Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016. x, 228 pp. (Tables.) US$65.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-472-11993-6.
The literature on post-communist transition has overwhelmingly focused on the transition from planned to market-oriented economy, and the political transition from authoritarianism to democracy. Yet, despite the economic and political changes in the post-communist states, neither economic nor political transitions have happened as expected. In many post-communist states, not only has the transition to a market economy met great difficulties, but the initial democratization has also tended to be reversed. How can such developments be explained? Lately, scholars have begun to turn to other aspects of the post-communist transition. The book under review here stands out and makes an important contribution to this still growing body of literature. In this excellent study, Cheng Chen focuses on ideology, a subject that has been unduly understudied in the literature.
More than sixty years ago, in his Ideology and Organization in Communist China, Franz Schurmann pointed to the significance of political ideology to the Chinese communist state, arguing that what held Communist China together was ideology and organization. This argument is certainly applicable to other communist states. Therefore, when one talks about the transition, these two aspects are equally important. In this sense, Cheng Chen has brought ideology back in.
The book focuses on the transitions in China and Russia. Both are former communist states. While in a normative sense, Russia has transformed itself into a post-communist state, China continues to be communist despite its no less radical changes in both the economic and political domains. In socio-economic terms, a transformed Russia is apparently less successful than a still-communist China. In the former, the ruling party has been unable to bring the country socioeconomic prosperity, while in the latter, the ruling party has been able to achieve what many have called an economic miracle. Among others factors, ideology matters. Ideology-building (or “rebuilding”) explains the differences between these two states.
Based on interviews, surveys, political speeches, writings of political leaders, and a variety of publications, Cheng Chen looks into the different ways regime ideology has been rebuilt in China and Russia. The author contends that successful ideology-building requires two necessary conditions. First, the regime must establish a coherent ideological repertoire that takes into account the nation’s ideological heritage and fresh surges of nationalism. Second, the regime must attract and maintain a strong commitment to the emerging ideology, at least among the political elite.
The research in this study is well structured, and its chapters well arranged. The author first discusses the role of regime ideology in the post-communist context, and examines the two necessary conditions for successful regime ideology-building. This is followed by a chapter dealing specifically with the empirical issue of establishing the “success” or “failure” in building a post-communist regime ideology. The author then compares the two cases, namely, the Putin regime in Russia and the post-Deng regime in Communist China, and discusses in detail their respective ideology-building projects, assessing their varying degrees of success based on solid analysis. In the conclusion, the author goes one step further and systematically compares and contrasts the two cases, drawing out both theoretical and empirical implications based on the main findings of the study.
Ideology is important, but building an ideology is no easy task. Cheng Chen identifies some major obstacles to ideology-building in modern Russia and China and assesses their respective long-term prospects. The key problem during the process of ideology-building is the growing incoherence in ideological repertoires, which originate from rather different sources. The author also discusses how Russia and China employ different strategies to shore up elite support to build a new post-communist regime ideology.
The author delineates the differences between the two. In Russia, while the regime muddled through a rather inconsistent assortment of selected elements from the past(s), it only arrived at vague ideas devoid of concrete socioeconomic programs, such as “sovereign democracy” or “conservative modernization,” to define itself (93). In China, despite the regime’s successive ideological changes, it still suffers from a sort of “ideological deficit,” and its search for a clear and viable regime ideology remains a work in progress. Nevertheless, by comparison, Russia is less successful than China. The Chinese regime’s ideological repertoire has had a relatively consistent and clearly defined “core”—a state-sponsored nationalism that has been widely accepted, at least within the regime and perhaps within its society (123).
This book opens a new research agenda for the post-communist transition. It explores ideological changes in Russia and China, and explains the differences between the two. But more research questions can be raised. The ruling parties in both countries have endeavoured to construct new ideologies by putting together different sources, and tried to impose these onto its citizenry. But how relevant are the new ideologies to reality? Also, in both Russia and China there exist diversified ideologies at the societal level, and confrontations take place between and among ideologies. Questions such as how effective a regime ideology might be in a society with such diversified ideologies offer potential research subjects for scholars in the field.
Yongnian Zheng
National University of Singapore, Singapore