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An Exchange of Views about Basic Chinese Social Organization Review Essay: Transfigured Community: Neo-Traditionalism and Work Unit Socialism in China *

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Brantly Womack
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Extract

In the last decade a variety of local studies and more comprehensive works have shed light on basic-level Chinese politics and society, but Andrew Walder's book Communist Neo-Traditionalism has been the boldest and most influential in proposing a new paradigm for understanding the human realities of life and power in China. Although the empirical base of his study is the state industrial workplace in China, Walder claims that it is applicable to industrial relation in other communist countries, and his theory fits closely with Jean Oi's analysis of clientelism in rural areas.

Type
Research Article
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 126 , June 1991 , pp. 313 - 332
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1991

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References

1. Walder, Andrew, Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986)Google Scholar. Page references to this work will be in parentheses.

2. See Oi, Jean, State and Peasant in Contemporary China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989)Google Scholar, also her article, “Communism and clientelism: rural politics in China”, World Politics, Vol. 37, No. 2 (01 1985), pp. 238–266CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. Chirot, Daniel, review of Walder, Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 47, No. 1 (02 1988), pp. 134–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Gold, Thomas, review of Walder, Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 17, No. 1 (1988), pp. 171–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Jowitt, Ken, “Soviet neo-traditionalism: The political corruption of a Leninist regime”, Soviet Studies, Vol. 35, No. 3 (07 1983), pp. 275–297CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. Lowell Dittmer uses Jowitt's neo-traditionalism in this sense to describe Chinese politics in the 1980s. Dittmer, Lowell, China's Continuous Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 265–68Google Scholar.

7. White, Gordon, review of Walder, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 94, No. 4 (01 1989), pp. 886–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. For a usage in this sense see Lee, Peter N. S., “The Chinese industrial state in historical perspective”, in Womack, Brantly (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Politics in Historical Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

9. The detailing, however, is not up to Weberian standards. On p. 11 Walder promises to define communist neo-traditionalism by a list of “elements”, beginning with an employment relationship in which the labour force is considered permanent. The second element dissolves into a “set of features” of the workplace organization, including enterprise monopoly on public goods, the party's monopoly on organization, and the broad discretion of supervisors. These features (now called “elements”) give rise to “several other features… that complete the definition of the type”, namely clientelist control of the workforce by management, ensuing vertical networks of control which are divisive in the workplace, and horizontal patterns of relation and exchange (guanxi) by which non-loyalists try to meet their needs. Then Walder begins again on p. 13 by saying that communist neo-traditionalism “as an analytical type” is defined by two institutional features, firstly “organized dependence”, theeconomic, political and personal dependence of workers on enterprise authority, and secondly institutional culture, the patterns and strategies which emerge from dependence. The remainder of the introductory essay is structured in terms of the three forms of dependence and the resulting institutional culture.

10. See for instance Davis, Deborah, “Patrons and clients in Chinese industry”, Modern China, Vol. 14, No. 4 (10 1988), pp. 487–497, especially pp. 495–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11. Cf. pp. 102, 157.

12. Gold, loc cit.; Perry, Elizabeth, “State and society in contemporary China”, World Politics, Vol. 41, No. 4 (07 1989), pp. 579–591CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. “While in the past I have tended to stress the dependence of China's workers on the enterprise and management, China's reforms have highlighted the dependence of managers upon their permanent labour force. The absence of a labour market gives the current labour force a monopoly on the supply of labour”. Walder, Andrew, “Factory and manager in an era of reform”, The China Quarterly, No. 118 (1989), p. 252CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14. Yang, Mayfair Mei-hui, “Between state and society: the construction of corporateness in a Chinese socialist factory”, Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, No. 22 (07 1989), pp. 31–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. See Oi, Jean, State and Peasant; also Jonathan Unger's critique of Shue in his “State and peasant in post-Revolution China”, The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 17, No. 1 (10 1989), pp. 114–136Google Scholar.

16. Chirot, Daniel, review of Walder, p. 135Google Scholar.

17. See the gruesome tales of mass firings in East German factories in Kirbach, Roland, “Die alten, neuen Herren: In den Betrieben haben heute die Direktoren mehr Macht denn je”, Die Zeit 1990, No. 16 (13 04), p. 30Google Scholar.

