[Part 3 Continuity vs Divergence] China Governance History
Jean-Pierre Cabestan explains it clearly in Demain la Chine: Démocratie ou Dictature?
Jean-Pierre Cabestan wrote:
Bureaucratic Tradition and the Soviet Model: Patterns of State Hegemony
In the West as well as in China, there is often a tendency to represent the current political system in the People’s Republic as a direct successor of the two-millennia-old imperial system that long ensured the country’s unity. Of course elements of continuity between the imperial bureaucratic tradition and the current politico-administrative organization are evident, prominent among them, as is widely known, being the selection of officials through competitive examinations. In fact, the CCP often cites this tradition to defend the unprecedented system of control over society and individuals it has set up. People in China are used to the state’s hegemony over their lives, which they have largely internalized.
Nevertheless, the differences between the imperial bureaucratic tradition and the Leninist system introduced in 1949 and still in place are fundamental and too often underestimated, including by PRC Chinese, as much in terms of institutions and organization as in those of ideology and political culture. These differences explain to a large extent the solidity of the CCP’s power and its strong capacity to adapt, as well as its much better chance of survival than the imperial system had, which after a long period of decadence that started near the end of the Qianlong reign in the eighteenth century quite naturally crumbled in 1911.
Elements of Continuity
Yet one cannot give short shrift to the elements of continuity between the Chinese bureaucratic tradition and more generally the imperial system on the one hand and institutions of the People’s Republic on the other. Since the late 1970s, Maoism’s burial, the launch of reforms, and a return to more stable and predictable administrative practices have narrowed the gap between the two models. The CCP’s instrumentalization of nationalism and the rehabilitation of the imperial (and even republican) past also helped reinforce the perception of such a continuity, in China at first and then abroad.
It should be clear at the outset that even when it was divided, China has always been an administered land. Qin Shihuang’s unification of the empire in 221 BCE is often cited as the bureaucratic tradition’s founding moment. In reality, beginning with the Zhou dynasty (1066–221 BCE), the politico-geographical entity later named China (a term that came from Qin) was administered, albeit highly decentralized and later fragmented into rival entities (the famous “Warring States”). It was in the Warring States era (475–221 BCE) that Chinese thinkers on politics and administration emerged, led by Confucius and his disciples but also the Legalist school (Han Feizi, Shang Yang, etc.), whose fierce but effective governance methods were later used by Qin Shihuang, as they were by many of his successors, albeit often without acknowledging their source.
Intellectual and political disputes between Confucians and Legalists were foundational, as they advanced two opposing approaches to governing people that remain more complementary than contradictory in practice today: government by “superiors” or “gentlemen” (junzi), competent people concerned not with personal interest—which is the lot of the “petty people” (xiaoren), that is, the uneducated sectors—but rather with the quest for common good on the one hand and government by law (hence the school of laws, fajia, or Legalists), to be understood as criminal law (xingfa) or punishment, on the other.
From Han to Manchu (Qing), Tang to Song, Yuan to Ming, all the emperors promoted the government of superiors, who later came to be called scholar-officials or literati. In this sense, Qin Shihuang constituted a traumatizing exception: he went down in history as the sovereign who buried alive a large number of lettered Confucians. At the same time, imperial governments always kept criminal law within easy reach, so to speak, invoking it unhesitatingly to deal with popular uprisings, insubordination, intrigue or corruption on a mandarin’s part, and any other infringement of what they deemed harmony under heaven (Tianxia).
This opposition between Confucians and Legalists remains crucial to this day and has been the subject of a body of analyses by sinologists such as Lucien Pye. Mao, a great admirer of Qin Shihuang, favored his Legalist-inspired methods to suppress all opposition, ensure obedience from the party-state bureaucracy, and maintain cadres’ rectitude and, crucially, their allegiance. He was a sort of modern symbol of the violent dictator (baojun). An example is the intensity with which Mao opposed Confucian thought, agreeing to launch in 1974, at the far end of his life, the “Criticize Lin (Biao), Criticize Confucius” (Pi Lin Pi Kong) campaign instigated by his wife, Jiang Qing, and other radical leaders of the Cultural Revolution. It was surely paradoxical to link the sage to the marshal who had most ardently backed Mao in this latest venture and had reestablished order with the army’s help, suppressing with a very legalist ferocity the Red Guards his leader had earlier mobilized, unwisely arming them against the regime’s top bureaucrats, including party member number two, Liu Shaoqi. But Qin Shihuang and Legalism continued to be honored until the death in September 1976 of the founder of the People’s Republic and the fall a month later of his political allies, the infamous “Gang of Four”. Thus, under Mao socialist law had been reduced essentially to criminal law, breaking with the Soviet tradition of drafting civil and commercial codes and transferring to party cadres the power to resolve disputes through mediation or more often through unchallengeable administrative decisions.
