This monograph tackles the enormous challenge of tracing the history of China’s two major revolutionary parties over three eventful decades, and it effectively harnesses their political development to advance broader comparative theories of parties in times of great turmoil. Highlighting the role of institutions, Lü demonstrates the decisive effect of the parties’ organizational infrastructure for mass versus elite mobilization, and he questions the views that dominant leaders tend to undermine the resilience of a party. Masterfully drawing on the voluminous literature, routinely working with primary sources, and productively employing quantitative data, this book pushes out the knowledge frontier about party development.
To explain the surprising rise of the CCP after decades of stagnation, and the fall of the KMT after decades of resilience and membership expansion, Lü proposes to focus on party institutions (chapter one). An innovative model of party building compels the reader through its precision and clarity: the qualities of party mobilizational infrastructure and the party’s ability to raise resources depend on party building strategies, which in turn are shaped by elite-level politics as well as ideology (chapter two). Prior to the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), the KMT’s elite mobilization facilitated resource extraction, whereas the CCP was unable to raise sufficient resources (chapter three). However, the shock of war hit the economic elites hard, thereby undermining the KMT’s material base and triggering extractive strategies that alienated citizens. By contrast, when the CCP belatedly felt financial pressure, it benefitted from newly built mobilization infrastructure to raise funds in a sustainable way (chapter four).
Lü then takes a step back, asking where this effective mobilization infrastructure came from in the first place. Initially, worker-centric Communist ideology hindered mobilization where it was most promising, namely among peasants in rural China. Due to leadership competition, the CCP was slow to adapt (chapter five). Only the rise of Mao to the CCP’s helm, which owed as much to luck as to apt strategy, allowed a more decisive turn to consistent mobilization tactics (chapter six). The KMT’s failure to build a mass following was the result of debilitating leadership contestation after Sun Yat-sen’s death in 1925. Only ten years later, after Chiang Kai-shek had consolidated power, did membership expand, albeit the earlier commitment to elite mobilization inhibited connections to the masses (chapter seven). In the conclusion, Lü traces the influence of the pre-1949 experience on CCP governance in China, visible for instance in campaign-style implementation, as well as on the KMT’s governance in Taiwan (chapter eight).
Lü’s ontology recognizes that deep causes, such as rural exploitation or peasant nationalism in reaction to Japanese colonization, are insufficient to account for the CCP’s winding path to victory over the KMT in 1949. Instead, focusing on party institutions, Lü vindicates the power of “middle range theory” (Daniel Ziblatt, “Of Course Generalize, But How? Returning to Middle Range Theory in Comparative Politics,” American Political Science Association-Comparative Politics Newsletter, 2006). Process tracing shows in vivid detail elite struggles and local realities of membership mobilization, beginning with the CCP’s persistent failures when recruiting workers. The reader recognizes the disjuncture between the expanding number of party members and the vulnerability of local party networks (p. 131), or even their usefulness as mobilization infrastructure (p. 172). At pivotal junctures, Lü draws on primary material, such as CCP documents or a speech by Mao that marked a new approach to party building (p. 146), so that readers gain an intimate sense of evolving strategies. Lü’s middle range theory explains not just the ultimate outcome of the revolution, but also the ups and downs in the histories of the CCP and the KMT. It promises to travel to other revolutionary movements.
The argument is buttressed by rich quantitative data. The book presents what to the best of my knowledge are the most complete statistics on the membership and organizational reach of the CCP and KMT during the Republican era, alongside interpretations in light of the historical circumstances. Lü also presents unprecedented fiscal data, meticulously compiled following transparently documented methodology. Anyone who has worked with Republican era data knows the enormity of the task, including the need to put monetary values to in-kind taxes, to convincingly reconcile contradictory data points of questionable quality, and to meaningfully extrapolate to areas with missing data. The data prove that the presence of party members allowed the CCP to extract more grain, whereas KMT party members were of little use. The data also demonstrate, better than previous attempts, that the CCP’s grain extraction was progressive: All rural classes were taxed, but poorer ones less (p. 103).
The argument is particularly compelling for three reasons: first, the book avoids “reading history backwards.” It pays due attention to temporarily successful strategies, even when in retrospect they seem inconsequential, such as the major KMT reforms of 1924 (p. 158). Second, it accounts for individual agency and contingent events, such as Sun Yat-sen’s death at age 58, pointing out the limits of theorizing revolutionary upheaval. Third, the argument fits equally well with the CCP as with the KMT, meeting the same high evidentiary standards for both parties. I expect little pushback against the innovative arguments about elite versus mass party mobilization. By contrast, the argument that dominance by one strong leader is essential for a revolutionary party could elicit debate, since the extant literature emphasizes the benefits of power-sharing. Lü himself recognizes the trade-offs and concedes that one leader’s dominance introduced risks and led to post-revolutionary disaster such as the Great Leap Forward famine (p. 190). Also, despite writing about the financial aid and continued presence of Comintern, Lü assigns surprisingly little explanatory power to the vacillating influence of foreign advisors, perhaps in the spirit of parsimony.
Domination and Mobilization is a must-read for anyone studying revolutionary parties, in China and beyond. The book significantly advances our understanding of the histories of the CCP and the KMT. It contributes to the comparative scholarship on authoritarian parties by demonstrating the usefulness of an organized mass following amidst crisis, and by making the case for the benefits of a dominant party leadership. For teaching purposes, the book is organized in such a way that one could assign stand-alone chapters. Read as a whole, Xiaobo Lü’s book is a landmark work in the historical comparative study of party development.
