The term “authoritarian resilience” is a curious one, tending to reflect the assumptions and preoccupations of outside observers rather than telling us much about life within the regimes themselves. To their own citizens, authoritarian regimes seem less “resilient” than “inevitable” and “all-encompassing”; that is, until the black swan moment after which they are neither. The discipline's overwhelming focus on seeking to anticipate and predict change (or lack thereof) has meant warehousing interesting and important ideas on how these countries are actually governed.
This ambitious and intellectually subversive volume deftly engages with precisely these ideas. Frustrated with how the study of politics apes generic notions of “science,” the editors frame the volume in terms of debates from the evolutionary sciences, paleo-anthropology and physical geography as metaphor. They insightfully and unpretentiously hone in on Foucault's notion of “governmentality” as their basic, volume-wide unit of analysis, allowing the contributors to engage it from the perspectives of specific levels of analysis, ranging from the state to the individual.
Elizabeth Perry shows how Chinese authorities draw from shared national tendencies, craft public sentiment and mobilize symbolic resources to create a regime of “cultural governance.” She notes “a surprisingly adaptive and responsive policy approach” (p. 42) despite the state's tendency toward miscalculation (the Confucius statue in Tiananmen Square), its obsession to avoid relinquishing control of the message (the Weng'an riot), and its adeptness at crafting an attractive medium with the actual message farther down in the mix (the Guangdong China Mobile case).
Sebastian Heilmann looks at the supra-ministerial “core executive” level of analysis in the policy-making realm. Focusing on the finance and economics policy area, Heilmann argues that the core executive body is not simply an aggregation of bureaucratic interests, but the “assert[ion] or reassert[ion] of central decisiveness,” concluding that “it is the entrenched policy mission and resilient institutional configuration of the core executive” (p. 58) that explain China's broad and largely continuous development strategies.
Vivienne Shue looks at the evolution of the first-ever national land-use master plan (quanguo zhuti gongneng qu guihua) of 2010, exploring how such an ambitiously aspirational living document emerged from protracted discussions covering every conceivable dimension of centre–local tension. Her conclusion is that the mapping central to this process represents “the graphic artifacts of a particular style of political leadership; one that has evolved out of past governance achievements, lapses, missteps, and in response to challenges presenting themselves on a scale and at a level of complexity never imagined or grappled with before” (p. 116).
Joel Andreas and Yige Dong compare mass supervision of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cadres in the past (1949–1968) and present (2007–2008), finding changes in form from collective- to individual-based supervision, and in content from combating “bureaucratism” to stamping out “corruption.” They assert that Xi Jinping's resurrection of Maoist campaign rhetoric notwithstanding, “both the form and content of the campaign belong wholly to the current era” (p. 146) in which cadre supervision has become more technical and, well, bureaucratized.
Robert Weller's fascinating essay explores the ubiquitous phenomenon of engaging in lies that everybody knows to be false. Drawing mostly from religious NGOs on the Mainland and in Taiwan, he argues that “shared fictions” are not simply forms of resistance or accommodation, but represent “obedience to…a shared subjunctive world” (pp. 155–56) in which officials, bureaucrats, and citizens together inhabit (a) parallel universe(s) of action and meaning in which all of them can avoid unwanted costs or constraints on (or judgement of) their preferred courses of action.
Ching Kwan Lee and Yong Hong Zhang engage the puzzle of how “an adaptive and resilient authoritarian state” can co-exist with “an assertive rights-conscious citizenry” (p. 177). They examine state–society interaction at the moment in which unrest occurs, finding that clientelist networks of an earlier era have been supplanted by affective and instrumental bargaining over the “price tag of stability,” occupying the space between government authority and citizens’ rights. They also find, surprisingly, that disgruntled citizens and local officials both opportunistically exploit unrest.
Looking at the formation of the impossibly complex Pearl River Delta megacity, Luigi Tomba rejects linear processes of transition, arguing that we should understand the process as “repackaging of fragmented realities,” whether they be bargaining outcomes, ever-changing experiments in “cadre best-practices,” or “exasperated localisms” (p. 204–205). His rich essay is a study of how urbanization is a vast patchwork of localized solutions necessitating the constant adaptation of governance practices.
Jean-Louis Rocca pushes us to consider conceptualizing China's recently emergent middle class as a phenomenon of “imagination,” a mental construct. He argues that altered patterns of social stratification, a perceived imperative to place the urban population as the social foundation of the regime, the normalization of civilizing conduct, and a tendency toward depoliticizing have led to a cognitive framework of “governing from the middle,” a “model … that demands certain behaviors and policies to be followed, in order to follow the so-called modernization paradigm” (p. 248).
Patricia Thornton demonstrates that any government withdrawal from effectively managing and administering to China's “vulnerable groups,” has been more than compensated for by the CCP. Thornton's essay is an important corrective to those who view the Xi-era Communist Party solely as a breeding ground for corruption or as a an agent of coercion: if the current CCP is, in fact, reverting to draconian practices of earlier eras, it is also re-establishing itself as an advocate for the most vulnerable elements of society. Thornton's extraordinary ability to seamlessly weave together space and time in China is matched only by the lushness of her description and analysis.
Christian Göbel and Thomas Heberer posit the self-generation of policy innovation by local cadres as contributing to the counter-intuitive juxtaposition of increased local discretion and greater central power. Their argument rests on the notion, borrowed from Derrida, of the central government instilling in local officials a sense of being haunted by “a perpetually felt need to do better” (p. 288) through a series of discourses and activities under the heading of “personality engineering” with the pursuit of cadre quality and refinement at the core.
Like any edited volume, the chapters vary in terms of style, approach and scope, a fact the editors suggest is a strength. I agree. Given that it is so difficult to conceptualize, that there are so many moving parts across multiple dimensions, I think the best way to present the complexity of state–society relations in China is through the format of the edited volume, despite the reluctance of university presses to publish them. This volume, in particular, with its diversified approach to “governmentality” is a perfect example of why they should reconsider. It is an eminently worthy companion to Perry and Selden's Chinese Society, and, like it, should be on upper-level undergraduate and graduate Chinese politics course syllabi.
