The premise of this chapter is that at least one of the factors affecting China's (often unpredictable) foreign-policy behavior since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seized power in 1949 has been an attempt to find a suitable place for itself in the modern world, a national identity. Approaching the modern international system with memories of a glorious traditional status as regional hegemon, followed by the humiliation of defeat and parcelization at the hands of perceived inferiors, China was accustomed to a position of international leadership that it could not sustain in the face of its political decay and scientific-economic backwardness. That sense of sudden degradation of national status gave rise to an ambiguous attitude of admiration and indignation vis-a-vis the arriviste Western powers, in addition to inhibiting adaptation to the hard rules of raison d'etre qua realpolitik that had come to apply to the post- Westphalian “international system.” For much of the first half of the twentieth century, China was “in” but not really “of” the world.

The communist victory made it possible for China to “stand up, ” as Mao put it in 1949. Denouncing the past century of national humiliation in the Marxist vocabulary of imperialism, the evils of China's own regional hegemony could also be forsworn under the rubric of feudalism. Yet that left a conceptual hiatus. Although the communists in fact tapped the animus of nationalism by mobilizing the Chinese people against Japan (and then against America, in Korea), any serious discussion of China's national interests and role or mission in the world was inhibited by the Marxist denial of nationalism's theoretical legitimacy – and by a leadership posture of dogmatic certitude.

The turbulence of Chinese politics in the twentieth century has given a peculiar twist to the utility of historical perspectives. Clearly, the projection of trends, the most obvious application of history, has been notoriously unreliable in Chinese politics. There have been times at which China has appeared to be threatened with national extinction, and it has variously been offered as proof of the international character of world communism, exemplar of a profoundly revolutionary and egalitarian societal model, and a confident pioneer in decentralizing politicaleconomic reform. Each of those impressions was based on a particular course of events, and each proved misleading when projected into the indefinite future.

The most recent – and convincing – experience of the changeability of Chinese politics concerned the events now permanently associated with Tiananmen Square in Beijing. First, those demonstrations could not have been projected on the basis of previous events, although retrospectively we can make sense of them and figure out their origins. The death of Hu Yaobang played an important role in ensuring a sudden and protected beginning for the student movement, and the peculiarly dissonant situation within the top leadership raised hopes and mobilized forces on both sides. Second, the violence of the mass repression on June 4, 1989, was unprecedented. The deeper one's familiarity with Chinese politics, the more profound one's sense of shock and outrage at the massacre. Third, the chief feature of the postmassacre regime has been its unpredictability.

The events of June 4, 1989, in a very real sense brought the Dengist period to a close. What defined the Dengist period more than anything else were three interrelated premises: the subordination of ideological struggle to economic development, the adoption of a “middle course,” and the recognition of the “relative autonomy” of specific fields of knowledge. The crackdown on June 4 severely compromised each of those.

The Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee, in December 1978 – the meeting that marked the inauguration of the Dengist period – called for shifting the emphasis of work to economic development. The importance of that decision lay in its reversal of the relationship that had existed between ideology and economic policy in the preceding three decades of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Previously, ideology had been the linchpin around which economic policy revolved. At the Third Plenum, the effort to integrate the party and nation around a common ideology, which had resulted in violent ideological struggle rather than unity, was abandoned in favor of an agreement on the primacy of economic development. The presumption was that with economic development, both the urgency and the divisiveness of ideological questions would be reduced.

Ideology thus changed from an organizing principle to a boundary. As expressed by the “Four Cardinal Principles” – which affirmed the leading position of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the role of Marxism- Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought, the people's democratic dictatorship, and the socialist road – ideology became a marker beyond which the expression of ideas was not to go, a barrier against “bourgeois liberalization.”

One of the many unresolved puzzles regarding the political system of the Maoist period, resolution of which may also provide a key to understanding the Dengist transformation of it, concerns the nature of grassroots political participation in the countryside and its relationship to the highly undemocratic character of the larger state and state-society relations. The puzzle has three parts. First, there persist in the literature on local politics and participation some rather contradictory findings and arguments: Local politics was lively and dead, participants were active and passive, participation was spontaneous and mobilized, genuine and ritualistic. Second, if there was some significant political participation, how can that be reconciled with the highly undemocratic nature of the state edifice that rested upon it? Third, how can that fit with what appears to be the very rapid collapse of direct participatory institutions and practices following Mao Zedong's death? Resolution of these conundra may help illuminate the nature of the Dengist state and reflect upon its prospects and those of China in the current period of crisis, in which the question of popular participation in politics has once again been thrust into the foreground.

THE DEBATE ON VILLAGE POLITICS AND PARTICIPATION

The first “view” concerning village politics and participation in China was actually a nonview. Scholarship during the 1950s and most of the 1960s simply did not pay attention to it. Like the sound of the tree that falls out of earshot, it did not exist.

