State and Peasant in Contemporary China: The Political Economy of Village Government
308
State and Peasant in Contemporary China: The Political Economy of Village Government
308Paperback(First Edition)
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520076372 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 08/12/1991 |
| Series: | Center for Chinese Studies, UC Berkeley , #30 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 308 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d) |
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State and Peasant in Contemporary China
The Political Economy of Village GovernmentBy Jean C. Oi
University of California Press
Copyright © 1989 Jean C. OiAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-520-06105-5
Chapter One
Peasant Politics in a Communist Economy An IntroductionCommunist revolutions eradicate traditional power structures, but they do not alter the basic issue of peasant politics: how the harvest shall be divided. Although the revolution removes landlords from the historical stage, the state and its agents appear as newly powerful claimants on the harvest. To a historically unprecedented degree, the state directs the division of the harvest, and this brings it into direct conflict with the peasantry. Before the revolution the harvest was divided in the context of a class relationship, but after the revolution it is divided in the context of an increasingly direct state-society relationship.
In most agrarian regimes, the state levies taxes but does not otherwise intervene in the local grain distribution. Grain surpluses are commodities bought and sold through the medium of money. In many socialist, centrally planned economies rationing replaces markets and limits the value of money. The state becomes a grain monopoly that purchases and distributes the food supply, regulates grain prices, dictates cropping patterns, imposes output targets, and directly extracts grain to feed the cities and finance industrial growth. The need for grain, made more urgent by ambitious industrialization policies and a strong commitment to the welfare of the urban population, brings the state into a protracted, though muted, conflict with its peasantry and even its local leaders.
Procuring sufficient grain is doubly difficult for those communist states that achieve power through peasant support. Their revolutionary mantle constrains them to extract grain without resorting to heavy taxation. In China, the Communist party has devised an elaborate set of regulations designed to maintain the fiction that the state only procures the agricultural "surplus," while in fact it exploits rural areas to fund industrial growth. This process, the crux of peasant-state relations and village politics, is the subject of this study.
The prevailing models for understanding state and society in communist states have focused on the autonomy of either the state or society, or the relative strength of each. The totalitarian model discounts the ability of civil society to influence state actions. It stresses the absolute power of the communist party and its efforts to mobilize and control, but it obscures citizen efforts to influence elites, affect policy implementation, and pursue interests. Citizens are depicted as atomized, passive, and politically ineffectual.
In contrast, the interest group model provides a more complex picture of communist politics, claiming that various identifiable groups have influenced policy formulation, particularly since Stalin's death. According to this later model, the state is an arena where different groups pursue their interests, an image akin to that of the pluralist state. Some scholars have employed such terms as "institutional pluralism" to describe a system where, in their view, interest groups, especially elite bureaucratic actors, influence the policy-making process. Students of Chinese politics have adopted this model to study how mass groups-such as workers, students, and peasants-participate in politics.
The "totalitarian" model encompasses a number of variations. The major elements presented here are based on Friedrich and Brzezinski's classic formulation in Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy. The idea of an "administered society" is a modified version that deemphasizes the reliance on terror but basically accepts the major premises of the classic totalitarian model. See Allen Kassof, "The Administered Society."
This study departs from both models and shifts the focus of inquiry from the relative power of either the state or society to the way that state and society interact. I begin with the premises that in a communist system a distinction exists between the interests of the state and society and that each has the means to pursue its own interests. I do not assume, however, that individuals will necessarily act as groups or use formal channels of interest articulation to pursue their interests as they do in pluralist systems. The word "society" is but a shorthand for a whole spectrum of organized and unorganized interests.
In collectivized agriculture, if people act together, they are more likely to do so in a local corporate group created by the process of collectivization itself than in one based on occupation or class. In China, this corporate group is the village, where peasants work and live. It lies at the intersection of state and society; it can be reduced to neither. As a political actor, its interests are distinct from those of both the state and the individual members who constitute it. Local personalities, local interests, and demands on village resources define it as a community. Here state meets society; here politics takes place. Here one can observe how state regulations shape political strategies and action as well as how state directives are circumvented, twisted, or ignored. Here is where I focus my research on the state-society relationship.
In this study I distinguish between the power of the state to formulate policy and the ability of the state to implement it. Relatively speaking, communist states are still among the most powerful and autonomous political actors, but their implemented policies are not necessarily the same ones that they formulated or intended. The term "state" usually refers to the central government and its directives, and this is how I use the term in this study. However, the state as represented at the local levels by its agents-the local level cadres who are also responsible for representing their collective's and their own interests-is a distinct entity whose interests cannot be assumed to be the same as or even compatible with those of the central government.
For a fuller discussion of this point, see Andrew Walder, Communist Neo-Traditionalism, introduction.
The importance of taking an inclusive view of peasant villages is increasingly being recognized by political anthropologists. See Judith Strauch, Chinese Village Politics.
Among the most prominent works of political scientists and sociologists who view states as autonomous political actors is Theda Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions; but the literature has become extensive. Although useful, for those who work on communist states this approach is all too familiar. Under the influence of the totalitarian model, we have overemphasized the state's autonomy and insufficiently considered the constraints on state action, almost to the point of denying the "autonomy" of society.
