the premier If the Legislative Yuan does not approve of the presidents choice it may pass a vote of no confidence against the premier In that case the president may call for legislative elections Thus the legis lature can fire the premierwho has relatively little powerbut it cannot fire the president who selects the premier This provision limits the governments account ability to the legislature In 2000 Taiwanese voters elected their first nonKMT president the DPPs Chen Shuibian Chen won a threeway race in which the KMT vote was divided between two prominent conservatives Lien Chan and James Soong Chens 39 percent vote share provided only a weak mandate and representatives of Liens KMT and Soongs newly formed People First Party PFP held a solid majority in the Legislative Yuan 476 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a During the eight years of Chens presidency this conservative majority stonewalled many of Chens legislative proposals In early 2008 Taiwan held legislative and presidential elections The KMT won both ending the era of divided government Still the Chen years exposed a serious flaw in Taiwans constitutional order Divided government is possible in all presiden tial and dualexecutive systems but most have institutional devices to resolve conflicts between the executive and legislative branches The United States has the presidential veto and the legislative override for example and the French system has a formalized structure for cohabitation in which the premier representing the legislative major ity takes the lead during periods of divided government Taiwan has nothing similar In the early 2000s many Taiwanese hoped to use constitutional amendments or even a new constitutionto resolve this and other institutional problems But like many other issues constitutional reform became entangled in the hotbutton debate over Taiwans international status The PRC has had four constitutions in its sixtyyear history reflecting the fundamental political changes the country has expe rienced But Beijing feared Taiwan was using a new constitution to establish a new country Given President Chens appetite for challenging Beijingand Beijings thin skin on the issuemany observers feared constitutional reform on Chens watch could lead to a military confrontation To prevent a crisis the Legislative Yuan set a high threshold for constitutional amendment effectively ending the constitutional reform debate Ma Yingjeou a KMT politician with law degrees from New York University and Harvard University and a former mayor of Taipei was elected president in 2008 and 2012 The KMT kept its legislative majority but efficient government remained elu sive Even with the KMT in charge of all three cooperation among the presidential office Executive Yuan and Legislative Yuan was difficult Disagreements within the ruling party abetted the DPPs efforts to derail presidential initiatives Taiwans expe rience under President Ma revealed its political system to be highly sensitive to public opinion even minority opinion Compared to the decisive authoritative leadership Taiwanese remember from the days of the Chiangs and Lee Tenghui todays politics can seem exasperatingly slow and ineffectual The IndePendenCe debATe Taiwan is the only country in the world that has all the attributes of a stategovern ment population territory military forcesexcept international recognition As it is often said Taiwan has de facto independence but not de jure legal independence It lacks recognition because Beijing insists it is a province of China and China is the PRC To have diplomatic relations with Chinaa rising global powerstates must repudiate Taiwan It is also important to acknowledge that Taiwan has not always been clear and consistent in its own message to the world about its status During the authoritarian era the ROC wanted to be recognized as the government of all China It refused to accept the existence of two Chinese statesthe ROC and the PRC It viewed the PRC as an illegitimate regime imposed by force on the Chinese people t a i w a n 477 During the transition to democracy many islanders began to question this char acterization While Mainlanders tended to accept the KMTs perspective many Taiwanese thought defending the interests of the island and its people was more important than overthrowing communism and saving the mainland Some people believed so strongly in putting Taiwan first that they advocated Taiwan independence the permanent renunciation of unification They wanted the international commu nity to recognize that Taiwan was notand never would bepart of a nationstate that also included mainland China Taiwan independence is anathema to Beijing Although the two sides have lived apart for more than sixty years the PRC government does not like to admit they are separated divorce is unthinkable Chinese leaders insist that they will use any means necessaryincluding military forceto block Taiwan independence In 2005 the PRCs National Peoples Congress passed legislation authorizing military action if the nations leaders decide independence is imminent China has hundreds of shortrange ballistic missiles aimed at the island backing up its threat Taiwanese are well aware of Chinas determination and they take the danger seri ously For that reason over the past decade no more than 10 percent of Taiwanese have ever said they want to pursue independence right away In that same period however the percentage that wanted immediate unification was even lowerbelow 5 percent What Taiwanese do want is to maintain the status quoto have the ben efits of de facto independence economic freedom and democratic selfgovernment without the risks of de jure independence There is no longer a big difference between Mainlanders and Taiwanese on this issue nearly everyone now agrees that main taining the status quo situation of the de facto independence that island has today is Taiwans best option see Table 181 The fact that few Taiwanese are interested in pushing for de jure independence is good news for Beijing but the declining enthusiasm for unification makes Chinese leaders nervous What will they do if Taiwan makes a sudden lunge for independence In fact it would even be difficult to recognize what steps would constitute inde pendence Clearly a declaration of independence by Taiwan would do the trick Short of that changing the name from ROC to say Republic of Taiwan or adopting a new national flag Taiwan still uses the original flag of the ROC founded in 1912 also TAble 181 Survey on The Publics Views on Current CrossStrait Relations december 2012 Regarding relations between Taiwan and mainland China which of the following positions do you lean toward Unification as soon as possible Maintaining status quo and moving toward unification Maintaining status quo and deciding on independence or unification later Maintaining status quo indefinitely Maintaining status quo and moving toward independence Independence as soon as possible No response 17 81 339 270 151 48 81 841 Those favoring some variant of the status quo Source Election Study Center National Chengchi University Taipei Taiwan For a chart showing the trend in the above responses from 1992 to 2012 see httpescnccuedutwenglishmodulestinyd2contenttonduIDhtm 478 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a would indicate a change Other gesturesincluding constitutional reformare more ambiguous In 2008 Taiwanese voters considered a ballot measure instructing the government to seek UN membership under the name Taiwan The measure failed but if it had passed would it have constituted an act of independence The answer is subjective but Beijing believed it was necessary to oppose the measureas it opposes all gestures toward independencejust in case RelATIonS WITh The MAInlAnd Since its democratic transition Taiwans relationship with mainland China has changed radically Under the authoritarian system Taiwan treated the PRC as enemy territory but democratization ushered in a more relaxed view In 1987 Taipei lifted the ban on travel to the mainland that had been in place since the 1950s and thou sands of Taiwanese made the trip Many were Mainlanders hoping to reunite families divided by the civil war but many others were Taiwanese who went as tourists The visitors included entrepreneurs who saw in Chinas fastchanging economy an investment opportunity Rising wages and land prices on the island were starting to suffocate Taiwans traditional manufacturers but marrying Chinas low costs to Taiwans knowhow and global connections offered a way forward Taiwanese manu facturers soon became a leading force in the Chinese economy and investment in the mainland became a critical factor in Taiwans economic growth As the second decade of the century began the two were among each others top trading partners and Taiwan was almost certainly the first or second largest source of direct foreign investment in the PRC economy6 The flood of Taiwanese visiting and investing in the mainland brought the two sides closer than they had been in four decades President Lee declared the civil war over in 1991 and replaced the goal of recovering the mainland with peaceful unification Representatives of the two sides began meeting in the guise of unofficial bodies to discuss issues ranging from the exchange of mail to criminal extraditions The conversations eased peopletopeople relations and economic cooperation but they also exposed profound differences in the two sides goals Beijings idea of unifi cation was to make Taiwan a province of the PRC but when Taiwans leaders spoke of unification they had in mind a marriage of equals Subordinating a democratic Taiwan to a communist PRC was unacceptable to a society that had only recently thrown off singleparty authoritarianism Eventually the talks broke down Relations deteriorated further in the second half of the 1990s Lee was growing anx ious that Taiwan would be roped into a unification it did not want so he looked to the international community to confirm the islands separate status In 1999 he stunned Beijing by calling the crossstrait connection a special statetostate relationship Fearing that Taiwan was on the verge of permanently discarding its Chinese identity Beijing tightened its stranglehold on Taiwans diplomacy Economic ties between the two sides continued to develop but political relations turned icy Campaigning for the presidency in 2000 the DPP candidate Chen Shuibian called for increased economic engagement between Taiwan and China but PRC leaders as well as many Taiwanese voters were convinced his real goal was Taiwan t a i w a n 479 independence a stance that had been part of his partys platform since 1991 As presi dent Chen found himself stonewalled by Beijing and by a Legislative Yuan dominated by his opponents In response he hardened his position especially after his reelection in 2004 The PRC was especially agitated when Chen described the situation in the Taiwan Strait as one country on each side The result was eight years of stagnation in crossstrait political relations The combination of hot economics and cold politics drove competing trends in Taiwans public opinion During Chens presidency the Taiwanese became ever more convinced that the islands economic prosperity depended upon taking advantage of the economic opportunities on the mainland At the same time though fewer and fewer Taiwanese felt themselves to be Chinese and the sense that Taiwan should remain politically separate deepened By 2008 unification had become so unpopular that even the KMT presidential can didate Ma Yingjeou refused to endorse it promising instead to take unification off the table He reiterated that position in the 2012 presidential campaign Mas position revealed the extent to which the status quoneither independence nor unification had become the consensus preference of Taiwans people There was little the PRC could do to counter this trend except to promote economic and social integration and hope that Taiwan would return to the fold someday To improve its chances of succeeding Beijing has worked with Taipei to expand crossstrait economic cooperation In 2008 the two sides began allowing direct flights which slashed travel times before travel ers had to switch planes along the wayusually in Hong Kong In 2010 they adopted an Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement that reduced trade and investment restrictions and created a structure for managing the economic relationship Overall Ma Yingjeous first term saw rapid improvement in crossstrait relations In addition to relaxing travel and economic restrictions the two sides exchanged highlevel visits stepped up their quasiofficial negotiations and opened direct talks between the Chinese Communist Party and the KMT While most Taiwanese wel comed the reduced tension and enhanced convenience these developments ushered in many also wondered whether Taiwans concessions might outweigh its gains According to his opponents Mas willingness to compromise with Beijing was naïve at best At worst they averred his actions revealed a preference for unification that put him far from the popular mainstream Claims that Ma might sell out Taiwan did not recede in spite of the presidents repeated denials One reason Ma has been willing to make more concessions than his predecessors is the PRCs evolving position In recent years Beijings rhetoric has shifted from insist ing on achieving unification as soon as possible to opposing independence While incorporating Taiwan into a unified China is still the PRCs longterm goal the range of acceptable formats under which that goal might be achieved has widened The KMT believes this new emphasis on patience and flexibility is real which makes it safe to negotiate on issues short of unification itself The DPP in contrast believes PRC leaders cannot be trusted Mas outreach to the PRC was no less welcome in Washington than in Beijing During the Chen years US policymakers found the ill will and lack of communica tion between the two sides dangerously destabilizing Chens behavior was hard to predict and Chinese reactions were alarming In that tense atmosphere even a small 480 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a misunderstanding or accident could have produced catastrophic results By the end of the George W Bush Administration 20012009 the United States was leaning hard on Chen to avoid actions and statements that might inflame the situation The United States went to great lengths to welcome the new tone under the Ma administration PolITICS And eleCTIonS During the authoritarian period Taiwans twentyfive local governments were the focal point for political competition As the result of a recent reorganization Taiwan now has twentytwo municipalities including fourteen counties three cities and five special municipalities as well as two tiny islands near the mainlands Fujian coast Each municipality has an elected executive and council and various submunicipalities townships towns villages and wards most of which elect their leaders as well Before the DPP was founded nearly all local politicians were KMT members but the party organization in each municipality was divided into local factions Although all were affiliated with the KMT when it came to local elections factions competed fiercely Local factions might cooperate to help KMT candidates in national elec tions but when opposition politicians began challenging the KMT in significant numbers factions found ways to leverage those opposition candidacies for their own advantage Local politics was an important training ground and venue for democratization and as the scope of elections expanded voters and politicians were wellprepared Taiwanese have participated in elections since the 1940s so it is not surprising that they are skilled in the arts of campaigning and voting During the period of oneparty rule campaigns revolved around vote pulling Candidates cultivated influential sup portersvote brokerswho mobilized their personal networks in support of those candidates Successful candidates rewarded their vote brokers and supporters with targeted benefitseverything from public works projects to funeral wreaths In smalltown Taiwan knowing a public official was a big deal and politicians spent a huge amount of time and money serving their constituents To supplement this personalized politicking Taiwanese politicians also used highvisibility techniques such as sound trucks campaign flags and rallies As the islands population has grown and politics has become more sophisticated parties and candidates have added mass mediaTV advertising media tours endorse mentsto their repertoire Today all these elements come into play in elections and candidates spend their days racing from TV studios to stadium rallies to wedding feasts In the 2008 Legislative Yuan election one candidate in Taipei City followed garbage trucks through his district shaking hands with voters as they came out to dispose of their trash residents are required to put their trash directly in the truck at a scheduled time see Box 181 As in most countries many of the issues voters care about are local Economic development law and order and public services top the list in municipal elections In national electionslegislative and presidential contestsTaiwanese voters pay atten tion to party affiliation too After more than two decades of multiparty politics the t a i w a n 481 KMT remains the party of the establishment It gets credit for many of Taiwans suc cesses over the yearsespecially the islands strong economic performance in the highgrowth eraand while its opponents have tried to paint it as a prounification party the partys platform puts it firmly in the mainstream In his successful 2008 and 2012 campaigns for example President Ma Yingjeou promoted Three Nos no independence no unification and no armed conflictin other words the status quowith the PRC He also promised to make it easier for Taiwanese to do business in the mainland Candidates associated with the KMT and its allies have won between 45 and 60 percent of the vote in every election since 2000 Only oncein the 2004 presi dential racehas the DPP outpolled the KMT The 2008 elections were the KMTs best performance in more than a decade it won 53 percent of the legislative vote and 58 percent of the presidential vote Its margin was slimmer in 2012 Ma won with 53 percent of the presidential vote and the KMT captured only 44 percent of the leg islative vote although under Taiwans winnertakeall electoral system that vote share translated to a healthy majority of seats in the Legislative Yuan box 181 taiwans hot anD noisy Politics In 2004 Taiwans presidential election made headlines worldwide when the incumbent president and vice president were shot while campaigning for reelection President Chen Shuibian grazed by a bullet across his midsection said he felt something when he was hit but went on waving to the crowd for several minutes When he finally looked down he realized he was bleeding Then he noticed Vice President Annette lu bleeding from her knee About that time he noticed a bullet hole in the car window The incident provoked a tsunami of conspiracy theories mostly because the official account seemed so implausible how could two politicians be shot in front of thousands of people without anyoneeven the candidates themselvesnoticing Its easy to understand why so many people scoffed at Chens story but if youve ever been to a Taiwanese campaign rally you wont find it quite so hard to believe Although security procedures have tightened since Chen and lu were following stan dard Taiwanese campaign protocol on March 19 2004 they were standing in an open Jeep secured by a seat belt driving through a tightly packed crowd with firecrackers raining down on them The air was full of smoke the noise was deafening and there were explosions going off everywhere no one could have heard a gunshot in the din both candidates said they initially assumed their injuries were nothing unusual just the typical dings from outofcontrol bottle rockets Television cameramen trailing the can didates in another car reported smelling their own hair burning as smoldering fireworks wrappers fell from the sky It was only later when the adrenaline wore off that Chen and lu recognized the nature of their wounds Crushing crowds and earsplitting noise are the sine qua non of Taiwanese political rallies They are required both literally and figuratively to meet the Chinese definition of fun renao hot and noisy A candidate who cannot provide themalong with a robust selection of food vendors and colorcoordinated tracksuits for the staffcannot expect to win an election Politics in Taiwan is a combination of doortodoor sales and traveling circus The real mystery is how so many politicians make it to election day in one piece 482 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a The DPP is known for promoting democratization but it also has a reputation as a proindependence party The partys position is more subtle and moderate than this characterization implies but perception is what matters in politics and many Taiwanese voters perceive the DPP as recklessly proindependence Until 2004 one of the DPPs strongest cards was its reputation for incorruptibilitya sharp contrast to the KMT Unfortunately President Chens second term was marred by scandals that tarnished his partys clean reputation After leaving office in May 2008 both Chen and his wife were convicted of corruption involving money laundering bribery and embezzlement of government funds Chen was given a life sentence in prison which was later reduced to twenty years and fined about US6 million The DPP still is considered a young outsider party its biggest chal lenge is to convince voters that it is sensible and competent Regrettably Chens presidency did little to advance that cause Election analysts attributed the KMTs big wins in the 2008 elections to voter dissatisfaction with Chens performance The DPPs 2012 presidential candidate a female politician named Tsai Yingwen recovered some of that lost ground One factor that worked against her was her opposition to the 1992 Consensus a vaguely worded agreementtodisagree that Beijing uses to justify its negotiations with Taipei Many voters worried that if their president repudiated the consensus lucrative crossStrait economic interactions would cease Beyond the two major parties political parties have come and gone but none has become a lasting force in Taiwan politics The most important of the small parties are the People First Party PFP the Taiwan Solidarity Union TSU and the New Party all of which grew out of splits in the KMT The PFP and TSU each won three legisla tive seats in 2012 ConCluSIon Taiwans prosperous economy and successful democracy should make it a model for developing countries but its troubled relationship with China has left it iso lated its achievements largely ignored After worsening steadily for more than a decade relations between Taiwan and China appear to have stabilized The two sides depend on one another economically and they have learned to communicate despite their differences Nonetheless those differences are profound The PRC hopes to incorporate Taiwan into a Chinese nationstate with Beijing as its capi tal while Taiwanese want to preserve their islands democracy As long as China retains its nominally communist partystate political framework a democratic Taiwan will need at least de facto independence The still large gap in the level of economic development and standard of living between the PRC and Taiwan also presents a significant obstacle to unification Resolving the standoff in the Taiwan Strait will require patience flexibility confidence and goodwill on both sides In the meantime Taiwan will continue to look for international affirmation and sup port wherever it can find itwhether in the UN General Assembly or on the Click Click Click website t a i w a n 483 noTeS 1 The most complete Englishlanguage account of these events is Tsehan Lai Ramon Myers and Wou Wei A Tragic Beginning The Taiwan Uprising of February 28 1947 Palo Alto CA Stanford University Press 1991 2 Edwin A Winckler Institutionalization and Participation on Taiwan From Hard to Soft Authoritarianism The China Quarterly 99 1984 482499 3 Taiwans economic development model is analyzed in detail in two books Thomas B Gold State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle Armonk NY M E Sharpe 1986 and Robert Wade Governing the Market Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization Princeton NJ Princeton University Press 1990 4 Accounts of Taiwans democratization include Linda Chao and Ramon H Myers The First Chinese Democracy Political Life in the Republic of China on Taiwan Baltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press 1998 Yunhan Chu Crafting Democracy in Taiwan Taipei Institute for National Policy Research 1992 Peter Moody Political Change on Taiwan A Study of Ruling Party Adaptability New York Praeger 1992 Shelley Rigger Politics in Taiwan Voting for Democracy London Routledge 1999 Denny Roy Taiwan A Political History Ithaca NY Cornell University Press 2003 Hungmao Tien The Great Transition Political and Social Change in the Republic of China Stanford CA Hoover Institution Press 1989 5 Chao and Myers The First Chinese Democracy 6 It is impossible to state with certainty exactly where Taiwan ranks among inter national investors in China because a very large portion of inbound investment flows through offshore channels including the Cayman Islands British Virgin Islands Hong Kong and Panama Of this a substantialbut unknowableportion originates in Taiwan SuGGeSTed ReAdInGS Andrade Tonio How Taiwan Became Chinese Dutch Spanish and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century New York Columbia University Press 2008 Bush Richard Uncharted Strait The Future of ChinaTaiwan Relations Washington DC Brookings Institution 2013 Copper John F Taiwan NationState or Province 5th ed Boulder CO Westview Press 2008 Gold Thomas B State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle Armonk NY M E Sharpe 1986 Goldstein Steven M and Julian Chang eds Presidential Politics in Taiwan The Administration of Chen Shuibian Norwalk CT EastBridge 2008 Hsiao Lihung A Thousand Moons on a Thousand Rivers trans Michelle Wu New York Columbia University Press 2000 Kastner Scott L Political Conflict and Economic Interdependence across the Taiwan Strait and Beyond Stanford CA Stanford University Press 2009 Keliher Macabe Out of China or Yu Yonghes Tale of Formosa A History of SeventeenthCentury Taiwan Taipei SMC Publishing 2003 Rigger Shelley Why Taiwan Matters Small Island Global Powerhouse Boulder Rowman and Littlefield 2011 Roy Denny Taiwan A Political History Ithaca NY Cornell University Press 2003 484 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a Tucker Nancy Bernkopf ed Dangerous Strait The USTaiwanChina Crisis New York Columbia University Press 2008 Tucker Nancy Bernkopf Strait Talk United StatesTaiwan Relations and the Crisis with China Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 2009 Wachman Alan Why Taiwan Geostrategic Rationales for Chinas Territorial Integrity Stanford CA Stanford University Press 2007 Timeline of Modern Chinese Political History 1760s1790s High Qingthe height of glory for Chinas last imperial dynasty 18391842 The First Opium War ends in a humiliating defeat for the Qing dynasty and the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing 1842 the first of the unequal treaties imposed on imperial China by Western powers 18501863 The Taiping Rebellion nearly overthrows the Qing and leaves more than twenty million dead before it is suppressed 18561860 The Second Opium War Chinas defeat leads to more unequal treaties 1860s Empress Dowager Cixi widow of Xianfeng emperor becomes the power behind the throne formally occupied by her infant son and the most powerful leader in Chinaa position she retains until her death in 1908 1860s1890s The SelfStrengthening movement involves efforts to save the Qing by modernizing the economy and the military while preserving traditional Chinese values 18941895 China defeated and humiliated in the SinoJapanese War loses influence in Korea and control of Taiwan to Japan 1898 The Hundred Days Reform is proclaimed by the emperor promising wideranging institutional changes but the movement is crushed by the Empress Dowager Cixi who places the emperor under palace arrest 18991900 The Boxer Rebellion breaks out in northern China and is suppressed by Western military forces The Boxer Indemnity further weakens the Qing dynasty financially 1905 The imperial examination system is abolished as part of a lastditch futile reform effort to save the Qing dynasty Sun Yatsen establishes the Tongmenghui or Revolutionary Alliance and calls for the overthrow of the Qing and the establishment of a republic 1908 The Empress Dowager dies but not before she moves to put another child emperor on throne the threeyearold Puyi who would be Chinas last emperor 486 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a 1911 Revolution breaks out in many parts of China Sun Yatsen becomes provisional president of a republican government before it comes to national power 1912 The Last Emperor abdicates and the Republic of China is established 19121916 General Yuan Shikai takes control of the Republic and tries to establish a new dynasty with himself as emperor 1912 Sun Yatsen founds the Kuomintang KMT Nationalist Party to oppose Yuans usurpation of power in the Republic of China 19161927 The Warlord Era which begins in the political vacuum left by Yuan Shikais death The Republic of China exists in name but power is in fact held by numerous regional military leaders 1919 The May Fourth Movement begins with protest against the weak response by the government of the Republic of China to the terms of the Versailles Treaty that granted Japan control of former German concessions in China ushering in a period of political and cultural ferment 1921 The Chinese Communist Party CCP is founded with advice and assis tance from the Moscowbased Comintern Communist International 1924 The KMT and the CCP agree to a united front to oppose the warlords 1925 Sun Yatsen dies Chiang Kaishek takes over leadership of the KMT 1926 The KMTCCP united front begins the Northern Expedition from southern China in a military campaign to subdue the warlords and reunify China 1927 Chiang Kaishek turns against the CCP and unleashes the White Terror driving surviving communists underground or deep into the countryside The CCP establishes the first of its major rural base areas in Jinggangshan 19271937 The Nanjing Decade Chiang Kaishek consolidates his position as the most powerful leader of the Republic of China and relocates the countrys capital to the central Chinese city of Nanjing Nanking 19281934 The KMT carries out a series of extermination campaigns against CCP base areas The CCP headquarters is relocated to a remote area in central China which is called the Jiangxi Soviet 1931 Japan begins its aggression against China taking control of Manchuria in the northeast and establishing a puppet state Manchukuo with Chinas Last Emperor as a figurehead ruler 19341935 The Long March the CCP is driven out of its Jiangxi Soviet base area by Chiang Kaisheks forces and undertakes a sixthousandmile trek to the northwestern sanctuary in Yanan during the Long March Mao Zedong moves to the top ranks of the CCP leadership 19351945 The Yanan period a crucial decade in the development of the CCP during which Mao Zedong becomes chairman of the party and consolidates his political and ideological power the CCP also greatly expands its popular support for its resistance against Japan and its program of reform 1937 Japan invades China proper setting off World War II in Asia Chiang Kaishek and the government of the Republic of China are driven to the far southwest and set up a wartime capital in Chongqing Chungking The Rape of Nanjing Japanese forces carry out horrific atrocities against hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians when they occupy the capital of China 1945 World War II ends t i m e l i n e o f m o D e r n c h i n e s e P o l i t i c a l h i s t o r y 487 1946 The Chinese civil war begins again after a temporary truce during the war against Japan and futile efforts by the United States to negotiate a KMTCCP coalition government 1949 The CCP wins the civil war and founds the Peoples Republic of China PRC with Chairman Mao as the leader and Beijing as its capital Chiang Kaishek and the government of the Republic of China retreat to the island of Taiwan 1950 The United States and its allies block the PRCs effort to assume the China seat in the United Nations claiming it still rightfully belongs to the Republic of China The Peoples Liberation Army invades Tibet The Seventeen Point Agreement leaves the Dalai Lama in charge in exchange for Tibets acknowledgment that it is part of China 19501952 The period of the New Democracy in the PRC which promises a mixed economy and a somewhat inclusive polity although under firm control of the CCP Land reform and other revolutionary programs begin 19501953 The Korean War China fights the United States and its United Nations allies to a stalemate 19531957 China follows the Soviet model of development under a First FiveYear Plan that involves a centralized economy the nationalization of industry and commerce and the collectivization of agriculture 19561957 The Hundred Flowers Movement Mao invites criticism of the CCPs rule over China in order to shake up the bureaucracy and prevent discontent from boiling over 1957 The AntiRightist Campaign in reaction to unexpectedly harsh criticism during the Hundred Flowers Movement the CCP strikes against critics 19581960 The Great Leap Forward Maos utopian campaign to accelerate economic development and bring true communism to China by relying on the labor power and revolutionary fervor of the masses China is plunged into the worst famine in human history and a deep industrial depression 1959 An uprising in Tibet against Chinese rule is crushed the Dalai Lama flees to exile in India 19611965 Mao retreats to the second line of leadership and turns economic poli cymaking over to Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping 19621964 Mao grows increasingly unhappy with the policies that Liu and Deng have implemented to recover from the Leap and set China on a course of sus tained economic growth The SinoSoviet split emerges Mao concludes that the Soviet Union has betrayed communism and restored capitalism that benefits the party elite and exploits the workers 1964 China detonates its first atomic bomb 1966 Mao launches the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution an ideological campaign to get China off the capitalist road down which he believes Liu Deng and other top party leaders have led it 19661968 The Red Guards emerge as Maos mass ally in the Cultural Revolution and carry out a reign of terror against anyone and anything judged to be remnants of capitalism or imperial China Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping are among those purged 488 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a 19681969 Mao concludes that the Red Guards and other rebels have gone too far and instructs the army under his loyal subordinate Lin Biao to restore order More than twenty million former Red Guards are sent for reeduca tion in the countryside 19691971 A period of military ascendency in Chinese politics Lin Biao is named as Maos successor 1971 SinoAmerican détente begins after a long period of hostility since the founding of the PRC in 1949 National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger makes a secret trip to Beijing July 1971 to prepare the way for President Richard M Nixons historic visit in March 1972 Lin Biao is killed in an airplane crash following an alleged coup to over throw Mao who had grown unhappy with Lin as his chosen successor The Peoples Republic of China assumes the China position in the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council replacing the Republic of China Taiwan 19721975 A momentous period of transition and tumult in Chinese politics Radicals led by Maos wife Jiang Qing fill part of the political vacuum left by Lin Biaos demise Deng Xiaoping is restored to power to balance the leadership and help longtime premier Zhou Enlai manage the economy Chinas relationship with the United States and the global community deepens 19751976 The political showdown between the radicals and more moderate CCP leaders intensifies 1976 Zhou Enlai dies in January A relative political unknown Hua Guofeng is unexpectedly named to succeed Zhou as acting premier in a move by Mao who is in deteriorating health to balance power between radical and moderate leaders The Tiananmen Incident A mass outpouring of mourning for Zhou Enlai turns into a protest against Jiang Qing and other radicals and is suppressed Deng Xiaoping is blamed for the Tiananmen Incident and again ousted from the partystate leadership by Mao Hua Guofeng is made PRC premier and first vice chairman of the CCP clearly emerging as Maos successor Mao Zedong dies in September Jiang Qing and her closest radical associates the Gang of Four are arrested by Hua Guofeng with the support of senior party leaders Hua Guofeng becomes chairman of the CCP 1977 Deng Xiaoping is restored to his party and state positions by Hua Guofeng and gradually pushes Hua aside to become Chinas paramount leader although he never assumes the top offices himself assigning them instead to loyal lieutenants 1978 A meeting of the CCP Central Committee in December marks the start of the era of economic reform and opening to the world 1979 The Democracy Wall movement calls for greater political freedom but is suppressed Deng Xiaoping enunciates The Four Cardinal Principles as the political and ideological framework for economic reform t i m e l i n e o f m o D e r n c h i n e s e P o l i t i c a l h i s t o r y 489 The United States and China establish formal diplomatic relations 1980 Zhao Ziyang a protégé of Deng Xiaoping replaces Hua Guofeng as pre mier of the PRC 1981 Jiang Qing and other members of the Gang of Four are sentenced to prison in a show trial Hu Yaobang another Deng protégé replaces Hua Guofeng as chairman of the CCP the title of the head of the party is changed to general secretary in 1982 Deng Xiaoping replaces Hua as chairman of the Central Military Commission thereby becoming the commander in chief of Chinas armed forces CCP issues the Resolution of Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the PRC which blames Maos political and ideological mistakes for the disasters of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution but concludes that his achievements far outweigh his shortcomings 1983 Party conservatives carry out an AntiSpiritual Pollution campaign against Western ideas they feel are contaminating Chinese society 1986 Student prodemocracy demonstrations in Beijing take place and are sup ported by many Chinese intellectuals 1987 Party conservatives carry out an AntiBourgeois Liberalization cam paign against democratic ideas that they see as a challenge to party rule Hu Yaobang is forced by Deng to resign as general secretary because he is said to be too sympathetic to calls for more democracy Zhao Ziyang becomes general secretary and Li Peng becomes premier 1989 Hu Yaobang dies in April Students gather in Tiananmen Square to pay their respects to Hu Yaobang regarded by many as a political reformer The student gathering turns into huge demonstrations and protests against corruption and for democracy eventually drawing upwards of a million people from nearly all walks of life and spreading to other cities during the spring June 4 The Peoples Liberation Army is ordered to clear the Square and does so with massive force resulting in the deaths of a large number of protesters Zhao Ziyang is forced to resign as CCP general secretary by Deng because of his sympathy and soft line toward the demonstrations he is replaced by Jiang Zemin party secretary in Shanghai who also becomes chairman of the Central Military Commission China enters a period of retreat from political and economic reform 19891991 The collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union alarms Chinas leaders 1992 During his Southern Inspection Tour of Chinas most prosperous region Deng proclaims that economic reform must again become the countrys highest priority 1993 Jiang Zemin becomes president of the PRC reviving the practice aban doned after Mao turned the position over to Liu Shaoqi in 1959 that the leader of the party also serves as president of the country 490 P o l i t i c s i n c h i n a 1997 Deng Xiaoping dies in the preceding few years he had allowed Jiang Zemin to consolidate his own power Hong Kong returns to Chinese sovereignty after nearly 150 years as a British colony 20022004 Jiang Zemin retires Hu Jintao becomes CCP general secretary 2002 PRC president 2003 and Central Military Commission chair 2004 20072008 Hu Jintao reelected to all of his leading positions with his second and final term scheduled to end in 20122013 2008 Largescale unrest occurs in Tibet and is forcefully suppressed Beijing hosts the Olympic Games 2009 Largescale unrest occurs in Xinjiang and is forcefully suppressed China celebrates the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the Peoples Republic 2010 Jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo is awarded Nobel Peace Prize 20122013 Xi Jinping becomes CCP general secretary 2012 PRC president 2013 and Central Military Commission chair 2013 Glossary Note This glossary does not include identifications of individuals For lists of top lead ers of the Peoples Republic of China see Table 31 19491976 and Table 41 since 1976 1911 Revolution the process that began on October 10 1911 Double 10 with a series of mutinies and rebellions in several Chinese cities and which culminated in the abdication of the Qing emperor and the founding of the Republic of China in February 1912 228 Incident events on Taiwan that began on February 28 1947 when tensions between Mainlanders and Taiwanese erupted into widespread violence Protests by Taiwanese over police violence in Taipei mushroomed into riots that engulfed the island When Kuomintang forces arrived from the mainland to reestablish control they rounded up thousands of suspected rioters including much of Taiwans political elite many of whom were executed 7000 Cadres Conference a large gathering of officials from different institutions and administrative levels in the PRC in early 1962 to assess efforts at recovery from the Great Leap Forward Mao offered a very restrained selfcriticism but also reasserted the cor rectness of the Great Leap policy line The CCP leadership rallied around the Chairman but Liu Shaoqi gave a speech critical of the Leap which Mao later claimed caused him to begin to doubt Lius political reliability administrative village the unit of governance in rural China technically a grassroots unit below the formal government structure of the PRC An administrative village is made up of one or more natural villages There are more than six hundred thousand administrative villages in China All China Womens Federation ACWF one of Chinas official mass organizations The official mission of the ACWF is to represent and to protect womens rights and interests and to promote equality between men and women It is a national organization with branches at every level of government Like other mass organizations the ACWF is under the leadership of the CCP 492 g l o s s a r y Anarchism from the Greek term meaning without rulers a political philosophy that rejects all formal state authority as tyrannical and harmful to individuals Anarchists believe society should be organized into small voluntary and cooperative selfgoverning units Anarchism was popular in the first decades of the twentieth century among some Chinese intellectuals who were looking for a solution to problems of late imperial and early republican China Ant Tribe refers to young college graduates in China who cant find suitable employment live in crowded shared accommodations take lowpaying jobs and spend a lot of time hanging out Antagonistic Contradiction in MarxismLeninism a contradiction between oppo sites that have no common ground and can only be resolved by force compared with nonantagonistic contradictions which can be resolved by discussion debate educa tion and other noncoercive means For example the contradiction between the bour geoisie and the proletariat is antagonistic AntiRightist Campaign launched by Mao Zedong and the CCP in 1957 in response to the unexpectedly harsh criticism of the partys rule during the Hundred Flowers Movement It deeply touched intellectuals and other segments of the urban population in particular and resulted in the extensive use of the rightist label which would curse people so designated for the rest of the Maoist era Many rightists were sent to the countryside for reform through labor in many cases for more than two decades The AntiRightist Campaign sent a chill of fear throughout Chinese society especially among intellectuals Article 23 of the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region HKSAR legislation that gives the HKSAR the power to enact laws on security issues such as trea son and subversion against the government of the PRC theft of state secrets and the formation of political organizations with foreign ties In 2002 the HKSAR government proposed enacting a tough new antisubversion law under the terms of Article 23 The proposal created much controversy and protest by those who thought it would decrease democracy in Hong Kong The government in consultation with the PRC withdrew the proposal after massive public demonstrations against it Asian financial crisis of 19971998 began in Thailand in July 1997 and spread to most of the other countries in East and Southeast Asia Among the causes were bad govern ment economic policies overinvestment and real estate speculation The International Monetary Fund IMF helped bail out the worst hit countries Hong Kong was seriously affected by the crisis but China was not because of its controlled currency and other economic controls Autonomous Region AR administrative units of the PRC with a high concentration of ethnic minorities and which are granted a limited degree of autonomy in economic cultural social and other matters but remain politically and militarily subordinate to the central government China has five autonomous regions Guangxi Zhuang AR Inner Mongolia AR Ningxia Hui AR Tibet AR and Xinjiang Uyghur AR Baojia System a system of community mutual surveillance first developed in China dur ing the early imperial period and based on grouping together a number of households that are responsible for maintaining law and order by watching and informing on each other Chiang Kaishek tried to revive the baojia system in the Republic of China during the 1930s Barefoot Doctors paramedics trained usually by medical teams of the Peoples Liberation Army to attend to the primary and preventive medical needs of people in Chinas rural areas during the Maoist era especially in the early 1970s Barefoot doctors were selected from among local residents and the term barefoot refers to peasants in g l o s s a r y 493 South China who worked without shoes in the rice paddies They also promoted hygiene and family planning Base Area a region in the Chinese countryside under the control of the Chinese Communist Party during the civil war against the Kuomintang The CCP had numer ous base areas in the period 19271945 the best known of which were the Jiangxi Soviet and Yanan Basic Law the socalled miniconstitution of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the PRC It is based on the One Country Two Systems principle and pro vides a blueprint for maintaining Hong Kongs legislative administrative judicial social and economic autonomy under Chinese sovereignty But the Basic Law empowers the Standing Committee of the National Peoples Congress of the PRC to interpret the provisions of the Basic Law thus giving China the final say on all matters related to Hong Kong Beidaihe an oceanside resort city near Beijing where the CCP leadership often holds important midsummer meetings Beijing the capital of the Peoples Republic of China and one of four directly adminis tered municipalities under the central government Beijing literally means Northern Capital During the Nanjing Decade it was renamed Beiping or Northern Peace Beijing Consensus a term sometimes used to describe the model of economic develop ment followed by the PRC that includes a commitment to innovation and experimenta tion stable growth based on sustainable and equitable development global integration with national selfdetermination and strong government oversight of market reforms It is often contrasted to the Washington Consensus Beijing Massacre the military assault ordered by the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party on prodemocracy protesters in and around Tiananmen Square on June 4 1989 Also called June 4 or simply 64 Beijingology an approach to the study of Chinese politics that emphasizes the analysis of the top leadership of the Chinese Communist Party which is based in the national capital Beijing The term is an adaptation of Kremlinology which refers to efforts to understand politics in the Soviet Union and to a somewhat lesser extent Russia today by analyzing the words and actions of the top leaders who work in the compound of buildings in Moscow called the Kremlin Big Bang an approach to economic development especially in countries going through a postcommunist transition from a planned economy to a market economy that car ries out widespread fundamental reforms simultaneously or in rapid succession See also gradualism Big Character Posters Dazibao handwritten wallmounted documents of over sized Chinese characters often written on newspapers or large sheets of paper that make a strong public political statement Although they have an earlier history in China they were used most extensively during the Cultural Revolution particularly by Red Guards most often to denounce some person or groups ideological mistakes Bingtuan Chinese abbreviation for Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps XPCC established in the early 1950s as places to live and work for demobilized soldiers and their families designed to promote economic development and Han settlement in the far western region of China inhabited largely by Uyghurs Bingtuan were initially mostly farms directly under the control of the Peoples Liberation Army They are now largely civilian organizations and are involved in a wide range of economic enterprises Blood Heads people in China who buy blood from poor farmers and resell it for a hand some profit to bloodproducts companies They often use unsanitary equipment and methods which has led to widespread HIV infections in donors that have been in turn 494 g l o s s a r y transmitted to sexual partners and newborns The problem has been most severe in Henan and adjacent provinces in central China where there are many AIDS villages in which a large percentage of the population is infected Blue Shirts a clique of the Kuomintang that favored fascism as an ideology for the Republic of China in the 1930s They were a paramilitary organization that drew inspira tion from Benito Mussolini in Italy The Blue Shirts were active in implementing Chiang Kaisheks New Life Movement Bourgeois Liberalization a term widely used by the CCP in the late 1980s to criti cize intellectuals and others who were thought to be advocating political reforms that would challenge party leadership The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 were said to have been caused in part by the spread of bourgeois liberalization See also spiritual pollution Bourgeoisie in Marxist theory the ruling class in capitalist society The bourgeoisie owns the means of production and employs and exploits the proletariat from whose labor they extract profits It is not only the economically dominant class but it also controls the state which it uses as an instrument to protect its own power and property as well as to suppress the working class Synonymous with the capitalist class Mao applied the term more broadly to refer to those who used their authority for selfinterest and to claim special privilege and higher status There could be a bourgeoisie and bourgeois ideol ogy even after private property had been abolished during the socialist transforma tion and the bourgeoisie as an economic class no longer existed See also class struggle proletariat Boxer Protocol the peace treaty that the Qing dynasty was forced by foreign powers to sign in September 1901 after the suppression of the Boxer Uprising Of all the Protocols humiliating provisions the most disastrous for China was a staggering indemnity to pay the cost of the war for the foreign powers which proved a crushing burden to the impe rial governments already crippled economy Boxer Uprising also known as the Boxer Rebellion or the Righteous Harmony Society Movement took place in North China in 18991900 The name Boxers refers to the martial arts mastered by the rebels which supposedly gave them protection against harm even from bullets The rebellion was aimed at Christian missionaries Chinese Christian converts and initially the Qing dynasty but its causes lie more deeply in the deteriorating economic conditions in the rural areas compounded by natural disas ters The Empress Dowager Cixi at first ordered the suppression of the rebellion but then embraced it as an antiimperialist movement It was subdued by the intervention of Western forces after the Boxers attacked foreign diplomatic buildings in Beijing See also Boxer Protocol BRICS Brazil Russia India China and South Africa as an informal grouping of four large emerging economies Building Socialism with Chinese Characteristics one of the two key components of Deng Xiaoping Theory the other being the Four Cardinal Principles The term conveys the idea that China must adapt both the theory and practice of socialism in its quest for modernization because of its relative economic backwardness This involves using whatever means are necessary even capitalist ones to promote development There are in turn two components to building socialism with Chinese characteristics reform of the economy by increasing the role of the market while reducing that of the state and opening to the outside world by expanding Chinas involvement in the global economy See also cat theory primary stage of socialism Buyun Experiment elections that were held in 1998 in which all the voters in the vil lages that were part of Buyun town in Sichuan province went to the polls to directly g l o s s a r y 495 elect the town leaders This experiment with direct elections got much publicity at the time but the central government soon ruled them unconstitutional and no such elections have been held since However the local leader who conducted the experiment Zhang Jinming has been promoted and continues as an advocate for more open election proce dures at the local levels of government See also consultative election cadre any person in a position of authority In China not all cadres belong to the commu nist party and not all party members are cadres The term encompasses officials from the very highest leaders to the lowest ranking and includes people in leadership positions in all types of institutions and settings not just political Cadre Exchange System a system of personnel management used in China in which leading town cadres such as the town head and party secretary are transferred to a different locality every three to six years This system is meant to prevent cadres from developing local networks that might dilute their allegiance to higherlevel authorities or provide opportunities for corruption Campaign see mass mobilization campaign Capitalism a type of economic system in which the means of production are for the most part privately owned and operated for profit Economic activity is based on a free market economy in which the state plays a limited role in determining such things as produc tion distribution investment prices supply and demand and the allocation of labor In Marxism capitalism is the stage of human social and economic development that comes after feudalism and before socialism It is a decisive period in history in which the bourgeoisie is the ruling class and the proletariat comes into being Capitalism ends and gives way to socialism when the proletariat rises in revolution and overthrows the bourgeoisie Capitalist Roader a label given to cadres in China who were accused of betraying social ism and advocating or following policies that would lead to a restoration of capitalism in the country Casino Capitalism a system in which an economy and the government become heavily dependent on gambling in private casinos Macao is an example of casino capitalism Cat Theory based on Deng Xiaopings famous saying that it does not matter if it is a white cat or a black cat as long as it catches mice in other words it is results that matter when determining whether a policy is correct The comment was made in a July 1962 speech on restoring agricultural production in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward famine Mao interpreted Dengs meaning as being that ideology did not matter in policymaking and this statement was used against Deng in the Cultural Revolution as evidence that he was a capitalist roader Central Advisory Commission established by Deng Xiaoping in 1982 as a CCP organi zation with little power whose purpose was to ease elderly senior leaders into retirement by removing them from important positions yet allowing them to retain some public visibility and prestige in an advisory capacity It was abolished in 1992 Central Commission for Discipline Inspection the CCP organization charged with monitoring and punishing abuses of power corruption and other wrongdoings commit ted by party officials Lowerlevel party organizations including provincial municipal and countylevel bodies also have discipline inspection commissions that report directly to the commission one level above them Central Committee the thirdhighest level of leadership in the Chinese Communist Party It now consists of about 376 regular and alternate members who are highranking CCP cadres from around the country It is elected every five years by the National Congress of the Communist Party of China and meets annually for about two weeks 496 g l o s s a r y Central Cultural Revolution Group CCRG became the de facto ruling body in China after the purge of Liu Shaoqi and other top leaders in 1966 although its power and that of all organizations was eclipsed by Maos personal authority at the height of the Cultural Revolution The CCRG was dominated by ideological radicals like Maos wife Jiang Qing who was the effective leader of the group It suspended operations in September 1969 Central Military Commission CMC the most important military organization in China Technically there are both a CCP CMC formally the Military Commission of the Central Committee and a PRC Central Military Commission in fact the two bodies overlap completely in personnel and function The current CMC has eleven members CCP General Secretary and PRC President Xi Jinping is the chairman which in essence makes him the commander in chief of Chinas armed forces All the other members are from the military Sometimes referred to in English as the Military Affairs Commission Central Party School formally called the Party School of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China located in Beijing the highestlevel institution for train ing CCP leaders Party leaders from around the country take courses there for periods ranging from a couple of months to a couple of years on MarxismLeninism and its Chinese adaptations as well as in areas such as comparative political systems and theo ries public administration economics law and various policyrelated subjects Being the head of the school is an important position within the party leadership particularly for rising stars and has been held at various times since 1949 by such important figures as Liu Shaoqi Hua Guofeng Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping Mao Zedong headed the school in 19421947 when it was located in Yanan and while he was consolidating his political and ideological authority within the party Central Special Case Examination Group established in 1966 as the organ of an innerparty inquisition that directed the ferreting out arrest and torture of sus pect Central Committee members and other officials It was formally dissolved in December 1978 Charter 08 a document signed by more than three hundred Chinese intellectuals and political activists issued as a blueprint for democratic reforms in December 2008 Its leading signatories were detained and sometimes jailed including Nobel Peace Prize lau reate Liu Xiaobo Chief Executive the head of the government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the PRC The chief executive must be a Chinese citizen at least forty years old and have lived in Hong Kong for twenty years or more He or she is elected for a fiveyear term by an Election Committee that currently consists of 1200 members elected or appointed from various sectors of society such as commerce finance labor the pro fessions religion and government The composition of the Election Committee is closely controlled by Beijing and the candidate elected has to be approved by the government of the PRC The Macao SAR of the PRC is also headed by a chief executive China Democracy Party formed in 1998 as an open opposition party by former Tiananmen Movement activists The party was initially allowed to register and open branches nationwide but fearing that it was becoming too popular the CCP banned the organization and arrested most of its leaders China Dream or Chinese Dream Catchphrase first used by Xi Jinping shortly after becom ing Chinas top leader in November 2012 to convey his vision for national rejuvenation involving both higher levels of economic prosperity and great power status for the PRC China Proper or Inner China a somewhat imprecise geographic term that refers to the provinces of eastern and central China that became part of the Chinese empire early in its history and is largely populated by the majority ethnic Han Chinese g l o s s a r y 497 Chinese Civil War the conflict between the Kuomintang KMT led by Chiang Kaishek and the Chinese Communist Party CCP led after 1935 by Mao Zedong There were two phases of the civil war 19271937 beginning when Chiang Kaishek unleashed the White Terror against the communists to the formation of a united front between the KMT and CCP to fight the Japanese after the Xian Incident and 19461949 from the resumption of KMTCCP hostilities following the surrender of Japan in World War II to the victory of the CCP and the founding of the Peoples Republic of China Chinese Communist Party CCP founded in 1921 it has been the ruling party of the Peoples Republic of China since 1949 It had 851 million members as of mid2013 mak ing it by far the largest political party in the world but still a small minority of the Chinese population which is consistent with its selfproclaimed role as a vanguard party Chinese Communist Youth League CCYL a mass organization of the CCP for people aged fourteen to twentyeight It is a training ground for future party members and lead ers In mid2013 the CCYL had about 90 million members Some of Chinas current top leaders advanced their political careers by working as leaders of the CCYL See also tuanpai Chongqing a city in southwestern China to which Chiang Kaishek and the Kuomintang retreated after the Japanese invasion in 1937 It became the wartime capital of the Republic of China See Free China Today it is one of the four directly administered cities of the PRC Civil Service Examination System