How Constant Has China's Bureaucratic Practice Remained?

The 1980s reform era created the impression of major change in the way China was governed. In part, those perceived changes were substantive and important. As was noted above, for example, the reforms significantly redistributed flows of information in the system and greatly reduced the role of ideology as a factor in structuring policy formation and implementation. But there is a danger of exaggerating the changes that the reforms produced in China's bureaucratic practice. As figures 1.1 and 1.2 highlight, the system has moved only very partially in the directions sought by the reformers.

Clearly, there have been important continuities as well as changes. The fundamental structure of the Chinese bureaucratic system that was established in the 1950s, for example, remains in place to the present and continues to exert tremendous influence on policy process. Mao Zedong himself altered the scope of authority of the various bureaucratic clusters over time in his quest to keep the political system responsive to his desires. Deng Xiaoping and his reform-minded colleagues continued this practice by considerably enhancing the resources and authority of the economic cluster at considerable cost to the organization/personnel, propaganda/education, coercive, and Party territorial clusters. At the beginning of the

1990s it appears that hard-liners may attempt to increase the resources of the five "losing" clusters of the reform era as part of their strategy for building support for turning back some reform initiatives. While all of these efforts have redistributed authority and resources, none has fundamentally changed the nature of the system. The "losing" clusters during each period remain in the wings as potential resources for political contenders who seek a change of course.

A number of additional factors make it difficult to judge the extent to which bureaucratic practice under Mao differed from the findings presented in this volume. For the Maoist era, we obviously lack the kind of detailed studies based on direct access that are contained here. In addition, the Chinese media were far less informative about this earlier period than they became during the 1980s. And many Chinese interviewees, acting in the best of faith, nevertheless tend to recall past situations in conformity with the current official views concerning those previous periods. Thus, the 1980s demonology concerning the Maoist era has affected recapitulations of decision making during that era.

Even the extent of pressures for change effected by the 1980s reformers is not unprecedented in the PRC. The Chinese reforms beginning in the late 1970s sought changes in important areas: bureaucratic organization, the scope of responsibility and definition of tasks of key bureaucracies, the distribution of bureaucratic resources, and the nature of the process by which decisions are made. In broad terms, the reform leadership of the country tried to make the system less personalized, less ideological, less centralized, and more sensitive to economic rewards for greater efficiency and dynamism.^[39]

But the bureaucracies under Mao also had to adapt to very different environments in terms of the intensity of ideological pressure,^[40] the openness to the outside world (i.e., to the USSR and Eastern Europe during the 1950s),^[41] the decision-making models they should follow,^[42] fiscal and budgetary environments,^[43] and so forth. In short, pressures for change of this magnitude have been a recurrent feature of China's

bureaucratic world.^[44] As is detailed in this volume, moreover, the 1980s reforms achieved only part of their ambitious agenda for change.

The question concerning the extent to which the bureaucratic world detailed in this volume also characterized the Maoist period must, therefore, remain unanswered. Significant changes have undoubtedly occurred in some aspects of policy process, especially since the role of ideology in the system has diminished greatly and the reforms appear to have significantly flattened bureaucratic hierarchies. But there may be more continuity than we assume, and researchers should keep this possibility in mind as they undertake further studies on the Maoist era.

The system as described and analyzed in this volume probably will remain more constant in the future than changes in elite-level political rhetoric might suggest. It is made clear, for example, that, while there is no constitutional or even normative bar to the central leadership's radically altering the distribution of authority crafted by its predecessors, this would require either that one leader emerge as a new strongman or that strong agreement be reached among all the top leaders that the system should move in this new direction. Without such agreement, policy decisions will lack the clarity, consistency, and detail that are necessary to bring a high probability of lower-level compliance. Without such agreement at the very top, to put it differently, there is apt to be widespread sabotage of national directives by officials at each subnational level. If the top-level initiatives move the system toward a more centralized system producing less information, moreover, then lower levels will be in a position quietly to achieve greater degrees of freedom through manipulation of information that goes to the leadership. In short, by focusing on fundamental structure and process, we examine here factors that indicate that the Chinese system is not nearly as malleable as are the dynamics of political contention at the apex of the system.

At the time of this writing there is a possibility that China will experience dramatic political change in the coming years. The factors under scrutiny here are of such a fundamental nature, however, that to some extent any successor system is likely to embody many of the features and dynamics that are discussed in these pages. Major changes would, of course, be evident, but the issues explored would very likely retain significant salience even if leaders who reject communism were to govern China.