Institutional Amphibiousness and the Transition from Communism: The Case of China

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 24, Issue 3, 1994, Pages 293-318

  Ding, X L ^a  

^a HONG KONG UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY   (Hong Kong)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84972191918     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0007123400006876     Document Type: Article

References (67)

1. Zbigniew, Rau, ‘Some Thoughts on Civil Society in Eastern Europe and the Lockean Contractarian Approach’ Political Studies. 35 (1987), 573–592. p. 574.
2. Ivan, Szelenyi, ‘Socialist Opposition in Eastern Europe: Dilemmas and Prospects in R. L. Tokes, ed. Opposition in Eastent Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979, pp. 187–208); Jacques Rupnik, ‘Dissent in Poland 1968-78: The End of Revisionism and the Rebirth of the Civil Society’, in Tokes, ed. Opposition, pp. 60-112; Andrew Arato, ‘Civil Society Against the State: Poland 1980-81’, Telos 47 23–47.
3. Civil society theory was initially applied to the East European and Soviet cases. See, for example, Moshe Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon: A Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California p. Press, 1988); John Keane, ed., Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives (London: Verso, 1988); Frederick S. Starr, ‘Soviet Union: A Civil Society Foreign Policy. 70 (1988), 26-41; Gail W. Lapidus, ‘State and Society: Toward the Emergence of Civil Society in the Soviet Union’, in S. Bialer, ed., Politics. Society, and Nationality inside Gorbachev's Russia (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Westview Press, 1989), pp. 121-48; William G. Miller, ed., Toward A More Civil Society? The USSR Under Mikhail S. Gorbachev (New York: Harper & Row, 1989); H. Gordon Skilling, Samizdat and an Independent Society in Central and Eastent Europe (Houndmills: Macmillan Macmillan Macmillan 1989); Timothy Garton Ash, The Uses of Adversity: of Adversity: Essays on the Fate qfCentral qfCentral Europe (New York: Vintage, 1990); Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1990); Geoffrey Hosking, The Awakening of the Soviet Union (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990); Janina Frentzel-Zagorska, ‘Civil Society in Poland and Hungary’, Soviet Studies, 42 (1990), 759-77; Robert F. Miller, ed., The Developments of Civil Society in Communist Systems (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992); Adam Seligman, The Idea q'Civil q'Civil Society (New York: Free Press, 1992); Marcia A. Weigle and Jim Butterfield, ‘Civil Society in Reforming Communist Regimes: The Logic of Emergence’, Comparative Politics, 4 (1992), 1–23. Many authors then have attempted to use the concept of civil society to explain developments in China. For lists of such writings, see Miller, The Developments of Civil Society in Communist Systems. pp. 151-2; Gordon White, ‘Prospects for Civil Society in China: A Case Study of Xiaoshan City’, Australian Journal of Chine.ve Affairs, 29 (1993), 63-87. 65; and a special issue of Modern China, 19 (1993), 107–240.
4. VladimirTismaneanu, ed. In Search oftivil oftivil Society: Independent Peace Movements in the Soviet Bloc (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 181.
5. See Kenneth Jowitt, ‘The Concepts of Liberalization. Integration. and Rationalization in the Context of East European Development’, Studies in Comparative Communism, 4 (1971). 79–91. p. 82; David Held et al. eds. Suites and Societies (New York: New York University Press, 1983), p. 219; Brzezinski, The Grand Failure, pp. 3–9.
6. Ernest Barker, Principles of Social and Political Theory (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), pp. 2–3.
7. Reinhard Bendix, John Bendix and Norman Fumiss, ‘Reflections on Modern Western States and Civil Societies’, Research in Political Sociology, 3 (1987), 1–38, p. 33.
8. John Keane, Democracy and Civil Society (London: Verso, 1988), p. 3.
9. Such a bifurcated conception of ‘state-society relations' genetically bears a deep mark of modern Western experience. See Franz-Xaver Kaufmann et al.y eds, Guidance, Control, and Evaluation in the Public Sector (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1986), pp. 92-3; Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), pp. 11–12.
10. This element was particularly stressed by social and political philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the creators of the term ‘civil society’, including Hobbes, Locke, Burke, Ferguson and Kant.