In contrast, Zhou Enlai, Mao’s indispensable but servile premier (from 1949 until Zhou’s death in January 1976), and his indirect successor, Deng Xiaoping, were often considered Confucians. Zhou strove to safeguard the stability and functioning of government machinery during a period jolted by numerous mass movements and catastrophes, including the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961) and Cultural Revolution in the narrower sense of the term (1966–1968), and Deng restored socialist (and Soviet) administrative and judicial institutions abused by Mao, then modernized them so as to make them serve economic development and reforms.
However, as in the imperial era, neither Mao nor Zhou nor Deng entirely neglected the other side of the bureaucratic tradition. Mao left to Zhou the jobs of leading the government, the State Council, even at the height of the Cultural Revolution, and then gradually rebuilding the country’s institutions with the help of Deng, rehabilitated in 1973 before being dismissed again in January 1976; Zhou and Deng and their successors never hesitated to use punishment to suppress all political challenges and keep opponents at bay as well as to stem officials’ corruption.
With Xi Jinping, it might well be said that the scale has again tilted toward Legalism; although he increasingly invokes Confucianism, the CCP chief has also openly reinstalled Mao’s ideas, insisting, even while initiating his own era, upon the continuity between the beginnings of the People’s Republic and of the reform period, exhibiting a deep distrust of—inescapably wrong—human nature, and displaying an obvious penchant for repression.
Apart from this opposition between Confucians and Legalists, two elements of the “celestial bureaucracy” so well analyzed by Etienne Balazs have in a way survived to this day: the emperor and the administration. An entire school of Chinese historians, represented for example by Wang Yanan, and a Sinological tradition abroad, headed by well-known experts such as Léon Vandermeersch, Tu Weiming, and Philip Kuhn, stress the continuity between institutions of the empire and those of successor regimes, including of the People’s Republic. Their argument is similar to that of Alexis de Tocqueville, who showed in L’Ancien régime et la Révolution (The Ancien Régime and the Revolution) how the French government’s deep-rooted centralizing tendencies transcended the political upheavals of the late eighteenth century.
In fact, the temptation to compare any contemporary Chinese strongman to emperors of yore is ever present. The inevitable concentration of civil and military powers in the party and state number one, the intimidating protocol surrounding all his activities at home and abroad, the supposed extent of his discretionary powers, and the opacity that marks the exercise of his prerogatives encourage such comparison.
Further, Xi’s inclination since 2012 and especially since 2017 to call into question the “collective leadership” principle at the CCP’s top level, and to raise himself above his equals in the Politburo and its Standing Committee by promoting his “thought’ (sixiang), reactivating the personality cult, and perpetuating his reign beyond the ten-year limit, contribute to supporting in China and abroad the comparisons not only between Xi and Mao but also between the Xi era and the periods officially deemed flourishing ones, when powerful and respected emperors ruled, such as Tang Taizhong or Qianlong. Sino-centrist diplomatic theories of Tianxia, according to which the whole world gravitates around a glorious China with its rediscovered power, are now finding an impressive echo, especially within the People’s Republic. Also, most diplomatic meetings in Beijing with the current Chinese strongman are readily interpreted as prostrations by representatives of humble tributary kingdoms before the most august personage of the imperial communist court.
From this flows a well-known paradox: it is in socialist countries whose official ideology promotes the idea, or rather myth, that people make history that not only are powers highly concentrated in small numbers of hands but society has the most belief in the determining role of major personalities or “great men.” I discuss later the admiration many Chinese have for strong leaders, most prominent of them being no doubt Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, and consequently for the personal role Xi has been playing, particularly in the anticorruption drive and on the international scene. It suffices here to note the popular backing for the installation of a powerful central authority capable of imposing its decisions on a local bureaucracy that is too often autonomous or corrupt. Such support generally reflects and perpetuates the belief firmly embedded in Chinese society that the emperor is irreproachable and that he is sometimes poorly advised and more important, misled by subordinates. Surveys invariably show that dissatisfied Chinese people heap their criticism generally on officials they directly deal with and rarely target intermediate levels of the administration and even less the central authorities and the topmost leader (see chapter 3).
