Previous: Integrating "hydraulic despotism" with "circumscription theory" to trace the Chinese state's origins
Has the CPC established a new, modern version of Chinese empire? In 1957, just as Mao was consolidating his power via the anti-rightist purges, Karl August Wittfogel argued in "Oriental Despotism" that, in essence, the Soviet and Chinese communist parties made decisive breaks from the long imperial pasts of the Czars and emperors, respectively, but that this was as a practical matter of keeping up with the times, more than it was a matter of fidelity to socialist or communist doctrine. In both the USSR and the PRC, the essential modus operandi of the age-old authoritarian state - the monopolization of economic activity by a large centralized bureaucracy - was not only reinstituted by the supposedly revolutionary party, but dramatically augmented.
So while the People's Republic presented itself in the Mao years as a rupture from imperial China, from the start its fate was determined by a new version of the bureaucratic apparatus that had existed since time immemorial. From the start, it retained this key marker of Chinese statehood and even of Chinese political identity itself. The communist party's success to date cannot be explained solely by its violence and repression: as with the most successful imperial dynasties, it has been very calculating and deliberate in its application of such coercion, thus betraying a sounder internal organizational principle and foundation than is generally acknowledged.
In fact, the political history of the Maoist era (1949-1976) should be assessed primarily from the angle of the dictator's continuous struggle to establish, maintain, control, and purify by all means necessary the new party apparatus state of the CPC. Indeed, it was a continuation of what had begun before the communist takeover, during the Yan'an period (1935-1948).
The CPC party apparatus state attained its peak of absolute authority during the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962), when it blindly executed Mao's will with catastrophic consequences for the peasantry. It then facilitated an economic recovery engineered by the party's moderate leaders, only to be all but wiped out by Mao when the dictator made his stunning comeback in the initial stages of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1969), effectively smashing the apparatus state in order to rebuild it from scratch. By 1972, having reestablished unrivaled control of the instrument of rule, the Great Helmsman haltingly relaxed his grip, allowing the apparatus to begin its practical administrative rehabilitation years before many officials would finally be reinstated by Deng Xiaoping.
Needless to say, the party state has always had a love-hate relationship with chairman Mao: many apparatchiks who suffered at Mao's hands in the Cultural Revolution would nonetheless end their careers with a stoic acceptance of the leader's willingness to exact such disproportionate costs to retain an extremely top-down, one-man system of rule. When it really came down to it, at Tiananmen Square in 1989, the party led by Deng Xiaoping simply couldn't imagine giving up the authoritarian regime that Mao had bequeathed it: its decision to use lethal force was an unequivocal affirmation of its intent to preserve Mao's creation and legacy.
Built to last: why Chinese communism succeeded where Soviet communism failed
Today, at 66 years of age, the People's Republic of China is in far better shape than was the Soviet Union in its own seventh decade, in the 1980s. It may yet implode - the possibility has never been absent - but for practical purposes it is an order of magnitude healthier than the system that Gorbachev inherited in 1985 and tried, with spectacular failure, to save from itself. The question of why this is the case is arguably one of the single most critical ones for international politics and world affairs at present, when much of the world - Putinist Russia included - is striving to emulate elements of the "Chinese model" of authoritarian development. Unfortunately, the West as a whole is still waiting for China to finally collapse someday, and has made little effort to understand the history of the PRC which has determined its current state and trajectory.
1. A rural power base, even to the present
As a start, much like the Bolsheviks in Russia before them, the Chinese communists claimed to establish popular rule by empowering the underclass of disfranchised peasantry and urban proletariat; and also much like the Bolsheviks, the CPC in practice served the popular will only inasmuch as this advanced its own interest of acquiring and maintaining absolute power.
But critically, Mao broke with the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy by positioning the rural peasantry, not the urban proletariat, as the backbone of communist revolution. While this clearly began as a practical concession to the revolutionary realities of China in the 1920s and 1930s - the level of industrialization was much lower than in Czarist Russia - this has had far-reaching consequences for the entire history of the People's Republic, which in the era of reform and opening (1978-present) has generally escaped notice.
