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Making Communism Work: Sinicizing a Soviet Governance Practice

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Making Communism Work: Sinicizing a Soviet Governance Practice S0010417519000227jra pp: 1--28 Techset Composition Ltd, Salisbury, U.K. 4/24/2019 Comparative Studies in Society and History 2019;61(3):1–28. 0010-4175/19 # Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2019 doi:10.1017/S0010417519000227 1 2 3 4 Making Communism Work: Sinicizing 5 6 a Soviet Governance Practice 7 8 Q1 ELIZABETH J. PERRY 9 10 Department of Government, Harvard University; Director, Harvard-Yenching 11 Institute 12 13 14 15 16 GOVERNING THE GRASSROOTS 17 Governing any large society, whether in modern or premodern times, requires 18 effective channels for connecting center and periphery. With government offi- 19 cials and their coercive forces concentrated in the capital, the central state’s 20 capacity to communicate and implement its policies at lower levels is not a 21 given. Reaching the grassroots is, however, crucial for regime effectiveness 22 and durability. Regardless of regime type, the official bureaucracy serves as 23 the primary conduit for routine state-society communication and compliance, 24 but it is subject to capture by its own interests and agenda. Extra-bureaucratic 25 mechanisms that provide a more direct linkage between ruler and ruled there- 26 fore prove critical to the operation and endurance of democracies and dictator- 27 ships alike. 28 Imperial China (221 BC–AD 1911), the longest-lived political system in 29 world history, devised various means of central-local connectivity. The most 30 famous was the highly competitive civil service examination for recruiting 1 31 members of society into the government bureaucracy. But extra-bureaucratic 32 channels were also important. For example, a periodic program of state- 33 appointed lecturers known as “rural compacts” (乡约) conveyed instructions 34 to villagers based on imperial edicts from the capital. Originally introduced 35 as a form of ideological indoctrination, the system over time became invested 36 37 38 39 Acknowledgments: My thanks to Fairbank Center Librarian Nancy Hearst and Harvard-Yenching China Collection Librarian Ma Xiaohe for their assistance in locating valuable source materials; and 40 to Zhao Shukai, Zhao Hanyu, Liu Yanwen, Zhang Jishun, Wang Haiguang, Yiching Wu, Steve 41 Smith, Lynne Viola, Jeremy Friedman, Lucan Way, Andrew Walder, Ruan Qinghua, and Jiang 42 Jin for many helpful suggestions and corrections. 1 Benjamin A. Elman, Civil Examinations and Meritocracy in Late Imperial China (Princeton: 43 Princeton University Press, 2013). 1 2 ELIZABETH J. PERRY 2 44 with additional critical responsibilities such as surveillance and defense. Other 45 extra-bureaucratic forms of governance, which served as a counterweight and 46 check on the operations of the imperial administration, included the deploy- 47 ment of censors and commissioners.3 In Republican China (1912–1949), 48 despite advances in communications technology, the challenge of governing 49 grassroots society persisted. The failure of the short-lived Kuomintang 50 regime (1927–1949) to consolidate a strong state is attributed, among other 51 things, to its inability to span the yawning central-local abyss.4 52 The difficulty of cultivating and controlling a dispersed and diverse grass- 53 roots constituency also bedeviled the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from its 54 earliest days. Founded in 1921 by urban intellectuals, the new party (in line 55 with Marxism’s focus on the industrial proletariat as well as the recent 56 example of the Russian Revolution) initially concentrated its organizing 57 energy on factory workers in major industrial centers.5 Although astute CCP 58 activists like Peng Pai and Mao Zedong recognized the potential power of 59 the Chinese peasantry, they could glean little guidance from the Soviet experi- 60 ence on how best to organize them. The social base of the Bolshevik Revolu- 61 tion had been confined largely to the workers of Moscow and St. Petersburg, 62 while subsequent attempts to impose Soviet power in the countryside proved 63 tragically oppressive, provoking bitter resentment and widespread resistance 64 from Russian peasants.6 The CCP would need to develop an alternative 65 approach, better attuned to local concerns, if it were to succeed at the pressing 66 task of grassroots mobilization. 67 Of the many ways in which Chinese Communism departed from Soviet 68 Communism, perhaps the most significant was the former’s much closer ties 69 70 71 2 72 Kung-chuan Hsiao, Rural China: Imperial Control in the Nineteenth Century (Seattle: Univer- sity of Washington Press, 1960), 184–205; Zhengyuan Fu, Autocratic Tradition and Chinese Pol- 73 itics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 101–2. 74 3 Li Konghuai (李孔怀), A History of Ancient China’s Administrative System (中国古代行政制 75 度史) (Shanghai: Fudan University Press, 2006). 4 Hung-mao Tien, Government and Politics in Kuomintang China (Stanford: Stanford Univer- 76 sity Press, 1972); Lloyd Eastman, The Abortive Revolution: China under Nationalist Rule (Cam- 77 bridge: Harvard University Press, 1974). 