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Strategies of Policy Implementation: Policy “Winds” and Brigade Accounting in Rural China, 1968–1978

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

David Zweig
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In this paper, I examine two key relationships relevant to the comparative study of policy implementation. The first is the linkage between the structure of elites, techniques of mobilization, and local policy implementation. Although many studies of elites have emphasized the effects of integration on political stability, they have only recently addressed the question of how elite integration affects policy implementation. More specifically, how does the existence of elites that are deeply divided over policy issues affect the power capabilities and opportunities of those elites and, therefore, the methods they employ to mobilize support for their policies? And how do these techniques affect the pattern

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , January 1985 , pp. 267 - 293
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1985

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References

1 The data on the local response to brigade accounting were collected during approximately 200 interviews that took place between September and November 1980 in Hong Kong, and between December 1980 and July 1981 in Beijing and in three brigades in different parts of rural Nanjing Municipality, Jiangsu Province. The complete interview data are available from the author.

2 The best analysis of the literature on the relationship between elite integration and political stability is Putnam, Robert D., The Comparative Study of Political Elites (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976)Google Scholar.

3 See Grindle, Merilee S., ed., Politics and Policy Implementation in the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 3–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Cynthia McClintock's chapter on Peru in this volume, pp. 64–97. For the best analysis of this relationship in Chinese politics, see Pye, Lucian, The Dynamics of Chinese Politics (Cambridge, MA: Oelgeschlager, Gunn & Hain, 1981).Google Scholar

4 See Anderson, Charles W., “The Latin American Political System,” in Uphoff, Norman T. and Ilchman, Warren F., eds., The Political Economy of Development (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 171Google Scholar; cited in Grindle (fn. 3), 12.

5 Grindle suggests that both policy “context” and “content” are crucial variables for explaining policy implementation. See Ibid., 8–10. For an adaptation of that approach to policy implementation in China, see Zweig, David, “Content and Context in Policy Implementation: Household Contracts in China, 1977–1983,” in M. Lampton, David, ed., Policy Implementation in the Post-Mao Era (forthcoming, 1985).Google Scholar

6 See Lowi, Theodore J., “American Business, Public Policy, Case Studies, and Political Theory,” World Politics 16 (July 1964), 677–715.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 For a discussion of compliance and control in bureaucracies, see Kaufman, Herbert, Administrative Feedback: Monitoring Subordinate Behavior (Washington, D.C.: The Brooking Institution, 1973).Google Scholar

8 For an analysis of how local environment led to different patterns of policy implementation in the American context, see Greenstone, J. David and Peterson, Paul E., Race and Authority in Urban Politics: Community Participation and the War on Poverty (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1973).Google Scholar

9 For an analysis of people's communes after the Great Leap Forward, see Ahn, Byung-joon, Chinese Politics and the Cultural Revolution (Seattle: University of Washington Press 1976)Google Scholar. The best description of the functions of the various levels of the people's communes around 1975 is Crook, Fredrick W., “The Commune System in the People's Republic of China, 1963–74,” in U.S. Congress, Joint Economic Committee, China: A Reassessment of the Economy, 94th Cong., 1st sess. (Washington: G.P.O., 1975), 366–410.Google Scholar

10 Ibid., 338.

11 Guofeng, Hua, Mobilize the Whole Party to Develop Agriculture and Struggle to Generate Emulation of Dazhai Counties (in Chinese) (Beijing: Renmin chuban she, 1975), 25Google Scholar. Translations are by the author of this article unless otherwise noted.

12 A similar shift from collective farms (kolkhoz) to a higher level of socialist ownership in the state farm (sovkhoz) was also part of the Soviet Union's vision of Utopia. See Gilison, James A., The Soviet Image of Utopia (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975)Google Scholar

13 See Domes, Jurgen, Socialism in the Chinese Countryside (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1980)Google Scholar. See also Zweig, David, “Agrarian Radicalism in China, 1968–1978: The Search for a Social Base,” Ph.D. diss. (University of Michigan, 1983)Google Scholar, chap. 3.

