Organizer: Stephen B. Herschler, University of Chicago
Chair: Elizabeth J. Perry, University of California, Berkeley
Discussant: Prasenjit Duara, University of Chicago
Bridging the 1949 divide, this panel argues that the central governments in the Republican and post-Mao eras both display a far greater impact on local political, administrative, and social organizations than generally posited. In so doing, it challenges images of political disunity and chaos used to characterize the Chinese state for much of the 20th century. Significant transformations in the role of the state have occurred over the century, but irrespective of the state's ideological inclinations, national political consolidation and local institutional permeation have remained a critical part of its agenda. Focusing on local affairs from the Warlord era to Dengist reforms, these interdisciplinary papers reveal the state's surprising capacity to expand its presence-even at times of presumed disunity.
The panel's four papers contribute to an understanding of the state's salience and expanding influence in these periods. Fung re-examines central-local relations in Warlord China, finding that provincial warlords benefited from cooperation with Beijing. Reeves uses the Chinese Red Cross to illustrate how local initiative sought to enlist the government in its activities. Remick shows Republican and post-Mao China to evince similar processes of state building at the county level. Herschler argues that in the post-1992 socialist market economy, an increasingly invasive center still delimits the role of local government. Whether serving as arbiter, ally, or institutional hegemon, the state has repeatedly found means to assert its prerogatives and play a key role in shaping local level social and political activities.
The Warlord Model Revisited: A Study of Center-Province Relations in the Early
Republican Period, With Special Reference to Guangdong, 1916-1919
Allen Fung, Harvard University
My presentation deals with center-province relations in the early Republican period. In particular I focus on the relationship between Beijing and Guangdong in the period 1916-1919. I argue that contrary to conventional wisdom, the death of Yuan Shikai did not witness the disintegration of China into autonomous blocs. In the case of Guangdong, the ties between the province and center were in fact strengthened after Yuan's death in 1916, and for good reasons. Beijing enhanced its claim of legitimacy with Guangdong's allegiance, and Guangdong gained a great deal, especially financially, from its relationship with Beijing. I will seek to examine in-depth what kind of relationship it was for both sides.
I argue that this wish of the Guangdong warlord Lu Rongting to cooperate with Beijing continued well into the hufa (protect-the-constitution) movement initiated by Sun Yatsen, who established a rival government in Guangzhou in late 1917 in response to Duan Qirui's attempt to revise the constitution. This was why even though Lu could easily have used the hufa as a pretext to detach Guangdong from Beijing and assert complete independence, he did not do so. As I will show, this was because he saw the advantages of aligning himself with Beijing, and it was also because, ironically, he saw Sun Yatsen as a far greater threat to his rule than Beijing was.
Coopting the State: Philanthropy and Local Government in Republican China
Caroline Reeves, Harvard University
This paper offers an insight into relations between state and social institutions from the non-state perspective. Focusing on a voluntary organization at the county level, I use the Chinese Red Cross Society archives to reveal the collaborative nature of popular participation in local and national charitable efforts, and the strength of local initiative in reaching out to the state. Although social historians have often suggested an oppositional relationship between government and non-official groups during the Republican period, my work argues that many of these groups actually "coopted" the government, taking advantage of official resources and prestige in a mutually beneficial relationship with the state.
Founded in 1904, the Chinese Red Cross Society actively enlisted the support of national and local governments, quickly expanding its charitable organization across China. By 1928 over 300 branch Societies were located in major cities and small towns. Against the background of these operations, this paper will focus on an incident in Funing County, Jiangsu, where a Red Cross chapter was closed down by the county head in late 1927. Local merchants banded together to petition the central government to reopen the chapter, citing the good works the group had performed in the area over a decade. The merchants called on the central government as the legal representative of the people to reinstate the charitable organization in their county. An examination of this incident helps concretize frequently under-specified conceptual issues, such as what does 'the state' mean, who is 'society,' and where state and society actually interact.
Cadres, Clerks and Tax Farmers: Building County-level Taxation and Public Finance
Institutions in Nanjing-decade and Post-Mao China
Elizabeth J. Remick, University of Oregon
Scholars of both Republican-era China and post-Mao China have tended to emphasize the political fragmentation and state retreat that they see in both periods. Through a county-level comparison of taxation and public finance institutions in two different regions (Tianjin/Hebei and Guangdong) during the years 1927-1937 and 1982-1992, this paper will argue that this emphasis is overstated. With cooperation from local leaders, county-level tax and finance organizations were growing larger and more complex, reaching downward, and taking on new tasks as they sought to, and indeed did, increase their revenues. Moreover, they did so at the urging of the province and the center.
In this paper, I will discuss similarities in the ways that county governments, with direction from above, tried to obtain increased revenues. In both periods, the counties were searching for new institutions to extract revenues from dispersed, difficult-to-regulate populations and local economies. The Republican solution was to intensify bureaucratization while continuing to rely on local elites to do the work of tax collectors. The result was often that local elite tax farmers were transformed into bureaucrats. The post-Mao era solution was to establish sub-county bureaucracies to collect commercial taxes, and to continue relying on a separate network of officials, village cadres, to collect the land tax. In both cases, institutional expansion was shaped, but not stymied, by local elites who had ambiguous relations with the revenue-extraction apparatus.
Raiding the Nest: State-County Relations in a Socialist Market Economy
Stephen B. Herschler, University of Chicago
This paper examines post-1992 moves toward a 'socialist market economy' and their impact on state-county relations. The new policies represent a proactive move by the central government to preserve its institutional and fiscal prerogatives.
Comparing post-reform institutional practices with the nested form of government practiced in the 1980s highlights the recent changes. "Nested governance" refers to an administrative system in which each administrative level worked within a sphere of institutional and economic discretionary power granted and overseen by superordinate levels. The system was instantiated primarily through the fiscal and planning systems. The central government encompassed the whole in ideological, organizational, and fiscal frames. Affluent counties could use these frames to local advantage; poorer counties lacked the authority and financial resources to undertake much independent action. Neither, however, broke with or directly confronted these centrally imposed frames.
Yet the current move to a market economy has brought ideological and administrative transformations. Active propaganda by the central government pushing the importance of 'market laws' has shifted central and local administrative identities away from nested conceptualizations and toward more zero-sum perceptions of interest as measured by economic criteria. Recent reforms seek to strengthen the state's influence on local affairs by increasing its ability to control and regulate. The 1994 tax reforms established a state tax bureau at the local level, giving the central government an added presence in the county. These new policies reveal the state reasserting its powers and adopting more invasive measures to increase its extractive capacity.