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China's Transition, by Andrew J. Nathan


4
Maoist Institutions and Post-Mao Reform

If there was ever a regime in world history that came close to totalitarianism, Mao's China was it. 1 The concept of totalitarianism had its origins in the 1930s as an ideal of fascist ideologues who were seeking a political order able to provide total organization for society. After World War II, it was refurbished as a social science concept. One of the most influential definitions defines totalitarian systems by six characteristics: a totalist ideology, a single ruling party led by a dictator, a secret police that carries out political terror, a monopoly of mass communications, a monopoly of political organizations, and monopolistic state control of the economy. The classic totalitarian systems are usually said to be Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, and Mao's China. 2

Mao's Regime as Totalitarianism

The Maoist regime departed in several ways from the classic concept of totalitarianism. The police played a less important role in creating political terror than in Stalin's Soviet Union or Hitler's Germany, since the terror was created mainly through the work unit. The military was a more important factor in inner-party politics, serving as a trump card in the hands of Mao Zedong, while both Hitler and Stalin relied more on the loyalty of their secret police organizations to buttress their rule and kept the military effectively out of politics. Although Mao was the dominant Chinese Communist leader and the subject of a cult of personality, his power was intermittently checked by the authority of his colleagues among the top leaders. His power was based less on personal charisma than Hitler's and Stalin's and more on a combination of personal loyalty to him among the other leaders (especially the military) and his authority as an ideologist.

Some theories of totalitarianism claim that these societies are classless, because they reduce everyone to a mass. While this may not have been true of any such system, it is surely wrong in case of Maoism, which was highly stratified in several ways: by the class status system, by the system of bureaucratic ranks, and by the social cleavages between rural and urban residents and between state and nonstate employees.

Most versions of the theory of totalitarianism pessimistically saw these systems as unchangeable. In fact, they have proven rather fragile. In China, the breakdown had already gone far in the late Mao years, due to the ideological exhaustion of the population and the rise of corruption resulting from unchecked power. The exaggeration of the permanence of this kind of regime grew out of the ideological origins of the concept, which glorified these systems as something completely new and able to remake human nature.

Still, the concept highlights well several aspects of Mao's regime:

Among totalitarian systems, Maoism most closely resembled Stalinism, which is not surprising considering Maoism's origins. The common points included exploiting the countryside to industrialize and creating a sharp urban-rural gap; establishing a command economy with huge, inefficient industrial enterprises; enforcing a rigid ideological orthodoxy; and creating a cult of personality.

But Maoism differed from Stalinism in having a less developed planning system with more economic decentralization and more small and local enterprises; in developing an ideology that was more voluntarist and more utopian: in the lesser role of the police and the different sociology of terror; in the creation of the unit and class status systems, both lacking in Stalin's Soviet Union; in Mao's relation to his colleagues and subordinates, which was never as absolute or as bloodthirsty as Stalin's except in 1966-68; in the relatively greater vigor of the Party; and in the greater influence of the military in politics.

After Mao's death, some Chinese writers referred to Maoism as a form of fascism. So far as this involves the idea that Maoism was a totalitarian system that was oppressive and unjust, it is true enough. But within the broad totalitarian type, Maoism and fascism are distinguished from one another by some important differences. Maoism's ideology was Marxist, while all forms of fascism have been based on self-styled fascist ideologies that usually included a myth of racial superiority. Fascist systems relied more than Maoism did on the police, police terror, and paramilitary organizations, and less on social and party organization. The class base of fascist regimes was the petty bourgeoisie, while Maoism was an avowedly proletarian movement that came to power with peasant support and, as a regime in power, created a broad base of support among a wide range of classes it labeled "progressive." Finally, although both Maoism and fascism were industrializing regimes, fascism was based on an alliance between big capitalists and the state, rather than on a state-owned economy that did away with capitalism.

Origins of Mao's Regime

When the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949, the new leaders faced the need to promote rapid industrialization in a continentally huge, backward agrarian economy, by relying mostly on capital drawn from within that economy. The Maoist regime can be understood as a unique ensemble of economic, social, and political institutions that resulted from a failed effort to impose a Stalinist development model on Chinese economic and cultural reality.