Few observers and analysts of the 1989 pro-democracy movement in China have pointed out, let alone stressed, that despite the appearance given by the international media, the movement was largely confined to only a fraction of the total population: urban students and workers. The vast countryside in which nine out of ten Chinese still lived and toiled was largely untouched: had this not been the case, the central government's pacification of the insurrection would have been much longer and costlier.
In 1989, China was still very much an agrarian country and economic system: its boom of the preceding decade was built upon the disbanding of the Mao-era rural communes and the emergence of a public-private partnership system between farmers and local officials, who colluded to combine market mechanisms, new technology, and common sense administration to create, by the mid-1980s, almost unheard-of agricultural surpluses throughout the country, thereby creating a solid foundation for accelerated industrialization and urbanization.
What has escaped much Western notice is that this crucial phase of Chinese rural development was essentially state-driven. True, it was spurred initially by private initiative in rural communities, but the real turning point was when the bureaucratic apparatus state, still as firmly controlled by the party as ever, took it upon itself to oversee and coordinate the new market-friendly policies. Critically, there was no official sanction of private property in these early years of reform, and as yet little corruption in the rural party ranks; both the speed and equitable distribution of the agricultural expansion of the early 1980s was greatly facilitated by the centralized party apparatus state. This, in turn, was only possible because Deng Xiaoping had attained a degree of unrivaled paramount leadership comparable to, if clearly less than, that of Mao.
Rural China did not escape the economic distortions of the second half of the 1980s, specifically inflation and corruption, which became a major problem as officials for the first time had much surplus production value, notably in the new small village enterprises, to pocket for illicit personal gain. But as a whole, the condition of the peasantry in 1989 was incomparably better than it was only a short time earlier. For the close to one billion Chinese citizens in the countryside, there may have been incentive to demand cleaner and more efficient administration, but there was practically no widespread discontent that would have translated into calls for a radical overhaul of the communist system. In the spring of 1989, this made rural China, yet again, the CPC's bulwark of support against its virtually exclusively urban opposition.
Thus, from Deng Xiaoping and the CPC hardliners' perspective, the crackdown on students and workers in Beijing, executed ruthlessly as it was by a predominantly peasant conscript army, indeed had the appearance of a counterrevolutionary operation to root out a neo-bourgeois uprising.
One could argue that the stoic peasantry has remained the party state's power base even to the present day. In the 1990s and 2000s, the 150 to 200 million farmers who moved to urban areas for manufacturing and construction work formed the backbone of the nation's transformation into an industrial and commercial superpower. Despite countless protests against the official corruption which exploded in this period, the peasantry notably refrained from demanding political reform or democratization, settling instead for a gradual increase of their living standards. Local village elections were permitted, giving a limited measure of autonomy to rural communities - an indication in itself of the party's relative trust and confidence in the peasantry's pliability.
And of course, under the populist Xi Jinping, the rural masses have arguably reassumed their overt importance to the party's legitimacy: Xi has prided himself as having the heart of a poor farmer, in stark contrast to the urbane technocrats and wealthy businessmen of the reform-era party apparatus.
2. Complete control of the security apparatus
In 1989, clear divisions emerged within the CPC leadership and ranks. However, the ease with which Li Peng and the conservatives ousted Zhao Ziyang and the reformers from the party state's power structure was indicative of the vise-like grip that Deng Xiaopoing, Chen Yun, and the rest of the council of revolutionary "immortals" still retained over the security apparatus.
The student and worker demonstrators were especially confident as their swelling ranks were joined by numerous party intellectuals, journalists, and low-to-mid-level functionaries in the university, state enterprise, and various state administrative systems; it seemed as if their massive strike had brought the party leadership to its knees by pushing the state-run economy to the brink of a complete standstill. Their fatal mistake was to equate numbers and popularity with strength and power: in this respect, the old revolutionaries literally took them to school.
