The Everlasting Empire (36 page)

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heavals: local elites and the commoners. The first were, along with the emperor, the chief victims of China’s entrance into modernity; the latter—whom we can no longer aptly term “commoners” but must refer to, in the modern parlance, as “the masses”—were supposed to be its major beneficiaries, and certainly gained a lot, though less than what might have been expected. It is with regard to two these groups that we find the most significant departures from traditional patterns of power configuration.

In the early twentieth century local elites briefly emerged as the most powerful political force in China. They benefited first from the weakening of the central government, which was losing its ability to monitor the elite’s activities and to rein in their abuses; and, second, from the late Qing reforms. As mentioned above, the establishment of provincial assemblies staffed almost exclusively by elite members was an important step toward the institutionalization of elite power. Moreover, with the abrupt abolition of the examination system in 1905, the dynasty lost its major leverage vis-à-vis the elites. These developments, which brought about comprehensive change in the balance of power between the court and the elites, emboldened the elite members, encouraging many of them to adopt an oppositional stance toward the imperial government, and even to endorse the republican movement. Yet in retrospect this sudden profession of republicanism by the dynasty’s traditional supporters was an ill-conceived gamble. The collapse of the old order had profoundly undermined the elites’ position and has hastened their demise.

From the beginning of the Republican era, the elite’s power began to wane. In the very first year of the Republic, massive expansion in the electorate deprived the elites of their exclusivity as the only responsible political class; then the replacement of parliamentarianism with the politics of the gun further undermined the elites’ preferential access to sources of political power. Perennial warfare, banditry, extractions by rival warlord armies, and the general loss of stability were detrimental to the interests of many elite members; yet these troubles were not exceptional to the Republican age, and normally would have resulted in changes in the elites’ personnel but not in their grasp over local society. Yet deeper changes were unfolding—and these fundamentally weakened local elites as a social stratum.

What most eroded elite power were not temporary political developments but the proliferation of the new discourse, the one directed at the creation of a modern Chinese nation. When Sun Yat-sen lamented in 1924 that “the Chinese people have only family and clan solidarity; they do not have national spirit… they are just a heap of loose sand,”
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he reflected the widely shared belief of contemporaneous leaders that, to survive, China must be transformed into a modern nation-state, and its

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people imbued with national spirit. Yet if the nation-state was to be formed, it would be necessary to abolish the elite’s role as mediators between the masses and the government; and the Republic duly endorsed this course. Attempts were made to build new institutions that would increase the state’s direct reach into peasant society and obliterate the need for elite intermediaries; and while these were not entirely successful prior to the Communist revolution, they were indicative of the new state’s desire to eliminate local elites. The very ideology of cooperation with, and co-optation of, these elites was discontinued. In his seminal study of this topic, Prasenjit Duara summarizes:

The Republican state was unable to hold on to [the elite] identification
[with the new nation-state] and build on it. The budding alliance be-
tween modernizing state and rural elites … failed to flower. The new
ideology of the modernizing state did not succeed in providing a viable
alternative to the cultural nexus that had generated legitimacy for
both local leaders and for the state.
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Putting aside Duara’s concept of the “cultural nexus,” his summary grasps well the fate of local elites in the new Republican state. The abandonment of the traditional ideology, according to which the state should cultivate the elite’s support while the latter should serve as a voluntary upholder of local order, meant that the rationale of cooperation was lost, and the fate of the elites was doomed. Although the elites were natural allies of the GMD government in the anti-Communist struggle, GMD support of their cause remained halfhearted at best. Abandoned by the state, having lost their preferential access to sources of political power and their role as brokers and mediators between local society and the central authorities, the elites could not withstand the Communist assault.

The CPC ascendancy epitomizes an inverse process to that of the elites’ demise: namely, the rise of “the masses” as the major political actor. The tendency to elevate the masses to the forefront of politics was embedded in the republican ethos, which identified “the people” as the source of sovereignty and not just as recipients of the ruler’s and the elite’s munificence. The fundamental distinction between “superior men” and “petty men,” which had guided the Chinese polity for millennia, was obliterated. “The people” were no longer an amorphous and benighted mass, whose only desirable political contribution would be to behave morally in their communities and to abide by the laws; rather, they were now appealed to as members of China’s nation, as potential agents who must be “awakened” and who would ultimately take the future in their own hands.
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This “masses-oriented” discourse permeated the political spectrum, but it was the self-proclaimed champions of the people, the Communists, who succeeded in turning it into the vehicle of their struggle,

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and who also contributed more than anybody else to the masses’ political emancipation.

The revolutionary nature of the CPC brought it from its very inception into the realm of popular uprisings, which had traditionally been the lower strata’s only effective means of political participation. Like many rebel groups in the past, the Communists acted as a kind of local “counterelite,” effectively mobilizing the have-nots against the existing order; but there were fundamental differences between the CPC and past rebels. Unlike traditional rebels, the Party aimed not just at seizing power from the current “dynasty,” but also at profound restructuring of the entire socioeconomic order. Inspired by their vision of “modernity” and of conscious and politically involved citizens, the party made mass mobilization and politicization of the people its primary goal, and not just a tool of temporary struggle. Mao Zedong succinctly summarized the party’s role vis-à-vis the masses in his formulation of the so-called mass line: the party should, first, absorb the “unsystematic and scattered ideas” of the masses; second, rework them; and third, bring the reworked ideas back to the masses “until the masses embrace them as their own.”
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This notion aptly represents both the elitist and the participatory strands in the Chinese Communist ideology. The masses were still unenlightened and required the party’s guidance, but once properly educated and imbued with the party line they would—and should!—become active political actors.