To understand why the Chinese Communist leaders first tried to adopt, and then modified, the Stalinist model, one needs to analyze the circumstances the new regime faced when it came to power.

First, the government faced a threatening international environment. As the two superpower blocs emerged after World War II, China found itself located on the boundary of their spheres of influence, so that any expansion of its influence would bring it into conflict with one or both. China was surrounded by countries that feared its potential, shared more land and sea borders with other countries and political entities than any other nation, and was highly vulnerable to invasion both by land and by sea, especially given its economic backwardness. 3

The stronger of the two blocs, led by the United States, viewed Chinese communism with firm hostility, especially after American and Chinese troops fought in the Korean War. China turned to the other bloc, led by the Soviet Union, for protection against the American threat. But the overwhelming Soviet interest was to reach an accommodation with the United States rather than to protect China. These conditions dictated that the Chinese leaders' top priority was to build up the industrial base for a strong, militarily self-reliant, and secure national defense. They sought not just economic growth, and not entry into the Western-dominated world market as an exporter, but also industrial and military self-sufficiency.

Second, the new leaders faced a threatening security situation at home. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had come to power by winning a civil war, yet this victory did not give the regime a strong mandate for building socialism. Rather, its civil war victory reflected the disgust of broad sectors of the population with the corrupt Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, or KMT) rule. Many sectors of the population gave only weak loyalty to the new regime or opposed it. There were local insurgencies, subversion, bandits, KMT forces in the Southwest as well as in Burma and Taiwan. Tibet was still not under Chinese control. Landlords and businessmen formed a potential opposition force. And the regime had only cool support from the intellectuals, many of whom were hoping for intellectual freedom rather than for the discipline that the CCP hoped to impose.

The third condition facing the regime was that China was a continental country with a huge and poor population, having no real alternative to self-reliant development. The Soviet Union gave substantial economic assistance, but it faced a development crisis of its own and its means were limited, so this aid was limited; and it all came in the form of loans. Western aid was out of the question, and even had this not been the case, American priorities lay in the development of Europe and to some extent Japan. China in 1949 had only a small industrial sector. The rural agrarian economy was the only conceivable source of the massive capital needed for self-reliant, rapid industrialization.

Fourth, in the late 1940s in many parts of the world, capitalism commanded little respect as a development model while Stalinist socialism was considered to have scored remarkable achievements, bringing the Soviet Union from backwardness to the status of a world-class industrial power in three decades under wartime conditions. Not only the CCP leaders, but virtually the entire Chinese intellectual class, believed that capitalism was a wasteful and unfair economic system while state planning was an equitable, rational way to direct capital to serve national needs.

So the Mao regime aligned itself with the Soviet Union in international affairs and began to impose a Soviet model on its economy and society. The model involved establishing state control over the agricultural surplus and agricultural investment by organizing the peasants into collective farms, and using the capital accumulated from agriculture to invest in a relatively small number of large, vertically integrated heavy-industrial firms and infrastructure projects.

After a few years, however, the Chinese Communists began to turn away from the Soviet model and to experiment with their own variant of Stalinism. On the international scene, the Soviet search for accommodation with the United States, beginning with Stalin and becoming more pronounced under Khrushchev, left China feeling isolated in the face of its most potent and threatening enemy, the United States. In the domestic political arena, the Chinese leaders saw the Soviet Union as trying to subvert their autonomy by building up a pro-Soviet bloc within the Chinese regime. In response, they conducted a series of purges and political campaigns to wipe out pro-Soviet forces in the party and economic structure.

Economically, the Soviet model did not work as well as the Chinese leaders expected. Soviet aid, although substantial, was limited. The early years of rapid construction created their own bottlenecks in transport, energy, construction materials, and other areas. The agricultural surplus did not increase as rapidly as the leaders expected it to. Expecting more rapid growth, the CCP leaders were disappointed and resolved to try new experiments to produce the extremely rapid economic growth that they believed was possible. These experiments led into the disastrous Great Leap Forward (1958-1960).