the system for selecting imperial bureaucrats that was first established in the Han dynasty 206 BCE220 CE and lasted until 1905 when it was abolished as part of a futile effort to save Chinas last dynasty the Qing 16441912 The exams mainly tested knowledge of Confucian texts and required years of intensive highly specialized studying to prepare for multilevel examinations that few passed Civil Society the social space occupied by private organizations and associations com posed of civilians who join together to pursue a common purpose other than the direct pursuit of political power and which operate independently of government authority Most simply it consists of those associations that exist and operate in the space between the family and the state Class Struggle the idea that exploited and exploiting classes are constantly engaged in conflict for example poor peasants and landlords or the proletariat and the bourgeoi sie It is one of the central ideas of Marxism Maos elaborations on the Marxist theory of class struggle especially that it continues even during the socialist transformation and after the elimination of private property are defining features of Mao Zedong Thought as a variety of Marxism It is also considered by the current leadership of the CCP as one of Maos ideological errors and a cause of the Cultural Revolution Cleansing of Class Ranks Campaign in 19681969 together with subsequent sup pressions in 19701972 probably killed at least 15 million people The targets were trou blesome rebel elements or others who had earned the displeasure of local authorities during the Cultural Revolution as well as ordinary criminals imaginary counterrevolu tionaries and the usual suspects with bad class backgrounds Collectives a type of rural organization established in 19561957 in the second stage of the socialist transformation of the Chinese countryside that followed the formation of cooperatives in 19541955 Collectives were much larger250 familiesthan the earlier cooperatives and more socialist in their organization the collective not only owned the land but members were paid only according to their labor with no account made of the amount of land or other resources that families had put in Only a small portion of the collectively owned land was set aside for private cultivation Also called HigherLevel Agricultural Producer Cooperatives HLAPCs 498 g l o s s a r y Collective identity a sense of belonging to a specific group based on some shared char acteristic for example race religion economic class culture language or gender Collective Ownership a type of public ownership of property in a socialist economy that is between state government ownership and private ownership In theory the property is owned jointly by a group of people and is operated in their common inter est rather than for the profit of any single individual In China rural land is collectively owned by the entire village and is contracted out to individual families or used for other purposes such as building a collectivelyowned factory Collectivization the transformation of private property particularly land into some type of public ownership In China the collectivizationor socialist transformation of agriculture unfolded in three major stages that involved establishing cooperatives 19541955 collectives 19561957 and communes 1958 Communes see peoples communes Comintern Communist International the organization established in Moscow in 1919 with the goal of supporting and spreading communist revolutions to other parts of the world It worked with existing communist parties and sent agents to help establish such parties where they did not exist Comintern agents were important in the founding and development of the Chinese Communist Party though its influence diminished as Mao Zedong rose to power Communism in Marxist theory the highest stage of human social development It is the goal of and follows the socialist transformation of society It is fundamentally egalitar ian power is in the hands of the producers and the state withers away since there is no need for coercion in a truly classless society Although reaching communism is the stated goal of all MarxistLeninist political parties including the Chinese Communist Party today no country has ever claimed that it has achieved communism The term is also often used as a synonym for MarxismLeninism Communist partystate a type of political system in which a communist party ideologi cally committed to some variant of MarxismLeninism has a monopoly of power and claims the right to exercise a leading role over the economy culture and other aspects of society including politics Communist Period Chinese history during which the Chinese Communist Party has been in power from the founding of the Peoples Republic of China in 1949 to the present Community or Shequ a relatively new form of the lowest level of urban administration in China first introduced in the 1990s to provide services for and as a means of control of workers laid off from stateowned enterprises The shequ is intended to take over many of the functions that were formerly the responsibility of work units and residents committees Confucianism a philosophy based on the teachings of Confucius 551479 BCE and his disciples and interpreters that emphasizes proper and righteous social behavior respect for and obedience to parents deference to elders and superiors the preservation of social harmony and the value of education Politically it stresses that good government must be based on morality including that of the ruler not harsh laws Confucianism deeply influ enced the history and culture of China as well those of the other countries in East Asia Consultative Election a process of selecting town cadresincluding the party secre taryin China that involves some direct input by all voters but in which the final selec tion is left up to higherlevel authorities and the deputies to the town peoples congress This process involves popular input into cadre selection but does not cross the line of leaving the election totally up to a direct vote as was the case in the Buyun experiment g l o s s a r y 499 Contradiction a central concept in Mao Zedong Thought with roots in Marxist the ory It refers to the interacting opposites inherent in all things such that each part of the contradiction cannot exist without the other the unity of opposites It is also the interaction of those opposites that is the source of change and development in society as well as in nature For Mao and Marx the most fundamental contradiction in society is that between classes such as between landlords and poor peasants and between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat whose interaction takes the form of class struggle See also antagonistic contradiction Cooperative Medical Scheme CMS the system of health care in rural China in the 1960s and 1970s during the Maoist period that provided free or almost free basiclevel preventive and curative services About 90 percent of rural residents were covered The CMS collapsed with the coming of decollectivization at the start of the reform era leav ing most rural residents uninsured until quite recently Cooperatives the first form of socialist organization introduced in the Chinese country side in 19541955 Cooperatives consisted of twentyfive to fifty families Land although still technically owned by the farmers as well as tools and draft animals were pooled Members were paid partly on the basis of how much work they did and partly according to how much property they had contributed to the cooperative Agricultural production was under the direction of cooperative officials Formally called lowerlevel agricultural producers cooperatives LLAPCs Cooperativization the process of establishing the rural cooperatives that was carried out in China in 19541955 in the first phase of the collectivization of the Chinese coun tryside and the agricultural economy Criticize Lin Biao and Confucius campaign had little to do with either Lin Biao or Confucius launched by Mao in 1974 because of his growing unhappiness with Zhou Enlais policies and the political reliability of the Peoples Liberation Army Lin Biao and Confucius were surrogates for criticism of alleged ultrarightist mistakes by Zhou who was attacked indirectly and the PLA leadership Although sometimes called a second Cultural Revolution it lasted less than a year and caused much less though not insig nificant disruption County the level of administration in the PRC below the province and autonomous region and directly administered municipality and above the town Cultural Revolution formally the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution a politi cal campaign and mass movement launched by Chairman Mao Zedong in 1966 to stop China from following both the bureaucratic Soviet model of socialist development and the Western capitalist road down which he had concluded some of his closest com rades were leading the country There is a scholarly difference of opinion as to whether the Cultural Revolution occurred during the relatively short span of 19661969 or engulfed the whole decade of 19661976 including up to and just beyond Maos death in September 1976 In either case the Cultural Revolution was a terribly destructive period that combined elements of a witch hunt a crusade an inquisition armed conflict and cutthroat palace politics Dalai Lama the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism from the seventeenth century to 1959 also the head of the government of Tibet Lama is a general term referring to a teacher of Tibetan Buddhism Dalai Lamas are believed to be the reincarnation of their predecessors The current Dalai Lama b 1935 is the fourteenth in a line of succession that goes back to the late fourteenth century In 1959 an invasion of Tibet by Chinas Peoples Liberation Army forced the Dalai Lama to flee to India where his government in exile still remains He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 500 g l o s s a r y Dangwai literally outside the party the general rubric applied to opponents of the Kuomintang KMT in Taiwan in the early 1980s when the formation of formal opposi tion political parties was still banned under the terms of martial law The fact that this was allowed by the KMT then under the control of Chiang Kaisheks son Chiang Chingkuo was seen by some as an encouraging sign that democratization might be beginning In 1986 dangwai politicians founded the Democratic Progressive Party DPP DaoistDaoism TaoistTaoism an ancient Chinese school of thought and practice that combines elements of philosophy religion and folk beliefs Dao or Tao literally means the Way and Daoism emphasizes harmony between humans and nature the wholeness of the universe spontaneity over thought simplicity and truth the rejection of worldly worries and desires and achieving transcendence through the cultivation of moral character Decollectivization the process of dismantling the peoples communes and establish ing the household responsibility system in the Chinese countryside in the early 1980s that was a key part of the market reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping when he came to power in the postMao era Democracy Wall a name given to a 650foot stretch of wall near Tiananmen Square in Beijing where in late 1978 to early 1979 there was an eruption of political posters by intel lectuals criticizing Maos mistakes and the neoMaoist whateverist faction as well as calling for democratization Democracy Wall was shut down and several leaders of the movement were arrested after it had served Deng Xiaopings purpose of isolating his left ist political opponents in the party leadership Democratic Centralism the Leninist principle of how a communist party is to be orga nized and operate internally The core idea is that the party should encourage open dis cussion and debate democracy while a matter is being decided but once the leadership has made a decision then all members are expected to accept and follow it centralism It stipulates that the individual party member is subordinate to the party organization and that lowerlevel party organizations are subordinate to higherlevel organizations Democratic centralism also provides for elections to leadership positions In the practice of communist partystates such as China the centralism part of the principle has far outweighed the democratic part See also innerparty democracy Democratic Progressive Party DPP one of the two major political parties in Taiwan the other being the Kuomintang KMT The DPP was established by Taiwanese oppo sition dangwai politicians in 1986 with independence for Taiwan as a major part of its platform The DPP won the presidency with the election of Chen Shuibian in 2000 who was reelected in 2004 but lost the presidency and control of the parliament to the KMT in 2008 The party is still more cautious about ties with the PRC than is the KMT but it no longer proposes outright independence for the island Demographic Transition describes the natural shift in a country from high birth rates and high death rates to low birth rates and low death rates as a consequence of economic development and modernization Deng Xiaoping Theory the official name given by the Chinese Communist Party to the ideology of Deng Xiaoping Deng Xiaoping Theory was added to the constitution of the CCP in 1997 as a formal part of the partys guiding ideology It can be said to consist of two main parts Building Socialism with Chinese Characteristics which involves the reform of the economy including introducing elements of capitalism and opening the country economically and in other ways to the outside world and the Four Cardinal Principles which lay out the political framework of Party leadership and the ideological conditions for economic reform and opening to the outside world See also cat theory g l o s s a r y 501 Dependency Ratio the size of the workingage population ages fifteen to sixtyfour expressed as a proportion of the total population The young birth to age 14 and the elderly over 65 are considered to be dependent on the working age productive popula tion Because of the onechild policy China has a rapidly aging population which will sharply increase its elderly dependency ratio This is a challenge to the government in terms of providing elder care and social security Developmental State a government usually an authoritarian one that is strongly com mitted to and uses its power to promote national economic development Dibao or minimum livelihood protection implemented to provide subsidies to all indi viduals with incomes below locally determined poverty lines in urban China after the welfare elements the iron rice bowl of the work unit system were eliminated in the reform era Dictatorship of the Proletariat the idea first proposed by Marx that after the pro letariat the industrial working class has seized political power from the bourgeoisie the capitalists itor the communist party on its behalfwill have to exercise strict control over the bourgeoisie and others who seek to overthrow the proletarian state See also peoples democratic dictatorship Direct Elections an electoral system of choosing political officeholders in which the vot ers directly cast ballots for the candidates or party that they want to see elected Contrast with indirect elections Directly Administered municipalities four cities in China that are under the direct jurisdiction of the central government Beijing Chongqing Shanghai and Tianjin They have the same administrative standing as provinces Dynasties the series of hereditary monarchies that ruled China from 221 BCE until 1912 CE There were a dozen or so major Chinese dynasties which lasted from under twenty years the Qin to two hundred Tang Ming Qing three hundred Song or four hundred Han years Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement ETIM a small militant Uyghur separatist group in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region supposedly affiliated with alQaeda that the United States Government declared to be a terrorist organization in August 2002 and which the Chinese government regards as a threat to its internal security Ecological Civilization part of former PRC president and CCP leader Hu Jintaos socalled scientific outlook on development and harmonious socialist society which are the hallmarks of the platform of his administration and his contribution to the guiding ideology of the CCP It emphasizes paying attention to the environ mental consequences of economic growth and supports giving priority to sustainable development Eight Immortals or eight elders eight very senior leaders of the CCP including Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun who wielded great power in the 1980s and into the 1990s even though they had mostly retired from their official positions Eight Model Operas the most famous of the very limited number of stage works approved for public performance during the Cultural Revolution by Jiang Qing As with all authorized works of the time they had revolutionary themes that praised the heroism of workers peasants and soldiers and highlighted the infallible leadership of the Chinese Communist Party The titles of some of them are Red Detachment of Women Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy and On the Docks Elitist Coalition a group of current Chinese leaders who prefer to continue giving pri ority to promoting development in the fastest growing and most modern parts of the country and are less concerned about problems such as inequality and environmental 502 g l o s s a r y degradation The elitist coalition represents the interests of entrepreneurs the emerging middle class and the coastal region See also populist coalition princelings Ethnic Minorities or National Minorities Chinas fiftyfive nonHan ethnic groups that range in size from sixteen million the Zhuang to under three thousand the Lhobo See also Tibetan Uyghur Executive Council ExCo the advisory body that assists the chief executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region HKSAR in policymaking In that sense it serves as the chief executives cabinet Members are appointed by the chief executive from among senior civil servants members of the Legislative Council and notable pub lic figures such as a university president There are currently thirty members including the chief executive Exportled Growth ELG a strategy of economic development that stresses using exports produced by comparatively cheap labor to pay for technology imports that fuel modernization and shift the composition of gross domestic product first from agricul ture to industry and then to services Chinas rapid economic growth has largely followed an ELG approach but the government is taking steps to put more emphasis on produc tion for domestic consumption as a more sustainable engine for economic development Extermination Campaigns efforts by Chiang Kaishek to destroy the Chinese Communist Party by military force There were five such efforts between 1930 and 1934 The Fifth Extermination Campaign in 1934 drove the CCP out of their Jiangxi Soviet base and forced them to undertake their yearlong Long March Extraterritoriality a concept in international law in which foreigners or international organizations are exempt or immune from the local laws of the country in which they are present It may be applied to specific places such as territorial concessions under the control of a foreign power It may also mean the extension of the jurisdiction of a nations laws to its citizens abroad in which case if such a citizen committed a crime in a foreign country he or she would be subject to the laws of his or her home country not the coun try in which the crime was committed Extraterritoriality was included in many of the unequal treaties imposed on the Qing dynasty by the West in the nineteenth century Faction an informal group of individuals who are united by some common bond and whose purpose is to maximize their power especially that of their own leader Factions may be motivated by shared ideology policy preferences personal loyalties or simply the desire for power Falun Gong literally Dharma Wheel Practice a spiritual sect that combines elements of Buddhism and Daoism along with breathing exercises and meditation founded in 1992 by Li Hongzhi a worker and musician turned spiritual leader It gained tens of millions of followers from all walks of life both inside China and abroad The Chinese govern ment began cracking down on the group in 1999 which led to a silent protest by ten thousand Falun Gong followers outside Zhongnanhai the CCP leadership compound in Beijing The government then labeled the group as a dangerous religious cult and banned it The ban remains in effect and the Falun Gong movement in China has been driven underground Fascism an ideology that exalts national glory and strong authoritarian government under a single party and a single leader It is highly militaristic Fascism is firmly anticommunist and believes in mutually beneficial economic cooperation between the state and the pri vate sector FiveYear Plan a defining feature of socialist systems first developed in the Soviet Union that establishes national targets for production and other economic objectives to be achieved over a fiveyear period Chinas FirstFive Year Plan covered 195357 Even g l o s s a r y 503 though the PRC has moved towards a socialist market economy planning still plays an important role in economic policymaking Chinas 12th FiveYear Plan covers the years 201115 Floating Population the ruraltourban migrant population numbering 260 million who have moved to Chinas cities in search of jobs since the 1980s It is likely the larg est population migration in history Most migrants have insecure lowpaying jobs in the construction or service industries In some of Chinas largest cities they make up as much as a quarter to a third of the total population Four Big Rights the right to speak out freely air views fully hold great debates and write bigcharacter posters included in the 1975 constitution of the PRCthe socalled Cultural Revolution constitution because of its many radical features These rights were removed when the constitution was thoroughly rewritten in 1982 after the Maoist era had ended Four Cardinal Principles the ideological guidelines for economic reform spelled out by Deng Xiaoping in a speech in March 1979 in which he said that in pursuing mod ernization it was necessary for China to 1 uphold the socialist road 2 uphold the dictatorship of the proletariat 3 uphold the leadership of the communist party and 4 uphold MarxismLeninism and Mao Zedong Thought The CCP still emphasizes the Four Cardinal Principles as part of its guiding ideology Free China that area of southwest China not under the control of the Japanese or the communists during World War II but under the authority of the Republic of China See Chongqing The term was frequently used by the United States and its allies during the cold war to refer to Taiwan in contrast to the Peoples Republic which was called Red China Gang of Four a label first applied by Chairman Mao Zedong in May 1975 to his wife Jiang Qing and her radical Shanghai colleagues Zhang Chunqiao Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen as part of a warning to them to stop their secretive factional maneuverings within the party leadership Practice MarxismLeninism and not revisionism unite and dont split be open and aboveboard and dont intrigue and conspire Dont function as a gang of four dont do it any more why do you keep doing it The label was then publicly applied to them as part of a campaign of denunciation after their arrest in October 1976 The Gang of Four was put on trial in 1980 and its members sentenced to long prison terms General Line the overall policy direction set by the leadership of the CCP Gini Index a statistical measure of the inequality of income distribution in a country It ranges from 0 perfect equality to 1 perfect inequality Chinas Gini Index has been going up during most of the reform era Going Out Strategy Chinas push to purchase overseas firms mines and resources to locate its own companies overseas and to list Chinese firms on global stock markets to acquire foreign capital This strategy began in the 1990s but has accelerated dramatically since the mid2000s Gradualism an approach to economic development that implements reform in a cautious stepbystep manner Chinas economic reforms are often characterized as being gradu alist in contrast to the big bang approach of rapid and multifaceted change under taken by the former Soviet Union and many Eastern European countries after the fall of the regions communistparty states But there have been big bang aspects to Chinas reform such as decollectivization the wave of privatization of stateowned and collec tive enterprises in the 1990s See also segmented deregulation 504 g l o s s a r y Great Leap Forward Maos utopian push from 1958 to 1960 to accelerate Chinas eco nomic development to catch up with the industrial powers and its ideological advance ment into the era of true communism The Leap was a mass mobilization campaign under party leadership that involved a radical reorganization of society relied on labor power and emphasized human will and revolutionary fervor to reach everhigher levels of production It ended in one of the worst famines in human history and an industrial depression that wiped out nearly all the economic gains of the CCPs first years in power See also peoples communes Lushan Conference Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution see Cultural Revolution Great Wall built as a fortification by various Chinese dynasties beginning with the Qin 221206 BCE to keep barbarians from the north from invading China It stretches from the coast northeast of Beijing about 4000 miles 6400 km to the west Greater China usually refers to close economic integration of the PRC particularly the southern province of Guangdong Hong Kong Macao and Taiwan Guanxi literally connections specifically informal interpersonal relationships or networks Guanxi can be based on a wide variety of connections between people such as native place school ties or common acquaintances and imply both trust and reciprocity Guerrilla Warfare a method of warfare in which small highly mobile units made up of fighters called guerrillas the word guerrilla is derived from the Spanish meaning lit tle war attack harass distract or demoralize larger and stronger forces of the enemy Guerrillas often rely on the support of civilians to provide them with food medicine shelter and intelligence Han the largest ethnic group in China comprising about 92 percent of the Chinese people in the PRC The name comes from the Han dynasty 206 BCE220 CE considered the great est of Chinas early dynasties Harmonious Socialist Society the core of former leader Hu Jintaos political plat form reflecting the proclaimed policy goals of his administration It emphasizes righting some of the imbalances and problems of Chinas rapid economic growth since the 1980s including income and development inequalities especially between city and countryside environmental degradation and the collapse of the health care system See also Scientific Outlook on Development High Qing the period during the latter half of the eighteenth century when the Qing dynasty was at the height of its cultural political and economic glory higherlevel agricultural producers cooperatives HLAPCs see collectives Hong Kong a special administrative region of the PRC formally known as the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region HKSAR It is a small area 420 square miles located on the far southern coast of China with a population of around seven million But it is also a dynamic financial and commercial center and has a standard of living that is comparable to the United States and Japan Hong Kong became a special administrative region of the Peoples Republic of China on July 1 1997 For about 150 years prior to that it was a colony of Great Britain See also Basic Law chief executive Executive Council Legislative Council One Country Two Systems Hong Kong Special Administrative Region HKSAR see Hong Kong house churches unofficial and officially illegal places of Christian worship in China that may range from tiny gatherings in rural villages to very large urban congregations House churches or underground churches are illegal because they are not affiliated with the stateapproved religious organizations such as the Protestant ThreeSelf Patriotic Movement or the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association g l o s s a r y 505 Household Registration system or hukou system first implemented in the mid1950s as a way to control the movement of Chinas population and to prevent the massive ruraltourban migration that plagued many developing countries Each individual had either an agricultural or a nonagricultural registration hukou which dictated where he or she could for example live work go to school receive health care and get and use ration coupons The system was very effective in achieving its purposes but was criticized for the way it reinforced and compounded urbanrural inequalities to the great disadvantage of those with agricultural registrations The hukou system began to break down in the 1980s with decollectivization market reforms and the need for labor mobility The system is being reformed but has not been abolished Household Responsibility system the basic form of organization in Chinas rural econ omy since the early 1980s when the peoples communes were abolished In this system individual households contract for use rights to the land which is still owned by the village and families make the decisions about crops investment savings labor alloca tion and marketing There were brief experiments with this type of organization in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward but they were stopped by Mao who regarded them as a sprout of capitalism See also decollectivization Hukou System see household registration system Hundred Days Reform a period in mid1898 when the emperor issued edicts ordering farreaching changes to save the Qing dynasty from further decline Among the pro posed reforms were modernizing the civil service examination system the entire edu cational system and the institutions of government The reforms were brought to a halt when the Empress Dowager Cixi ordered the arrest of the reformers and put the emperor under palace arrest Hundred Flowers Movement launched by Mao Zedong and the CCP in 1956 to let a hundred flowers bloom let a hundred schools of thought contend as an invitation for freedom of discussion and debate about progress and problems in the first years of communist rule in China The criticism was much more severe and extensive than the leadership expected with the result that much of it was labeled as poisonous weeds antagonistic contradictions rather than fragrant flowers nonantagonistic con tradictions The movement was shut down in 1957 and followed by the AntiRightist Campaign which suppressed and punished hundreds of thousands of people mostly intellectuals Ideology a systematic and comprehensive set of ideas and beliefs that provide a way of looking at and understanding the world or some aspect of it A political ideology addresses fundamental questions about power such as who should have power how should it be organized distributed and used and what are the ultimate goals for which power is used Imperial Period Chinese history from the establishment of the Qin dynasty in 221 BCE to the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912 CE Indirect Election an electoral process in which persons elected to office are chosen not by voters at large but by members of a body that has previously been elected sometimes directly and sometimes also indirectly In China for example deputies to the National Peoples Congress are elected by the peoples congresses at the provincial level not by all the voters in the province In the United States