Fragmented Authoritarianism In Broader Perspective

The authors of the major works that have contributed to the fragmented authoritarianism model recognize that this model reflects research primarily on economic decision making. An important contribution of this volume is its exploration of the extent to which this model adequately conveys the dynamics of decision making beyond the economic cluster of bureaucracies (and within that cluster, beyond decision making on major new investment projects). Every chapter makes a substantial contribution to this effort. The following discussion culls out some of the important factors that emerge from this study and that modify to a greater or lesser extent the fragmented authoritarianism model as an adequate description of the entire Chinese bureaucratic system.

Like most of the literature on bureaucratic bargaining in China, Barry Naughton's contribution in chapter 9 focuses on decision making concerning major investment projects. Naughton notes the irony that Chinese leaders intended the reforms to reduce the amount of bargaining in the management of the economy by substituting market forces for bureaucratic management of the decision-making process. Instead, the reforms increased the role of bargaining in this sector, and they changed the types of resources that the various parties brought into the bargaining arena.

The two key resources that structure bargaining positions regarding proposed major investment projects, according to Naughton, are control over information and skills and control over resources. The bureaucratic bargaining literature to date has emphasized the latter almost to the exclusion of the former. As is often noted elsewhere, the reforms have, on balance, shifted control over resources—especially over budgetary resources—to lower bureaucratic levels in the system. But this same reform effort has effectively created greater central-level control over economic information and skills.

Enhanced availability of information for the Center commenced with the rehabilitation and expansion of the State Statistical Bureau, which

had been devastated during the Cultural Revolution. It then proceeded further via two channels: considerable relaxation of the rules governing release of economic data;^[34] and the establishment of various new policy-research organs at the central level to enhance directly and indirectly the ability of the leaders to produce more highly coordinated economic policy based on greater availability of information. In chapter 5 Nina Halpern analyzes the important influence on policy process that the new policy-research institutes exerted. As a result of these measures, the Center could undertake more sophisticated economic projections and planning.^[35]

This shift in several types of resource did not reduce bargaining in the system. The Center no longer retained the direct economic levers necessary to obtain its wishes by simple command. Nevertheless, it did command information, expertise, and some critical resources that the localities would need in order to pursue economic development effectively, especially in terms of infrastructure development. As a consequence, the Center used its superior information and skills to bargain with the localities to obtain cooperation in the pursuit of the Center's priorities.

As the Center's priorities became better informed, therefore, its bargaining position vis-à-vis the localities was correspondingly enhanced. In contrast, the greater transparency of the Chinese system under the reforms created the impression that the prereform planned economy was characterized by an extremely strong Center. In reality, lack of information and skills at the Center kept this level of the system considerably weaker than outward appearances suggested.

As Naughton's focus on information and skills highlights, the reforms produced very complex changes in the distribution of pertinent resources in the Chinese political system. Focusing on decision making in the economic cluster, Naughton finds, not surprisingly, that the net result is an enriched and highly complex set of bargaining relationships. Other chapters in this volume provide information both on the sectors of the system in which bargaining plays less of a role and on the conditions under which bargaining flourishes in the Chinese polity.

Carol Lee Hamrin, in chapter 4, focuses on a key layer of bodies—comprising "leading groups"—that links the top few leaders with the country's far-flung bureaucratic network. This arrangement groups most of the major bureaucracies into broad functional clusters and assigns a small group, typically led by a member of the Politburo or its

Standing Committee, to manage that policy cluster and to act as liaison between it and the top decision-makers. These "leading groups" do not appear on organizational charts, and their membership is not announced. But they serve vital functions in the Chinese system: they work up materials for the consideration of the top leaders, initiate pertinent policy research, resolve some issues that cannot be handled at a lower level, and coordinate activities among the various bureaucracies in each bureaucratic cluster.

