The essays that editor Joseph Fewsmith commissioned for this volume provide a timely, one-stop introduction to an array of critical issues facing China. Organized into sections on social order, economics, politics, and systemic constraints, the essays, all written by leading scholars, vary in breadth and analytical edge. Each can stand alone as a valuable, discrete reading. However, the volume's interpretive impact and pedagogical utility would have been further enhanced by an explicit integrating framework, section introductions, or more direct engagement across contributions.
Given the PRC's current obsession with harmony (hexie) and aversion to chaos (luan), Fewsmith sensibly places the Social Order section first. Elizabeth Perry engagingly argues against the trend in recent scholarship that links popular protests to the emergence of “rights consciousness” and a nascent civil society. She urges us to see these protests instead as the “less dramatic” expression of a “rules consciousness” (p. 28) that operates within the constraints of the party-state. The section's next two essays—by Jamie Horsley on the rule of law and by Robert Weller and Yafei Sun on religion—neither continue nor confront this interpretive line. They provide compact, nuanced introductions to their topics, but they do not relate their cautiously optimistic assessments about further opening of Chinese society (for example, Weller's and Sun's assertion that Protestantism offers potential as a vehicle for protest) to Perry's less sanguine analysis.
Much of the unrest in China ostensibly reflects rising unhappiness with the increasing economic polarities in China. In contrast to Martin Whyte's recent book arguing that China's distributive injustices do not lead inevitably to social unrest, the contributors to this volume's section on the economy (Barry Naughton, Carl Riskin, and Sebastian Heilmann) agree that China's privileging of economic growth at any price generates persistent economic inequalities that will impede the Party's goal of social harmony. Riskin, whose sharp critique of inequality in China constitutes a useful literature review of the issue, sees the economic disparity as a policy problem linked to local governments’ addiction to revenues from high-speed growth, rather than as a structural one. Like Riskin, Heilmann finds China deficient in its ability to achieve redistributive goals but nonetheless still characterizes it as an effective “planning polity.” Indeed, Heilmann strikingly argues that China's “green,” “welfarist” techno-authoritarianism provides an exemplar for a future in which state-led rather than neo-liberal market-based solutions will better address the world's complex problems (p. 126).
The next two sections on politics and systemic restraints examine the tensions inherent in the Chinese state. Politics comprises essays by Min Ye on the role diasporic networks played in promoting foreign investment and reform, by Liu Yawei on the last decade of local elections, by Ren Jiantao on the stubborn persistence of state ideology, and by Fewsmith on elite politics. Fewsmith masterfully reveals how in order to contain political conflict the post-Tiananmen CCP remade the political system: it quasi-formalized rules, thereby smoothing leadership transitions and allowing the outgoing group to constrain abrupt departures from its policies by influencing the composition of its successor group; it adopted a conservative stance of upholding “the primacy of the party state against challenges” (p. 156); it downplayed ideology (an analysis with which Ren Jiantao disagrees) and established a shared pragmatic commitment to the absolute need for economic growth. Though Fewsmith has a few explicit references to other chapters that impinge on his own, one wishes that this section's contributors had made more of the potential connections presented by Fewsmith's analysis. For example, Min Ye strikingly argues that overseas Chinese influenced central as well as provincial politics and provided critical, if not indispensable, financial and intellectual capital to reformers. And Liu Yawei convincingly concludes that, until intraparty democratization occurs, elections cannot move up the system. Yet, where, if anywhere, do disaporic networks’ activities and the issues of elections fit in elite politics?
Zheng Yongnian's stimulating and provocative piece on “central-local relations” highlights the section on systemic constraints. Zheng traces the cycle of decentralization/centralization that China has experienced over the course of reform and argues that the current recentralization serves the critical purpose of diminishing the authority of local governments. Counterintuitively, he regards this authority as the greatest impediment to state-society decentralization and thus to the appearance of an effective civil society. Though equally concerned with centralization/decentralization, Edward Cunningham's fascinating but relatively specialized essay on “Energy Governance,” tacks in the opposite direction. Unlike Zheng, Cunningham finds the fragmentation and contention in energy production beneficial. Without a devolution of investment and ownership, he argues, China could not have met its enormous demand for energy. Both in subject matter and attention to center/local relations, Joanna Lewis's fine introduction to China's environmental challenges logically follows Cunningham's essay, but disappointingly for the reader the two articles do not engage with each other.
Still, to some extent one or more of these recurrent themes appear in nearly all the essays: the inherent tensions between center and periphery; a cycle of decentralization/recentralization that drives policy changes; contradictory impulses in favor of unrestrained economic growth and pursuit of social justice; vacillation between tolerance and intolerance for a more open society; increasing, if circumscribed, opportunities for the expression of interest group politics; interaction between elite politics and society as a whole. Given this range of issues and China's extraordinary transformation over the last thirty years, one that Fewsmith rightly concludes surpassed anyone's imagination, predicting its future will be no easier. However, notwithstanding my criticisms, this volume constitutes a good place to start.