14 See Gottlieb, Thomas, Chinese Foreign Policy Factionalism and the Origins of the Strategic Triangle (Santa Monica, Calif.: The Rand Corporation, 1973)Google Scholar, and Lieberthal, Kenneth, “The Foreign Policy Debate in Peking as Seen Through Allegorical Articles, 1973–1976,” China Quarterly, No. 71 (September 1977), 528–54.Google Scholar

15 See Lieberthal, Kenneth, with Tong, James and Yeung, Sai-cheung, Central Documents and Politburo Politics in China (Ann Arbor: Michigan Papers in Chinese Studies, No. 33, 1978).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Hua Guofeng (fn. 11), 25.

17 Chunqiao, Zhang, On Exercising Ail-Round Dictatorship Over the Bourgeoisie (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1975)Google Scholar. I was told about Zhang's various activities in an interview at the Institute of Agricultural Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in April 1981.

18 See People's Daily, March 20, 1979; Shaanxi Daily, January 21, 1979; and Hubei Daily, January 21, 1979.

19 Information given in a lecture on the Chinese countryside by a professor in the Economics Department at Nanjing University, March 12, 1981.

20 In 1977–1978, before central leaders made unofficial speeches to rally support for “house hold production quotas” or tried out official “test points,” Anhui's use of this remuneration system became known in Nanjing and stirred up a “horizontal wind.” Local leaders who did not like it, ignored it; those who supported it, tried it out. See Zweig, David, “Implementing the System of Responsibility: Central Policy and Local Response,” Conference on Bureaucracy and Rural Development in China, S.S.R.C. Joint Committee on Contemporary China, Chicago, August 26–30, 1981.Google Scholar

21 See Chang, Parris, Power and Policy in China (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975).Google Scholar

22 See Domes, Jurgen, China After the Cultural Revolution (London: C. Hurst, 1975)Google Scholar, chap. 2.

23 Pye (fn. 3), 15.

24 Zhejiang Daily, November 29, 1978, p. 3.

25 Ibid.

26 Shaanxi Daily, January 10, 1979, p. 1.

27 The Dazhai Brigade, in Xiyang County, Shanxi Province, played a crucial role during the entire period. It first became famous in 1964 when Zhou Enlai called on all Chinese peasants to learn from the Dazhai peasants' “communist spirit” of hard work and selfreliance. In the late 1960s, it became a model for many of the radical policies. In 1975, at the First National Conference on Learning from Dazhai in Agriculture, Xiyang County, where Dazhai is located, became a national model as attention shifted to strengthening the county party committee's role in organizing rural development. In 1976, however, the Gang of Four criticized Dazhai Brigade and the Dazhai Movement for its excessive attention to economic development at the expense of ideological development. See Friedman, Edward, “The Politics of Local Models, Social Transformation and State Power Struggles in the People's Republic of China: Tachai and Teng Hsiao-p'ing,” China Quarterly, No. 76 (December 1978), 873–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 Mao blamed the 1959 “communist wind” during the Great Leap Forward (which led to expropriation of private and team property) on overzealous commune and county cadres. See “Speech at Lushan Conference,” in Schram, Stuart R., ed., Mao Tse-tung Unrehearsed: Talks and Letters, 1956–71 (London: Penguin, 1974), 134.Google Scholar

29 Zhejiang Daily (in. 24), 3.

30 My thanks to Marc Blecher who shared his interview protocol with me.

31 See People's Daily, January 10, 1979 and February 10, 1978.

32 Unger refers to a “milieu of activism,” from which I draw my sense of the “radical environment.” See Unger, Jonathan, “Collective Incentives in the Chinese Countryside: Lessons from Chen Village,” World Development 6 (1978), 583–601.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33 Union Research Institute, The Case ofP'eng Te-huai (Hong Kong, 1968)Google Scholar, 3.

