Sydney: University of South Wales Press, 2022. US$28.00, paper. ISBN 9781742237480.
“Have historians anything to contribute to discussions on contemporary China?” Australian historian John Fitzgerald credits political scientist David Shambaugh in the acknowledgments with having provoked the book with the aforementioned question. Drawing on both his expertise in Chinese history and participant observation, including as representative of the Ford Foundation in China during the crucial transition period between 2008 and 2013, Fitzgerald proceeds to analyze the basic political structures as well as foundational claims to legitimacy and history made by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Xi Jinping. The book is directed at a general readership, yet also contains a number of interesting insights for professional China specialists.
Fitzgerald is primarily interested in the functions of the party’s roughly 40 million cadres, about half of whom are employed off-budget in various service work units. But even the 20 million cadres living on state subsidies cost the country two trillion yuan per year, according to an estimate by Chinese economist Yang Shaozheng, who ultimately came to be imprisoned for making this state secret public. Public discontent about the privileges of these “insiders” runs like a red thread through modern Chinese history and constantly needs to be counterbalanced by way of deflecting attention to other subjects. The cadres constitute, in Fitzgerald’s apt formulation, a “surrogate nation” (225), who monopolize participation in public debates and politics, and supposedly distinguish themselves from the general populace by advanced consciousness. This “institutionalization of inequality” (270), and its social, political, and economic consequences, are what this book is about.
Fifteen concise chapters, with only marginal overlap, analyze the disputed legitimacy of cadre rule and the inbuilt quest for status among cadres at different bureaucratic levels, with constant reference to historical precedents. This yields a number of important insights that are commonly overlooked. These pertain, for example, to the various forms of blending history and territorial unity since at least the Song dynasty, the metamorphosis of employing the term “anti-fascism” in CCP rhetoric, but also to the notion of the “family-state” (jiaguo), which is frequently used as a metaphor to describe the supposedly close relationship between ruler and ruled under Xi Jinping. This attempt to link and ultimately transfer sentimental attachments from families to a state or party leader originated in nineteenth-century Japan. It was taken up by Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek, sometimes in quasi-fascist discursive contexts, to combat the centrifugal forces of local and regional loyalties. In these and other respects, Xi Jinping thus is shown to have adopted a number of ideological positions previously held by the CCP’s former arch-enemy, the Guomindang.
Unlike New Confucian approaches that emphasize notions of “meritocracy” as the dominant imperial legacy with regard to cadre selection, Fitzgerald sees the exclusion of the common people in the name of a supposedly higher principle, the imperial “heavenly mandate” or the CCP’s “historical mission,” as the common denominator. While representatives of the party-state claim to “embrace the people,” the only adequate response from below is gratitude for the benevolence bestowed from above, thus keeping the people in a state of perpetual passivity. For the more recent past, the shift in ideological grounds of exclusion becomes especially obvious in the repeated references to Milovan Djilas’s concept of a “new class” (1957). While for Djilas, the power of cadres as special stratum rested on their de facto monopoly over property and the allocation of goods, in recent decades it has been the privileged access to markets, capital, and resources that has made in particular the families of high-ranking cadres rich. Chen Yuan, son of the Mao era “economic czar” Chen Yun, is quoted in this context as justifying privileges by birthright among second-generation cadres as “conscious members of a ruling class” (156).
Fitzgerald does not see particular cultural “genes” at work here, a term frequently used by Xi Jinping himself, but rather conscious political choices. For him, the attempts to disentangle the state from the party or to expand the sphere of societal engagement during the reform era are thus not a façade to hide true intentions, but serious attempts knocked off balance by external shocks, most importantly the domestic and political repercussions of the global economic crisis in 2008, and the rampant corruption among party cadres. There is nothing spectacularly new in this analysis, and yet the precision and clarity of how “a proud, diverse and vibrant country is absorbed into a disciplined party in spite of itself” (4) is admirable. It is the great merit of this volume that it constantly rebuffs the mythical language that has come to dominate party discourse in the past decade with clear and critical insights derived from the careful, long-term study of Chinese history and politics. After reading the book, there can be no doubt that some of the best analyses of contemporary China are indeed written by historians.
Daniel Leese
University of Freiburg, Freiburg im Breisgau