Why did Mao Zedong launch the Cultural Revolution? Few would dispute that the answer lies in CCP politics between 1956 and 1966, but explanations vary greatly. The CCP official account explains the CR as a result of the conflict between Mao's “Left-deviationist error” and his colleagues' persistence in the “correct policies”. Numerous scholars also attribute the CR to policy differences among the CCP leaders. A few emphasize Mao's deep-seated antibureaucratism, or focus on “the politics of succession” in the leadership, or see the CR “essentially as an aberration”, resulting from changes in the political environment that put different constraints on Mao and his colleagues in decision making. The power-struggle analysts see the CR originating in the elite struggles for power, although these struggles were often triggered by policy disputes.

This chapter examines CCP politics in 1956–66 from the perspective of the structure of leadership relations. It shows that the CCP leaders' policy choices were essentially structure-induced after the two-front arrangement was set up in policy making (see Chapter 4). That is, given his policy preferences and guanxi with the other leaders, a leader's rationale in decision making was eventually subject to the constraints of the two-front arrangement.

The two-front arrangement was adopted to solve Mao's dilemma in the policy process: Mao had to keep all manner of control flowing to him in order to maintain his command, yet it was too much a task for him to follow every policy issue closely.

How could Mao do away with the Party state? Why did Mao initiate his assault in the cultural field? Most Western analysis and the CCP official accounts blame Mao's absolute power and his personality cult, and see as random its initial unfolding in the cultural field. Yet my examination in Chapter 5 shows that Mao's authority was at its lowest ebb in 1965. By then, the Party bureaucrats (PB) had controlled the policy process, and the remarkable recovery from the GLF under their management had increased their reputation and influence. Their control was so extensive that Mao was virtually incapable of doing anything in Beijing without their cooperation.

Mao had to find the legitimacy – that is, an ideological justification – and a force to break the Party state. He obtained the legitimacy by provoking a confrontation with the PB in the cultural field, which is why the Cultural Revolution preluded an all-out assault on the Party establishment; and he organized his forces outside the Party state, which is why his personality cult was created in order to impel and control a broad but poorly organized mass movement. Thus, Mao's personality cult and his absolute power were not so much the cause as the result of the CR.

The fundamental departure of this study from the literature on factionalism in CCP politics is that factionalism is an independent variable in the shaping of leadership relations and leadership decision making. This chapter shows why and how factionalism is embedded in the CCP political system, a system that has provided the necessary and sufficient conditions for the development of factionalism in political affairs. The analysis then focuses on how factionalism has reinforced itself through cadre promotion and changes in leadership relations.

CONDITIONS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF FACTIONALISM

Personal Entrustment of Power

The pattern of power distribution in CCP politics is rooted in the process of its revolution. The perilous situation after the bloody setback in 1927 forced the CCP to embark on an arduous route for power, a route best summed up by Mao as “setting up the armed independent regimes in the countryside and encircling the cities from the rural areas”. With this strategy, the CCP cadres were sent to the remote and usually mountainous regions where the authority of the incumbent government could barely reach.

FACTIONALISM AND POLITICAL OUTCOMES IN CHINA

Factionalism, an Essential Dynamic in CCP Politics

The system of single-party dictatorship imposes a double dilemma on the CCP leaders. In order to maintain the image of the Party's unity, which is the prerequisite for its rule, they have to deny any differences among themselves in public, but differences are inevitable in the policy process; and they need support in a policy dispute, but they cannot generate support through an open debate because that would undermine the image of unity. This double dilemma has forced the CCP leaders to engage in factional activities: when a policy dispute emerges, they pass information and seek support through informal channels provided by guanxi (personal ties). Moreover, it has also brutalized CCP politics: the weaker ones must be victimized once the dispute breaks open, even though their policy preferences might be correct, because any compromises would expose the division within the leadership and hence undermine the image of unity. Thus, we have observed fierce factional activities whenever a policy dispute emerged among the CCP leaders, and those who had control of the strongest factional networks would prevail. Indeed, the extent of a CCP leader's power is measured essentially by his ability to manipulate factional activities in political affairs. Mao and Deng were, in this sense, the supreme leaders of their times, and Mao was a stronger leader than Deng in this respect.

