In The Art of Political Control in China, Daniel Mattingly provides an original and persuasive argument about how the Chinese Communist Party uses society itself to control and coerce citizens in rural China. We tend to think of civil society as robustly associated with good governance – it breeds social capital and trust among citizens and in turn facilitates collective action and political accountability. This book flips that argument on its head. Mattingly shows that in rural China, civil society groups can help local elites implement unpopular policies like land requisitions and birth quotas. Leaders in rural China cultivate and leverage the moral standing of temple organizations, lineage associations and social clubs to achieve their goals. Villages in China that have these groups tend to fare worse in terms of land confiscations and the enforcement of birth quotas. To turn Joel Migdal's phrase, “a strong society can in fact complement a strong state” (p. 183).
The empirical portion of the book begins in chapter three, where Mattingly cleanly lays out the core governance challenge facing officials in rural China: they often lack the trust and support of the local population, and they are tasked by the centre with implementing difficult, unpopular policies. Members of lineage groups and other social organizations, in contrast, are more trusted in these communities, which makes them useful tools for local officials.
The remainder of the book outlines the key strategies of control. Where possible, local officials cultivate civil society to enhance state capacity (chapter four), co-opt civil society elites to help persuade citizens to abide by government policy (chapter five), or infiltrate society with networks of informants (chapter six). In each chapter, we get paired comparisons of villages to show the causal processes at work, followed by quantitative evidence that these practices help local officials achieve their goals.
Mattingly's impressive toolkit is on full display. The prose flows seemingly from rich insights gleaned from a year of fieldwork in rural China, to survey experiments, to rigorous quantitative work, to insightful anecdotes from other cases. It is a masterclass in multi-method research. The full strengths of each method are brought to bear, and the weight of the evidence renders Mattingly's argument credible.
I especially appreciated the author's ability to draw insights from other cases. We learn that the core strategies of informal control are present in political contexts from “India to Appalachia” (p. 87) (including Mattingly's beloved New Haven). This is the rare China book that might make the jump to a broader social science readership. The general sweep of the argument – that local leaders create, co-opt and infiltrate informal social organizations for their own gain – can and should cause the field to revisit our understanding of civil society.
Mattingly does leave some stones unturned, and for that reason The Art of Political Control will serve as inspiration for future scholars. He leaves us with a somewhat uncomfortable picture of civil society. These groups can facilitate trust among their members and beget public good provision, but they can also help local officials create buy-in for extractive or coercive policies. This leads us to wonder, are these groups a net good or bad for citizens in China's villages? Should policymakers be promoting civil society in nondemocracies, or does this actually worsen outcomes for citizens? The answer is probably context dependent; it will vary on the policy area, the nature of local government and the type of civil society organization. Mattingly starts to get us there in his analysis of the subtle variation across lineage groups and religious association, but more can be done. This book is focused on what Mary Gallagher has termed “unofficial civil society” (p. 7), but future work can explore more formalized groups, like NGOs, legal aid associations or workers’ rights organizations.
In short, this book is worth your time. And a spot on your syllabus.