11. “See Z. A. Pelczynski, ‘Solidarity and “The Rebirth of Civil Society” ’ (in Keane, ed., Civil Society and the State), pp. 361–380, especially at pp. 368–9, fora critique of the usage de-emphasizing the associational dimension of civil society.
12. Heath, B. Chamberlain, ‘On the Search for Civil Society in China’, Modern China, 19 (1993), 199–215, p. 200.
13. Abraham Brumberg, ed., Chronicle of a Revolution: A Western-Soviet Inquiry into Perestroika (New York: Pantheon, 1990), p. 33.
14. Pelczynski, ‘Solidarity and “The Rebirth of Civil Society” ’ pp. 365–366.
15. For example, in his critique of recent discussions on ‘state-civil society relations’, Keane (Civil Society and the State, pp. 62 and 70; Democracy and Civil Society, p. 65) remarks that most contemporary writers have misconceived the distinction. However, Keane's own statements on the subject reveal that, while his review of the classical literature illustrates the existence of ‘important differences in the geographic distribution, temporal changes and semantic variation of the distinction’ (Civil Society and the State, p. 62), which have been ignored by many contemporary writers, Keane's own usage of the ‘state-civil society’ scheme demonstrates no meaningful difference from most of the other writers whom he criticized. Try to compare, for instance, Keane (Civil Society and the State, p. 21; Democracy and Civil Society, p. 3) with John Thompson (‘Introduction’ to Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), pp. 6 and 321) and R. N. Berki (in Jack Hayward and R. N. Berki, eds, State and Society in Contemporary Europe (New York: St Martin's, 1979), p. 2).
16. See Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (New York: Free Press, 1968), p. 29.
17. Joseph Schumpeter (Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1942)) long ago noted amphibious relations among institutions. I am indebted to Ken Jowitt for this information.
18. Chalmers Johnson, ed., Change in Communist Systems (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1970), p. 19.
19. Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), p. 49, observed institutional conversion at a higher level in transitions from authoritarian rule in Southern Europe and Latin America. I have borrowed some phrases from them but avoided transplanting the concept of ‘resurrection of civil society’ into the communist environment.
20. I thank R. Winfree for helping me clarify this.
21. Timothy Garton Ash, The Revolution of the Magic Lantern’, New York Review of Books, 36 (1989), no. 21, p. 42. Even in Poland itself institutional amphibiousness was a predominant pattern in the opposition before the 1980s. As Pelczynski (‘Solidarity and “The Rebirth of Civil Society” ’ pp. 368–9) notes, until the 1980s the critical intellectual groups ‘owed their existence to the laxity of party control. the relative toleration of the security police apparatus and a degree of judicial independence. not to an infrastructure of genuinely autonomous social organizations. They were beneficiaries of loopholes in the state structure. Hence the application of the civil society concept to Poland before the rise of Solidarity – any meaningful talk of “the rebirth of civil society” - is in my view highly misleading; indeed, a piece of mystification and wishful thinking’.
22. See Brumberg, ed., Chronicle of Revolution, p. 9; Gail Kligman, ‘Reclaiming the Public: A Reflection on Creating Civil Society in Romania’, East European Politics and Societies, 4 (1990), 393–427, p. 422: Daniel Chirot, ed., The Crisis of Leninism and the Decline of the Left: The Revolutions of 19H9 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), passim.
23. To see how civil society theory impairs an appropriate characterization of major parts of’ the transition. one may read Lewin's book on social changes in the Soviet Union that led to the Gorbachev
24. revolution. On the one hand. Lewin, on the basis of his informative study, contends that ‘The usual antithesis of “state” versus “society1’ may be inadequate when one wants to explore relations between the two1 in the post-Stalin era. On the other hand he still tries to use the civil society concept to generalize his empirical findings and thus is caught in a self-contradiction. He writes: ‘By “civil society”, we refer to the aggregate of networks and institutions that either exist and act independently of the state or are official organizations capable of developing their own. spontaneous views on national or local issues and then impressing these views on their members, on small groups and, finally, on the authorities. The concept of civil society operating in the very fortress of statism - among broad layers of officials, political opinion makers, and the party apparatus - challenges conventional thinking about the Soviet state1(The Gorbachev Phenomenon, p. 80; emphasis added). It is clear that what Lewin describes here is largely institutional manipulation and conversion.