THE WORST-CASE SCENARIO AND “HOPE AGAINST HOPE”

Let me begin this afterword with a sentence from Brandy Womack's Introduction: “It is unclear how long [the current regime] will last, what might succeed it, and how it will attempt to resolve its contradictory commitments to repressive recentralization and to continuing modernization and ‘openness’. ” He may be understood as raising this question about the political-economic-social-cultural system in its configurational uniqueness as an entity, though not about all its parts. There are, in China and abroad, those who expect an almost imminent collapse of the regime, who foresee an impending revolution, nonviolent or otherwise, and who fix their gaze on a miraculous transformation of China into its opposite. Of course, there are also those who still celebrate the victory of the June 4 crackdown and who believe that the current system will survive that tragic blunder, as well as other grave errors and serious acts of misrule in the past.

These two groups of political actors, some in the limelight and others still relatively unknown to the public, occupy the two extremities of a new and deadly form of polarization produced by the events of June 3 and 4, 1989, which were presented to us in the outside world in bloody and macabre scenes on our color televisions in our living rooms day after day for weeks on end.

This book began as an effort by some of Tang Tsou's students to honor him. Tang Tsou received his doctorate in political science from the University of Chicago in 1951 (his dissertation concerned the development of American political science), and he has been teaching there since 1959. As his seventieth birthday and retirement approached, Norman Nie, chair of the Political Science Department at the University of Chicago, suggested that his former students might organize a conference in his honor. Experienced academics reading this preface will know that, whether because of a deficit of filial piety among American academics or the lack of a thematic focus at such an occasion, such festschrift conferences and their written products often are diffuse and ephemeral. Former students and colleagues may want to participate out of nostalgia, but for outsiders they are like someone else's family album.

This project was different. First, Tsou's students' bond to their mentor is more than a historical bond. Tang Tsou is the most challenging and wide-ranging China scholar of our acquaintance, and so a conference honoring Tsou found us grappling with a current leader in the field, rather than engaging in retrospective reminiscences.

Second, it was fortunate that a number of Tsou's most active students are established experts in a quite comprehensive spread of important issue areas in Chinese politics. That diversity is due in part to Tsou's respect and support for the intellectual interests of his students.

Although the party-state that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) created turned out to be the most powerful state in Chinese history and frequently has used its coercive power ruthlessly to implement social changes, the political process has never been institutionalized. That was the case during the Maoist era, as well as in the past ten years of reform, when Mao's patriarchal leadership has been publicly repudiated. The bloody June 4 incident once again demonstrates China's failure to vest political authority in offices and to develop a procedural rule for decision making. Deng Xiaoping, whose only official position was to chair the Military Affairs Commission, made the final decision to crush the students' democratic movement. Zhao Ziyang's greatest mistake during the crisis supposedly was to reveal to Gorbachev the CCP's practice of referring all important matters to Deng Xiaoping.

These two contradictory aspects of Chinese politics – the powerful party-state and the utter lack of institutionalization – lead one to view the Chinese state as a political elite rather than as institutionalized sets of offices whose incumbents are empowered to exercise the state's authority. These aspects also point to a broad hypothesis that the importance of the political elite is inversely related to the degree of institutionalization of political offices.

Mosca's and Pareto's insights that a political elite exerts enormous influence in shaping a political system were particularly true of traditional China, where a well-defined ruling elite of gentry-scholar-bureaucrats dominated not only political life but also economic and cultural life.

If capitalism can be said ever to have taken root in China, it was in Shanghai in the early 1920s. Fertile ground for modern banks and for new industries of all sorts, the city was the center of a budding bourgeois way of life. And if anyone can be said to have tried to plant the seeds of capitalism wider in China, it was the old Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce (Shanghai zongshanghui).

Founded in the late Qing period, the Chamber of Commerce of the 1920s filled its ranks from the city's wealthiest and most prestigious Chinese guilds, trade associations, native-place associations, companies, and stores. The participation in its activities of such local luminaries as the comprador-merchant (and friend of Chiang Kai-shek) Yu Qiaqing, the highly respected banker and industrialist Fang Jiaobo, the political firebrand Feng Shaoshan, and the cagey tobacco tycoon Jian Zhaonan made it a power to be reckoned with, even by the French and British authorities in the great treaty port. Outspoken and public-spirited, it played a vital and controversial role in Shanghai's whirlwind politics of great anti-foreign boycotts and popular movements.

In a China being ravaged by war and revolution, the Chamber of Commerce made no secret of its bourgeois ideals. Between 1921 and 1927 it celebrated capitalism in its house organ: the Monthly Journal of the Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce (Shanghai zongshanghui yuebao) (hereafter referred to as the Journal).