荒诞者共和

The Chinese leadership has systematically liberalized the economy under the close guidance of the State Council and the Communist Party. The notable factor here, however, is how this transition has reconfigured the form of the state in a way that has unleashed the powers of capitalism. The transformation has brought a metamorphosis in which property, markets and capitalists break out of the cocoon of the socialist state, and a bourgeois social order, economy and state unfold from the old mode of production. The reorganization of the Chinese state has created a structure of remarkable complexity. Some observers refer to ‘state sprawl’ and are surprised that it has not shrunk under a more liberal order. But the point is not whether the state is smaller, but how it has been restructured and what its components have been required to do. [40]

China’s transition to a capitalist state has been carried out through a remarkable marriage of central power and decentralized authority. On the one hand, the tradition of administrative hierarchy is strong. The central government has managed the transition to capitalism every step of the way, issuing a series of directives in the shape of formal laws, policy declarations and general pronouncements. On the other hand, China has a long history of dispersed power over its enormous territory, with considerable provincial and county integrity, and local-government autonomy. It is not surprising, therefore, that an essential part of the transition to capitalism has been allowing a greater decentralization of the state. Economic liberalization and primitive accumulation have been facilitated, and even accelerated, by a rescaling and downward shift of state power. [41]

The central government has favoured cities, in particular, as vehicles of transition. One policy front has been the relative autonomy granted to large cities, especially the four metropolises—Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing and Tianjin—and others of prefecture level. These have been given additional powers to annex territory, and to subordinate counties and small cities in their penumbra. [42] Of course, the actual degree of autonomy of any local government depends on the political struggles of party factions, power blocs and interest groups. While party secretaries and city mayors are centrally appointed, this is done as a function of local jockeying for position or the power of big-city party factions over the Chinese Communist Party as a whole—as with the national dominance of the Shanghai faction in the 1990s.

Local governments have been set loose throughout China in pursuit of economic growth. Municipal, provincial and county authorities act as overseers of development, working with whoever offers the best promise of rapid growth. Local officials have a range of implements in the growth-promotion tool kit. Annexation of territory, seizures of farmland and extension of infrastructure have all been useful in urban expansion. Property transfers, favourable leases and land banking have been effective in assisting builders and developers. City plans, redevelopment schemes and modernization discourses have promoted the reconfiguration of urban space. Manufacturing has been aided through such devices as tax concessions, land grants and industrial parks, as well as through assuring a supply of labour by the manipulation of hukou permits and entry fees, and the policing of labour organizing and protests. [43]

State and party officials at a local level have become highly entrepreneurial in promoting industrial expansion, construction and commercial development. Many act as managers of state-owned enterprises and property companies in the public sector, while some serve on boards or have stakes in private businesses. Others serve as brokers and deal-makers between public and private, or between state agencies; and still others grease the wheels through black-market deals, bribes and informal networking, known as guanxi. In addition, party cadres have come to be judged for promotion on their ability to deliver regional growth, employment and foreign investment. Personal prestige, faith in modernization and general zeal all play a part in motivating local officials to promote their towns and cities.

Local governments are motivated, above all, by a fiscal regime in which their revenues depend more on local taxes and rents than on redistribution of national revenues. Since the 1980s, revenue sharing has taken place upwards, with local governments retaining what is left. China is now one of the most decentralized states in the world in fiscal terms. [44] One major source of local income is business taxes on profits and sales. The largest part of local revenue still came from state and township enterprises in the 1980s, but the proportion derived from private business has risen sharply since then. The other major source of income is landed property, from rents, leases and transaction fees; this has ballooned with the property booms of the 1990s and 2000s. In addition, there are certain extra-budgetary revenues that local governments do not have to share with those higher up. [45]

Altogether, the Chinese situation reminds one of the American federal system and its urban growth politics, from which an array of public and private players profit handsomely. Backroom payoffs are far from unknown in the us, but the exchange of favours and rewards is done to the mutual advantage of many. What the Chinese call guanxi is very like what Americans call horse-trading. Regional government competition in China is also reminiscent of American federalism. It is pointless to complain, in this context, about the duplication and inefficiency of local boosterism. [46] The evidence in both the us and China is that this kind of wide-open alliance between state and capital for regional development works very well indeed.

