CHAPTER 2
Governance and Leadership
“This vast country, it isn’t easy, but it is hopeful.”
—Deng Xiaoping in a meeting with governors from the United States, October 17, 1979
“My bureau’s work is ‘dealing with contradictions.’”
—Bureau director, Ministry of Urban and Rural Construction and Environmental Protection, November 10, 1982
“History in China is different. Since the Tang dynasty [618 CE–907 CE] we’ve had a central government.”
—Yang Xizong, governor of Sichuan, December 1983
“As for myself, regardless of international reports about me, all those who have contacted me can come to the conclusion that I am not an authoritarian person—not a dictator. Why? The elements of Western capitalist education I received carry considerable weight in my brain. I studied the history of capitalist revolution in Europe, the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address—all elements of Western culture. So I am among those Chinese who know a considerable amount about the West.”
—President Jiang Zemin, Zhongnanhai, Beijing, June 14, 1996
Governance and leadership in today’s China reflect an alloy of continuities and discontinuities. The continuities are seen to greater and lesser extents in political culture, institutional practice and structure, resource constraints, and the problems that governing such a populated and expansive land entails. Since 1977 the discontinuities are seen in the facts that individual Chinese leaders have become less dominant in the overall system, society and the bureaucracy have become increasingly pluralized (fragmented), and many actors at all levels of the system have become empowered to act in their own interests—they have information, human resources, and money. China’s central leaders have the old pretenses of control but face new problems born of reform and change in politics, society, and the economy.
How will a political system with presumptions of centralized control, a strongman leadership tradition, and an overloaded decision-making structure deal with the realities of weaker leaders, an increasingly balkanized society, and more empowered players at all levels? Will a China struggling to control itself be a cooperative actor in an interconnected world?
THE BIG PICTURE: CONTINUITY AND CHANGE
Continuities
Governance and leadership in China have had considerable continuity throughout the reform era starting in 1977. Indeed, aspects of contemporary governance and leadership have resonance with China’s traditional dynastic system and a deeply engrained political culture characterized by leaders who are deeply anxious about their grip on such a huge and diverse population and territory. As C. H. Tung, Hong Kong’s first chief executive in the postcolonial period, has remarked, “‘[Chinese] leaders, from their earliest days, are taught to expect that dangers lurk around every corner. Be cautious!’”1
The basic wisdom about governing China has been voiced by Yao Yilin, one of China’s most prominent (and politically conservative) economic leaders: “China was so big that it was very difficult for things to go completely bad or go completely well, and hence leaders had to simply manage big problems as well as possible and not go to extremes in either actions or analysis.”2 Herbert Simon called this “satisficing”—less jargonistically, this is the search for “good enough,” or chabuduo in Chinese.
It is striking how enduring the tasks of governing China have been over time, tasks that boil down to achieving growth and maintaining social and political stability. Central to achieving stabilization has always been “feeding the people” (yang min); maintaining revenue flows to the central state; communicating policy expectations effectively down the very deep hierarchies; monitoring the implementation of central directives and having adequate internal intelligence to warn of pending instability locally or nationally; and securing China’s historically elastic boundaries from threats both near and far, often from non-Han peoples with populations spilling across far-flung frontiers. In a 1979 meeting, Vice-Premier Li Xiannian (later president), who presumably had the experiences of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution fresh in his mind, revealed his underlying worry by stating his minimalist governance objective: “[I] can’t guarantee results but I’ll ‘guarantee no starvation.’”3
Chinese citizens and leaders have persistently believed that the centralized state plays a decisive role in achieving these objectives. For Americans, government is a danger; for Chinese, government ought to be the solution. In January 2000, Vice-Premier Qian Qichen expressed the view that East Asian governments could not achieve progress without strong government.4 Chinese political discourse revolves around what the government can and should accomplish and how it can do so effectively. This is a far cry from American beliefs on limiting government and enlarging the private and individual sectors. One senior PRC academic explained in 1999, “‘In America government is accountable to the people. In China, the people are accountable to the government.’”5
China scholar Lily Chen illustrates these concepts in a Chinese idiom:
In the older Chinese governance tradition, officials, especially local governors, are called fumu guan, or parent officials. Local governors in ancient China were called mushou, which means that they will guard the mass or the herd of people for the emperor. This implies that these local officials have rights over their herd, just as the parents, knowing and having the best interests over their children, have rights over their children, including education, training, and discipline. This concept of fumu guan is somewhat inherited after 1949. . . . The antithesis of this concept, I think, is “taxpayer,” a concept Chinese borrowed from the West, implying that the mass, the people, have a right to know what the officials have done with their tax money, and therefore implying a sense of democracy and representativeness of government officials.6
Thinking on Chinese governance has always stressed the importance of political leadership. Leaders are not weather vanes sensing popular will whose job is to understand what the people want and deliver it, though some impulses in this direction are evident in today’s China. Rather, the core task of political leadership is to understand, define, and act upon society’s enduring interests; when the populace does not understand its own underlying interests, the leader is supposed to educate, persuade, and perhaps even change popular inclinations. In a discourse deeply resonant with the Confucian tradition, the leader’s legitimacy resides less in being representative than in being far-seeing, wise, and educated; exercising “humane authority” (ren zheng); and contributing to the shared goal of “national revitalization” (minzu fuxin). This has some similarities to the trusteeship vision of political leadership in Western political discourse, a tradition in which leaders implement their vision of the citizenry’s actual interests, not their momentary wants. Elections are an opportunity for the public to ratify or reject the leader’s understandings, but in the interim it is the leader’s job to arrive at an informed understanding of the popular interest, to pursue it, and to educate the public.
The supreme leader throughout the communist era, and in earlier times, has been the one who simultaneously sits at the apex of the military, executive, and party hierarchies (what I term the “systemically central hierarchies”) that run from Beijing down through the bureaucratic layers to relatively low, albeit variable, levels of Chinese society. The concepts of rule of law and checks and balances have played a far smaller role in either limiting the leader or empowering the citizen in China than in the West.
Beyond this idealized role of the leader and the state in China lies the enduring reality that its leaders are overloaded—China is underinstitutionalized and overcentralized. The combination of its geographic expanse, its massive population, its centralized character, and the expectation that senior leaders are indispensable agents of dispute resolution across an infinite range of issues means that at any given moment much in China actually is beyond the awareness or control of the center (zhongyang). Governing China is like “Whac-A-Mole,” the arcade game in which the player has a mallet to try to pound multiple pop-up moles back into their holes—while attention is devoted to “whacking” challenges in one direction, new ones appear in several other directions simultaneously. Because multiple initiatives must be undertaken simultaneously, it often is difficult for the political center to know how implementation is going or how one policy may affect other initiatives—much less ensure reasonable congruence between initial central intention and eventual local outcomes. The center’s pretense of control is considerable, but in reality the writ of Beijing is often quite limited: one mallet is insufficient. An admittedly bizarre example makes the point. When one U.S. congressman challenged Premier Wen Jiabao in a meeting to explain why a professor at Peking University had been fired for political reasons, the premier seemed almost incredulous that he would be asked about such a thing: “Perhaps we [meaning the questioner] need to change our approach; we can see China’s special characteristic is lots of people—1.3 billion people. [What you are describing is a] small problem. I don’t know the person you spoke of, but as premier, I have 1.3 billion people on my mind.”7
Chinese leaders are at the top of an inverted funnel that directs the most nettlesome problems upward for resolution. Subordinates, some representing functional bureaucracies and others territorial administrations, are interdependent but often unable to resolve differences among themselves. Consequently, the contesting parties seek out authoritative superiors who can either mediate or enforce a resolution of the dispute. These senior officials find themselves with crushing travel and meeting schedules, literally jumping from resolving one conflict to another. As the bureau director cited in an epigraph at the opening of this chapter said, the job of China’s leaders is “dealing with contradictions.” Since China began opening up to the world in the late 1970s, domestic issues have become increasingly complex and intertwined with global considerations, requiring the attention of top leaders even more often. Chinese leaders are drinking from a fire hose, with all interested parties besieging them. As the director of a major State Council Office put it, “The higher you get, the colder it becomes.”8 Another very senior former figure in the State Council described the often informal pathways through which the elite are lobbied: it is “‘like reporting in the Qing dynasty, when advisers gave slips of paper to the emperor.’”9
In the Chinese lexicon of governance, xietiao means “to coordinate,” or, more loosely translated, “to resolve conflicts among bureaucracies, localities, organizations, and others.” Xietiao is the job of the “supreme leader,” vice-premiers, state councilors, and everyone in a position of political authority. This task of leadership and governance has remained much the same throughout the entire period, from the beginning of Deng’s reform in 1977 to the present. Often coercion does not work, and one day’s bureaucratic truce is a mere pause during which the various forces regroup for future struggles. To a Westerner, this combination of centralization, leadership dominance, and imperfect implementation, all running on a bargaining treadmill, seems like a system with all the downsides of authoritarianism without any of its presumed benefits of efficiency and focus. In China, it has been this way for a very long time.