In such a crisis, the ruling regime survives by sharply tightening its grip on the security apparatus: the specialized security services, the police state (to include paramilitary forces), and of course the military. Every totalitarian or quasi-totalitarian system is designed such that its security apparatus, despite being a small fraction of the overall state apparatus and a minuscule portion of the population, has virtually unlimited rapid reach into every nook and cranny of both the state and the society. Hence even the loss of allegiance of a significant portion of the civilian bureaucracy - which seems to have taken place during the Tiananmen standoff - is not as severe a blow to the rulers as it would first appear, so long as they retain unchallenged control of the state's lethal arms. In any case, even in severe crises, practically all of the essential civic functions of the state must carry on normally anyway, leaving these authorities with little leverage against the ruling clique should they in fact sympathize with its opponents.
Deng Xiaoping deftly maintained a highly centralized control of the security state even as he loosened up the communist system's civil administration. He thus had the means to coerce the entire police, military, and paramilitary force into executing the party's will by violence. Throughout the 1989 crisis, this chain of command was not seriously threatened: though the citizens of Beijing managed to block the PLA's initial entry into the city in the first days of martial law (declared May 19), the party had no trouble shuffling out the reluctant commanders who had succumbed to people power, and merely withdrew the army to regroup and reinforce for the next, final thrust into Tiananmen Square, which it now knew must involve deadly force.
Thus, the failed 1989 democracy movement in China, contrasted with the successful revolutions in the communist bloc in eastern Europe later that year and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, proves that there technically isn't any such thing as a nonviolent overthrow of a dictatorship: even when the peaceful citizenry does triumph, it is ultimately not because the rulers are too conscientious to kill their own people, but because they realize that they must crack down on their own unwilling security apparatus first, with the likely result that the very guns meant for the protesters would be turned against themselves.
The rulers of Moscow's eastern bloc satellites could never be so sure of such unquestioning loyalty from their security men to begin with - they always relied implicitly on the Kremlin's invocation of the Warsaw Pact which made the Red Army the ultimate guarantor of state integrity behind the Iron Curtain. But from 1987 onward, with glasnost and perestroika Gorbachev systematically dismantled the totalitarian infrastructure of the USSR itself, complementing this internal policy by a deliberate deescalation of the Cold War and a mutual drawdown of nuclear and conventional forces with NATO. This left the Soviet satellites completely naked and without protection against the popular revolts of 1989. Two years later, with the Soviet security state in tatters and much real power having devolved back to the individual Soviet republics, the hardliner junta that briefly deposed Gorbachev in the August 19 coup found that it had virtually no control over vast swathes of the Red Army: it could not shoot pro-Yeltsin Russian demonstrators because it feared retaliation from disobedient generals, including airstrikes on the Kremlin itself.
By contrast, in China the party security apparatus proved its worth to the top leadership in 1989, and thereafter grew only stronger. In the Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao years, even as the party retreated from micromanagement of the daily affairs of the populace, giving some room for civil society to grow, it seized every opportunity and pretext to beef up the security forces and infrastructure (notably including the crackdown from 1999 of Falun Gong). As China enjoyed a prolonged period of low threat of international conflict even as its internal social discontents intensified, the internal police state came to eclipse the PLA in prominence, reaching its height in the twilight of Hu's tenure (2009-2012), becoming almost a state within the state. The party's paramount leadership, however, easily reasserted absolute control over it during the Bo Xilai scandal, in which security czar Zhou Yongkang, Bo's ally, was sidelined by Hu via the Central Military Commission (CMC).
Xi Jinping, the clear beneficiary of the fall of the Bo-Zhou nexus (which some believe collaborated to derail his succession in 2012), has ironically relied heavily on the enhanced security apparatus left by Zhou to carry out the signature anti-corruption campaign whose highest-ranking victim has been none other than Zhou himself. As of early 2015, he appears to have replaced the highest echelon of the apparatus - the men charged with his own personal security - with his trusted personal confidants. The continued scale and intensity of the anti-graft crusade - after initial doubts that it would do so, it now appears to be sweeping the ranks of current provincial officials and state enterprise executives (notably finance and banking execs) - indicates Xi's increasingly confident hold on the instrument of coercion.
