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  • Red Swan: How Unorthodox Policy Making Facilitated China's Rise by Sebastian Heilmann
  • Meg Rithmire (bio)
Sebastian Heilmann. Red Swan: How Unorthodox Policy Making Facilitated China's Rise. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2018. viii, 267 pp. Hardcover $49.00, ISBN 978-962-996-827-4.

How has the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) achieved rapid economic growth while maintaining a monopoly on political power? This question, for better and for worse, is the foundation of the vast majority of social scientific and popular writing on contemporary China. Sebastian Heilmann, one of the most accomplished and original senior scholars of contemporary China, has written a book that manages to answer the question rather clearly while also mounting a significant critique of contemporary political science.

Over the past decade or so, Heilmann has produced a coherent body of work on themes related to the CCP's adaptability; Red Swan collects this work in a single volume, one that specialists will find well argued and provocative and non-specialists will find informative and digestible. The book's premise is that China's "exceptional and unexpected development trajectory . . . requires a rethinking of conventional assumptions and models in comparative politics" (p. 1). Specifically, Heilmann takes on models that privilege "systemic features" (market versus plan, regime type) and theoretical paradigms that assume that China is en route to something else, typically democracy or a fully market economy, which he calls the "teleological bias" of social science debates about China (p. 123). Instead, Heilmann looks to the "software" of the CCP—its modus operandi, or "workstyle" (zuofeng)—rather than the "hardware" of its institutions or ideology.

Heilmann argues persuasively that the regime's success is derived from problem-solving and policy-making through a highly agile system of experimentation, feedback, course correction, and learning. While other scholars have noted the role of experimentation and the importance of decentralized policy innovation and implementation in China's reforms, Heilmann's work should be considered the most definitive for a number of reasons. First, rather than shoehorning the CCP's use of experiments into a pet theory of economic growth (see "market-preserving federalism"), Heilmann describes experimentation in the same language the CCP itself uses: "experimental points" (shidian) proceed from "point to surface" (you dian dao mian) in a experimentation policy cycle identifiable across policy domains (chapter 3 presents studies of state-owned enterprise reform, introduction of private business, foreign trade, rural healthcare, and land reform). Second, Heilman emphasizes the importance of hierarchy and the "indispensable" role of China's central government. While others have emphasized the decline of central power and the rise of decentralized, autonomous actors, Heilmann shows how local pioneers (usually with the protection of central patrons) work [End Page 361] toward the center under the "weight of hierarchy," and none are free of the threat of central interference (p. 91).

Third, Heilmann effectively locates the origins of the CCP's unique governing style in its revolutionary experience and the widespread acceptance of pragmatism in the Republican period. Drawing on the work of John Dewey as well as non-communist programs of social reform (including the Rural Reconstruction Movement), the CCP learned the utility of experimentation for testing the tactics of revolutionary change and establishing models of successful practice but ensured that the top leadership of the party was solely responsible for policy content and objectives. During the decades-long struggle for power in China, the CCP learned to value "agility over stability"—remaining open to unexpected opportunities, never codifying procedures so as to remain inscrutable to the enemy, and adapting tactics to local conditions (e.g., land reform) while never compromising core objectives. The similarities between the CCP's wartime experiences and its governing style led Heilmann (in a chapter coauthored with Elizabeth Perry) to dub the unique practices "guerilla-style policy-making" (p. 26): "a fluid, context-, situation-, and agency-based modus operandi: a method of policy generation and implementation based on acceptance of pervasive uncertainty, a readiness to experiment and learn (even from enemies and foreigners), an agility to grasp unforeseen opportunities, a single-mindedness in pursuing strategic goals, a willingness to ignore ugly side-effects, and a ruthlessness to eradicate...

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