Hamrin provides far more detail on the origins, development, functions, and politics of these leading groups than has ever been presented before. Noting that these groups grew out of a clustering of the bureaucracies that originally took place in order to facilitate personnel assignments, Hamrin stresses that these bodies have become an extraordinarily concentrated expression of centralized power in China. At this level, the system is highly personal. The heads of these various "leading groups" typically have known each other for many decades, and their relationships cannot fruitfully be analyzed in terms of a fragmented authoritarianism model. There is, rather, a great deal of informal contact and maneuvering, with control over the various "leading groups" an important prize in the political jockeying in the capital.

In chapter 5 Nina Halpern focuses the analysis just one step below the "leading groups." She deals with the research institutes that were established—primarily at Zhao Ziyang's initiative—to develop policy options for the top leaders. While he was premier of the State Council, Zhao devoted considerable attention to creating an extensive "in-house" policy-research capability. The research institutes he established lacked line functions, but as staff organs they nevertheless influenced in important ways the information flows within the government and enhanced the ability of the leaders to develop and implement coordinated policies.

The institutes greatly increased the leadership's information on policy externalities, which effectively enhanced the leaders' ability to formulate coordinated policies. These institutes also gave the top leaders greater leverage vis-à-vis their own line organs by reducing their dependence on the line organs for vital information. And the research institutes forced many of the line bureaucracies to consider more fully the externalities of their policy proposals during the drafting process, as the bureaucrats knew that their proposals would have to compete with those of the pertinent research institutes. The Maoist system did not encourage this broader vision.

Nina Halpern's analysis emphasizes that at this level of the system bargaining (which, again, focuses on exchange and mutual veto power) does not capture the essence of the relationship between the research institutes and the top decision-makers. The institutes, after all, did not

seek to trade off resources as much as they sought to influence policy thinking. A command relationship, in which the institutes faithfully provided the top leaders with the information they sought, would have drastically reduced the real benefits of the institute structure for the leaders. Halpern characterizes the resulting relationship as one of "competitive persuasion."

This relationship mixed both formal bureaucratic and highly personal elements. In essence, the institutes competed with line bureaucratic units (and with each other) to persuade Zhao Ziyang and other top officials of the wisdom of the institutes' policy proposals. Their effectiveness depended in part on the personal ties between the institute leaders and the top political leaders, as is shown by the changes (generally, for the worse) in the stature and effectiveness of various institutes since Zhao Ziyang's ouster in mid-1989. But the fact that the institutes demonstrably had the ear of powerful officials also made line bureaucratic units take the institutes seriously and try to adjust their own policy advocacy to a system in which these institutes provided the top leaders with serious information and analytical work. The net result contributed to the enhanced availability of information to the top leaders that is noted in chapter 9.

Below the level of the top leaders and the research institutes, the system is dominated by bureaucratic bodies, most with line functions. Key issues about these bodies concern their responsiveness to political leaders, the extent to which their actions are governed by formal rules and regulations, and the ways in which they deal with each other. This is an extremely complex system, but the various chapters in this volume permit some important generalizations to be made.

As Melanie Manion illustrates in chapter 8, on the cadre retirement policy in the personnel system, the ability of the top leaders to reach clear and detailed decisions seriously affects the functioning of the system as a whole. Bureaucratic middlemen tend to regard policies that are flexible and ambivalent as the equivalent of having no policies at all. They are more likely to implement policies to the extent that the policymakers reduce the middlemen's risks, constrain their actions, and coordinate the various demands made on them. But these suggest that the crucial elements are matters of policy content and coordination, not of bureaucratic structure and rules. Where policies lack the necessary specificity, clarity, and "fit" with other related activities, the middlemen studied by Manion would simply fail to implement them. This was thus not a bargaining situation so much as it was a matter of policy compliance. And policy compliance depended crucially on the ability of top leaders to produce well-coordinated sets of clear, detailed policies.

