The Starting Point: The "Fragmented Authoritarianism" Model

Just as the reform era itself created opportunities for intensive research on Chinese bureaucratic practice, the content of the reforms influenced the specific research agenda in important ways. Decentralization of decision-making authority was a key reform initiative, and much research sought to understand better the dynamics of a system in which Beijing seeks to work with lower levels rather than to dictate to them.

There are, in broad terms, three dimensions to the study of decentralization and centralization: value integration; structural distribution of resources and authority; and processes of decision making and policy implementation.^[16] These three dimensions are not mutually exclusive, but they do highlight different aspects of the system under scrutiny. The "fragmented authoritarianism," explained below, focuses especially on the latter two dimensions.

Values can provide a strong basis for integration of policy making and implementation. In China under Mao, for example, the top leaders used massive doses of ideological indoctrination as a vehicle for achieving greater fidelity to the goals of the leaders even in the absence of informational and other resources adequate to assure the desired level of compliance. In contemporary Japan there is often sharp conflict in policy before a consensus has been reached, but the various parties to the decision

can then act with confidence in the knowledge that all concerned will obey the "consensus" decision once it has been made.^[17] Shared values, in short, can substantially affect the operations of a political system. Value consensus can basically reduce the need of the political leadership to develop additional resources to assure fidelity to their priorities and compliance with their policies.

Political structure, by contrast, examines the formal allocation of decision-making authority. Various political systems have, of course, adopted a very wide array of allocations of power, and significant structural variations may appear even in one political system over time. In China, for example, the government ministries exercised considerable power over the economy during the First Five-Year Plan of the mid 1950s, the Communist Party expanded its relative influence over the economy during the Great Leap Forward of 1958–61, and the military became a key decision-maker regarding the economy during the late 1960s. The reforms of the 1980s brought a significant devolution of budget-making authority (a process that had actually begun in earnest in 1971), with Party and government officials in major municipalities gaining greatly increased influence over economic decision making. These variations amounted to structural changes in the distribution of basic decision-making power in China's economic sphere.

In general, the structure of centralization and decentralization is highly complex. These terms encompass, for example, considerations about the span of control of various organs, the levels at which particular decisions are nested, the bases of resources of various players in the system, the degree of specificity that characterizes decisions, the amount of flexibility formally allowed in policy implementation, and so forth.^[18] The clarity with which organizational boundaries and decision-making procedures are specified affects structural centralization.

Structural dimensions of centralization and decentralization by themselves, of course, provide at best an inexact guide to the real operations of a political system. The focus of much scholarly analysis is the actual policy process that characterizes decision making and implementation. Forces that influence that process and help to shape it include, inter alia, the values held by participants in this process, the structural distribution of authority and resources, and the structure of rewards.

The "fragmented authoritarianism" literature touches on all three

dimensions of analysis: value integration, structural elements, and policy process. To a significant degree, however, the literature has emphasized the latter two. This fact probably reflects three problems. First, the study of values is inherently very difficult, and this is especially true in a society like China that does not permit the types of survey research and participant observation that are best suited to reaching well-grounded conclusions about value integration. Second, the huge changes in value hierarchies that the reforms demanded as compared with the late Maoist era produced a generally unstated consensus among Western scholars of China that the level of value integration among PRC officials during the late 1980s was low. And third, as was noted above, foreign scholars have gained the greatest access to the economic bureaucracies;^[19] the relative ease of observing bargaining over control of tangible resources in this sphere quite naturally focused the attention of researchers on the material (instead of the value) dimension of the Chinese policy process. Because of these factors, the fragmented authoritarianism model has devoted most of its attention to the structural allocation of authority and the behavior of officials related to policy process, especially those behaviors that have characterized the reforms.

The fragmented authoritarianism model argues that authority below the very peak of the Chinese political system is fragmented and disjointed. The fragmentation is structurally based and has been enhanced by reform policies regarding procedures. The fragmentation, moreover, grew increasingly pronounced under the reforms beginning in the late 1970s, as the following brief examples illustrate.^[20]

Structurally, China's bureaucratic ranking system combines with the functional division of authority among various bureaucracies to produce a situation in which it is often necessary to achieve agreement among an array of bodies, where no single body has authority over the others. In addition, the reforms' decentralization of budgetary authority enabled many locales and bureaucratic units to acquire funds outside of those allocated through the central budget, which they could use to pursue their own policy preferences. This cushion of "extrabudgetary" funds in turn permitted many locales to become less sensitive to the policy demands from higher levels.

