Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T14:36:52.126Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Institutional Amphibiousness and the Transition from Communism: The Case of China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

X. L. Ding
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In the practice of social science, the most conspicuous recent attempt at theorizing about nonconformity and protest in late communism rests on the conceptual schema of ‘civil society versus the state’. Based on a case study of the institutional basis of criticism of, and dissent against, communism in China, I contend that the dichotomous concept ‘civil society versus the state’. when used to explain the transition from communism, is applicable only in rare, extreme cases and misleading in most cases. Instead, I introduce the concept of ‘institutional amphibiousness’, stressing institutional parasitism and institutional manipulation and conversion. In most cases, institutional amphibiousness more adequately accounts for the dynamics of the erosion of communism than the concept of ‘civil society versus the state’.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , July 1994 , pp. 293 - 318
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Rau, Zbigniew, ‘Some Thoughts on Civil Society in Eastern Europe and the Lockean Contructuriun Approach’, Political Studies. 35 (1987), 573–92, p. 574.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Szelenyi, Ivan, ‘Socialist Opposition in Eastern Europe: Dilemmas and Prospects’, in Tokes, R. L., ed., Opposition in Eastern Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979, pp. 187–208)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rupnik, Jacques, ‘Dissent in Poland. 1968–78: The End of Revisionism and the Rebirth of the Civil Society’Google Scholar, in Tokes, , ed., Opposition, pp. 60–112Google Scholar; Arato, Andrew, ‘Civil Society Against the State: Poland 1980–81’, Telos, 47 (1981), 23–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Civil society theory was initially applied to the East European and Soviet cases. See, for example, Lewin, Moshe, The Gorbachev Phenomenon: A Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Keane, John, ed., Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives (London: Verso, 1988)Google Scholar; Starr, Frederick S., ‘Soviet Union: A Civil Society’, Foreign Policy, 70 (1988), 26–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lapidus, Gail W., ‘State and Society: Toward the Emergence of Civil Society in the Soviet Union’, in Bialer, S., ed., Politics. Society, and Nationality inside Gorbachev's Russia (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. 1989), pp. 121–48Google Scholar; Miller, William G., ed., Toward A More Civil Society? The USSR Under Mikhail S. Gorbachev (New York: Harper & Row. 1989)Google Scholar; Skilling, H. Gordon, Samizdat and an Independent Society in Central and Eastern Europe (Houndmills: Macmil Ian, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ash, Timothy Garton, The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe (New York: Vintage, 1990)Google Scholar: Brzezinski, Zbigniew, The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1990)Google Scholar; Hosking, Geoffrey, The Awakening of the Soviet Union (Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1990Google Scholar): Frentzel-Zagorska, Janina, ‘Civil Society in Poland and Hungary’, Soviet Studies., 42 (1990), 759–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Miller, Robert F., ed., The Developments of Civil Society in Communist Systems (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992)Google Scholar; Seligman, Adam, The Idea of Civil Society (New York: Free Press, 1992)Google Scholar: Weigle, Marcia A. and Buttertield, Jim, ‘Civil Society in Reforming Communist Regimes: The Logic of Emergence’, Comparative Politics, 4 (1992). 1–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Many authors then have attempted to use the concept of civil society to explain developments in China. For lists of such writings, see Miller, , The Developments of Civil Society in Communist Systems, pp. 151–2Google Scholar; White, Gordon, ‘Prospects for Civil Society in China: A Case Study of Xiaoshan City’, Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, 29 (1993), 63–87, p. 65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and a special issue of Modern China, 19 (1993), 107–240.Google Scholar

4 Tismaneanu, Vladimir, ed., In Search of Civil Society: Independent Peace Movements in the Soviet Bloc (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 181.Google Scholar

5 See Jowitt, Kenneth, ‘The Concepts of Liberalization. Integration, and Rationalization in the Context of East European Development’, Studies in Comparative Communism, 4 (1971). 79–91. p. 82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Held, David et al. , eds. States and Societies (New York: New York University Press, 1983), p. 219Google Scholar; Brzezinski, , The Grand Failure, pp. 3–9.Google Scholar

6 Barker, Ernest, Principles of Social and Political Theory (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), pp. 2–3.Google Scholar

7 Bendix, Reinhard, Bendix, John and Furniss, Norman, ‘Reflections on Modern Western States and Civil Societies’, Research in Political Sociology, 3 (1987), 1–38, p. 33.Google Scholar

8 Keane, John, Democracy and Civil Society (London: Verso, 1988), p. 3.Google Scholar

9 Such a bifurcated conception of ‘state-society relations’ genetically bears a deep mark of modern Western experience. See Kaufmann, Franz-Xaver et al. , eds, Guidance, Control, and Evaluation in the Public Sector (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1986), pp. 92–3Google Scholar; Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), pp. 11–12.Google Scholar

10 This element was particularly stressed by social and political philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the creators of the term ‘civil society’, including Hobbes, Locke, Burke, Ferguson and Kant.