Such perceptions reflect a monist (yiyuanhua) or holistic conception of authority: for the CCP, as in Confucian thought, a “good government” is one that does not limit its own powers but rather uses all its power to symbolize imperial sovereignty in the best way possible. In Theodore de Bary’s formulation, “moral restraints . . . are intended not to make (the prince) less of a king but to help him be a king”. Conversely, in Confucian perspective, as in that of the CCP now, bad government reflects a moral decadence among elites rather than institutional rigidities or dysfunction.
China’s long bureaucratic tradition has also been a highly pervasive and serious element of continuity. The country has for long been governed by a complex and hierarchical administration that guaranteed numerous services of public and economic interest such as major irrigation works, maintaining granaries, regulating markets, and managing famines. The empire’s requirements in economic, hydraulic, and ecological terms spawned the well-known theories of Marx’s “oriental mode of production” and Karl Wittfogel’s “oriental despotism”.
Created by the Han in the second century BCE, the xian (county) remains the country’s basic administrative division. The organization of the central government in six major ministries goes back to the Sui dynasty, which in the seventh century was the immediate predecessor of the Tang, and that arrangement lasted practically until the empire’s fall in 1911, instituting administrative bodies that have survived, such as finance, civil service, army, and justice. The famous mandarin system, the class of scholar-bureaucrats expected to be impartial and chosen through competitive examinations since the Song (tenth century), introduced a meritocratic ideal (xiancheng) which, after having been challenged and abandoned by Mao, has been fully restored since the early 1990s. Whereas the PRC’s founder preferred promoting party and state cadres who were “red” before being “expert,” their recruitment since the late 1970s has been based on both their competence and their allegiance to the regime. Since 1993 officials have been systematically selected through examinations, reconnecting with a tradition the West has borrowed from China since the nineteenth century, first in the British Empire (Indian Civil Service), then in Britain itself (Royal Civil Service) and elsewhere in Europe. This continuity led Tu Weiming to conclude: “The Confucian scholar-official still functions in the psycho-cultural construct of East Asian societies.”
Among the characteristics specific to Chinese bureaucratic tradition that the CCP inherited are, first, elitism as a direct consequence of the system, which was in principle meritocratic and particularly demanding in the selection of imperial era administrative elites. The concepts of elites (jingying) and elitism (jingyingzhuyi), banished under Mao, have regained a privileged place in the PRC’s political vocabulary with disconcerting ease and no real critical ethos, especially among official intellectuals.
The second element of continuity is the concentration of power in the head of each locality or public organization (yibashou), the introduction of work divisions among administrations, the absence of separation of executive and judicial powers, and finally the adoption of an autonomous system of vetting officials known in the imperial era as the Censorate. Regarding the latter, it should be noted that Mao was an exception, stripping all real powers from the party’s control commissions and dismantling them at the start of the Cultural Revolution. It was only at the beginning of the reform era that a control system of CCP and state cadres was restored, with the institution in 1978 of the party’s discipline inspection commissions. And as has been noted, it was not until Xi launched the anticorruption campaign in 2013 that these commissions became more powerful and independent of CCP committees at the same level, to which, however, they still continue to report, thus connecting more closely with the Tang and Ming censors’ tradition (yushi).
The traditional recourse permitted against administrative authorities constitutes another element of continuity; in fact, today’s petitioners greatly resemble those of yore, taking to the same forms of protest against injustices suffered (yuan, the classical character for injustice that is still regularly used) by flocking to the headquarters of the local government or, if it remains deaf, to Beijing.
It would be tempting to take the comparison between the imperial and communist bureaucracies further and add the adherence to written procedures, importance of seals, ritualism, opacity, and a cult of hierarchy, even a passion for it. Forms of ritualism have evidently changed and are dominated now by the official workings of the party, punctuated by its Congress and the annual Central Committee plenary sessions, as well as the state apparatus, marked each year in March by the “two sessions” (lianghui) of the NPC and the CPPCC. Meanwhile, the protocol and etiquette around these activities, and even the reception of foreign guests, seem like rightful continuations from the “Immobile Empire” dear to Lord Macartney, the first British envoy to China in 1793, and to Alain Peyrefitte.
