[Part 4 Contradictions of Center] China Governance History
MacFarquhar’s 15-volume Cambridge History Epilogue on Onus of Unity
Roderick MacFarquhar wrote:
EPILOGUE: THE ONUS OF UNITY
In the preface to Volume 14, we said that a rounded perspective on the Communist enterprise in China might be possible only after a century. An epilogue appended to the final volume of a history of China covering two thousand years is a hazardous venture. Yet to take our narrative so close to the present and not offer some contemporary reflections seems craven, even if the result will only provide harmless amusement for future historians.
In our introduction to these final two volumes, entitled "The Reunification of China”, we pointed out that “a billion or so Europeans in Europe and the Americas live divided into some fifty separate and sovereign states, while more than a billion Chinese live in only one state”. We rejected geography and ethnic diversity as sufficient explanations for the failure of Europeans to revive the Roman empire, as compared with the success of the Chinese in restoring theirs.
We argued, rather, that the disorder of the Warring States period (403-221 B.C.) led Chinese political philosophers such as Confucius to enshrine peace and order as central ideals, thus transforming unity into an overriding political goal. Once achieved, unity was preserved by the invention of bureaucratic government. The bureaucracy’s function was facilitated by the unifying symbol of the emperor and legitimized by a universal ideology of which it was the guardian.
Placed in that long historical trajectory, the Chinese Communists can be seen as another unifying “dynasty”, equipped with "imperial" chairman, bureaucracy, and ideology. Yet their achievement, so startling to contemporaries, pales by comparison with that of the Ch'in (221-206 B.C.), who imposed the first true empire upon the chaos of the Warring States, and the Sui (A.D. 589-617), who reestablished the Ch'in-Han system after three centuries of disunity, thereby transforming it from a vanished ideal into the norm of political organization for another thirteen hundred years. The feat of Mao and his colleagues in setting up their regime after fewer than forty years of disorder resembles more the relatively speedy takeovers by the Han, T'ang, Ming, and Ch'ing.
Whatever the extent of their achievement, the Communists' commitment to unity had the support of all patriotic Chinese. The Nationalists would obviously have preferred a China united under their own banner, but no one questioned that age-old ideal, especially after the fragmentation of the warlord era from 1916 to 1928. Indeed, if unity was “the legitimator of dynasties”, as we put it, then the CCP's success in uniting mainland China, which Chiang Kai-shek had never achieved, conferred upon it the traditional "mandate of heaven”.
Implicit in most histories of China is acceptance of and indeed admiration for the unifying imperative of Chinese politics. Yet looked at from today's perspective, after forty years of Communist rule, negative consequences of that historic Chinese achievement are beginning to emerge.
As we pointed out, governing the vast Chinese population as a unit is a "gargantuan task”. Traditionally, the emperors had claimed absolute rights over the lives and ideas of their citizens. In practice, the steel frame of the imperial civil service was able to maintain only general and superficial oversight of law and order and the economy, and, especially after the population explosion in the eighteenth century, was heavily dependent on local gentry for detailed supervision of society. While the gentry subscribed to the bureaucracy's desire for stability and to its Confucian ideology, the imperial pattern of rule permitted great diversity of custom and belief, as well as freedom of economic activity, among the population at large. That equilibrium between center and locality, state and society was destabilized by the Communists.
During its decades in the wilderness, the CCP had been honed under Mao into a superb instrument for control and mobilization: “Fortunately for the CCP, the modern development of transport and communications, of firepower and police networks, had given the new government of the People's Republic various means to control the Chinese state and, for a time, the society." CCP cadres penetrated the remotest villages.
The superior organizational and technical resources of the CCP were not all that differentiated it from the traditional mandarinate. Even more significant was its Promethean urge to change nature. This alteration of ethos from the traditional acceptance of the natural order compares with the innovative breakthroughs of the Ch'in and Sui. The mandarinate had been committed to a steady-state agrarian society; now the CCP was bent on transforming China into a modern industrialized nation, and at a rapid rate.
As a result of its advantages and in line with its aims, by 1957:
A strong centralized state had been established after decades of disunity, China’s national pride and international prestige had grown significantly as a result of fighting the world's greatest power to a stalemate in Korea, the country had taken major steps on the road to industrialization and achieved an impressive rate of economic growth, the living standards of its people had made noticeable if modest progress, and the nation's social system had been transformed according to Marxist precepts in relatively smooth fashion. [reference - Frederick C. Teiwes, "Establishment and consolidation of the new regime”, CHOC, 14.51]
Abroad, especially in non-communist Asia, the CCP's achievements were regarded with awe. But the tools of success were also weapons of destruction, when the aims were pursued with arrogant fervor. The CCP could train downtrodden peasants into victorious soldiers and transform smallholders into collective farmers, but it could also mobilize them for the disastrous Great Leap Forward [GLF] in which millions perished. Only in a state as united and controlled as China could so terrible a calamity have taken place nationwide.