11 See Pelczynski, Z. A., ‘Solidarity and “The Rebirth of Civil Society”’Google Scholar (in Keane, , ed., Civil Society and the State), pp. 361–80, especially at pp. 368–9Google Scholar, for a critique of the usage de-emphasizing the associational dimension of civil society.

12 Chamberlain, Heath B., ‘On the Search for Civil Society in China’, Modern China, 19 (1993), 199–215, p. 200.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Brumberg, Abraham, ed., Chronicle of a Revolution: A Western-Soviet Inquiry into Perestroika (New York: Pantheon, 1990), p. 33.Google Scholar

14 Pelczynski, , ‘Solidarity and “The Rebirth of Civil Society”’, pp. 365–6.Google Scholar

15 For example, in his critique of recent discussions on ‘state-civil society relations’, Keane, (Civil Society and the State, pp. 62 and 70Google Scholar; Democracy and Civil Society, p. 65Google Scholar) remarks that most contemporary writers have misconceived the distinction. However, Keane's own statements on the subject reveal that, while his review of the classical literature illustrates the existence of ‘important differences in the geographic distribution, temporal changes and semantic variation of the distinction’ (Civil Society and the State, p. 62Google Scholar), which have been ignored by many contemporary writers, Keane's own usage of the ‘state-civil society’ scheme demonstrates no meaningful difference from most of the other writers whom he criticized. Try to compare, for instance, Keane, (Civil Society and the State, p. 21Google Scholar; Democracy and Civil Society, p. 3Google Scholar) with John Thompson (‘Introduction’ to Lefort, Claude, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), pp. 6 and 321)Google Scholar and Berki, R. N. (in Hayward, Jack and Berki, R. N., eds, State and Society in Contemporary Europe (New York: St Martin's, 1979), p. 2).Google Scholar

16 See Parsons, Talcott, The Structure of Social Action (New York: Free Press, 1968), p. 29.Google Scholar

17 Schumpeter, Joseph (Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1942))Google Scholar long ago noted amphibious relations among institutions. I am indebted to Ken Jowitt for this information.

18 Johnson, Chalmers, ed., Change in Communist Systems (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1970), p. 19.Google Scholar

19 O'Donnell, Guillermo and Schmitter, Philippe, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), p. 49Google Scholar, observed institutional conversion at a higher level in transitions from authoritarian rule in Southern Europe and Latin America. I have borrowed some phrases from them but avoided transplanting the concept of ‘resurrection of civil society’ into the communist environment.

20 I thank R. Winfree for helping me clarify this.

21 Ash, Timothy Garton, ‘The Revolution of the Magic Lantern’, New York Review of Books, 36 (1989), no. 21, p. 42.Google Scholar Even in Poland itself institutional amphibiousness was a predominant pattern in the opposition before the 1980s. As Pelczynski (‘Solidarity and “The Rebirth of Civil Society”’, pp. 368–9Google Scholar) notes, until the 1980s the critical intellectual groups ‘owed their existence to the laxity of party control, the relative toleration of the security police apparatus and a degree of judicial independence, not to an infrastructure of genuinely autonomous social organizations. They were beneficiaries of loopholes in the state structure. Hence the application of the civil society concept to Poland before the rise of Solidarity – any meaningful talk of “the rebirth of civil society” – is in my view highly misleading; indeed, a piece of mystification and wishful thinking’.

22 See Brumberg, , ed., Chronicle of Revolution, p. 9Google Scholar; Kligman, Gail, ‘Reclaiming the Public: A Reflection on Creating Civil Society in Romania’, East European Politics and Societies, 4 (1990), 393–427, p. 422CrossRefGoogle Scholar: Chirot, Daniel, ed., The Crisis of Leninism and the Decline of the Left: The Revolutions of 1989 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), passim.Google Scholar

23 To see how civil society theory impairs an appropriate characterization of major parts of the transition, one may read Lewin's book on social changes in the Soviet Union that led to the Gorbachev revolution. On the one hand, Lewin, on the basis of his informative study, contends that ‘The usual antithesis of “state” versus “society” may be inadequate when one wants to explore relations between the two’ in the post-Stalin era. On the other hand he still tries to use the civil society concept to generalize his empirical findings and thus is caught in a self-contradiction. He writes: ‘By “civil society”, we refer to the aggregate of networks and institutions that either exist and act independently of the state or are official organizations capable of developing their own, spontaneous views on national or local issues and then impressing these views on their members, on small groups and, finally, on the authorities … The concept of civil society operating in the very fortress of statism – among broad layers of officials, political opinion makers, and the party apparatus – challenges conventional thinking about the Soviet state’ (The Gorbachev Phenomenon, p. 80Google Scholar; emphasis added). It is clear that what Lewin describes here is largely institutional manipulation and conversion.