Alongside this opacity is a governance system that clouds issues and misleads observers about the real seats of power. Just as the dowager empress Cixi preferred to “oversee politics from behind the curtain” (chuilian tingzheng)—that is, make decisions after spying on ministers and advisers—the CCP rarely arrives at decisions in public, and the leaders who have the greatest influence are not necessarily those occupying the most prominent official positions. For example, Premier Li Keqiang is only the nominal head of government, his powers with regard to economic policy in reality being largely usurped by a party-leading small group (and now commission) presided over by Xi and overseen on a daily basis by Liu He, a close presidential adviser and since 2017 a Politburo member. Therefore one needs to be wary of formal rules declared by the state and even the party; they are religiously invoked, but rarely respected, such being the vast discretionary power of the number one at each level.
What is most striking in China is the cult of hierarchy and the passion for organization and administrative titles. The hierarchical principle is, of course, the basis of all administration, not only of the legal-rational bureaucracy so well analyzed by Max Weber. However, inscribed as it was in the Book of Rites (Liji) and anchored in the empire’s ideological and political history, this administrative principle in China reflects a Confucian conception that makes hierarchy the key for harmonious familial and thus social life. This hierarchy obsession becomes the model for all organized activity. Thus, heads of public enterprises receive an administrative-equivalent rank in line with the importance of the entity they manage, for instance vice minister for heads of major national behemoths. Armed with such titles and ranks, the heads of these state companies are powerful enough to thumb their noses at provincial authorities and a fortiori Chinese embassies in countries where they operate …
… The imperial legal tradition was above all penal and only secondarily administrative; the resurrection of laws since the launch of reforms is far from having helped the People’s Republic acquire the rule of law. Like the emperors, the CCP’s supreme leaders are only accountable to themselves, except of course in the case of a revolution and, needless to say, on the off chance it succeeds.
Fundamental Divergences
Despite these similarities, the imperial bureaucratic tradition and the political system set up in 1949 diverge in fundamental ways. The similarities presented here are like rosy images or caricatures, which mostly fall apart under closer analysis of ideological, political, and institutional realities past and present. There is a tendency to forget that 1949 constituted a radical rupture, and for many Chinese a traumatic one, that CCP leaders may not challenge or “revisit” without endangering the regime’s bases.
The most basic of these divergences, from which flow many other political and organizational differences, is ideological. The current Chinese regime’s Marxism-Leninism and what I would call “Sovietism” appear to be toned down. The communist ideal’s transformative strength has obviously disappeared. Meanwhile Sovietism—including the study of Stalin’s works—remains the ideological, organizational, and legitimizing basis of a party at once managerial and militant and whose missions, despite the reforms introduced since 1979, have always been and still remain more important and numerous than those of imperial bureaucracy. Xi and the 19th Party Congress have merely confirmed this significant reality.
Among the party’s missions, pride of place goes to economic development and direct management of a host of state enterprises, which despite the rise of the private economy continue to control key industry sectors (energy, heavy industries, and infrastructure) and services (transport and telecommunications), or what has often been called the “commanding heights of the economy”. Its other undertakings include direct surveillance of the population; neutralization of any political, social, or religious force capable of challenging the ruling party; and more generally, unrelenting action against all external and internal enemies. During the imperial era, control of society was more restrained, variable, and erratic, especially in religious matters. And it was wielded mostly indirectly via local elites, the gentry, often jointly responsible for maintaining public order. Thus, the communists replaced a “semi-managerial order” with a “total managerial order”. While this observation by Wittfogel is less true of the economic domain now, it remains fully applicable in the political arena.
Several crucial institutional characteristics stem from the CCP’s ideological precepts. First is the transformation of the state into a party-state or, to be more accurate, the establishment of state institutions managed by the CCP and fused with it. Such fusion, copied from the Soviet Union, has been fully incorporated; thus, the current seven Politburo Standing Committee members share the topmost posts of the party and the state. In this institutional framework, the armed forces fall under the CCP and its supreme head and not under the government.
Second is the creation of a Leninist- and Soviet-inspired nomenklatura system, which confers on the party a monopoly over promotions to leading posts in all the organizations depending on the party-state. Since the introduction in 1993 of public servants’ selection through examinations, this has evidently evolved; these administrative professionals are the main—though not the only—candidates for future CCP leading cadres. However, it is party membership and political loyalty, not mere merit or impartiality and much less neutrality, that determine their selection and promotion. Thus, while the CCP has tried since the start of reforms to select more competent cadres, their careers continue to be subject to political and especially clientelist criteria. Consequently, the administration is a political entity subservient to party interests. This is not to say that in imperial China, as in any other bureaucratic system, political or practical factors such as the venality of offices did not play a role in the promotion of mandarins (guan). But any allegiance to a faction (dang, in the original and very negative connotation of the word “party” in Chinese) was forbidden. The proliferation of factions toward the end of the Ming is often considered a crucial factor leading to the dynasty’s decline and defeat by the Manchu armies.
