The Modern Chinese State (review)

This volume on the modern Chinese state originated in a conference held in October 1998 that was sponsored by the Institute of Russian, European, and Eurasian Studies and the Sigur Center for Asian Studies at George Washington University. Most of the contributors are either colleagues or former students of Professor Franz Michael (1907-1992), in honor of whose intellectual legacy the volume is admiringly dedicated. It takes as its starting point Franz Michael's proposition that one cannot comprehend China without understanding how the country's bureaucratic and political institutions evolved over time and responded to economic and social influences. Accordingly, the seven scholars who have contributed to this collection follow in Michael's footsteps and offer a systematic examination of how the Chinese state evolved from the Ming dynasty through the Nationalist and Communist party-states right into the twenty-first century.

Each essay reflects a concern with the sociopolitical events that have affected the nature of state power in China. However, the main emphasis of the chapters is on a detailed assessment of how the internal organization of the Chinese state changed, which political parties governed, and which values and ideologies guided these parties in their attempts to foster a successful state. Therefore, the volume as a whole functions as an effective historical survey of the political and institutional changes in the Chinese state since the Ming dynasty.

David Shambaugh's introductory chapter is typical of this kind of edited volume. It attempts to crystallize the themes and lays out the basic contents of each chapter. The most interesting observation is stated right at the outset. Shambaugh notes that during its modern evolution the Chinese state absorbed many new and at times foreign organizational and normative features. Yet, some elements of the past were retained at each historical juncture, and these later melded with the new institutional arrangements. As a result, the Chinese state has, over time, become an "eclectic amalgam" with "multiple, coexistent, and competitive subidentities" (p. 2). Statements like this capture the development of the Chinese state cogently. Unfortunately, the rest of Shambaugh's introduction does little to elaborate a set of overarching themes that could weave the contents of each of the volume's chapters together.

After the introduction, the chapters proceed more or less in chronological order. H. Lyman Miller analyzes the Qing dynasty's political evolution, including a comprehensive review of recent historiographical approaches to Qing political history. Miller notes quite correctly that the study of the state in contemporary China has been the preserve of political scientists, who have often failed to take into account new developments in imperial historiography. The result has been that references by political scientists to the Qing era have generally utilized conclusions that are no longer widely held by scholars of late imperial history. Miller sets out to correct this. He paints a picture of a late imperial state that, despite a highly centralized and rather efficient bureaucratic machine, was unable to hold a tight grip on the populace. He refers to several studies showing that the imperial state failed to expand in step with the unprecedented growth in population (p. 32) and relied on co-opting rather than penetrating local elites (p. 34). The Qing state was therefore a "minimalist state" that was ultimately unable to cope with several major socioeconomic processes under way (p. 36).

These new interpretations of the late imperial state emphasize the discontinuities rather than the continuities between the Qing and communist states. As Miller puts it, the new interpretation "would provide an evolutionary, society-centered picture of the breakdown of a limited imperial state through economic and social change and the concurrent creation of the foundations of a far more intrusive modern state in the twentieth century" (p. 41). In other words, the roots of the communist state are unlikely to be found in the tradition of a highly penetrative imperial state (which never actually existed to...