For quite some time, the capability of China's authoritarian state to maintain the political status quo, despite many predictions that it will fall amidst drastic socio-economic changes, has been used to discredit the transitology paradigm, according to which a Communist regime's transition to liberal democracy is inevitable. Besides critiquing the transitology paradigm, so far few China scholars have identified, positively and systematically, the characteristics of the Chinese polity that explain its exceptional staying power.
Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth Perry's edited volume is a pioneering effort to fill this gap. The book reveals the historical-institutional foundation of the resilience of China's authoritarian state, arguing that the CCP's capacity to overcome successive challenges over the last three decades hinges on the flexibility of its policymaking process. Whenever the government faces a new challenge, it resorts to local experimentation to find the most effective solution, which is then promoted to other areas. The Chinese party-state thereby manages to maintain its fundamental power structure while being responsive to popular demands. The institutionalized flexibility of China's contemporary political system also characterized the Republican and the Mao periods, the editors argue.
After the introduction, Elizabeth Perry contributes a chapter that examines the Socialist New Countryside program under Hu Jintao, in comparison to rural campaigns in the Mao era, to showcase the essentials of the CCP's adaptive governance. She finds that Mao's mass campaign and Hu's managed campaign are similar in their use of propaganda teams to promote the center's policy goals, their reliance on local initiative to experiment in search of effective ways to improve rural livelihoods, and their emphasis on promoting successful “test-point” experiments to the nation.
Heilmann's chapter shows us that this flexible and experimental governing style can be found in the CCP's land reform experiments in its rural red bases in the 1930s. It can also be found in the GMD's program of rural reconstruction before 1949. He attributes the common experimental approach of the CCP and GMD to the influence of John Dewey's pragmatist philosophy, which was popular in China's intellectual circles, left and right, in the Republican period.
In the other substantive chapters, each author deals with one particular policy area. Wang Shaoguang outlines how the model of cooperative medical services was first developed through experimentation in the 1950s, became nationwide practice at the height of the People's Commune movement, declined after the disintegration of the Communes, and was revived and reformulated in recent years following the apparent failure of the market-based approach. Nara Dillon deals with the CCP's handling of the voluntary sector, marked by vacillation between different combinations of legalist and political approaches. Benjamin Liebman discusses how the CCP's conception of law as practical and adaptable has led to the rise of a populist legality in recent years that diverges from Western-style conceptions of rule of law. Yuezhi Zhao's chapter illustrates the CCP's zigzag path of liberalizing, monitoring, and controlling the media. Patricia Thornton traces the rise of scientific surveys as a means for the government to monitor public reception of its policies, marking the end of the mass line and turning “activist masses” into passive and “receptive publics.” In the last two chapters, Joseph Fewsmith and Jae Ho Chung, respectively, discuss the party-state's ever-changing and not-always-successful efforts to deal with two big problems of China's governance since imperial times: namely, the problems of governing sub-county-level social organizations and of fostering a stable and productive center-local relationship.
It is impossible to expect such a pioneering and vast enterprise as this volume to be free of blemishes. After going over all substantive chapters, readers may find certain inconsistencies and gaps in the arguments. For example, while Perry sees Mao-era mass campaigns as an illustration of the CCP's adaptive and experimental approach and highlights their achievements despite well-known disastrous results (p. 34), Heilmann appears to regard Mao-era campaigns as cases of centralized command that deviate from adaptive governance. For another example, while some chapters do show how the CCP's experimental approach helps the government to identify effective solutions to challenges (such as in the area of cooperative medical services), other chapters do not clearly tell us whether the CCP's vacillation and ambiguities in other policy areas (such as media and voluntary organizations) are contributing to or undermining the regime's resilience. Historians would find the practice of adaptive governance as described in the book strikingly familiar. They would wonder whether it can be traced back further to late-Qing reforms or even to the statecraft tradition among Ming-Qing scholar-officials.
Despite these minor imperfections, this breathtaking overview of China's adaptive governance over half a dozen policy areas offers a revolutionary new perspective on today's Chinese state and its continuities with the past. China transgresses the rigid dichotomy between liberal democracy and authoritarian rule, constituting a new regime type that is not politically open yet is capable of responding to popular demands effectively. Students of the Chinese political system in years to come will have to be in dialogue with this novel perspective. This book, henceforth, will be key reading for scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students eager to understand China's political processes.
