The Decline of Communism in China: Legitimacy Crisis, 1977-1989 (review)

130 China Review International: Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 1996 X. L. Ding. The Decline ofCommunism in China: Legitimacy Crisis, 19771989 . New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 1994. xiii, 230 pp. Hardcover $49.95, isbn 0-521-45138-8. There have been several good studies done recently on political elites in postMao China.1 This book is a valuable contribution to this growing literature. Political scientists have renewed their attention in recent years to the role that elites play in the process ofliberalizing authoritarian regimes and in smoothing the path to democratization. This book does a terrific job ofshowing how elites both inside and outside the Communist Party have wrestled over the question ofliberalizing China's political system, and what the status ofdemocratic thought in China was as of1989. Ding's thesis is not really a new one. He argues that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) followed two conflicting paths in the post-Mao era. On the one hand, it tried to open the system to economic reforms so that the forces ofeconomic production could modernize China. On the other hand, it tried to maintain communist orthodoxy in China's political system. But as Ding points out, it is impossible to liberalize the economic system without having to face real challenges to the CCP's monopoly ofpolitical power. What is different about Ding's focus is his attention to the details ofhow elites within the CCP come into sharp conflict with the counterelite—those outside the Party, or those on the margins of Party power who are critical ofthe CCP's political domination. As the elites within the Party introduced reforms, counterelites used these reforms to criticize Party programs and policies and, in doing so, undermined the Party's legitimacy. He refers to this phenomenon as institutional parasitism—a concept that has been overlooked by scholars studying the demise of communism in Europe and Asia. Ding is sharply critical of other studies because he believes they have only scratched the surface ofthe reforming-communism dilemma. He believes that this superficiality can be attributed to the use of existing Western social science methods to study elite conflict in China and elsewhere. More particularly, he argues that scholars have missed the important inner dynamic of elite struggles in China. Thus, the specific ways in which economic liberalization has given rise to a legitimacy crisis in China and the subsequent campaigns to rescue Marxism in the face of calls to abandon the Marxist experiment have been overlooked. The© 1996 by University author suggests that earlier works have also been sketchy in their study of ofHawai iPresswhether counterelites should support an immediate move to democracy or embrace the "new authoritarianism" once practiced by Taiwan and South Korea as an intermediary step. Reviews 131 The weakness ofWestern social science methods in studying elite behavior is probably not as significant as Ding argues it is. While Ding criticizes Western models, his own model is based on a number ofwell-known Western sociological and comparative studies familiar to most sinologists and Western social scientists alike. His categories and approach to studying the breakdown ofcommunism are typically Western. For this reason, readers may not find the author's theoretical argument in the first chapter all that convincing, nor his concluding remarks on his contributions to theory. But the chapters that make up the bulk ofthe book are nonetheless a marvelous contribution to the study of elite politics in China. Drawing from a wealth ofpersonal contacts and hard-to-get documents, Ding carefully takes the reader through a labyrinth of counterelite efforts to undermine communist authority. He documents the efforts of the counterelites to publish their ideas, their influence on CCP debates on ideology and policy, and the discrepancy between socialist promise and socialist reality in China. This book is the best yet written for a discussion ofthe resistance to the CCP's patriotic campaigns , the storm over the film River Elegy, and the debate among the counterelites over how best to move China along the path toward democracy. Ding's book does not demonstrate the emotional pain intellectuals have suffered in the way that Perry Link's Evening Chats in Beijingdoes. Instead, Ding portrays a determined and...