China's Political Development

Chinese and American Perspectives

Kenneth G. Lieberthal, Cheng Li, Yu Keping

• Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780815725367
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

China's path to political reform over the last three decades has been slow, but discourse among Chinese political scientists continues to be vigorous and forward thinking. China's Political Development offers a unique look into the country's evolving political process by combining chapters authored by twelve prominent Chinese political scientists with an extensive commentary on each chapter by an American scholar of the Chinese political system. Each chapter focuses on a major aspect of the development of the Chinese Party-state, encompassing the changing relations among its constituent parts as well as its evolving approaches toward economic gorwth, civil society, grassroots elections, and the intertwined problems of supervision and corruption.

Together, these analyses highlight the history, strategy, policies, and implementation of governance reforms since 1978 and the authors' recommendations for future changes. This extensive work provides the deep background necessary to understand the sociopolitical context and intellectual currents. behind the reform agenda announced at the landmark Third Plenum in 2013. Shedding light through contrasting perspectives, the book provides an overview of the efforts China has directed toward developing good governance, the challenges it faces, and its future direction.

1

The People's Republic of China's Sixty Years of Political Development

YU KEPING

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) overthrew the rule of the Kuomintang and founded the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, marking the transition of the CCP from a revolutionary party to a ruling party, a substantial change of far-reaching significance for both the CCP and China. Thereafter, the primary task of the party and its government changed from seizing political power to consolidating it, from destroying the old state to building a new one. The foundation of the CCP's legitimacy also gradually changed from revolution to reform and from political movement to law making. This political development advanced down six main paths: from revolution to reform, from struggle to harmony, from dictatorship to democracy, from rule of man to rule of law, from centralization to decentralization, and from state to society. This transition was slow and difficult and did not approach completion until China launched its reform and opening-up program thirty years later. The entirety of political life in the PRC over the past sixty-five years, with all its tragedy and drama, can be explained along these lines of change.

From Revolution to Reform

Revolution is an armed struggle with the aim of overthrowing the existing political order and making a thorough social transformation by means of violence. In the words of Friedrich Engels, “A revolution is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannons—authoritarian means.”¹ Marxists believe that “revolutions are the locomotives of history” and a powerful driver of human progress.² According to their logic, no reactionary class will depart the stage of history on its own accord; only through violent revolution can a new society be established. The CCP, by applying the Marxist revolutionary theory to China's peculiar conditions to mobilize workers and peasants at the bottom of society and carry out a resolute armed struggle, eventually seized political power. In this sense, the founding of the new socialist state in China also marked the victory of Marxist revolutionary theory.

Revolution was sacred to the Chinese Communist Party and the newly established People's Republic of China. During the thirty years following the founding of the PRC, revolution was the shining political term and represented the highest political value and the highest political authority. Revolution was a formidable weapon not only for seizing political power but also for consolidating it. It was the fundamental source of legitimacy for the new government and all its actions. As a result, revolution became the fundamental political criterion dividing right from wrong in China. All thoughts, speeches, behaviors, systems, policies, and guidelines that were approved by the party and government were revolutionary, and thus whatever was opposed or not approved by the party and government was counterrevolutionary or nonrevolutionary.

According to the political logic of the leadership, all counterrevolutionary forces must be resolutely suppressed. During the 1953 Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, a total of 1.29 million people were arrested, 1.23 million were disciplined, and 710,000 were executed.³ Mao Zedong and other leaders also set about transforming every aspect of Chinese society, including ideology and culture, under the name of continuing “permanent revolution” until the fulfillment of communism. Mao Zedong said, “I stand for the theory of permanent revolution. In making revolution one must strike while the iron is hot—one revolution must follow another, the revolution must continually advance.”⁴ Acting on this theory of continuous revolution, Mao Zedong launched one political campaign after another, from the Anti-Rightist Movement to the Cultural Revolution.