This edited volume represents the homecoming of a scholarly odyssey lasting more than a decade and spanning 10,000 miles from one side of the Pacific to the other. We now find that our intellectual debts are so heavy and our creditors so numerous that we could not possibly repay or even mention them all. In terms of intellectual origins the book represents a confluence of at least two currents: In the study of Japanese politics, it can be traced to Haruhiro Fukui's pioneering interest in the gaps between formal rules and actual political behavior, resulting for example in his attempt to explain the “consistent inconsistencies” between the theoretically expected and the actual results of every change in Japanese electoral laws since the late nineteenth century. In the study of Chinese politics, although seasoned China-watchers have had an intuitive grasp of informal politics for some time, its methodologically self-conscious analysis dates from a debate between Andrew Nathan and Tang Tsou in the pages of the American Political Science Review and the subsequent intellectual fermentation of Tsou's teachings among his students (including Lowell Dittmer, Joseph Fewsmith, Peter Lee, and Ben Ostrov). These two currents converged in the Santa Barbara–based research project, “Informal Politics in East Asia,” codirected by Fukui and Dittmer and generously endowed with two-year funding (1991–1993) by the Pacific Rim Research Program of the University of California. This enabled us to put together a research team consisting initially of recruits from the UC campuses and later cross-fertilized by other interested scholars.

The danwei, an enclosed, multifunctional and self-sufficient entity, is the most basic collective unit in the Chinese political and social order. It finds its origins in the early administrative arrangements of the Red Army and the Soviets and wartime base areas, which were designed to be highly autarkic: Each military unit had responsibility for its own provisioning, training, discipline, propaganda, and morale. Unit organization was then generalized across the country in an effort to restructure society in the context of the relatively complete socioeconomic disaster (e.g., industrial destruction, hyperinflation) that followed thirty years of invasion and civil war. Although the unit is the lowest tier of the executive, it is also a production unit and social community. In its political role, the danwei functions as a mechanism through which the state controls members of the cadre corps implementing its policies among the working populace. As an economic and communal entity, the danwei fulfills the welfare and social needs of its members. Danwei membership is inclusive, entailing entitlement to a potentially infinite range of goods and services, for example, housing, bonuses, transportation subsidies, medical care, recreation, and other rationed commodities. The danwei's omnifunctionality has led to a relationship of mutual dependency between the organization and its membership that is not unlike kinship. Yet the danwei is hardly a voluntary association; rather, it is a quasipermanent, quasiascriptive identity in almost the same sense as a nationality or native place.

As our survey clearly shows, informal politics remains a prominent, pervasive feature of political life throughout contemporary East Asia. We have contended, however, that whereas “bringing the state back in” has made a major contribution toward conceptualizing the political economy of rapid growth in the region, it does not really take us very far toward understanding how politics actually gets done – perhaps anywhere, but certainly not in East Asia. The “state,” as in the “state–society” paradigm, is a concept that is far too homogeneous and monolithic, too static and rigid to capture the infinite variety of cross-cutting relationships that we find to be characteristic of informal politics. If the “state,” conventionally defined, is too narrowly gauged, “society” is too broad and indiscriminate. The concept of “political culture” encompasses our interests, as is fruitfully realized within this volume by C. F. Yang, who shows how the normative dimension of informal politics in particular is inseparable from its cultural-linguistic dimension; or by Douglas Pike's evocative account of the impact of “lingering traditionalism” on Vietnamese politics. Yet the concerns of “political culture” also go well beyond informal politics – including, for example, theories of transhistorical versus psychocultural origin, or the relations between public symbolism and psychological motives, and other unresolved methodological controversies that need not detain us here. The analysis of “civil society,” which was greatly stimulated by the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, seems initially more promising as a conceptual bridge to span the hiatus beween state and society.

As suggested in the Introduction to this volume, informal politics both complements and competes with formal politics in complex and dynamic patterns of interaction. Recent Japanese Diet (parliamentary) elections illustrate this subtle but often powerful role that informal politics plays vis-à-vis formal politics. We examine in this chapter the power and pattern of informal politics primarily in Diet elections held in the late 1980s and early 1990s under the multiple-seat election district system, known as a single non-transferable vote (SNTV) system, as seen in three candidates' experiences. As we will argue, however, our arguments and conclusions also apply to the more recent Diet elections without any significant modifications.