The Communists’ new type of elitism—a Leninist rather than Confucian one—had a profound impact on both the elites and the masses. The Communists were not rebels but revolutionaries: they refused to be coopted into the extant sociopolitical order but rather wanted to topple it. In particular, they were committed to uprooting the elite’s economic, social, and political dominance. This was achieved through a series of careful steps that created new organizational frameworks for mass action, and gave birth to a new state, which was carefully constructed in the bottom-up fashion. Amid this construction, local society was profoundly restructured.
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The elites were treated as natural enemies—both as exploiters and as the Party’s competitors for societal power—and were identified as the Revolution’s immediate target. Their political elimination was finalized immediately after the CPC’s nationwide victory in 1949. It was achieved not just through terror from above, but in a much deeper fashion, through mass mobilization to the land reform. The landlords’ lands were expropriated and redistributed, while rich landowners—the backbone of local elites—were identified as “enemies of the people,” deprived of basic rights, struggled against, humiliated, and— quite often—executed by incited peasants. Cruel as it was, the process of land reform was extraordinarily successful. It not only eliminated the elites from the local arena but, more significantly, prevented their reemer

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gence. Under the new norms of land distribution, the resurrection of the landowning elite became impossible. Gone was the social class that had dominated China for millennia.
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The land reform had multiple political and social consequences. From its initial attempts to redistribute the landowners’ possessions, back in the 1930s, and in a more comprehensive way after 1949, the Party learned how to arouse the peasants and mobilize them against the landlords, and for the party’s cause. The overwhelming success of this method may have strengthened the Party’s belief in mass mobilization as the ultimate remedy for a variety of political, social, and economic ills. From its first moments in power, the Party launched a series of mass campaigns among the rural and urban populace. These campaigns tremendously increased both the Party’s hold over the population and the degree of party-state penetration into the lowest social levels, yet the Party was not satisfied with mere control. Rather, mass mobilization and politicization of the citizens continued on an unprecedented scale, resulting in the broadest— often involuntary—involvement of the population in state affairs. These mass campaigns were continued long after they had outlived their political utility, and even when they became obviously counterproductive economically, as was the case with the disastrous Great Leap Forward (1958–1961).
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Mao’s desire repeatedly to galvanize the masses and to preserve a semblance of popular political participation finally led him into conflict with moderate Party leaders, who began realizing that the once-effective policy had become pernicious. The conflict ultimately brought about the most devastating mass campaign in China, if not in human history: the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
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During the early stages of this tumultuous campaign, the intoxicated “revolutionary masses” were expected to scrutinize the deeds of top Party and state officials, and—at certain moments—were encouraged to “seize power” from the discredited Party establishment. The campaign not only violated the Leninist principles of the party leadership but endangered the very foundations of political order; yet Mao remained adamant. That Mao opted to mobilize the masses, rather than purge his rivals through routine intraparty procedures,
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is indicative of his unwavering commitment to the notion of mass politicization. As such, the Cultural Revolution can be considered the true peak of the antielitist and pro-masses trend in twentieth-century Chinese politics.

Eventually, the Cultural Revolution, with its images of violence, disorder, and the collapse of normal ways of life, became a powerful antidote against continued political mobilization of the masses in the aftermath of Mao’s era. The new generation of leaders, many of whom had been primary targets of the Cultural Revolution campaigns, considered excessive

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politicization of the population counterproductive, and shifted their concern from fostering new citizens to developing the economy. Gradually, the political realm became less masses-oriented: input from below (e.g., through localized protests or, increasingly, through a variety of Internet debates) is tolerated,
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but mass actions—even in support of party policies—are actively discouraged. The leadership is no longer prone to mobilize the masses; rather, it prefers to educate them through such campaigns as “character education” (
suzhi jiaoyu
) and “patriotic education” (
aiguozhuyi jiaoyu
), and to monitor their activities. Simultaneously, the Party acts subtly but steadily to dissociate the majority of the population from political life and to professionalize the political realm. The new generations of cadres are valued for their educational level and managerial abilities, rather than for their ability to manipulate the masses. These elitist trends divorce the Party from the “mass line” of the past and increase its resemblance to the erstwhile “Confucian” elite.

This shift toward political elitism coincides—not incidentally—with the partial resurrection of socioeconomic elites. Although currently this process is still in its infancy, and the newly emerging elites are incomparably more diversified, less stable, and less powerful than their late imperial counterparts, the likelihood of their future importance in China’s increasingly stratified society cannot be easily dismissed. May we expect, then, a resurrection of politically active social elites in some distant or not-so-distant future? Will the party-state opt to ignore the newly emerging elites, suppress them, or try to co-opt them and relegate some of its burdensome responsibilities to them, mirroring the trend of the imperial age?
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Can we expect the rise of new forms of elite voluntarism? Is it imaginable that the future will see the reemergence of an intermediary stratum between the state apparatus and the populace? While currently it is too early to attempt to answer these questions, the mere fact that we can reasonably pose them is indicative of the surprising relevance of past patterns for evaluating possible development trajectories for the Chinese state in the future.