Led by the CCP, the people's revolution fundamentally changed the historical process of China. It not only established the CCP's ruling position but also created for the first time in China a socialist system, including an economic system based on common ownership of the means of production and a basic political system with the people's democratic dictatorship at its core. The socialist revolution greatly advanced China's social and historical progress. First, it substantially increased the country's productivity, leading to rapid economic development within a short time. In 1952 the gross output of industry and agriculture reached RMB 81 billion, up 77.5 percent over 1949 and 20 percent over 1936, the highest level preceding the founding of the PRC. From 1950 to 1980, the gross output of industry and agriculture in China increased more than tenfold, from RMB 57.48 billion to RMB 661.90 billion, representing an average annual growth of 8.5 percent.⁵ The large population of peasants and workers who used to be at the bottom of society thus enjoyed significantly improved social and political status, including democratic rights they had never before enjoyed. They became, in effect, the mainstream classes of society. The literacy rate also rapidly increased, and ordinary people began to acquire cultural knowledge. New values such as freedom, equality, and civilization became important components of China's culture. With the founding of the PRC, China also enjoyed enhanced international status and became fully independent from semicolonization for the first time in the modern era.

The fundamental role of revolution, however, is to break up the existing state apparatus and establish a new political order. If revolutionaries continue to make political revolutions even after they have established a new political system, the positive effect of revolutions on historical progress will gradually weaken, leading eventually to negative results. Fundamentally speaking, revolution is a political action that fulfills its role in advancing historical progress by breaking up the existing system and releasing social productivity. But revolution itself is not a productive force: it can promote economic development but absolutely cannot substitute for economic development. Moreover, revolution is an anomaly of the historical process, and it defies any law or regulation. Democracy, a direct goal of the proletarian revolution, is inseparable from rule of law—without the rule of law there can be no democracy. In this sense, revolution is hardly compatible with democracy, as was emphatically proved by what happened in the thirty years following the founding of the PRC, the period in which the theory of continuous revolution was practiced.

The economic growth brought about by the revolution soon slowed down. Less than ten years after the founding of the PRC there occurred the so-called three years of natural disasters, a period in which tens of millions of people starved to death.⁶ In reality, “natural disaster” was just another name for economic destitution and fragility. Toward the end of the Cultural Revolution, material privation was so severe that even a box of matches, a bar of soap, a half kilogram of pork, or a foot of cloth had to be bought with coupons, which were of limited supply. The national economy was on the “brink of collapse.”⁷ In terms of political life, approximately 550,000 intellectuals were branded as “rightists” and were deprived of basic political rights during the Anti-Rightist Movement of 1957–58. The Cultural Revolution was even worse, a political disaster unprecedented in Chinese history: according to one general estimate, more than 100 million people were wrongfully accused, implicated, or persecuted, and several million died in the process, including President Liu Shaoqi and founding marshals Peng Dehuai and He Long. A great number of senior cadre members were accused of being rightists or “persons in power taking the capitalist road” (党内走资派, dangnei zouzipai) and persecuted. The revolution eventually turned on itself and began to engulf revolutionaries themselves.

Immediately after the death of paramount leader Mao Zedong in 1976, the leadership of the CCP, in a bid to save the country from even greater chaos, took radical action and arrested the Gang of Four, who were still resolutely implementing Mao Zedong's theory of permanent revolution. This move, in effect, ended the ten-year-long Cultural Revolution. Finally, at the far-reaching and epoch-making third plenary session of the 11th CCP Central Committee, held from December 18 to 22, 1978, the focus of the party and the government was changed from class struggle to economic development. It was at this meeting that China returned to the road of modernization. For the next thirty years, reform replaced revolution as the dominant political term and the main theme of the new period of China's development.