Procedurally, several major changes designed to produce more effective information and incentive systems had the additional effect, according to the fragmented authoritarianism model, of contributing to the fragmentation of authority of China's economic decision making. The leaders reduced the use of coercion—purges, labeling, demotions—against those who propose ideas that eventually are rejected, thus emboldening participants to argue forcefully for their proposals. The stress laid on serious feasibility studies during the 1980s also, de facto, encouraged various units to marshal information to support their own project preferences, often in competition with others. The encouragement given to many organs to become increasingly self-supporting through bureaucratic entrepreneurship also strengthened the tendency of bureaucratic units to work vigorously to promote and protect their own interests in the policy-making process. The general decline in the use of ideology as an instrument of control increased the "looseness" of the system, and decentralization in personnel management permitted many bureaucratic units additional initiative. All of these changes thus combined to reduce the extent to which organs respond in disciplined fashion to instructions from higher levels.

The resulting situation proved to be quite complex, and no simple characterization captures even its essential features. To an extent, the above developments seem to have produced increased bargaining in the Chinese bureaucratic system. "Bargaining" involves negotiations over resources among units that effectively have mutual veto power. Fragmentation of authority encouraged a search for consensus among various organs in order to initiate and develop major projects. This consensus, in turn, required extensive and often elaborate deals to be struck through various types of bargaining stratagems. Perhaps the fact that the issues under study generally concerned the allocation of real resources made it more likely that visible bargaining would characterize much of the decision making in the economic cluster. In any case, the fragmented authoritarianism model focused attention on the importance of bureaucratic bargaining, and one major concern of this volume is to determine the conditions under which such bargaining does and does not occur.^[21]

This system still retained some important elements of coherence. Research found that bureaucracies retained a real sense of mission and purpose. It also revealed striking instances of "policy communities" that formed around particular projects and issues and that cut across formal bureaucratic lines. This research, moreover, did not conclude that the leaders at the top of the system are helpless. Rather, it portrayed a system

in which the information available to the leaders, the strategies of the leaders themselves, and the actual policy implementation are affected in significant fashion by the structural and procedural aspects of the bureaucracies, at least in the economic cluster.

The fragmented authoritarianism model thus did not present the Center as helpless, the bureaucracies as unable to cooperate, or the locales as all-powerful. But it did seek to identify the causes of fragmentation of authority among various bureaucratic units, the types of resources and strategies that provide leverage in the bargaining that evidently characterizes much decision making, and the incentives of key individuals in various units,^[22] in order to gain a better grasp on the ways in which bureaucratic structure and process affect Chinese policy formulation, decision making, and policy implementation. On balance, as was noted above, this model lays considerable stress on bargaining relationships.

The fragmented authoritarianism model echoes some of the literature on bureaucratic politics, such as Graham Allison's Essence of Decision .^[23] Allison argues that organizational processes (what he terms "standard operating procedures") and bureaucratically shaped politics influence decisions, and thus that rational-actor assumptions about decision making (in his case, regarding national security) do not fully capture the forces that shape policy-making and implementation. Similarly, the fragmented authoritarianism model regarding China under the reforms does not argue that rational problem solving at the top does not occur. It rather details other dimensions of the system that are not adequately captured in a straightforward application of a rationality model.

The fragmented authoritarianism model thus seeks to put into better perspective two well-developed groups of literature concerning policy-making in post-1949 China.^[24] The first group posits essentially a rationality model for understanding Chinese political outcomes. This literature implicitly assumes both that top-level leaders can exercise enormous leverage over the political system as a whole and that these same leaders make decisions by identifying problems and then adopting responses to those issues that derive logically from their own value preferences^[25] —or power needs in intraelite struggles.^[26] Books in this literature, whether

they focus on elite politics per se,^[27] or on the politics of various functional areas, such as public health,^[28] agriculture,^[29] or education,^[30] explain policy decisions almost exclusively in terms of leadership perceptions and preferences.

The second group stresses the extent to which China is what has been termed a "cellular" society. This literature focuses on the consequences of various policies over the years that have decentralized decisions and produced bureaucratic devices that permit localities effectively to block upward flows of information and to blunt higher-level initiatives that cascade down on local leaders. While this literature initially focused primarily on economic linkages,^[31] in more recent versions it has been extended to the political system, too.^[32] The experiences of businessmen who dealt with China during the 1980s added much anecdotal evidence to support the cellular model of the Chinese system, as localities repeatedly demonstrated an ability to frustrate the policies of the upper-level authorities.^[33]

To repeat, the fragmented authoritarianism model acknowledges the great insights offered from elite-oriented rational-actor approaches and from a cellular conception of the system. However, it adds a third necessary ingredient to the equations: the structure of bureaucratic authority and the realities of bureaucratic practice that affect both the elite and the basic building blocks of the system.

The structures that link the top and the bottom of the system—in order to function—require negotiations, bargaining, exchange, and consensus building. Fragmented authoritarianism finds wanting both strictly "top down" and "bottom up" views of Chinese politics. This model, rather, focuses attention on the effects of the interactive processes among the constitutent elements of the Chinese polity. In so doing, it finds that the system is somewhat but not totally fragmented. The fragmentation has not reached the point where its constituent parts have the legitimate autonomy characteristic of a pluralist system.