3. Fulfillment of the Chinese nationalist dream
Finally, the awakening of Chinese nationalism in the post-Tiananmen period lends incredible weight of legitimacy to the party state's project of continued total power. In fact, it may be the most significant of all three factors treated here, and though it is rather easy to dismiss or trivialize, it has very deep origins in modern Chinese history and is actually a culmination of that history. Its power to shape China's course in the 21st century, therefore, remains unmatched by any other single force.
When modern China was politically freest, it was also the most fragmented, decentralized, and therefore militarily weakest. This critical period of the so-called Warlord era (1916-1928) was defined by the May 4 movement of 1919, which aroused for the first time a universal consciousness throughout the Chinese world of the need for an effective central government and national institutions based on the Western model of Westphalian statehood. It was not enough to simply have an official Republic of China with a constitution and legal system, which had already been established in 1912: the humiliating betrayal which the Chinese people suffered at the hands of the Allied powers in the Paris peace treaty opened their eyes to the fact that they were disorganized, poorly led, and thus lacked the "hard power" in terms of economic and military strength to be taken as seriously as archrival Japan. And so, even as they enjoyed unprecedented personal freedoms in the 1920s, this was not pursued as an end in itself, but to build a strong modern nation-state.
The Nationalist (KMT) party, inheriting the leadership of Sun Yat-sen, was able to flesh out this yearning through the northern expedition (1926), and under its emerging strongman Chiang Kaishek, seemed destined to eventually unite all China under the republican banner. When the KMT turned against its communist allies upon unifying southern China, the CPC seemed like little more than a nuisance to its grand ambitions.
But the KMT's ultimate failure cannot be reduced to its unusual bad luck, namely the plunging of the world into the Great Depression, precipitating a Japanese invasion that prevented it from wiping out the communist insurgency; nor to its inferior military tactics and strategy; nor even to its corruption, which repulsed its Western supporters. In the final analysis, the KMT simply failed to inspire the rural masses of the vast Chinese hinterland to risk their lives for a new kind of nation.
Chiang Kaishek's regime envisioned a new China that would adopt Western science and technology while retaining its Oriental character; thus, even as it eagerly imported the best foreign advances it could handle, it sought to retain the conservative Confucian value system and social structure that undergirded the bulk of the vast population, especially in the countryside, which it naturally viewed as a bulwark of Chineseness against excessive Westernization or, conversely, Sovietization. This would have been the right formula to modernize China - had China and the world at large been at peace.
But China was no longer at peace when Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931. In those critical five years from the Manchurian incident (September 18, 1931) to the Xi'an incident (December 1936), Chiang Kaishek and the KMT correctly judged that Mao's communists were a greater threat to their power than the militarists in Tokyo; what they failed to update accordingly was their strategy of consolidating control of the countryside before either the Japanese or the communists snatched the window of opportunity away from them. The Nationalists woefully underestimated the scale of national mobilization that would be demanded of them, whether to stand up to the invaders or to crush the insurrectionists; their conservatism which would have been an asset in peacetime turned out to be a liability in war.
The communists, meanwhile, didn't exactly get off to promising starts, whether in the initial southern soviets of Jiangxi/Fujian or after their arrival in northern Yan'an at the end of the Long March (1935). Their brutality and contempt for the existing order quickly turned even many of their peasant supporters against them; but through their blunders and adjustments, they gradually perfected the art of running a ruthlessly efficient police state that successfully organized the masses of peasant labor for both economic and military purposes. Where terror and repression backfired, incentives and moderate land reforms were expediently pursued instead to keep both landlords and tenants on board.
Mao's true genius was his unswerving dedication to this agrarian state-building, and his gradual formulation of a strategy that incorporated the entire population of the countryside into a coordinated mass movement; this was his absolute priority during the anti-Japanese war, namely to surreptitiously rip the land away from the occupying power by building an alternate state right under its nose, all while giving an appearance of acceptance or even collaboration. It's not surprising, then, that he considered Peng Dehuai's "Hundred Regiments Offensive" of 1940 such a grave crime against the revolution to the day of Peng's death in the Cultural Revolution: Mao's whole strategy to seize power relied on what was effectively a strategic alliance with the Japanese and their collaborators.