senators were elected by state legisla tures before 1913 and in many countries today for example South Africa the president is indirectly elected by the national parliament rather than by all voters See also direct elections 506 g l o s s a r y InnerParty Democracy means allowing more open discussion and debate and more competitive elections within the Chinese Communist Party It is aimed at enhancing the democratic aspect of democratic centralism without undermining the key principle of centralized leadership According to Chinas current leaders one of Mao Zedongs big gest mistakes was violating and destroying innerparty democracy in the CCP Iron Rice Bowl the cradletograve benefits and lifetime employment that were guaran teed to workers in stateowned enterprises and to a somewhat lesser extent to peas ants in peoples communes during the Maoist era One major objective of the market reforms begun in the early 1980s was to smash the iron rice bowl which was considered to have been a costly drag on enterprise and commune finances as well as a disincentive to labor productivity and efficiency Jiangxi Soviet also known as the Chinese Soviet Republic the base area headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party from 1931 to 1934 located deep in the countryside of central China The CCP was forced to abandon the Jiangxi Soviet under assault by Chiang Kaisheks KMT army and to embark upon the Long March in October 1934 Job Assignment System or fenpei system a method of labor allocation used in China from the 1950s into the 1990s in which university students were assigned state sector jobs according to national needs upon graduation This was in exchange for the free university tuition and housing they had received Students had little choice over what jobs they were assigned or even where they were located Joint Ventures companies that are partly owned by private foreign investors and partly owned by the Chinese government or a Chinese firm When the PRC first opened to the world economy in the 1980s all foreign investment had to be in the form of a joint ven ture the share of foreign ownership was limited to less than 50 percent and the Chinese partner was always a stateowned enterprise or other government entity Now there are no such limits although some sectors of the economy especially the financial sector remain restricted to foreign involvement Korean War fought from 1950 to 1953 with the PRC and its ally North Korea the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea on the one side with limited Soviet support and on the other side the United States acting under the authorization of the United Nations and its ally South Korea the Republic of Korea It began with North Koreas invasion of South Korea which then led to the intervention of first the United States and then the PRC It ended in a truce that left the political situation on the Korean peninsula essentially unchanged For the PRC the outcome was a victory despite very heavy casualties including one of Maos sons because it had fought the United States to a stalemate The Korean War enhanced the legitimacy of the PRC internationally and the CCP nationally Kowtow literally knock head also known as the three kneelings and nine prostrations an act of submission performed by almost anyone who came into the presence of the Chinese emperor or more generally by any commoner in the presence of an imperial official Kuomintang KMT Guomindang in pinyin literally National Peoples Party founded by Sun Yatsen in 1912 to oppose the usurpation of power in the Republic of China by the warlord Yuan Shikai The KMT was taken over by Chiang Kaishek after Suns death in 1925 It then fought and in 1949 lost a civil war with the Chinese Communist Party after which it fled to Taiwan where it headed an authoritarian government until democ ratization began in the 1980s The KMT won the 2008 presidential and legislative election in Taiwan Also referred to as the Nationalist Party g l o s s a r y 507 Land Reform the process of redistributing land from those who own a lot to those who have little or none Land reform can be legal and peaceful with landlords compensated for their property or it can be extremely violent with the land seized by force and with out compensation In China most of the land reform carried out by the CCP in their base areas before 1949 and in the PRC in the early 1950s was of the latter type Law of Avoidance a rule of the imperial Chinese government that someone who had passed the civil service examination and was appointed to an official position could not serve in his native province this was in order to remove opportunities for favoritism to and pressure for special treatment by family and friends The CCP has implemented a version of this traditional practice in prohibiting officials in charge of investigating cor ruption from working in their own localities Leading Small Groups informal decisionmaking bodies set up by the CCP to deal with important issues that cut across bureaucratic and organizational boundaries There are about ten such groups at the national level including for example groups on foreign affairs on finance and economics and on state security Some leading small groups are more or less permanent and some are temporary The main purpose of these interagency executive committees is to better coordinate implementation of policies among various top decisionmaking bodies such the Politburo the State Council the Central Military Commission and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Legalism an influential school of Chinese thought that unlike Confucianism empha sizes strict laws and harsh punishments as the only sound basis for government Its golden age was during the Qin dynasty when scholars were persecuted and books were burned Legislative Council LegCo the legislature of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region HKSAR It was first established while Hong Kong was a British colony LegCo currently has seventy members with thirtyfive chosen from geographical constituencies through direct elections and thirtyfive elected by functional constituencies such as industry financial services labor education sports performing arts culture and pub lishing It plays an important role in Hong Kong politics and governance but is limited in its power because of the executivedominant nature of the political system which gives great authority to the HKSAR chief executive Letters and Visits the process by which Chinese citizens can lodge a complaint by mak ing a petition to the authorities Rather than going through the formal court system peti tioners seek official mediation through the Letters and Visits Offices to resolve problems such as local cadre abuse labors disputes and property rights Long March the epic and somewhat mythologized yearlong 6000mile trek of the Chinese Communist Party and supporters in 193435 through some of Chinas most dif ficult terrain from their Jiangxi Soviet base area in central China to Yanan in the north western province of Shaanxi More than one hundred thousand people began the Long March but less than ten thousand made it to Yanan It was during the Long March that Mao Zedong moved into the very top ranks of party leadership LowerLevel Agricultural Producer Cooperatives LLAPCs see cooperatives Lushan Conference an expanded meeting of the CCP Central Committee held in August 1959 to assess the progress and problems with the Great Leap Forward Chairman Mao Zedong reacted furiously to criticism of the Leap by Defense Minister and highranking party leader Peng Dehuai As a result Peng and others were purged as part of an antirightist campaign within the party and some of the radical aspects of the Leap were intensified until the reality of the famine forced a major policy shift in 1960 508 g l o s s a r y Macao a special administrative region of the PRC It is located on Chinas far southern coast about 37 miles southwest of Hong Kong It is only 11 square miles in area and has a population of a little over half a million Macao became a special administrative region of the Peoples Republic of China on December 20 1999 For about 150 years prior to that it was a Portuguese colony and Portugal first established its influence there in the sixteenth century It is one of the worlds great centers of casino gambling which pro foundly shapes its economics politics and relationship with the PRC See also casino capitalism Mainlanders people on Taiwan who came to the island in the late 1940s as part of the Kuomintangs retreat from the CCPs impending victory in the Chinese Civil War and their descendants See also Taiwanese Manchus a nonHan ethnic group native to what is now the Northeast of China formerly known as Manchuria They conquered China in 1644 and established the Qing dynasty Mao Zedong Thought the official name given by the Chinese Communist Party to the ideology of Mao Zedong Sometimes referred to by foreigners as Maoism Market Economy an economy in which market forces such as supply and demand and the profit motive rather than government policies and actions are the major determinant of economic outcomes See also capitalism market reform Market Reform the process of making the transition from a planned economy to a mar ket economy through policies that reduce the role of the government and increase the influence of market forces It also involves a reduction in the amount of state and collec tive ownership of property and other assets and increases private ownership Martial Law a system of administration usually invoked by a government in emer gency circumstances in which the constitution is suspended and the military is used to maintain order MarxismLeninism the ideological foundation of communism and communist partystates It is based on the ideas of Karl Marx 18181883 particularly his emphasis on the role of classes and class struggle in history and V I Lenin 18701924 notably his prescriptions for the organization of a revolutionary political party Mass Incidents protests demonstrations riots and other forms of civil unrest involving more than a handful of people Causes of mass incidents include shady land deals that enrich developers and sometimes cadres but dont adequately compensate villagers environmental problems ethnic tensions forced demolitions of housing and relocation of occupants corrupt or abusive officials police brutality and labor disputes Mass Line the Maoist theory of leadership or work style that emphasizes that officials must always remain in close touch with those they lead It rejects leaderless spontaneous action by the masses as well as leadership that is aloof or divorced from the masses It is one of the principles of Mao Zedong Thought that the current leadership of the CCP holds to be valid Mass Mobilization Campaign a style of policy implementation used by the Chinese Communist Party that combines leadership and direction from above and the mobilized involvement of people on the local level to achieve specific objectives Mass Organizations in the PRC associations that represent the interests of a specific constituency but which are under the leadership of the CCP The major mass organiza tion include the All China Womens Federation ACWF Chinese Communist Youth League CYL the All China Federation of Trade Unions and the AllChina Federation of Industry and Commerce Materialism the view that all things are based on material conditions not ideas or ideals idealism Marxism offers a materialist view of history historical materialism that sees g l o s s a r y 509 change as the result of economic development and its impact on the class structure of society References to Marxist materialism basically refer to the primacy the theory gives to economic aspects of human existence sometimes called economic determinism May 16 Directive 1966 formally Circular of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution marked the formal announcement of the launching of the Cultural Revolution May 7th Cadre Schools established in 1968 during the Cultural Revolution to train urban cadres to follow the mass line in carrying out their work The bureaucrats were sent for periods ranging from a couple of months to several years to work and live among the masses mostly in rural communes while also engaging in political study and selfcriticism The name of the cadre schools came from a directive Chairman Mao Zedong issued on May 7 1966 to the Peoples Liberation that in addition to preparing to fight a war it should become a big school by having soldiers engage in a wide range of civilian activities including agricultural production May Fourth Movement roughly 1919 to 1924 a crucial period in Chinas political social and cultural development The name of the movement is taken from the events of May 4 1919 when students and others gathered in Beijing and other cities to protest the terms of the Versailles Peace Treaty which gave Japan control of former German concessions in Shandong province following World War I The major themes of the movement were national independence dignity and salvation Many intellectuals were radicalized by the events of the time one result of which was the founding of the Chinese Communist Party on July 1 1921 See also TwentyOne Demands Meiji Restoration the period beginning in 1868 when power in Japan came into the hands of a modernizing elite who in the name of the Emperor Meiji reigned 18521912 embarked the country on the path of industrialization and political reform that would transform Japan into first a regional and then a world power Missing Women the fact that in some countries there are many millions fewer females than there should be given natural sex balance ratios See also onechild policy sex ratio imbalance Nanjing Decade the period from the establishment of the capital of the Republic of China at Nanjing by Chiang Kaishek and the Kuomintang in 1927 to the takeover of the city by Japanese forces in 1937 It is considered by many to be a time of relative peace and economic development for China Nanjing literally means Southern Capital National Congress of the Communist Party of China or National Party Congress meets every five years for about one week The most recent party congress elected in 2012 had more than 2200 delegates chosen in indirect elections by CCP organizations around the country According to the constitution of the CCP the national congress has the power to elect top leaders of the party but most of its proceedings are symbolic and ceremonial and the decisions it makes have already been approved by the CCPs higherlevel organizations including the Central Committee the Politburo and the Standing Committee National Peoples Congress NPC the national parliament or legislature of the Peoples Republic of China It consists of more than three thousand deputies elected every five years and meets annually for about two weeks According to the PRC constitu tion the NPC has significant powers such as electing the president and declaring war While more active in recent years in shaping legislation and serving as a forum for discus sion of important issues it still operates within the framework of party leadership and is not a truly independent branch of government Nationalist Party see Kuomintang 510 g l o s s a r y Natural Villages small rural communities in China that have emerged naturally over a very long period of time in most cases the PRC put several natural villages together to be governed as a single administrative village NeoAuthoritarianism a school of political thought in China that borrows from tradi tional Chinese tenets of meritocracy legalism and hierarchy as the basis of a new form of party dictatorship This school of thought is referred to as Chinas New Right and favors elite rule by technocrats a strong military and a socialist market economy NeoLiberalism an economic philosophy and the policies that go along with it that emphasizes free market capitalism a limited role for the state in managing the economy and unrestricted international trade New Culture Movement a period of great intellectual ferment in China in the 1910s to 1920s when intellectuals attacked Confucianism as the source of the nations problems and lauded science democracy and other Western ideas A wide range of philosophies from radical and liberal to conservative and reactionary were debated on university cam puses The movement included a language revolution that promoted a vernacular bai hua writing style in which the written language is the same as the spoken language to replace literary Chinese wenyan a difficult grammatical form that was an obstacle to increasing the rate of general literacy See also May Fourth Movement New Democracy the early period 19491952 of rule by the CCP after the founding of the Peoples Republic when the party promised to go slow in the undertaking the socialist transformation of China and to maintain a mixed economy of both state and private ownership of property and include noncommunists in the governing of the country New Life Movement an effort by Chiang Kaishek in the 1930s to resurrect Confucianism in the Republic of China in order to revive traditional values and cultivate civic virtue It was part of an attempt to both bolster the legitimacy of his rule and to offer an alternative to communism New Social Strata includes groups in Chinese society that have been created during the process of market reform and internationalization most importantly private entrepre neurs managers and technical staff who work for foreign enterprises as well as profes sionals intellectuals and others who are selfemployed or work outside the public sec tor of the economy The Three Represents theory was an ideological rationalization for allowing members of these strata to join the CCP Nomenklatura a Russian term meaning name list refers to several thousand highranking leadership or cadre positions in the party government and military as well as large business firms key universities and other institutions that must be approved by the CCP organization department at the relevant level This personnel management system was adopted from the Soviet communist party Control of the cadre appointment process is one of the CCPs most important sources of power NonAntagonistic Contradiction contradiction among the people a difference that can be resolved through debate discussion and other noncoercive means because the opposing sides are still part of the people who support the revolution socialism and the CCP See also contradiction antagonistic contradiction North China the area between Beijing in the north and the Yangtze River in central China Northeast the three provinces of northeastern China Heilongjiang Jilin and Liaoning formerly called Manchuria Northern Expedition began in southern China in 1926 as a joint military campaign by the KMTCCP United Front to advance against warlordheld cities with the goal of defeating the warlords and taking control of the government of the Republic of China Drew to a close in 1927 when Chiang Kaishek and the KMT established the capital of g l o s s a r y 511 the Republic at Nanjing and technically brought an end to the Warlord Era See also White Terror One Country Two Systems the principle first enunciated by Deng Xiaoping in the early 1980s and agreed to in essence in the SinoBritish Joint Declaration of 1984 under which Hong Kong became a special administrative region SAR of the PRC This meant that although Hong Kong would become part of the PRC socialism would not be implemented there and its capitalist system and way of life would not be changed for fifty years The principle also applies to Macao the other SAR of the PRC It has been proposed by the PRC as the basis of an agreement for reunification with Taiwan but Taiwan has not shown any interest in those terms OneChild Policy the official population policy of the PRC since 1979 It stipulates that with increasingly broad exceptions couples may have only one child The policy has been implemented in various stages and by various means ranging from coercion to monetary fines to education Chinas population growth rate has decreased dramatically but there is debate about whether it was the onechild policy or other factors that were the primary cause of fertility decline The policy has also had important unintended consequences such as a sex ratio imbalance missing girls and a rapidly aging population in terms of the percentage of people over the age of sixtyfive which will put a strain on Chinas woefully inadequate pension welfare and health care systems OneLevelDown Management System a system of personnel management used in China in which cadres at each level have the authority to appoint their own subordinates For example the head of a county government can appoint the head of the town govern ment without seeking approval from higher authorities at the municipal or provincial levels Open Recommendation and Selection a process of selecting state and party officials that has been implemented in some towns and cities in China to increase competition public input and transparency in such appointments through the use of means such as written exams candidate forums telephone hotlines and even televised debates It does not involve direct election and the CCP organization department still has ultimate authority over the process Open Sea Nominations a process of selecting candidates for village committee Open up the West a campaign launched by the PRC in the late 1990s to steer more resources to the western part of the country including Tibet and Xinjiang in the effort to narrow the gaps between those regions and Chinas coastal provinces which have benefitted much more from reform era policies Also know as the Great Western Development Drive Operational Code the sum of beliefs of political leaders about the nature of politics and political conflict the possibility of bringing about change and the strategy and tac tics required to achieve political objectives The operational code of a leader influences decisionmaking and therefore has policy consequences Perceptions of the enemy are an important part of an operational code Opium War 18391842 between Britain and Qing China caused by the clash between British insistence on being able to sell opium in China and Chinese efforts to halt the trade It ended in a humiliating defeat for China and contributed significantly to the weakening and ultimate downfall of the Qing dynasty A Second Opium War was fought from 1856 to 1865 with much the same outcome See also Treaty of Nanjing unequal treaties Organic Law of Villagers Committees first introduced in 1988 and revised in 1998 the legislation under which elections for local leaders take place in Chinas rural villages An organic law in general is a fundamental or basic law that specifies the foundation of governance in this case in Chinas villages 512 g l o s s a r y Organization department of the CCP is in charge of reviewing and approving all per sonnel appointments of leading cadres on the nomenklatura list There are organization departments at most levels of the CCP from the top the Central Committee down to the county Outer China a somewhat imprecise geographical term that refers to the vast but sparsely populated area to the west of China Proper and which was incorporated into the Chinese empire later in its history The area has a large concentration of Chinas ethnic minorities Party Congress see National Congress of the Communist Party of China PatronClient Relations or clientelism involves exchanges between a more powerful patron and a less powerful client The patron may offer resources such as land or a job or protection to the client while the client provides various services including labor personal loyalty and political support to the patron Peaceful Evolution a term used by the PRC to suggest that the West particularly the United States is trying to peacefully undermine CCP rule in China so that it evolves Westernstyle multiparty democracy Peasants generally those who earn their living by working a relatively small quantity of land and who produce just enough if that for the subsistence of their family Mao Zedong Thought is in part characterized as a variant of MarxismLeninism because of the important place it gives to peasants as a class in taking a leading role in the revolution to seize political power and in the socialist transformation of society Peoples Armed Police PAP Chinas paramilitary force that is primarily responsible for internal security It is estimated that there are about 15 million members of the PAP It was the PAP that responded in force to the ethnic unrest in Tibet in 2008 and Xinjiang in 2009 Peoples Communes the form of rural production and living that was established in 1958 during the Great Leap Forward The communes virtually eliminated private property in the countryside and created larger five thousand to twentyfive thousand families and more radical and egalitarian forms of living than the collectives that preceded them They were designed to be comprehensive selfreliant units that would pave the way to communism through agricultural industrial and ideological development Although the peoples communes were significantly scaled back in size function and authority after the failure of the Great Leap they remained the highest unit of economic and social organization in the Chinese countryside until the beginning of the reform era in the early 1980s Peoples Congresses the legislative bodies of all levels of government in the PRC from the National Peoples Congress at the top and extending down to district peoples con gresses in the urban areas and town peoples congresses in the rural areas The peoples congress is constitutionally empowered to supervise the work of the peoples govern ment at its level Only town and district peoples congresses are directly elected by all voters other levels of peoples congress are chosen by indirect elections Peoples Daily the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party Peoples Democratic Dictatorship a Chinese Communist variation on the dictator ship of the proletariat It is meant to convey that classes besides the proletariat includ ing the peasantry revolutionary intellectuals and other groups supportive of party lead ership are part of the people in whose name dictatorship is exercised over the enemies of socialism It is also implies that the people are able to enjoy democracy Article 1 of the constitution of the Peoples Republic of China defines the country as a socialist g l o s s a r y 513 state under the peoples democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants Peoples Government the executive branch of the government at all formal levels of the PRC political system as in provincial peoples government or town peoples government See also peoples congress Peoples Liberation Army PLA the combined armed forces of the Peoples Republic of China including the army navy and air force Peoples Republic of China PRC the formal name of China since the Chinese Communist Party came to power in October 1949 Permanent Revolution in Mao Zedong Thought the idea that there will always be a need for revolution if human society is not going to stagnate although the form of that revolution changes as society develops Mao concluded that even after the overthrow of capitalism and during the socialist transformation of China the permanent revolution would still take the form of class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie Pinyin the system of Romanization or transliteration used in the Peoples Republic of China to make the pronunciation of Chinese characters accessible to people unfamiliar with the language Planned Economy or centrally planned economy or command economy an economic system that is controlled by the central government which makes all important deci sions concerning production investment prices and distribution of goods and services It relies on plans and commands rather than the free market to regulate the economy Planned economies were key features of communist partystates such as the Soviet Union The economic reforms introduced in China since the early 1980s have greatly reduced but by no means eliminated the role of planning Plenum or plenary session a meeting of the CCP Central Committee normally held annually between the elections of the Central Committee by the National Congress of the Communist Party of China which convenes every five years Politburo or Political Bureau the secondhighest level of leadership in the Chinese Communist Party It now consists of about twentyfive members and generally meets monthly See also Standing Committee Populist Coalition a group of current Chinese leaders mostly of humble origins who want to shift Chinas policy priorities to address some of the serious problems such as vast economic inequalities and environmental degradation that resulted from the growthat anycost strategy pursued for much of the last three decades The populists often voice the concerns of vulnerable social groups such as farmers migrant workers and the urban poor and support greater attention to the development of the inland regions of the coun try See also elitist coalition tuanpai Pragmatist Faction or practice faction a group of CCP leaders who early in the postMao era supported a return to a less ideological approach to policymaking under the slogan practice is the sole criterion for testing truth They were led by veteran cadre Chen Yun and were strong advocates of restoring power to Deng Xiaoping who had been purged by Mao in April 1976 They were opposed by the neoMaoist whateverist faction Predatory State A government that preys on its people and the economy for the benefit of those in power Presidium of the National Peoples Congress the organization that presides over each session of the National Peoples Congress of the PRC It sets the agenda and determines the process for legislation to be considered by committees and voted on The Presidium also decides on the candidates for election to Chinas top leadership posi tions including president vice president and the chief justice of the Supreme Peoples 514 g l o s s a r y Court although in reality these candidates are determined beforehand by the Central Committee of the CCP Primary Stage Of Socialism or initial stage of socialism declared by the CCP in the early 1980s to be where the PRC was in terms of its level of ideological and economic development This provided justification for using aspects of capitalism and the market economy to promote Chinas economic development It was said that one of Maos big gest mistakes was to skip or compress this primary stage of socialism by eliminating all elements of capitalism like the profit motive and moving too fast in the mid1950s in implementing Chinas socialist transformation Princelings an informal group or faction of current CCP leaders who are children of revolutionary heroes or highranking officials They are mostly associated with the elitist coalition in Chinese politics Proletariat the industrial working class in a capitalist society which Marx saw as the most exploited class in history and the most revolutionary Mao used the term more broadly to refer to an ideology embracing revolutionary change that empowers the working masses See also bourgeoisie class struggle Province the level of administration in the PRC just below the central government China has twentytwo provinces Public Security Bureau is the chief law enforcement agency in Chinese cities and most other locales Its main functions are policing and maintaining social order but it also performs other duties such as supervising the household registration system hukou system Local public security bureaus are under the authority of the Ministry of Public Security in Beijing Qin dynasty 221206 BCE regarded as the beginning of the Chinese empire and Chinese imperial history even though Chinese cultural history dates back another two thousand years The Emperor Qin established the dynasty after defeating and unifying a number of small independent kingdoms Qing dynasty imperial Chinas