34 See Stiefel, Matthias and Wertheim, W. F., Production, Equality and Participation in Rural China (London: Zed Press, 1983), 61–63Google Scholar, and Vemeer, Eduard B., “Social Welfare Provisions and the Limits of Inequality in Contemporary China,” Asian Survey 19 (No. 9, 1979), 858.Google Scholar

35 See Chinese Agricultural Yearbook (Beijing: Agricultural Publishing House, 1983), 6.Google Scholar

36 For a discussion of ecological fallacy, see Merritt, Richard L. and Rokkan, Stein, eds., Comparing Nations: The Use of Quantitative Data in Cross-National Research (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966).Google Scholar

37 See Zweig (fn. 13), 91.

38 See People's Daily, August 6, 1973.

39 Interview at the Agricultural Economics Institute, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, April 1981.

40 See Stiefel and Wertheim (fn. 35), 61.

41 See Friedman (fn. 27).

42 People's Daily, April 4, 1979.

43 See People's Daily, November 28, 1978.

44 Other requirements enumerated to me in interviews in China in 1981 included relative inter-team equality, mass support, and a sound brigade economy.

45 The data were collected by Michel Oksenberg and first used by Teiwes, Frederick C. in “Provincial Politics in China: Themes and Variations,” in Lindbeck, John M. H., ed., China: Management of a Revolutionary Society (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971) 116–89.Google Scholar

46 People's Daily, November 28, 1978.

47 Hubei Daily, January 21, 1979.

48 Nee, Victor, “Peasant Household Individualism,” in Parish, William, ed., China's Rural Development: Evolving Issues (Armonk, NY: Praeger, 1985).Google Scholar

49 People's Daily, March 20, 1979, p. 2.

50 See People's Daily, January 4, 1979.

51 Hubei Daily, January 21, 1979, p. 1.

52 See Bachrach, Peter and Baratz, Morton, “The Two Faces of Power,” American Political Science Review 56 (December 1962), 947–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

53 “Brigades and Teams: Survey of a Commune (iii),” Peking Review 12 (March 18, 1966).Google Scholar

54 For an analysis of “formalism” in policy implementation, see Zweig (fn. 13), 316–23. In Zambia, Quick found the local response to the “ideological” program to establish rural cooperatives to be formalistic. See Quick, Stephen A., “The Paradox of Popularity: ‘Ideological’ Program Implementation in Zambia,” in GrindleGoogle Scholar (fn. 3), 50.

55 Information was supplied by Marc Blecher who, with Vivienne Shue and Steve and Phyllis Andors, visited this brigade in 1979. It was also the focus of a report in Beijing Review, 14 April 1980.

56 Mao Zedong Sixiang Wansui [Long live Mao Zedong thought] Ogura, Yoshihiko, ed. (Tokyo: Tashu-kan, 1967), 192.Google Scholar

57 See Starr, John, Continuing the Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 277Google Scholar, and Huntington, Samuel, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 8–12.Google Scholar

58 See Parish, William, “China: Commune, Brigade or Team?” Problems of Communism 25 (March-April 1976).Google Scholar

59 Unger (fn. 32), 398.

60 Interviews in Hong Kong and rural Nanjing.

61 The best discussion on how teams used economic incentives to develop collective loyalty from the peasants is Unger (fn. 32).

62 Lowi (fn. 6).

63 Dahrendorf, , Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1959)Google Scholar. For an application of this theory to China's Cultural Revolution, see Tsou, Tang, “The Cultural Revolution and the Chinese Political System,” China Quarterly, No. 38 (April-June 1968), 63–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

64 See Lane, David, Politics and Society in the USSR (New York: New York University Press, 1980), 409.Google Scholar

65 Quick (fn. 54), 45.

66 See Valenzuela, Arturo, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Chile (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982)Google Scholar. Another study looking at unofficial policy formation by a small group within a ruling elite is Schneidmann, Laurence, Atomic Energy Policy in France Under the Fourth Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965).Google Scholar

67 See Downs, Anthony, Inside Bureaucracy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chaps, II and 12.

68 68 Kaufman (fn. 7).

69 Ibid., 4.