Finally, intellectually, the Chinese leaders began to reassess the appropriateness of the Soviet model for China. Mao took the lead in this effort, developing a critique of the Soviet model as "revisionist" and articulating a separate model he deemed more suited to China, which depended more on human willpower, on what he called "unbalanced development," and on political mobilization. These theories undergirded both the Great Leap and the subsequent and also disastrous Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-69). Mao's anti-Sovietism, adopted in the search for autonomy, went hand in hand with the search for China's own model. China found itself in international isolation, on terms of enmity with both superpowers, and driven even further into the need for self-reliant economic development.

The institutions of Maoist China thus become a hybrid between the original half-realized Stalinist pattern and various other patterns, some drawn from the Party's Yan'an experience, some from the KMT and Japanese traditions, some developed as experimental, on-the-spot adjustments to immediate economic or political problems. This history explains why Maoism as a regime partially resembles and partially differs from Stalinism.

Characteristics of Maoism

The economic structure of Maoism consisted of repressing consumption so as to raise state-controlled investment to high levels. Its social structure forced individuals into dependency on party secretaries in their work units in order to enforce social conformity despite these low levels of consumption. Its political structure penetrated society to provide a high degree of social control, and centralized power in the hands of a few decisionmakers at the top.

In the long run, the system generated strong social cleavages that became axes of socio-psychological tension that broke out in the violence of the Cultural Revolution. 4 It also permitted abuses of power at both the unit and the national levels that ultimately led to a "crisis of faith" that provided the impetus for Deng's reforms.

Ten features characterized Mao's regime.

  1. Capital for development was drawn predominantly from the domestic economy, with little coming from foreign aid or trade . A very high rate of accumulation (forced savings) of about 30 percent of GNP was achieved by repressing consumption, with investment flowing from the countryside to the cities, from agriculture to industry. Many of the regime's key political and social institutions were adopted in order to make these high accumulation rates possible. In the early years, the accumulation came almost exclusively from the agrarian economy, through a mechanism called the "price scissors" by which the state purchased agricultural commodities at low prices and sold agricultural inputs and consumer goods at relatively high prices. The exploitation of countryside by city gave rise to the major and still existing social gap in China, that between rural and urban dwellers.

    The accumulation strategy thus consisted of pressing peasants to minimum living standards, at or below the average standards of the 1930s. Urban living standards were also kept low, although not as low as in the rural areas. The repression of living standards became the regime's largest political liability and the key reason why Deng's reforms were necessary after Mao's death.

    The commune system--Maoism's most characteristic institution--was put into place, after several years of disappointment in the rural harvest, partly in an attempt to realize quickly what the leaders believed was the potential for increases in productivity, but even more importantly to assure state control over the surplus that existed, which the leaders thought was being squirreled away by the peasants.

  2. Forced rapid industrialization focused on a small number of huge, vertically integrated state-owned factories . Efficiency was not a criterion. Major inputs were set at low prices to encourage the growth of enterprises. This left the legacy of the need for price reform, the rock on which the reform process foundered in 1988-89.

  3. A "command" or administered economy relied neither on a well-developed plan nor on market mechanisms for coordination but responded to orders from above . This system enabled the leaders to make successive efforts at "breakthrough development." The lack of plan or market forms of coordination encouraged village and enterprise "cellularization," excessive local autarky, self-sufficiency, and vertical integration of enterprises, and left no real alternative to breakthrough development or what Mao called "creative imbalances."

