We are excited to announce a new title in the Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute book series: Where the Party Rules: The Rank and File of China’s Communist State, published by Cambridge University Press. The book’s author is Daniel Koss, an Assistant Research Fellow at the Institute of Political Science of Academia Sinica, Taipei, who earned his PhD in Government from Harvard University.
In most non-democratic countries, today governing forty-four percent of the world population, the power of the regime rests upon a ruling party. Contrasting with conventional notions that authoritarian regime parties serve to contain elite conflict and manipulate electoral-legislative processes, this book presents the case of China and shows that rank and-file members of the Communist Party allow the state to penetrate local communities. Subnational comparative analysis demonstrates that in ‘red areas’ with high party saturation, the state is most effectively enforcing policy and collecting taxes. Because party membership patterns are extremely enduring, they must be explained by events prior to the Communist takeover in 1949. Frontlines during the anti-colonial Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) continue to shape China’s political map even today. Newly available evidence from the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961) and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) shows how a strong local party basis sustained the regime in times of existential crisis.
“Where the Party Rules is a work of remarkable scope, imagination, and intellectual energy. Koss traces temporal and spatial variation in the Chinese Communist Party’s penetration of society from its origins in the anti-Japanese War through subsequent decades and into the present.The book sets a new standard for scholarship on the most essential of Chinese political institutions.”
-Andrew G. Walder, Stanford University
We thank Dr. Koss for taking the time to discuss his book with us. Please read the following Q&A to learn more about the research and questions that drove his project.
What were some of the main questions about authoritarianism and governance that motivated you to write Where the Party Rules?
Before going into academia, I had worked in Africa. Coming out of Africa, I was most puzzled not by how China grew rich, but by how the Chinese state has been able to exercise very effective governance in quickly evolving communities across such a huge landmass. Of course, when going to China, one also notes deficiencies and is struck by the diversity of outcomes within the country, so my curiosity turned into the comparative question: Why is the Chinese state so much more effective in some localities than in others? From the start, I was interested in tracing differences in “state strength” back in time – if necessary to the imperial area. Once I found that local party branches and its members were a pivot of local governance, I realized that it would be enough to go back to the rise of the party during the Sino-Japanese War from 1937 to 1945 in order to understand the particularly deep embeddedness of the party in certain places.
Why do you think China has succeeded in having a longstanding party-based authoritarian regime?
One often-overlooked pillar of regime success is the Communist Party (CCP)’s rank and file. The vast majority of party members are NOT officials, but ordinary people from all walks of life. Their advantage over local officials is that party members do not spend their days sitting in government offices shuffling paper, but that most of them are working in ordinary professions – moving amongst citizens and therefore knowing public sentiment. On the other hand, what makes party members more valuable than volunteers is their discipline, since they are fully embedded in the party hierarchy, attending regular meetings and taking orders from and reporting back to the party. This disciplined portion of the citizenry makes a big difference for enforcing policy compliance, such as the one-child policy or tax collection, which pose formidable challenges to the state. The book demonstrates that party members greatly contribute to the effectiveness of Chinese governance. At moments of crisis, such as during the Cultural Revolution, party members were essential to return the country from the brink of anarchy.
Why do you find that certain geographical areas in China have more party membership than others? What seems to motivate membership at the local level?
As with red states versus blue states in the U.S., history is key for understanding the macro-patterns of CCP membership. The party first thrived as a guerilla force in areas occupied by Japan during World War II. One reason is that Japanese occupation uprooted the local people and made them easier targets for Communist recruitment; another reason is that the Japanese presence shielded the party from persecution by the Nationalist Government, which had little choice but to declare a United Front. The areas formerly occupied by Japan still tend to be places where the CCP most deeply penetrates local society today.
As for recruitment patterns today, the party gives priority to urban communities where the state faces great governance challenges. Urban neighborhoods are sometimes identified as the most critical communities should there ever be a surge in popular discontent. As for the demand side, many citizens join the party for personal gain, material privileges, and career advances. Yet, under Xi Jinping, party discipline is tougher and expectations of party membership are higher, so that non-material motivations, including patriotism, should no longer be underestimated as a powerful motivation for joining the party.
Could you describe your methodology in researching and organizing this study?
For me the key was spending a lot of time in China, and some time in Japan as well, altogether two years: Chatting with a family in their muddy rural farm house, pondering over fading documents in a countryside archive, enjoying the hospitality of Chinese officials over a formal dinner, and seeing war photos dug out from behind a tiny Japanese family shrine. Observations in the field constantly challenge your theories, and vice versa, driving the research process.
In contrast to the iterative and unpredictable process of theory building, there was a point after which I began a much more systematic effort of confronting this theory with evidence. To bring to bear as much information as possible, I used a variety of methods: quantitative analyses, such as a causal identification strategy based on a difference-in-difference model, and a test of my own theoretically derived convergence model; but also qualitative evidence, such as archival material, especially looking at events in the early People’s Republic and tracing the origins of party strength chain back to the first half of the twentieth century.