Changes
Continuities notwithstanding, there have been dramatic changes in Chinese governance and leadership in the post-Mao reform period, and changing domestic and global conditions portend more profound future developments.10
One obvious change is apparent from a comparison of the psychological circumstances of both leaders and ordinary citizens from the early 1970s to the present. In 1971, fear and high anxiety were evident in all realms of society, from ordinary citizens to low-level officials, and even in the demeanor of members of the upper echelons of the party (who almost uniformly chain-smoked). Owing to the uninterrupted stream of post-1949 mass and political rectification movements, not least the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, by the 1970s there was an all-pervasive anxiety that anyone at any moment could run afoul of the ideological and personal whims of Mao Zedong and the machinations of his acolytes. When speaking with a group of American university students in mid-1971, for instance, Premier Zhou Enlai paid attention to the Chairman’s young leftist lapdogs that were in the room, watching him carefully and listening.11 As one of the participants in that meeting, Susan Shirk, put it in public remarks years later, “There was lots of tension in the room. Yao [Wen-yuan] and Zhang [Chunqiao] sat there, Mao’s palace clique, [they] sat there looking contemptuous, clearly there to watch Zhou.”12 Zhou’s concern was justified, for a couple of years later the “Criticize Lin [Biao], Criticize Confucius” (Pi Lin, Pi Kong) campaign was launched by the Left, aimed in no small measure at the premier.
In this same context, in 1974, shortly after returning from his first of two Cultural Revolution–era exiles, in a meeting with a group of American university presidents, Deng Xiaoping exhibited caution. He spoke meticulously and hewed closely to Mao’s words, knowing that his political enemies might yet again turn Mao against him, as did occur in the spring of 1976.13 In this conversation he contradicted what he would say quite soon after Mao’s September 1976 death and the purge of the “Gang of Four,” parroting Mao’s thinking that a large population was China’s strength: “We have seen our population grow by 60 percent in the last 20 years, but our grains increased 140 percent. Even if the population should increase by another 50 to 60 percent, we would still have enough to eat, plus a bit of surplus.”14 In an October 23, 1977, meeting with then vice-premier Deng Xiaoping shortly after he had returned from his second Cultural Revolution–era exile, Professor Lucian Pye described the scene: “Deng was very low-keyed during the whole discussion. He seemed tired and almost bored, with very little sense of fire, very little enthusiasm. It was as though he had to go through a ritual performance.”15 This state of affairs (overwhelming intimidation) was brought home to me during a 1976 meeting with Dr. Zhou Peiyuan, a theoretical physicist at Peking University who had worked with Einstein at Princeton earlier in his career. This gray-haired eminence was the nominal university leader, but the ignorant head of the university’s “Revolutionary Committee” did the talking, and Professor Zhou’s head was lowered.
Today, Chinese leaders at all levels generally speak with relative openness, and ordinary citizens are often caustic in their assessment of leaders, policies, and the elite’s not infrequent peccadilloes and idiosyncrasies. Citizens have little capacity to organize for political change, but they can express dissatisfaction and pursue a broad range of personal and family interests. The Internet and social media have become petri dishes growing and nurturing a broad range of dissatisfaction and commentary.
Beyond the political atmosphere and self-expression, several factors have moved Chinese governance and leadership into an entirely different political space from that of 1977. First, there has been a dramatic change in the type of leaders China has recruited at very senior levels and their power in relationship to a pluralizing society—a topic raised in the preceding chapter and elaborated on here. China is moving from the transformational and charismatic leadership of Mao Zedong and the strongman leadership of Deng Xiaoping to a more transactional, system-maintenance type of leader. China has moved from a strongman system to a collective system of leadership, albeit one with fissures. One very senior policy adviser described the contemporary leadership picture as “a mosaic of China . . . a rainbow coalition.”16 I would say governance by committee.
Second, there has been pluralization of both Chinese society and the governing bureaucracy, reflecting economic growth, specialization and professionalization, urbanization, scientific development, and globalization. For example, the as-yet-incomplete move from classic state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to something more nearly approximating Western-style corporations is creating powerful economic actors that are only partially responsive to party-state directives, either domestically or as they act abroad. Enormous swaths of the globalizing Chinese economy are growing up outside, or tenuously connected to, the state structure. For example, more than 70 percent of Chinese ships fishing far from China’s shores were privately owned in 2012, according to scholar Tabitha Mallory. One implication of this substantial privatization of fishing is that preventing overfishing in the global commons, even if the PRC government were committed to that objective, has become much more difficult.17
In Beijing, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs building is overshadowed (literally) by the towering headquarters of two of China’s three major oil companies. In the same neighborhood is the huge headquarters of Polytechnologies, which is, among other things, a global arms merchant. One could interpret this location as a metaphorical sign that the Foreign Ministry controls these actors. Personnel in the foreign affairs system, however, portray this physical reality as a manifestation of the ministry’s weakening control over the PRC’s external links and behavior, and the growing influence of economic interests, asking themselves—Who is surrounding whom? Social, bureaucratic, and economic pluralization has made decision making, effective policy implementation, and monitoring of outcomes—whether domestically or overseas—increasingly difficult.
Finally, resources (human, financial, and informational) are progressively becoming less a monopoly of the central party-state. China’s leaders know they must mobilize increasingly diffuse resources to solve ever more problems. Yet they generally fear empowering social groups (shehui tuanti) to assist, anxious that latitude given to such groups to address crucial challenges could morph into the pursuit of unsanctioned activities and could boomerang on the regime itself. Nonetheless, the number of social organizations is growing rapidly because of the initiative of an increasingly self-motivated and empowered citizenry determined to address the problems it confronts and the recognition of leaders that they and their bureaucratic instruments cannot alone meet all the challenges.
Resources and the capacity to act are devolving to a broader range of societal actors. Financial resources also have been diffused to the lower levels of government, thereby empowering them to act independently of the center. By 2010, for instance, over 50 percent of government science and technology expenditures were made by local governments,18 and 71.7 percent of the entire national R&D funding that same year came from “business.”19 Thus authority has moved toward parts of the economy with unclear linkages to the center (business) and to lower levels of the territorial hierarchy (local government). With respect to “business,” for example, talk about the development of an incipient venture-capital industry and the need for “business-government” partnerships is commonplace these days. With respect to local government, one former battle-hardened veteran of the State Council said, “When local governments are richer they try to expand their control.”20
FIGURE 2. Untethered pluralization.