The central state is another matter, of course, and the Communist Party leadership has long derived its power from non-capitalist sources of state revenue, party organization and socialist legitimacy. One would not expect the State Council to play midwife to the birth of capitalism in the same way as local governments. China’s ‘developmental dictatorship’ is more in line with continental European experience in this regard. But there are signs of a new stage in the bourgeoisification of the state. National officials increasingly have their fingers in lucrative local industrial and land-development pies, through vertical administrative connections, or xitong. Moreover, in a highly controversial move in 2002, members from the ranks of private business were welcomed into the Communist Party; some experts claim that capitalist cadres have become a majority among the national party leadership. [47]

Our purpose here has been to dissect the changes in Chinese cities in order to show that the prc has passed the point of transition to a predominantly capitalist order, and that it has followed a path not so distant from those of Europe and North America. Such a comparison is an essential baseline for China scholars and outside observers trying to understand the country’s economic development or assess current social conditions there.

The use of the classic Marxist terms ‘transition’ and ‘primitive accumulation’ in itself implies a critique of the ills unleashed by capitalist dynamics. While liberals will emphasize the positive outcomes of China’s economic miracle—on average, incomes are rising, housing has improved, more basic consumer goods are available and cities are flourishing—the heavy costs are evident: widening inequalities and extreme exploitation of labour; higher unemployment and increased job insecurity; and widespread loss of services such as childcare and health care. There is now a yawning gap between prosperous city-dwellers and poor peasants, and between the roaring east coast and backward interior. The environmental costs have also been severe: appalling air pollution, massive toxic spills and deadly industrial hazards. It harks back to the horrors of the industrial revolution in Britain, as revealed by the Factory Reports or Mayhew’s studies of the London poor.

What might be done to alter the trajectory of capitalism in China? Popular protest is on the rise, spurred by such indignities as contaminated water, wholesale housing clearances and the venality of local officials. The leadership of the Chinese Communist Party is acutely aware of the danger of unrest, and has introduced some reforms and launched campaigns against ‘corruption’. But it has not allowed the people to organize and speak for themselves; a tight lid has been kept on democratic awakenings, from Tiananmen Square to Internet 2.0.

This raises a final question. If China is increasingly a liberal state and market economy, why has there been no liberalization of politics? In the conventional liberal view, democratic freedoms flow directly from private property and the market. Yet despite the potential relation between the parcellization of economic sovereignty in the hands of the bourgeoisie and the weakening of state absolutism, these processes have never been sufficient to assure a democratic order. Western polities only gained a degree of real freedom through popular rebellion, dispersion of property, union organizing, expansions of suffrage and political struggle over two long, difficult centuries in which Britain clung to its monarchs and peerage, the United States to slavery and Jim Crow, while France reverted to emperors and kings and Germany and Italy succumbed to fascist dictators.

Why should we expect better in China today? The abolition of the right to strike in the 1982 Constitution and the shooting of dissidents in 1986 and 1989 are classic examples of the brutal birth of a capitalist order—comparable to the Peterloo Massacre in England, or the Great Railway Strike in the us. Moreover, the Chinese state’s exercise of extreme repression is unsurprising, given the ccp’s ongoing monopoly on political power—a crucial component of the prc’s distinctive road to capitalism. An imminent leap to democracy under such circumstances is a liberal fantasy. The people of China face a long and arduous period of popular struggle if they are to tame the beast that has been unleashed.

Note:

[1] Thanks to You-tien Hsing for sharing her knowledge of China, to Carolyn Cartier for reading an earlier draft, and to Robert Brenner for his close reading and recommendations.

[2] Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett, China and Socialism: Market Reforms and Class Struggle, New York 2005, pp. 31, 58; Robert Weil, Red Cat, White Cat: China and the Contradictions of Market Socialism, New York 1996, p. 230.

[3] Changping Li, ‘The Crisis in the Countryside’, in Chaohua Wang, ed., One China, Many Paths, London 2003, pp. 198–218; Guidi Chen and Chuntao Wu, Will the Boat Sink the Water? The Life of China’s Peasants, New York 2006.

[4] David Harvey, A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism, New York 2005, p. 144; Ching Kwan Lee, Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women, Berkeley 1998, p. 68; ‘Women Make up 45 Per Cent of China’s Work Force’, Women of China website, 20 April 2007.

[5] Dorothy Solinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State and the Logic of the Market, Berkeley 1999; Ching Kwan Lee, Livelihood Struggles and Market Reform: (Un)making Chinese Labour After State Socialism, United Nations 2005.