18. Totalitarianism became the dominant mode of analysis of communism in the early 1950s in response to Stalinism, the Gleichschaltung ofEastern European “people's republics”, and the western intellectual rearmament of the Cold War. A classic of this period is Friedrich, Carl J. (ed.), Totalitarianism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Although not usually going so far as adopting an interest group approach, experts gradually distanced themselves from the paradigm as they became more aware of the nuances of communist politics. T. H. Rigby expressed well a common attitude: “… it is scarcely open to dispute that communist systems are dominated bya single highly centralized party, which tolerates no opposition, which directs all the institutions of society, and which had its origins in Marxist-Leninist doctrines and continues to justify all its actions in termsof these terms. Yet… the reality of political legitimation in communist countries is considerably more complex”. Rigby, T. H. and Feher, Ferenc (eds.), Political Legitimation in Communist States (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982), p. 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The concept of totalitarianism has experienced a renaissance with the political transformations of Eastern Europe, now as the “putrescent beast” upon whose grave the democratic revolutionaries dance. See Paul, Ellen Frankel (ed.), Totalitarianism at the Crossroads (London: Transaction Books, 1990), p. 4Google Scholar. But it is not clear that the new political utility adds to its analytical merit.

19. Crozier, Michel, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964)Google Scholar.

20. A good counterpart to Crozier's repairman is Oi's description of how everyone tries to please the tractor driver because he determines which field gets ploughed first. Oi, , State and Peasant, p. 112Google Scholar.

21. Blecher, Marc, review of Walder, Pacific Affairs, Vol. 60, No. 4 (Winter 1987–1988), p. 658Google Scholar.

22. Ibid. pp. 659–660.

23. A personal aside: After presenting this paper to the Faculty of Oriental Studies of Cambridge University I did personal fieldwork there in neo-traditional (actually preserved feudal) workplace-relatedbenefits, and found them all quite pleasant.

24. See Womack, Brantly, “The Chinese party-state”, Problems of Communism (1990), No. 5 (09 10)Google Scholar.

25. The printing co-operative studied by Mayfair Yang can be used as a limit case of its applicability.

26. The exception proves the rule. Cases of removal are based on political allegations involving challenge to authority, but such cases are very rare. A comprehensive study of urban residents found that 94% of urban adults experienced no personal political difficulties under the PRC, and only 0.3% hadbeen fired for political reasons. Whyte, Martin and Parish, William, Urban Life in Contemporary China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 280Google Scholar.

27. Shue, Vivienne, The Reach of the State: Sketches of the Chinese Body Politic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

28. This is well illustrated by Brigade Secretary Ye's outlook in Shumin, Huang, The Spiral Road (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989), especially by the case on pp. 107–109Google Scholar.

29. Davis details the importance of some of these in her criticisms of Walder, especially pp. 491–93, and the complex interaction of these factors leaps out of any concrete case study.

30. This is rooted in purely rational calculus. As Axelrod has observed in the context of international politics, the optimal game-theoretic stratagem in an indefinite series of games is to begin with co-operation. A small, stable group presents the situation of an indefinite number of indefinite series of games. Axelrod, Robert, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984)Google Scholar.

31. Cf. Blecher, Marc and White, Gordon, Micropolitics in Contemporary China (White Plains, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32. Scott, James C., Weapons of the Weak (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

33. This is well described in Chan, Anita, Madsen, Richard and Unger, Jonathan, Chen Village (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)Google Scholar, and also Huang, , The Spiral Road, pp. 69–86Google Scholar.

34. This is developed at some length in Yang, Mayfair, “The gift economy and state power in China”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 31, No. 1 (1989), pp. 25–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35. Walder, , “Factory and manager”, pp. 260–62Google Scholar.

36. Peter Nan-shong Lee, “The Chinese industrial state in historical perspective”.

37. This is well described in Lukes, Steven, Emile Durkheim (London: Allan Lane, 1973), pp. 138–167Google Scholar. The following is based on his analysis.

38. This was brought to my attention in a postgraduate research paper by Li Wei.

39. The World Bank, China: Socialist Economic Development, 3 vols. (Washington: The World Bank, 1983)Google Scholar.

40. Hirschman, A. O., Exit, Voice and Loyalty (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970)Google Scholar.

41. This is the basic “prisoner's dilemma” in game theory. If the game series has an end, then co-operation ceases to be the rational choice.

42. Unger, Jonathan, “State and peasant”, pp. 134–35Google Scholar. This process can be seen in Huang's The Spiral Road.