In short, a once dominant center increasingly faces more potent localities, economic actors, and social groupings that possess greater financial resources, human talent, and information. These various forces have given rise to untethered pluralism—a stronger society and bureaucratic activism at all levels, uninhibited by an established rule of law, adequate oversight, sufficient regulatory structures, or, in many cases, ethical norms.
Figure 2 graphically illustrates the changes that have moved the Chinese system from one political space into another. From 1977 to 2013 the PRC has moved from a political space characterized by strong leaders, a relatively homogeneous society, and weak subordinate levels of society and government (lower, right rear box) to a political space characterized by less dominant top leaders, a more fragmented government and society, and increasingly empowered subordinate organizations and social groups (upper, left front box). In one generation China has moved itself from one corner of political space to the completely opposite corner.
A system characterized by weaker central leadership, ever more pluralism, and an increasingly empowered society, organizations, and individuals requires a far stronger rule of law and conflict-reducing mechanisms (courts and legislatures), as well as effective regulation, transparency, and accountability, not to mention the restraint on individuals provided by strong ethical norms. What is needed is the gradual construction of an altered political system and a broadened rationale for legitimacy. As a department director put it: “Stakeholders are relevant these days.”21 Absent these changes, China is in for a bumpy, perhaps tumultuous, period ahead. Such turbulence would spill into the wider world in very unwelcome ways.
Concisely, governing China has become progressively more difficult. Two examples provide concrete evidence of what it means on the ground when we observe that China has moved into an era of less dominant leaders, more pluralized society and bureaucracy, and more empowered subnational groups. The first illustrative case is that of a development corporation (Wanda Group) that was able to secure approvals from local authorities in Mianyang, Sichuan Province, to build two skyscrapers a short distance from the runways of the local airport (was bribery involved, or just poor planning?). Then, when the Civil Aviation Administration of China and the military (which regulate flight operations and control air space, respectively) both entreated the company to halt construction, Wanda Group ignored them and continued to construct and sell apartments, while the airport had to curtail night operations because of safety considerations at the cost of US$31,000 per day.22
In another case, Zheng Yanxiong, party secretary of Wukan City in Guangdong Province, put the difficulties of governing China like this: “There’s only one group of people who really experience added hardships year after year. Who are they? Cadres, that’s who. Me included. . . . Your powers decline every day, and you have fewer and fewer methods at your disposal—but your responsibility grows bigger and bigger every day. Ordinary people want more and more every day. They grow smarter every day, and they are harder and harder to control. Today’s government officials are having a hard time.”23 Then, in the tradition of U.S. politicians, Zheng went after the mass media—“If you can trust in outside media, then pigs can climb trees.”24
We now take a deeper look at the leadership, bureaucratic, and societal changes of the 1977–2013 period that together have pushed China into its new political space.
LEADERSHIP
Defining Leadership
China’s leaders have ruled a vast and diverse territory for thousands of years and have systematically thought about the leader’s tasks since the pre-Qin era (before 221 BCE).25 Much of what outsiders view as China’s Leninist governing style since the communist revolution in 1949 also has deep resonance with Chinese approaches to rule throughout history—not least the Confucian and Legalist traditions, which are, themselves, in some tension with one another.
Chinese political philosophy has placed central importance on the nature and character of the leader—the quality of that person’s strategic thinking and the competence and character of the people with whom the leader surrounds him- or (rarely) herself. A great leader should possess the quality of “humane authority” (ren zheng) and is to take the “kingly way” (wang dao).26 “Humane authority is founded on the superior moral power of the ruler himself.”27 In this view the welfare of the people directly depends on the wisdom, capacities, and compassion of the leader, as well as those who work next to him. At the same time, there is the Machiavellian recognition that a leader must also hold a knife, discreetly sheathed, not infrequently drawn, and sometimes used to make an example of lesser threats to preempt the appearance of bigger ones—“kill the chicken to scare the monkey” (sha ji jing hou).
As former mayor of Shanghai Wang Daohan put it in 1997, “‘The starting point for Chinese understanding is the overall interest of the whole Chinese people.’”28 It is the leader’s job to discern the people’s interests, to adopt policies that serve those interests, to select officials, and to effectively organize implementation. As time passes, the context changes, interests and policies evolve, and the wise leader adapts. But the central point is: the leader plays a decisive role in defining societal interests. “The interest of the people” is not simply the equilibrium that results from the clash of individual and group interests, as we often think of political life in the West. Even in contemporary democratic Taiwan, these presumptions about leadership have resonance. As a ministerial-level official in Taipei stated in 2011: “‘ The right vision is the key thing; leaders have the responsibility to implement policies in the interests of the people. This is their highest task.’”29
Chinese political philosophy speaks of the fundamental constraint on “the prince” being a basic acceptance by the people: the ruler is a boat; the people the sea; the boat floats atop the sea; if the sea becomes rough, the boat can capsize. Or, as Premier Wen Jiabao put it at a 2007 press conference, “Every cadre and leading official should know that ‘while water can carry a boat, it can also overturn it.’”30 Despite this clear understanding, in China there is an absence of policy grounded in popular will and representation. Historically, the main political task in Western democratic systems has been constraining leaders; in China it has been empowering them. The Chinese leader must be wise in assessing desirable goals, the people’s interests, and what is objectively achievable given that he has fewer institutional constraints. As Zhou Enlai put it to former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Charles Yost late one evening in June 1973, “There is a Chinese saying that a wise ruler does not make laws that he knows will be ignored.”31 The ruler makes the laws, but wisely, because widespread noncompliance strips away legitimacy and nurtures rebellion.
The Chinese leader traditionally has played a dominant role in designating a successor, though this has moved toward a more collective process in recent leadership transitions. In a remarkable meeting with Jiang Zemin during the latter days of November 2002 when he was relinquishing his posts as party general secretary and president, Jiang explained that Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping had each chosen the wrong successor more than once but that he, Jiang Zemin, had gotten it right the first time with Hu Jintao. He also indicated he would remain on as chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC). Jiang framed his decision to remain CMC chairman (until 2004, as it turned out) as essentially his own to make. The fact that he publicly described the succession process in these terms with colleagues and foreigners present demonstrates something significant about shared conceptions of leadership.
I want to talk about how I handled the transition in leadership. . . . “Our great leader” [Jiang said this in English] Mao Zedong had a number of successors—Liu Shaoqi, then Lin Biao, Wang Hongwen, and Hua Guofeng lastly. Hua was a good guy, but he later had the theory of the two whatevers [whatever Mao said is right, and whatever Mao said is to be done]. . . . As for the late Deng Xiaoping, his first intention was Hu Yaobang [as a successor]. Then he was not the right guy, and Zhao Ziyang was not the right guy. And actually, I succeeded Deng thirteen years ago. Here I would not talk about my achievements, and some problems, but what is important is the stable situation [China has enjoyed] over thirteen years. . . . This time, before the Party Congress, I did a lot of thinking about this succession, [and] I concluded that only one of seven members of the Politburo Standing Committee could stay. Hu Jintao stays, the others resign. . . . This reminds me of Shakespeare’s As You Like It. “The world is but a stage and all we are players, and they each have their entrances and their exits.” So, it is with great pleasure that I handed over to Hu Jintao, and I would be pleased if he does better than me.32
The Chinese leader occupies a far different space than the leader does in American political discourse and practice. In nonwartime conditions, Americans view constraining leaders and empowering citizens as a central mission, while Chinese traditionally have seen a weak, burdened leader as a threat to be guarded against. A central component of Chinese political culture is the fear of luan or chaos, the fear of being rudderless and vulnerable in a predatory world. For Chinese people, their country has big problems and needs larger-than-life leaders to foster stability. What Chinese people expect from their leaders, and what Chinese leaders expect from one another, is based on this need.