  4. Rural-urban segregation, expressed in a household registration system, forbade rural residents from changing their place of residence . Peasants were tied to the land in order to enforce the low rural standard of living and to prevent excess rural population from flooding the cities. 5

  5. The "unit" system tied both rural and urban residents to a work or residential unit that controlled virtually all functions of their lives .This included jobs, education, marriage, housing, medical care, recreation, and political education. 6

    In the countryside, the key kind of unit was the commune, with its subsidiary levels of the production brigade and production team. The functions of the commune system were to achieve state control of the surplus, to mobilize excess labor for investment, to achieve social control, and to spread technological innovation. In the cities, the major kinds of units were factories, schools, offices, and neighborhood committees. The functions of these urban units were to help with political and social control and to allocate jobs, housing, medical care, and other benefits, and thus help keep down the level of consumption so that funds could be directed to investment.

    Because assignment to a unit was normally for life, the system provided the political authorities virtually complete control over individuals' geographic and social mobility. Dominant and unchecked power within the unit was normally exercised by the Party Secretary.

    Political terror was implemented in China not through the police but predominantly through the unit. The unit system rendered each person vulnerable to the whims of the unit Party Secretary. The class status (chengfen ) system created a permanent class of targets, to whom others could be added by the process of giving them negative political "labels." As in other socialist systems, the use of terror grew out of the siege mentality of the regime vis-Ãá-vis real and imagined class enemies.

  6. The class status system assigned each individual a pair of labels.One described his or her class origin (father's class), and one describing his or her own class (normally inherited from the father) . The system originally grew out of the administrative needs of land reform teams who had to take land away from landlords and rich peasants and give it to poor, middle, and rich peasants. It was extended to cities gradually during the 1950s. Originally intended to be temporary, it became fixed in place as heightened political tensions especially after the Great Leap Forward led to a search for class scapegoats. 7

    Among competitive urban young people, the "good class" vs. "bad class" cleavage became a crucial dynamic in the factional struggles of the Cultural Revolution. 8

  7. A high level of ideological mobilization  was carried out through political campaigns, study groups, and a massive institutional system of propaganda media and political-ideological education. The regime used ideology to legitimate itself, to provide a sense of identity and solidarity to citizens, to mobilize the population, and as a language for communicating policy priorities. Some CCP leaders believed in the possibility of using ideological indoctrination to remake human nature and create a new kind of citizen who was selflessly dedicated to socialism and the national interest.

    Chinese communism was characterized by a distinctive mentality, involving the personality cult of Mao, asceticism and self-denial, definition of human value in terms of political virtue, and dehumanization of the class enemy. The fervor was such that for many years most acts of political repression were not carried out by police or Party cadres but by civilians acting against one another. The Maoist ideological system began to crumble in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as a result of the ending of the Cultural Revolution, the sending down of urban youth to the countryside, and the alleged coup attempt and death of Mao's chosen successor, Lin Biao.

  8. A Leninist-style system of single-party dictatorship was closely modeled on the Soviet system . The elite party, comprising about five percent of the population, regarded itself as the vanguard of the proletariat and of the progressive forces generally. It was motivated by a strong sense of mission and of infallibility because of its command of an ostensibly scientific ideology. The Party exercised strong internal discipline over its members: the careers of both party members and nonmembers were controlled by the party organization department and its subsidiary organs via a Soviet-style nomenklatura (the list of jobs to be filled by party appointment).

    The Chinese Communist Party penetrated society even more deeply than the Soviet Communist Party. It had members in all but the lowest levels of all kinds of units, and wherever they were located, party members were the dominant people in their units. The party thus had a low level of differentiation from other power structures in the civilian sector. Since the Party was located in virtually every unit, it was able to take over the administrative functions that might otherwise have been performed through other hierarchies. The Party not only reigned but also ruled, not only led society but actually ran most units in society.

  9. The supreme leader . Power was not only concentrated in the Party, but also within the Party was highly concentrated in the party center. At its apex, the party center consisted of at most of thirty to forty individuals who had the authority to make all major decisions. Among them power was highly personalized, uninstitutionalized, and fluid. Mao was the dominant leader. He did not have absolute power and often had to struggle for his way, but he had predominant power, thanks to his compelling ideological vision, his record of leadership successes, his political skills, and his direct and exclusive control of the military.