last dynasty established by a nonHan ethnic minority the Manchus in 1644 and overthrown by the 1911 Revolution that led to the founding of the Republic of China in 1912 Rape of Nanjing Nanking or Nanjing Massacre occurred during a sixweek period beginning in December 1937 when Japanese forces killed an estimated two hundred thou sand to three hundred thousand Chinese and raped tens of thousands in their takeover of the city of Nanjing the capital of the Republic of China Rectification Campaign a Chinese Communist Party method of enforcing compliance of its members with the prevailing party ideology policies and leadership The method was used both before the CCP came to power most famously in Yanan in 1942 and afterward Reeducation Through Labor laodong jiaoyang or laojiao is an administrative sanc tion Chinese public security bureaus police impose without judicial process to detain people for up to four years It is used to punish those accused of minor crimes but has also been wielded against political targets including democracy activists eth nic dissidents in Xinjiang and Tibet and Falun Gong and underground house church adherents It was announced in November 2013 that it would be abolished Red Capitalists refers to member of the CCP who are also private entrepreneurs Red And Expert the Maoist ideal for scientists technical personnel and other intellectu als to combine both ideological commitment and knowledge of their field in the service of the country the people and the revolution Red Army founded in August 1927 as the armed force of the Chinese Communist Party It was the predecessor to the Peoples Liberation Army g l o s s a r y 515 Red Guards organizations of students committed to carrying out Maos call for a Cultural Revolution They first emerged in Beijing high schools and universities beginning in June 1966 but soon became a nationwide movement though never under any kind of central direction The Red Guards were responsible for the massive destruction of property and cultural artifacts as well as widespread brutal psychological and physical persecution of alleged class enemies They engaged in increasingly violent factionalism and armed clashes until Mao decreed that order be restored in 1968 by the Peoples Liberation Army The Red Guards were disbanded and more than twenty million of them were sent to the countryside to labor with and learn from the peasants Reform Era the period in China since the late 1970s when Deng Xiaoping first introduced the dramatic economic changes that took the country in a very different direction from where Mao Zedong had led it The reform era is said to have formally begun in December 1978 at the plenum of the CCP Central Committee See also Building Socialism with Chinese Characteristics Reform Through Labor Laodong Gaizao or Laogai a prison system used mostly to incarcerate those convicted of serious crimes The laogai camps are often located in more remote parts of the country the living conditions are harsh and the labor required of inmates whether in fields mines or factories is hard Regional Power Hierarchy the idea that there is an implicit ranking rather than a balance in the power relationship among countries in a region The tributary system of imperial China in which other countries could trade with China as long as they rec ognized Chinas political and cultural supremacy was a regional power hierarchy Some scholars believe that the recent rise of China marks the emergence of another regional power hierarchy in East Asia Rent Seeking refers to seeking monetary gains rents through political rather than eco nomic activity Rent seeking may be legal lobbying by interest groups for a larger share of the pie or illegal bureaucrat manipulating government regulations in order to profit themselves Republic of China the government of China following the overthrow of the Qing dynasty in the 1911 Revolution until the founding of the Peoples Republic of China in 1949 following the conclusion of the Chinese Civil War Toward the end of the civil war more than a million supporters of the ruling party of the Republic of China the Kuomintang and its leader Chiang Kaishek fled to the island of Taiwan where with American support they were able to establish a stronghold Taiwan still officially calls itself the Republic of China ROC Republican Period Chinese history from the establishment of the Republic of China in 1912 to the founding of the Peoples Republic of China in 1949 Residents Committee a quasiofficial unit of urban administration in China that func tions below the street office and may encompass between one hundred and one thou sand families Residents committees are made up of three to seven members headed by a director and carry out a variety of functions in the area under their jurisdiction including organizing volunteer security patrols or cleanup squads posting official announcements hearing residents complaints and conveying them to higher levels and even dispute mediation The committee members are generally elected to fixed terms by residents Residents committee are being replaced by communities shequ Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the Peoples Republic of China a major document published by the CCP in 1981 as the authoritative and still largely upheld assessment by the postMao leadership of the partys achievements and shortcomings since 1949 The Resolution acknowledged that Chairman Mao Zedong had made serious mistakes but concluded 516 g l o s s a r y that his achievements were greater than his failings It also contained an assessment of Mao Zedong Thought that distinguished between those aspects that were wrong or taken to extremes and those that remain relevant today to the partys guiding ideology Revisionism a betrayal of MarxismLeninism by revising its core principles The CCP accused the Soviet Union of revisionism and the label was also applied to Maos oppo nents in the Cultural Revolution Revolutionary Committees were created during 1968 to 1969 as the provisional organs of government to replace those destroyed by the Cultural Revolution They consisted of representatives of the party the army and the masses and were established at the pro vincial municipal and other subnational levels of administration as well as in schools factories peoples communes and other institutions Initially the military was usually the dominant force on these committees since it was their responsibility to restore and maintain order after the chaos of the Cultural Revolution The Revolutionary Committees remained the primary administrative organs of the PRC until they were replaced by peo ples governments in the late 1970s Rightful Resistance a type of grassroots protest in which the protesters invoke national laws when they seek redress for abuses by local officials Rightful resisters believe that the legal system and the national leadership are on their side The PRC government usu ally permits this kind of protest but some rightful resistance pushes the legal limits and sometimes goes beyond in which case the it meets with state repression River Elegy a 1988 documentary that aired on China Central Television scathing about Chinas cultural chauvinism and insularity characterized as yellow culture reflecting the dull yellow color of the Loess Plateau in northwestern China where Chinese civi lization began and admiring of its cosmopolitan and overseas influences called blue culture in reference to the seafaring and diasporic nature of this side of Chinese culture The program was initially supported by highranking CCP leaders but after the Beijing Massacre in June 1989 it was banned and several of those associated with its making were either arrested or left the country Scientific Outlook on Development the general rubric under which former CCP leader Hu Jintaos contributions to Chinese communist ideology is put It incorporates the idea of creating a harmonious socialist society Second Opium War fought in 1856 to 1860 between Qing China and Great Britain which was joined by France The cause had less to do with opium per se as with Western frus tration more generally with the lack of progress by the Qing dynasty in implementing the terms of the Treaty of Nanjing which ended the first Opium War in 1842 The war resulted in another humiliating defeat for the Qing and the imposition of another unequal treaty the Treaty of Tianjin which further opened China to foreign merchants and missionaries legalized the opium trade and ceded a second part of Hong Kong Kowloon to Britain Secretariat an important CCP organization that handles the Partys routine business and administrative matters Secretariat members there are currently seven meet daily and are responsible for coordinating the countrys major events and important meetings as well as top leaders foreign and domestic travels segmented deregulation an approach to economic reform that implements the new policies over time in different sectors of the economy or different parts of the country The implementation of Special Economic Zones SEZs in China is an example of seg mented deregulation See also gradualism SelfStrengthening Movement a series of efforts undertaken roughly between 1861 and 1898 to save the Qing dynasty after it had been seriously weakened by external con flicts and internal rebellion The movement was led mostly by powerful provincial Han g l o s s a r y 517 Chinese leaders and aimed to strengthen China through economic and military modern ization Its approach was captured in the idea that Western techniques could be adopted for their use yong while Chinese learning could be preserved as the essence ti of the nation It was generally opposed by the Empress Dowager Cixi and the conservatives in the Qing court SeventeenPoint Agreement formally The Agreement Between the Central Government and the Local Government of Tibet on Measures for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet the surrender document signed in May 1951 by the Dalai Lamas government and the PRC after the invasion of Tibet by Chinas Peoples Liberation Army The agree ment acknowledged that Tibet was part of China but also stated that the Dalai Lamas position would not be changed and that Tibets religion and customs would be respected Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome SARS a highly contagious potentially fatal virus that first broke out in southern China in 20022003 and eventually led to 774 deaths worldwide Chinese officials initially covered up or downplayed the severity of the epi demic but were forced to confront it when it spread outside the country The experience is considered a wakeup call to the PRC government that it must deal more proactively with potential and real epidemics such as HIVAIDS Sex Ratio Imbalance an unnatural ratio between males and females in a population par ticularly as reflected at the time of birth The natural gender balance is 105 boys for every 100 girls China has recently had a sex ratio of 119 boys for every 100 girls and in some places it has been as high as 130 boys per 100 girls The cause of serious imbalance is the countrys onechild policy Many rural couples desperate to have a boy because of customary sonpreference and economic necessity have resorted to female infanticide abandonment of baby daughters and more recently sexselective abortion made possible by widely available and inexpensive ultrasound tests See also missing girls Shequ See community Sinification the process of being sinified that is being absorbed by assimilated to or deeply influenced by Chinese Sinitic culture society or thought In the imperial period both the Mongols and the Manchus were sinified after they had conquered China and established ruling dynasties Likewise Mao Zedong is said to have sinified MarxismLeninism by adapting it to Chinas particular circumstances as a economically poor peasant society SinoBritish Joint Declaration formally known as the Joint Declaration of the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Government of the Peoples Republic of China on the Question of Hong Kong signed in December 1984 It specified the terms under which the PRC would take over the sovereignty of Hong Kong on July 1 1997 Hong Kong had become a British colony in stages during the nineteenth century See Basic Law One Country Two Systems SinoJapanese War 1895 sparked by competition between Qing China and imperial Japan over influence in Korea Ended in a particularly humiliating defeat for China since Japan was viewed with disdain in the traditional Chinese worldview One result of the war was that Taiwan became a colony of Japan and remained so until the end of World War II The invasion and occupation of much of eastern China by Japan from 1937 to 1945 is also referred to as the SinoJapanese War SinoSoviet Split the ideological conflict between the Chinese Communist Party and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that began to appear in the late 1950s The split involved a number of issues including major differences over how to assess the international situation during the Cold War and how to deal with the United States Each side accused the other of betraying MarxismLeninism Hostilities reached the point of 518 g l o s s a r y military clashes along the SinoSoviet border in 1969 Relations between the two coun tries were normalized in the 1980s See revisionism Small And Medium Enterprises SMEs enterprises of a certain scale in the PRC as determined by some combination of number of employees capital or the value of assets and sales volume Since 1997 all SMEs in China have been privatized leaving only large enterprises owned by the state SMEs are one of the most dynamic sectors of the Chinese economy in terms of growth and innovation Socialism in Marxism the stage of human history between capitalism and communism See also socialist transformation Socialist democracy is the type of democracy that the PRC says it is practicing and perfecting It is said to be democracy for all the people unlike democracy in capitalist countries which favors the rich and powerful How socialist democracy operates in prac tice is determined by the CCP See also peoples democratic dictatorship Socialist Education Movement 19621966 aimed at ideologically reinvigorating vil lage cadres and combating corruption It only reached about onethird of Chinas vil lages Mao Zedong and Liu Shaoqi had some differences over how the movement should be conducted which became a major source of Maos growing unhappiness with Liu on the eve of the Cultural Revolution Socialist Legality is how the PRC refers to the nature of its legal system implying that it is different from and better than capitalist legality which is seen as heavily weighted in favor of the rich In contrast socialist legality is said to serve the interests of all the people Like other important areas of Chinese society the CCP claims the right to exer cise a leading role in the legal system Socialist Market Economy the official designation given by the PRC to its current eco nomic system The implication is that the economy combines elements of both socialism and the free market capitalism In November 2013 the CCP announced that the mar ket would become the decisive force in the economy Socialist Transformation the process of moving the country from capitalism to socialism notably through the abolition of most private ownership the nationalization of industry and commerce and the collectivization of agriculture Once socialism has been established the ideological goal is to develop it further and prepare for the ultimate transition from socialism to communism Soft Power the use of noncoercive means such as diplomatic cultural and economic influence by a state to advance its interests and influence other nations contrast to hard power which involves use of military means or threats and other forms of coercion South China the area between the Yangtze River in central China and the countrys southern borders Southern Inspection Tour or Southern Journey undertaken by Deng Xiaoping in 1992 to investigate firsthand the situation in Chinas most economically dynamic region in Guangdong province bordering Hong Kong Deng concluded that China should make economic reform and openingtotheworld its highest priority again after a period of retrenchment following the Beijing Massacre of 1989 Special Administrative Region SAR administrative units of the PRC that have a sig nificant degree of local autonomy in all matters other than foreign relations and defense China has two special administrative regions the Hong Kong SAR a former British colony that returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 and the Macao SAR a former Portuguese colony that reverted to China in 1999 SARs are much more selfgoverning than are the autonomous regions of the PRC such as Tibet and Xinjiang But ultimate authority resides in Beijing g l o s s a r y 519 Special Economic Zones SEZs or Export Processing Zones EPZs areas of the coun try that are allowed to implement incentives designed to attract foreign investment by firms that will produce goods for export Such incentives may include tax holidays low rents guaranteed supply of materials and utilities and inexpensive labor The benefits to the host country include job creation and the transfer of technology and management skills Chinas first SEZs were established in the early 1980s followed by a rapid expan sion of similar open cities and development zones in many parts of the country but especially along the coast Spiritual Pollution a term that was widely used in China in 1983 to 1984 during a cam paign against ideas and influences mostly from abroad which according to the CCP contaminated the thinking and threatened the wellbeing of the Chinese people It was a vague term that was applied to everything from democracy to pornography See also bourgeois liberalization Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party It is the most powerful leadership organization in the PRC It cur rently has seven members headed by the general secretary Xi Jinping Standing Committee of the National Peoples Congress SCNPC is responsible for any issues that require congressional consideration when the full National Peoples Congress is not in session It generally convenes every two months with each meeting lasting about one week State Asset Supervision and Administration Commission SASAC the PRC gov ernment organization that oversees enterprises that remain under state control SASAC covers five sectors of the economytelecommunications petroleum and refining metal lurgy steel and other metals electricity and military industry State Capitalism an economic system in which the government plays a dominant role in guiding the market and owns or controls assets that represent a significant share to the countrys total gross domestic product State Council the cabinet of the central government of the PRC It is led by the premier and consists of vice premiers state councillors who are senior government leaders with broad responsibilities ministers or commissioners who head functional departments such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the National Health and Family Planning Commission and a secretarygeneral who manages the daytoday business of the Council state farms huge agricultural enterprises run the by PRC central government They are usually located in more remote parts of the country such as the Northeast and Xinjiang They are run much like stateowned enterprises The number of state farms has been reduced in the reform era but as of 2010 there were still about 1800 of them employing more than 33 million people StateBuilding the process of establishing and strengthening the formal institutions and processes of government at the national and subnational levels StateOwned Enterprise SOE a company that is owned and operated by some level of state administration By the mid1950s all businesses in China had been nationalized and brought under the authority of state planning SOEs received production quotas from the state were supplied with all the inputs needed for production from the state and had to sell its output to the state at fixed prices Managers were appointed by the state SOEs were not allowed to fail and if they got into financial trouble the state would bail them out The economic reforms particularly since the 1990s have greatly reduced the num ber of SOEs in China and have streamlined those that still exist as well as making them accountable for their bottom line Tens of millions of workers have been laid off from closed or reformed SOEs See also iron rice bowl work unit 520 g l o s s a r y Street Office or subdistrict the lowest official unit of formal urban administration in China Chinese cities are divided into districts which in turn are divided into subdistricts called street offices The street office staff are government cadres and there may be a small police station at the street officelevel See also residents committee commu nity shequ struggle meeting a technique used by the Chinese Communist Party in which a per son is subjected to intense criticism struggled and sometimes physical punishment because of alleged political or ideological mistakes The purpose is to elicit a confession selfcriticism repentance and compliance Struggle meetings were used during rec tification campaigns land reform the AntiRightist Campaign and most extensively during the Cultural Revolution Supreme Peoples Court the court of highest jurisdiction in the PRC The SPC exercises bureaucratic ministrylike authority over the lower judiciary which includes provincial high courts intermediate courts and basic courts The court is headed by a chief justice president a first grand justice vicepresident and eleven second grand justices There are more than three hundred other lowerlevel justices who hear cases in smaller panels The chief justice is elected by the National Peoples Congress and can serve no more than two fiveyear terms Supreme Peoples Procuracy Procuratorate the nationallevel organization responsible for both prosecution and investigation of legal matters It is also responsible for supervising the courts to make sure they are consistent in enforcing the law There are procuratorial offices at the subnational levels of government including provincial and county levels Sustainable Development emphasizes the environmental consequences of economic growth and modernization and takes into account the imperative of maintaining resources and a livable world for current and future generations See also ecological civilization Taiping Rebellion 18501864 a long and largescale rebellion against the Qing dynasty led by a Christian convert Hong Xiuquan who claimed to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ and whose mission was to establish the Taiping Great Peace Heavenly Kingdom on earth Because of deteriorating economic and social conditions and its promise of radical changes the rebellion gained a huge number of followers from among Chinas peasants It conquered most of South China up to the Yangtze River before it was undone by its own internal intrigues and discord and suppressed by armies led by powerful provincial Han Chinese leaders The death toll from the rebellion is estimated to have been about twenty million Although it did not succeed the Taiping Rebellion greatly weakened the Qing dynasty Taiwan an island about 75 miles off the coast of southeastern China At the conclusion of the Chinese Civil War in 1949 the defeated forces of Chiang Kaisheks Kuomintang fled to Taiwan With American support the KMT was able to continue governing Taiwan as the Republic of China Taiwan is now an economically developed democracy that still calls itself the Republic of China and is de facto a separate and distinct political entity from the Peoples Republic of China The PRC claims that Taiwan is rightfully a prov ince of China Taiwan Strait or Formosa Strait the 112milewide stretch of water between the PRC and the island of Taiwan It has been the site of several military and political crises most seriously in the 1950s and remains one of the most strategically fragile parts of the world despite muchimproved relations between the mainland and the island Taiwanese can refer generally to all the people who live on Taiwan or more specifi cally to those whose ancestors came to the island before 1945 or so Taiwanese make g l o s s a r y 521 up about 84 percent of the population of Taiwan compared with the 14 percent who are Mainlanders although these are much less important sources of collective identity than in the past Technocrats political leaders who were trained as engineers or scientists before begin ning their careers in government and politics In China many top leaders are techno crats though an increasing number have training in economics political science or law Ten Thousand Character Letters a series of four underground pamphlets written by CCP intellectuals between 1994 and 1997 that were critical of the direction economic reform was taking in China The authors complained of the decline in the state sector rising foreign and private investment and the declining hold of socialist ideology over society This group of critics was referred to as Chinas New Left ThreeAnti campaign a mass mobilization campaign against corruption waste and bureaucracy launched by the CCP shortly after the founding of the PRC in part to target cadre abuses of the mass line Three Gorges Dam on Chinas Yangtze River the largest dam and hydroelectric power station in the world It was begun in 1994 and mostly completed by 2006 at an estimated cost of 39 billion Its purpose is not only to provide a source of muchneeded clean energy to southwest China but also to permit large ships to sail all the way from Shanghai on the coast to Chongqing and to greatly improve flood control and irrigation Critics of the dam point to the ecological and archaeological damage caused by the creation of gigantic artificial lakes which also forced the relocation of 15 million residents mostly poor farmers The construction of the dam was controversial both internationally and in China but much of the internal dissent was suppressed Three Principles of the People a political philosophy developed by Sun Yatsen that became the core ideology of the Kuomintang party The Three Principles are Nationalism Democracy and Peoples Livelihood Three Represents former CCP leader Jiang Zemins contribution to Chinese commu nist ideology It means that the CCP should always represent Chinas advanced pro ductive forces advanced culture and the interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people In essence this was a reaffirmation of the absolute priority given by Deng Xiaoping Theory to economic development by any means but also an ideological justification for allowing private entrepreneurs capitalists to be members of the CCP Jiangs theoretical contributions were inscribed in the party 2002 and state 2003 con stitutions and the CCPs guiding ideology was formally dubbed MarxismLeninism Mao Zedong Thought Deng Xiaoping Theory and the important thought of the Three Represents Third Plenum the milestone meeting of the CCP Central Committee in December 1978 that is considered the beginning of Chinas reform era because it set economic develop ment as the nations top priority and signaled a clear break with the Maoist past Tiananmen Incident events in April 1976 when hundreds of thousands of Chinese citi zens spontaneously gathered in Tiananmen Square to demonstrate their affection for the popular premier prime minister Zhou Enlai who had died in January Not only were wreaths and poems lauding Zhou posted but so too were scathing criticisms of Chairman Mao and his radical wife Jiang Qing After Jiang Qing ordered the removal of the wreaths that honored Zhou people overturned a police vehicle and burned an official command post on the edge of the Square The Square was finally emptied with a brief spasm of violence but no one died and there were few arrests The events were at first labeled as a counterrevolutionary incident and blame was placed on Deng Xiaoping who was removed from his leadership positions by Mao After Maos death and Dengs 522 g l o s s a r y consolidation of power the official judgment of the Tiananmen Incident was reversed and it was called patriotic and revolutionary Tiananmen Movement the largest mass protest in the history of the Peoples Republic of China took place in the spring of 1989 It began in Beijing with university students gathering in Tiananmen Square in early April to commemorate the death of former party leader Hu Yaobang who they regarded as a reformer sympathetic to their desire for greater political freedom The protesters set up camp in the square and at one point attracted more than a million citizens from many walks of life who expressed a wide range of grievances including official corruption The movement was crushed when the leadership of the CCP ordered the Peoples Liberation Army to clear the square on June 4th resulting in a large loss of civilian life known as the Beijing Massacre Tiananmen Square the largest urban public space in the world 100 acres located in the center of Beijing adjacent to the front entrance of the Forbidden City the onetime imperial palace Tiananmen literally means Gate of Heavenly Peace Tibet a huge sparsely populated area in Chinas far west whose inhabitants are about 96 percent Tibetan Its capital is Lhasa Tibet was invaded by the Peoples Liberation Army PLA in 1951 and incorporated into the PRC A major uprising against Chinese rule in 1959 was crushed by the PLA and the leader of Tibetan Buddhism the Dalai Lama fled to exile in India In 1965 it was formally named the Tibet Autonomous Region TAR There has been extensive economic development in Tibet in recent years and also extensive immigration by Han Chinese The situation in Tibet remains politically volatile with frequent episodes of ethnic unrest Tibetan one of Chinas fiftyfive ethnic minority groups There are altogether about 57 million Tibetans in China 24 million of whom live in the Tibet Autonomous Region the remainderthe majoritylive mostly in areas called in Tibetan Kham and Amdo which are now part of the provinces of Qinghai southern Gansu western Sichuan and the northern tip of Yunnan Tibetan Plateau a region in the far west of China that includes the Tibet Autonomous Region and parts of Qinghai Gansu Sichuan and Yunnan It makes up about 30 percent of all of Chinas area Totalitarianism a term used to describe a type of political system in which a single polit ical party under a charismatic leader attempts to exercise total power over society and will use any means including terror to do so Town And Township the lowest levels of formal government administration in rural China Towns have a higher percentage of population with nonagricultural registrations see hukou system than do townships Township And Village Enterprises TVEs rural industries that are technically owned collectively by the township town or village and are not part of the state planned econ omy TVEs expanded rapidly in the 1980s and were an important part of rising living standards in the countryside and of Chinas spectacular economic growth more generally Beginning in the mid1990s most TVEs were privatized Trading State a country whose international commerce dramatically increases its national power China is a contemporary example of a highly successful trading state Treaty of Nanjing signed by the Qing dynasty and Great Britain in 1842 to end the first Opium War It was the first of the unequal treaties forced upon imperial China by for eign powers from that time to the early twentieth century Its main purpose was to open China to foreign trade It also gave Britain the first part of what would become its colony of Hong Kong g l o s s a r y 523 Triad Organizations secret society criminal gangs that are active in Chinese communi ties in many parts of the world especially in Hong Kong and Macao Tributary System the arrangement by which outsiders were allowed to conduct trade and