Whereas the main goal of revolution is to break up an existing order, the main goal of reform is to repair and improve it. Before coming to power, revolutionaries are usually the staunchest opponents of reform; they view all reformers and reformists as reactionary. However, if revolutionaries continue to emphasize revolution even after coming to power, the spearhead of attack will inevitably be directed at its own people. It is the historical responsibility of the successors of founding revolutionaries to shift the focus from revolution to reform and to foster ideology that is supportive of reforms.

The third plenary session of the 11th CCP Central Committee established Deng Xiaoping as the second paramount leader of China. The first obstacle to Deng's reform efforts came from the orthodox ideology, especially its theory of continuous revolution. If the ideological and theoretical issues were not dealt with correctly, any reforms would not have a firm foundation of legitimacy. As the pioneer of reform, Deng led the great debate on the criterion of truth, which marked the beginning of an ideological emancipation movement. Deng advocated emancipation of the mind. What is the criterion of truth—the theory of continuous revolution or the reality of social practice? After heated debate and passionate discussion, the majority of CCP leaders and intellectuals arrived at Deng's intended conclusion, and the party identified social practice as the true foundation of the legitimacy of reform. In early 1992, Deng went even further by summarizing the criteria as the three advances: “advance the development of socialist productive forces, advance the enhancement of China's overall capacity as a socialist state, and advance the improvement of people's living standards.”⁸

The reforms led by Deng constituted a wide-ranging social transformation involving politics, economy, culture, and social life. Economically, the reforms started with the people's commune system in the countryside. On January 1, 1982, the CCP Central Committee approved and released the minutes of the National Rural Work Conference. This document changed the rural economic system from one in which the means of production were owned on three levels and the production team was taken as the basic accounting unit (三级所有, 队为基础, sanji suoyou, duiwei jichu) to one anchored by the household responsibility system, which was promoted nationwide. This reform, which stimulated farmer incentive to produce and rapidly improved agricultural productivity, soon solved the problem of how to clothe and feed China's 800 million rural people. The CCP leadership then vastly deepened economic reforms by advancing the transition from a planned to a market economy and changing the existing economic system from one of unitary public ownership to a mixed ownership system based on public ownership. Another important component of the economic reforms was the opening-up movement, including opening up the domestic market for foreign investment, introducing advanced corporate management experience and practices and advanced technologies, joining the World Trade Organization, and participating extensively in international economic competition.

The thirty year period that followed the third plenary session of the 11th CCP Central Committee was an era of reform in every way. With the transition of the country's basic economic system from a socialist planned economy to a market economy, a full range of components of the economic system were overhauled, including ownership, business operation, employment, allocation, foreign trade, circulation, finance, and compensation, to name only a few. In addition to economic reforms, there were also major changes in many other systems such as the political, education, cultural, public health, welfare, and insurance systems as well as other important social and political administration systems. Reform became the embodiment of justice and reason during this period: all beautiful things, all good systems, and all eminent persons were identified with reform.

The Deng reforms brought a sea change to Chinese society. In terms of the challenges the Chinese people faced and the extent to which they advanced socially, nothing less than a revolution occurred. The greatest change of all was a miracle of economic growth unprecedented in human history. In the thirty years from 1978 to 2008, China's GDP soared from RMB 364.5 billion to RMB 30.1 trillion, with per capita GDP, urban per capita disposable income, and rural per capita disposable income increasing from RMB 381 to RMB 22,600, from RMB 343 to RMB 15,781, and from RMB 134 to RMB 4,761, respectively. The telephone usage rate increased from less than 1 phone per 10,000 residents to 74.3 phones. The number of college students increased from 860,000 to more than 20 million. The ratio of urban to rural population changed from 18:82 to 46:54. And the country's foreign reserves increased from USD 170 million to USD 2 trillion. The reforms were far more than a process of economic development: they were also a process of overall social progress. With rapid economic development and substantially improved living standards, China's social, political, and cultural life also underwent marked changes.

