China's Provinces in Reform

Class, Community and Political Culture

David Goodman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134712700
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

China is a far larger and more diverse country than many people in the West realise. The provinces that make up the country are considerable social, economic and political systems in their own right. They are comparable in size and complexity to European states.
China's Provinces in Reform is concerned with the impact of economic reform and social and politial change within the provinces at the immediate sub-central level of the People's Republic of China. One of the main aims of this book is to question over-generalizations about China's development in the reform era. However, the provincial analysis of social and political change in China also has the potential to reveal even more in a comparative perspective.
This is the first volume of a series and covers Guangxi, Hainan, Liaoning, Shandong, Shanghai, Sichuan and Zhejiang. It is part of a project conducted by the Institute for International Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney, that will provide the most thorough and up to date analysis of China's provinces yet published.

1 China in reform
The view from the provinces

David S.G.Goodman

China’s provinces, or rather the provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities at the immediate sub-central level of the People’s Republic of China ( PRC), are considerable social, economic and political systems in their own right. Most are the size and scale of a European country in population, land area and social complexity, though most are self-evidently not as big in land area as Tibet, or as large in population numbers as Sichuan’s 120 million and more. Under other circumstances many might well be regarded as nation-states, rather than component parts of a single, unitary state, or even units of ‘local government’ as is often misleadingly the case. In terms of their position in the administrative hierarchy they are perhaps best regarded as at a genuinely intermediate level that mediates the sometimes conflicting demands of national and local politics.¹

The differences and interactions between and among China’s provinces have long been a defining characteristic of that country’s politics, not least since in almost all cases their boundaries have been created by the dominant ‘circulations of people, goods and ideas’ over some two thousand or more years.² As a result it would be reasonable to expect comparison only with similar continental systems—the USA, the former Soviet Union, India, Indonesia, and possibly Australia and Canada—rather than single, unitary states. That this is often not the case is as much a function of the neuroses of the Chinese state since the late Qing,³ as it is of the inability of Western academics to fully understand and conceptualise the scale of China. The need for generalisation of a fairly complex environment, often at the behest of media articulation or to aid governments, is only part of the problem. Lack of access to or information about the range of experience in provincial China has perhaps been more fundamental.

Despite earlier attempts, Western attitudes to the PRC really started to change only with the advent of the reform era.⁴ The stimulus was largely the introduction of a widespread policy of decentralisation, and its more immediate and obvious consequences. Reform has clearly altered the relationship between centre and province, not least as central government has moved from a policy of control through direct management of the economy to one based on macro-economic controls. In the process, fiscal relationships between the centre and the provinces have changed dramatically, with the latter gaining control of a higher proportion—in some cases, a dramatically higher proportion—of their revenues.⁵

At its most sensational, the higher profile for the provincial-level in China’s politics has led some, but by no means all, commentators to speculate about the continued coherence of the Chinese state.⁶ However, to a large extent this is a problem of perspective: greater publicity for and discussion of provinces and provincial differences does not necessarily entail political disintegration. Reform was always bound to affect each province differently. An essential axiom of economic reform has been the drive to encourage each province to develop its comparative advantage. Natural resources, location and the political skills of provincial leaderships have all been important determinants of the specific development of provinces during the reform era.⁷

The project to examine China’s Provinces in Reform is concerned not so much with the ways in which provinces have responded to the opportunities presented by economic reform, nor the changing relationships between centre and province,⁸ but in the ways those economic reforms have influenced social and political change within each province. If it is axiomatic that different provinces respond differently to the prospects of the reform era, then it must necessarily follow that social and political change cannot be identical in each province, though there may of course be common patterns and commonalities between and among provinces. However, to date there have been remarkably few attempts to identify or conceptualise the dimensions of provincial variations in policy and performance, before the reform era let alone since 1978. ⁹

At its simplest the analysis of each province represents the attempt to disaggregate overgeneralisations about China’s development in the reform era. However, the provincial analysis of social and political change in China has the potential to reveal even more in a comparative perspective. At issue are not only the determinants of provincial politics or central-provincial relations in China, but also wider concerns about the impact of economic modernisation on social and political change. Of course there are limits to the range of outcomes that may result at provincial level within China. Nonetheless the variety of different economic, social and cultural environments, and different rates, sequences and processes of modernisation offer interesting possibilities for examining various hypotheses in the social sciences about the interconnections of economic, social and political change.

