Earlier this year, the Planet Money Podcast did an episode on “The Secret Document That Transformed China,” a story they describe as follows:
In 1978, a group of farmers in a Chinese village called Xiaogang wrote a secret contract and hid it in the roof of a mud hut. They were afraid the document might get them executed. Instead, it wound up completely transforming the Chinese economy.
The episode, which you can listen to via the embedded player above, describes how farmers in Xiaogang and across China had their working hours and planting patterns dictated by Communist Party officials, and had to communally share their harvests. Under that system they were barely subsisting, often reduced to begging for food, a shameful experience for those whose work was to grow it. So a small group of farmers agreed in secret to try something new. The farmers would keep a portion of their own yield, and so be inspired to work harder with the knowledge that their own families would benefit.
Of course, in the villages of Communist China there was no personal property. As one of the farmers told the Planet Money reporters, every single piece of straw belonged to the group. According to Party officials, even the teeth in each farmer’s mouth belonged to the collective. Knowing how boldly their plan contradicted Party directives, the farmers all agreed to provide for the families of any one of them who was killed or banished as punishment for their new system.
As the podcast details, their pact was a great success. They all worked much harder than before, and had harvests to match. Those things couldn’t go unnoticed, though, and they were found out by a local official who planned to shut down their arrangement, until he was overruled by a higher bureaucrat who demanded the farmers be allowed to continue. The Party decided to treat these farmers and their twist on the Protestant ethic as an experiment, and their success led to the arrangement’s wide adoption across Deng Xiaoping’s newly reform-minded China.
The Planet Money folks characterize the drafting of that secret document as a watershed moment in Chinese history, and, given the prevailing conception of the CPC as steadfast in its resistance to change, it’s easy to imagine this “transformation” of China as the result of a rare and unlikely willingness to experiment. But a recent book from the Harvard University Asia Center suggests otherwise.
In Mao’s Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China, a group of distinguished scholars details China’s “guerilla policy style,” which flowed from and resembled Mao’s revolutionary strategy. The book’s contributors argue that constant adaptation is in large part responsible for the ability of the Chinese Communist system to survive such disruptions as Tiananmen Square, outlive rapid economic expansion, and outlast the Communist governments of the Soviet Union and other Eastern European nations that were all ostensibly defined by their shared institutional structure.
China’s governance techniques are marked by a signature Maoist stamp that conceives of policy-making as a process of ceaseless change, tension management, continual experimentation, and ad-hoc adjustment. Such techniques reflect a mindset and method that contrast sharply with the more bureaucratic and legalistic approaches to policy-making that obtain in many other major polities.
Due to its idiosyncratic developmental pathway over the last thirty years, contemporary China presents an enigma not only to the field of Chinese politics, which did not predict the surprising resilience of the Communist system under reform and has yet to provide a convincing explanation for it. It also poses a major puzzle to the field of comparative politics, where prevailing theories of modernization, democratization, and regime transition to date offer little illumination for the case of post-Mao China.
They go on to explain that even today’s vaguely capitalist China is still characterized by Mao’s own style, essentially guided by his invisible hand:
The erratic and idiosyncratic course navigated by the Great Helmsman in his quixotic quest to continue the revolution after 1949 was terribly disruptive and destructive to be sure, but the underlying protean approach remained available for more productive uses. China’s long revolution gave rise to a “guerrilla-style policy-making” approach that proved capable of generating an array of creative—proactive as well as evasive—tactics for managing sudden change and uncertainty. With new political leadership and policy priorities, these familiar practices could lead to very different outcomes.
The volume’s essays argue that after Mao and his colleagues came to appreciate “the advantages of agility over stability,” the adaptive mechanisms inherited from the Chinese Communist Revolution left the Republic’s governance “singularly adept in adjusting to the demands of domestic economic reform,” and unusually receptive to “on-the-ground generation of new knowledge and practice,” just as in the case of Planet Money’s farmers of Xiaogang.
The aim of Heilmann, Perry, and the other contributors to Mao’s Invisible Hand is to challenge the sense of many Western social scientists (and politicians) that democracy is the most politically stable and economically sound governance model. Not to endorse China’s model, but to explain how a system widely assumed to be threatened by a growing middle class and an emboldened climate of dissent may very well continue to demonstrate its resilience. The result is a volume that Jonathan Mirsky described in the New York Review of Books as “one of those books that make one feel good about scholarship.”
There’s an interesting exchange to imagine between Mao’s Invisible Hand, which dispassionately explains how Chinese Communism has managed to survive and may yet continue to do so, and The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy, forthcoming from Edward Luttwak. The latter predicts an imminent blockade in China’s path to preeminence, caused in large part by the reliance of Chinese officials on ages-old strategies for managing opposition. Of course, some of those strategies are the very same ones that Heilmann, Perry, et al. argue could continue to sustain Party rule.