Indeed, the importance of policy content versus bureaucratic institutionalization of the Chinese system is evident time and again in these

chapters. For example, even in the mid and late 1980s, nobody seems to have seriously questioned the right of the top leaders to reach any decisions (and enforce any redistribution of power) that they saw fit. This ability of higher-level leaders throughout the system to impose their will on lower levels without serious institutional (versus self-imposed policy) constraints shows through repeatedly, as in Paul Schroeder's treatment of the relations between Wuhan and Hubei and in David Zweig's analysis of the approach taken by county governments to subordinate administrative towns and townships. Bureaucratic behavior inevitably limits the information available to the top leaders and may produce various distortions in policy implementation. But no institutional regulations in themselves seriously constrain the options available to the top leaders as a group.

This is a system, then, where the balance between policy and institutional integrity tips very heavily in favor of the former, even under the reforms. In chapter 3 Susan Shirk stresses, in this regard, that the reform agenda required that the top political leaders adopt reform as the official political line. Only within this context could government officials at lower levels implement the reforms. The government alone, Shirk argues, could not have generated the reform policies against the wishes of the Party apparatus. The fact that the top leaders adopted "reform" as the political line, however, enabled lower-level government officials to implement many reform policies even in the face of obstructionism by the Party bureaucrats who wished to slow down this process. Shirk does not argue that the adoption of a political strategy by the top leaders is by itself adequate to produce results in China. She asserts, rather, that the adopted political strategy creates the framework within which subsequent bargaining generally occurs. The bargaining, in turn, reflected several facets of the reform effort: its focus on economic issues; disagreements among the leadership about specific reform policies; and lack of consistency and specificity that characterized reform decisions.

In sum, the picture above suggests that the top leadership in China remains very powerful, despite the reforms. At the top, bureaucratic boundaries fade even as leaders compete for control over bureaucratic resources. Personalities and personal relationships assume tremendous importance at the pinnacle, and then through "leading groups" and other devices the small coterie of very top officials ties into the huge bureaucratic clusters through which they govern China. While the reforms have decentralized administrative control over many resources, they have also in various ways (especially through the enhancement of the availability of information) increased the potential leverage of top leaders vis-à-vis their own bureaucracies. While no changes have occurred that effectively limit the right of the highest leaders to change the

rules of the system itself, the leaders' ability to elicit lower-level compliance is reduced when there is evidence of leadership tentativeness or disunity.

Several chapters in this volume deal specifically with bureaucratic clusters that do not concern the economy. In these other clusters, there appears to be far less evidence of bargaining relationships than has generally been found in decision making and policy implementation in the economic cluster. This may, of course, in part reflect the possibility that it is simply more difficult to identify bargaining behavior in bureaucratic sectors that deal more with intangibles such as propaganda and education, but the pertinent chapters suggest that the differences are real and are important.

Lynn Paine's examination of the educational system casts light on a bureaucratic cluster that produces, in her words, a "mushy" product—that is, it is very difficult in the short term to determine the payoff of specific investments of resources in education. Overall, moreover, the educational system is bureaucratically weak at every level. It consumes, rather than generates, resources, and it has repeatedly been associated with producing values and behaviors that the top leaders have regarded as anathema. Paine finds that this mushy, resource-poor bureaucratic system is not characterized by extensive bargaining among its various units. Paine reveals, not bargaining to protect and enhance resources, but a process of "groping," where the Center sets vague standards, the locales implement the policies quite flexibly, and then there are iterations of interactive adjustment as units with very limited organizational resources seek to find ways to accomplish their tasks. In the process, these units adopt what Paine describes as "loosely jointed coping mechanisms" to get things done. The Chinese Communist Party remains extremely powerful in defining the boundaries of the acceptable in the educational sphere, but the policy dynamics within this sphere bear little relationship to those regarding major economic decision making.

Jonathan Pollack's examination of the military system intrudes into an area where very little was known previously about policy process. Pollack portrays the People's Liberation Army as a virtual internal empire within the PRC, and he sees it as having early on reached a compact with the Party in which the military would remain loyal so long as it could protect its vast and varied domain. Within this system, Pollack argues, personal ties rather than institutional positions determine the power of people at and near the top of the system. The closer to the apex of the military system, in short, the less command derives from specific rules and norms and the more it is personalistic.

