Organizer: Bruce J. Dickson, George Washington University
Chair: Victor Falkenheim, University of Toronto
Discussant: Kenneth Lieberthal, University of Michigan
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is beyond a doubt the single most important political institution in China. While much has been written of elite conflict and bargaining over policy within the party, very little information is available on this organization that has grown to over 50 million members in recent years. Its secretive nature has prevented detailed analysis of its membership and operations. Recent opportunities for field work and new sources of data, however, make it possible to investigate more fully the activities of the CCP. Whereas recent AAS conferences have included panels on Chinese politics that concentrate on the reform process or palace intrigue, there have been no panels devoted to the political and organizational activities of the party itself.
This panel focuses on the membership, organization, and operations of the CCP at both the central and local levels. Two of the papers (by Francis and O'Brien) are based on extensive field research, the former on the role of the party in state-owned enterprises, the latter on the party's interactions with other political organizations in rural villages. The other two papers take advantage of recently available archival material to investigate the internal operations of the party. Dickson uses new county gazetteers to examine changing patterns of recruitment of new party members and Schoenhals uses party archives to reveal the power of central offices responsible for the purges and punishment of central party and state leaders. Thus, the papers on this panel are all based on primary research and cover both rural and urban locales and central and local issues.
The chair of the panel (Falkenheim) and the discussant (Lieberthal) are internationally known experts on Chinese politics and the party in particular. Their involvement along with the paper writers will bring fresh insights into these understudied but essential aspects of contemporary Chinese politics.
Michael Schoenhals, Stockholm University
This paper deals with the secret Central Case Examination Small Group (Zhongyang zhuan'an shencha xiaozu) (CCESG), created by the CCP Politburo standing committee in May 1966 and disbanded in the spring of 1979, and its subsidiary network of so-called "case groups." The latter were ad hoc institutions responsible for the investigation, interrogation, and punishment of countless CCP officials (including Liu Shaoqi, Lin Biao's generals, and the "Gang of Four") and persons with suspected links to such officials.
The CCESG represents a seriously under-studied aspect of the CCP in power. It was the apex of a nationwide supralegal organization that for more than a decade enjoyed even more unlimited power than the Soviet Union's notorious Cheka. At one point, its Third Office macro-managed the investigation of no less than 10 million so-called "May 16th Elements" suspected of opposing Premier Zhou Enlai and the PLA. Of these "elements," 3.5 million were eventually arrested. Yet Western scholarly writings on China hardly mention the CCESG, much less comment upon it. In a first effort to remedy this, the paper will present in some detail the internal structure of the CCESG, its links to other party, government, and military institutions, its changing personnel, and the evolving day-to-day operating procedures of its subsidiary case groups. It will attempt a tentative analysis of how the existence and operation of the CCESG helped influence and shape the progress of the Cultural Revolution. In this context, it will take issue with much of the recent Western and Chinese literature on the Cultural Revolution which is dominated by uncritical chronicling of poorly understood events augmented with speculation about the psychological make-up of one or two exceptionally brutal and perverse individuals (e.g., Mao Zedong, Kang Sheng) and attempt to show that in-depth study of key CCP institutions like the CCESG remains a prerequisite for substantive, historically accurate, and morally convincing accounts of what happened in the Cultural Revolution.
Bruce J. Dickson, George Washington University
The single most important fact of China's political system during the latter half of the 20th century is that it is ruled by a communist party. Yet little is known about the composition of the party. Public announcements over the past decade about party membership state that on the whole the membership is getting younger and better educated, but little evidence is provided to substantiate these claims. Moreover, information about local variations from the national trends is scant. In short, we have little information about the more than 50 million members of the CCP.
This paper examines data from over 100 recently published county gazetteers (xianzhi) to examine trends in party recruitment at the local level between 1949-85, with particular emphasis on the post-Mao period. These gazetteers provide detailed demographic data on party members, including age distribution, level of education, profession, gender, and nationality. By comparing party membership with the total population of the county, it is also possible to determine where the party is most concentrated. These county-level data, unavailable in the past, make it possible for us to see how the composition of the party has changed over time in the aggregate and in individual counties, and how separate regions of the country differ from one another in regard to party membership. In particular, they reveal that although party members have generally become better educated in the post-Mao era, which is conducive to the economic development of the country, they have not become younger, which was also a goal of party policy.
Corinna Barbara Francis, Brown University
This paper explores the legacy-institutional, organizational, and behavioral-of the Chinese Communist Party in the industrial workplace; the obstacles these presented to the goals of economic reform; and the efforts and outcomes of the reform process. Contrary to general perception, I argue that the greatest obstacle which the institutional legacy of the party presented to reform was not a concentration of authority in an unyielding party organization, but rather the lack of formal authority, or what many enterprise managers called the "power of command." As a consequence, one of the greatest challenges to state reformers was the construction, rather than the dismantling, of an effective power structure. The paper explores how the state approached this task.
The paper further argues that the enterprise community did not perceive the reforms, at least initially, as bringing enhanced "autonomy" to the enterprise, but rather as aiming to reinvigorate the state's presence in the workplace through a more loyal, local state agent in the person of the "enterprise manager," and through the imposition of a new management style, set of operating principles, normative standards, leadership goals, etc. Rather than being essentially autonomous from the state, the new enterprise managers were to be the state's new, reinvigorated agents of a new social and political order in the workplace, even if they were given somewhat more autonomy in certain managerial decisions, such as investments, personnel, etc. Old party leaders-the state's old agents-responded to the threat in many cases through the strengthening of alliances with other groups within the workplace whose interests were also threatened by reform-most importantly, the workers. This conservative party-worker alliance was a major obstacle to the implementation of reforms in many enterprises.
Ultimately, the paper argues, the state's effort to sever the webs of community obligation within which enterprise leaders operate failed. New enterprise managers, despite the state's and often their own efforts, failed to acquire a new type of authority not grounded in community interests. This helps to explain the general failure of the structural and operational reform of state owned enterprises. Given this, "reform" now appears to have sunk to the level of the gradual severance of wages and the informal closure and bankruptcy of state-owned enterprises.
Kevin O'Brien, Ohio State University; Lianjiang Li, Ohio State University
This paper explores the dynamics of seeking audiences and lodging complaints at higher levels (shangfang gaozhuang). In it, we consider a range of activities, legal and illegal, that are both more open than typical "everyday forms of peasant resistance" and more channeled (and smaller in scale) than outright rebellion. We highlight the early critical stages of lodging a complaint, when a few individuals become aware of an opportunity to stand up to village cadres and exploit it. Relying on extensive interviews in one north China village (which we will call Wangjiacun), archival materials, and recent fieldwork in Fujian and Shandong, we focus on the parties involved: the individuals who defy grassroots cadres and initiate action, the villagers who wait and watch the situation develop, and the village cadres who are the principal targets. To a lesser extent, we also explore the role of various outsiders (township and county cadres, journalists, visiting work teams) as they enter the fray.
Important questions addressed include: What emboldened the Wangjiacun activists to organize and seek redress? How did they convince others to support them? How did they tilt the odds in their favor, and how did township officials respond? More generally, what can this and other similar cases tell us about the logic of popular action in China's countryside?
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