China’s reform era is commonly approached from one of three broad historical perspectives on the dynamics of social and political change: the experience of Western Europe in the early part of the nineteenth century that gave birth to notions of capitalism and liberal-democracy; the implosion of communism and the subsequent political disintegration that characterised much of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in and after 1989; and the transformation of authoritarianism that has been the hallmark of much of East Asia, but particularly Japan, South Korea and Taiwan since the 1970s. None of these can be a precise predictor for China’s future, or indeed for the future development of any individual province. While the development of the PRC shares common features with each of those historical experiences, it also has significant differences.¹⁰ At the same time, each bequeaths a series of questions which provide a useful framework for the observation and analysis of social and political change in contemporary China, though not all may apply in detail to every province. In particular, they highlight the impact of economic modernisation on the changing role of the state and the locus of political power; on the development of identities and political communities; and on reform and openness, to the outside world and to new ways of operating.

CAPITALISM, LIBERAL DEMOCRACY AND THE STATE

The prospect of state socialism in China becoming or being replaced by some form of capitalism and liberal democracy is hotly debated. There are of course two different axes to this debate: a discussion of what constitutes capitalism often independent of what constitutes liberal democracy. At one extreme of the capitalism part of the debate there are the arguments of those who see any move away from Maoist orthodoxy as the embrace of ‘capitalist restoration’.¹¹ At the other there are those who reject any notion of capitalist development where the forces of industrialisation are not independent of the state.¹² In between there are arguments about the role of the state in forms of late and directed capitalism.¹³

The discussion of the prospects for liberal democracy are similarly complex. There are those who argue that human and civil rights are not universal, and those who maintain the opposite. There are those who argue that the conditions are not appropriate for liberal democracy at this point in time, and those who fundamentally disagree.¹⁴ More even than in the discussion of capitalism there is often considerable confusion between description and prescription.

It seems virtually self-evident that China is not in the process of a bourgeois revolution, as that term is usually understood. Apart from any other considerations, the state created by the revolution of the late 1940s and early 1950s remains in place, though there have been changes in its roles and structures which are central to any analysis of China’s political economy. Less confrontational and less cataclysmic changes may or may not prove no less revolutionary in the longer term, but it is likely to be a much longer term and the more immediate concerns become those of detailing and understanding changes in the locus of political power, and in particular the current transformations in the state.

In economic management, particularly of industry, there has been considerable structural change as the state sector’s share of production has decreased, and that of the collective sector and to a lesser extent the private and foreign-funded sectors has increased. The precise impact of these changes remains unclear not least because of their inherent variety. Ownership categories are no longer as specific as they were under more orthodox state socialism, and reform has seen a proliferation of practices and experimentation in industrialisation.¹⁵ At the same time, even a cursory glance at statistical compilations reveals significant differences among and within provinces.¹⁶ Hainan Province, for example, has a small collective sector and relatively few private enterprises; Zhejiang Province on the other hand has a collective sector reported to produce over half the province’s value of industrial output. Within provinces the differences may even be more extreme. Some localities—even at the level of county or city—apparently favour the development of either collective or private enterprises almost to exclusion, though in practice the effective differences between these two categories of enterprise may be considerably less. Thus, for example, in Guangdong Province, Zhongshan reports a large collective sector and almost no private sector; whereas the opposite is true in Chaozhou.¹⁷

A key point in discussion of these structural changes in the PRC economy is the extent to which the state or the party-state continues to control the agenda not only of economic management but also of politics in general. This is of course less easy to identify or measure than changes in economic management, not least because as is often the case economic managers and policy-makers may operate in more than one role, particularly in a situation of rapid change. Nonetheless, where there are—or more probably, where there appears to be the start of what might be—concentrations of political power and authority that are not part of the state, these are likely to attract attention, particularly from a comparative perspective.