Whereas the imperial avoidance system (huibi zhidu) ensured that officials could not serve in their province of origin, this rule was abandoned under Mao and has hardly been applied systematically since the beginning of the reforms. In the imperial era, the number of officials selected through examinations and put in charge of major public jobs was quite low: twenty thousand civil officials and twenty thousand military officers during the late Qing.
This leads to the third major difference: imperial era bureaucracy was in reality quite restrained. On the one hand, apart from official functionaries, it included about 1.5 million auxiliaries chosen by the former and taking care of most day-to-day administrative chores; on the other, the administration’s grassroots level was the xian or county, the gentry exercising the intermediary role with family clans and village communities. But the bureaucracy the CCP established in 1949 has been a sprawling one despite reforms and several simplifications introduced since 1979. It is present in each township (xiang), town (zhen), and, in a form more participative and democratic in principle, each village (cun) or urban community (shequ). As noted previously, with ten million government officials (seven million of them recruited through examinations), the bureaucracy has a total of nearly seventy million cadres, including those in the party apparatus, state enterprises, and institutions, as well as official mass organizations. Even adjusted for population size, these figures are striking, highlighting the multiple missions the CCP and its ruling ideology demand of the state. And there is no question of the party either relaxing its tight grip on public industrial groups deemed strategic or relying on private entrepreneurs—modern equivalents, mutatis mutandis, of imperial era rural gentry—to collect taxes and maintain social stability. Rather, they are increasingly often under surveillance from party organizations that they are required to host in their business precincts.
Finally—and this stems directly from the CCP’s ideological project and ambition to stay in power forever—China now commands an immense machinery for surveillance of the population and any organized activity. To facilitate the economic development and supplementary financial means the regime needs, this surveillance apparatus has been modernized and on the whole rapidly deployed, helping nip in the bud any dissident political activity, strictly controlling the Internet, and registering only those NGOs that will not hurt the regime’s stability (see chapter 4). In 2010 the state budget earmarked for safeguarding stability (weiwen), that is, internal security, began to overtake that of the PLA. This gap has persisted since then ($160 billion compared to $150 billion in 2016).
In sum, the People’s Republic and the party-state established in 1949 are more inheritors of the Soviet governance model established by Lenin and Stalin than of the celestial bureaucracy of the imperial epoch. Also, the latter comparison is even more misleading, as it fails to take into account the fundamental transformations of the Chinese state at the end of the Manchu era and in the republican period.
Republican Continuities and Ruptures
Any reflection on the future of the Chinese political regime must take into consideration reforms introduced at the end of the empire and during the republican era. At present, in an attempt to legitimize the current regime by invoking the supposed glory of imperial dynasties, conservative forces are seeking to minimize the profound political changes of the late imperial and the republican periods, concentrating on the humiliations inflicted by the West and Japan. Obviously this narrative and historical reconstruction overlooks several historical realities. The humiliation the Chinese suffered in that period was mainly caused by the Manchu, who dominated the political system, imposing the synarchy principle (one Manchu, one Han, the first having precedence over the second) for all key posts in the bureaucracy, meanwhile proving incapable of lifting the country out of poverty. This led to the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), which left twenty million dead and accelerated the empire’s inexorable weakening, as well as to the rise among nationalist movements of a current favoring restoration of the Ming dynasty. This also fed a predominantly racial approach to nationalism (minzuzhuyi), the Chinese nation (Zhonghua minzu) representing the Han majority, with the other ethnicities called upon to merge and mix with this majority.
For a great majority of Chinese elites in the second half of the nineteenth century, more important than opposition to invaders and Manchu tutelage was learning from the West and taking aboard diverse currents of thought they believed could help modernize China. The success of Japan’s Meiji restoration (1868) and China’s military defeat by the Japanese army in 1895 sped up this process. While the Marxist and Leninist currents eventually prevailed with the CCP’s military victory over the Nationalist Party or Kuomintang (KMT), it was the liberal ideas in matters economic as well as political that spread most quickly and dominated the entire period. These ideas were introduced by famous scholars and intellectuals such as Yan Fu, Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, and Hu Shi.