Pollack examines Deng Xiaoping's far-reaching reforms in the military in terms of their stress on budgetary restraint, effectiveness in producing

new technology, and progress in creating more resilient institutions. While Pollack suggests that Deng made very substantial progress along all of these lines, he argues that during the 1989 crisis the military system reverted very much to its more personalistic, prereform character.

Although Pollack is not able to address directly the issue of bargaining relationships in the military, the thrust of his analysis suggests that the overall effect of the reforms had been to strengthen the role of central organs within the military. Greater need for technological improvements to prepare for modern warfare effectively enhanced central coordination in all phases of the weapons research, development, testing, and evaluation system. He does not present evidence that would suggest that the reforms in the military, like those in the civilian economic sphere, led to policy processes in which bargaining became increasingly important to policy outcomes. Possibly the pertinent policies—stress on high technology, on professionalism, on institutionalization, and on budgetary restraint—created an environment less conducive to wide-ranging bargaining. Because there remain sharp limitations on our information about this sphere—despite the fact that Jonathan Pollack breaks considerable new ground in chapter 6—the answers to many questions about policy process in the military must at this point remain tentative. This is especially true since, in the wake of June 4, 1989, many of Deng's efforts to professionalize the military have yielded to renewed emphasis on politicization of the armed forces.

The chapters that focus, therefore, on personnel (Manion), education (Paine), and coercion (Pollack) find that the reforms of the past decade do not appear to have nurtured the pervasive bargaining relationships that researchers have found in the economic sphere. To be sure, some bargaining characterizes the dynamics of every functional system, but the differences of degree suggested here are substantial and important. Bargaining behavior evidently requires at least that tangible resources be at stake and that substantive policies permit leeway in implementation. These conditions are not met in significant measure for much of China's bureaucratic behavior.

Three chapters focus specifically on distinctive subnational bureaucratic levels in China: Paul Schroeder examines the provincial level (relations between Hubei and Wuhan when the latter was granted provincial budgetary status); Andrew Walder analyzes fiscal and budgetary dynamics at the municipal level; and David Zweig illuminates the political dynamics of rural urbanization at the subcounty level. All three focus substantial attention on economic decision making at these three levels.

Schroeder, in chapter 10, stresses the failure of the Chinese system, even under the reforms, to develop political or legal formulas that would permit the development of stable definitions of authority. The result,

which he details in his examination of the changing formal status of Wuhan municipality vis-à-vis Hubei province, is fluidity, competition, incessant bargaining, and a resulting muddle. Where jurisdictional issues arise (as they do constantly, given the many changes initiated by the reformers), the legal system is not mature enough to settle the issues and to provide case-law precedents to guide the behavior of others. Vague policies from the Center essentially produce bargaining among lowerlevel units, where the parameters of the situation remain uncertain. This chapter illustrates well the interconnections among the formal administrative system, the legal system, the economic system, and substantive policy decisions in shaping the results of reform initiatives. Schroeder finds that the actual relationships among these various elements are fluid and that the system as a whole, therefore, lacks the institutional regularity necessary to permit reform decisions to have their desired effect.

Andrew Walder, in his analysis in chapter 11 of the processes that determine the financial flows between city budgets and enterprises, argues that bargaining activity does not necessarily stem from fragmentation of authority, as the fragmented authoritarianism model has stressed. Walder notes, indeed, that the key characteristic of the municipal fiscal environment is that of concentration of power rather than of its fragmentation. But this concentration of budgetary power and resources occurs in a larger environment of unreformed prices, unequal capital endowments, and unclear rules and regulations. He finds plenty of bargaining behavior in the process of determining financial flows between the city budgets and enterprises he examines, but these negotiations are intended to reduce individual responsibilities, avoid risks, and assure broad equity (or "fairness") in the distribution of and accounting for financial resources. Walder concludes that it is more important to understand the characteristics of the environment that structure bargaining than to concentrate attention on the dynamics of the resulting bargaining itself.^[36]