[6] Hart-Landsberg and Burkett, China and Socialism, p. 33; ‘A Survey of China’, Economist, 25 March 2006; Shahid Yusuf, Kaoru Nabeshima and Dwight Perkins, Under New Ownership: Privatizing China’s State-Owned Enterprises, Stanford 2006.

[7] Jean Oi, ‘Fiscal Reform and the Economic Foundations of Local State Corporatism in China’, World Politics, vol. 45, no. 1 (1992), pp. 99–126. There is only piecemeal data on the fate of tves, for example, Yusuf et al., Under New Ownership, p. 98. The number left unemployed is impossible to determine with any certainty. See also Daniel Buck, ‘The subsumption of space and the spatiality of subsumption: city, country, and the transition to capitalism in Shanghai’, Antipode, forthcoming.

[8] On the condition of workers, see Anita Chan, China’s Workers Under Assault: The Exploitation of Labour in a Globalizing Economy, New York 2001; Hart-Landsberg and Burkett, China and Socialism.

[9] Peter Alexander and Anita Chan, ‘Does China Have an Apartheid Pass System?’ Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 30, no. 4 (2004), pp. 609–21; Fei-Ling Wang, ‘Reformed Migration Control and New Targeted People: China’s Hukou System in the 2000s’, China Quarterly, 177 (2004), pp. 115–32; ‘Chongqing to Urbanize Rural Migrants’, China Daily online, 16 June 2007.

[10] Peter Ho, ‘Who Owns China’s Land? Policies, Property Rights and Deliberate Institutional Ambiguity’, China Quarterly, 166 (2001), pp. 394–421; Samuel Ho and George Lin, ‘Emerging Land Markets in Rural and Urban China’, China Quarterly, 175 (2003), pp. 681–707; George Lin and Samuel Ho, ‘The State, Land System, and Land Development Processes in Contemporary China’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 95, no. 2 (2005), pp. 411–36.

[11] Fulong Wu, ‘The New Structure of Building Provision and the Transformation of the Urban Landscape in Metropolitan Guangzhou, China’, Urban Studies, vol. 35, no. 2 (1998), pp. 259–83, and ‘The “Game” of Landed Property Production and Capital Circulation in China’s Transitional Economy, with reference to Shanghai’, Environment and Planning A, vol. 31, no. 10 (1999), pp. 1757–71.

[12] You-tien Hsing, ‘Brokering Power and Property in China’s Townships’, Pacific Review, vol. 19, no. 1 (2006), pp. 103–24, and ‘Land and Territorial Politics in Urban China’, China Quarterly, 187 (2006), pp. 575–91.

[13] Yan Zhang and Ke Fang, ‘Is History Repeating Itself? From Urban Renewal in the United States to Inner-City Redevelopment in China’, Journal of Planning Education and Research, 23 (2004), pp. 286–98; Shenjing He and Fulong Wu, ‘Property-Led Redevelopment in Post-Reform China: A Case Study of Xintiandi Redevelopment Project in Shanghai’, Journal of Urban Affairs, vol. 27, no. 1 (2005), pp. 1–23.

[14] Min Zhou and John Logan, ‘Market Transition and Commodification of Housing in Urban China’, in John Logan, ed., The New Chinese City, Oxford 2002, pp. 137–52; Youqin Huang, ‘The Road to Homeownership: a Longitudinal Analysis of Tenure Transition in Urban China (1949–1994)’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 28, no. 4 (2004), p. 774.

[15] Fulong Wu and Anthony Gar-On Yeh, ‘Urban Spatial Structure in a Transitional Economy: The Case of Guangzhou, China’, Journal of the American Planning Association, vol. 65, no. 4 (1999), pp. 377–94.

[16] Ya Ping Wang and Alan Murie, ‘Commercial Housing Development in Urban China’, Urban Studies, vol. 36, no. 9 (1999), pp. 1475–94; Bo-Sin Tang and Sing Cheong Liu, ‘Property Developers and Speculative Development’, in Chengri Ding and Yan Song, eds, Emerging Land and Housing Markets in China, Cambridge, ma 2005, pp. 199–231; Hsing, ‘Brokering Power’; He and Wu, ‘Property-Led Redevelopment’.

