Governing China: From Revolution through Reform (review)

Reviews 487 Li, K. W., and W.S.C. Leung. 1994. "Causal Relationships among Economic Aggregates in China." Applied Economics 26, no. 2:1189-1196. McKinnon, R. 1. 1973. Money and Capital in Economic Development. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution. Schumpeter, J. A. 1934. The Theory ofEconomicDevelopment. NewYork: Harvard University Press. Shaw, E. S. 1973. Financial Deepeningin EconomicDevelopment. NewYork: Oxford UniversityPress. Thornton, J., and S. R. Poudyal. 1990. "Money and Capital in Economic Development: A Test of the McKinnon Hypothesis for Nepal." JournalofMoney, CreditandBanking22, no. 3:395-399. be Kenneth Lieberthal. Governing China: From Revolution through Reform. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1995. xxv, 498 pp. Hardcover $30.00, isbn 0-393-03787-8. Studies of China since the economic reforms began have partitioned China into ever narrower areas ofspecialization, obscuring the whole by focusing on only a fragment ofa vast nation. Professor Kenneth Lieberthal's book Governing China reintegrates the study of Chinese politics, providing a comprehensive analysis of China in a continuous progression from Qin Shi Huang Di to the palace intrigues ofthe post-Deng succession, thus consolidating the Imperial, Republican, and Communist Chinas within a two-thousand-year continuum. It is the author's thesis that the contemporary Chinese state is the product of several legacies—the imperial tradition, the Republican period, and the Chinese Communist revolution—that have shaped the way China is governed today. The imperial state was based on the moral authority derived from Confucianism; strong personal leadership in the person ofthe emperor, who ruled through his virtue; and a large administrative bureaucracy. A tension arose between the personal power ofthe emperor, unregulated by laws, and the stability promoted by the bureaucracy—a tension that produced a structural weakness in Chinese governance that has lasted to the present. This legacy to contemporary governance in China is the inherent weakness of "organizations without institutions," administrative structures that have not become institutionalized practices that could shape the behavior ofmembers ofthe formal organizations. This leaves China© 1996 fry University with a l^ge» unstable bureaucracy undermined by the political power that operofHawai 'i Pressates behind and around it. The Maoist legacy was to create large party, army, and government organizations , but then to subvert them with the leadership instability created by Mao's 488 China Review International: Vol. 3, No. 2, Fall 1996 personal conspiracies and intrigues. Mao's beliefin struggle and in setting one social group against another, and one subordinate against another, degenerated into massive violence at the top and bottom of the political system. Mao's failure to institutionalize succession politics meant continued instability, which has lasted up to the present. Political scientists, in the eternal quest to determine "who governs," have long recognized the distinction between the formal structure ofgovernment and the informal exercise ofpolitical power. In the study ofChina, these two types of politics before the Cultural Revolution were characterized as the realms of organization and ideology. During the Cultural Revolution, attacks on the formal structure of government by those on the outside motivated Western researchers to look beyond formal organizations, to the politics of factional elites and the politics of the street, the university, and the workplace as the arenas ofdecisive conflict. Recent scholarship has shown a renewed interest in the patterns of Chinese informal politics because it is here that the post-Deng succession crisis will be carried out. Lieberthal masterfully examines this formal/informal dichotomy in two fascinating chapters. The chapter on formal political structure, "The View from the Outside," provides an organizational chart of the bureaucracy at the center, provinces , counties, cities, and work units, creating a state that thoroughly dominates Chinese society. As in all Leninist party-states, there is a dual structure, in which the parry organization parallels the governmental at all levels. The Chinese government bureaucracy is a matrix of fragmented authority spread across vertical bureaucracies (tiao) and horizontal coordinating bodies (kuai) that form the tiao/ kuai relationship. This tiao/kuai antagonism ensures a continual jostling among organizations in jurisdictional disputes to determine which one has authority concerning a specific issue. This dispersion ofresponsibility creates a system of "fragmented authoritarianism" that is prone to gridlock, and is another example of "organizations without institutions...