This is why Chinese reformers have always had a great interest in the movement of ideas and institutional transformations of the last years of the Qing and the period after the Republic of China (ROC) was born in 1912. This interest has grown since early in the twenty-first century among Chinese intellectuals, especially given the KMT regime’s democratization in Taiwan and the resumption of cross-Strait relations.
Chinese elites have always been divided over the solutions for challenges facing their country at any given moment. Some Qing officials such as Zhang Zhidong wished to import just the “Western techniques” while keeping the political system’s “Chinese substance” in line with the well-known Zhongxue wei ti, Xixue wei yong formula. Others, such as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, artisans of the timid and ill-fated 1898 Hundred Days’ Reform, wished to modify governance methods (bianfa) but failed in their efforts when faced with powerful resistance to any political change. Unlike Japan, which in 1889 had established a constitutional monarchy with a Diet partly elected through restrictive suffrage (based on the amount of property tax paid), China merely set up an education ministry; on a constitution, elections, or parliament, there was silence. Moreover, numerous tentative reforms that the Manchu court finally approved after the crisis—and warning—of the Boxer Rebellion (1900) were motivated by a political instrumentalist approach; for China it was all about acquiring the same institutional arms as the West and, importantly, modernizing and strengthening the state in the face of menacing foreign powers, although to the detriment of citizens’ individual rights.
Of course the political transformations in China even before the fall of the empire and the 1911 revolution testify to the awareness among the elites starting in the latter part of the nineteenth century of the decadence and irrelevance of their system of government as well as the influence of Western and liberal ideologies. In 1905, as no public jobs could be found for all those who passed the exams, imperial examinations were abolished. Around the same time, Shen Jiaben introduced major reforms of the criminal code, banning among other things the cruelest punishments.
Toward the end of Cixi’s reign (1908) the first drafts of a constitution betrayed the pervasive preoccupation, even obsession, with strengthening the state and more generally building a modern one. The same was true of the plan for the gradual introduction of a constitutional government, unveiled toward the end of his life by Sun Yat-sen, the first provisional president of the ROC (1912); it aimed to prepare Chinese society, which was rather backward and rural, for the exercise of democratic rights. After a period of military government, in order to reunify China under the republican banner (junzheng), the KMT—the party that had led the revolution—was expected to exercise its tutelage (xunzheng ou dangzheng) over the political system. The plan was to first set up a veritable party-state, or rather hand over power to a party capable of forming a modern state (yidang jianguo). This plan was executed by Chiang Kai-shek, who succeeded Sun as head of the KMT and of the nationalist army formed in Canton (now Guangzhou). Having rallied most of the warlords to his side during the famous Northern Expedition (beifa), Chiang set up the central government of the Republic of China in Nanjing, the country’s new capital, in 1927–1928.
Nonetheless, in Sun’s as well as the KMT’s view, a constitutional and democratic regime (xianzheng) was meant to eventually take shape. Initially intended to end in 1935, after the encirclement campaigns against communist guerrillas, the tutelage continued because of Chiang’s conservatism and the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) until 1947, when the constitution adopted the previous year came into force. Although national elections were organized in 1947–1948 in all the regions under nationalist administration, a constitutional regime never took shape owing to the resumption of civil war with the CCP and the KMT’s flight to Taiwan in 1949. The continuation of the state of war with the communists was Chiang’s reason for freezing all application of the Constitution of the Republic of China while in Taiwan until his death in 1975. It was his son and successor, Chiang Ching-kuo, who in 1987, a year before his death, lifted martial law and introduced the first democratic reforms. Whereas the KMT’s tutelage as well as the martial law imposed on Taiwan from 1950 were conceived of as provisional, the CCP’s domination over the People’s Republic is deemed to be perpetual. In this regard, it is worth noting that the constitutionalist movement that sprouted in China from 2008 has in fact demanded that the CCP give up tutelage over the state and accept the principle of a constitutional regime (xianzheng), which alone would have allowed a real implementation of the constitution adopted in 1982.
