The nature of the state created by the Chinese Communist Party has long been of interest to scholars of pre-1949 Republican era and post-1949 Communist China. Juan Wang’s wide-ranging and important new book sheds new light on this matter. Her theoretical and substantive empirical work is intended to show us how the state persisted, met with crisis, and survived across the Mao era and then well into the reform period.
The first chapter addresses the issue of rural governance and local protest. Rejecting grievance-focused research paradigms of protest and collective action, Wang wants to understand a puzzle: Why did protest persist in the reform era when the policy responses to popular claims and actions in this period were different from those in the Mao era, when Mao and his loyal cadres reacted to protest with abuse and harsh repression? Her answer is that, in the absence of systematic state repression, a new group of protest activists entered the picture— disgruntled village-level party cadres—who often incited and enabled farmers to take up collective action that frequently took the form of petitioning the state. An increasing percentage of collective petitions, up to 4%, were stimulated or organized by cadres whose authority had been undercut by reform and who were frightened by the uncertainty it portended. This trend “reflected a fundamental erosion of elite cohesion, a decaying functionality of rural government, and a transition in state-society relations” (p. 34). Wang wants to show the consequences of this phenomenon for the cohesion of rural governance.
The second chapter provides an analysis of the nature of Communist Party cadre recruitment and collective performance in the early Mao years and the post-Mao era. Although not a historian, Wang is very astute, because she shows that Mao’s rural party leaders joined the party for privileges and personal gain, engaging in various forms of corruption and deviant behavior. Such behavior was embraced not only to resist change but also to feign obedience to and please their superiors. This study shows, interestingly, that the grassroots activists of the early Mao era were poor and illiterate “peasants” and demobilized war veterans. Importantly, this chapter makes it clear that these same cadres were subjected to severe administrative punishment if they did not comply with the draconian procurement goals of Mao in the Great Leap Forward and that their personal safety was constantly threatened by the high Maoist state. The goal of the national leadership, ideally, was to promote “intrastate cohesion,” and this was done in the early reform era by moving toward a patronage system, village elections, a petition system, and new cadre screening and promotion systems to enable local people to challenge cadre abuse and corruption and provide the center with a more reliable political base. These changes were not easily implemented, however. Many of the old guard Maoists were still around and not always open to new leadership norms and codes of conduct, and some of the new public servant regulations ironically encouraged corruption and bribery. Still, this chapter shows that reform promoted local elite collaboration and reciprocal relationships between different local units of government (including the county and township levels) while also fostering the development of webs of nepotism among the cadres at these two levels. All in all, the reforms of the 1990s fostered intrastate alliances locally and helped stabilize routines of governance across the county and township levels. However, this process did not fully include or benefit village-level party cadres, many of whom were alienated from upper-level party leaders who were under pressure to put checks on the personalism and favoritism of the Mao era.
The central thesis of this work is found in Chapter 4. After analyzing the persistence of the imprint of the Maoist regime into the first decade of reform, as well as documenting policy evasion and predatory practices, including arbitrary extraction, that occurred across official local administrative levels in Chapter 3, Wang takes up the question of how central-government reforms dismantled the Mao era local state and in the process isolated and alienated village-level party cadres. In this period, particularly after Deng Xiaoping died in 1977, structural fiscal changes deprived both township- and village-level cadres of control over government revenue: agricultural taxes were abolished, new controls on township-level land expropriation and land-leasing schemes were established, new oversights on township budgets were instituted, funds earmarked for certain reform projects (improvement of education) were sent mainly to the county level, and a downsizing of township-level cadre personnel took place. As a result, the central government threw its weight behind the development of a “county-level Leviathan,” and the township- and village-level cadres lost the power to rake in resources from the local community for their own purposes. At the same time, the township-level governments were obligated to meet unfunded central-government developmental mandates, so that they were expected to fund a range of projects with much less resources. The result, according to Juan Wang, was that village cadres concocted a host of predatory survival strategies, including resisting central-government-mandated changes and joining with rural gangs. Such cadres were alienated, and many felt abandoned and betrayed. The essence of Wang’s argument is that the old guard cadres felt they were being left behind and hence developed a set of grievances that they themselves expressed or used local farmers’ anger to express through petitions against reform and progress. In reality, they were increasingly at the mercy of county-level authorities and caught in the cross-fire of villagers’ anger and the efforts of township officials who had to hustle to save themselves. As Juan Wang artfully shows, this process crippled many of the agents of the lowest tier of the state and weakened both the extractive and coercive powers of the three-way local state (village, township, and county) system of alliance and collaboration that had continued during the first two decades of reform.
In exploring the implications of declining coercion and state capacity, Juan Wang makes an insightful contribution to our knowledge of the consequences of the central state’s attempt to dismantle the local, in some ways rival, state, particularly with regard to petitioning. Faced with greater stress and less rewards, village cadres sometimes turned the petitioning process into a weapon of a disempowered elite, encouraging and using petitions to retaliate against an unsupportive township or county government. With the central government insisting on maintaining stability, however, this put more pressure on the township- and county-level party leaders to thwart petitions, resulting in the county-level suppression of petitioners—either by preventing them from traveling outside their localities to petition Beijing or capturing and returning them home if they did reach the national capital. Villagers knew that local authorities were under national administrative pressure to thwart petitions, and so they often used this form of protest to pressure those authorities to address their claims and demands, knowing full well that the township and county leaders could not afford to let their petition letters and protests reach the center. I studied petitioning for many years, and I did not understand this complex dynamic until Juan Wang explained it.
The conclusion resonates with that of Susan Shirk’s study, China: Fragile Superpower: Wang emphasizes that the real problem for the Communist Party elite is not corruption or even repression, but rather the internal conflicts and warfare within its own regime, especially at the lowest levels of political order where the party-state needs its cadre base to help maintain social stability. Whether the center can reinstitute some version of cohesion and collaboration within its ranks at this level remains to be seen.
Although this is an important study, I would have preferred that Juan Wang address four issues in more detail, with deeper reflection. First, Wang skates over who were Mao’s cadres, more or less accepting that they were “poor peasants.” Actually, the so-called poor peasants were not tillers at all but people from the ranks of drifters, rogues, and ruffians. They were brutal members of the lumpen proletariat, and some were criminals. Mao relied on these brutes to run his political campaigns, including those that rural people petitioned against. Second, Mao and his brutes did not, as Juan Wang claims, institutionalize and encourage petitions: instead, they suppressed them, just as central-government rulers did from 2005 to 2018. Third, the book’s central problem is that the case for a “new type of village activist” is based on 4% of the petitions being influenced and enabled by village cadres. But is 4% that significant a proportion? And who initiated the other 96% of the petitions, and how did they differ from the cadre-based 4%? Wang does not address these questions. Fourth, one cannot help but wonder if a stronger case might be made for path dependency. Wang takes up this critical issue in Chinese politics, but she does not analyze or discuss it thoroughly. After all, the Mao era also saw pandemic cadre corruption, lying, and coercion, yet neither Mao nor his successors reformed the work style that produced and reproduces this conduct. I see evidence for a path dependency argument in parts of Juan Wang’s important work. What I do not see is an understanding of why and how the cowardice of central-government elites inhibited a deep reform and of why elites at the apex of power feared the dismantling of their local political base and, in turn, relied on that base, sometimes routinely and sometimes in the crisis moments of state command, to maintain their autocratic system of power.
