BOOK REVIEWS

Jing Huang, Factionalism in Chinese Communist Politics

Factionalism has been a persistent puzzle for students of Chinese communist politics. We know that it is an important feature of the regime, but there are several unresolved issues. How does factionalism in China differ from the same or related phenomena elsewhere—is it more important in China, or just more evident or more talked about? What causes Chinese factionalism—is it attributable chiefly to cultural or to institutional factors? Is it a constant feature of Chinese communist politics, or does it break out intermittently? How does the power struggle among factions relate to the formal institutions and processes of the Party-state? Building on the earlier literature on this subject, Jing Huang pushes forward in resolving such issues on three fronts: historical, conceptual and game-theoretic.

To start with the book's historical contribution, Huang offers a convincing new narrative of CCP political history from 1935 to about 1987, built around the idea of what he calls the “Yan'an Round Table”. The Yan'an Round Table was “the first-generation [Chinese communist] leadership with Mao in command” (p. 9). This leadership structure was composed of numerous “mountaintops” (shantou) or factions, each built up in one of the pre-revolutionary base areas and comprised of a network of military or civilian officials loyal to a particular leader. Huang shows that the mountaintops were further consolidated during the takeover period when whole groups of cadres were transferred together from certain base areas into either the central government or the newly liberated zones. The unique feature of the “Round Table,” which brought all the factions together in one structure, was that it came to a peak with Mao, whose authority was based in personal loyalties owed to him by the faction leaders, and who alone enjoyed the power to bridge between the factions, and between the otherwise separate military and civilian chains of command.

Power dynamics in the Maoist system were thus shaped by a series of functionally reinforcing pathologies. Horizontal communication among factions was forbidden, making the top leader into a bottleneck through whom all political coordination flowed. The lack of any civilian control over the military below the level of the functionally autonomous Central Military Commission sustained the need for a top leader to bridge the two domains of power, and the top leader's authority in turn depended on maintaining this military-civilian gap. Anyone who tried to do a good job in some functional area (like the economy) by co-operating with other administrators, found himself violating Mao's power interest in keeping the system fractionalised, and was therefore likely to be purged. Anyone whom Mao chose as a successor, and who therefore began to accumulate power across bureaucratic systems or factions, threatened Mao's interests and had to be purged. The fact that only Mao could make the system work provided the chief source of his authority and also meant that he was indispensable to the other leaders, so that even as he tore the system down, no one could afford to contradict him or replace him.

What resulted from this structural situation, on Huang's telling, was not a repetitive cycle of similar-looking factional struggles, as some theories have had it, but something resembling a natural history, or rise and fall, of the Yan'an Round Table, a process which Huang describes in five chapters. In the first phase, 1935-52, Mao assembled the system, established his dominance over it, and strengthened it during the early state-building period of the PRC by assigning different jobs to different mountaintops. In the second phase, 1952-56, Mao first cultivated the power of Liu Shaoqi, then felt threatened by Liu's prominence and tried to contain him by encouraging Gao Gang to challenge Liu, then finally sided with Liu and sacrificed Gao. In the aftermath of the Gao-Rao affair—a controversial subject among specialists, for which Huang's explanation is persuasive—Mao tried to alleviate the workload that the system imposed on him by creating two “fronts” of leadership and asking party bureaucrats on the “first front” to handle practical policy-making.

This new arrangement, however, carried the seeds of its own destruction. Just by doing their jobs, the first-front leaders violated Mao's interest in monopolising the role of co-ordinating other decision-makers. He therefore initiated a third phase of power struggle that lasted from 1956 to 1966. The Party bureaucrats, as Huang calls them, found themselves torn between the need to build their own power bases in order to perform their assigned tasks, and the need to avoid resisting Mao's power. Mao for his part enjoyed everyone's deference in principle but was marginalized in practice. In the fourth phase of struggle, the cultural revolution, Mao finally destroyed the Yan'an Round Table in his bid to protect his own supremacy. Mao first built up Lin Biao's power in order to purge others, then did away with Lin because his power had become too great. In all, the tragedy of the designated successor repeated itself three times, each time taking the self-destruction of the Round Table a step further.