Much of the PRC’s conflict with the West over the proper role of government and political rights derives from this concept. Though rights consciousness is growing in China’s society and may explode with the combination of popular frustration, globalization, urbanization, rising material security, a younger, wired generation coming of age, and simply the yearning for dignity, it also is true that China still has a deeply embedded political culture in which the people have seen themselves more as “subjects” than as “citizens”— still expecting to be acted upon rather than actively participating in governance. Even as China is rapidly urbanizing, in 2013 still just under half of the population remained rural. In the countryside, the expectation for leaders to act in a traditional, paternalistic, and authoritarian manner remains.
The Diversity and Evolution of Leadership
The above notwithstanding, over the reform era, leaders have changed from the traditional strongman variety toward more norm-constrained figures who are primus inter pares within a collective group. These new leaders are more incremental in their approach and transactional, focusing on system maintenance rather than on precipitous social transformation.
Despite their similarities, Chinese leaders are also diverse, reflecting the full range of personalities that one finds in every human society—running the gamut from ambitious and gregarious to retiring, from serious to humorous, from strategic thinkers to narrow tacticians, and from those who work best in back rooms to those that feel most at home out in the field talking to citizens.33 Some are thugs and others are compassionate.
Deng Xiaoping didn’t talk much, was remote, listened carefully to those he trusted, didn’t rely on think tanks, and was generally noncommittal until he uttered a few clear words that constituted a decision—often punctuated with a wad of spit into a spittoon. As senior Chinese policy advisers put it in 1998, “Deng Xiaoping always had a big strategic picture in his mind and didn’t need to consult with anyone except his bridge partners.”34 More intimately, Deng showed considerable devotion to those he loved, unlike Mao, for whom kinship seemed to be nearly a death sentence. Deng’s daughter, Xiao Rong, recalls the touching vignette of a Deng disconsolate over the death of his first wife Zhang Xiyuan, who had died in the wake of childbirth in 1930: he visited and protected her remains for years thereafter until they could be properly buried in 1969.35
Premier Zhao Ziyang had a lively, inquiring mind and a winning smile and liked to be surrounded by bright young people. He believed in expert advice and listened. He was data driven.36 General secretary and president Jiang Zemin relied on advisers and used theatrics and unpredictable discourse that ran off on tangents to defuse situations and divert attention until, circling like a bird of prey, he dived in on his point. He used humor to soften disagreements. Premier Zhu Rongji’s style was to constantly ask probing questions and make observations. He possessed a nonstop, inquiring mind like a steel trap. He could criticize an errant subordinate one moment and in the next disarm an audience with his humor. The people closest to him were fiercely loyal. He was devoted to traditional Chinese music. Premier Wen Jiabao always looked nervous, twitching in the face, but he didn’t waste time before getting to the point, all the while conveying humanity. He liked to quote poetry and, like Zhao Ziyang, was data and fact driven. NPC head Wu Bangguo was quite simply the fastest-talking person I have ever met at a very senior level in the PRC.
At local levels, Chinese leaders are similarly distinctive in their personalities. Take former mayor of Dalian Bo Xilai, for example—he was so hyperkinetic and anxious to attract foreign direct investment and modernize his city (which he did with great success) that he once simultaneously hosted two separate banquets for two separate delegations (one Japanese and one American) and careened between rooms the whole evening. When Bo became first party secretary in Chongqing in November 2007, he quickly unleashed a thuggish “strike the black” (da hei) anticorruption campaign on the city, reminding many observers of his brutal behavior as a Red Guard youth in the Cultural Revolution. In March 2012 he was removed from office in Chongqing and the Politburo as his wife stood implicated (and in August of that year was convicted) in the murder of a British national, while associates were accused of involvement in financial and other improprieties. In summer 2013, Bo was convicted of corruption and abuse of power.
In Shanghai, Mayor Wang Daohan loved books, and a later Shanghai mayor, Xu Kuangdi, went into raptures over Mozart. Shanghai party secretary Chen Liangyu (sacked for corruption in 2006) told visitors with pride that his father had studied in Chicago—“Actually, the United States is not alien; my father studied at Chicago in 1949—one year and two months in the United States. He spent longer in the U.S. than my eight months in England.”37 Thus clearly China’s system does not produce only gray, bureaucratic technocrats. Caricatures of leaders can mislead. In group conversations with Premier Li Peng, for instance, I found him a careful listener, directly responding to questions, and not visibly concerned with softening his answers out of concern for the sensitivities of his listeners.
In the evolution of Chinese leaders from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping, the kinds of individuals the Chinese political system is “selecting for” (to use a biological term) has changed. One obvious way this has unfolded is seen in the average age of Politburo members. In 1982 the average age of the Politburo was seventy-two, and in 2007 it was sixty-two.38 In the Eighteenth Politburo selected in late 2012, the average age of Politburo members dropped marginally to “slightly over 61.”39 Indeed, in his October 20, 1971, meeting with Henry Kissinger, Premier Zhou Enlai remarked to a member of Kissinger’s delegation, Dwight Chapin: “Mr. Chapin, you seem quite young.” When Chapin responded, “I am thirty,” Zhou commented, “So I admire you greatly. In this aspect, we Chinese still have to catch up with you Americans because you dare to use young people.”40 Beyond age, education, and similar indicators, one can describe the fundamental evolution of China’s leadership over the reform era by considering two typologies: one articulated by Max Weber and the other by James MacGregor Burns.41
Chinese Leadership through a Weberian Lens
Max Weber categorized the bases upon which leadership exercises authority and holds power (legitimacy): traditional authority is the right to rule rooted in custom; charismatic authority is rule anchored in the character of, and devotion to, the leader; and legal-rational authority is a legitimacy in which authority is grounded in constitutional and legal norms.42 Societies evolve from conferring leadership on traditional and charismatic grounds toward conferring it on the basis of legal-constitutional norms and regularized processes. As a society urbanizes and grows more complex, and as educational levels and societal expectations for participation and predictability grow, so does the tendency to anchor legitimacy in legal-rational authority. In cases of social breakdown, law, norms, and bureaucratic procedure can falter and older means of establishing authority (custom and devotion) can reassert themselves, causing political decay.
It was precisely the process of institutionalization, regularization, bureaucratization, and constraint on leadership that Mao Zedong resisted in the last decade-plus of his life. Being pushed into the “second line of leadership” in the late 1950s, he fought against this change throughout the chaotic Cultural Revolution decade (1966–76), a period during which he strove to reassert his charismatic, traditional authority. Premier Wen Jiabao was referring to this possibility of political decay when, at a 2012 press conference, he said: “Reform has reached a critical stage. Without the success of political reform, economic reforms cannot be carried out. The results that we have achieved may be lost. A historical tragedy like the Cultural Revolution may occur again.”43
In the transitions from Mao Zedong to Deng Xiaoping, then to Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and finally Xi Jinping, there has been a progression that echoes Weber’s expectations. Mao and Deng were each legitimated with a distinct mix of “traditional” and “charismatic” authority, in no small part owing to their exceptional life histories—Mao was in many respects an emperor masquerading as a new type of leader, and Deng exerted great influence simply holding the title of honorary chairman of the China Bridge (as in cards) Association at the end of his life. Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao both were designated as serial successors appointed by Deng Xiaoping himself (notwithstanding Jiang Zemin’s claim of credit above). In the case of Hu Jintao, Deng Xiaoping’s influence extended beyond the grave.