Looking at rural urbanization, David Zweig examines the sphere where the reforms since the late 1970s reportedly had gone the farthest toward reducing bureaucratic authority in favor of having decisions driven by market forces. Small-scale rural enterprises have flourished with the dissolution of the communes and the policy decision to permit peasants to leave farming in favor of working in small towns. These

changes suggest that rural towns are relatively freewheeling places, but Zweig's research paints a distinctly different picture. While the production and marketing of agricultural produce are no longer monopolized by local officials, the county's control over development assistance and investment for expanding urban infrastructure has assured a continuing—and in many cases an expanding—role for the county government in county-towns and townships. Bureaucratic administrative control over rural town development, as a consequence, remains very powerful, and the characteristics of that control—such as lack of institutional constraints on the authority of upper levels—will sound very familiar to those who have read the other chapters.

The Schroeder, Walder, and Zweig contributions draw remarkably similar pictures in their examination of various subnational levels in China. They all agree that the reforms significantly decentralized control over economic resources, that subnational bureaucracies became more important in decision making on economic issues, that the system lacks clear rules and a stable distribution of authority, and that these circumstances have combined with vague or inconsistent policies from above to produce and contour widespread bargaining behavior. Very considerable budgetary power, moreover, now appears to be concentrated at the level of the municipality and of the rural county (at least, in the latter case, vis-à-vis the rural townships). This concentration of power has not reduced bargaining—it has, rather, reshaped it.

These explorations into four bureaucratic clusters and of the top and bottom of the system challenge and modify the fragmented authoritarian model in several important ways. They may be briefly summarized as follows:

The reforms have not produced straightforward decentralization of China's bureaucratic system. Rather, they have had complex effects. Reform policies have consciously decentralized decision making in the economic sphere and have given lower bureaucratic levels more control over fiscal resources. The reduced role of ideology has reinforced fragmentation of the system. But countervailing trends, such as enhancement of the Center's authority to acquire and analyze information, have also been nurtured by the reforms. The resulting system structures new bargaining relationships and dynamics of decision making, but the Center continues to hold serious cards in this economic game.

Fragmentation of the bureaucratic system is most severe in the domain from the ministries through the provinces. Above the ministries and below the provinces, this is a political system characterized by extraordinary concentrations of power. The key to whether bar-

gaining occurs at the bottom of the system is not simply the extent to which power is fragmented.

The reforms since the late 1970s have produced only very limited progress toward institutionalizing the political system. While top leaders no longer launched disruptive political campaigns to shake up the bureaucratic institutions, the system as a whole failed to develop institutional ways of allocating authority on a stable basis. The legal system does not function in a fashion that enables it to adjudicate key issues and establish stable precedents. Law and regulation combined do not pose effective bars to the adoption of policies that redistribute power and violate past commitments.

While formal rules do not constrain the top leaders in reshaping the system, three other factors do limit considerably the effective leverage of those leaders. First, officials at lower levels tend to ignore or circumvent top-level decisions that are vague or inconsistent. Second, substantive policy goals, especially those of the reformers, demand that top leaders allow their subordinates considerable leeway, as any other approach chokes off information, reduces enthusiasm and creativity, and precludes China's developing the dynamic society envisioned by the reformers. Third, top leaders generally recognize that policy implementation, especially regarding major economic projects, can be slowed down and made more difficult by unenthusiastic provincial and lower-level officials, and thus they often seek to bring those officials on board rather than to coerce them into compliance.

For many parts of the political system, processes other than bargaining tend to play very important roles in determining how bureaucratic units deal with each other. These may include, inter alia, the personal maneuvering at the apex suggested by Carol Hamrin, the competitive persuasion noted by Nina Halpern, or the coping mechanisms detailed by Lynn Paine. Bargaining is more likely to occur where tangible resources are at stake, both parties need each other, and the rules that govern decisions are not fixed and clear. Quite often, one or both of the first two of these conditions is not present.