other foreign relations with the Chinese empire involving the giving of gifts tribute that recognized the superiority of and submission to the Chinese emperor Tuanpai literally League Faction an informal group of current CCP leaders who advanced their political careers through the ranks of the Chinese Communist Youth League CCYL They are mostly associated with the populist coalition in Chinese politics TwentyOne Demands a set of demands made by imperial Japan on the government of the Republic of China in January 1915 giving Japan territorial and other concessions in China The weak response by the Chinese government led to widespread student pro tests including those on May 4 1919 which in turn gave rise to the May 4th Movement Unequal Treaties The series of numerous agreements signed under military or diplo matic pressure in the nineteenth century by the Qing dynasty and foreign powers on terms that were very unfavorable to China and included economic territorial and other concessions that greatly weakened the imperial system Unitary State a type of political system in which all subnational units of administration provinces states etc are subordinate to the central government The PRC is a unitary state Compare with a federal system like the United States in which subnational levels of government have considerable power United Front the communist party concept of joining together with other groups even your adversaries to fight against a common enemy and to achieve a common goal There were two united fronts in China in the first half of the twentieth century the First United Front joined the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party in 19241927 to fight against the warlords and unify the Republic of China The Second United Front 1937 1945 again brought the KMT and CCP together in order to fight the Japanese invasion of China See also Northern Expedition Warlord Era Urban Villages areas of former farmland in or near cities that have been converted into lowcost and often substandard rental housing for migrant workers Uyghur one of Chinas fiftyfive ethnic minorities Uyghurs are a Turkic ethniclinguistic group who practice Islam Most of Chinas 84 million Uyghurs live in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region There are also large populations of Uyghurs in other parts of Central Asia notably Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan Vanguard Party the Leninist idea that a communist party should consist only of the most ideologically advanced and committed communists who are capable of leading the revo lution to overthrow the old society and the socialist transformation of the country once political power has been seized The CCP considers itself a vanguard party Village the basic social unit in rural China made up of both administrative villages and natural villages Villages are technically selfgoverned although they fall under the juris diction of a nearby town Village population is typically around one thousand to two thousand See also village committee villager representative assembly VRA Village Committee the governing body in Chinas rural administrative villages It con sists of three to seven members including the chair of the committee or village leader vice chairs an accountant a female member who deals with family planning and womens affairs and a person in charge of public security In most of rural China the village com mittee is directly elected by all eligible voters Ultimately the village committee is subor dinate to the authority of the village communist party branch 524 g l o s s a r y Villager Representative Assembly VRA monitors the work of the village committee according to the Organic Law of Villagers Committees Every five to fifteen households elect one representative to the VRA which reviews annual village budgets investment plans and the implementation of national policies on the local level Voluntarism the concept that human willpower and determination can overcome any obstacles or that the subjective can conquer the objective Mao Zedong Thought is often said to put a great deal of emphasis on voluntarism particularly the power of the masses when motivated by revolutionary spirit and mobilized by the communist party to achieve extraordinary economic or political results Such voluntarism is contrasted with Marxist materialism which emphasizes the objective limits particularly economic of human action at any given point in history Warlord is a person with power over a part of a country based on control of military forces who are loyal to the warlord rather than to the central government Warlord Era the years 1916 to 1927 in China when political power was in the hands of regional or provincial military leaders warlords and the central government of the Republic of China was relatively weak Washington Consensus policies promoted primarily by the United States the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund IMF that prescribe a neoliberal approach to economic development including reducing the role of the state in the economy and maximizing that of the free market eliminating government subsidies privatizing gov ernment industries and public utilities and removing barriers to free trade and foreign investment See also Beijing Consensus Whateverist Faction a group of CCP leaders who in the early postMao era in 1977 pledged to support whatever policy decisions were made by Chairman Mao and to unswervingly follow whatever instructions were given by Chairman Mao The group which has been called neoMaoist because of its desire to continue some aspects of Maoist policies and ideology and preserve the Chairmans reputation They were politi cally opposed by the pragmatist faction The whateverist faction was gradually pushed aside after Deng Xiaoping returned to power in 1978 White Terror the suppression of the Chinese Communist Party by Chiang Kaishek that began in April 1927 during the Northern Expedition The terror nearly wiped out the CCP and forced most of the survivors to retreat to the remote countryside Marks the beginning of the first stage of the Chinese Civil War between the KMT and the CCP Work Teams small groups of party cadres who are sent by the leadership to investigate guide and report on a situation Work teams were sent to university campuses in Beijing at the outset of the Cultural Revolution in June 1966 to guide the Red Guards but wound up clashing with the rebel youth The teams were withdrawn in August 1966 and later accused of having tried under the authority of Liu Shaoqi to suppress the Red Guards Work Unit Danwei the place of employment for most urban Chinese citizens during the Maoist period The work unit provided not only jobs but also housing health care education childcare pensions restaurants shopping and vacation resorts for their members These benefits along with permanent employment made up the iron rice bowl that was a feature of urban and to an extent rural life in Maoist China Work units were also important means of social and political control Their importance has declined steadily during the reform era but they still exert steadily influence on urban life for some citizens especially for workers in stateowned enterprises g l o s s a r y 525 Work Style in CCP terminology the method of leadership that cadres use in carrying out their responsibilities and exercising their authority particularly in relation to the masses See also mass line World Trade Organization WTO the international body based in Geneva Switzerland that regulates commerce among its 159 member states Countries have to apply for accession to the WTO China acceded to the WTO in 2002 after agreeing to a large number of conditions to make its economy more open to trade Formerly called the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade GATT Xian Incident the kidnapping of Chiang Kaishek in the northern city of Xian by Marshall Zhang Xueliang a warlord ally of Chiang in December 1936 Zhangs purpose was to force Chiang to agree to a united front with the Chinese Communist Party to fight the Japanese who were extending their aggression in China Chiang did agree but never really put his heart or forces into the fight against the Japanese preferring instead to focus on what he thought was the more dangerous communist threat Xinhua the New China News Agency NCNA the official news service of the Peoples Republic of China Xinjiang an autonomous region of the Peoples Republic of China with its capital in Ürümchi It is a huge sparsely populated area in Chinas far west Central Asia It is formally called the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region About 69 percent of its popu lation of nineteen million consists of nonHan ethnic minorities the largest of which are Uyghur Muslims who make up 45 percent of the population Oil and cotton have been the basis of recent economic development in the region But it has also been the site of protest sometime violent by Uyghurs who oppose Chinese rule and ethnic conflict between Uyghur and Han residents See also Bingtuan Yanan the area in the northwestern province of Shaanxi where the Chinese Communist Party established their headquarters and most successful base area from 1935 to 1945 It was in Yanan that Mao Zedong fully consolidated his political and ideological domina tion of the CCP Yangtze River Yangzi the longest river in China nearly four thousand miles and the third longest in the world It runs from its source in the far western province of Qinghai to the East China Sea near Shanghai Young Pioneers a mass organization to which almost all students aged seven to fourteen in the PRC belong The purpose of the Young Pioneers is to create positive feelings about the party educate the members about party goals and organize students to engage in service projects consistent with party policies Yuan the base unit of Chinese currency since the late nineteenth century In the PRC renminbi is denominated in 1 5 10 20 50 and 100 yuan bills Zhongnanhai literally Central and Southern Seas the large walled complex of build ings in the heart of Beijing near Tiananmen Square where the Chinese Communist Party and the State Council has its headquarters and where many of Chinas top leaders both live and work 228 Incident Taiwan 472 491 7000 Cadres Conference 1962 92 96 491 1911 Revolution 27 4952 486 491 514515 administrative divisions in China 9 Administrative Litigation Law ALL 125 235 Administrative Procedure Law APL 235 314 Africas trade with China 281 Agrarian Reform Law 1950 79 Agricultural Law 1993 314315 AIDS and AIDS policy blood donation and 493494 civil society and 370 372 375 epidemiology of the disease and 370371 373375 health care bureaucracy and 377 nongovernmental organizations NGOs and 372 374 protests and 373 rates of disease and 373374 Ai Weiwei 348 AllChina Federation of Trade Unions 129 All China Womens Federation ACWF 308 330 392393 491 ambans imperial commissioners in Tibet 407 Analects Confucius 42 anarchism 56 152 492 Anhui Province rural reforms 121 262 antibourgeois liberalization campaign 128129 489 494 519 AntiMonopoly Law 2008 230 235 AntiRightist Campaign 1957 Chinese legal system and 226 criticism of 177178 Deng Xiaoping and 174 fear inspired by 8586 Great Leap Forward and 88 Hundred Flowers Movement and 487 492 505 Mao Zedong and 8586 91 492 struggle meetings and 520 targets of 86 167 345 Antonioni Michelangelo 349 ant tribe 334 340n19 492 Apple 326 Armitage Richard 429 arts policy censorship reduction and 30 121 128 346348 Chinas global cultural profile and 349350 Cultural Revolution and 98 343345 347 501 marketbased reform and 345346 historical context of 342345 Jiang Qing and 77 98 344 501 nationalism and 342 Asian Financial Crisis 19971998 458 492 Audit Commission Hong Kong 457 466 authoritarianism Beijing Consensus and 282 bureaucratic form of 136 Chinese Communist Party CCP and 5 119 143 219 247 consultative form of 22 neoauthoritarianism and 135 510 revolutionary form of 22 soft form of 22 245 473 in Taiwan 32 120 469 472474 478 480 500 automobile manufacturers in China 277 autonomous regions in China 89 3132 402 434 492 See also Tibet Xinjiang avian influenza 339 369370 Azerbaijan 120 Bai Hua 128 Bakunin Mikhail 152 Bankruptcy Law 2006 229 Index 528 I n d e x baojia system 60 492 barefoot doctors 367368 492493 Barnett A Doak 18 base areas See under Chinese Communist Party CCP Basic Law Hong Kong 455459 461463 465 493 Basic Law Macao 454 Be Concerned with the WellBeing of the Masses Mao Zedong 1934 160161 Beethoven Ludwig von 121 Beg Yaqub 432 Beidaihe meeting 1958 Great Leap Forward and 90 493 Beijing 798 Factory arts district in 350 as a directly administered municipality 322 floating population in 325 as a global city 339 Olympic Games 2008 in 137 139 186 339 347348 401 419 429 490 pollution in 353 population size of 8 Beijing Autonomous Workers Federation 129 Beijing Consensus 246 282 493 Beijing Massacre 1989 See also Tiananmen Movement censorship regarding 347 Deng Xiaoping and 28 109 122 131 181 212 258 economic and political context of 258 impact on democratization movement and 188 516 Li Peng and 131 Peoples Liberation Army and 130 489 522 sociopolitical impact of 386387 summary description of 493 Beijingology 20 143 493 Bekri Nur 445 Belden Jack 3233 Bhutan 402 408409 big character posters 98 100 128 493 503 Bingtuan Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps 435 437 439 442 493 black children hei haizi 141 393 blood donation 335 371 375 493494 blue culture 137 516 Blue Shirts 60 494 Bohai Sea 354 Bolsheviks 153 Bonaparte Napoleon 33 Book of the Sky Xu Bing 350 Borodin Mikhail 57 59 bourgeoisie Cultural Revolution targeting of 9798 171 Maoist era criticism of 79 95 97 in Mao Zedong Thought 168170 494 499 in Marxist theory 151152 494495 497 499 501 bourgeois liberalization See antibourgeois liberalization campaign Boxer Protocol 49 51 485 491 Boxer Uprising 49 423 485 494 Bo Xilai Chongqing and 142 235 247 scandal 2012 involving 140 142 219 247 trial of 228 235 247 Bo Yibo 8384 Brazil 1517 494 Brezhnev Leonid 95 140 170 Brezhnev Doctrine 102 BRICS countries Brazil Russia India China South Africa 17 494 building socialism with Chinese characteristics 178182 357 494 500 bureaucratic politics approach to Chinese politics 19 21 Burma See Myanmar Buyun election experiment 136 310312 494495 498 cadre exchange system 300302 495 Cadres Bureaucracy and Political Power in Communist China Barnett 18 Cai Yuanpei 56 Cantonese 11 Cao Jianming 245 Cao Kun 54 capitalism See also bourgeoisie Cultural Revolutions targeting of 209 256 487 499 Deng Xiaoping Theory and 28 178180 258 500 Leninist theory and 154155 Mao Zedong Thought and 23 163 168171 261 505 514 Marxist theory and 151153 156157 495 state capitalism and 271 519 capitalist roaders 76 103 209 487 495 capital punishment 236 carbon dioxide emissions 355 357 363n6 casino capitalism Macao 455 495 cat theory Deng Xiaoping 93 123 178179 495 censorship 30 140 346348 466 centerlocal relations approach to Chinese politics 19 2122 Central Advisory Commission 125 495 Central Commission for Discipline Inspection 195 197 214 237 314 495 Central Committee Chinese Communist Party and 195197 202 205206 208 210 212214 217 514 Cultural Revolution and 100103 Deng Xiaopings appointments to 125 Document 12 on direct local elections and 310 educational levels among 205 elections for 196197 212 Gang of Four and 113 I n d e x 529 Hua Guofeng and 122 124 military members of 102 Organization Department and 512 provincial leaders ascension to 208 summary description of 495 Third Plenum 1978 121 123124 133 196 224 257 262 488 515 521 Third Plenum 2013 142 393394 tuanpai on 217 turnover rate in 213214 Xi Jinping and 141 Central Cultural Revolution Group CCRG 98101 103 106 496 Central Intelligence Agency CIA 409 Central Military Commission CMC Chinese Communist Party and 193 195196 198 200203 214 218 Deng Xiaoping and 8182 126 203 489 elections and 201 factional politics and 218 Hu Jintao and 138140 203 490 Jiang Zemin and 203 489 organization and role of 81 Peoples Liberation Army PLA and 203 summary description of 496 turnover rate in 214 Xi Jinping and 140 198 203 490 496 Central Party School 138 185 205 496 Central Special Case Examination Group 101 496 Chan Jackie 350 Charter 08 139 238 246 496 Chen Boda 98 105 Chen Duxiu 59 Chengdu Gay Community Care Organization 372 Chen Guangcheng 211 244 Chen Kuiyuan 416 Chen Liangyu 138139 235 Chen Shuibian 462 475476 478479 481482 500 Chen Xitong 131 235 Chen Yun death of 134 Deng Xiaoping and 122 economic policy and 76 8083 8687 90 93 122124 127 Hua Guofeng and 122124 Mao Zedong and 80 82 90 political reform and 129 pragmatist faction and 121 123 513 Chiang Chingkuo 474 500 Chiang Kaishek attacks on CCP and 59 62 64 158 165 486 524 Chinese Civil War and 6667 114 497 515 corruption and 67 death of 474 extermination campaigns and 62 502 Japan and 6364 Manchuria and 63 military leadership of 57 5960 6667 Nanjing Decade and 5962 nationalism and 63 Nationalist Party KMT leadership of 32 59 65 114 471 486487 506 509 515 520 New Life Movement and 6061 494 510 Northern Expedition and 5960 486 510511 524 on Taiwan 67 471 473474 487 515 520 United States and 65 Xian incident and 64 497 525 Xinjiang and 433 China Can Say No 137 China Democracy Party CDP 136 188 496 China Dream Xi Jinping 142 184185 246 422 496 China National Offshore Oil Corporation CNOOC 279 China New Construction Group China Xinjiang Group 437 China Proper Inner China 7 496 China Shakes the World Belden 3233 China Shakes the World Kynge 33 China Youth Daily newspaper 216 Chinese Communist Party CCP See also communist partystate arts policy and 30 66 342343 345346 348 350 atheism and religious policies of 187 authoritarianism of 5 119 143 219 247 base areas of 62 65 68 7475 79 82 161 173 486 493 506507 changing composition of 203206 checks and balances in 212218 Chinese civil war and 8 10 27 3233 6569 74 7778 114 139 164165 255 433434 471472 487 493 497 524 Deng Xiaoping Theory and 178 180181 183184 educational levels in 205206 Eighth Party Congress of 80 8485 Eighteenth Party Congress of 181182 184 196197 203 217218 225 247 357 entrepreneurs and 182183 187 205 208210 502 510 514 521 factions role in 20 29 75 77 82 168 192193 212 214216 218 221 fascism and 186187 founding of 27 57 59 486 General Office of 197 general secretary position in 196 golden years 19491956 and 7985 Hong Kong and 456457 459 461 463 ideology and 1314 24 2829 149151 156 161 166 174 177178 180187 193 increasing size of 203204 innerparty democracy and 92 139 186 193 197 212 506 530 I n d e x Chinese Communist Party Cont International Liaison Department and 197198 lawyers in 208 210211 leading small groups and 198 507 legitimacy discussions regarding 139 254 Mao Zedong Thought and 156 174 177178 181 183184 262 MarxismLeninism and 150 154156 174 178 182186 496 mass line leadership theory and 66 161163 177 508 middle class and 283 333 502 move toward collective leadership in 211212 215 217 nationalism and 1213 185186 Ninth Party Congress of 102103 nomenklatura system of cadre management and 197 202 294 300 311 323 510 official assessment of Mao by 113114 116 175177 516 Organization Department of 197 512 Peoples Liberation Army PLA and 202203 pluralism in contemporary leadership of 192 political dominance of China by 45 1214 28 86 119 144 186 188 192 194 201 218 221 293 politicallegal committees of 227 241 provincial leadership as source of advancement in 206208 rectification campaigns and 66 75 78 514 520 red versus expert in 205 515 rescue campaign 1943 and 78 rural China governance and 296 298303 305 316317 Seventh Party Congress of 74 76 socialism and 150 185 194 262 513 socialist market economy and 270 Soviet Union and 5759 62 7375 78 8081 8586 90 156 169 343 498 518 summary description of 497 Tenth Party Congress of 107 Three Represents and 136 182185 209210 270 333 510 521 Tibet policy and 404405 408417 420424 441 totalitarianism and 22 79 8486 119 143 town government and 309312 united front with KMT and 5759 64 74 158 486 497 523 525 urban planning and 321 336 338 urban workers and 203204 as vanguard party 14 156 160 162163 177 185 497 523 White Terror 1920s and 59 6162 165 486 497 511 524 womens representation in 206 World War II and 33 65 68 114 164165 497 Xinjiang and 433434 437 441442 444445 Chinese Communist Youth League CCYL 215217 497 523 Chinese language 11 5556 513 Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference CPPCC 210 218 461 Choedron Thrinley 413 Chongqing Bo Xilai and 142 235 247 demonstrations in 331 as directly administered municipal area 322 501 nailhouse case in 234 Nationalist Party KMT in 6465 486 497 Christian missionaries in China 44 49 494 516 Chui Saion Fernando 455 Civic Party Hong Kong 460 464 civil service examination system Communist Party 310 civil service examination system imperial China 41 50 206 485 497 505 507 civil society AIDS policy and 370 372 375 Chinese legal system and 238 in contemporary China 25 143144 238 342 definition of 25 497 in Hong Kong 465466 civil war in China Battle of HuaiHai 19481949 67 Chiang Kaishek and 6667 114 497 515 Chinese Communist Party CCP and 8 10 27 3233 6569 74 7778 114 139 164165 255 433434 471472 487 493 497 524 Manchuria and 6667 Mao Zedong and 33 6667 73 114 497 Nationalist Party KMT and 8 27 32 6568 74 7778 114 164 255 433434 471472 487 497 506 515 524 struggle meetings during 6869 United States and 6566 Cixi Qing Empress Dowager 4750 485 494 505 517 class analysis 151 168 class struggle deemphasizing of 84 121 124 180 Mao Zedong Thought and 85 93 114 166 168172 177 262 497 499 513 Marxism and 151152 156 497 499 508 mass mobilization campaigns and 6869 79 cleansing the class ranks campaign 1968 1969 102 497 Click Click Click game 468469 clientalism 512 Clinton Bill 136138 Clinton Hillary 211 244 Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement CEPA 459460 coal 280 335336 355 I n d e x 531 Coastal Development Strategy 19871988 257258 265 collective ownership 498 collectives See also cooperatives Mao Zedongs role in establishing 8384 93 peasants and 8384 86 126 260261 497 summary description of 83 497498 Combat Bourgeois Ideas in the Party Mao Zedong 168 Comintern 57 59 62 156 158 486 498 communism ideology of 14 24 28 152 498 See also Mao Zedong Thought Marxism MarxismLeninism Deng Xiaoping Theory Communist League 152 The Communist Manifesto Marx 151152 157 Communist Party of Nepal Maoist 176 Communist Party of the Soviet Union CPSU 153 169 174 communist partystate See also Chinese Communist Party CCP China as 1314 economic planning in 513 international examples of 1314 MarxismLeninism and 1314 24 150 498 party institutions and 28 192198 202203 Soviet Union as 193194 state institutions and 28 193194 198203 summary description of 498 structure of 193203 community See shequ Company and Securities Law 1990s 229 233 Company Law 1990s 229 233 Confederation of Trade Unions CTU Hong Kong 465466 Confucianism the arts and 343 347 challenges to 49 55 510 contemporary Chinese politics and 2324 imperial China and 10 12 41 45 4950 225 legal system in China and 225 New Life Movement and 60 notions of propriety in 347 summary description of 498 Confucius 10 42 107 344 349 499 Confucius Institutes 41 137 consultative authoritarianism 22 consultative elections 311312 498 consumerism 128 187 357 Consumer Rights and Interests Protection Law 1993 231 Contract Law 1999 229 contradiction theory See under Mao Zedong Thought Convention of Peking Beijing 452 Cooperative Medical Scheme CMS 367368 499 cooperatives Mao Zedongs role in establishing 8283 114 256 summary description of 83 499 corruption campaigns against 138139 142 159 163 197 211 221 247 271272 489 495 518 521522 Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and 197 Chiang Kaishek and 67 Cultural Revolutions targeting of 159 demonstrations against 28 130 133 220 330331 489 522 dual price system and 257 272273 guanxi connections and 231 Hong Kong and 457 during imperial era 43 in legal system 232 242 legal systems efforts to combat 225 228 233235 237238 243 246247 Liu Zhijun case and 219 Macao and 454 marketbased economic reforms and 127 243 271 278 pervasiveness of 16 254 271 public opinion regarding 233 237238 rentseeking and 272273 rural regions and 297 312313 Socialist Education Movement and 94 stateowned enterprises SOEs and 271273 Tiananmen Movement 1989 and 28 130 489 522 Court of Final Appeal Hong Kong 462 Criticize Lin Biao and Confucius campaign 107 499 Cui Jian 128 131 Cultural Revolution anticapitalist emphasis of 209 256 487 499 arts policy and 98 343345 347 501 beneficiaries of 104 106107 111 big character posters and 98 100 128 493 503 building socialism in a big way da gan shehuizhuyi and 266 Central Cultural Revolution Group CCRG and 98101 103 106 496 chaos and violence in 3 20 23 27 97102 104 115 161 175 192 344 346 413 497 499 516 Chinese legal system and 226 228 criticisms of 101 104105 108 110 111112 115 177 405 489 Criticize Lin Biao and Confucius campaign and 107 499 Deng Xiaoping and 27 76 98 100 108 174175 179 209 256 destruction of cultural artifacts and 344 Fifty Days JuneJuly 1966 and 9899 Gang of Four and 77 113 health policy and 367368 immediate aftermath of 102103 institutional innovations and 101 115 120 163 international isolation and 257 349 532 I n d e x Cultural Revolution Cont Mao Zedongs assessment of 104110 Mao Zedongs role in 4 27 7273 96102 104107 109110 112 115 159 161 168 175 256 344 487 489 496 499 509 515516 Mao Zedong Thought and 2324 161 165 168 170172 497 May 7th Schools and 163 509 May 16 Directive and 97 509 periodization of 96 117n18 Peoples Liberation Army and 101103 107 345 517 political purges and class struggle during 20 102 168 170171 180 206 Red Guards and 97100 102 159 175 344 413 487488 493 515 524 rehabilitations following 107 208 Revolutionary Committees and 101102 516 SinoSoviet Split and 169 struggle meetings in 520 Tiananmen Square rallies and 9899 in Tibet 412414 421 423 totalitarianism of 97 Dahal Pushpa Kumal Prachanda 176 Dalai Lama Fourteenth current Chinas restrictions on the worship of 416 419420 exile of 32 411412 414415 419420 487 499 522 Kalachakra and 414 negotiations with China and 423424 444 Nobel Peace Prize 1989 of 499 potential succession of 424 retirement from politics of 420 Seventeen Point Agreement and 409 487 517 Tibetan nationalism and 423 United States and 415 Dalai Lamas previous governance of Tibet and 402 408 relations with Chinese emperors and 405407 422 dangwai phrase applied to KMT opponents in Taiwan 474 500 danwei See work unit danwei Daoism 343 500 502 Datong 335336 decentralization Great Leap Forward and 88 91 impact on health policy 365 373 376 marketbased economic reforms and 21 127 213 255 258 political impact of 213 in Soviet Union and Eastern Europe 120 taxation issues and 264 decollectivization agricultural reform and 121 economic impact of 134135 260261 263265 500 householdbased farming and 262263 labor market impact of 265266 505 sociopolitical impact of 136 294295 368 summary description of 500 Democracy Wall 1979 criticisms expressed at 124 180 488 500 Deng Xiaoping and 124 180 500 political impact of 128 Tiananmen Movement 1989 and 129 Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong DAB 457 464465 democratic centralism 57 154 162 181 500 506 Democratic League 67 Democratic Party Hong Kong 457 461 464 Democratic Progressive Party DPP Taiwan 462 474476 478482 500 democratization See also political reform rural governance Chinas prospects for 23 29 188 220221 247 Chinese legal system and 237241 in East Asian region 120 in Hong Kong 456 463464 in Taiwan 474475 478 480 482 500 507 Tiananmen Movement 1989 and 129131 489 522 demonstrations See also resistance AIDS policy protests and 373 antitax protests and 134 264 against corruption 28 130 133 220 330331 489 522 environmental activism and 139 359 in Hong Kong 461462 466 492 mass incidents and 219220 233 246247 508 in rural China 293 297 312316 selfimmolations and 420 Tiananmen Incident 1976 and 109110 521522 Tiananmen Movement 1989 and 129131 343 489 522 in Tibet 32 138 401 404405 415416 418421 442443 490 512 in urban China 129 329331 in Xinjiang 32 428 434 438 441447 490 512 Deng Pufang 127 Deng Xiaoping See also Deng Xiaoping Theory AntiRightist Campaign 174 Beijing Massacre 1989 and 28 109 122 131 181 212 258 Central Military Commission CMC and 8182 126 203 489 Chinese legal system and 125 224 Cultural Revolution and 27 76 98 100 108 174175 179 209 256 death of 28 134 138 260 490 decollectivization and 262 Democracy Wall and 124 180 500 Great Leap Forward and 8991 174 179 I n d e x 533 Great Leap Forward recovery and 91 93 159 256 487 Hong Kong and 453 511 Mao Yuanxin and 108 Mao Zedong and 76 82 8990 92 9596 103 106 108 110111 115 125 168 170 174175 495 522 marketbased economic reforms and 4 2729 120 122125 127 132133 168 170 173175 178180 183 196 254 257258 345346 416 488489 500 515 521 military leadership of 116n6 Peoples Liberation Army and 202 Politburo and 100 106108 213 political purging of 27 76 103 108 110111 256 487 495 522 political reform and 128129 political resurrection of 1973 76 106107 111 488 political resurrection of 1977 27 76 121 488 pragmatist faction and 121 513 524 seeking truth from facts and 173 178 Southern Inspection Tour Nanxun of 133 142 258 489 518 third generation of CCP leaders and 193 Third Plenum 1978 and 121 196 Tiananmen Incident 1976 and 110 121 522 Tibet and 414416 United States and 137 180 Deng Xiaoping Theory Building Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and 178182 357 494 500 capitalistic methods and 28 178180 258 500 cat theory and 93 123 178179 495 Chinese Communist Party CCP and 178 180181 183184 dictatorship of the proletariat and 180 Four Cardinal Principles and 128 179182 186 189n24 488 494 500 503 Mao Zedong Thought and 178 180181 503 MarxismLeninism and 178 180 503 socialism and socialist transformation in 179 Deng Zihui 8384 93 dependency ratio 394 501 developmental state 16 501 Devils at the Doorstep Jiang Wen 348 dialectics 166 Diaspora Capitalism 276 dibao minimum livelihood protection 329 501 dictatorship of the proletariat 14 9697 128 154 180 501 503 512 See also peoples democratic dictatorship directly administered municipalities 89 322 501 Djilas Milovan 170 Domingo Placido 350 drug use in China 370371 374375 dual price system shuang jiage 257 272273 East China Sea 354 Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement ETIM 428429 445 501 Eastern Turkistan Republic ETR 433436 ecological civilization 361 501 economic and technical development zones ETDZs 276 Economic Contract Law 1981 229 economy of China See also marketbased economic reform challenges facing 16 281286 China as trading state and 274275 522 decollectivization and 262264 development zones and 275276 developmental state and 16 dilemmas of partial reform and 271274 domestic consumption levels and 285 economic planning and 513 exportled growth strategy and 268 280 286 502 First Five Year Plan 19531957 and 256 267 487 502 foreign direct investment FDI and 276277 foreign exchange reserves and 285 GDP growth figures and 1415 going out strategy and 279281 503 industrialization and 255 256257 267268 286 internationalization of Chinese economy and 255 259260 274281 Mao era and 29 255257 267268 national champions and 279 natural resource demand and 280281 population policy and 389391 395 private sector growth and 29 260 268 270271 public sector decline and 29 260 268270 Reform Era and 29 257260 rural reform and 260267 segmented deregulation and 275276 503 516517 small and medium enterprises SMEs and 267 Soviet models and assistance in 255 267 487 states role in 255 town and village enterprises TVEs 264265 trade balances and 285 trade expansion and 274275 Twelfth FiveYear Plan 20112015 and 271 356357 503 World Trade Organization WTO and 277278 Eighth Party Congress Chinese Communist Party 80 8485 Eight Immortals 129130 501 eight model operas 344 501 Electoral Law of the Peoples Republic of China 311 elite politics approach to Chinese politics 1920 elitist coalition 214218 501502 