Only in the case of Xi Jinping was a leader’s elevation to the top position the product of a collective political process less subject to his predecessor’s decisive influence, though age and rotational norms already had begun to develop in the preceding successions of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. This development of norms and reduced patron influence in leadership turnover does not mean that China has yet adopted a fully legal-rational system, but Xi Jinping has acquired power on a very different basis of legitimacy than his predecessors. Xi’s authority rests on a selection process that involved many in a “selectorate” (upper reaches of the CCP). What the selectorate has conferred, the selectorate can withdraw. The norms governing selection are increasingly known to the wider public, and increasingly there are performance measures and opinion polling within the party that move beyond subjective assessments. The norms governing leadership selection (intraparty consultation, predictable rotation, term and age limits, and performance measurement with public input) are not equivalent to law and constitutionalism but may be a way station on the road there. These gradually solidifying norms are incomplete and reversible, but they mark a dramatic change from Mao’s system, in which the Chairman, like Saturn in Goya’s painting Saturn Devouring His Son, could single-handedly mobilize “the street” against the Communist Party he had built, in no small part over his concern with succession.
Although Deng did not possess the unbridled and quixotically exercised power that Mao did, when it came to strategic decisions, once he had listened to respected colleagues, Deng would weigh in authoritatively and decisively. The scale and consequences of these decisions were often enormous. As Cheng Li put it, Deng “felt no need to consult think tanks when making decisions. . . . Indeed, his most significant decisions . . . have all been attributed to Deng’s visionary thinking and political courage.”44 A notable illustration of Deng’s dominance was his May 17, 1989, decision to declare martial law and deploy troops in Beijing—a choice made in consultation with an extraconstitutional cabal of older comrades, most of whom held no formal posts. Later in the same day, Deng’s fateful decision was presented by Premier Li Peng to the Politburo Standing Committee as a fait accompli, and the Standing Committee (the body presumed to decide such things) was simply told how to proceed. Li informed the nominal head of the party, Zhao Ziyang, and his Standing Committee colleagues that “the decision on martial law . . . was made by Comrade [Deng] Xiaoping at this morning’s meeting. I support Comrade Xiaoping’s views on martial law. I believe that the topic for the present meeting is not whether martial law should or should not be imposed but, rather, what steps to use in carrying it out.”45 Professor Ezra Vogel reports that earlier in the day, at the meeting where Deng announced his decision, “When some in the room expressed worries that foreigners would react negatively to any use of force, Deng replied that swift action was required and ‘Westerners would forget.’”46
In addition to this decision, several other pivotal choices by Deng come to mind, including his decision to suppress the 1979 Democracy Wall movement, mentioned in chapter 1. Deng explained to visiting Americans at the time, “As to the so-called Democracy Wall or the demonstrations and sit-ins, etc., this can’t represent the genuine feeling of our people.”47 In another example of resolute decision making, the one-child policy, Deng was absolutely convinced that the PRC’s per capita income could not be sufficiently raised without limiting the birth of mouths to feed, as also explained in chapter 1.48 It seemed self-evident to Deng that individual choice should take a back seat to collective needs and the imperative of economic growth, and that to move in this intrusive direction was within his discretion.
Turning to the issue of Taiwan, while his successors hesitated to be seen as weak on an issue with so much combustible nationalism surrounding it, Deng was sufficiently secure to be ambivalent, perhaps even relaxed about the issue—certainly willing to defer conflict over the issue to the indefinite future. A very senior Taiwanese academic summarized Deng’s conversation with him in the late 1980s, describing Deng’s seemingly flexible thoughts on the island: “I talked with Deng Xiaoping, Zhao Ziyang, and Jiang Zemin, and conversations with Deng were the most useful. In 1987 Deng asked, ‘You grew up in Taiwan?’ [and wanted to know] why the DPP wanted independence. [I replied,] because [Taiwan was] a colony, the KMT was very corrupt, and [Taiwanese were] not treated very well. Deng said, ‘Yeah, looks like [we should] leave cross-Strait [relations] to the next generation,’ and he started eating.”49
Fast-forwarding to China’s three early twenty-first-century leaders who followed Deng (Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping), it is inconceivable that they—given the characteristics they embody as leaders—could have initiated policies as intrusive as the one-child policy was in the late 1970s, for example. The foundations for legitimacy have gradually shifted, and the strength that this legitimacy confers on Deng’s successors has steadily diminished their capacity to initiate, much less sustain, highly disruptive, intrusive, and capricious society-wide policies. As one senior Chinese academic put it in 2011, “We have moved from a strongman leadership, through Deng Xiaoping to Jiang Zemin, who could still be called ‘core leaders,’ to the current situation with Hu Jintao and his presumed successor, who cannot be called ‘core leaders’ ‘but merely first among equals.’”50 The PRC has gone from leaders who had personal and experiential credibility to leaders who are constrained by collective decision making, by term limits, by evolving norms, by the boundaries of the permissible partially defined by “public opinion,” and, in part, by their own technocratic and relatively educated characters. In 2002, a senior Chinese diplomat put it as follows: “‘Mao and Deng could decide, Jiang and the current leaders must consult.’”51
In late 2012 and into 2013, the contrast between an empowered Deng and more constrained successors was again on dramatic display. In the 1970s, in order to proceed with normalization and build ties with Japan, Deng agreed with Tokyo to simply shelve the nationalism-laden issue of sovereignty over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands to the northeast of Taiwan in the East China Sea. In late 2012 and into 2013, in the context of the transition from Hu Jintao to Xi Jinping, China’s new leader felt obliged to be much more assertive in the face of Japanese “nationalization” of the islands. Beyond having new capabilities at their disposal, China’s twenty-first-century leaders do not have the political clout Deng enjoyed.
Chinese Leadership through the Lens of James MacGregor Burns
The political scientist James MacGregor Burns provides another vantage point from which to view the PRC’s leadership evolution by looking at the leader’s goals: there are leaders whose objectives include enormous change, while others see themselves in system-maintenance roles. These are transformational and transactional leaders, respectively. Burns also identifies a third type, the power wielder—the leader seeking power as an end, not as a means to other ends.
On the transformational-to-transactional continuum, Deng Xiaoping would be placed far toward the transformational end of the scale, albeit transformational in a far different way than Mao Zedong. Mao sought to change China by changing its people and fundamental societal organization—the desired direction of change often being contrary to the citizenry’s natural impulses. This led the Chairman to attempt to build and use coercive educational, peer-group, and organizational instruments to create what the outside world called the “new Maoist man.” He also was a ruthless power wielder.52
Deng Xiaoping, though also a leader with transformational goals, found his modus operandi in working with the nature of his people as he found them—people with an irrepressible urge for self-improvement, particularly materially, and a patriotic impulse to elevate China’s global status. Mao sought to remake China by remaking its people and used coercion and ideology to do so. Deng’s affinity for employing material incentives could not have been clearer than when he told American visitors in late 1979: “One thing is correct. [It is] Impossible to give play to personal enthusiasm and initiative without linking it to incentives.”53 Deng was going to move China up economically, and the place to start was with human acquisitiveness. One vice-minister described China’s condition at the onset of reform and Deng’s approach this way: “[With] the planned economy, there was not fast growth, and during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution [China] went to the brink of bankruptcy. ‘Yes, Chinese were equals, Chinese were equally poor.’ Deng [Xiaoping] will be remembered ‘as the greatest man of contemporary China.’ Deng said: ‘Poverty is not socialism. Economic development is the priority of priorities.’ ‘He brought back the entrepreneurship that runs in the blood of the Chinese.’”54
Deng’s other steps were to radically open China to foreign knowledge, encourage many of China’s young people to go abroad (an attitude influenced by his own formative experience in France), and let comparative advantage, trade, and education work their magic. He was going to work with (not against) the forces of human nature to change China.
