The aim of the communism that was implemented over vast areas of the world in this century (the real thing, not intellectual or salon communism) was to bring about a seamless unity of the state's official belief system, state monopoly of political and military power, stateprescribed social norms and relations, state-defined culture, and, importantly, state ownership, control, and management of the economy – in short, to bring into being a monolithic totalitarian state: allembracing and omnipotent, a oneness of state and society. Allowing for temporal, regional, and national variations, the institutions of the state itself (party, government, police, the judiciary, the military, mass organizations, economic planning apparatus) were highly hierarchical, commandist, centralized, pervasive, and pathogenically bureaucratized.

The totalitarian ideal was never fully attained – in China especially, localism continued to exert its traditional influence – but most variants of real socialism came very close to it at one time or another, in some instances over extended periods. To gain total control of the economy, which is what concerns us here, the communist state in almost every case had to tackle a double task: physical rebuilding of an economy ravaged by war and/or civil conflict and a restructuring (reform) from first principles of key economic institutions, primarily of the mechanism of allocation and coordination, and the system of property rights. In almost every case the first task proved to have been the easier of the two.

Thinking about the future is an exercise in humility. Thinking about China's future, if its modern history is any guide, is an exercise in frustration. No major country has gone through as many radical policy shifts as has the People's Republic of China (PRC) since its founding in 1949. But a number of factors point to greater continuity in the future. Thus, this chapter hazards a presentation of a “most likely” scenario of state development over the mid-term future.

CHANGE IN COMMUNIST AND ONE-PARTY STATES

Writing some thirty years ago, during the heyday of communism, Richard Lowenthal identified a fundamental contradiction in Marxist-Leninist states. On the one hand, they are utopian, seeking the creation of a new socialist man and the elimination of class differences. On the other hand, they mobilize their populations for rapid economic development and modernization. As development occurs, however, it gives rise to a new elite of bureaucrats, scientists, engineers, military officers, and skilled blue-collar workers. This new elite, in turn, undermines the egalitarian goals of the revolution.

As history has demonstrated in recent decades, the new elites eventually triumph over the communist ideologues. On the surface, there is little left to separate communist from nationalist revolutions in developing nations. Both undertake fundamental social change in pursuit of national power and economic growth. In theory, the most important remaining differences between communist and nationalist revolutionary models are that the former are characterized by state ownership of the means of production and central planning substitutes for market forces.

From the vantage point of 2000, Taiwan is widely seen as a textbook case of successful economic development and of peaceful transformation from authoritarian rule to democracy. It has drawn the attention of scholars and politicians who see it as a potential model for other developing countries, not least of all the People's Republic of China (PRC). But this was not always so. After Chiang Kai-shek moved the Nationalist government to Taiwan in 1949, he created a strong authoritarian state which repressed domestic aspirations for political change. Although Taiwan's rapid economic modernization began in the late 1950s, its notable economic success was matched by its continued authoritarian political system and the deterioration of its international standing. Until a decade ago, most observers saw little hope of its political transformation or its renaissance as an international player. Indeed, it has only been in the past ten years that one could describe Taiwan as a model of political development and be taken seriously.

The evolution of the state on Taiwan has been shaped by an uneasy amalgam of traditions from imperial China, legacies of the Nationalist era, distinctive qualities of Taiwan's political economy and social structure, and the consequences of development itself. The relative importance of each of these factors has varied over time, but each has made an impact on the structure of the state, its goals, and its performance. Over time, the legacies of the past diminished in importance, and the issues of the present began to dominate. Indeed, it was the willingness of the Guomindang (GMD) to shed its traditional orientations that allowed it to adapt to the changing domestic and international environments it faced.

This volume owes a debt of gratitude to many. Most of all it owes a special intellectual debt to the memory of Franz Michael (1907–1992), to whom the volume is admiringly dedicated.

Most of the contributors to this volume were either colleagues or students of Professor Michael. Personally, as an undergraduate, he was one of my first teachers of Asian history. He did much to shape my initial understanding of China and Asian civilizations, and he particularly challenged me, as a young liberal, to see how easy it was for unbridled state power to be used in despotic ways. Professor Michael was one of the first Asian scholars to apply the totalitarian paradigm (developed to understand modern fascism and Stalinist communism) to the study of Chinese communism, as he recognized that dictatorships knew no cultural boundaries. This recognition also grew out of his understanding (and debates with Karl Wittfogel) of “Oriental Despotism.” His own European heritage and study of Asia blended intellectually in Professor Michael's critical mind.

Franz Michael's impact on the field of Sinological studies was significant. His influence endures in the number of students that he trained in thirty-five years as a professor of history at the University of Washington, George Washington University, and University of Pittsburgh – many of whom pursued careers as China scholars. He also taught large numbers of students who would enter government service and other pursuits in international affairs. However, through his daunting number of articles and books, Franz's scholarly impact reached beyond those in his classroom. His three-volume The Taiping Rebellion is still considered the classic work on the subject.

There are few issues that have interested China scholars over the years as the evolution of the Chinese state. As the following chapters illustrate, the Chinese state in the modern era has been a particularly dynamic entity. While it has evolved, the Chinese state has shed and absorbed a variety of organizational and normative features – becoming, over time, an eclectic amalgam.