25. I question the value of the civil society schema as a generally applicable analytic tool in explaining transition from communism, but do not question its value as a normative ideal and as a political-strategic concept in the same setting. A notion that has great normative and political appeals to a society does not necessarily have a great explanatory power to that society.
26. Alex Inkeles, Social Change in the Soviet Russia (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971) p. 419.
27. David Kelly and He Baogang, ‘Emergent Civil Society and the Intellectuals in China’, in Miller, ed. The Developments of Civil Society in Communist Systems. pp. 24–39, quotation on p. 29.
28. David Strand, ‘Protest in Beijing: Civil Society and Public Sphere in China’. Problems of Communism, 5–6 (1990), 1–19, p. 18.
29. in the following discussions I cite evidence mainly from practitioners of civil society theory, in order to show the discrepancy between the theory they are using and the reality they are dealing with.
30. ~y Skiling, Samizdat and an Independent Society in Central and Eastern Europe, p. 38.
31. Frentzel-Zagorska, ‘Civil Society in Poland and Hungary’, p. 766; emphasis added.
32. Hosking, The Awakening of the Soviet Union, p. 45.
33. Elemer Hankiss, ‘The “Second Society”: Is There an Alternative Social Model Emerging in Contemporary Hungary?’ Social Research, 55 (1988), 13–42, p. 31. Emphasis added.
34. C. M. Hann, ed., Market Economy and Civil Society in Hungary’ (London: Frank Cass, 1990), p. 19.
35. See Hosking, The Awakening of the Soviet Union, pp. 63-75; Miller, Toward a More Civil Society? Society? pp. 27–35.
36. G. Ekiert, ‘Transitions from State-Socialism in East Central Europe’, States and Social Structures Newsletter, 12 (1990), 1–7, p. 3.
37. Frentzel-Zagorska, ‘Civil Society in Poland and Hungary’, p. 761.
38. Tony Judt, ‘The Dilemmas of Dissidence: The Politics of Opposition in East-Central Europe’, Eastern European Politics and Societies, 2 (1988), no. 2 185-240 p. 201. For a detailed study of the interaction in Hungary, see Anna Seleny, ‘Hidden Enterprise, Property Rights Reform and Political Transformation in Socialist Hungary’ (doctoral thesis, Department of Political Science, MIT, 1993).
39. Hankiss, ‘The “Second Society” p. 35.
40. Hosking, The Awakening of the Soviet Union, p. 17.
41. )The Economist, 4 January 1992, pp. 40–41.
42. For more details of the research, see X. L. Ding, The Decline of Communism in China: Legitimacy Crisis, 1977–1989 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
43. Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon, pp. 147–148.
44. Thomas F. Remington, ‘Regime Transition in Communist Systems: The Soviet Case’, Soviet Economy 6 (1990), 160–190, p. 179.
45. Andrew G. Walder, Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Vivienne Shue, The Reach of the State: Sketches of the Chinese Body Politic (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988).
46. Andrew G. Walder, ‘The Political Sociology of the Beijing Upheaval of 1989’ Problems of Communism, 38 (1989), nos. 9–10, 30-40; Tony Saich, ed., The Chinese People's Movement: Perspectives on Spring 1989 (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1990); Linda Jakobson, ‘ “Lies in Ink, Truth in Blood”: The Role and Impact of the Chinese Media During the Beijing Spring of’89’ (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University JFK School of Government, Discussion Paper D-6, 1990).
47. Quoted from China's leading critical journalist Liu Binyan's public speeches at Harvard University late in 1988.
48. See Perry Link, Evening Chats in Beijing: Probing China's Predicament (New York: Norton, 1992), pp. 249–290.
49. See Harry Harding, China's Second Revolution: Reform after Mao (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institute, 1987); Hong Yung Lee, From Revolutionary Cadres to Party Technocrats in Socialist China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
50. A term borrowed from Walder, Communist Neo-Traditionalism, pp. 123ff.
51. On these results. see Deborah Davis and Ezra F. Vogel, eds, Chinese Society on the Eve of Tiananmen (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Council on East Asian Studies Publications, 1990).
