Legitimating the Chinese Communist Party Since Tiananmen

A Critical Analysis of the Stability Discourse

Peter Sandby-Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136962325
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Kommunismus, Postkommunismus & Sozialismus

The dominant view concerning the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is that it is simply a matter of time before it comes to an end. This view has been dominant since the pro-democracy protests in 1989 and has only been strengthened by the increasing number of protests in recent years. However, the Chinese Communist Party has continued to remain in power throughout this period and its rule appears to be secure in the short-to medium-term. As the twentieth anniversary of the military suppression of the pro-democracy demonstrations approaches, this book explains how the Chinese Communist Party has maintained its authority since 1989. It provides a detailed analysis of the Party's discourse emphasising stability in the post-Tiananmen period, analysing the government's propaganda in order to show how this discourse has been used by the Party to legitimate its authority. The interdisciplinary nature of this book makes it relevant to a number of different academic disciplines including Asian studies, China studies, international relations, politics and sociology.

1
Conceptualizing legitimation

Introduction

This chapter will develop the conceptual framework to be used in this book for analysing the legitimating effects of the stability discourse employed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As such, this framework both opens up the space in which the stability discourse can be analysed in relation to the CCP’s legitimacy and places the effects of this discourse upon its legitimacy within the broader context of political action in China. In order to develop this conceptual framework, it is first necessary to interrogate the concept of legitimacy. In doing this, the definition of legitimacy that will be applied in this book will be made explicit. Indeed, a criticism that can be levelled at the contemporary literature on the legitimacy of the CCP is that this concept is rarely interrogated, with the result that it is left unclear who or what is being legitimated.¹ Following on from this, the concept of legitimation, i.e. the process by which legitimacy is attained, will be explicated. As pointed out in the Introduction, Weber’s conceptualization of legitimation, which is the de facto standard framework used in such analyses, is limited by its functionalist view of the structure–agency relationship. In order to overcome this, Weber’s conceptualization will be situated within the strategic-relational approach. Through its concepts of strategic actors, strategically selective contexts and discursive selectivity, this approach allows for a more dynamic understanding of legitimation to be put forward in which multiple legitimating strategies can be considered. This book will focus on the CCP’s use of the stability discourse.

The concept of legitimacy

This chapter will begin by detailing the concept of legitimacy to be applied in this book so as to better clarify what legitimation achieves. First, it is necessary to establish that legitimacy does play a role within a political system. For Gries and Rosen, ‘[l]egitimacy is central to politics everywhere’ (2004: 6), while White acknowledges that legitimacy constitutes ‘a crucial basis of politics’ (2005: 2). Even Huntington, who refers to legitimacy as a ‘mushy concept’, deployed it as one of the five independent variables when explaining the ‘third wave of democracy’ that swept away authoritarian regimes in the early 1990s (1993: 46). For Weber, the centrality of legitimacy to the political system can be explained by ‘the generally observable need of any power, or even of any advantage of life, to justify itself’ (1978: 953). Drawing on Weber’s observation, Beetham goes further in stating that wherever power is exercised ‘societies will seek to subject it to justifiable rule, and the powerful themselves will seek to secure consent to their power from at least the most important among their subordinates’ (1991: 3). As a consequence, it is possible to state that in all political systems where power is exercised, legitimacy can, in theory at least, be said to operate. Such a statement, therefore, allows for the possibility that legitimacy exists not only in democracies, as some academics would hold,² but also in communist states, authoritarian regimes as well as dictatorships.³ Indeed, for Beetham (1991: 181), legitimacy in a communist state is comprised of the same two components that make up legitimacy in capitalist democracies: namely, the interrelated but distinct notions of the economy and the polity (or political ideology).

Moving onto a definition of the concept of legitimacy, it is important, at the outset, to acknowledge that legitimacy, as White admits, ‘is not easy to define’ (2005: 1). For Weatherford, this is because the concept ‘plays such a protean role in accounting for political phenomena, taking on different aspects as it links global attributes of the political system with orientations of individual citizens’ (1992: 150). However, such difficulty also means that many competing definitions of legitimacy have been put forward to explain the concept. Holmes traces the origins of legitimacy back to Greek political thought on the grounds that ‘Plato and Aristotle were concerned inter alia with obligation, obedience and authority and thus with many of the issues that relate to a modern analysis of legitimacy’ (1993: 10).⁴ However, it is the German social scientist Max Weber who is widely credited with developing the concept of legitimacy for deployment in analyses of modern political systems. As Zheng and Lye note, ‘Max Weber’s formulation of legitimacy has been a dominant thread in the literature on this topic’ (2005: 187).⁵ Weber’s conception of legitimacy was derived from his conception of power as being relational, i.e. actors did not possess power per se but rather their power stemmed from others’ belief in that actor’s rightfulness to exercise power. Consequently, for Weber, legitimacy rested upon this notion of belief, so that ‘the basis of every system of authority, and correspondingly of every kind of willingness to obey, is a belief, a belief by virtue of which persons exercising authority are lent prestige’ (1964: 382). Moreover, the effect of this belief in the legitimacy of the ruler(s) is to convert the exercise of power into that of authority. For Blau, these two concepts can be distinguished by virtue of the fact that ‘people, a priori, suspend their own judgement and accept that of an acknowledged superior without having to be convinced that his is correct’ (1963: 307). For Habermas, such authority is demonstrated when a political decision can be made ‘independently of the concrete use of force and of the manifest threat of sanctions and can be regularly implemented even against the interests of those affected’ (1988: 201). In effect, authority means that obedience is derived from the legitimacy of those who issue orders rather than from the actual orders themselves (Weber 1964: 324–5).

