Organizing China: The Problem of Bureaucracy, 1949-1976 (original) (raw)

1983, The American Historical Review

Second only to espousing moralistic ideologies, the Chinese genius in politics is creating bureaucracies. Historically the Chinese were given to the ideal, in Benjamin I. Schwartz's words, of a "convergence of the doctrinal-ethical order and the political order," which in practice meant arranging certifiedly superior, and, they hoped, morally exemplary, men in hierarchies. Out of every period of disorder the Chinese have with alacrity recreated hierarchical arrangements as though that was the natural equilibrium for mankind. Paralleling this tradition has been the equally persistent phenomenon of profound distrust by China's supreme rulers for precisely the bureaucracies formed beneath them, supposedly to facilitate their rule but which invariably entangled them in constraints calculated to break their will to rule. Mao Zedong adhered to this tradition, and today it is Deng Xiaoping's turn to give vent to his frustrations with bureaucracies. Without knowledge of this history of distrust by Chinese rulers of their bureaucracies it might seem perverse that such ideological opponents as the "gang of four" and Deng should have been equally hostile to China's bureaucrats, the former calling them "revisionists" and the latter saying, "Veteran revolutionaries only end up as monsters and ghosts." With remarkable sagacity Harry Harding, as a graduate student, recognized that bureaucracy was the heart of Chinese politics, and set about writing a thesis on organizing China. We now have the revised result which is destined to become a standard and frequently cited work which belongs in even modest libraries on contemporary China. In this work Harding displays astonishing skill in organizing large masses of materials into neat and relevant categories, and in identifying succinct lists of key variables and critical problems. Yet his basic approach is chronological as he tells, from the perspective of the problems of bureaucratic organization, the story. of Chinese Communism under Mao. It is a rather complete story because not much happened in China which was not in one way or other related to the problems of, or the problems caused by, bureaucracies. Harding views these problems from the top down in that he largely accepts the Chinese leadership's definitions of the issues. He therefore does not deal with such substantive matters of organization as: What is it like to serve in the Chinese bureaucracy? How do the cadres go about their daily business? Why has the management of some tasks been better than that of others? What are the strains and anxieties on the one hand and the gratifications and rewards on the other of service at the various levels of officialdom? Instead, Harding's unwavering focus is on how Mao and others at the top and centre saw the problems of organizing China. In treating soberly the complaints of the highest leadership, Harding runs the risk of taking at face value the words of men so situated that