The reforms both transformed China's history and saved the socialist cause of the CCP. In this sense, it can be said that in spite of the seeming confrontation with and deviation from revolution, from the perspective of the ultimate goal of the CCP and China's socialist revolution the reforms were actually a continuation of the revolutionary cause.

From Struggle to Harmony

Maintaining a revolutionary environment inevitably leads to the prioritization of class struggle because revolution is a means of struggle and the highest form of class struggle. According to classic Marxist theory, private ownership and the division of labor appeared after humanity became civilized, and this in turn led to the creation of different classes. The history of society is the history of class struggle.⁹ Since the emergence of a class structure, society as a whole has split into two fundamentally hostile camps. The first ruling class is the exploitative class, which is in possession of the means of production. The ruled class is the exploited class, which is not in possession of the means of production. The former has been the minority while the latter the overwhelming majority. Owing to their fundamental antagonism, the two classes have fought fiercely against each other. When the ruling class is unable to rule as usual, class struggle turns into revolution. Class struggle has many forms, but violent revolution is its highest form.

The CCP not only accepted all the above Marxist doctrines on classes and class struggle; after the founding of the PRC, it pushed the theory of class struggle to the extreme. According to Mao, the historical process starting with the coming to power of the proletariat and ending with the realization of communism is a long one. This process is always accompanied by classes and class struggle, even fierce class struggle at times. Mao also held that after the CCP came to power, class division and class struggle had developed within the party, leading to the emergence of two antagonistic camps. He warned, “You are making the socialist revolution, and yet you do not know where the bourgeoisie is. It is right in the Communist Party—those in power taking the capitalist road. The capitalist-roaders are still on the capitalist road.”¹⁰ He admonished the Chinese people to “never forget class struggle.” “Class struggle,” he said, “must be held in mind every year, every month, and every day.”¹¹

In the thirty years after the founding of the PRC, class struggle was a current that ran through every aspect of society. In the economic field, the slogan was “Socialist weeds are better than capitalist seedlings.” Politically, “Who are our enemies and who are our friends?” became the foremost question in revolution and was used to make political classifications of social groups. Landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists (地富反坏右, di fu fan huai you), the so-called Five Black Categories (黑五类, heiwulei), were classified as class enemies and were deprived of basic civil rights. Across society, the theory of class origin (出身论, chushenlun, or 成份论, chengfenlun) was widely adopted, positioning persons according to their family backgrounds and social relationships. Only those born into poor working or peasant families were considered the successors to the revolution, and all the rest were subjected to political education and political testing. Ideologically, the people were required to examine the bourgeois elements of their own thoughts and exercise self-criticism, combat selfishness and repudiate revisionism (斗私批修, dousipixiu), and combat selfishness as soon as it flashes in their brain.

In socialist theory, the ideal state to be achieved by class struggle is the gradual narrowing of class differences and, ultimately, the elimination of classes. The goal is to move toward a more harmonious society where human nature reaches its full potential and every individual enjoys more freedom. In reality, however, class struggle moved in the opposite direction, so that class differences were constantly strengthened, human nature was increasingly suppressed, and only one way of thinking was allowed throughout the nation. Ironically, of the 550,000 people who were persecuted in the Anti-Rightist Movement, fewer than 100 were not eventually rehabilitated. The Cultural Revolution evolved into an all-encompassing armed internal struggle in which each force claimed to represent “the Great Leader Chairman Mao” and “attacked with reason and defended with force” (文攻武卫, wengongwuwei). During this armed struggle in which more than a million people lost their lives, many couples became enemies, fathers and sons disowned each other, and comrades became foes. The Cultural Revolution, triggered by class struggle, was a huge disaster for the Chinese nation and “brought catastrophe to the Party, the state and the whole people.”¹²

It is an invariable rule that without social stability and harmony there will be no social progress and development. It is an anomaly for revolution to advance historical progress, and it is the norm for stability to promote social development. Mao did not, and indeed could not, bring order to China because his ambitiou...