Mao’s Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China ed. by Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth J. Perry (review)

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the political system it established—together we refer to them as the Party-state—have so far avoided the fate of many of the former socialist regimes. The Party-state has not only generated rapid economic growth, which itself stands out in economic history, but also maintained firm political control over China. Many scholars have sought to explain its puzzling vigor and widely attributed it to well-managed decentralization and the Party-state’s resilience that is situated in formal and informal institutions. This edited volume is more ambitious. It attempts to search for the roots of the successful decentralization and the Party-state’s resilience, which it finds in the CCP’s revolutionary heritage (p. 7). In a range of policy areas, the nine authors of this book trace specific linkages between revolutionary precedents and contemporary practices.

The introduction, written by Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth Perry, analyzes the CCP’s “guerrilla-style policy-making” that rests on fluid institutional arrangements and creative adaptations to new economic changes and uncertainty (p. 7). It lays the conceptual frame for the volume and is followed by two chapters concerning methodologies.

The second chapter, by Perry, studies continuities in contemporary CCP’s use of mass campaigns in politics. Tracing precedents of today’s Constructing a New Socialist Countryside program back to the Republican era’s rural reconstruction programs and Mao’s massive rural campaigns from the 1950s to 1970s, Perry discovers not only similar agendas, but also similarities in techniques used in carrying out the programs. She argues that the post-Mao government has actively learned from revolutionary practices and modified past mass campaigns into “managed campaigns” (p. 49). Despite avoidance of the term “campaign,” Maoist rhetoric and practice permeate the contemporary initiatives (p. 39).

Sebastian Heilmann’s following chapter is crucial as well. It examines the “experimentation under hierarchy” method (p. 88), which Heilmann regards as the key to understanding China’s policy making today. This method derived from the experiments of “proceeding from point to surface” (p. 62), which the CCP devised in the 1920s, refined in the 1930s, officially approved in Yan’an, and redefined in the 1940s and early 1950s. Heilmann is not blind to the non-Communist sources of policy experimentation during the Republican era, but to him what distinguished the CCP was its control of the overall experimental process. Heilmann’s insight also lies in his assertion that this seemingly bottom-up methodology could be coercive and could be applied as a top-down process, as demonstrated by the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. I hope Heilmann can elaborate more on this subtle dialectic nature.

The above conceptual frame works nicely with the more focused contributions of scholars on health care, social regulation, legal reform, media control, public opinion, subcounty governance, and central-local relations. Wang Shaoguang’s chapter addresses the issue of rural health care. Wang illustrates well the zigzag course of the post-Mao Chinese government’s search for good health care programs to cover the countryside. He contends that the cooperative medical system that emerged from 1955 to 1978 served as the prototype for the new models of basic health insurance today. Giving much attention to the similarities, Wang overlooks some significant differences. For example, the cooperative medical system under Mao was essentially part of rural collective institutions; it received little financial support from the state. While now the state finances the new systems substantially, and likely it has drawn inspiration from abroad, not simply from the past.

Nara Dillon explores the continuity in the CCP’s regulating voluntary associations and nonprofit groups from Mao’s era to the post-Mao period. She notes that, in the last few years, the Chinese Communist government tended to employ more quasi...