513514 534 I n d e x Empress Dowager See Cixi Empress Dowager Engels Friedrich 151152 154 entrepreneurs bureaucratic 209 Chinas exportled growth and 270 Chinese Communist Party CCP and 182183 187 205 208210 502 510 514 521 Chinese legal system and 233 land issues and 266 selfmade 209 332 in Taiwan 473 478 technically oriented 209 in urban China 30 332333 environmental issues automobiles and 353 Beijing Consensus and 282 clean energy investment and 357 climate change and 355356 deforestation and 354 357 desertification and 353354 ecological civilization and 361 501 economic incentives for improving 357358 enforcement problems and 359360 engineering fix and 360 environmental activism and 31 139 220 281 315 335 358359 government responses to 3031 315316 336 356358 greenhouse gas emissions 353 355357 health problems and 336 339 376 impact on cities and 30 332333 335336 338339 353 lack of transparency and 360361 legal system and 359 limits to reform efforts and 359362 nongovernmental organizations NGOs and 358 pollution and 281 315 335336 339 352354 356360 376 public opinion and 201 233234 281 soil erosion and 354 sustainable development and 31 361362 501 520 traditional Chinese philosophy and 352 transboundary effects and 353355 362 Xinjiang and 360 436 439 ethnic minorities in China 78 32 4243 210 502 512 523 525 See also autonomous regions Tibet Xinjiang Eu Audrey 464 Executive Council Hong Kong 456457 460 502 exportled growth ELG strategy 1617 268 280 286 502 export processing zones EPZs 276 519 extermination campaigns Chiang Kaishek 62 502 extraterritoriality for Western settlements in imperial China 44 63 502 factional politics approach to Chinese politics 1920 Fair Labor Association 326 Falun Gong Chinese legal system and 244 crackdown against 119 134135 188 502 reeducation through labor laojiao and 239 514 Zhongnanhai protests 1999 of 134 502 farmers See peasants fascism 60 186187 494 502 Federation of Trade Unions FTU Hong Kong 465466 female infanticide 385 391392 517 Feng Yuxiang 54 The Fifth Modernization Wei Jingsheng 124 Fifty Days JuneJuly 1966 9899 The First Emperor Tan Dun 350 FiveYear Plans 94 271 356357 502503 floating population 8 30 139 324327 503 Food Safety Law 2009 231 The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains Mao Zedong 1945 164165 foreign direct investment FDI from China 279281 foreign direct investment FDI in China Chinese legal system and 232 Mao era and 257 Reform Era increases in 258259 round tripping and 276277 foreign trade companies FTCs 257 265 274 287n3 Four Big Rights 128 503 Four Cardinal Principles Deng Xiaoping 128 179182 186 189n24 488 494 500 503 Four Frees and One Care policy 371372 Four Modernizations 124 Four Olds Tibet 413 Foxconn 326 France 47 49 Free China 64 503 Gang of Four arrest of 7677 112113 121122 124 256 343 488 Cultural Revolution and 77 113 Mao and 111 503 versus old guard 106 113 Politburo and 113 trial of 489 503 Zhou Enlai and 109 Gao Gang 77 8283 97 114 Gao Xingjian 350 Gao Yaojie 371 378n15 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade GATT 277 525 general line for transition to socialism 8283 503 General Office of the Chinese Communist Party CCP 197 I n d e x 535 General Principles of Civil Law 1987 231 ghost cities 338 Gini Index 284 503 global cities Sassen 339 Global Economic Crisis 20082009 Chinas response to 139 283284 502 Washington Consensus and 282 Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network GOARN 369 going out strategy zou qu chu 279281 503 Gorbachev Mikhail economic and political reforms of 258 416 visit to China 1989 of 130 170 Xi Jinpings criticisms of 185 Great Britain 1911 Revolution in China and 51 Hong Kong and 32 452 454 457 504 507 516 523 Opium Wars and 44 452 485 511 516 522 SinoBritish Joint Declaration and 409 454 511 517 Tibet and 407 treaty ports in China and 47 Greater China 12 504 Great Leap Forward Beidaihe meeting 1958 and 90 493 cooling off period and 90 criticism of 77 9192 114116 177178 489 507 decentralization and 88 91 Deng Xiaoping and 8991 174 179 famine and 3 27 84 8889 91 115 159 169 256 262 366 412 487 504 507 Lushan Conference and 9091 507 Mao Zedongs role in 4 27 7273 76 8793 98 112114 116 159 168 256 487 489 491 504505 Mao Zedong Thought and 2324 159 161 165 origins and purposes of 85 88 peoples communes and 90 159 171 256 266 512 recovery from 9196 159 179 256 491 505 revolutionary romanticism of 173 as state land grab 266 steel production targets and 8788 in Tibet 412 421 voluntarism and 165 Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution See Cultural Revolution The Great Union of the Popular Masses Mao Zedong 1919 160 Great Wall of China 7 42 504 Great Western Development Drive See Open Up the West campaign Group of 2 G2 17 34n15 Group of 20 G20 17 Guangxu emperor 4748 50 Guangzhou 44 322 339 Guantanamo detention center 428429 guanxi connections 20 231 233 299 332 504 guerrilla warfare definition of 504 Mao Zedong Thought and 172 176 Nian rebellion and 46 Gu Kailai 142 Guo Jinlong 402 Guzmán Abimael Gonzalo 176 Gyenlok faction Tibet 413 Haji Sidik Rozi 444 Han dynasty 7 10 4142 225 320 501 504 Han ethnic group as Chinas majority 7 402 504 imperial officials from 4547 51 407 517 520 Manchus and 5052 North China and 4243 Taiping Rebellion and 45 in Tibet 417419 421 441 522 in Xinjiang 32 417 421 428429 432435 437443 446447 493 Han Han 219 Harbin 354 harmonious socialist society Hu Jintao 138 140 183184 215 361 366 422 501 504 516 Harvard Girl 334 health policy aging population and 376 394 AIDS policy and 31 365366 370375 377 avian and swine flu and 369370 barefoot doctors and 367368 492493 basic health care and 31 499 Cooperative Medical Scheme CMS and 367368 499 Cultural Revolution and 367368 decentralization and 365 373 376 floating population and 325 Four Frees and One Care policy 371372 health care costs and 283 376 imperial era and 365366 infant and maternal mortality rates and 366367 376 life expectancy rates and 366367 376 Maoist Era and 31 365368 376 marketbased economic reforms impact on 31 365 368369 public health campaigns and 366367 370 Republican era and 365366 rural areas and 31 365 367370 373 376 499 SARS crisis and 369370 517 urbanizations impact on 376377 Henan province blood donation scandal 371373 He Shen 43 He Weifang 202 247 HigherLevel Agricultural Producers Cooperatives HLAPCs 83 497 See also collectives High Qing period 43 485 504 HIVAIDS See AIDS policy 536 I n d e x Ho Albert 461 Ho Chi Minh 155 Ho Hauwah Edward 454455 homosexuality in China 372374 See also AIDS policy Hong Kong Asian Financial Crisis 19971998 and 458 492 Audit Commission in 457 466 avian and swine flu in 369 Basic Law and 455459 461462 465 492493 British rule of 32 452 454 457 504 507 516 523 chief executives in 458465 496 502 507 Chinese Communist Party CCP and 456457 459 461 463 civil service reform in 458 461 civil society in 465466 Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement CEPA and 459460 demonstrations in 461462 466 492 Deng Xiaoping and 453 511 District Boards in 456 District Councils in 463 economic dynamism of 32 132 457 504 education in 459 Election Committee in 458 461 463465 Executive Council in 456457 460 502 as a global city 339 housing reform in 458 Independent Commission Against Corruption in 457 466 Individual Visit Scheme in 460 investment in China by 276 joint ventures in China and 265 276 judiciary in 457 462463 Legislative Council LegCo in 452 456457 463465 502 507 map of 453 media in 466 as model for China 135 national identity in 459 465 National Peoples Congress NPC and 201 Office of Ombudsman and 466 One Country Two Systems approach to 454 456457 493 511 Peoples Liberation Army in 457 political reform in 463465 Principal Officials Accountability System POAS in 460461 Provisional Legislative Council in 456 SARS and 369 SinoBritish Joint Declaration and 409 454 511 517 special administrative region SAR status of 89 3132 452 454 492493 496 504 511 518 student activism in 459 tourism in 460 trade unions in 465 transition from British to Chinese rule of 32 345 454 456 490 504 511 517 triad organizations in 461 United Work Front Department and 197198 Hong Xiuquan 520 house churches 245 504 householdbased farming 93 126 260 262263 household registration hukou system impact on health policy 367 impact on labor markets of 334 impact on migration of 139 260 321 505 impact on urban China of 321 324326 334 onechild policy and 384 reform of 139 327 505 Third Plenum 2013 and 327 household responsibility system 93 415 Hua Guofeng Central Party School and 496 Chen Yun and 122124 Cultural Revolution and 77 Deng Xiaoping and 77 122 488489 economic policy and 121124 Gang of Four and 77 112113 121122 124 488 as Mao Zedongs successor 108 110113 121122 488 Politburo and 108 political marginalization of 124 126 489 tenyear plan of 124 whateverist faction and 121 HuaiHai battle of 19481949 67 Huangpu River 358 Hu Chunhua 402 Hui Chinese Muslims 46 Hu Jintao AIDS policy and 372 anticorruption efforts of 138139 235 censorship and 140 Central Military Commission CMC and 138140 203 490 Central Party School and 496 Chinese legal system and 224 241 246 Communist Youth League and 125 consensual leadership style and 212 Deng Xiaoping and 125 138 141 economic policies of 28 140 254 270 education of 206 environmental issues and 139 501 foreign policy and 140 Four Cardinal Principles and 181182 fourth generation of CCP leaders and 123 193 Harmonious Socialist Society and 138 140 183184 215 361 366 501 504 516 health policy and 366 Hong Kong and 460 Jiang Zemin and 183 I n d e x 537 migration policy and 139 new socialist countryside and 264 police policies and 139 Politburo and 138 217218 political reform and 317 populism of 139 183 populist coalition and 214215 217 Scientific Outlook on Development and 138 184185 215 361 501 516 social welfare policies and 123 183 215 succession of 141 Tibet and 138 207 215 402 404 415 417 tuanpai and 217 Xinjiang and 445446 hukou See household registration hukou system Hundred Days Reform 1898 4748 485 505 Hundred Flowers Movement 8587 114 161 163 167 181 487 505 Hungary 87 Hu Shi 56 Hu Yaobang as CCP general secretary 126 Communist Youth League and 126 Cultural Revolution rehabilitations and 122 death and commemoration of 122 129 489 522 Deng Xiaoping and 122 127 212 489 partial political rehabilitation of 122 132 political marginalization of 127 129 212 441442 489 political reform and 127129 141 Tibet and 122 414415 441 Xinjiang and 441 hydroelectric power 360 521 ideology See also anarchism Deng Xiaoping Theory fascism Leninism Mao Zedong Thought Marxism MarxismLeninism as approach to studying Chinese politics 1920 24 communist partystate and 1314 24 150 Confucianism as 4950 consumerism as 187 definition of 24 149150 168 505 political behavior and 150 Ideology and Organization in Communist China Schurmann 149 imperial China See also Qing Dynasty bureaucracy in 5253 civil service examination system in 41 50 206 485 497 505 507 Confucianism and 10 12 41 45 4950 225 decline of 33 4346 Han dynasty and 10 4142 225 320 501 504 legal system in 225226 New Army in 5051 54 Qin dynasty and 10 41 Tibet and 405 unequal treaties and 44 49 51 58 63 485 502 522 imperialism Lenins theory of 154155 Independent Commission against Corruption ICAC Hong Kong 457 466 India comparisons with China and 6 15 17 284 367 376 384 391 Dalai Lama and 411 414 diplomatic relationship with China and 415 gender imbalance in 392393 Maoist groups in 175176 Tibet and 402 409 416 war with China 1962 and 402 indirect elections 505 Individual Visit Scheme Hong Kong 460 Indonesia 284 349 inequality within cities 30 336338 economic reforms impact on 134 Gini Index and 284 503 in health care 368 Hu Jintaos efforts to reduce 183 254 504 imperial era and 45 Mao Zedongs efforts to reduce 95 284 public opinion regarding 284 regional dimensions of 260 264 283284 336 rural versus urban areas and 16 159 183 260 283 285 327 337 368 418 438 Xinjiang and 438440 446447 inflation 65 67 127 129 informal politics approach to Chinese politics 1920 Inner China See China Proper Inner Mongolia 8 63 199 207 337338 416 421 438 492 innerparty democracy 92 139 186 193 197 212 506 Internal Liaison Department CCP 197198 internationalization of Chinas economy 29 182 255 259260 274281 362 510 See also going out strategy International Monetary Fund IMF 282 492 524 Internet in China 22 247 348 intravenous drug users 370371 374375 Introducing a Cooperative Mao Zedong 1958 161 Iran 137 280 iron rice bowl 127 230 260 321 365 506 Japan Chinese public opinion regarding 186 Chinese students in 51 Chinese wartime collaboration with 6465 69 comparisons with China and 1617 contemporary Chinese protests against 335 419 economic policy in 274 foreign direct investment in China and 258 impact of Chinas environmental problems on 354355 538 I n d e x invasion and occupation of China by 10 33 47 60 6265 68 74 114 173 348 486 497 509 525 Korea and 47 6263 485 517 Meiji Restoration in 48 52 62 120 509 as model for imperial China 48 5052 Rape of Nanjing and 64 486 514 RussoJapanese War and 50 63 shogunate in 52 SinoJapanese War 1895 and 47 63 471 485 517 Taiwan and 8 47 63 471 485 517 Treaty of Versailles and 56 486 509 Twentyone Demands 1915 56 63 523 Jiang Jiemin 272 Jiang Qing arts policy and 77 98 344 501 Cultural Revolution and 77 98 101 105 111 344 496 501 Eight Model Operas and 501 Gang of Four and 77 488489 503 Mao Zedong and 77 111 Politburo and 103106 115 Tiananmen Incident 1976 and 109110 488 521 Jiang Wen 348 Jiangxi Soviet 6162 69 486 502 506 Jiang Yihuah 469 Jiang Zemin Central Military Commission CMC 203 489 Chinese legal system and 224 consensual elite politics and 135 212 Deng Xiaoping and 125 141 196 212 490 economic policies of 28 123 132 134135 183 260 education of 206 elitist coalition and 214215 217 Falun Gong and 134135 Hong Kong and 460 Hu Jintao and 183 ideology and 28 migration policy and 139 New Right and 135 Politburo and 206 217 political reform and 309 316317 Shanghai and 132 207 323 third generation of CCP leaders and 123 193 Three Represents sange daibo and 136 182185 209210 270 333 521 Tibet and 416 424n2 United States and 123 137138 Jia Zhangke 131 job assignment fenpei system 333 506 Joint Declaration of the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Government of the Peoples Republic of China on the Question of Hong Kong See SinoBritish Joint Declaration joint ventures 127 209210 231 276277 506 Kadeer Rebiya 443446 Kalachakra Buddhist ceremony 414 Kang Sheng 78 98 101 344 Kang Youwei 4749 Kazakhstan 447 523 Khrushchev Nikita Brezhnev and 170 Chinas nuclear weapons program and 436 Maos criticisms of 168169 Stalin and 86 95 125 169 174175 Kissinger Henry 488 KMT See Nationalist Party KMT Korea imperial Chinas loss of 47 485 Japan and 47 6263 485 517 Korea North Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea communist partystate in 14 Korean War and 506 Korean Workers Party in 192 Korea South Republic of Korea Chinas normalization of relations with 133 democratization in 131 economic growth in 120 132 268 286 economic policy in 274 286 Korean War and 506 Korean War China and 7980 114 165 169 487 506 Soviet Union and 169 506 United States and 79 165 487 506 Korean Workers Party North Korea 192 kowtow 43 506 Kuomintang See Nationalist Party KMT Kynge James 33 Kyrgyzstan 429 523 Lake Tai 358 land rural See also Land Reform collectives cooperatives decollectivization peoples communes contracting and management of in villages 296297 298 299 300 304 309 316 leasing to developers 308309 legal rights to 230 231 232 233 235 240 266267 noodlestrip farming of 264 287n12 protests over illegitimate seizure of 219 234 240 315 316 struggle between state and peasants over 256257 Sun Yatsen on ownership of 5758 Taiping plan for 45 land reform Chinese Communist Party CCP and 6162 6869 7879 83 507 during Mao era 7879 83 173 260 284 Japan Cont I n d e x 539 Mao Zedong Thought and 160 173 pre1949 and 57 6162 6869 165 Taiping Rebellion and 45 Taiwan and 473 Tibet and 410411 Lang Lang 349350 law of avoidance 213 507 Law on Assembly Procession and Demonstration 1989 315 Leadership in Communist China Lewis 18 Lee Ang 347 350 Lee Bruce 350 Lee Martin 465 Lee Tenghui 474 476 478 Legalism 10 12 135 225 507 510 legal system in China administrative law and 29 235237 247 anticorruption and 225 228 233235 237238 243 246247 capital punishment and 236 Chinas communist partystates limits on 29 125 193 202 211 226227 230 237 240241 243244 246 518 commercial litigation and 233 Confucianism and 225 contracts and 229231 233 corporate governance and 229230 corruption in 232 242 Criminal Law in 228 238 criticism of 202 241 Cultural Revolution and 226 228 democratization and 237241 Deng Xiaoping and 125 224 Eighteenth Party Congress 2012 and 225 environmental issues and 359 extralegal detention and 238239 gaps in 29 242244 grand mediation da tiaojie and 241 Hu Jintao and 224 241 246 human rights lawyers and 244247 imperial period and 225226 Internet and 247 Jiang Zemin and 224 labor law and 232 325 local protectionism in 232 marketbased economic reform and 29 225 228232 242243 245246 martial law and 135 181 National Peoples Congress NPC and 227 239 242 520 number of lawyers and 210211 peoples courts and 226 peoples procuracies and 226 perceived regime enemies and 238 Politburo and 246247 potential reforms for 244247 property law and 230231 233234 public governance and 233237 public opinion and 232 234236 241 245 reeducation through labor laojiao and 238239 247 514 Reform Eras expansion of 227 regional discrepancies in 243 Republic of China period and 226 rights consciousness and 245 socialist legality and 135 Soviet models for 226 State Council and 227 Supreme Peoples Court and 200202 218 226 236 240241 246 520 Supreme Peoples Procuracy and 200201 218 226 520 taxation issues and 229 Third Plenum 1978 and 224 Third Plenum 2013 and 239 tort law and 231 234 trade and investment law 231 World Banks assessment of 228 Xi Jinping and 224225 241 247 Lenin Vladimir See also Leninism biographical sketch of 153 Chinese Communist Party CCP and 57 as leader of Soviet Union 153 174 408 nationalities policy of 408 Russian Revolution and 152 Leninism See also MarxismLeninism capitalism and 154155 democratic centralism and 57 154 162 500 departures from Marxism and 154 dictatorship of the proletariat and 154 peasantry and 157 proletariat and 154155 socialism and socialist transformation in 154155 159 167 theory of imperialism and 154155 as theory of revolutionary organization 153154 160 172 508 vanguard party and 153156 160 523 Lenovo 279 Leong Alan 460 letters and visits petitioning process 228 241 245 313314 507 Leung CY 461462 Leung Elsie 463 Lewis John Wilson 18 Lhasa Tibet 411 415 417 419 Liberal Party Hong Kong 457 464 Liberation Daily Shanghai newspaper 132 Li Bin 377 Libya 281 Lien Chan 475 Li Hongzhi 502 Li Keqiang AIDS policy and 372373 biographical sketch of 199 economic policies and 270271 281 283 285 education of 205 211 245 Henan province and 373 populist coalition and 217 540 I n d e x Lin Biao Cultural Revolution and 92 103105 107 488 499 death of 77 104106 488 Mao Zedong and 77 92 103105 107 163 202 military leadership of 77 95 103 163 202 488 Politburo and 103105 as potential successor to Mao 100 103105 212 488 Quotations from Chairman Mao and 95 Lin Liguo 104105 Li Peng Beijing Massacre 1989 and 131132 economic policies and 127 132133 254 education of 206 Politburo and 206 Tiananmen Movement 1989 and 129131 Zhou Enlai and 127 Little Red Book Mao Zedong 95 Liu Haisu 347 Liu Shaoqui 7000 Cadres Conference and 92 96 Central Party School and 496 Chinese civil war and 82 cooperativization and 8283 Cultural Revolution and 96 98 100 169 209 256 education policy and 9596 Great Leap Forward recovery and 9193 159 256 487 Mao Zedongs criticisms of 82 94 96 107 518 political purging of 76 103 105 169 256 487 496 as potential successor to Mao 7576 81 8990 92 94 212 Liu Xiaobo 238 246 490 496 Liu Yunshan 199 Liu Zhijun 219 235 Li Xiannian 112 117n26 Li Yuanchao 217 Long March 62 74 7677 158 165 486 502 507 Lop Nor Xinjiang 436 lowerlevel agricultural producers cooperatives LLAPC 83 499 See also cooperatives Lu Annette 481 Luo Gan 246 Lushan Conference 1959 9091 168 507 Lushan Plenum 1970 104105 Lust Caution Ang Lee 347 Lu Xiaobu 139 Lu Xun 55 Ma YoYo 349 Macao casino capitalism and 455 495 508 chief executive of 496 corruption in 454 investment in mainland China by 276 National Peoples Congress NPC and 201 National Security Law in 455 One Country Two Systems approach to 511 Portuguese rule of 454455 special administrative region SAR status of 89 201 454455 496 508 518 transition to Chinese rule of 345 triad organizations in 455 United Work Front Department and 197198 MacLehose Sir Murray 453 Mainstream CCP magazine 134 Mak Chaikwong 461 Makhsum Hasan 429 manager buyouts MBOs 265 Manchukuo 6364 486 Manchuria See also Northeast China Chinese civil war and 6667 Japan and 47 6364 486 Manchus 7 42 5052 405 407 517 See also Qing dynasty Mandarin 11 Maoism See Mao Zedong Thought Mao Yuanxin 106 108110 168 Mao Zedong See also Mao Zedong Thought 7000 Cadres Conference 1962 and 92 96 491 AntiRightist Campaign and 8586 91 492 arts as political weapon and 343344 centralization of control by 27 66 7273 76 78 8082 87 89 91 9799 114115 212 486 Central Military Commission CMC and 81 Central Party School and 496 Chinese civil war and 33 6667 73 114 497 Chinese Communist Partys official assessment of 113114 116 175177 516 collectivization and 8384 93 cooperatives and 8283 114 256 criticisms of 4 27 92 97 110 113116 120 124125 175 177 489 497 500 506 516 521 Cultural Revolution and 4 27 7273 96102 104110 112 115 159 161 168 175 256 344 487 489 496 499 509 516 death of 72 112113 120 212 254 256 261 343 414 488 522 Deng Xiaoping and 76 82 8990 92 9596 103 106 108 110111 115 125 168 170 174175 495 522 economic policy and 1617 23 73 78 84 8687 114 120121 123 126 284 education policy and 9496 environmental issues and 352 first generation of CCP leaders and 193 Gang of Four and 503 golden years 19491956 and 7985 Great Leap Forward and 4 27 7273 76 8793 98 112114 116 159 168 256 487 489 491 504505 health policy and 367 376 Hundred Flowers Movement and 85 87 114 161 163 167 181 505 I n d e x 541 Jiangxi Soviet and 6162 Korean War and 80 82 Long March and 62 74 7677 158 165 486 507 Memorial Hall of 175 New Democracy period and 487 510 on nude painting 347 Peoples Liberation Army and 95 499 Politburo and 7576 156 population policy and 381 pragmatism of 7375 79 114 rise to power of 7479 Soviet Union and 73 8081 8688 90 92 9596 102103 158 168169 498 Tiananmen Incident 1976 and 109 521 Tibet and 409410 412413 421 Xinjiang and 433435 at Yanan 156 343 486 496 525 Zhou Enlai and 7576 80 82 84 87 94 104 107 109111 499 Mao Zedong Thought anticapitalist emphasis in 23 163 168171 261 505 514 bourgeoisie and 168170 494 499 Chinese Communist Party CCP and 156 174 177178 181 183184 262 class struggle and 85 93 114 166 168172 177 262 497 499 513 communism and 171172 contemporary China and 28 119 128 150151 156 174 516 contradiction theory and 165167 171 173 499 510 Cultural Revolution and 2324 161 165 168 170172 497 Deng Xiaoping Theory and 178 180181 503 dialectics and 166 dogmatism versus empiricism in 173 emphasis on modesty and 163 Great Leap Forward and 2324 159 161 165 guerrilla warfare and 172 176 impact beyond China of 175176 land reform and 160 173 Marxism and 164 171173 MarxismLeninism and 28 66 7374 78 80 84 94 107 114115 128 150 156158 160161 166167 170 172173 175176 512 517 mass line theory of leadership and 66 161163 177 508 nationalism and 186 peasants and 61 66 73 157161 170 176 512513 permanent revolution and 171172 513 political control of the military and 202 populism and 160161 164 183 pragmatism of 74 171174 177178 proletariat and 159 168 170 499 513 religion and 187 on revolution 167 171172 revolutionary romanticism and 73 173 177 seeking truth from facts and 74 92 172174 176178 selfreliance emphasis in 177 six criteria Hundred Flowers and 181 socialism and socialist transformation in 23 80 8283 159 167171 176 179 181 513 Three Great Differences and 159 voluntarism and 163165 179 524 marketbased economic reform See also internationalization of Chinas economy privatization segmented deregulation arts policy and 345346 Chinese legal system and 29 225 228232 242243 245246 Coastal Development Strategy and 257258 corruption and 127 243 271 278 decentralization and 21 127 213 255 258 Deng Xiaoping and 4 2729 120 122125 127 132133 168 170 173175 178180 183 196 254 257258 345346 416 488489 500 515 521 dual price system shuang jiage and 257 economic prosperity and 34 23 127 133 143 216 232 260 263 elitist coalition and 215 environmental issues and 357358 financial sector reform and 283 285 gradualism versus big bang approach in 126 269 493 503 health policy and 31 365 368369 housing and 133 middle class creation and 332 problems with 258 rentseeking and 272273 rural China and 29 293 299 368 social welfare reductions and 506 Special Economic Zones SEZs and 257 stateowned enterprises SOEs and 30 126127 257 269 327328 331 498 519 Third Plenum 1978 and 121 123 196 257 515 Third Plenum 2013 and 142 trade liberalization and 257 259 unemployment and 127 134 World Trade Organization WTO and 255 260 277278 market reforms See marketbased reform privatization market socialism 121 126 179 Marshall George 66 martial law in China 1996 135 definition of 508 in Taiwan 472 474 in Tibet 402 415 542 I n d e x Marx Karl See Marxism Marxism See also MarxismLeninism bourgeoisie and 151152 494495 497 499 501 capitalism and 151153 156157 495 class analysis and 151 168 class struggle and 151152 156 497 499 508 communism and 152 156157 166 dictatorship of the proletariat and 154 501 economic determinism and 164 Leninisms departures from 154 Mao Zedong Thought and 164 171173 peasantry and 157 159 proletariat and 151154 157 159 499 501 revolution and 152153 157 socialism and 80 152 155157 159 166 497 stages of economic development and 151152 as theory of history 153 156 171 508509 524 MarxismLeninism See also Marxism Chinese Communist Party CCP and 24 28 57 128 150 154156 174 178 182186 496 521 Deng Xiaoping Theory and 178 180 503 dialectics and 166 Maos interpretation and implementation of 28 66 74 78 80 84 94 107 114115 128 150 156158 160161 166167 169170 172173 175176 512 517 market socialism and 121 pace of reform and 84 proletariat and 61 Sinification of 156 517 Stalinist version of 80 mass incidents 219220 233 246247 508 mass line theory of leadership 66 161163 177 508 mass mobilization campaigns 22 6869 508 Mauss Marcel 406407 May 7th Cadre Schools 163 509 May 16 Directive 97 509 May Fourth Movement 5557 61 63 155 486 509510 523 Ma Yingjeou 469 476 479 481 Meiji Restoration Japan 48 52 62 120 509 Mekong River 354 melamine milk scandal 2008 234 236 273274 377 middle class China Dream and 185 Chinese Communist Party CCP and 283 333 502 consumer habits of 277 332 economic reforms benefits for 328 economic struggles of 219220 emergence of 25 30 332333 energy demand and 280 former stateowned enterprise managers and 332 Hong Kong and 458 political activism of 220 245 Three Represents theory and 136 Tibet and 418 in urban China 30 331333 young professionals in 332 migration See also floating population household registration systems impact on 139 260 321 505 impact on villages by 327 from rural to urban areas 8 30 139 209 261 269 294 304 307 313 320 322 324327 to Tibet 417 421 women and 307 to Xinjiang 417 421 428 432 435 military See Peoples Liberation Army PLA Ming dynasty 407 471 minimum livelihood protection dibao 329 501 See also iron rice bowl Ministry of Environmental Protection 139 281 357 Mongolia 417 432 436 Mo Yan 350 Myanmar Burma 370371 Nanjing Rape of 64 486 514 Nanjing Decade 19271937 5961 65 486 509 National Bureau of Corruption Prevention 139 National Climate Change Assessment Report 356 nationalism among young people 335 arts policy and 342 Chiang Kaishek and 63 China Dream and 184185 in contemporary Chinese politics 1213 119 137138 141142 185186 278 335 424 Han ethnic group and 51 in imperial China 49 Sun Yatsen and 51 5758 Tibet and 416 422423 Nationalist Party KMT 228 incident Taiwan and 472 491 Chiang Kaisheks leadership of 32 59 65 114 471 486487 506 509 515 520 Chinese civil war and 8 27 32 6568 74 7778 114 164 255 433434 471472 487 497 506 515 524 in Chongqing 6465 486 497 dangwai phrase applied to opponents 500 factionalism in 60 fascism and 60 Nanjing Decade and 509 Northern Expedition and 5960 486 510511 524 Republic of China era 19121949 and 27 5354 5768 Sun Yatsen and 53 486 Taiwan and 8 27 32 67 120 471477 479482 491 500 507508 520 I n d e x 543 Three Principles of the People and 5758 521 united front with CCP and 5759 64 74 158 486 497 510511 523 525 United States and 65 164 520 White Terror 1920s and 59 6162 165 486 497 511 524 Xinjiang and 433434 Yuan Shuakis outlawing of 54 National Party Congress Chinese Communist Party 195197 201 210 225 357 495 509 National Peoples Congress NPC Chinas communist partystate and 193 198 200201 206 210 218 509 Chinese legal system and 227 239 242 520 Cultural Revolution and 120 elections and 200201 505 509 entrepreneurs in 210 health policy and 377 Hong Kong and 456 459 461465 Legislative Affairs Commission of 227 policy debates in 201 presidium of 513514 rural versus urban representation in 200201 special administrative regions SARs and 201 Standing Committee of 201 227 456 459 461463 465 493 519 Taiwan and 469 473 Tiananmen Movement 1989 and 129130 village elections and 303 National Salvation Associations 64 nativization initiative in Xinjiang 441442 Naxalites India 175176 neoauthoritarianism 135 510 Neoliberalism 186 510 Nepal 175176 408409 netizens 22 New Army imperial China 5051 54 New China News Agency Xinhua 457 New Culture movement 5556 510 New Left in China 134135 138 186 New Life Movement 6061 494 510 New Party Taiwan 482 New Right in China 135136 186 510 new social strata groups 182 205 510 Nexen 280 Nian rebellion 46 Nigeria 281 Ninth Party Congress Chinese Communist Party 102103 nitrogen oxide NOx emissions 353 Nixon Richard M 474 488 nomenklatura system of cadre management 197 202 294 300 311 323 510 nonantagonistic contradictions 84 Nongnu The Serf Chinese film about Tibet 411 nongovernmental organizations NGOs AIDS policy and 372 374 government restrictions against 135 population policy in China and 390 North China Boxer Uprising in 49 485 494 Chinese Communist Party bases in 65 68 7879 definition of 7 Han ethnic group rule of 4243 Nian rebellion and 46 warlordism in 55 Northeast China See also Manchuria definition of 7 unemployment in 127 331 Northern Expedition Chiang Kaishek 5960 486 510511 524 North Korea See Korea North Nothing to My Name Cui Jan 128 nuclear weapons program in China 436 nude painting 347 Nyamdrel faction Tibet 413 Nyemo revolt Tibet 413 Office of Ombudsman Hong Kong 466 The Old Regime and the Revolution Tocqueville 219 Olympic Games in Beijing 2008 137 139 186 339 347348 401 419 429 490 On Contradiction Mao Zedong 165167 onechild policy See also population policy abortion and 383385 391393 517 costbenefit analysis of 390394 exceptions to 386387 392 394 female infanticide and 385 391392 517 infant abandonment and 392 marriage and birth permits impact on 384 Open Letter 1980 on 391 phase one 19791983 and 383386 phase three 19891995 386388 phase two 19841989 and 386 phrase four post1989 388390 political and economic context for 383 resistance to 31 211 385 387388 rural versus urban implementation of 31 263 298 384386 392393 sexratio imbalances and 31 388389 391395 sterilization and 385386 summary description of 511 Third Plenum 2013 and 393394 One Country Two Systems approach Hong Kong 454 456457 493 511 oneleveldown management system 300302 511 one white one black approach Xinjiang 436 439 On Khrushchevs Phony Communism and Its Historical Lessons for the World Chinese Communist Party 1964 169 On Practice Mao Zedong 172173 On Revolution Han Han 219 On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People Mao