Before we present the case studies and discuss their implications, it will be helpful to reiterate a cliché about Japanese politics in general and Japanese elections under the SNTV system in particular: They were both very expensive. As we pointed out in our previous discussion of a related topic, a candidate could legally spend only so much – a little less than ¥16 million on average in the 1990 lower house general election – during a legally prescribed campaign period of about two weeks. The amount was not insignificant, but neither was it totally beyond the average adult citizen's reach in a nation with a mean per-capita gross national product (GNP) of nearly ¥3.5 million in 1990. In reality, however, a Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) candidate in a Diet election in the late 1980s and early 1990s typically spent between ¥100 and ¥200 million.

The Vietnamese tend to have a rather singular regard for politics, formal and informal alike. Their perceptions can be traced back through the centuries to various historical experiences and social traumas, many of them of searing quality. These formative forces shape individual Vietnamese' outlook on life's struggles, the proper response to society's challenges, as well as general political behavior. The resultant clutch of attitudes is marked by a deep distrust of politics in general and a cynicism about political leadership. All this, taken as a whole, forms the bedrock of today's Vietnamese political culture. It must be taken into account when studying Vietnamese politics. One simply cannot understand today's political scene without such consideration.

Of the many factors of influence, four have been singled out here for discussion as being of overriding importance: (a) lingering traditionalism; (b) clandestinism in political and social organization; (c) weak political institutions; and (d) a special kind of political divisiveness.

LINGERING TRADITIONALISM

Vietnam today remains deceptively traditional. The basic sociopolitical unit is the village. In the cities and towns can be found the transitional and modern Vietnamese, the movers of society. The 5,121 villages, where two-thirds of the population lives, remain bastions of traditionalism.

As in like societies, this traditionalism is characterized by a tyranny of custom; an overriding spirit of noninnovation; and acceptance, even defense, of hierarchy. The parochial villager is concerned with the particularistic but seldom with the universalistic.

The informal dimension has always played an extremely important part in Chinese leadership politics. This is due in part to the unsettled nature of the Chinese political scene throughout the twentieth century, which makes it difficult for any political arrangement to become securely institutionalized, and in part to the traditional aversion to law and preference for more moralistic, personalized authority relations. Although usually not part of the explicit analytical framework, the informal dimension has been implicitly taken into account in the biographical analyses of the lives of prominent leaders or thinkers and in the study of leadership coalitions and cleavages (“factionalism”). Informal politics per se did not, however, become the basis of social science theory until relatively recently – specifically, with the publication of Andrew Nathan's pioneering article on factionalism and in Tang Tsou's rebuttal, which coined the term.

While such contributions have taken us a long way toward a consensually acceptable analytical framework, a critical review will be necessary before beginning our own analysis. The following chapter consists of three parts: Following a brief review of the literature, we introduce our own attempt at conceptual synthesis. We then attempt to apply that schema to the leadership politics of post-Liberation China, focusing on the reform era.

NOTIONS OF PERSONAL POLITICS

The central variable in Nathan's pioneering model was the faction, which he uses to explain patterns of conflict and coalition among CCP elites.

Academic attention on democratic consolidation is riveted to the making of formal rules, notably the choice of electoral system and the rewriting of the constitution. Formal rules are important for an understanding of the political process. They lay down the basic institutional framework within which political elites compete. They embody an incentive system that shapes the behavior of political elites.

However, politics should be understood in terms of unwritten rules as well. First, formal rules may become completely ritualized, as in pre-1989 European communist regimes. Often, formal rules simply exist on paper, either unenforced or overlooked. For example, political contributions and electoral spending grossly exceed the legal limits in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Second, while formal and informal power may eventually converge, this process may be very long. Third, the discrepancy between formal rules and the actual code of conduct can be very significant. Fukui and Fukai show that informal politics in Japan is normal politics, while the making and remaking of formal rules are extraordinary politics that explains what went wrong with informal politics but do not explain what usually occurs in Japan. Hence, once the infrequent drama of remaking formal rules is over, unwritten rules reemerge to guide politics.

In informal politics, factionalism stands out as a particularly salient phenomenon. This is particularly true in some parts of the world, such as East Asia, the Mediterranean countries, developing countries in general, and, arguably, the pre–civil rights American South and big immigrant cities.

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.