5 - Modalities of State Building

Summary

After laying out the substantial challenges faced by the young People’s Republic of China in 1949, this chapter focuses on the particular ways in which revolutionary policies were implemented: by an ever shifting mix of bureaucratic and campaign modalities that were supported by a range of public performances. Bureaucracy was characterized by hierarchy, order, precedent, the strengthening of formal state institutions and a mania for classification, thus radically simplifying complex realities through a process of disaggregation; campaigns mobilized moral commitments through a different type of radical simplification – fusion into morally charged narratives and popular mobilization. Both modalities were in evidence in the two signature campaigns of 1951: the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries and land reform. While, in the early 1950s, bureaucratic and campaign modalities were co-constitutive, after the mid 1950s, they were more often in stark tension with each other.