If the GLF underlined the negative aspect of the combination of transformative goals and mobilizational skills, the Cultural Revolution exposed the disastrous consequences of the newfound ability to inculcate a national ideology directly from the center. Imperial Confucianism had inevitably been adulterated by the time it filtered down to the grass roots, but pure Mao Tse-tung Thought could be transmitted directly throughout the land by radio, television, and the circulation of millions of “little red books”.
The Cultural Revolution also magnified another aspect of the traditional political culture: the power of the imperial symbol. The emperor had been dependent mainly on sober mandarins and gentry to inspire and maintain respect for him, and they had their own national and local agendas, whereas the cult of the "imperial" Chairman could be nurtured by direct contact between Mao and fervent Red Guards and opportunistic acolytes, and spread abroad by them and by incessant media propaganda. In the name of Mao and his Thought, numberless atrocities could be committed and the country could be brought to the brink of anarchy.
By Mao's death in 1976, the disastrous consequences of combining the traditional stress on unity and the traditional political instruments for preserving it — emperor, bureaucracy, and ideology — with modern propaganda and organization, plus the modern goal of transforming society was clear for all to see. The mixture was so powerful that China had been brought successively to the brink of economic ruin and political anarchy.
Teng Hsiao-p'ing's actions after his assumption of paramount power at the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee in December 1978 suggested that he had learned at least some of these lessons. He did not abandon the notion of unity, for its restoration had been too central a goal of the Communist revolution; nor did he abandon the hope of transforming society, another central revolutionary goal. But he did alter the role of the traditional political instruments and moderate the use of the modern techniques that had rendered them so devastating. He tried to diminish the critical role of the "imperial" symbol by personally eschewing the formal leading roles in Party and state and, unlike Mao, genuinely sought to assign increasing power to his chosen successors. He diminished the role of ideology and he also encouraged the unleashing of society from the bonds of bureaucratic rule, a process initiated by Mao’s assault on the CCP during the Cultural Revolution.
Mao had long railed against bureaucrats, particularly when he felt they were trying to tie his hands. He became convinced that the CCP, once in power, had served to suppress the people rather than to unleash them. Teng appeared to share Mao's view, though mainly about the deadening effect of Party control on the economy. He cut back the role of the Party by unshackling the peasantry from collectivism and encouraging private enterprise in the urban areas. He undermined the role of ideology, already on the retreat as a result of the hyperbole of the Cultural Revolution, by extolling practice as the sole criterion of truth. The media ceased to be primarily an instrument of ideological indoctrination.
But there was one profound difference between Mao and Teng: Whereas Mao appeared to revel in upheaval or luan, Teng abhorred it, especially after he had witnessed the national chaos and personal tragedies resulting from the Cultural Revolution. Like China's traditional political philosophers he sought peace and order, and saw national unity as their necessary prerequisite.
Yet Teng's reform program had undermined the symbols and instruments that had ensured order and unity, and had not substituted new ones. As an increasingly diverse society began to flex its muscles and make new demands on the state from the mid-1980s on, the state had only one instrument for ensuring order and unity, the PLA.
The suppression of the prodemocracy movement in T'ien An Men Square by tanks in mid-1989 exposed the political vacuum at the heart of Teng Hsiao-p'ing's reform program. It laid bare the continuing fundamental problem for Chinese politicians attempting to lead their country into the modern world: how to maintain the unity of a billion persons while allowing them sufficient political, economic, and social freedom to make their country prosper.
The Communists, like the Confucians before them, have feared factionalism and suppressed provincialism. This has been their onus of unity. In this light, the European inability to preserve or restore Roman unity was not failure but actually the key to Europe's pluralistic future. In his analysis of the impact of the fall of the western Roman empire, Gibbon pointed to the benefits of what would have been for Chinese a traumatic experience:
Europe is now divided into twelve powerful, though unequal kingdoms, three respectable commonwealths, and a variety of smaller, though independent states: the chances of royal and ministerial talent are multiplied, at least, with the number of its rulers The abuses of tyranny are restrained by the mutual influence of fear and shame; republics have acquired order and stability; monarchies have imbibed the principles of freedom, or, at least, of moderation; and some sense of honour and justice is introduced into the most defective constitutions by the general manners of the times. In peace, the progress of knowledge and industry is accelerated by the emulation of so many active rivals; in war, the European forces are exercised by temperate and undecisive contests. [Reference - Edward Gibbon, Tie decline and fall of the Roman Empire, 2.95]
Gibbon went on to argue that modern freedom was secured by the emergence of this new European polity comprising a concert of smaller, independent states hammered out of the fragments of the old empire. The rivalry associated with the balance of power was greatly preferable to the stifling, deadening uniformity of empire. After the experience of twentieth-century slaughter and holocaust, one winces at Gibbon’s eighteenth-century insouciance about "temperate and undecisive" war. But his confident assertion that the failure to reestablish the Roman empire was beneficial for Europeans because it liquidated a stifling uniformity and encouraged a productive international emulation is relevant today, and particularly for China.