In Deng’s successor, Jiang Zemin, we see a leader who was midway on Burns’s transformative-transactional continuum. Jiang succeeded Deng after having “tested” best (as former Shanghai mayor Wang Daohan put it),55 because he was viewed as capable and nonthreatening to both the forces within the party wanting reform to move forward and those wary of reform. In the initial period of his tenure as general secretary of the CCP (1989–92), Jiang trod carefully between these two contending impulses, but in 1992 Deng’s “Southern Tour” rekindled reform and helped (or forced) Jiang to jump off the fence on the side of rapid reform, where he stayed until his retirement from the CMC in 2004. In 1994, the year Deng’s personal office was closed out of consideration of his age and infirmities, Jiang appeared to truly step out on his own from under the shadow of Deng Xiaoping. One senior Chinese person who interacted with Jiang put the difference between working with Jiang and Deng as follows: “Deng was there, it was not easy to reach him. So think tanks had only indirect influence. Deng was much more remote. Very few people could approach him. Jiang is more willing to [meet] more different people. When we spoke to Jiang last October he took notes, worked very hard.”56
Jiang articulated and promoted great change in China along several key dimensions. He drove forward China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (2001), whereupon the PRC’s trade with the world exploded, rising from 4 percent of total global trade in 2001 to 9.9 percent by 2011.57 China’s global two-way trade from 2001 to 2011 totaled roughly $20 trillion, seven times greater than the prior decade.58 He oversaw and supported China’s vigorous move into space, which was capped with its first manned space mission (2003). He articulated, for the first time, that the CCP needed to bring more creative and skilled people into its membership ranks (in February 2000 he first enunciated his policy of the “Three Represents”); thereafter, party membership jumped from 64.5 million in 2000 to 82.6 million in 2011, a 28 percent increase.59 Between 1993 and 1999, Jiang, and his indispensable colleague Premier Zhu Rongji, put some twenty-five million state-owned enterprise (SOE) workers out of work in the quest for efficiency and transformation of the PRC’s industrial base.60 During his thirteen-year rule, China’s economy grew at an average annual rate of 9.7 percent (real/constant price GDP growth).61
Notwithstanding all of the above, Jiang was more transactional than transformational by virtue of both his character and his circumstances. He sought balance between forces. He was an engineer, so he was practical and oriented toward making things work, as Jiang’s conversation with an American group, including former U.S. congressman Barber B. Conable Jr., demonstrates:
Shanghai, Mr. Conable was there in 1988. I was mayor, and I told him about my job; difficult; seven million people in the city center—eleven million overall. In the summer, it is a major problem to get rid of watermelon rinds; they are everywhere—a big garbage problem. When in 1981 I went to Chicago and people asked what I wanted to visit, I said I’d like to know about garbage. Chicago has these difficult problems but does a good job in garbage relative to Shanghai. “It must be very difficult for Americans to conceive of handling this [China’s] population.”62
President Jiang concluded this meeting by observing that building bridges in Shanghai was complicated too because the usual linear and horizontal approaches for bridges would cover many hectares and displace excessive numbers of residents. He then pointed to an innovative solution his municipal administration had adopted: “How to build a bridge in Shanghai is a big problem. Construction took two years. [We] saved land with corkscrew approaches. I am proud.” By “corkscrew approaches,” Jiang meant road approaches to the bridge that were not linear but rather built in an upward spiral fashion to minimize their footprint.63 In a society as complex as China is becoming, governance is about trade-offs. China’s leaders have less opportunity to think about transformation because they are preoccupied with more circumscribed decisions and the cost of mistakes is great.
This brings us to Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao. Both of these leaders were much closer to the transactional than to the transformational end of the continuum. This, in part, accounts for the widespread domestic and international perception that reform in China had slowed compared to the growth and change under Deng and Jiang. A senior Chinese diplomat presciently foretold this on the eve of Hu Jintao’s assumption of power in the summer of 2002: “Another trend will be toward collective [jiti] leadership, rather than supreme leaders. Future leaderships will be collective, more democratic, they will seek consensus rather than make arbitrary decisions. But the downside is that they will enjoy lesser amounts of authority. It will be more difficult for them to make bold decisions when bold decisions are needed. Such a leadership will be more careful, more committed to social progress.”64 Xi Jinping’s evolution remains to be seen.
This brings us to the second dimension of the political space into which the Chinese polity has moved in the reform era: pluralization.
THE PLURALIZATION OF CHINESE BUREAUCRACY AND SOCIETY
Background
Even before Mao’s death in September 1976, Western analysts were intent on specifying bureaucratic, regional, class, occupational, and other politically salient divisions that they presumed existed in the PRC—believing that politics in China, as most everywhere else, was about reconciling or energizing political cleavages to achieve goals. The Cultural Revolution revealed that there were deep divisions in the Chinese polity, yet it was difficult to see their contours. The reigning ideologically driven assertion during the Mao era was that there was only one interest: “the interest of the Chinese masses.” “The masses” became the reified repository of solidarity, indeed purity. The job of governance was to repress recalcitrant forces, to educate the Chinese masses as to their true interests so they would embrace them, and, in the case of bureaucracy, to simplify it, putting functional organs under political, not expert, guidance. Governance was not about reconciling differences, it was about eliminating them.
Consider, for example, a July 19, 1971, meeting with American students in the Great Hall of the People. There a naturally cosmopolitan, but then guarded, Premier Zhou Enlai reflected the times. The setting was surreal, as he was watched closely by leftist critics Yao Wenyuan and Zhang Chunqiao:
You have entered the Red Guard period. We will have to ask these two comrades [Yao Wenyuan and Zhang Chunqiao] to tell you something about the Red Guard movement. The Red Guards called themselves members of the “service committee,” or members of the “general service committee.” It is also a Red Guard trend of thought that they don’t like to be called “minister” or “section head” or “director.” They like to think that’s all bureaucratic and therefore we must do away with the bureaucratic structure and call ourselves “service personnel” of the people. . . . I heard that you were asking why people weren’t wearing the colorful cloth produced in textile mills. It is because it is the custom today to live simply and therefore people like to wear simple clothes, and also as a symbol of discipline. In order to provide a symbol of learning from the PLA, people like to wear army uniforms. And the style of simplicity is also in opposition to bourgeois degradation. . . . So we welcome very much this spiritual help from you [the students to whom he was talking]. It is “rectifying wrong ideas.” That is Chairman Mao’s wording. It is not brainwashing, it is rectifying erroneous ideas. I haven’t thought of a way to wash one’s brain yet. In a certain way I would like to have my brain washed because I have old ideas in my mind. I have already passed 73, how can it be said that I have no old ideas in my head, because I came over from the old society? . . . And if any of you have taken tape-recorders with you, you can also record the talk here if you want. Since we are meeting with you, of course we will speak freely. Maybe I will say something wrong here, or perhaps these other two comrades might say something wrong, or the interpreter might interpret wrong. . . . So if you are going to show your recordings when you get back to the United States, you must make a statement at the beginning and say there are bound to be some wrong statements in this recording. . . . Of course we stand on the position of the proletariat, and you of course are clear about that. As for our views we do our utmost to see that they are in accordance with Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-tung [Mao Zedong] Thought.65
In the more than forty years between 1971 and 2013, China’s leaders and citizens have moved from denying societal and governmental conflicts to explaining governance challenges in terms of the conflicts. While pathways for the expression of interests remain limited and opaque and elites are often unresponsive, China’s rulers now try to resolve interest conflicts, repressing them only when perceived threat is high.
Embracing Pluralization
During the reform era, particularly after Deng Xiaoping, China has developed a responsive authoritarianism that explicitly balances (through representation at the highest reaches of the CCP) major geographic, functional, factional, and policy interests.66 There is an attempt to co-opt as much conflict as possible, accommodate the rank and file of groups, and impose high personal costs on the ringleaders of movements that assume an organized, antisystem coloration.