What are some of the sources and data that you used when writing this book?
The book draws on a large variety of documentary evidence. To analyze the role of party members during the Cultural Revolution, I use military cables from PLA units dispatched to scenes of escalating violence; as well as denunciations and self-critiques. To understand recruitment prior to 1949, a report written by Japanese investigators traveling along the Grand Canal put into perspective the CCP’s own local histories. Maps allowed me to connect past events to present outcomes, using Geographic Information Systems (GIS).
My data are derived from widely available sources, such as the census or the CHIP survey, with two exceptions. The first is the fiscal data that show in unusual clarity how much each province contributes to the central state coffers. I saw them during an interview and then looked for a long time before I could get hold of a hard copy. The second exception is the particularly complete and detailed party statistics, reporting, for instance, how many people lost their membership in any given year. I found this previously highly classified material in China’s National Library and copied a few pages. The following day, when I wanted to copy the rest, it was gone. Luckily in this case, the librarian of the Fairbank Center at Harvard, Nancy Hearst, found another copy.
What kinds of challenges did you encounter while doing research on this topic?
Researching Chinese politics necessarily touches on sensitive issues. Everyone knows that the Great Leap Famine and the Cultural Revolution are highly sensitive topics. It is less commonly known that the CCP – like its imperial predecessors at the head of the Chinese state – also seeks tight control over earlier history, including the revolutionary history of the Sino-Japanese War. So archival access was tough. It also takes a lot of probing to move beyond standard narratives when in conversation with officials as well as with ordinary citizens. Yet, at the end of the day, I could carry out research in about a dozen archives, and also found the local history sections of some provincial libraries unexpectedly useful. Paradoxically, in the midst of the research process out in the field, I often felt disappointed by the lack of access, but when sitting down and writing the book, in retrospect, I felt almost overwhelmed by the wealth of interesting material that I had been able to accumulate in the field.
Have you observed any changes in the power of the party on the local level in China in recent years?
Since the 1989 Tiananmen Incident and the collapse of the Soviet Union, CCP leaders have put party organizing back on the agenda as a strategically important task. The Organization Department has continuously innovated to maintain a presence among quickly evolving communities. The traditional way of organizing assumed that people were fixed in their work units; without reform it would have lost touch with the extremely mobile society working in diverse occupational settings. Despite the technocratic language and bureaucratic approaches of the organizers, we should not underestimate the prowess of the resulting organization. The party’s power in the countryside has diminished, but in the cities the party has kept up with the transformation of society and effectively maintains its presence.
Building on these reforms, when Xi Jinping took over at the helm of the CCP, he rolled out initiatives to “revitalize” the party. For instance, a campaign of “criticism and self-criticism” was reminiscent of the Mao era and clearly off the trodden path. Higher expectations placed on party members have slowed down recruitment. It is too early to tell whether this “spiritual revitalization” will make the party stronger in the long run. It could be, for instance, that the greater secrecy will also inspire greater public suspicion; and that the lack of dissent inside the party will hide problems rather than solve them. In any case, since the end of the Mao era, CCP members have never been as disciplined as they are today in the name of a strong China.
How would you like your book to expand or challenge our understandings of Chinese politics and of authoritarian governance?
There was very little in the literature to indicate that party members play much of a role in the local governance of China. To be sure, we have the classic works on the CCP from the 1960s, like Franz Schurmann’s, as well as the important recent research by Bruce Dickson on party members’ motivations, and David Shambaugh’s on the party’s place in society. But there were no good answers to the question: what, from the regime’s point of view, are the function of ordinary party members? More broadly, the literature on authoritarian governance sees the function of authoritarian regime parties as mediating elite conflict and distributing pork. This is entirely correct, even when, in the case of China, top-level leadership transitions are not quite as institutionalized as observers once thought. But the literature has little to say about party members and overlooks their function in local governance. The literature underestimates the usefulness of the party’s rank and file to non-democratic regimes. China shows that ordinary party members can be a powerful instrument to enforce its policies. This is by no means a purely academic debate – for instance, foreign companies must deal with the increasing presence of party cells in their China operations, both within the ranks of the management and on the factory floor.
Can you tell us briefly about your current research project(s)?
While researching this book, I became increasingly fascinated by political parties and their members outside of China as well; even in democratic systems like Japan, which is the other country I am researching. Against perceptions that party members have become irrelevant in the information age, I am now discovering that Japan’s perennial ruling party devotes plenty of energy in grassroots organizing. The party built up an active membership base, along with specialized party branches taking the lead in nominally non-party associations.
Of course, my deep interest in the People’s Republic of China is undiminished: I am now working on the evolution of the party’s role in governance, including the new missions of party cells in private companies; and on the learning processes by which local communities have internalized some of the lessons from the devastating crises of twentieth century Chinese history.
