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  • Institutions and Institutional Change in China: Premodernity and Modernization
  • Pei Huang (bio)
Fei-ling Wang . Institutions and Institutional Change in China: Premodernity and Modernization. International Political Economy Series, vol. 23. London and New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998. xviii, 227 pp. Hardcover $65.00, ISBN 0-312-21360-3.

This book is a case study analyzing China's past and present problems using an innovative institutional approach. Since its unification in the third century B.C., China has been noted for its highly stable and undifferentiated domestic institutions—mainly two, the family and the state—which have operated and functioned in similar ways. The state, under authoritarian rulers, has always sacrificed political democracy for stability and effectiveness, a situation that has continued up to the present. By analyzing China's premodern institutions, Fei-ling Wang attempts in this book to answer such questions as what caused China to remain backward for so long and what new domestic organizational structure should China therefore be seeking in its modernization process.

The book consists of five chapters. The first, a lengthy one, lays down a conceptual framework. Among the concepts it clarifies are modernization, market economy, human institutions, institutional legitimacy, and many theoretical and methodological issues. An understanding of all of these is essential to an understanding of what the book is trying to accomplish. The second chapter focuses on labor allocation patterns (LAPs), which are associated with the division of labor and reflect both economic development and sociopolitical changes. Historically there have been three types of LAP: traditional, labor market, and authoritarian. The last of these three is an extreme form of the first, while the second represents personal freedom and labor mobility. China's LAP under Communism, especially before the 1980s, belonged to the third type.

Chapter 3 reviews China's domestic organizational structure from the third century B.C. to the nineteenth century. State, economy, and society in this period [End Page 230] were never well differentiated. With the rise of foreign and native enterprises in the period 1840-1949, however, changes began. A market-oriented LAP emerged in the coastal urban centers, but the new trend was distorted by internal and external troubles. Under Communism, China launched destructive drives such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. It also attempted to apply such devices as household registration, personal dossiers, and the work unit, and these efforts only suffocated China's economy and society instead of modernizing them.

Chapter 4 discusses China's modernization from the perspective of the labor allocation patterns of the 1990s. Under Deng Xiaoping and his associates, China shifted from Maoist ideology to pragmatic policies. In a little more than ten years China has become a major participant in international trade, and the market-oriented LAP has thus made great strides. But despite this impressive progress, the premodern domestic organizational structure and sociopolitical complex have remained almost intact. Although rapid political democratization is inadvisable at present, China is still in need of substantial political reform.

The last chapter sums up the book and predicts the future course of China's modernization and its relation to the world. Premodern China's institutional stagnation, the author argues, resulted mainly from imperial despotism, a huge population, and international isolation. China today has a mixed and transitional domestic organizational structure, and on the way to complete modernization it faces many problems, internal as well as external. Among the internal problems are political corruption, surplus rural labor, and regionalism, while the external problems would likely include Chinese emigration, China's record on human rights, and the Taiwan issue. The full modernization of China will have to take a different form from that of other modernized states in terms of market economy, personal freedom, standard of living, and political evolution. A modernizing China, the author believes, is likely to focus on domestic problems, while the needs of integration into the international community and future technological change will tend to discourage aggressive behavior.

The value of Wang's study is manifold. It provides an innovative framework for analyzing Chinese institutions and the changes they are undergoing, with an emphasis on labor allocation patterns. This framework opens a new...

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