Pluralism in China is everywhere. It is present in the conflicting ambitions of powerful individuals and evident within and among China’s bureaucracies, economic sectors, localities, and social groups. As one official put it, “‘My view is the battlefield of interests.’”67 In the bureaucracy, “small leading groups” (lingdao xiaozu) are forums in which supraministerial officials resolve fights among squabbling ministerial-level or other subordinate organizations and localities. Vice-premiers and state councilors spend much of their time resolving disputes. Provinces and industrial and commercial associations seek to push their interests using “representative offices” in Beijing to cultivate good relations with key decision makers in relevant bureaucracies. This model is duplicated by counties in their provincial capitals. Big cities (e.g., Shanghai) set up their own promotion offices that search for business and political support nationally. As one Chinese diplomat explained to me, however, these offices “don’t lobby the [National People’s] Congress, they lobby the executive. In China now they lobby less for money and more for favorable policy.”68 As one office director in a central government science and technology-related ministry put it, “‘Stakeholders are relevant these days’” in terms of competing for R&D money.69 While considerable lobbying efforts are directed at executive agencies to obtain administrative and policy leeway, as noted above, lobbying is also increasingly directed toward local and national legislatures.
Chinese in and out of government have become more open in describing this process. Former vice-premier Li Lanqing vented his frustration with the bureaucratic fights it was his fate to continually referee. Li recounts one meeting in which he mediated a catfight between three contending foreign trade corporations, each claiming the exclusive right to trade in designed textiles (“drawnwork”):
The man from Chinatex claimed that drawnwork was a textile product and the man from CNACIEC contended that it was a handicraft. The leader of China Tushu argued that ramie was a native product and went so far as to declare that anything that flew in the sky, grew on the ground, or was raised by man was either native produce or an animal product and was therefore well within his company’s business domain. He fell just short of saying that all commodities on earth should be left to their management. . . . When I announced the verdict, I knew it was only a temporary “armistice agreement,” rather than a thorough settlement of the issue.70
One already can see the adaptation of local-level officials to a new mode of politics. When an American group met with the secretary of the Minhang District Party Committee (of Shanghai), this impeccably dressed, young, self-assured local official described the direction in which local governance was moving: “‘In Shanghai, now in Minhang [District], there is a different way of governing. There is a different culture, a different language. We have developed so fast, it is a question of development. I spend four hours each day on the Internet, monitoring complaints, etc. The next generation will be more like this. This is a fundamental change—we have better feedback.’”71
This brings us to the third dimension of the new political space in which the Chinese polity finds itself: more empowered localities, organizations, and individuals.
EMPOWERED SOCIETY, DIFFUSION OF RESOURCES
The Chinese polity is also transforming because society and subordinate levels of government are becoming more empowered (as we will see in detail in chapter 3). Lower levels of society and government have more resources and information than in the past, as well as a greater capacity to be mutually aware. More often, intellectuals, policy entrepreneurs, and commercialized mass media are becoming the substance of “public opinion,” which leaders increasingly invoke to bolster their legitimacy. The inability of China’s central authorities to address all the problems needing attention and resources forces them to rely upon subordinate organizations within and outside government, organizations and levels of society with their own interests and resources.
Public Opinion
For Mao Zedong, “public opinion” (or the “will of the masses”) was not an independent restraint on his policy; it was something that was his prerogative to define, invoke, and mobilize. Perhaps under the extreme conditions of the Great Leap Forward and its aftermath (1959–62), public desperation constituted a constraint, accounting for Mao’s retreat to the second line of leadership in 1959 (when he gave up the presidency to Liu Shaoqi). But this was unusual. Although local cadres could not remain entirely unresponsive to the communities in which they had to live—except perhaps during mass mobilizations—generally speaking, “public opinion” was not a day-to-day consideration in policy at the center.
For Deng Xiaoping, in contrast, the principal motivating force behind his reform efforts was his fear that the CCP was close to losing legitimacy because of the preceding two decades of chaos and deprivation. The turbulent sea was close to capsizing the boat. The reform and opening-up policies had their raison d’être in “public opinion.” Further, Deng’s strategy of reform was grounded in identifying those areas of change with the greatest intrinsic public support, then using success in these domains to build momentum for further change where there was more resistance and inertia within the government, the party, and portions of society.72 Deng’s reform strategy was anchored in his correct reading of public opinion, but he went in the direction of public thinking only when it comported with his own analysis.
By the new millennium, however, China’s leaders invoked “public opinion” to explain both foreign and domestic policy choices to a greater extent than ever before. Though absence is not itself proof, a computer search of all the interview transcripts used for this book for the phrase “public opinion” reveals virtually no instances in the 1970s and 1980s, very modest use of the term in the 1990s, and a relative explosion in references to the term in the 2000–2013 period.73 Further, in the last two decades the PRC has built a very large apparatus to measure public opinion (in 2008 there were 51,000 firms conducting polling of various sorts, with 1,500 firms specializing in it),74 and survey data concerning party leaders began to play a role in assessing cadre fitness for promotion and election within the party itself. One of these pollsters explained:
As to the role of public opinion in society, I work mostly for companies, some for profit, but more and more of my business is from government, and [they] “can feel the pressure of public opinion.” After Deng [Xiaoping] there has been no superman [strongman], so public opinion has become a kind of “civil society.” So many issues, often environmental, in Shifang, Ningbo, so now [there is] giving into public opinion, so they [central leaders] want local leaders to make no trouble, so officials have to have two voices. Leaders are using public assessment. In the United States polling is used for elections, but in China a major use is to monitor government performance. Businesswise [for me], this is good news—more and more business [for my firm].75
While clearly not democracy, these developments represent recognition that greater responsiveness to public views is now required.
In the post-2000 period, “public opinion” regularly has been invoked by Chinese diplomats and economic negotiators in explaining policy vis-à-vis Taiwan, Japan, the United States, the exchange rate, and maritime disputes, as well as strictly domestic actions, whether tax policy (e.g., agricultural and gas taxes) or the decision to cancel some planned industrial and infrastructure projects because of public opposition, as the pollster quoted above intimated.76 For instance, in 2009–10 PRC external behavior became “more assertive” in the eyes of many of China’s neighbors and powers at a greater distance, including the United States. This, in turn, led China’s neighbors and the United States to respond by initiating a “rebalancing” (or “pivot”) policy in Asia to increase solidarity in the face of what was perceived to be this worrisome Chinese shift.
Niu Xinchun, an analyst at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, explained that Beijing’s more assertive posture had been a response to the domestic insecurity of Chinese leaders after dealing with the public anger at how the United States and the West tried to push China around in the run-up to the Beijing 2008 Olympic games and with respect to other issues. At the same time, Niu explained, the Chinese public was proud of the nation’s achievements, including space launches and the PRC’s strong performance in the global financial crisis. The insecurity of leaders who needed public support, along with a more self-confident and assertive public, was Niu’s explanation for Beijing’s tougher posture in 2009 and 2010. “This increasing national self-confidence [by the public] and a sense of its [the Chinese leadership’s] own political vulnerability pressured the country to adopt a stronger foreign policy, even while the space to do so was narrowing.”77 By 2012, the public had seized on another provocative issue that it perceived China’s leaders were being “soft” on—the island disputes with Japan in the East China Sea and with Vietnam and the Philippines in the South China Sea.