And this was the winning nationalist formula, it turned out, that the Nationalists themselves failed to adopt. They sought to modernize China with a top-down approach whereby the Westernized urban and coastal elites would gradually transform the rural and interior by working with the existing social structures and hierarchies, that is the existing landed gentry-officialdom and its auxiliary merchant-guild classes. That this was in fact roughly the path of industrialization later taken by Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and parts of Southeast Asia under the US nuclear umbrella of the Cold War, serves to underscore the point: to carve out a truly independent political development, Mao and the communists recognized that they would have to build a new Chinese state from the bottom up; to preserve Chinese autonomy, they figured, they would have to sacrifice Chinese tradition and the existing rural social order. It's as if they decided to destroy China in order to save it.
The efficacy of their approach took decades to play out, but the history of the Cold War bears testimony to it. With only limited Soviet assistance - given that Stalin was wary at the outset of Mao's growing power base of Asiatic communism - the CPC handily defeated the KMT, exiling the latter to Taiwan and establishing the People's Republic in 1949. The fledgling PRC was then baptized in the fire of the Korean War (1950-53), fighting the mighty US and UN forces to a stalemate under Moscow's incipient nuclear umbrella. Then, after about a decade of using the Soviet Union in a marriage of convenience, Mao broke away from Khrushchev almost as if he had become the senior partner of the communist bloc; Soviet historians particularly recount that by the start of the Cultural Revolution (1966), the nuclear-armed Maoist party state was aiming for nothing less than domination of the global socialist movement.
And to top it all off, when the opportune moment came, Mao himself pulled off arguably the greatest master stroke in modern geopolitics: striking a deal with Nixon in 1972 to box in the mighty USSR, directly contributing to the latter's reluctant opening to the West via Détente in the 1970s and, by extension, the Soviet collapse in the following decade.
This unmistakable history of China's dramatic return to greatness among the family of global civilizations is already etched in the hearts and minds of serious-minded Chinese who, while conscious of Mao's great blunders that cost millions of lives, also understand that the totality of his legacy is one of the Middle Kingdom's return to primacy. And it is a story that continues as these words are written.
The more things change, the more they stay the same
Today, in 2015, China retains the most salient features of ancient Oriental despotism. Corrupt officials still exploit poor peasants and laborers; private property still exists in subordination to the state, its size itself a function of its relationship with that apparatus; the central leadership still struggles in a constant tug-of-war with the regions; even Confucius has made a comeback in the official ideological lexicon, which increasingly emphasizes a "harmonious society" and the "Chinese" in "socialism with Chinese characteristics."
China is still a society in which individual rights and liberties seem to take a back seat to the welfare of the collective whole, its opposition to Western "universal values" very much a reflection of a longstanding state-centered belief that the individual has no existence at all apart from the broader community he is obligated to serve and uphold.
In short, China is still China. Its "hard power" is the absolute monopolization of violence by the central government, as it ever was in the imperial days; its "soft power" is the Confucian justification of societal stratification that places the officialdom at the apex of a pyramid whose wide base is formed by the masses. All the recent talk of China's desire and potential to develop a large middle class is highly misleading: the "middle class" that Xi Jinping and the CPC have in mind is very different from the middle class in Western connotation. It is a class that, like the upper class, poses no political ambitions to alter the essential structure and nature of the apparatus state (the party-state); in other words, a class whose material prosperity actually renders it more conservative and hostile to political reform.
If so, the West has much to be concerned about, but perhaps not so much the non-Western world, which generally has strong traditions of authoritarianism and despotism similar to that of China. The 21st century may well lead to the conclusion that liberal democracy was always an anomaly in human history, not its inevitable end; or it may yet see the evolution of most of the world to more mixed modes of governance that contain both representative and authoritarian elements, as some would argue is already the case even now. But one thing's for certain: the great battle of ideas in this century will be no less, perhaps even more foundational, to the character and nature of the global society than was the battle between communism and capitalism, between dictatorship and democracy, in the last century. More than any other single factor, China's rise under the banner of red empire has restarted the struggle for history that only a quarter-century ago seemed to have concluded with its much-celebrated "end."
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