The concept of “informal politics,” refurbishing previous work on informal power, informal institutions, and informal economy, has recently witnessed rejuvenation in East Asian comparative politics in general and Chinese politics in particular. Yet despite its obvious relevance, informal politics has largely remained terra incognita in the study of North Korean politics. The prevailing assumption was that, given North Korea's inaccessibility and the paucity of data, we are not able to peer into the “black box” of Pyongyang's informal politics. Moreover, if socialism has mono-organizational tendencies, the North Korean political system is mono-organizational to a fault. To the extent that factional strife is deemed coterminous with informal politics, the concept thus seemed a poor “fit” for the study of contemporary North Korean politics.

Yet the informal dimension has always remained an integral part of North Korean politics, albeit in shifting form. This has more to do with the unsettled nature of the politics of a divided Korea than with traditional political culture. The division of the nation in 1945 set in motion a politics of competitive legitimation and delegitimation as each Korea, starting from an identical cultural and historical baseline, began pursuing separate paths in a parallel state-building and legitimacy-seeking process underwritten by the two competing superpowers. This was the beginning of a legitimacy cum identity challenge that a divided Korea would have to cope with for years.

Political institutions determine economic rules in general, although the causality runs both ways. That is, property rights are determined and enforced by political institutions, but the structure of economic interests will also influence political structure. One of the most important political economic structures that has determined Korea's property rights in the past is the tightly knit relationship between the administrative branch of the government and the chaebol, the large family-owned industrial conglomerates. The organization of the Korean government endows the executive branch with special privileges that other democratic nations' governmental administrations usually do not enjoy; that is, ministries can change the rules and regulations governing commerce and other matters without the approval of the legislative branch. Using the dominant executive power, Korea's past presidents have developed personalized political exchanges to benefit specific groups. Since ministers are political appointees of the president, he has direct lines of command and authority over the ministries. Businesses and individuals with direct access to the president, therefore, have been able to get the rules and regulations changed in their favor or persuade the government to grant special privileges on their behalf. In return for extending the desired favors, the ruling party leader receives large political contributions from big businesses that he uses primarily to fund elections.

Past political economic exchanges in Korea are largely responsible for the present economic crisis that has collapsed the stock market/exchange rates and dictated the $US57 billion IMF bailout package.

For more than seven decades from 1921 on, the top leadership structure of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has taken shape in an informal and organic process. There were several attempts at leadership succession during Mao's era, but they were not successful at installing a new political leader of the party-state. Examples include such cases as Liu Shaoqi, Lin Biao, Wang Hongwen, and Deng Xiaoping. Hua Guofeng was chosen and groomed for leadership succession in the last days of Mao Zedong in 1976, precluding other candidates, such as Deng Xiaoping and the “Gang of Four.” Yet although Hua managed to acquire almost all of the top formal leadership posts, he failed to hold onto them after the death of Mao Zedong.

Although an unsuccessful candidate for (premortem) succession, Deng Xiaoping was among the first to explicitly recognize the succession issue under Mao as problematic. As soon as he reassumed power in 1978, he took initiatives to carry out the retirement of the massive cohort of veteran revolutionaries and to engineer the process of leadership succession. In the CCP, political leadership is dealt with as an informal structure that is neither explicitly stated in the party's charter nor in any other official document. In Deng's view, political power is more than the holding of top formal posts in the CCP; the central leadership team led by the leadership core exercises it.

A PERSPECTIVE, DEFINITIONS, AND EXAMPLES

Politics is, in Harold Lasswell's elegantly spare definition, “Who gets what, when, how.” At the expense of its elegance of parsimony, we might embellish it a little as: “Who gets what, when, how, and at whose expense.” The last phrase is added to make it explicit that politics is concerned with the distribution not only of the benefits derived from the use or consumption of goods and services, but also the costs required for their production and supply. The “what” here is to be understood as primarily a public, as opposed to private, good or service. Since, however, who gets a public good or service, how, and at whose expense critically affects who gets a private good or service, how, and at whose expense, we would leave the “what” in Lasswell's original formulation alone.

We adopt this broad and open-ended definition of politics rather than David Easton's well known but more restrictive definition: “authoritative allocation of values.”

As we will attempt to explain in this introduction and the chapters that follow, we believe, for both ontological and epistemological reasons, that any allocation of the costs and benefits of the production, distribution, and consumption of public goods and services – whether authoritative or questionable, legitimate or illegitimate, legal or illegal, overt or covert – is fundamentally political and therefore a proper subject for investigation by the political scientist.

This chapter will attempt to highlight the relationship between a certain type of informal group, that characterized by patron–client relations, and formal organization. While not wishing to rule out the possibility that such groups can find their origins in phenomena like common regional or generational origins, this study will explore the possibility that sometimes these groups may have their basis in formal organization. It will not provide a conclusive resolution to the question of the nature and primary activity of these groups. Instead, through a brief case study of politics within China's national defense science and technology research and development (R&D) sector up to and including the Cultural Revolution, a path for further investigation will be proposed.

Informal, in contradistinction to formal, politics concerns a process that occurs outside formal rules and among groups that cannot be considered formal organizations. The process is marked by a behind-the-scenes, hidden character, as opposed to public and open procedures such as the election of the president of the United States. The informal groups that are major actors in this form of politics have usually been classified as factions in Chinese studies. Andrew Nathan considers a faction to be a structure mobilized on the basis of clientelist ties to engage in politics and consisting of a few, rather than a great many, layers of personnel. The clientelist tie at the heart of it is a “one-to-one rather than a corporate pattern of relationships between leaders (or subleaders) and followers.”

While I was ensconced in writing the first draft of this paper, the Hong Kong business community was shaken by the news that Zhou Guanwu, aged 77, head of Shougang, China's largest and most powerful state-owned steel manufacturer, had been forced into retirement and that, the following day, his son, Zhou Beifang, head of a Hong Kong–based holding company of this enterprise, was under arrest and investigation in Beijing for his possible connection to serious economic crimes. Zhou Guanwu was reported to be close to Deng Xiaoping, a relationship that became manifest when Deng visited the company in 1992, a gesture of approval for the company's adherence to Deng's policies. Since then, Shougang obtained exclusive rights to launch businesses bearing no direct connection to the production or marketing of steel. This special treatment was widely seen to be linked to the cordial relationship between Deng and the Zhous. Furthermore, one of the subsidiaries of Zhou's holding company in Hong Kong had among its partners no other than Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka Shing and another Shanghai-based company in which Deng's second son, Deng Zhifang, was a vice managing director. The news broke amid rumors of Deng's deteriorating health. Many speculated that this event represented a showdown between two megapowers. Backed by the intertwined relation network (guanxi wang) between the two families, Shougang had reportedly been resisting the new tax reforms initiated by government policy makers, which would drastically reduce the profitability of the giant enterprise.