24 I question the value of the civil society schema as a generally applicable analytic tool in explaining transition from communism, but do not question its value as a normative ideal and as a political-strategic concept in the same setting. A notion that has great normative and political appeals to a society does not necessarily have a great explanatory power to that society.

25 Inkeles, Alex, Social Change in the Soviet Russia (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971), p. 419.Google Scholar

26 Kelly, David and Baogang, He, ‘Emergent Civil Society and the Intellectuals in China’Google Scholar, in Miller, , ed., The Developments of Civil Society in Communist Systems, pp. 24–39, quotation on p. 29.Google Scholar

27 Strand, David, ‘Protest in Beijing: Civil Society and Public Sphere in China’, Problems of Communism, 5–6 (1990), 1–19, p. 18.Google Scholar

28 In the following discussions I cite evidence mainly from practitioners of civil society theory, in order to show the discrepancy between the theory they are using and the reality they are dealing with.

29 Skilling, , Samizdat and an Independent Society in Central and Eastern Europe, p. 38.Google Scholar

30 Frentzel-Zagorska, , ‘Civil Society in Poland and Hungary’, p. 766; emphasis added.Google Scholar

31 Hosking, , The Awakening of the Soviet Union, p. 45.Google Scholar

32 Hankiss, Elemer, ‘The “Second Society”: Is There an Alternative Social Model Emerging in Contemporary Hungary?’ Social Research, 55 (1988), 13–42, p. 31. Emphasis added.Google Scholar

33 Hann, C. M., ed., Market Economy and Civil Society in Hungary (London: Frank Cass, 1990), p. 19.Google Scholar

34 See Hosking, , The Awakening of the Soviet Union, pp. 63–75Google Scholar; Miller, , Toward a More Civil Society?, pp. 27–35.Google Scholar

35 Ekiert, G., ‘Transitions from State-Socialism in East Central Europe’, States and Social Structures Newsletter, 12 (1990), 1–7, p. 3.Google Scholar

36 Frentzel-Zagorska, , ‘Civil Society in Poland and Hungary’, p. 761.Google Scholar

37 Judt, Tony, ‘The Dilemmas of Dissidence: The Politics of Opposition in East-Central Europe’, Eastern European Politics ami Societies, 2 (1988), no. 2, 185–240, p. 201.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a detailed study of the interaction in Hungary, see Seleny, Anna, ‘Hidden Enterprise, Property Rights Reform and Political Transformation in Socialist Hungary’ (doctoral thesis, Department of Political Science, MIT, 1993).Google Scholar

38 Hankiss, , ‘The “Second Society”’, p. 35.Google Scholar

39 Hosking, , The Awakening of the Soviet Union, p. 17.Google Scholar

40 The Economist, 4 01 1992, pp. 40–1.Google Scholar

41 For more details of the research, see Ding, X. L., The Decline of Communism in China: Legitimacy Crisis, 1977–1989 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

42 Lewin, , The Gorbachev Phenomenon, pp. 147–8.Google Scholar

43 Remington, Thomas F., ‘Regime Transition in Communist Systems: The Soviet Case’, Soviet Economy, 6 (1990), 160–90, p. 179.Google Scholar

44 Walder, Andrew G., Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Shue, Vivienne, The Reach of the State: Sketches of the Chinese Body Politic (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988).Google Scholar

45 Walder, Andrew G., ‘The Political Sociology of the Beijing Upheaval of 1989’, Problems of Communism, 38 (1989), nos. 9–10, 30–40Google Scholar; Saich, Tony, ed., The Chinese People's Movement: Perspectives on Spring 1989 (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1990)Google Scholar; Jakobson, Linda, ‘“Lies in Ink, Truth in Blood”: The Role and Impact of the Chinese Media During the Beijing Spring of'89’ (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University JFK School of Government, Discussion Paper D–6, 1990).Google Scholar

46 Quoted from China's leading critical journalist Liu Binyan's public speeches at Harvard University late in 1988.

47 See Link, Perry, Evening Chats in Beijing: Probing China's Predicament (New York: Norton, 1992), pp. 249–90.Google Scholar

48 See Harding, Harry, China's Second Revolution: Reform after Mao (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institute, 1987)Google Scholar; Lee, Hong Yung, From Revolutionary Cadres to Party Technocrats in Socialist China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).Google Scholar

49 A term borrowed from Walder, , Communist Neo-Traditionalism, pp. 123ff.Google Scholar

50 On these results, see Davis, Deborah and Vogel, Ezra F., eds, Chinese Society on the Eve of Tiananmen (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Council on East Asian Studies Publications, 1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

51 Bonnin, Michel and Chevrier, Yves, ‘The Intellectual and the State: Social Dynamics of Intellectual Autonomy During the Post-Mao Era’, China Quarterly, 127 (1991), 569–93, p. 577.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

52 The following is based on my interviews in the United States with four Chinese ecocomic researchers who participated in policy-making processes in China during the 1980s and on my fieldwork in China during 1993.

