In this concise and highly readable account of several local experiments in “incremental democracy” in China, Joseph Fewsmith investigates whether the power of the Chinese Communist Party might be constrained as a result of the evolution of new institutions. His conclusion is not surprising, and jibes with a now-large body of literature on the nature and reasons for what Andrew Nathan described in 2003 as “authoritarian resilience” in China. “At the moment,” Fewsmith writes, “it seems that those forces seeking to blur the lines [between public and private power] and to prevent institutional checks on the party have emerged as the more powerful” (p. 16).
The book examines experiments in internal party elections, consultative and deliberative policy making, township government elections and collaborative governance. In none of the instances does Fewsmith find evidence of enduring institutionalization, meaning new institutions that constrain the exercise of power and thus lead China incrementally closer to democracy.
The much-touted deliberative experiments in governance in Zhejiang province, for instance, have tended to reinforce authoritarian rule by strengthening intra-elite legitimacy and expanding government powers. The path of “incremental democracy,” he concludes, is blocked because reforms tend to be personalistic, random and unconstraining. Encouraging experiments in “incremental democracy” tends to reinforce the regime.
This is an important analytic claim because, despite being grouped together with the now predominant “authoritarian resilience” scholars of China, Fewsmith's findings are at odds with those who explain this as being a result of institutionalization. Fewsmith's explanation of authoritarian resilience is that the CCP has avoided institutionalization while encouraging institutional innovations that strengthen its power and enhance intra-elite legitimacy (or support networks). Likewise, Fewsmith finds that all of the cases he studies reflect attempts by the Party to cope with a growing legitimacy crisis, a starkly different claim from those authoritarian resilience scholars who see robust legitimacy or popular support.
Fewsmith's book suggests that in fact different logics are at work in different places (which might be extended to different policy areas and levels of government), that authoritarian resilience is internally heterogeneous and cannot be explained by a single theory. His case studies of governance in minor localities in Chongqing and Jiangsu, for instance, show how the Party enjoyed legitimacy and institutionalized its rule in one place but ran roughshod over opposition and ruled personalistically in the other. The system remains in both case but for different reasons.
This seems like a reasonable take-away. But Fewsmith's heavy reliance on data taken from official accounts in the media, journals and Party and government reports raises serious doubts about its veracity – although its utility in mapping the discourse on these issues in China is great. When I conducted field research in 2007 on the “illegal” township elections held in 2004 for seven township government heads in Yunnan's Honghe prefecture near the Vietnam border, for instance, I discovered that in all seven cases the existing head had been re-elected. Fewsmith, relying on official reports, gives the impression that new candidates were elected in all seven (not the ten he reports) cases. Moreover, the key figure in the elections was not the (Han Chinese) prefectural Party secretary Luo Chongmin whom Fewsmith puts at the centre of his narrative, using official reports. Rather, it was the (Yi ethnicity) chairman of the prefectural people's congress, Bai Baoxing, who was the one defending the experiments when central delegations arrived to investigate. Luo Chongmin acceded to the experiments, hoping to gain acclaim and escape the crisis-ridden area (he was later transferred to the Yunnan education department). The “idealism” of Luo to which Fewsmith, using official reports, ascribes this incident, had nothing to do with it. Moreover, the reason the experiment was crushed was not a lack of enthusiasm in the Party, as Fewsmith writes. The Central Organization Department actually commended it (although not in the official media). Rather, it was the opposition of the National People's Congress, guardian of China's Soviet-style constitution, that was decisive. If the official version of events that Fewsmith relies on departs so radically from reality in this case, one wonders about the others.
This is a theory-taking book rather than a theory-making one. Fewsmith is more interested in on-the-ground realities in China than in using China to understand authoritarian regimes in general. Yet we are left wondering about what exactly the on-the-ground realities are, as well as how to reconcile the multiple conflicting theories of authoritarian resilience in China.