In this age of nationalism and especially of China's cultural nationalism, no Chinese statesman can contemplate dissolving a 2,000-year-old state. But Peking politicians inevitably must acknowledge the necessity of institutional innovation in politics as well as in the economy. As many Chinese and foreign observers have told them, one cannot move far toward a free market for goods without permitting a free market for ideas, nor sponsor economic initiatives without creating channels of political expression and participation.
On this frontier of development, history may offer suggestions. The success stories of Taiwan and Singapore suggest that in a trading community, a strong but supportive Chinese bureaucracy can maintain political control and simultaneously allow and indeed encourage industry and commerce. In Hong Kong, Chinese entrepreneurs have proved that they can develop dynamically even under an alien bureaucracy that is content simply to stand by and let trade expand.
In the PRC, five Special Economic Zones and the fourteen ports open for foreign trade testify to the ingenuity of mainland economic reformers. What political equivalents can be imagined? How can the world's most populous state with the longest political continuity re-create its polity? The American example of federalism was contemplated by some in the 1920s. As of 1990, the modification of party dictatorship was under way in Taiwan, Eastern Europe, and even the Soviet Union.
Of course, the mandarins running the three "little dragons" have only relatively tiny populations to worry about compared with that of the mainland, and they preside over a public mainly devoted to urban life and commerce instead of still mired in the remote villages of a largely agrarian subcontinent. But that only underlines the urgency for the CCP to find forms of political, economic, and social disaggregation if China's modernization is not to founder. The dead hand of the central bureaucracy must not be allowed to stifle the talents of the people.
Both Mao and Teng have understood this in their different ways. In July 1957, Mao called on his colleagues "to create a political climate in which there is both centralism and democracy, discipline and freedom, unity of purpose and personal ease of mind and liveliness" as the basis for developing China.
At the historic Third Plenum in December 1978, Teng repeated that call, and put it in a more concrete context:
At present, we must lay particular stress on democracy, because for quite a long time democratic centralism was not genuinely practised: centralism was divorced from democracy and there was too little democracy. Even today, only a few advanced people dare to speak up If this doesn't change, how can we persuade everyone to emancipate his mind and use his head? And how can we bring about the four modernizations?
Teng had a vision of the contrast between China and Europe and the constraints imposed upon him and his colleagues by the gargantuan size and the still agrarian-centered economy of their country:
There are many provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions in China, and some of our medium-sized provinces are as big as a large European country. They must be given greater powers of decision in economic planning, finance and foreign trade - always within the framework of a nationwide unity of views, policies, planning, guidance and action.
Here, of course, is the rub. "Unity of views, policies, planning, guidance and action" is to be desired no doubt, but for a polity of more than a billion people it is plainly impossible and in fact undesirable if thought is to develop. A "unity of views" enforced by state and Party police is an empty facade without efficacy. Here the idea of unity can only be self-defeating.
The narrative in the bulk of this volume ends in the early 1980s to permit a measure of historical perspective. Those were years of hope, with a genuine sense of a new beginning under Teng's leadership. The Chinese people were beginning to demonstrate their willingness and capacity to exploit new freedoms in order to improve their lot.
But the argument within the Chinese leadership over unity and diversity persisted. Throughout the 1980s, Teng threw his weight behind economic diversity, opening up China to outside intellectual influences in order to encourage it. But he became increasingly dissatisfied with their corrosive impact upon political unity. Briefly in 1983-84, more toughly in 1986-87, and then with armed force in the summer of 1989, he acted to reimpose central political control over the burgeoning forces of society set in motion by his own reforms.
Neither Mao nor Teng was able to square the Chinese circle, preserving unity while simultaneously permitting freedoms. The tragedies of the campaigns against counterrevolutionaries, the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the T'ien An Men Square massacre are sufficient proof of that. In the last analysis, unity, and the disciplined order of which it is the basis, have always seemed more important, and freedom, and the loss of control that it spawns, too dangerous to China's leaders.
But the onus of unity assumed by China's leaders is increasingly an incubus for the Chinese people. If there is one historic lesson to be drawn from the four decades of the People's Republic, it is that there has to be fundamental change in the political system which over the centuries welded the Chinese people together. If not, the pressures of an increasingly self-confident developing society will finally grow so powerful that the system will burst asunder. In the 1990s and beyond, unity will be preserved only by diversity.
The Source:
Roderick MacFarquhar, 'Epilogue: the Onus of Unity’, in The Cambridge History of China, Volume 15, The People's Republic, Pt. 2, Revolutions within the Chinese Revolution, 1966-1982, edited by Roderick MacFarquhar and John K. Fairbank, Cambridge 1991 [pp. 875-881]
[MGH: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose - the perspective value of 30-year old 15-Volume history books]
1951 “Celebrate 30th Anniversary of Birth of Chinese Communist Party”
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