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This chapter is devoted to analyzing the official appeal to socialist morality and its consequences. It describes the sociopolitical background that explains why the Dengist leadership felt it necessary to put great efforts into a massive campaign called “Building a High Level of Socialist Spiritual Civilization” during the first half of the 1980s. It shows how the Dengists' carefully formulated dual-traffic policy, as represented by the appeal to socialist morality, was attacked from both sides.
The hard-liners in the military and party establishment were angry about the Dengist leadership's partial concessions to the functional requirements of modernizing China, for example, opening to the outside, stress on the development of science and education, and respect for technical personnel. They worried that the partial concessions would lead to total decay of the structural uniqueness of Chinese communism.
The counterelite opened fire on the dual-traffic policy from the opposite direction. It was angry about the Dengist leadership's retreat from the commitment to “material civilization” – that is, to modernizing China – and protested that preservation of “socialist uniqueness” could only suffocate the vitality and dynamism recently regenerated in Chinese society through openness. It therefore strove to remove from the official agenda all ideas and policies incompatible with modernizing China.
The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union has raised a most serious challenge to the recent mainstream theories of revolution in the social sciences, which neither prepared researchers to catch key signs presaging the revolutions of 1989 nor provided a satisfactory explanation afterward (Brumberg 1990: 3–16; EEPS 1990; Chirot 1991). In the light of the historic events in the communist world in the late 1980s and early 1990s, theoretical revisions and conceptual innovations in the social sciences are necessary.
In a review of existing theories of transition from communism, Thomas F. Remington (1990: 177, 184) notes that these theories are either regime-centered or society-centered and that “each adopts a partial view of the relationship” between regime and society, in which concentration is placed on “the political or the social domain to the neglect of the other.” “A theory of transition from communism,” Remington suggests, “should instead be based upon an understanding of how the regime and the society influence and penetrate each other, and how that relationship changes during the transition itself.”
Having correctly pointed out the inadequacy of these theories, Remington nevertheless fails to see that the root of that inadequacy is in the dichotomous conceptualization of civil society versus the state, which underlies both the regime-centered and society-centered theories.
This chapter discusses the major differences between China's counterelite and ruling elite, explains the counterelite's composition, and describes its efforts to capture existing institutions and form new ones. By presenting a number of cases of the counterelite's ventures, the chapter illustrates the prevalence of institutional parasitism in nonconformity and opposition in China from the late 1970s to the late 1980s.
Before rendering a detailed characterization of the counterelite and its institutional underpinnings, this chapter provides a brief look at the larger population from which the counterelite came, in order to give the reader a sense of the position of the counterelite within Chinese society.
According to China's 10 percent sampling population census of 1982, the most comprehensive data of the kind published so far, “mental workers” with post–high school education totaled about 30 million, 3 percent of China's population of 1 billion. Post–high school education here includes formal schooling, on-the-job training, and vocational and television schooling. Of those 30 million, scientific, technical, medical, and cultural personnel counted about 17 million; educators, 9 million; and administrative and managerial personnel, 4 million (Shehuixue Yanjiu No. 5, p. 69; No. 6, pp. 18–19, 1988). In addition, 1.88 million nationwide were enrolled undergraduate and graduate students in 1986, the midpoint of the time covered by this study (China Statistical Yearbook 1989: 796).
The major theoretical arguments made in this work can be summarized as follows: First, the mainstream theories of political stability often define what is an elite too narrowly. They usually focus attention on only a small number of national political leaders. In the case of communist studies, for example, the main focus is on the Politburo or the party central committee level, and other levels and types of elites in society are often neglected. I advocate widening the scope of what gets considered as elite in the studies of the transition from communism, to include not only party-state leaders but also a group I call the counterelite, consisting of intellectuals and professionals who were, for the most part, opposed to the communist ruling elite.
The second flaw in the mainstream theories of political stability is that they stress only one aspect of the function of legitimation – to keep a regime surviving. This one-dimensional view justifies the approach in which the researcher pays heed mainly to the process of self-legitimation and solidification among a few power centers. Against this, I advocate a multifunctional view of regime legitimation: The function or purpose of regime legitimation should be understood both negatively – keeping power or securing political survival, and positively – using power or achieving socioeconomic objectives.
This chapter is about patriotism as a two-edged sword in the politics of legitimation in post-Mao China. We shall see, on the one hand, how the Communist ruling elite made an appeal to patriotism in the hope of bolstering popular support for the regime. We shall also see how the counterelite appealed to patriotism in an attempt to mobilize popular resentment against the regime. The ruling elite's effort to appeal to patriotism was made necessary precisely because there had already been a crisis of confidence in the Communist system, and the government's socialist-moral appeal had failed to produce positive results. But it turned out that patriotism, which had been the regime's strong legitimating instrument, became in the hands of the counterelite a powerful tool for criticism of, and protest against, the Communist regime.
Background: the failure of the regime's earlier legitimation device
The Communist regime turned to patriotism in response to two sociopolitical shocks. One might be called the “Unrequited Love shock,” the other the “Fang Lizhi shock.” The first refers to middle-aged intellectuals' resentment and indignation as a result of their experience under Communist rule. A great number of them had been the Communist party's allies when it fought for survival during the Japanese invasion and the civil war in the 1930s and 1940s.
The 1988–89 Nanjing Anti-African protests, exposing a high degree of student discontent towards the Chinese political system four months before the spring 1989 pro-democracy movement, exhibited a complex interaction between Chinese nationalism and efforts to promote political reforms. Nanjing students fused together racist strains in Chinese culture, their perception of themselves as the embodiment of Chinese patriotism and their support for legal and democratic political reforms as they took to the streets to protest against the government's inadequate handling of the alleged murder of a Chinese by an African student.