The central state dictates policies and creates the political and economic context in which local political actors must operate but, because of the nature of the state control system, in practice these policies may exert no more than a restraining influence by delineating the boundaries of legal action. In the village, the State-society relationship is played out by people who have assumed the role of cadres, who interpret the will of the state to the peasants. Rural politics is composed of the interactions of the different political actors within state and society as they pursue their interests.
The major reorganizations that have taken place since 1949 require that I further clarify the term "village." What anthropologists call the "natural village" was submerged in the process of collectivization. By the late 1950s the natural village became part of a much larger commune (gongshe), into which peasants were incorporated until the early 1980s. The natural village, in most cases, became a "production brigade" (shengchan dadui), the second tier of commune administration. Each brigade was divided, in turn, into several "production teams" (shengchan xiaodui), the lowest tier. With the return of household farming, the natural village reemerged as an administrative unit and was renamed the "village" (cun), now the lowest level of administration. The production teams were abolished, although in some places they were renamed "village small groups" (cun xiaozu) and in others they simply disappeared. The commune became, in most instances, the "township" (xiang or zhen; see Table 1).
Regardless of these administrative changes, the village that I see as the intersection of state and society is the unit of organization where peasants live and work, where the harvest is collected and divided, where peasant incomes are earned and distributed, and where the state procures its grain. Because I am concerned about the functions rather than the designation of an administrative unit I shift the unit of analysis from the production team in the commune period to the natural village in the post-Mao period.
One might argue that for the collectivized village, the proper unit of analysis should be either the commune or the brigade. The commune was formally the lowest level of state administration. Only commune-level leaders were considered "state cadres" (guojia ganbu), receiving salaries from the state payroll and ration coupons for their grain. Brigade and team leaders were considered "local cadres" (difang ganbu), whose wages and grain rations came from village coffers; they were still officially required to participate in collective labor. However, these are less useful units of analysis because they represent only units of administration, not units of production or accounting; peasants did not directly participate in politics at this level.
The brigade was the unit of accounting and production in those few areas where the Learn from Dazhai Campaign was successfully implemented. In such cases, the proper unit of analysis would be the brigade. On the attempts to raise the level of accounting, see David Zweig, "Strategies of Policy Implementation," and his Agrarian Radicalism.
The struggle over the harvest took place in the team, not in the brigade or the commune. Although the production team owned the harvest, the state decided how and how much the team had to pay in taxes and sell in grain. If the state took too much grain, the team and its members suffered. Consequently, the team also tried to hide grain from the state and keep more for its own needs. The brigade and the commune only oversaw the procurement process; they inspected the fields to make sure that the teams were not trying to hide grain and cheat the state and that sufficient amounts of the harvest would be left as the surplus. It was their duty to call all the team leaders together and act out the fiction that peasants wanted to sell large amounts of grain to the state. They chaired the meetings where the team leaders pledged the amounts their teams would sell to the state and ensured that those amounts would sufficiently meet the state's quotas.
The brigade and commune were higher administrative units that peasants saw as the "upper levels": officials with whom they had infrequent contact. Daily activity centered on the production team. In fact, peasant interaction with the state was filtered through the intermediary of the team, primarily the team leader. Collectivization coupled with rationing and closing free grain markets made teams into closed corporate villages and allowed team leaders to act as gatekeepers. For these reasons, in the period of collectivization I focus on the peasants' relationship with team, rather than brigade or commune, leaders. Brigade officials were unquestionably more powerful than team leaders in the larger scheme of commune politics. Yet, the political actor most directly engaged in a day-to-day relationship with the peasants, routinely interpreting state law for them, was the team leader. The team leader was not a "state cadre," but he was a state agent. To the peasant he represented the state; he implemented state policy and controlled the upward flow of information.
The state's decision to abolish communes and return to household farming in the 1980s eliminated the production team as a claimant on the harvest and turned over direct administration of peasants to the former brigade, now village, cadres. The household is once again both the producer and the owner of its harvest. The state is still a claimant but less rapacious. Instead of administrative means to force peasants to sell all the grain they have at unfairly low prices, the government allows them to keep what they want and uses economic incentives to get the rest. Village officials no longer direct the production of the harvest; they only administer the contracts that individual households sign with the state for the purchase of their crop. Now village cadres assume responsibility for enforcing state policies, ensure prompt payment of taxes and sales to the state, and issue authorizations and licenses allowing peasants economic opportunities. For the peasant, political power now rests in the village rather than the team.
Village politics in China is best described as clientelist. Yet, despite its widespread currency in political science, the concept of clientelism has rarely been used to analyze communist systems. Students and journalistic observers of communist politics regularly note the importance of personal ties, and many recognize the significance of informal bonds in economic and political spheres at all levels of society. Some even apply the term "clientelism" to the political behavior they describe. But the use of the term clientelism is generally limited to elite-level politics, factionalism, career mobility, recruitment patterns, and attainment of office at the top- to middle-level echelons of the bureaucracy. Few have considered clientelism as a type of elite-mass linkage through which both the state and the party exercise control at the local level and individuals participate in the political system. Students of communist states see their subjects as rather unique systems where mobilization is achieved through coercion or commitment to either an ideology or a leader, but rarely is mobilization achieved through using patron-client networks-a well-accepted fact in the study of political systems.
(Continues...)
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