Zedong 181 open coastal cities 276 544 I n d e x Open Constitution Initiative gongmeng 246 open recommendation and selection process 310311 open sea nominations 303304 308 511 Open Up the West campaign Great Western Development Drive 418 440 504 511 Opium Wars 44 452 485 511 516 522 Organic Law of Local Peoples Congresses and Local Peoples Governments 310 Organic Law of Villagers Committees 293294 302306 312 315 511 524 Organization Department CCP 197 512 Outer China 78 512 Outline Plan for Family Planning Work in 19952000 389 Overseas Chinese 258 276 Panchen Lamas 406 410 412 415 424 Panthay rebellion 46 Pan Wei 135 partystate See Communist partystate patriotic health campaigns 366367 patronclient relations 20 460461 Patten Christopher 456 Pearl River Delta 265 325326 354 peasants Chinese civil war and 68 Chinese Communist Party CCP and 6162 79 194 203205 255 260 Chinese legal system and 233 collectivization and 8384 86 126 260261 497 consumer habits of 263 cooperativization and 256 499 Cultural Revolution and 159 515 decollectivization and 9293 121 136 262 education and 94 entrepreneurs and 209 Great Leap Forward and 8889 261 land issues and 266267 Leninism and 157 Mao Zedong Thought and 61 66 73 157161 166 170 176 512513 Marxism and 157 159 private farming and 9293 121 260 revolution and 157159 socialism and 159 taxation and 139 264 in Tibet 411 413 urban workers and 166 Pei IM 349 Peng Dehuai 77 88 9192 97 116n1 168 507 Peng Liyuan 142 373 Peng Zhen 92 97 101 302303 People First Party PFP Hong Kong 475 482 People Power coalition Hong Kong 465 Peoples Action Party Singapore 135 Peoples Armed Police PAP 195 443 512 peoples communes capital improvements and 261 decollectivization and 124 262 505 Great Leap Forward and 90 159 171 266 512 limitations of 261 social welfare and 506 virtual elimination of private property and 90 512 peoples congresses 133 198 200 239240 294 306 peoples democratic dictatorship 14 181 194 501 512 See also dictatorship of the proletariat peoples government executive branch of government 512 516 Peoples Liberation Army PLA back to the barracks movement of 1973 110 barefoot doctors and 492 Beijing Massacre 1989 and 130 489 522 Bingtuan corps Xinjiang and 435 437 branches of 513 business activities of 135 Chinas communist partystate and 194195 201203 Chinese Communist Party CCP and 202203 Cultural Revolution and 101103 105 107 345 509 516 Deng Xiaopings reforms of 125 Great Leap Forward and 91 Hong Kong garrison of 457 Jiang Zemins reforms of 135 National Peoples Congress NPC representation and 201 naval forces and 18 Quotations from Chairman Mao and 95 regional governance and 81 Taiwan and 137 in Tibet 402 408409 411412 487 499 517 522 permanent revolution 171172 513 Perry Elizabeth J 12 Peru 175176 petitioning 228 313316 PetroChina 281 Piece of Red Cloth Cui Jan 131 Poland 8687 126 policy and eventcentered approach to Chinese politics 19 25 Politburo Central Military Commission CMC and 203 Chinese Communist Party and 194199 202203 205208 211 213214 217218 Chinese legal system and 246247 Cultural Revolution and 98 100101 103 106 educational levels among 205206 Hong Kong and 456 Korean War and 80 Maoist Era and 66 7578 8081 84 87 98 100101 103 106108 111 Maos criticisms of 87 Maos position on 156 I n d e x 545 military members of 81 102104 125 135 198 202 National Peoples Congress NPC and 201 organization and role of 75 198 princelings on 217 provincial leaders ascension to 207208 Secretariat and 197 Standing Committee of 100 104 135 138 141 194196 198199 201203 206207 213214 217218 247 456 519 summary description of 514 Tiananmen Incident 1976 and 109110 tuanpai on 217 turnover rate in 213214 Xi Jinping and 141142 political culture approach to Chinese politics 2324 political development approach to Chinese politics 19 2223 political economy approach to Chinese politics 19 23 25 political institutions and processes approach to Chinese politics 19 22 political reform See also democratization Deng Xiaopings discussion of 125 from the bottom 218219 221 from the top 219 221 in Hong Kong 463465 Hu Yaobang and 127129 141 limits of 128130 197 218 221 as opposed to revolution 219 peaceful evolution strategy and 247248 512 rehabilitations and 124125 in rural China 294 316317 in Shizhong Chengdu Sichuan 309310 Soviet Union and 258 spiritual pollution and 128 489 Tiananmen Movement 1989 and 129130 Xi Jinping and 141 185 Zhao Ziyang and 129131 pollution See under environmental issues Polo Marco 78 Population and Family Planning Law 2001 390 population policy See also onechild policy aging population and 31 388389 394 501 birth control and family planning in 381382 385386 demographic transition and 389 500 dependency ratios and 394 501 economic development and 389391 395 Mao Zedong and 381 missing women and 392393 509 511 nongovernmental organizations NGOs and 390 Outline Plan for Family Planning Work in 19952000 389 Population and Family Planning Law 2001 390 sex ratio imbalance and 31 380 388389 391395 511 517 sustainable development and 388 Third Plenum 2013 and 393394 populism Hu Jintao and 139 183 Mao Zedong Thought and 160161 164 populist coalition 215218 513 523 Prachanda See Dahal Pushpa Kumal pragmatism Mao Zedong Thought and 74 171174 177178 pragmatist faction 121 123 513 524 predatory states 16 243 513 princelings 140 215217 286 514 Principal Officials Accountability System POAS Hong Kong 460461 privatization in health care system 368 376 of land 267 pace of 269 of stateowned enterprises SOEs 119 258259 260 268 285286 town and village enterprises TVEs and 265 proletariat dictatorship of 14 9697 128 154 180 501 503 512 Leninism and 154155 Mao Zedong Thought and 159 168 170 499 513 Marxism and 151154 157 159 494495 497 499 501 Three Represents and 136 Propaganda Department CCP 197 Property Rights Law 2007 230 protests See demonstrations public health See health policy public sector decline 229 232 268270 Public Security Bureau PSB 226 324 514 Pye Lucian W 18 alQaeda 428429 445 501 Qianlong Chinese emperor 43 430 432 Qiao Xiaoyang 465 Qin dynasty 6 10 4142 350 514 Qing dynasty 1911 Revolution against 10 27 4951 486 491 514515 abdication of 51 486 491 Boxer Uprising and 49 423 485 494 Chinese legal system and 226 decline of 27 4346 5253 134 454 efforts to save 27 4650 52 497 505 517 financial problems of 43 46 49 53 432 494 511 High Qing period and 43 485 504 Hundred Days Reform 1898 4748 485 505 Opium Wars and 44 452 485 511 516 prosperity during 43 Taiping Rebellion and 4445 134135 423 485 520 Taiwan and 471 475 Tibet and 43 49 405 407410 421423 546 I n d e x tributary system and 4344 47 515 523 urbanization during 320321 Xinjiang and 430 432433 QinghaiTibetan Plateau 356 410 QinghaiTibet Railway 133 418 Qingming Festival 1976 109 Qin Shihuangdi 350 Qin Shi Huangdi Chinese emperor 10 41 Qi Yuling 240241 Quotations from Chairman Mao 95 Ramo Joshua Cooper 282 Rape of Nanjing 64 486 514 Reascending Chingkangshan Mao Zedong 165 rectification campaigns 66 75 78 156 514 520 Red Army Chinese Communist Party 61 514 Red Capitalists 205 514 See also entrepreneurs Red Flag Hong Qi 173 Red Guards Cultural Revolution 97100 102 159 175 344 413 487488 493 515 524 reeducation through labor laojiao 139 238239 247 514 reemployment service centers RSCs 329 Reform Era See marketbased reform political reform reform through labor laogai camps 86 239 516 religion in China Buddhism in Tibet and 32 135 188 405407 409410 412414 416 419421 423 517 growing influence of 187188 house churches and 245 505 informal politics and 20 Renan Ernest 422 rent seeking 272273 278 286 515 See also corruption Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan Mao Zedong 1927 158 167 Republic of China 19121949 corrupt politics in 5455 economic difficulties during 60 65 6768 individualism in 56 legal system in 226 May Fourth Movement and 5557 61 63 155 333 486 509510 Nanjing Decade 19271937 5961 65 486 509 National Assembly in 53 Versailles Treaty and 56 486 warlordism in 21 27 5457 60 486 510511 523524 Republic of Uyghurstan proposal 1951 434 residents committees urban subdistricts 9 298 323 330 515 resistance See also demonstrations legal modes of 293294 312314 noncompliance as a form of 314315 petitioning as 228 313316 rightful forms of 312314 516 in rural China 293294 297 semilegal and illegal modes of 294 312 314316 in Tibet 405 409410 412 Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the Peoples Republic of China 1981 113114 116 125 175177 489 515516 Revolutionary Alliance Sun Yatsen 51 53 485 revolutionary authoritarianism 22 Revolutionary Committees 101102 516 Revolutionary Communist Party USA 175 River Elegy 137 516 round tripping 276277 roving ballot boxes 304 rural China See also land rural peasants rural governance towns and townships administrative organization in 30 294296 523 agricultural output levels and 262263 education and schools in 297 299300 health care in 31 365 367370 373 376 499 household responsibility system in 262 505 industrialization in 257258 262 264266 268 land development and disputes in 266 marketbased economic reforms and 29 293 299 368 migration from 8 30 139 209 261 269 294 304 307 313 320 322 324327 migrations impact on 327 onechild policy and 384386 392 political economy of 260267 rural small towns xiaocheng zhen and 266 suicide among women in 306307 unrest and resistance in 30 293294 312317 urbanization in 327 338 rural governance See also towns and townships administrative divisions and 295296 elections and 30 125 136 200 239240 293 300 302305 308309 316 family clans and 308309 Organic Law of Villagers Committees and 293294 party secretaries and 298299 301 304305 308309 314 proxy voting and 304 village committees and 298 300 302303 306 309 317 511 villager representative assemblies VRAs and 30 305306 524 vote buying and 308309 women in village politics and 306 308 Rural Women magazine 308 Russia See also Soviet Union authoritarianism in 120 Bolsheviks in 153 Boxer Uprising and 49 Qing dynasty Cont I n d e x 547 comparisons with China and 15 17 economic reforms in 269 impact of Chinas environmental problems on 354 imperial China and 4749 peasantry in 157 PRCs relations with 170 Revolution 1917 in 57 152155 RussoJapanese War and 50 63 Xinjiang and 432 Russian Social Democratic Labor Party 153 RussoJapanese War 50 63 Ryukyu Islands 47 safety scandals in China 234 236 273274 335 377 Sanlu Dairy Group 236 273 SARS See Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome SARS Sassen Saskia 339 Schram Stuart 97 165 Schurmann Franz 149 157 Scientific Outlook on Development Hu Jintao 138 184185 215 361 501 516 Second Convention of Peking 452 Secretariat of Chinese Communist Party CCP Chinese Communist Party and 195 197 202 214 218 516 factional politics and 218 turnover rate in 214 Seeking Facts Qiu Shi 173 segmented deregulation 275276 516 The Selected Works of Jiang Zemin 183 selfreliance 16 177 260261 SelfStrengthening Movement 4647 52 485 516517 Sen Amartya 392 Seventeen Point Agreement Tibet 409411 414 487 517 Seventh Party Conference CCP 74 76 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome SARS challenge to Chinese public health system and 31 339 369370 373 377 517 epidemiology of 369 Hong Kong and 369 state responses to 237 365366 369370 372 377 517 sex ratio imbalance in China 31 380 388389 391395 511 517 sexselective abortion 391393 517 Shang dynasty 10 Shanghai Cultural Revolution in 100101 as a directly administered municipality 322 elite coalition and 215 floating population in 325 as a global city 339 legal system in 243 party secretary in 193 population size of 8 World Expo 2010 in 186 Shanghai commune 101 Shantou 257 Sheng Shicai 433 Shenzhen 257258 shequ urban administration level 323 329330 498 Shi Lang 471 Shining Path Sendero Luminoso 176 Shizhong political reforms 309310 shuanggui dual regulation 237 Sichuan earthquake 2008 211 297 338 Sichuan Province rural reforms 121 262 Sinawatra Thaksin 142 Singapore 133 135 Sinification of MarxismLeninism 156 517 SinoBritish Joint Declaration 454 511 517 SinoJapanese War 1895 47 63 471 485 517 SinoJapanese War 193745 See under Japan invasion and occupation of China by SinoSoviet Split 88 95 102103 137 169170 412 436 487 517518 SinoSoviet Treaty 169 small and medium enterprises SMEs 267 518 socialism See also socialist transformation Building Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and 178182 357 494 500 Chinese Communist Party CCP and 150 185 194 262 513 Deng Xiaoping Theory and 179 in early Republic of China 5658 marketbased reform and 125127 Four Cardinal Principles and 128 Leninism and 154155 159 167 Maos interpretation and implementation of 23 167171 181 market socialism and 121 126 179 Marxism and 152 156157 166 495 518 May Fourth Movement and 155 peasants and 159 population policy and 381382 in early Republic of China 56 58 15556 primary stage of 514 Sun Yatsen and 5758 work unit socialism and 329 socialist democracy 240 518 Socialist Education Movement 19621966 94 96 518 socialist legality 135 226 518 socialist market economy 133 179 258 270 389 503 518 socialist transformation Deng Xiaoping Theory and 179 general line and 8283 in Hong Kong 511 of industry and commerce 84 Lenin on 154155 548 I n d e x Mao Zedong Thought and 80 176 181 market socialism and 179 Marxism and 80 152 155 497 summary of 518 in Tibet 410 soft authoritarianism 22 473 soft power 18 137 518 Solidarity movement Poland 126 Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership Mao Zedong 1943 162 Song dynasty 41 501 Songhua River 354 Song Jiaoren 5354 Song Ping 138 Soong James 475 South Africa 17 South China 7 455 493 518 520 Southern Inspection Tour Deng Xiaoping 133 142 258 489 518 South Korea See Korea South southnorth water transfer program nanshui beidiao gongcheng 360 Soviet Union censorship in 346347 Chinese Communist Party CCP 5759 62 7375 78 8081 8586 90 156 169 343 498 518 Chinese students in 61 74 collapse of 131132 185 258 416 422 489 command economy and 126 as a communist partystate 193194 Czechoslovakia invasion and 102 deStalinization in 174 economic and technical advances by 87 economic assistance to China and 267 economic reforms in 120 503 ideology in 149 153 KMT and 5759 Korean War and 169 506 Leninism in 153 Mao Zedong and 73 8081 8688 90 92 9596 102103 158 168169 498 nationalities policy in 408 revisionism charges against 96 114 169171 176 516 SinoSoviet Split and 88 95 102103 137 169170 412 436 487 517518 totalitarianism in 22 urban planning in 321 Xinjiang and 433 435436 447 special administrative regions SARs 89 3132 518 See also Hong Kong Macao Special Economic Zones SEZs 257258 276 516 519 The Spirit of Chinese Politics Pye 18 spiritual pollution 128 489 519 Stalin Joseph Chinese Communist Party CCP and 57 59 7475 78 158 Khrushchev and 125 174175 Mao Zedong and 7475 80 86 158 169 totalitarianism of 22 Xinjiang and 435 Standing Committee of the National Peoples Congress SCNPC 201 302 459 461463 465 493 519 State and Revolution Lenin 154 State Asset Supervision and Administration Commission SASAC 270 272 519 statebuilding 2122 60 78 114 state capitalism 271 519 State Compensation Law 235 State Council AIDS Working Committee of 372 Chinas communist partystate and 193 198 200201 218 Chinese legal system and 234 economic policy and 81 89 Executive Committee of 200201 factional politics and 218 Legislative Affairs Office of 227 Regulation Concerning Letters and Visits 314 regulations on social organizations and 358 reorganization of after Cultural Revolution 108 110 summary description of 519 State Economic and Trade Commission 279 State Environmental Protection Administration 357 state farms 266 519 stateowned enterprises SOEs Chinas communist partystate and 195 210 215 221 Chinese legal system and 229 232233 corruption and 271273 dual price system and 272273 marketbased reform and decline of 30 126127 257 269 327328 331 498 520 environmental issues and 362 impact on urban China from 321 327329 332 334 outbound foreign direct investment OFDI and 280281 as path to political leadership 210 privatization of 119 258259 260 268 285286 social welfare benefits and 260 321 329 337 506 State Asset Supervision and Administration Commission SASAC and 269270 state assistance for 519520 township and village enterprises TVEs and 265 273 in Xinjiang 436 438 State Planning Commission 94 statesociety relations approach to Chinese politics 19 2425 Stilwell Joseph 65 socialist transformation Cont I n d e x 549 street offices urban subdistricts 9 323 520 struggle meetings 6869 520 Sudan 280281 suicide among Chinese rural women 306307 sulfur dioxide emissions 353 357 Sun Yatsen 1911 Revolution and 51 486 contemporary China and 349 KMT and 53 5758 486 506 521 nationalism and 51 5758 political philosophy of 226 Revolutionary Alliance and 51 53 485 socialism and 5758 Three Principles of the People and 5758 521 Supreme Peoples Court 200202 218 236 240241 246 520 Supreme Peoples Procuracy 200201 218 226 520 sustainable development 31 361362 388 501 520 swine flu 369 Taiping Rebellion 4445 134135 423 485 520 Taishi village protests 2005 315 Taiwan 228 incident and 472 491 before 1945 469472 aboriginal population of 471 authoritarian rule in 32 120 469 472474 478 480 500 Click Click Click game and 468469 constitutional reform in 476 contemporary politics in 475476 480482 Control Yuan in 475 corruption in 482 dangwai phrase applied to KMT opponents 474 500 democratization in 32 131 474475 478 480 482 500 507 economic dynamism and growth in 32 132 268 469 473474 481 economic policy in 120 274 473 elections in 462 469 473476 480482 entrepreneurs in 473 478 exclusion from world community of 469 Executive Yuan in 475476 foreign direct investment in China and 258 geography of 469470 independence debate and 476479 482 Internet in 468469 investment in China by 265 276277 478 Japan and 8 47 63 471 485 517 joint ventures in China and 265 276 Judicial Yuan in 475 land reform in 473 Legislative Yuan in 475476 479 481 local politics in 480481 Mainlanders in 471473 477478 508 521 martial law in 472 474 map of 470 National Assembly in 472 Nationalist Party KMT and 8 27 32 67 114 120 487 500 507 515 520 PRC policy toward 8 3132 114 125 135 218 402 469 476480 482 511 520 premiership in 475 presidency in 475476 Taiwanese population and 472473 477 520521 United States and 8 32 137 469 472 474 479480 503 520 United Work Front Department and 197198 White Terror 1950s1960s in 473 Taiwan Solidarity Union TSU 482 Taiwan Strait 471 520 taking grain as the key link yi liang wei gang 261 Tan Dun 350 Tang Henry 461 Tang dynasty 50 52 501 Tang Hui 239 Tarim Basin Xinjiang 432433 taxation in China 229 264 276 300 314315 388 technocrats 135 205206 211 521 Ten Thousand Character Letters wanyanshu 134 521 Tenth Party Congress Chinese Communist Party 107 Thatcher Margaret 454 Third Plenum 1978 Chinese legal system and 224 Deng Xiaopings leadership and 121 133 196 economic reform and 121 123124 196 257 262 488 515 521 Third Plenum 2013 142 393394 ThreeAnti Campaign 163 521 Three Gorges Dam Sanxia 133 360 363n15 521 Three Principles of the People Sun Yatsen 5758 521 Three Represents sange daibo Jiang Zemin 136 182185 209210 270 333 510 521 Tiananmen Incident 1976 109110 121 124 129 488 521522 Tiananmen Movement 1989 See also Beijing Massacre anticorruption emphasis and 28 130 489 522 artists and 343 bourgeois liberalization charges against 494 censorship regarding 347 Democracy Wall prisoners and 129 democratization emphasis in 129131 489 522 failure of 130131 Hu Yaobang and 122 Shanghai and 132 summary of 129132 522 work assignment fenpei system and 333 550 I n d e x Tibet autonomous region status of 89 3132 402 405 412 421 492 British invasion 19031904 of 407 Buddhism in 32 135 188 405407 409410 412414 416 419421 423 censorship regarding 347 401 Central Intelligence Agency CIA and 409 Chinese Communist Party policy in 404405 408417 420424 441 Cultural Revolution in 412414 421 423 democratic reform in 411412 demonstrations in 32 138 401 404405 415416 418421 442443 447 490 512 Deng Xiaoping and 414415 marketbased reform in 405 416418 environmental issues in 356 360 Four Olds in 413 Great Leap Forward in 412 421 Gyenlok faction in 413 Han ethnic group in 417419 421 441 household responsibility system in 415 Hu Jintao and 207 215 402 404 417 Hu Yaobang and 122 441 imperial China and 405 421 India and 402 land reform and 410411 Manchu views of 407408 Mao Zedong and 409410 412413 421 map of 403 middle class in 418 nationalism and 416 422423 Nyamdrel faction in 413 Nyemo revolt in 413 Open Up the West campaign and 418 504 511 peasants in 411 413 Peoples Liberation Army in 402 408409 411412 487 499 517 522 Qing dynasty and 43 49 405 407410 421423 QinghaiTibet Railway and 133 Red Guards in 413 reeducation through labor laojiao and 239 religious restrictions in 135 416 421 Republic of China 19121949 and 408 432 rural development campaign in 418 selfimmolation protests and 420 447 Seventeen Point Agreement 1950 and 409411 414 487 517 travel restrictions in 404 419 United States and 402 409 415 419 unrest 2008 in 208209 uprising in and invasion of 1959 411412 487 499 522 Tito Josip 121 Tocqueville Alexis de 219 Tohti Ilham 445446 449n41 Tort Liability Law 2010 231 totalitarianism Chinese Communist Party CCP and 22 79 8486 119 143 town cadres administrative responsibilities of 300302 cadre exchange system and 300302 495 oneleveldown management system and 300302 511 towns and townships elections in 125 136 301 309312 316 498 government heads in 300301 309310 317 government structure in 295296 300301 open recommendation and selection process in 310311 party committees in 301 party secretaries in 300301 305 309310 317 peoples congresses and 198 301 306 309 311312 political reform in 309310 population level in 295 township and village enterprises TVEs 264 Chinese legal system and 229 introduction of 126 privatizations impact on 269 522 stateowned enterprises SOEs and 265 273 Treaty of Nanjing 44 47 452 485 516 522 Treaty of Tianjin 516 triad organizations 455 461 523 tributary system 4344 47 63 515 523 Tsai Yingwen 482 Tsang Donald Tsang Yamkuen 460464 466 tuanpai Chinese Communist Youth League faction 215218 523 Tung Chee Hwa 458463 466 Turkis 430 432433 See also Uyghurs Turkistan Islamic Party TIP 429 Turkmenistan 447 Twentyone Demands Japan and China 1915 56 63 523 unemployment marketbased reform and 127 134 in Northeast China 127 331 in urban China 30 327331 338 in Xinjiang 438 440 unequal treaties 44 49 51 58 63 485 502 516 522523 unitary state 8 21 523 united front CCP and KMT 5759 6465 74 158 486 497 523 525 United Front Work Department CCP 197198 United Kingdom See Great Britain United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women 1995 389 444 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change 355356 I n d e x 551 United Nations International Conference on Population and Development 1994 389 United States auto industry in 277 Boxer Uprising and 49 Chen Guangcheng case and 211 244 Chinas cultural relationship with 348 350 Chinas diplomatic relationship with 3 1718 32 65 103 137138 140 169 257 474 487489 Chinas economic relationship with 218 231 258 277 279280 285 348 Chinese civil war and 6566 Chinese leaders visits to 136137 180 Chinese public opinion regarding 137 186 Chinese students in 335 comparisons with China and 6 8 1517 133 195 201 214 274 276 280281 284285 294 315 320 324325 332 350 354355 357 367 380 384 comparisons with Hong Kong and 457 504 comparisons with Taiwan and 476 détente with China and 18 103 111 169 474 488 East Turkistan Islamic Movement ETIM and 429 445 501 foreign direct investment FDI to China and 258 imperial China and 43 Jiang Zemin and 123 Korean War and 165 Nationalist Party KMT and 65 164 Red Scare 1950s in 33 Taiwan and 8 32 137 469 472 474 479480 503 520 Tibet and 402 409 415 419 Vietnam War and 175 Washington Consensus and 282 World War II and 65 Xinjiang and 429 445 501 Unrequited Love Bai Hua 128 urban bias 16 159 260261 265 321 urban China administrative levels in 30 322323 330 demonstrations in 129 329331 dibao system in 501 elections in 324 entrepreneurs in 30 332333 environmental problems in 30 332333 335336 338339 353 floating population in 324327 governance of 323324 grid management in 324 imperial era and 320321 inequality in 30 336338 law enforcement in 324 Marco Polo on 78 mayors in 323 middle class in 30 331333 migration to 8 30 139 209 261 269 294 304 307 313 320 322 324327 minimum livelihood protection dibao system in 329 501 party secretaries in 323 peoples congresses in 324 peoples government in 323 redevelopment and 231 321 reemployment service centers RSCs and 329 residents committees in 323 515 shequ urban administration level in 323 329330 498 stateowned enterprises SOEs in 321 street offices subdistricts in 9 323 520 unemployment in 30 327331 338 urban planning and 321 336 338 urban villages chengzhongcun and 325326 work units danwei in 321 327 329330 young people in 30 333335 urban workers Chinese Communist Party CCP and 203204 demonstrations by 129 education and 94 Mao Zedong Thought and 166 peasants and 166 stateowned enterprises and 268 Ürümchi Xinjiang 435 438439 442443 445446 Uyghurs See also Turkis in Central Asian countries 32 523 Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement ETIM and 428429 445 501 education levels among 439440 in Guangdong province 442 in Guantanamo detention center 428429 in imperial China 42 Muslim identity of 32 430 nationalism and 423 Republic of Uyghurstan proposal 1951 and 434 violence against 442443 in Xinjiang 32 421 423 428 430 433447 493 523 525 Uzbekistan 523 vanguard communist party Chinese Communist Party as 14 156 160 162163 177 185 497 523 Leninism and 153156 160 523 market socialism and 179 Versailles Treaty 56 486 509 Vietnam 47 155 175 284 354 village cadres accountability and 304305 314 administrative responsibilities of 297300 303305 308 552 I n d e x village cadres Cont diminishing control by 293 308 marketbased reforms impact on 299 elections and 302305 308309 land management and 297299 308309 316 population policy and 298300 303 306 308 Socialist Education Movement 19621966 and 94 518 town officials and 299 303305 308 villagers relations with 294 296300 302 309 312 314315 villages See also rural governance administrative villages 295 government structure in 295296 migrations impact on 327 natural villages 295296 298 party secretaries in 298299 301 304305 308309 314 population level in 295 village committees and 298300 302303 306 309 317 511 villager representative assemblies VRAs and 30 305306 524 Wang Dongxing 524 Wanggyal Baba Phuntsog 408409 Wang Hongwen 106107 110111 115 503 Wang Jingwei 65 Wang Lequan 438 446 Wang Qishan 199 Wang Shengjun 246 Wang Yang 218 Wang Zhen 435 Wan Li 130 262 Warlord Era 21 27 5457 486 511 524 Washington Consensus 282 493 524 Wei Jingsheng 124 238 Wen Jiabao AIDS policy and 372 economic policy and 254 270 education of 206 financial holdings of 272 Hong Kong and 460 new socialist countryside and 264 populist coalition and 215 tuanpai and 217 whateverist faction 121 123124 144n3 500 513 524 What Is to Be Done Lenin 153 172 White Lotus Rebellion 43 White Terror China 1920s 59 6162 165 486 497 511 524 White Terror Taiwan 1950s1960s 473 Williamson John 282 work units danwei 384 498 524 benefit structure in 337 reform and elimination of 327 329330 501 in urban China 321 327 329330 337 World Economic Herald Shanghai newspaper 132 134 World Expo Shanghai 2010 186 World Trade Organization WTO Chinas accession to 133 260 270 274 277278 525 Chinas marketbased economic reforms and 255 260 277278 Chinas export growth and 270 Chinese legal system and 231 242 278 foreign direct investment in China and 276 278279 trade dispute tribunals and 278 World Uyghur Congress WUC 443445 wound literature 121 Wu Bangguo 206 224 Wu De 524 Wu dialect 11 Wukan village protests 2011 316 Wu Peifu 54 Wu Yi 372 Xiamen 139 257 359 Xianfeng emperor 47 Xian incident 1936 64 497 525 Xiao Yang 246 Xi Jinping AIDS policy and 372 anticorruption efforts of 235 272 biographical sketch of 199 Central Committee and 141 Central Military Commission CMC and 140 198 203 490 496 Central Party School and 496 China Dream and 142 184185 246 496 Chinese legal system and 224225 241 247 Cultural Revolution and 208 economic policies of 28 123 141142 217 246 281 283 285 352353 education of 205206 elite coalition and 215 217 environmental issues and 352353 361362 familys financial holdings 272 fifth generation of CCP leaders and 123 193 Hong Kong and 464 ideology and 28 Leading Small Groups and 198 migration policy and 285 nationalism and 141142 184 Politburo and 141142 217 political reform and 141 185 316317 previous leadership positions of 207 reeducation through labor reform and 238 Shanghai and 323 Shenzhen visit of 142 Tibet and 404 Xinjiang I n d e x 553 autonomous region status of 89 3132 430 434 492 Bingtuan corps and 435 437 439 442 493 censorship regarding 443 446 Chinese Communist Party CCP policy in 433434 437 441442 444445 Chinese nuclear weapons program in 436 cotton production in 436437 439 demonstrations in 32 428 434 438 441447 490 512 Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement ETIM and 428429 445 501 Eastern Turkistan Republic ETR and 433436 economic development in 435440 environmental issues in 360 436 439 future of 447 geography of 430431 Han ethnic group in 32 417 421 428429 432435 437443 446447 493 Hu Yaobang and 441 inequality in 438440 446447 Islam and 32 188 430 432 525 Law on Regional Autonomy 1993 and 438 Mao Zedong and 433435 map of 431 nativization initiative in 441442 natural resources in 430 436 438 440 445 447 one white one black approach in 436 439 Open Up the West campaign and 440 504 511 Peoples Republic of China period and 433434 private sector in 438 Qing dynasty and 430 432433 reeducation through labor laojiao and 239 religious restrictions in 442 Republic of China 19121949 and 432433 Republic of Uyghurstan proposal 1951 434 Russian empire and 432 Soviet Union and 433 435436 state farms in 519 Tarim Basin in 432433 Turkis in 430 432433 unemployment in 438 440 unrest 2009 in 442446 Uyghurs in 32 421 423 428 430 433447 493 523 525 warlordism in 433 Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps XPCC See Bingtuan Xinjiang Work Group 446 Xinsi 360 Xi Zhongxun 141 215 Xu Bing 350 Xu Zhiyong 246 Yaan experiment consultative elections 311312 Yanan CCP base in 64 66 74 165 173 343 486 493 525 Long March and 62 158 486 507 Maos consolidation of power at 156 343 486 496 525 Yang Baibing 135 202 Yang Jia 236 Yang Shangkun 135 202 Yangtze River 7 44 133 265 360 521 525 Yan Xishan 54 Yao Wenyuan 106 503 Ye Jianying 112 Yeltsin Boris 130 Ye Qun 104105 Younghusband Francis 407408 Young Pioneers 216 525 Yuan dynasty 43 405 407 Yuan Shikai 1911 Revolution and 5051 in early Republic of China 5354 59 63 486 506 TwentyOne Demands and 63 Yunnan Province 46 Yu Zhengsheng 199 Zeng Qinghong 459 Zhang Chunqiao 105106 503 Zhang Chunxian 446 Zhang Dejiang 199 Zhang Gaoli 199 Zhang Jinming 310311 495 Zhang Qingli 418 Zhang Xiaoyu 236 Zhang Xueliang 64 525 Zhang Zhizhong 433434 Zhang Zongchang 5455 Zhang Zuolin 63 Zhao Ziyang death of 131132 Deng Xiaoping and 122 127 212 489 marketbased economic reforms and 122 126 129 254 258 265 political purging of 122 130132 212 254 258 489 political reform and 129131 State Council and 126 Tiananmen Movement 1989 and 129131 Zhao Zuohai 236 Zhejiang province protests 2005 315316 Zheng Chenggong 471 Zheng Zhilong 471 Zhongguo Antonioni film 349 Zhongguo Middle Kingdom 6 44 437 554 I n d e x Zhongnanhai leadership compound 134 502 525 Zhou Enlai birth planning policies and 381382 Chinese foreign policy and 76 107 111 Cultural Revolution and 76 101 107109 death and commemoration of 108111 129 488 521 Great Leap Forward recovery and 91 94 Li Peng and 127 Mao Zedong and 7576 80 82 84 87 94 104 107 109111 499 as premier 8182 84 87 106 488 Tibet and 412 Zhou Qiang 245246 Zhou Yongkang 202 246247 312 Zhu De 61 Zhu Feng 281 Zhuhai 257 Zhu Rongji 133 206 264 278 Zhu Suli 243 Zongli Yamen Office for General Management imperial China 47 Zuo Zongtang 432