52. Michel Bonnin and Yves Chevrier, The Intellectual and the State: Social Dynamics of Intellectual Autonomy During the Post-Mao Era’, China Quarterly, 127 (1991), 569–593, p. 577.
53. The following is based on my interviews in the United States with four Chinese ecocomic researchers who participated in policy-making processes in China during the 1980s and on my fieldwork in China during 1993.
54. These businesses won the nickname of ‘red-hat enterprises'.
55. Strand, ‘Protest in Beijing’, p. 12; Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, ‘Between State and Society: The Construction of Corporateness in a Chinese Socialist Factory’, Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, 20 (1989), 31-60; Philip C. C. Huang, ‘ “Public Sphere’7“Civil Society” in China?’ Modern China, 19 (1993), 216–40, pp. 234–5. For detailed accounts of institutional amphibiousness in China's economic realm, see the following studies, though the term ‘institutional amphibiousness' has never been used: Jean C. Oi, ‘Commercializing China's Rural Cadres’, Problems of Communism, 9/10 (1986), 1–15, and ‘Market Reforms and Corruption in Rural China’, Studies in Comparative Communism, 22 (1989). 221–33; Dorothy Solinger, ‘Urban Entrepreneurs and the State: The Merger of State and Society’, in A. Rosenbaum, ed., State and Society in China: The Consequences of Reform (Boulder, Colo. Westview, 1992), pp. 121-41; Yia-ling Liu, ‘Reform from Below: The Private Economy and Local Politics in the Rural Industrialization of Wenzhou’, China Quarterly, (1992), 293-316; David Wank, ‘The Expansion of the Private Economy in China’ (unpublished paper, Department of Sociology, Harvard University)
56. Bendix et al., ‘Reflections on Modern Western States and Civil Societies’, pp. 12–13.
57. T. H. Rigby, ‘The USSR: End of a Long, Dark Night?’ in Miller, ed., The Developments of Civil Society in Communist Systems, pp. 11–23, at p. 15.
58. Jowitt, ‘The Concepts of Liberalization, Integration, and Rationalization’, p. 82.
59. See a graphic account of the phenomenon in communist Eastern Europe by Vaclav Havel in Vaclav Benda etai, ‘Parallel Polis, or an Independent Society in Central and Eastern Europe’, Social Research, 55 (1988), nos. 1–2, 211-46 pp. 233–234.
60. Andrew J. Nathan, China's Crisis: Dilemmas of Reform and Prospects for Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 5–6.
61. EEPS, ‘A Survey of Opinion on the East European Revolution’, East European Politics and Societies, 4 (1990), 153–207, p. 155.
62. For instance, in a recent article designed to summarize the transformation of Soviet-type regimes in accordance to the ‘civil society versus the state’ model, Weigle and Butterfield state that ‘Unable to freely choose representatives to the state and thus to influence policy or pursue private interests in a legally protected public sphere, those individuals in society who did not accept the regime's domination of public association and participation either withdrew into the private life of the family or developed alternative, underground networks of association and participation’ (‘Civil Society in Reforming Communist Regimes’, p. 4). The authors fail to see that besides these two alternatives, there was a third strategy: to manipulate official and semi-official structures for anti-system purposes.
63. This does not mean that the Chinese opposition were not seeking legal protection for their associational freedom. They tried several times, but were rejected by the government. We are not discussing their wishes here, but the political reality they had to face and within which they operated.
64. Remington, ‘Regime Transition in Communist Systems’, pp. 177 and 184.
65. Based on interviews and conversations with participants in two conferences in Paris in June and September 1989, most of whom were activists of the Spring 1989 Movement.
66. A Japan specialist has coined the term ‘the societal state’ to distinguish the Japanese state from its Western counterpart. see Daniel 1. Okimoto and Thomas P. Rohten. eds. Inside the Japanese System (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988). p.211.
67. See, for example, Frederic Wakeman Jr, ‘The Civil Society and Public Sphere Debate’. Modern China 19 (1993), 108–138: Huang. “Public Sphere'7”Civil Society- in China?‘. Modern China, 19 (1993), 216-40: Robert Wade, Governin infg the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government U? East Asian Industrialization (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990): Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925–75 (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1982): Karel van Wolfercn, The Enigma of Japanese Power (New York: Vintage, 1990).