[17] For Shanghai, see He and Wu, ‘Property-Led Redevelopment’, p. 7; People’s Daily online, 28 October 2002. For Beijing, People’s Daily online, 7 February 2001; Colliers International report on Beijing office market, 2nd quarter 2006; William Mellor and Allen Cheng, ‘Chinese Chasing the Wealth’, San Francisco Chronicle, 24 May 2006. All China figures from Haiyan Chen, S. Ganesan and Beisi Jia, ‘Environmental Challenges of Post-Reform Housing Development in Beijing’, Habitat International, vol. 29, no. 4 (2005), p. 572, and John Fernández, ‘Resource Consumption of New Urban Construction in China’, Journal of Industrial Ecology, vol. 11, no. 2 (2007), pp. 99–115.

[18] Li Tu, ‘Central Bank Warns Shanghai Real Estate Jeopardizes Banks’, Epoch Times online, 15 February 2005; ‘Looting the Aged’, Economist, 9 September 2006.

[19] ‘Ready for Warfare in the Aisles’, Economist, 5 August 2006, pp. 59–61; Andrew Glyn, ‘Imbalances of the Global Economy’, nlr 34, July–August 2005; Mellor and Cheng, ‘Chinese Chasing the Wealth’.

[20] Ruei Suei Sun, ‘Creative Deconstruction, or Deconstructive Creation? The Case of Xintiandi at Shanghai’, paper presented at 4th East Asian Regional Conference in Alternative Geography, Taipei, June 2006, pp. 24–30; Jianfa Shen, ‘Space, Scale and the State: Reorganizing Urban Space in China’, in Laurence Ma and Fulong Wu, eds, Restructuring the Chinese City, London 2005, p. 47.

[21] Fulong Wu, ‘Rediscovering the “Gate” Under Market Transition: From Work-Unit Compounds to Community Housing Enclaves’, Housing Studies, vol. 20, no. 2 (2005), pp. 235–54.

[22] Yun-Wing Sung, The Emergence of Greater China: The Economic Integration of Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, New York 2005, p. 36; ‘Can Pigs Fly?’, Economist, 24 February 2007.

[23] ‘The Problem with Made in China’, Economist, 13 January 2007; ‘Slow! Government Obstacles Ahead’, Economist, 17 June 2006; see also ‘Survey of China’.

[24] Sung, Emergence of Greater China, pp. 12, 27; furthermore, a significant share of Hong Kong investment represents ‘round tripping’, whereby mainland soes, enterprises owned by the People’s Liberation Army and other entities invest through subsidiaries in Hong Kong.

[25] Sung, Emergence of Greater China, p. 38; Glyn, ‘Imbalances of the Global Economy’, p. 15.

[26] Mellor and Cheng, ‘Chinese Chasing the Wealth’.

[27] Wang Hui, China’s New Order: Society, Politics and Economy in Transition, Cambridge, ma 2003; Hart-Landsberg and Burkett, China and Socialism. Because corruption is rife, primitive accumulation in China is accompanied by theft pure and simple; some of the richest, such as Yang Bin and Zhou Zengyi, have been jailed for fraud. As one investment banker puts it, ‘This is like the robber baron age in the us in the 19th century; everything is up for grabs’: quoted in Mellor and Cheng, ‘Chinese Chasing the Wealth’.

[28] Good data is lacking on the degree of privatization, but see Samuel Ho, Paul Bowles and Xiaoyuan Dong, ‘“Letting Go of the Small”: An Analysis of the Privatization of Rural Enterprises in Jiangsu and Shandong’, Journal of Development Studies, vol. 39, no. 4 (2003), pp. 1–26; Yusuf et al., Under New Ownership, p. 98; Russell Smyth, ‘Asset-Stripping the Chinese State-Owned Enterprises’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, vol. 30, no. 1 (2000), pp. 3–16.

[29] Hart-Landsberg and Burkett, China and Socialism, p. 45; Harvey, A Brief History, p. 128.

[30] Li Zhang, Strangers in the City, Stanford 2001. She confuses things, however, by failing to distinguish, among urban migrants, the new bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie from the workers.

[31] Economist, ‘Survey of China’.

[32] Harvey, A Brief History, p. 133; ‘India: Safe and Sorry’, Economist, 3 June 2006.

[33] Lin and Ho, ‘The State and Land Development’, p. 703; Economist, ‘Survey of China’; ‘The People’s Republic in the Grip of Popular Capitalism’, Economist, 28 April 2007.

[34] The government has been able to prop up shaky banks by injecting foreign- exchange reserves and siphoning off bad loans into asset-management companies backed by the Central Bank; but non-performing loans are still 20 to 30 per cent of bank portfolios: Economist, ‘Survey of China’, p. 13; Harvey, A Brief History.