However, though influential, Weber’s formulation has been subject to numerous criticisms. These criticisms can be grouped into three categories: the notion of belief; incompleteness; and non-universality. In terms of belief, Schaar contends that Weber’sdefinition conflates ‘legitimacy with belief or opinion … [i]f people hold the belief that existing institutions are “appropriate” or “morally proper”, then those institutions are legitimate. That’s all there is to it’ (1981: 19–25). However, Schaar’s charge that Weber conflates legitimacy with belief appears to overlook the fact that, within Weber’s formulation, legitimacy is acquired through the process of legitimation from particular sources.⁶ The relationship between these sources and the concept of legitimacy is the Lebenswelt notion of belief. Moreover, given that belief in legitimacy is the product of the dialectically related sources, Weber’s formulation avoids the charge of conflation directed at it by Schaar. With regard to incompleteness, Beetham (1991: 11–13) criticizes Weber on the grounds that his formulation does not allow space for the concept of legality or consent of the governed to be considered alongside the notion of belief. However, I would argue that Beetham’s criticism is misguided, in that neither the concept of legality nor the consent of the governed is independent of belief. Laws may possess formal recognition and a level of enforceability beyond that of belief, but, as Alagappa points out, their ‘authority derives from the beliefs that underscore the political order’ (1995: 14).⁷ As for consent of the governed, though it is not explicitly stated, Weber’s formulation includes this concept within his recognition that power is relational and in need of justification. The final criticism of Weber concerns the non-universal applicability of his definition, in that Weber’s focus on the notion of belief deprives the concept of legitimacy of any moral and evaluative force (Alagappa 1995: 15). However, such criticism is emblematic of those who prefer to apply a more normative definition of legitimacy rather than deploying a social scientific conceptualization of legitimacy and, as such, constitutes an ontological difference rather than highlighting a theoretical inconsistency within Weber’s formulation.

Rejection of these criticisms does not equate to full acceptance of Weber’s formulation. Rather, as Alagappa points out, ‘Weber’s work on legitimacy, while useful, should be considered as a starting point that demands explication and considerable development to make the concept analytically relevant’ (1995: 340 n.6). While accepting that legitimacy, in short, concerns the right to rule (Holmes 1993: 39) and that the notion of belief constitutes the basis of legitimacy, Weber’sdefinition fails to clearly specify who or what is being legitimated, by whom this legitimacy is conferred, and how much legitimacy is operating within the political system. A fuller definition is provided by Rigby, who states that legitimacy refers to

[t]he expectation of political authorities that people will comply with their demands … not only [because of] such considerations as the latter’s fear of punishment, hope of reward, habit or apathy, but also on the notion that they have the right to make such demands. This notion both inheres explicitly and implicitly, in the claims of authorities, and is reciprocated, to a greater or lesser extent, in the minds of those [from] whom compliance is demanded.

(Rigby 1982: 1)

Thus, in Rigby’sdefinition, the focus of legitimation is identified in the form of the ‘political authorities’ and this power is legitimated, and so made distinct from that of coercive power, by the ‘people’. Furthermore, Rigby’s definition allows for the possibility that not all members of the people will accept the exercise of legitimate power as equally legitimate. However, while Rigby’sdefinition represents an advance on that offered by Weber’s, it is still necessary to further interrogate the terms deployed in his definition so as to more fully understand the concept of legitimacy.

System and regime legitimacy

In Rigby’sdefinition, legitimacy is seen as existing between the ‘political authorities’ and the ‘people’. However, for Holmes, ‘[t]he notion that citizens either believe or do not believe that rulers have a right to rule begins to look too simple: we have to distinguish between “system legitimacy” and “regime legitimacy”’ (1993: 25). In this, ‘system legitimacy’ refers to the legitimacy of the political system, while ‘regime legitimacy’ refers to that of the government/position. The distinction between these two forms can be made on the grounds that legitimate authority is derived from the belief in the legitimacy of the system whereas legitimacy of the government/position is dependent on the exercise of that authority within the system.⁸ Furthermore, applying this analytical distinction, it is possible for a government to suffer from a lack of legitimacy while the legitimacy of the system remains intact. Yet, if the system is delegitimated the legitimacy of the government/position will suffer a corresponding withdrawal of legitimacy.