Concerns with the manifestations (or otherwise) of civil society reflect just one such comparative perspective on potential countervailing forces in China’s politics.¹⁸ A number of studies have highlighted the social space to have emerged with economic reform between various social organisations and the state, or the ways in which social groups may start to organise in their own and potentially independent (of the state) interests.¹⁹ While these observations must be central to accounts of change in China, they do not inevitably lead to descriptions of nascent liberal democracy let alone civil society, which is itself almost an essentially contested concept (and possibly a cultural solecism) in a Chinese context. Moreover, the concepts of civil society and liberal democracy may indeed overlap—through such characteristics as freedom of association and expression—yet they may also conflict.²⁰ As the recent experience of several parts of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union demonstrates, a developed civil society may impede rather than assist the emergence of political society and liberal democracy.²¹

PROVINCIALISM, IDENTITY AND COMMUNITY

Equally as hotly debated as the prospects for capitalism and liberal democracy in China is the discussion of the continued cohesion of the unified state. For some, the dramatic implosion of ruling communist parties and the emergence of new localisms in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in and after 1989 are the political spectres at China’s economic feast, particularly when added to an apparent history of centrifugalism.²² Others have emphasised the predominance of the ‘state idea’ of China in most of the territory of the PRC ( Xinjiang and Tibet are the exceptions that may prefer independence but in the process prove the rule in the rest of the PRC);²³ the economic imperatives that reinforce a single China (which paradoxically do not currently include a high degree of national economic integration);²⁴ as well as the social and cultural differences between China on the one hand and the former communist party states of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, on the other.²⁵

There are three distinct but interrelated dimensions to the debate about political disintegration in China. There are arguments over the Chinese Communist Party’s ( CCP) long-term future in the leadership of China as an institutionalised communist party state; the continuation of the PRC as a unified political system; and the maintenance of a unitary state. Despite the CCP’s belief that all three are inseparable, that is no necessary equation. Though it is less likely, the PRC can remain a unified political system even were the CCP to suffer the fate of its counterparts in Eastern Europe. Even less likely, it may also even remain a unitary state under those conditions, assuming the emergence of another at least equally as effective centralising political force. Moreover, the equation of unity with uniformity is by no means immutable, though it has been part of China’s political culture for the last two centuries. There are many political systems where unity is based on social and political diversity, including various forms of federalism where governmental functions may not be solely vested in a single level or form of government. Indeed, federal systems are most often found in multi-cultural societies, those with a large territorial area, or those where political divisions are acute.²⁶

These observations highlight the importance of political traditions, identities and communities, all of which may well be variable within as well as among provinces. There is already considerable evidence that the CCP’s political traditions and its social roots differ from province to province. The CCP has an organised tradition of political support in those provinces— Liaoning, Jilin, Shanghai for example—that were the major beneficiaries of state inv...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• MAPS
• TABLES
• CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE
• ABBREVIATIONS
• 1: CHINA IN REFORM THE VIEW FROM THE PROVINCES
• GUANGXI ZHUANG AUTONOMOUS REGION
• 2: GUANGXI TOWARDS SOUTHWEST CHINA AND SOUTHEAST ASIA
• HAINAN PROVINCE
• 3: HAINAN COMMUNAL POLITICS AND THE STRUGGLE FOR IDENTITY
• LIAONING PROVINCE
• 4: LIAONING STRUGGLING WITH THE BURDENS OF THE PAST
• SHANDONG PROVINCE
• 5: SHANDONG THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF DEVELOPMENT AND INEQUALITY
• SHANGHAI CITY
• 6: SHANGHAI AN ALTERNATIVE CENTRE?
• SICHUAN PROVINCE
• 7: SICHUAN DISADVANTAGE AND MISMANAGEMENT IN THE HEAVENLY KINGDOM
• ZHEJIANG PROVINCE
• 8: ZHEJIANG PARADOXES OF RESTORATION, REINVIGORATION AND RENEWAL