CHINA'S ECLECTIC STATE

Unlike many Western polities that have evolved over the same period of time generally within a singular liberal paradigm, the modern Chinese state has undergone several macro transitions: from imperial to republican to revolutionary communist to modernizing socialist and, in Taiwan, to democratic phases. While radically different in its basic ethos and organizational structure in each phase (monarchical-republican-Leninistliberal), the Chinese state on the mainland has had three enduring missions: modernization of the economy, transformation of society, and defense of the nation against foreign aggression. The intended goals of social transformation varied (from neo-Confucianist to neofascist to radical Maoism to pragmatic Dengism), but for more than a century these have been the central and consistent missions of the Chinese state regardless of their fundamentally different cast. As one evolved to the next, some elements of the past survived each transition and were woven into new institutional frameworks. Each new departure was never total, although all were sharp and each sought to “overthrow” and replace the former. In reality, though, each new Chinese state maintained certain features of the old. Moreover, in each phase, different foreign elements were imported and grafted on to the evolving indigenous root, creating an ever-more complex hybrid.

After 1900 Qing government leaders launched a series of reforms aimed at strengthening China so that it could contain foreign encroachment and enrich society as well as preserve Manchu monarchical power. Within a decade a new Ministry of Education had begun educational reforms and recruiting talented civil servants for government; a flood of imperial edicts established new ministries of trade, police, foreign affairs, and army; and former offices including the Court of Sacrificial Worship, the Banqueting Court, and the Court of State Ceremonial were annexed to the Ministry of Rites. As new central administrative organs such as the Ministry of Posts and Communications and the Ministry of Justice were set up, they each had only one head instead of one Manchu and one Chinese as in the past. Various committees drafted a constitution and rules for electing provincial, national, and local self-governing assemblies, and another compiled a new criminal code, along with commercial and civil codes. These reforms – designed to save the Qing dynasty and protect the powers of provincial governors and gentry elites – restructured the state and delegated more power to the provinces and the people.

The Qing rulers and their supporters continually had to confront the problem – I will call it the Machiavelli problem – of persuading those who benefited from the old order not to oppose their innovations and convincing those who might benefit but were too timid to support reform to do so. On the one hand, former Manchu officials and displaced central bureaucrats, military officers, and conservative gentry did not welcome these political reforms and feared their loss of power and privilege.

The Chinese state evolved greatly during the post-Mao era. Deng Xiaoping left his successors a state (and society) very different from that which he inherited from Mao, while the post-Deng regime continues to restructure the state and reform its relationship with society. As Frederick Teiwes elucidates in the preceding chapter, Mao bequeathed to Deng a “totalistic” state characterized by highly personalized and concentrated power; an expansive and intrusive Leninist organizational apparatus that employed commandist, coercive, and mobilizational techniques of rule; with autarkic approaches to development and foreign affairs. The Chinese state under Mao was all-inclusive, playing multiple roles normally left to the private sector in many countries: employer, saver, investor, manager, economic planner, price setter, social provider, and redistributor of social and economic resources. All of these formerly totalistic functions performed by the Maoist state changed fundamentally under Deng, and are further devolving to subnational and nonstate actors in the post-Deng era.

The declining role of the state is best seen through the lens of the economy. Consider a few examples. When Mao died in 1976 the state was the monopolistic owner and employer of the means of production. By 1998 the state sector accounted for only 45 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and employed only 18 percent of the work force (those employed in the service sector have risen from less than 5 percent to nearly 30 percent today). As an investor in the economy, the share of central state appropriation has declined substantially, from 36 percent in 1982 to a mere 3 percent today.

Western historical scholarship on late imperial China seems less settled than ever. In recent years it has evolved in directions that significantly alter longstanding interpretations of the late imperial state. Once-definitive perspectives regarding the scope of the late imperial state, its processes and institutional trends, and its reach into Chinese society have been reopened. New frameworks built on different lines of inquiry and evidence have challenged enduring views on the reasons both for the unprecedented longevity of the Qing dynasty as an alien conquest regime and for its decline in the nineteenth century and demise in the early twentieth century. Presumed continuities between the late imperial past and the authoritarian present no longer seem as compelling as they once did. In their place a renewed appreciation of patterns of dynamism and change has suggested more fertile approaches to making the past serve the present. With all of these changes, alternative chronologies built around newly recognized historical turning points reorganize what seems useful in understanding how we got to the Chinese present from its late imperial past. More than ever, historians seem to speak with contending voices, not consensus regarding state and society in late imperial times.

For historians of China's late imperial era – here defined as China from the mid-sixteenth century until the 1911 Revolution – the emergence of these changes in the historiography of the late imperial era has seemed evolutionary and gradual. For them, they are the familiar consequences of the normal functioning of a now well-established disciplinary com-munity. Older answers to fundamental questions raise new questions whose answers in turn refine, modify, and sometimes transform previous work.

While the subject and focus of this essay is the Maoist state, it cannot be separated from the dynamics of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) elite politics. This is clearly reflected in the above statement by a leading ministerial official from the heavy industry sector in the midand late 1950s, someone who thus operated in both the heavily bureaucratic Soviet model period and under the personally driven policies of Mao Zedong during the Great Leap Forward. Simply put, the way in which the state functioned was fundamentally a result of the interactions of a small number of leaders – numbering no more than two dozen – at the apex of the system, with the input of Mao as unchallenged leader crucial whether in allowing other leaders to operate complex bureaucracies or taking the whole process by the scruff of the neck himself. This is by no means to say that Mao and his two dozen colleagues were the be-all and end-all of the Chinese state from 1949 to 1976, but it is to assert that his (and their) role was decisive.

A number of key issues arise about the Maoist state. One concerns the changing role of the many complex bureaucracies of the People's Republic of China (PRC), particularly the relationship of these institutions to the party leadership.