Sun Yat-sen’s political and institutional ideas also presented elements of continuity with imperial tradition. In the institutional project he initiated, which was picked up by the KMT and enshrined in the Constitution of the Republic of China in 1946, Sun envisaged the establishment of not three but five distinct authorities or councils (yuan) that could act as checks and balances on each other: the Executive Council, Legislative Council, Judicial Council, Control Council, and Examination Council. Directly inspired by the most “modern” institutions of the imperial tradition, the last two councils were created to respectively oversee officials and organize their recruitment through examinations. Despite eventual transformations (today the Control Yuan is not elected but appointed by the president with the approval of the Legislative Yuan, or parliament), this separation of five powers remains in force in Taiwan where, since its democratization, they function more or less as Sun had visualized. The institution of recruitment of officials through examinations has been modernized and is no longer based on the assimilation of Confucian classics but on the grasp of administrative, judicial, and economic knowledge.
In general, Sun and the KMT were inspired by the liberal ideas of the Enlightenment and especially of Montesquieu. Sun’s Three Principles of the People—nationalism, democracy, and people’s well-being—offer a modern and “Sinicized” synthesis of an ideology of Western origin. Sun’s objectives were to transform the Chinese empire—in which following the fall of the Ming in 1644, the Manchus, Mongols, and Tibetans held a privileged institutional and religious position—into a modern and multiethnic nation; create institutions for a constitutional and pluralist democracy; and offer minimum social guarantees for a population still largely impoverished.
The May 4th movement of 1919 confirmed this domination of liberal ideas among Chinese elites. Provoked by the Treaty of Versailles, which handed Japan the German possessions in China, the demonstrators of May 4th highlighted the famous calls for “Mister Science and Mister Democracy,” conceived of and internalized as two inseparable facets of any modernization of the country.
Among the May 4th actors, some Marxist intellectuals, such as Chen Duxiu, one of the CCP’s founders, became spokesmen for a “scientific and instrumentalist” approach to democracy, which can be considered the ideological breeding ground of the Leninist regime installed in 1949. More generally, the influence of socialism and the young Soviet Union was perceptible in the political ideas Sun developed toward the end of his life (he died in 1925); that was the case with his third principle, “people’s well-being” (minsheng), the foundation of the KMT’s social policy, his opposition to imperialism, his rapprochement with the Bolshevik regime, and the decision to enter into an alliance with the CCP, founded in 1921.
All the same, the May 4th phenomenon consolidated the predominance of liberal and democratic ideas. These were represented by many groups, the most famous of them being the New Youth (Xin Qingnian) movement, intellectuals such as Hu Shi and Cai Yuanpei, and writers such as Lu Xun and Wen Yiduo. More generally, the KMT’s ideology was largely based on liberal principles. Of course Leninism directly influenced the Nationalist Party’s organizational pattern. But the KMT never acquired the level of quasi-military discipline or opacity of the CCP, a weakness that contributed to its defeat by Mao’s army in 1948–1949. Chiang had briefly been seduced by the European authoritarian and totalitarian regimes of the 1930s, such as fascist Italy and then Nazi Germany, which had helped modernize his army in Nanjing. Further, from 1931 Chiang and a majority of KMT chiefs imposed a conservative course, seeking much more to reconnect with Confucian tradition and run a strong government than to spread Sun’s democratic ideals, political pluralism, and respect for people’s liberties. In the economic domain, the advent of the Nanjing regime slowed down the development of private enterprise, especially family capitalism, which had enjoyed unprecedented growth in the early twentieth century, in favor of crony capitalism and the state sector. These are evolutions not without ramifications and continuations in the People’s Republic now.
However, the KMT could never completely turn its back on its liberal ideology, which was the basis of both the 1911 revolution and the close relations the ROC had developed with the United States and other democratic countries, nor totally suppress political opposition to its government. These relations were not merely diplomatic and military, although during the Sino-Japanese War, and especially after the United States entered World War II against Japan in 1941, such links were mostly augmented. They were also economic, social, academic, and religious. The role of Western and particularly American religious congregations and missionaries in republican China was enormous, notably in education, contributing to the spread of liberal and democratic ideas. For instance, American philosopher and educator John Dewey, who was much attached to democracy and was a friend of Hu Shi, the translator of many of his conferences during his two years in China (1919–1921), exerted a large influence on Chinese elites.