A very senior official in the foreign affairs system summed it up this way—“‘There is a profound social transition here. Watch the TV talk shows. The perceptions of people in the big cities are changing very rapidly. The emphasis is on freedom, rule of law, human rights, individual freedom, international practice—this is a very profound change. Eventually this will affect foreign policy and domestic policy.’”78
Resources: Money, Talent, Social Organizations, and Information
At the outset of Deng Xiaoping’s reform era, the impulse was to decentralize resources in order to spur incentives and put resources where decisions could be made more intelligently. While there have been ebbs and flows in the balance between centralization and decentralization, for the most part resources of all kinds have accumulated at lower levels. The percentage of total state revenues spent at the central level has gone from 54.3 percent in 1980 to 17.8 percent in 2010, while that spent at the local level has gone from 45.7 percent in 1980 to 82.2 percent in 2010.79 Similarly, the percentage of total industrial output from the state-owned sector has dropped from 78 percent in 1978 to 11 percent in 2009.80 The share of industrial output from the private sector was negligible at the onset of reform, and by 2009 was 41 percent.81
Money is the most fungible type of power, and it has been pushed down the hierarchy, as have various other forms of power. The accumulation of money, resources, and discretion at lower levels of bureaucracy or society, however, does not in turn mean that either political or economic freedom is the undiluted result. Empowered corrupt local officials, crime syndicates, some military leaders, and rogue entrepreneurs engage in behavior that is in the interests of neither the center nor local citizens.82
There are many ways one could express the change occurring in the area of human resources, but the clearest way is to look at higher education enrollments and study abroad. In 1977–78 (the first post–Cultural Revolution year of higher education enrollment), the number of Chinese higher education students matriculated domestically was 402,000.83 By 2010, that number had risen to 6.62 million.84 Chinese students sent abroad from the 1978–79 academic year to 2009 totaled about 1.62 million, 37 percent of whom went to the United States.85 In the academic year 2010–11, the number of Chinese students in the United States alone was 157,558,86 jumping to 194,029 the following academic year. Moreover, large numbers of students who studied abroad were, and are, returning to China after their studies—roughly 497,000 had done so by the end of 2009.87 The point is that China is generating rapidly increasing quantities of human capital and is achieving larger return rates from the students it sends abroad. This talent goes into the government but also increasingly empowers social and commercial organizations that are not entirely state dominated. As this occurs, the state-society balance gradually shifts—in favor of society.
What exactly is the power of social organizations in China, notwithstanding the very real limitations placed on nongovernmental groups and their activities? Even if the state manages to keep them somewhat leashed, each and every day these entities grow in number and capability, making them potentially more able to secure autonomy. The state’s need for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) stems fundamentally from its incapacity to meet the mounting needs of society. As the district party secretary in Shanghai’s Minhang District cited above stated, “‘China’s [central] government is not strong; we need to transfer some functions to NGOs, but it takes time.’”88 As one example of what is possible, NGO head Ma Jun in Beijing has been able to have his organization, the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, collect data on factory waste disposal practices and water contamination statistics (the water pollution database and China Water Pollution Map), publicize bad practices and “violators,” and thereby bring government, public, and market power to bear on them to alter behavior. As Ma explained in an interview with Yale Journal of International Affairs, “This helps create public pressure on companies. . . . Some of them are quite keen to get their names off the list.”89
Information is a key resource in political development. Ian Bremmer describes development in terms of the “J Curve,” where nations often begin in a stable, low-information milieu, move through an unstable transition of increasing information availability, and eventually arrive at a new equilibrium characterized by high-information (“open”) societies. A PLA general put the impact of the Internet on policy making in the PRC starkly in a 2010 conversation about U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan and a possible Beijing response: “‘Decisions are being driven by “Netizens.” . . . If they are sold [weapons to Taiwan], I don’t know what the response [will be]. Chinese leaders cannot make this decision—Netizens will make that decision.’”90 Another Chinese general framed it this way: “‘The Internet, Twitter 2.0, and the next generation of smart phones can be encrypted and be data terminals: and this is a whole new mode of communication.’ The Chinese government changed its view of Internet war. . . . We have 340 million Internet users. Six hundred million cell phones, [we are] number one in websites. ‘China has to manage; in ancient China the people can float the boat or capsize the boat. Water can be channeled but it cannot be blocked, even by a mountain.’”91
The Internet and its addictive social networking tools, combined with globalization and the awareness and interdependence that have come with it, have given birth to what Zbigniew Brzezinski has called a “global political awakening.”92 This is deeply affecting China’s governance, as is urbanization—a process that increases education and income levels, raises popular expectations, and creates high population densities just as citizens are becoming more politically aware. Urbanization is made more potent by new communications technologies. As one senior Chinese economist put it, “‘In the city, people breathe the fresh air of freedom.’”93 All this accounts for the central government’s gargantuan efforts to both harness the benefits of the Internet and insulate itself from its most destabilizing effects through the simultaneous construction of the cyber “Great Firewall” and e-government.
One of the first manifestations of this “awakening” has been a tidal wave of pride stemming from China’s move up the global power hierarchy, which has amplified latent nationalism, a force that Chinese leaders must channel and assuage. This pride has always been both a threat to and a boon for the regime. One of the greatest threats that these new means of communication and organization represent is the capacity of the Chinese people to organize out of sight of internal security. The first dramatic instance of this was unveiled to the elite in April 1999 when the spiritual organization the Falungong managed to gather several thousand followers outside Zhongnanhai, the leadership compound in central Beijing, without the regime being aware of the effort until it had materialized. The idea of “flash mobs” makes China’s leaders extremely anxious.
The cliché that since 1977 China has experienced economic reform but not political reform has a surface plausibility that obscures a deeper, more important truth—today’s Chinese polity is very different, in three key ways, from the one Deng Xiaoping encountered when he returned to power: (1) China’s leaders have become progressively less dominant, weaker relative to each other and in relationship to society; (2) the pluralization of Chinese society and governing structures has become pronounced; and (3) the leadership is confronting a society with ever more resources. Taken collectively, these developments have put China in an entirely new political space. As a first party secretary and concurrently mayor in one of China’s most important cities put it, “‘Many people have shown an interest in political reform. But it has taken place quietly and out of view.’”94
These several developments could combine to produce alternative futures for the PRC, and China may not be too far from some of these major forks in the road. Scenario one: there could be political retrogression. In this scenario, economic and political insecurity could create the conditions for the reassertion of a more centralized, authoritarian system that—while resonating with the past—would ultimately fail to meet the needs of a transforming society, much less the world’s need for a cooperative partner in China. A second possibility is that, in the face of disorder and decay, a charismatic, more transformational leader could appear who would establish a new order, perhaps democratic but just as likely not. Both of these first two possible paths would almost certainly entail a long and painful transition period. A third scenario is that China’s current pluralization might become increasingly embedded in rule of law, regulatory structures, and shared ethical values. As such, governance might become increasingly participatory and cooperative in character. A final possibility is that China would continue to pluralize but would fail to build the regulatory institutions and culture of civic responsibility required for responsible governance at home and constructive behavior abroad—this could lead to an increasingly uncontrolled China. All of these scenarios are possible; the third path is preferred, and the fourth is to be avoided and feared.
China’s greatest governance and leadership challenges are figuring out how to tame mounting social pluralism and direct it constructively and cooperatively. This requires developing a set of legitimating ideas that move beyond growth, materialism, and global status and building a set of institutions that can manage this pluralism—institutions anchored in popular support that transcends simple economic-oriented performance-based legitimacy. There needs to be a transition toward reform-based legitimacy. As one senior PRC scholar argued in 2010: “With respect to our political system, ‘the problem is not legitimacy, it is that Chinese don’t even understand their own political system. Our CPPCC [Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference] is not the U.S. Senate; our NPC is not the U.S. House; our democratic parties are not opposition parties. We can say what our institutions are not, but we cannot say what they are.’”95