53 These businesses won the nickname of ‘red-hat enterprises’.

54 Strand, , ‘Protest in Beijing’, p. 12Google Scholar; Yang, Mayfair Mei-hui, ‘Between State and Society: The Construction of Corporateness in a Chinese Socialist Factory’, Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, 20 (1989), 31–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar: Huang, Philip C. C., ‘“Public Sphere”/“Civil Society” in China?’ Modern China, 19 (1993), 216–40, pp. 234–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For detailed accounts of institutional amphibiousness in China's economic realm, see the following studies, though the term ‘institutional amphibiousness’ has never been used: Oi, Jean C., ‘Commercializing China's Rural Cadres’, Problems of Communism, 9/10 (1986). 1–15Google Scholar, and ‘Market Reforms and Corruption in Rural China’, Studies in Comparative Communism, 22 (1989), 221–33Google Scholar; Solinger, Dorothy, ‘Urban Entrepreneurs and the State: The Merger of State and Society’, in Rosenbaum, A., ed., State and Society in China: The Consequences of Reform (Boulder, Colo. Westview, 1992), pp. 121–41Google Scholar; Liu, Yia-ling, ‘Reform from Below: The Private Economy and Local Politics in the Rural Industrialization of Wenzhou’, China Quarterly, 130 (1992), 293–316CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wank, David, ‘The Expansion of the Private Economy in China’ (unpublished paper, Department of Sociology, Harvard University).Google Scholar

55 Bendix, et al. , ‘Reflections on Modern Western States and Civil Societies’, pp. 12–13.Google Scholar

56 Rigby, T. H., ‘The USSR: End of a Long, Dark Night?’Google Scholar in Miller, , ed., The Developments of Civil Society in Communist Systems, pp. 11–23, at p. 15.Google Scholar

57 Jowitt, , ‘The Concepts of Liberalization, Integration, and Rationalization’, p. 82.Google Scholar

58 See a graphic account of the phenomenon in communist Eastern Europe by Václav Havel in Benda, Václav et al. , ‘Parallel Polis, or an Independent Society in Central and Eastern Europe’, Social Research, 55 (1988), nos. 1–2, 211–46, pp. 233–4.Google Scholar

59 Nathan, Andrew J., China's Crisis: Dilemmas of Reform and Prospects for Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 5–6.Google Scholar

60 EEPS, ‘A Survey of Opinion on the East European Revolution’, East European Politics and Societies, 4 (1990), 153–207, p. 155.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

61 For instance, in a recent article designed to summarize the transformation of Soviet-type regimes in accordance to the ‘civil society versus the state’ model, Weigle and Butterfield state that ‘Unable to freely choose representatives to the state and thus to influence policy or pursue private interests in a legally protected public sphere, those individuals in society who did not accept the regime's domination of public association and participation either withdrew into the private life of the family or developed alternative, underground networks of association and participation’ (‘Civil Society in Reforming Communist Regimes’, p. 4Google Scholar). The authors fail to see that besides these two alternatives, there was a third strategy: to manipulate official and semi-official structures for anti-system purposes.

62 This does not mean that the Chinese opposition were not seeking legal protection for their associational freedom. They tried several times, but were rejected by the government. We are not discussing their wishes here, but the political reality they had to face and within which they operated.

63 Remington, , ‘Regime Transition in Communist Systems’, pp. 177 and 184.Google Scholar

64 Based on interviews and conversations with participants in two conferences in Paris in June and September 1989, most of whom were activists of the Spring 1989 Movement.

65 A Japan specialist has coined the term ‘the societal state’ to distinguish the Japanese state from its Western counterpart, see Okimoto, Daniel I. and Rohlen, Thomas P., eds, Inside the Japanese System (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988), p. 211.Google Scholar

66 See. for example. Wakeman, Frederic Jr, ‘The Civil Society and Public Sphere Debate’. Modern China, 19 (1993), 108–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Huang, , ‘“Public Sphere”/“Civil Society” in China?’. Modern China, 19 (1993), 216–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wade, Robert, Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Johnson, Chalmers, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925–75 (Palo Alto. Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1982)Google Scholar: van Wolferen, Karel, The Enigma of Japanese Power (New York: Vintage, 1990).Google Scholar