Late in his life Mao was surrounded by leaders lacking deep roots in either the military or the Party bureaucracy, the most redoubtable being Zhou Enlai, whose power situation Huang analyses insightfully. He tried one more manoeuvre to save the regime, calling out the one leader still possessing a “penetrating mountaintop,” Deng Xiaoping. The last historical chapter of the book carries the story through most of the period of Deng's rule. Although the first generation of leadership had mostly left the scene, Deng maintained some key elements of Mao's rule, including the gap between military and civilian power structures and the top leader's distinctive role as the bridge between them.

While drawing on the work of others who have told parts of this story (including his mentor, Roderick MacFarquhar), Huang gives a strong and convincing thematic coherence to his analysis, although packing in so many political details that it is often hard to follow the story as narrative. He uses the ever-growing memoir style of literature as well as a series of interviews with highly-placed, anonymous informants and party historians to resolve a number of historiographical debates. The subtlety of his analyses should warn us that we are almost never going to get it right when we try to interpret CCP doctrinal and factional conflicts contemporaneously, when we lack the inside stories and the full context of events that can be gained only from multiple sources years later. It seems that things are never what they seem on the surface—apparently it is one of the features of factionalism to be always really about power and never about policy or ideology.

What emerges starkly from the narrative is the fierceness and pitilessness of political struggle in the CCP. Mao sacrificed loyal colleague after loyal colleague to his power needs. He was infinitely devious and patient, and he always won. However, his political victories brought great losses for his countrymen and eventually destroyed the very power structure, and in a sense the regime, that he had laboured to construct.

There is a sense in which the power of Huang's narrative defeats any attempt to theorize. This was a factional system like no other, built around the personal relationships that Mao had assembled and evolving according to the unique logic of Mao's attempt to preserve it against the inbuilt dynamics of its self-destruction. No such system existed in Stalin's Soviet Union or elsewhere, so far as I know.

Huang nonetheless does theorize, in three chapters of literature review and conceptual exploration. He suggests that factionalism was and continues to be imposed on the CCP by the fact that it is a dictatorship. Since there are no legitimate channels to express policy disagreements, politicians are forced to use informal personal networks to process policy disagreements and power rivalries. The unstated subtext is that democratic institutions would make factionalism unnecessary. Yet many democratic regimes also have factions of some sort, and some dictatorships do not seem to have factions, at least in the form found in China, so this and other propositions in Huang's argument call out for comparative study. It is a weakness not only of his book, but of other works in the tradition within which he is working (including my own), that in-depth comparative study is lacking.

Huang offers a second theoretical argument that I find less convincing and indeed less clear. This is the proposition that factionalism is an independent rather than a dependent variable. This makes sense insofar as it means that the Yan'an Round Table system created a conflict dynamic all its own. But this is not an innovative point, as Huang claims that it is, since scholars in this field have long argued that the existence of factions shapes the rules of the political game. But if the argument means more than this, the additional implications are not clear. The idea of factionalism as an independent variable begs the questions of why Mao set the system up and why he was able to do so. If it was to compensate for the lack of other institutions, as suggested above, then one could say that the presence or absence of factionalism is a dependent variable of institutional design. And if Mao's organizational creation took advantage of cultural resources ready to hand, such as the stress on guanxi, then we could say that factionalism is a dependent variable of culture.

As a third contribution of his research, Huang turns to game theory to formalize insights about factional dynamics. Game theoretic language is an effective metaphor throughout the narrative for the absoluteness of power calculations. Huang stops at several points to consider the hierarchy of political options facing contending actors and to show how each actor's choice was the one that made the most sense in light of the structure of power at the moment. Ideology, policy and human sympathy count for nothing when a politician considers his next move in such a rational power framework.

When these insights are expressed in game theoretic formulas, however, they offer little additional clarity. In prisoners' dilemma, one of the game models that Huang uses, both parties can make greater gains by cooperating than by defecting, and the dilemma concerns whether they can trust one another. But in the stories Huang tells, both actors aim to do maximum damage to each other, and are constrained from doing so only by insufficient power. In other words, these are zero-sum games rather than examples of prisoners' dilemma. When modelling the Mao-Liu struggle in early 1962, on the issue of whether Liu did best by informing Mao before changing policy or changing policy first and suffering Mao's criticism later, Huang's technical appendix does not add nuance to his serviceable explanation in the text.

One is disappointed to find more than a few errors in the Romanisation and in English spelling and usage in a work in the Cambridge Modern China Series. But this is a major work which will be mined by many both for its valuable details and for its insight into the structure of Chinese communist politics.