However, the extent to which this distinction can be made depends on the extent to which power has been institutionalized.⁹ While such a distinction can be clearly made within democratic political systems, communist political systems, as a result of constructing a ‘party-state’, have tended to blur the distinction between these two types of legitimacy, so that the legitimacy of the system becomes entwined with that of the government. With regard to the exercise of power in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), there has been a move towards the partial institutionalization of power in recent years. This was most clearly evidenced in the transfer of power from the ‘third generation’ of leaders, headed by Jiang Zemin as party secretary, to that of Hu Jintao and the ‘fourth generation’ of leaders that took place at 16th Party Congress in 2002. In addition, following the 17th Party Congress in October 2007, a further orderly transfer of power appears to have been put in place for 2012. Commenting on this, Nathan notes that ‘few authoritarian regimes – be they communist, fascist, corporatist, personalist – have managed to conduct orderly, peaceful, timely, and stable successions’ (2003: 7). Moreover, alongside the transfer of power, Hu’s authority, in contrast to that of his predecessors, is derived, in large part, from his status as party leader, i.e. from his position rather than his person.¹⁰ As a consequence, the exercise of power within the Party as a whole is now less personalized and more regularized, with rules and procedures increasingly governing its exercise.¹¹ In addition to rules of succession and political decision-making, other examples of institutionalization within the CCP can be seen in the introduction of elements of the rule of law, the increasing differentiation and specialization of government agencies, as well as the ‘professionalization’ of the political elites.¹² However, though there are signs of institutionalization, Nathan cautions that the regime ‘is still a party-state, in which the Party penetrates all other institutions and makes policy for all realms of action. And it is still a centralized, unitary system in which power at lower levels derives from grants by the center’ (2003: 13). Consequently, it is still possible to state that, in the People’s Republic of China, the legitimacy of the political system and that of the Chinese government can not be clearly distinguished.¹³

Tripartite legitimacy

Having established that legitimacy can be analytically bifurcated into system legitimacy and regime legitimacy, it is now necessary to examine the society in which legitimacy is conferred. Up to this point, ‘the right to rule’ has been presented as an exchange between rulers and the ruled. However, Weber’s view of society conceived of three main strategic groups: ‘chiefs’, ‘staffs’ and ‘masses’.¹⁴ The ‘chiefs’ referred to the political leaders or ‘rulers’, the ‘staffs’ referred to the bureaucracy responsible for implementing and enforcing the laws and policies of the ‘chiefs’, while the ‘masses’ referred to the public at large. In this book, the term ‘elites’ is preferred to ‘chiefs’ and, applying Walder’s definition of this group, refers to all cadres ‘at the rank of country magistrate or division chief and above’.¹⁵ The term ‘cadres’ is preferred to ‘staffs’ and refers to those in the national bureaucracy below the level of county magistrate and division chief.¹⁶ As for the term ‘masses’, it will be retained on account of the fact that it is still the term most frequently employed in public discourse when referring to the general public. However, it should be pointed out that these groups constitute analytical distinctions and, though each group has a material basis, the boundaries between them are not, as such, fixed. For example, party members can belong to any of these three groups, while non-party members can usually only belong to the ‘cadres’ and the ‘masses’.¹⁷ Moreover, within each of these broad categories, further subgroups can be distinguished.¹⁸ However, for the purpose of this book, the identification of these three strategic groups is sufficient to allow for heuristic analysis.

For Weber, the relationships between each of these groups could be ordered hierarchically in terms of legitimacy. Consequently, Weber identifies three separate but interdependent relationships: elites–cadres; elites–masses; and cadres–masses. Of these, the relationship between the elites and cadres was viewed as the most important on the grounds that, even if there was a withdrawal of legitimacy from the masses, elites would still continue to exercise legitimate authority if they retained the support of the cadres. Supporting this view, Alagappa states that, in the context of non-democratic political systems, ‘[c]onsent of the administrative staff and strategic groups is critical for the legitimation of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes’ (1995: 24). In relation to China, Walder believes that, ‘if the elite maintains the discipline of state bureaucrats and the allegiance of party members, it can withstand challenges from other groups in society, even in periods of economic hardship and social upheaval’ (2006: 21).¹⁹ Following on from this, Holmes defines the withdrawal of legitimacy by the masses as constituting only a ‘severe legitimacy deficit’ as long as ‘[o]fficial ideologists … do have new ideas for legitimation and a belief in what they are doing’ (1993: 23). Consequently, for Holmes a legitimation crisis only occurs when ‘those who would normally be expected to attempt to legitimate the order are no longer able and/or willing to do so’ (1993: 23).²⁰

The final relationship in Weber’s hierarchy is that between cadres and the masses. Indeed, for White, it is important to disting...