[35] John Lewis, ed., The City in Communist China, Stanford 1971; Piper Gaubatz, ‘Urban Transformation in Post-Mao China: Impacts of the Reform Era on China’s Urban Form’, in Deborah Davis, Richard Kraus, Barry Naughton and Elizabeth Perry, eds, Urban Spaces in Contemporary China, New York 1995, pp. 28–60.

[36] George Lin, ‘The Growth and Structural Change of Chinese Cities’, Cities, vol. 19, no. 5 (2002), pp. 299–316.

[37] George Lin, ‘Towards a Post-Socialist City? Economic Tertiarization and Urban Reformation in the Guangzhou Metropolis, China’, Eurasian Geography and Economics, vol. 45, no. 1 (2004), pp. 18–44.

[38] Piper Gaubatz, ‘Globalization and the Development of New Central Business Districts in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou’, in Ma and Wu, Restructuring the Chinese City, pp. 98–116; Fulong Wu, ‘Polycentric Urban Development and Land-Use Change in a Transitional Economy: the Case of Guangzhou’, Environment and Planning A, vol. 30, no. 6 (1998), pp. 1077–1100; Lin, ‘Towards a Post-Socialist City?’; Wu and Yeh, ‘Transition of Urban Spatial Structure’. Although there has been a great deal of planning by city governments, Chinese cities have become more subject to uncontrolled, chaotic development, much like that in the us.

[39] Fulong Wu, ‘Transplanting Cityscapes: The Use of Imagined Globalization in Housing Commodification in Beijing’, Area, vol. 36, no. 3 (2004), pp. 227–34; Youqin Huang, ‘From Work-Unit Compounds to Gated Communities: Housing Inequality and Residential Segregation in Transitional Beijing’, in Ma and Wu, Restructuring the Chinese City, pp. 192–221; Zhang, Strangers.

[40] Vivienne Shue, ‘State Sprawl: The Regulatory State and Social Life in a Small Chinese City’, in Deborah Davis et al., Urban Spaces in Contemporary China, pp. 90–113; Laurence Ma, ‘Urban Administrative Restructuring, Changing Scale Relations and Local Economic Development in China’, Political Geography, vol. 24, no. 4 (2005), pp. 477–97; Shen, ‘Space, Scale and the State’.

[41] Ma, ‘Urban Administrative Restructuring’; Carolyn Cartier, ‘City-Space: Scale Relations and China’s Spatial Administrative Hierarchy’, in Ma and Wu, eds, Restructuring the Chinese City, pp. 21–38.

[42] Wild annexations mean that administrative boundaries do not strictly correspond to the economic territory or built-up area of cities. Many towns and counties won city designation on flimsy grounds before the central government tightened up the rules in the 2000s and put some provinces back above cities in the hierarchy: Jae Ho Chung and Tao-Chiu Lam, ‘China’s “City System” in Flux: Explaining Post-Mao Administrative Changes’, China Quarterly, 180 (2004), pp. 945–64.

[43] Fulong Wu, ‘Globalization, Place Promotion, and Urban Development in Shanghai’, Journal of Urban Affairs, vol. 25, no. 1 (2003), pp. 55–78; Lan-Chih Po, Strategies of Urban Development in China’s Reforms: Nanjing 1984–2000, doctoral dissertation, Berkeley 2001; Hsing, ‘Territorial Politics’; Wang, China’s New Order.

[44] Oi, ‘Fiscal Reform’; Shen, ‘Space, Scale and the State’. There is an ongoing struggle among levels of government over who controls territory, revenues and land. While the national government took a larger slice of local revenues in the 1990s, it has effectively given municipalities more control over land development since 2000.

[45] Ho and Lin, ‘Emerging Land Markets’; Hsing, ‘Brokering Power’.

[46] For example, Hart-Landsberg and Burkett, China and Socialism, p. 56. See also Gabriella Montinola, Yingyi Qian and Barry Weingast, ‘Federalism, Chinese Style: The Political Basis for Economic Success in China’, World Politics, vol. 48, no. 1 (1995), pp. 50–81.

[47] Bruce Dickson, Red Capitalists in China: The Party, Private Entrepreneurs and Prospects for Political Change, Cambridge, ma 2003; Wang, China’s New Order; also Hsing, ‘Territorial Politics’.