Another way to put the findings in this volume into perspective is to look at the Chinese political system as being in transition from a traditional hierarchical system toward a more modern, market-oriented system. In the former, activities are guided primarily by traditional vertical relationships within the bureaucratic apparatus, while in the latter a wider range of activities is shaped by pure rule-guided and especially market relationships. This is a basic set of changes sought by the post-1978 reforms. Figures 1.1 and 1.2, which build upon, modify, and am-

plify a presentation David Zweig made at the Tucson conference, provide a framework for an understanding of the resulting situation.

In the traditional system, relations are shaped primarily by informal criteria, such as personal connections and actual control over resources. The more modern variant posits a greater role for formal institutional boundaries, accepted rules, and laws. In short, in the more modern polity, the role of personal elements is reduced and that of more formal criteria is enhanced.

As is indicated in these charts, for each of these two types of polity there are three basic structural relationships: those where both parties

are inside the bureaucracy, those where one is in and one is out, and those where both parties are outside the bureaucracy. Within each of these, moreover, the charts distinguish relationships among unequal parties (vertical/asymmetrical relationships) from relationships among basically equal parties (horizontal/symmetrical relationships). The resulting ranges of types of behavior for each structure of relationship in the traditional and modern polities are indicated.

In the more modern version of vertical/asymmetrical relationships, pleading is replaced by persuasion and patron-client ties are replaced by rule-guided behavior (box 1), corruption (including rent-seeking) is supplanted by service according to regulations (boxes 3 and 4), and assistance is rendered on the basis of merit (box 5). The modern analogue of horizontal/symmetrical relationships substitutes rule-guided behavior for bargaining and corruption/rent-seeking and has pure market relationships replace guanxi (boxes 2, 4, and 6).

To repeat, an objective of the 1980s reforms in China was to shift from a situation where activities are guided primarily by traditional vertical

relations within the bureaucratic apparatus to one where a wider range of activities is shaped by pure rule-guided and especially market relationships.^[37] Thus, the reformers sought to move the polity from a bureaucratic leviathan that operates in traditional fashion toward a polity that acts in more modern fashion and in which the bureaucratic apparatus plays a narrower role.

As the chapters in this volume confirm, the reality of the reforms fell far short of the ultimate goals of shifting to more modern forms of behavior and of sharply curtailing the scope of bureaucratic activity. Rather, the major changes in the 1980s moved an increasing array of decisions from the "Both In" vertical cell (box 1) in the Traditional Polity chart to the "Both In" horizontal cell (box 2) and the "One In, One Out" vertical and horizontal cells (boxes 3 and 4) in that same chart. The actual scope of bureaucratic activity remains surprisingly pervasive,^[38] and these changes reflect the fact that the reforms in many ways flattened China's bureaucratic hierarchy and increased the importance of nonbureaucratic sectors without changing the nature of relationships to those of a more modern polity. Only within the decision-making apparatus developed directly under Zhao Ziyang's aegis in the Zhongnanhai, as is detailed by Nina Halpern, did behavior move in very substantial measure toward the appropriate box (box 1) in the chart Modern Polity.

One important result of these shifts that is not highlighted in this volume is that they have nurtured corruption and rent-seeking behavior both within the bureaucracies and between officials and the population. These behaviors reflect in part the combination of the rapid development of nongovernmental efforts, the commercialization of many governmental activities, continued bureaucratic power to intervene in the market, and confusion over norms. Note that these forms of behavior predominate even as the unofficial party acquires resources that create a relatively symmetrical relationship with the official party. Thus, the very process of reform itself has created conditions that nurture corruption by relaxing former rules and habitual practices, diffusing authority and resources, and creating confusion over guiding norms.

The charts and the discussion of the fragmented authoritarianism model reflect a preliminary way of looking at the trends in the kinds of

relationships—and in the resulting behavior—that are occurring under the reforms in the PRC. The particular data in the various chapters flesh out this framework in some detail. No polity operates in a purely "modern" fashion (nor should it), but the differences between low levels of institutionalization combined with expansion of the role of the market to produce widespread rent-seeking behavior and corruption, versus far greater use of law and regulation to achieve market-driven outcomes, is serious and important.