The Making of the State Enterprise System in Modern China: The Dynamics of Institutional Change (review)

This text represents a bold break with the epistemological orthodoxy that views contemporary Chinese history as a progression of distinct types of social formation: progressing from an Imperial China to the early Republic, then to the rise of Nationalist Party rule over the Republic, and finally to the Communist regime. Each of these transitions is supposed to be marked by the death of the signature institutions and relationships of the old regime and the birth of distinctly new institutions and relationships, such that each social formation is sui generis. Thus, each transition is a revolution, the destruction of one form of society and the creation of a completely new type, and not simply a changing of the guard.

However, deploying an institutionalist framework, Morris L. Bian rejects this view of Chinese social transformation qua revolution and, instead, grounds his text in an exploration of the continuities between Imperial, pre-Nationalist Republican, Nationalist, and Communist China (particularly the continuities between the last two) that fostered the growth and development of the state enterprise system and the larger bureaucratic system of which it was a component part. In doing so, he traces the path of development of many of the "socialist" institutions that have come to be associated with Chinese communism to the Nationalist regime, including those elements, such as the extensive network of social services and welfare, whose particular manifestation under the Communists came to be known as the Iron Rice Bowl. Bian would have us understand that these institutions and the "mental models" upon which they are based predate the rise to power of the Communist Party of China (CPC). Indeed, according to Bian, even the ideological content of the "revolutionary" post-1949 society can be traced back to non-communist origins. In Bian's formulation, Sun Yat-sen not only is the intellectual father of the Nationalist variant of the Chinese social formation but also displaces Mao as the intellectual father of the post-1949 social formation as well. Indeed, although Bian does not say so explicitly, it is not difficult to connect the dots and view Sun's Doctrine of Peoples Livelihood as the direct antecedent and primary intellectual raw material for Jiang Zemin's Well-off Society. In other words, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

This is a provocative claim precisely because so many political interests are embedded in the notion that there is a fundamental difference between the Nationalist and Communist regimes, as well as between these regimes and the Imperial regime that preceded them. In order to make his point, Bian has produced a rather detailed historical exploration of the origins of key institutions, processes, and modes of thought during the Nationalist period that are understood as having carried over into the Communist period. In Bian's analytical framework, these social phenomena not only survived the revolutionary transition from one regime to the other but became the signature structures of the Communist era. In this way of viewing contemporary Chinese history (where the past is always prologue), the so-called Maoist revolution is not so revolutionary.

This leads us to a primary theme of the text: that social transformation is sensitive to initial conditions and crises. The Nationalist regime necessarily began with the institutional and intellectual resource endowment passed along from the prior Imperial and brief pre-Nationalist Republican regimes and only made major innovations to those initial conditions in response to crises. This last ontological aspect of Bian's thinking is just as critical as his break with the notion of a historical progression of fundamentally distinct social formations. He has painted a picture of continuity but must also explain institutional and intellectual invention and innovation. After all, it would be quite difficult to argue in favor of a Parmenidian social universe in the face...