78 5 Elizabeth J. Perry, Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor (Stanford: Stanford Uni- versity Press, 1993); S. A. Smith, Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 79 1895–1927 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). 80 6 Victoria Bonnell, Roots of Rebellion: Workers’ Politics and Organizations in St. Petersburg 81 and Moscow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); David M. Mandel, The Petrograd ’ 82 Workers and the Fall of the Old Regime (New York: St. Martin s Press, 1983): S. A. Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 83 1983); Diane Koenker, Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University 84 Press, 1981); Lynne Viola, V. P. Danilov, N. A. Ivnitskii, and Denis Kozlov, eds., The War against 85 the Peasantry: The Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance 86 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). MAKING COMMUNISM WORK 3 7 87 to the countryside. From the revolutionary period to the present, multiple con- 88 duits have connected CCP cadres to townships and villages far removed from 89 major cities. Among these various linkages, arguably none has proven more 90 critical for effective grassroots mobilization and governance than the practice 91 of deploying “work teams” (工作队/工作组/工作团). Yet, perhaps because 92 work teams straddle the boundary between informal and formal institutions 93 (absent from official organization charts and active for only an interim 94 period, yet authorized and operated by official agencies), they have received 95 scant analytical attention from students of Chinese history and politics. 96 While work teams figure prominently in narrative accounts of the major cam- 97 paigns of the PRC, their origins, operations, and political implications have yet 98 to be fully explored. 99 Work teams are ad hoc units that are appointed and directed by higher- 100 level Party and government organs to advance a specific mission, dispatched 101 to the grassroots for a limited period to carry out their assignment by means 102 of mass mobilization. Work teams were central to the implementation of 103 Land Reform during the Civil War and early PRC periods, and to a host of sub- 104 sequent CCP-sponsored campaigns and state responses to unexpected crises. 105 At times work teams convey a broad, nationwide mandate for change, with 106 tens of thousands of them operating simultaneously across the country. At 107 other times their mission is narrowly circumscribed by task and locale, and 108 their number may even be limited to a single team. The practice of deploying 109 work teams in order to promote developmental priorities, troubleshoot crises, 110 propagate ideology, and monitor and discipline local cadres, among other pur- 111 poses, remains one of the most common and effective methods of Chinese 112 Communist Party governance even today.8 This paper examines the origins 113 and evolution of work teams (from the 1920s until the mid-1960s) in an 114 effort to understand how the Chinese Communist Party fashioned this func- 115 tional and flexible mode of central-local connectivity. 116 The roots of Chinese work teams were planted deep in Russian revolution- 117 ary soil, but the successful flowering of this practice was due to creative CCP 118 cultivation over decades of revolutionary and post-revolutionary transplanta- 119 tion and experimentation. Mao and his comrades deserve credit for converting 120 the Bolsheviks’ campaign method of dispatching mobile units (e.g., grain 121 detachments, 25,000ers, shock brigades, and so on) into a distinctively 122 Chinese mode of governance. Sinicized work teams were not only a key 123 124 7 125 Benjamin I. Schwartz, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao (Cambridge: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1951); Lucien Bianco, Origins of the Chinese Revolution (Stanford: Stanford Univer- 126 sity Press, 1974). 127 8 Elizabeth J. Perry, “From Mass Campaigns to Managed Campaigns: Constructing a New ” ’ 128 Socialist Countryside, in Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth J. Perry, eds., Mao s Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China (Cambridge: Harvard Univer- 129 sity Press), 30–61. 4 ELIZABETH J. PERRY 130 factor in the victory of the Chinese Communist revolution; they have continued 131 to play a critical role in the development and control of the vast Chinese hin- 132 terland, right down to the contemporary poverty alleviation and anti-corruption 133 campaigns. As an effective means of spanning the central-local divide, work 134 teams contribute powerfully to the resilience of the Chinese Communist 135 party-state. 136 137 REVOLUTIONARY ORIGINS 138 The genesis of Chinese work teams can be traced at least as far back as the early 139 1920s, when the CCP—under the aegis of a United Front with the Kuomintang 140 (KMT) and under the guidance of Soviet advisors—first began to craft a sys- 141 tematic strategy for grassroots mobilization.
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