    Mao understood little about practical economics and was suspicious of intellectuals and experts. He had enormous self-confidence and nervous energy and enjoyed conflict and crisis. Over the course of time he was able to violate with impunity party norms that called for deliberate, collective decisionmaking among the top leaders, and to push his own vision in a series of economic and political experiments that were designed to prevent China from becoming revisionist and to lead the country rapidly into communism, which Mao identified with a high level of industrial development and public-spirited devotion to the collective welfare regardless of personal interest.

  10. An autonomous army, loyal only to Mao.  The role of the army in Mao's China was distinctive among socialist states. Although, as in other socialist states, the Chinese army had a commissar system and a system of party organizations intended to assure party control, in fact the military reported only to the Military Affairs Commission, which in turn reported only to Mao. In political crises within the leadership, this was a crucial source of Mao's power.

Deng's Reforms

Mao died in 1976, and after an interlude of political maneuvering Deng Xiaoping acquired the leading role in Chinese politics in 1978. Chinese communism under Deng could no longer be called totalitarian, because it substantially relaxed political mobilization and terror, allowed the emergence of some independent groups and institutions in the economy and among intellectuals, gave citizens more individual freedom, and to some extent limited the exercise of power and made it more predictable. But it was still not a democratic regime because of the monopoly of power in the hands of a single political party, indeed, in the hands of a few top leaders.

The processes of reform in China resembled those in other socialist states. In each case reform aimed chiefly at improving economic performance and standards of living. It brought about reduced political mobilization, relegitimation of the regime on a technocratic rather than revolutionary-utopian basis, and a change in the makeup of the elite to bring in younger, better educated, more technically competent leaders at every level.

The legacy Deng inherited from Mao's regime was an economic, social, and political crisis. Economically, the Maoist development program had produced substantial results. Industry had grown at an average rate of 11 percent a year, China was industrially self-sufficient, and between 60 and 70 percent of GNP was produced by industry and commerce. However, the new industrial system was technologically twenty to thirty years behind the West, was extremely inefficient, and faced energy and transport bottlenecks. Because the Maoist economy grew by suppressing consumption, living standards had not increased since the 1950s, and there was a widespread popular impression that the Maoist program was an economic failure.

Socially, the political campaigns of the Mao years had created a huge number of "unjust, false, and wrong cases"--instances of political persecution, criminal convictions, demotion or loss of jobs, internal exile, erroneous application of class labels, denial of access to schooling, and so on--which led to a wave of demands for redress after Mao's death. These cases probably numbered in the tens of millions, enough to create vast social pressure for reform.

Politically, the regime was no longer able to legitimize its rule by appealing to a vision of communist utopia. People had become skeptical of the Party's programs and of its right to rule. The party leaders themselves, many of them victims during the Cultural Revolution, felt the need to make changes in the system to ensure that abuses of the Party's normal collective decisionmaking processes could not occur again.

The international environment was far less threatening to Deng's regime than it had been to Mao's. Thanks to Mao's opening to the United States from 1971 onward and the changes in American foreign policy resulting from the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, China no longer regarded the United States as a serious security threat except in the special area of Taiwan, where China continued to suspect the United States of encouraging Taiwan's de facto independence. The Chinese also evaluated the Soviet threat as receding under Mikhail Gorbachev from the mid-1980s on. Deng announced that China should take advantage of what he thought would be a prolonged period of international peace to solve its internal problems.

To resolve these problems, the regime undertook far-reaching reforms in Chinese communism. 9 Deng's regime tried to reform economic institutions so as to increase living standards and efficiency; to redress the grievances of individuals who had been harmed under Mao; to create a new legitimacy based on economic performance rather than a vision of a future utopia; and to institutionalize the Party's own decisionmaking processes to improve the quality of its leadership. Deng, however, made it clear that these reforms aimed to save, not dissolve, Chinese communism. He articulated "four basic principles" that reform should never challenge: socialism, dictatorship of the proletariat, Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, and Communist Party leadership.

In the first ten years of reform (late 1978 to early 1989), the Deng regime changed some of the elements of the Mao system more than others.

