Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. viii, 208 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$50.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8047-8936-3.
A book that contains the following quotes from its rural Chinese interviewees has to be interesting: “If you’re not corrupt, no one will trust you,” (15) and “In Mao’s day we had more fairness, but that’s because we all had an equal share of nothing” (138). And while Ben Hillman’s study of patronage links starts off with a fairly abstract scene-setting chapter about the nature of kinship and the political, moral, and economic values attached to this in contemporary China, the material that follows is richly informed by the decade-long period he spent doing field research in a remote part of the southwest.
His broad subject is the reach of the Chinese Party-state into the most distant places. The picture he draws is of a Communist Party and government often portrayed as hierarchical and rigid in its Beijing manifestation which, in its most local face at least, has created an extraordinary, dynamic accommodation with the highly networked nature of society there. In the author’s description, the Party has, in the ways in which its officials organize relations and dispense resources, made a very broad framework within which people work, leaving plenty of space for variations and adaptations. It is a less fiercely prescriptive entity than the one that is sometimes portrayed, at least outside China. The Party in this account is pragmatic to its fingertips, and, depending on whether you are looking at it from its provincial, prefectural, country, or town levels, shows different faces to the world.
In the village-level entity where the author spent most of his time, there were two issues he picked up on that illustrate this diversity. One was that, purely through bureaucratic accident, a place that anywhere else in China would have ranked as a township was given classification as a rural area. This allowed it to hold multi-candidate elections under the 1998 Village Election Laws, despite the fact that from the early 2000s the brief experiment in townships elections effectively ceased. The second was that on the whole the relationship between kinship links and how these led to the exercise of power was not a straightforward one. People spent time mobilizing areas of support through the different groups ranged around them when elections came up; there were constituencies that were relatively easy to mobilize, and other which were more neutral and had to be appeased by different sorts of incentives, from money to discreet favours and other promises. While not a “democracy” in the formal sense, at the most local level, from the evidence presented here, China is certainly a place where people often negotiate, campaign, and form alliances, support for which has to be won rather than assumed.
This is one of the problems that Hillman’s book very lucidly puts into sharper focus. Everyone knows that China remains a highly networked society, and that human relationships and connections remain a fundamental characteristic of the business, cultural, and political life of the country. But trying to get inside these relationships to give them a stronger sense of definition and content is challenging. The fact that people went to the same schools, worked in the same factories or on the same farms, or are linked by marriage gives at least some clues as to what that content might be. But kinship also means something more than this—a sense of shared interest and values, or clan identity for instance, or shared world views.
This issue of content is highlighted in an informal survey the author undertook, showing that most of the residents of the area he is looking at rank political connectedness and wealth over all other preferred qualities in a village leader—including efficiency and honesty. The most we can conclude from this is that the Chinese people he talked to place a high value on perceptions of being well-connected. But the real value of this connectedness is far harder to quantify. He refers later to other studies that show rank incompetence has not precluded the well-connected from enjoying good careers when they get the right sort of support. But against this, he does also offer signs of supportive relationships that get exhausted and end, or people whose incompetence is finally dealt with by them being sidelined in positions at cultural bureaus or academic entities where they have grand-sounding titles, but zero powers or influence. In these aspects, China is not so different from the outside world. Even when it comes to connections and kinship values, people change their minds and have strategies in place to deal with this.
This links to probably the most contentious issue the book raises: how far can lessons observed in the regions Hillman studied be extrapolated elsewhere in China? This, after all, is the promise implied in the book’s title and subtitle, which seems to promise a description of networks and power in rural China generally, rather than one area of Yunnan. Ethnically, geographically, and even developmentally, Hillman is evidently looking at somewhere which is very specific. Perhaps the only safe conclusion to draw from this book is that, organizationally at least, the Communist Party of China represents different things to different people, and this almost liquid aspect of the way it exercises power is the source of its durability.
One of the most enjoyable aspects of Hillman’s study is the lively vignettes that he relays about some of the elections he has witnessed and the way people in the area he researched related to each other, tried to gain influence, and, when things didn’t go well, how they sometimes lost it. For a crisp, accessible description of how towns, counties, and prefectures are meant to operate, this book is invaluable. Whether it tells us much about the real nature of power in China, however, is more debatable.
Kerry Brown
University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
pp. 407-49