In other words, as Frank Dikötter says, the republican era was an “age of openness”, a theater of much drama, vicissitudes, and authoritarian tendencies but also of real economic development, a flowering of ideas, multiple experiences of modernization, and most crucially a readiness to draw inspiration from outside and appropriate democratic principles from the West. Contrary to CCP propaganda, republican China was not synonymous with decadence and with an inability to modernize the country. In fact, it was a veritable laboratory for ideas and reforms in all domains: economy, agriculture, education, culture, judiciary, military, and even politics. Without the Sino-Japanese War, as Mao himself admitted (and thanked the Japanese for), the CCP would never have come to power, and the KMT could well have achieved its task of economic and then political modernization.
Three examples of ROC accomplishments suffice. First, the six codes of the ROC (Liufa Quanshu) that the KMT promulgated between 1928 and 1935 constitute an impressive body of work, which has not only served as the basis of laws in force in Taiwan today but also deeply influenced the judicial reforms Deng introduced after 1979.
Second, in the international arena, it was Chiang and not Mao who in 1943 abolished foreign concessions or extraterritorial zones, which accorded numerous legal privileges and guarantees to expatriates in China. It was Nanjing and not Beijing, as a founder member of the United Nations (UN), that contributed to the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. And third, many historical and diplomatic documents of the immediate postwar period show that had Chiang succeeded in retaining his regime in Nanjing after 1949, he would have compelled Britain to return Hong Kong much earlier than the CCP managed to do. In other words, when it comes to the former British colony, the People’s Republic prolonged rather than shortened the “humiliation” the “Chinese people” suffered.
Finally, the republican era was also the only time in modern Chinese history when genuinely pluralistic national and local elections were organized; first were the legislative elections of 1913, which the KMT won. It would have been in power with Song Jiaoren as prime minister had he not been assassinated at the behest of the then strongman Yuan Shikai. Second were the 1947–1948 elections, whose democratic character was much more debatable but which in the context of the renewed civil war between the KMT and the CCP were the last real national elections organized in China before Mao took power.
Conclusion
Clearly there is need for caution regarding the discourse from the PRC authorities and official historians on the country’s past. What occurred in 1949 was less a fundamental rupture with the imperial period than with the ideas that had spread and the reforms introduced in a China that was effervescent, open to the outside world, even cosmopolitan, during the late Qing and the republican eras.
If there is an essential element of continuity between the imperial and republican traditions on the one hand and the PRC on the other, it is what Etienne Balazs called “statism” and the overwhelming role the bureaucracy and officials play. This statism stems largely from the Confucian ideology and the monist conception of political power it offers. It also is attributable to the vastness of the territory to be administered and central authorities’ ever-present need to depend on reliable representatives capable of maintaining local societies’ stability and the country’s unity. Mention may also be made of the key role the state has played in China’s development strategy in both the republican and current periods. More generally, in Confucianized East Asian countries such as Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, the state, while letting a particularly dynamic familial capitalism prosper, is not only a regulator but also an organizer of development, education, and social services.
Nevertheless, CCP cadres seeking to eulogize and idealize the scholar-officials of yore and to imitate their impartiality or at least to assume the appearance of their dignity have stood out from their models because of their very ideology, mission, competences, and practices. Also, unlike the KMT, which espoused a liberal ideology and considered its tutelage over the state to be provisional, the CCP has always considered leadership of the state as its right forever and itself as the immanent representative of the “people”. Moreover, in contrast to the KMT and all previous regimes, the CCP exercises total domination over the state and hegemony over society, maintaining a level of surveillance and repression never seen before, which modern means at its disposal also render more effective. These are differences that make any transition of the current regime toward democracy much more difficult.
That being said, the question arises whether in the context of modernization, privatization, urbanization, and globalization of China’s economy, the administration could still exercise the “absolute power” that Balazs attributed to it in the 1960s. Although private entrepreneurs remain highly dependent on the party-state, as discussed later, such dependence is reciprocal and contributes to undercutting the bureaucracy’s omnipotence.
Consequently, while continuing to administer a substantial part of the economy and strictly control society, the party-state of the PRC is on the whole advancing on a path leading away from the one it chose in 1949. It is this new orientation that is in fact leading the CCP to invoke tradition and restore Confucianism. The destination and the culmination of this itinerary are of interest next.
The Source:
Jean-Pierre Cabestan, China Tomorrow: Democracy or Dictatorship?, French edition Demain la Chine 2018, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers 2019 [Chapter 2]
[MGH: It is a book that offers excellent answers for questions that motivated this China Governance series. What a good catch it has turned out to be.]
'The Commune's Fish Pond', a propaganda poster. If you are lucky you may sometimes see it exhibited in the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australia.
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.