  1. While maintaining high rates of state accumulation and investment, the authorities relaxed the price scissors . Peasants were allowed to sell much of their crop on free markets, and the state substantially raised the prices it paid for crops it purchased from the peasants. As a result, rural living standards increased and the peasants were allowed to set up small factories or migrate to cities and towns looking for work.

  2. More autonomy was given to large, state-owned factories in an effort to increase their efficiency . Initial steps were taken to raise the prices of industrial inputs like energy and steel to more realistic levels and to free the prices that industrial enterprises could charge their customers. Permission was given for the development of small- and medium-sized private enterprises (some of them labeled "collective").

  3. The regime took advantage of the more relaxed international environment to pursue an "open door" policy that drew in billions of dollars of foreign trade and investment . It endeavored to move away from the "command economy" to a version of "market socialism" in which major enterprises would remain state-owned but would operate in a market environment. The market environment in turn would be guided by the state through its control of banking, taxation, and other "economic levers." During the era of reform the transition to market socialism was not completed, and there were periodic efforts to reassert and improve planning, as well as debate over the possibility of moving beyond market socialism to a true market economy based on privatized ownership of enterprises.

  4. Rural-urban segregation was substantially eased . Although peasants were still forbidden to move permanently into cities, they were encouraged to move to small rural towns to work in factory jobs and were allowed to look for work (usually in construction) even in big cities.

  5. The "unit" system was virtually dissolved in the rural areas with the demise of the communes . In the cities, it remained substantially in place except for self-employed entrepreneurs and workers in private enterprises. But the hold of urban units on their members was somewhat weakened by the decline of ideology and the rise of an embryonic labor market that gave people at least a possibility of switching to different jobs.

    With the decline of both the unit and ideology, political terror greatly decreased. People were still punished for political deviance, and some leading dissidents, such as Wei Jingsheng, were jailed for long terms. But campaigns of political persecution within units fizzled out because neither party secretaries nor unit members were willing to disrupt normal routines for values that were no longer widely believed.

  6. The class status system was abandoned .

  7. The regime continued its efforts at political education through political campaigns, study groups, and the propaganda media . It no longer demanded a high level of participation from ordinary people, however. The regime tolerated people's opting out of politics to pursue private concerns, and it increasingly allowed intellectuals inside and outside the Party to debate sensitive issues publicly, although within limits. The goal of reforming human nature was pushed off into the distant future, and various philosophical and policy issues that had been regarded as closed were reopened for discussion.

  8. The Leninist-style system of party dictatorship, constituting perhaps the most essential of Deng's four basic principles, was carefully maintained . Reforms were made, however, to institutionalize the Party's internal procedures and to limit its interference in the work of government organs and economic enterprises.

  9. Deng Xiaoping tried to avoid becoming another Mao . He restricted himself to relatively modest official posts (vice-premier, chairman of the Party's Central Advisory Commission, chairman of the Military Affairs Commission) and promoting others to the key posts of Party General Secretary and Prime Minister. Yet Deng never managed to shake the essentially personal nature of power in the CCP top command. Until his final illness he remained the supreme leader whose assent was needed for all crucial decisions, although he shared power somewhat more than Mao did with other senior leaders.

    Deng was not much more of an economist than Mao, but his instincts were pragmatic. In guiding the reform, he encouraged subordinates like Zhao Ziyang to present policy proposals formulated by experts from specialized institutes. But the advice of the experts often conflicted, and Deng often made compromise decisions in order to maintain a consensus among senior party figures, including both those in office and those formally retired. Because of these factors, the reform unfolded in an experimental, inconsistent way. It went furthest in the countryside, remained a mixed success in the urban economy, and made relatively few inroads into the structure of the Party.

  10. Under Deng, the army remained largely independent . It reported directly to Deng as chairman of the Military Affairs Commission. The military accepted cuts in its budget and manpower in return for substantial modernization of arms and training. It proved its loyalty to the party elders in the operations of May and June 1989, putting down the democracy movement that almost toppled Deng's regime.

