Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Contributors
- INTRODUCTION: On the Significance of Informal Politics
- PART I Informal Politics in Industrialized Asian Democracies
- PART II Dictatorship with Chinese Characteristics: Macroperspectives
- 4 Psychocultural Foundations of Informal Groups: The Issues of Loyalty, Sincerity, and Trust
- 5 Informal Politics Among the Chinese Communist Party Elite
- 6 Formal Structures, Informal Politics, and Political Change in China
- 7 The Informal Politics of Leadership Succession in Post-Mao China
- PART III Case Studies in Chinese Corporatism
- PART IV Asian Authoritarianism on the Chinese Periphery
- CONCLUSION: East Asian Informal Politics in Comparative Perspective
- Glossary
- Index
6 - Formal Structures, Informal Politics, and Political Change in China
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Contributors
- INTRODUCTION: On the Significance of Informal Politics
- PART I Informal Politics in Industrialized Asian Democracies
- PART II Dictatorship with Chinese Characteristics: Macroperspectives
- 4 Psychocultural Foundations of Informal Groups: The Issues of Loyalty, Sincerity, and Trust
- 5 Informal Politics Among the Chinese Communist Party Elite
- 6 Formal Structures, Informal Politics, and Political Change in China
- 7 The Informal Politics of Leadership Succession in Post-Mao China
- PART III Case Studies in Chinese Corporatism
- PART IV Asian Authoritarianism on the Chinese Periphery
- CONCLUSION: East Asian Informal Politics in Comparative Perspective
- Glossary
- Index
Summary
Western studies of China have offered sometimes dramatically different images of the way the political system works and how policy decisions are made. In recent years, studies of China's political system have drawn on Western understandings of bureaucratic processes to develop a picture of a highly institutionalized, albeit fragmented, administrative system. In particular, Lieberthal and Oksenberg's monumental study of the energy bureaucracy depicts a system in which there is an elaborate division of labor and institutionalized operating procedures that direct the paper flow and greatly influence the decision-making process. Their work, as well as that of others, has highlighted the fragmentation of power and consequent bargaining that takes place in the system. The richness of this work suggests the intellectual mileage that can be gained by looking carefully at the formal, institutional structure of the system. Yet as Lieberthal and Oksenberg clearly recognize, China's political system is far less institutionalized at the highest levels of the party, and there are policy arenas in which bargaining models are far less useful. As Jonathan Pollack remarked in a recent article on the People's Liberation Army, “The closer to the acme of the system, the less command derives from specified rules and norms. …” Lieberthal has similarly noted that the “fragmented authoritarianism” model was largely constructed around studies of investment projects and does not necessarily have the same utility in other areas.
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- Informal Politics in East Asia , pp. 141 - 164Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000
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