Deng's Regime as a Postmobilization Authoritarian Regime

China's evolution under Deng is well explained by the theory of postmobilizational regimes developed by Richard Lowenthal, Chalmers Johnson, and others. 10 The theory argues that communist systems in their early phases are modernizing regimes that rely on mass political mobilization and state control of the economy to achieve industrialization. But such regimes cannot maintain a high state of revolutionary tension indefinitely. People become exhausted, and disappointed in the failure to realize the utopian vision. At the same time, the regime's success in creating modern, large-scale industry requires it to adopt more sophisticated economic structures, to rely more on technocrats, to adopt regular procedures and rational regulations, and to create a less politicized, more meritocratic and liberal society. Modernization thus imposes its own dynamic on the mobilization regime, ushering it into the "postmobilization phase" or phase of "mature communism."

What this theory failed to predict was that mature communist systems would prove to be as unstable as they were. In Eastern Europe in 1989, most of the postmobilizational Communist regimes collapsed. In China, Deng's regime confronted a series of crises. Economically, although the reforms succeeded in improving both living standards and economic performance, they failed to solve the key problem of the inefficiency of state enterprises. Meanwhile they generated both inflation and corruption, which aroused popular opposition.

Politically, people--especially urban residents, and among them particularly students and intellectuals--proved unwilling to settle for the limited political freedoms and rights they were granted under reform communism. After the repression of the Mao years, a desire for intellectual and political freedom became a political force of its own. In the spring of 1989, political demonstrations to commemorate the popular leader Hu Yaobang snowballed into a massive and prolonged nationwide urban movement that threatened the existence of the regime. This movement was crushed in June with military force.

The events of 1989 signaled that the legitimacy crisis inherited from Mao's regime could not be solved without fundamental political change. Deng and his senior colleagues had been unwilling to break with the most fundamental political characteristics of the old regime, partly because they were themselves of Mao's generation. Under the slogan of "socialism with Chinese characteristics," they looked for new solutions that would preserve the monopolistic authority of the Party. As it turned out, the regime could stabilize itself only temporarily by improving economic performance, but a legitimacy based solely on economic performance evaporated when performance faltered.

Most analysts had assumed that postmobilizational authoritarian regimes would stabilize themselves short of making a transition to democracy. In retrospect it appeared that analysts had underestimated the fragility of these regimes, overlooked internal forces that threatened their existence, and failed to investigate their possible paths of development after the phase of reform communism.

Note 1: This chapter is abridged from "Totalitarianism, Authoritarianism, Democracy: The Case of China," in Myron L. Cohen, ed., Columbia Project on Asia in the Core Curriculum: Case Studies in the Social Sciences, A Guide for Teaching  (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1992), pp. 235-256. Back.

Note 2: Juan J. Linz, "Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes," in Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby, eds., Handbook of Political Science , Vol. 3 (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1975), pp. 175-411. Back.

Note 3: Andrew J. Nathan and Robert S. Ross, The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress: China's Search for Security  (New York: Norton, 1997), ch. 1. Back.

Note 4: Lynn T. White, III, Policies of Chaos: The Organizational Causes of Violence in China's Cultural Revolution  (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). Back.

Note 5: Sulamith Heins Potter and Jack M. Potter, China's Peasants: The Anthropology of a Revolution  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), Ch. 15. Back.

Note 6: Anita Chan, Richard Madsen, and Jonathan Unger, Chen Village: The Recent History of a Peasant Community in Mao's China  (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Andrew G. Walder, Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry  (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Martin K. Whyte and William L. Parish, Urban Life in Contemporary China  (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Back.

Note 7: Richard Curt Kraus, Class Conflict in Chinese Socialism  (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981). Back.

Note 8: Anita Chan, Children of Mao: Personality Development and Political Activism in the Red Guard Generation  (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985). Back.

Note 9: Harry Harding, China's Second Revolution: Reform After Mao  (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1987). Back.

Note 10: Chalmers Johnson, ed., Change in Communist Systems  (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970). Back.

China's Transition