BOOK REVIEWS

Joseph Fewsmith, Elite Politics in Contemporary China

Joseph Fewsmith is known for his extensive work on the contemporary political scene in China; and he has in recent years come to be considered an essential source of reference for anyone working in one of his more specific fields, the political elite. Indeed, he has devoted several articles to it—articles worthy of note , and noted widely—published during the 1990s and collected here in a single volume entitled Elite Politics in Contemporary China. There is nothing new, then, inside this rather alluring dust jacket—alluring by virtue of its title, and also the photograph, taken in 1989, in which one can recognise, from left to right, Jiang Zemin, Li Peng, Qiao Shi and Deng Xiaoping. Those who already know and appreciate Fewsmith's earlier work are bound to be excited by a front cover like this… so that in the few moments it takes to open the book we are let down with a bump.

Yet, the feeling of having been taken in passes just as quickly. The informed reader, and a fortiori the ignorant one, can only feel gratitude to the writer, and the publisher, for having conceived this doubly successful idea. Each of these articles relates, in a lucid style, a particular aspect of China's political development, during the reform period, while setting it back in its historical perspective. Thus, now they have been gathered together, these intelligently descriptive articles amount to an excellent textbook and reference work for students and researchers, in fact for anyone interested in this subject. Its conciseness, moreover—fewer than 200 pages—together with the exhaustive index, should be enough to convince the most reluctant among us of the usefulness of reading, even owning, this book. And, even if the numerous intrinsic virtues of these articles were not enough to call for their being re-published in book form, present circumstances justify it entirely. Situated as we are between the time for stocktaking prompted by the eightieth birthday of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the time for futurology with the approach of the Sixteenth Party Congress, researchers and journalists are whipping up a storm of papers and interviews and vying for our attention as they peer into the future.

Admittedly, ever since studies on the ground became possible, they have overtaken analyses founded, on the one hand, upon watching the top people's musical chairs—or, to borrow a highly appropriate phrase from Fewsmith, “watching the tea-leaves”, (p. xi)—or, on the other hand, upon speculation about the direction things are taking. “Pekinology”, for that is what we are talking about here, decried and outdated as it is today, is nonetheless still a profitable exercise and, these days, very timely. And such is the case with the “Pekinology” offered by Elite Politics in Contemporary China.

Fewsmith's introduction, while paying tribute to Tang Tsou (1919-99), the great China specialist to whom he dedicates this book, explains his approach to his subject and reminds us of the context within which each of the subsequent chapters was written. As regards his methodology, the writer aligns his technique with that of his master by proceeding on the basis of case studies. It comes down to examining “a particular event or time period to see what lessons it revealed about the conduct of elite politics and where China was headed at a particular period of time” (p. xiv). Accordingly, Tang Tsou and Joseph Fewsmith favour an inductive approach, which consists in minutely examining the facts and then setting out paradigms. Thus, they are opposed to the more current approach, which consists in adopting some hypotheses or a theoretical model in advance, and then testing them out by comparing them with reality.

The first chapter, entitled “The Dengist Reform in Historical Perspective”((1), underlines the necessity for reforms, as well as the continuity of the debates between China before 1949 and China of the reform period: this raises all the more sharply the dilemma described by Liang Qichao as to the responsibilities to be apportioned between the state and society, between the public and the private. Fewsmith reminds us that, throughout the twentieth century, the thorniest problem that China has faced, one that is still today unsolved, is the question of how a civil society could emerge. In the writer's view, as long as there is no public sphere that is independent of the state, China will not find a way out of this social tension.

The second chapter is about “Formal Structures, Informal Politics and Political Change in China”((2). The China of the 1980s was witness to a revival of informal politics: for the better, because the system gained thereby a certain flexibility, along with equal vitality, thus saving the regime from the sclerosis and collapse that occurred in the USSR. In the following decade, informal politics faded a little, though it did not totally disappear; it was replaced by a more complete legislative apparatus and by a bureaucracy that was broader but better led.

The same question is pursued in the next chapter, entitled “Institution Building and Democratization in China”((3), which assesses the political development within the People's Republic during the 1990s and attempts to answer the following question: does China fulfil the conditions necessary for a transition to democracy and, still more important, for democracy to be consolidated. Fewsmith suggests that mainland China might well follow the example of Taiwan. In his view, indeed, the development of institutions and the regime's growing professionalisation could soften its authoritarianism, the very condition that prefigured democratisation in the island.

This optimism is also to be found in chapter four: “The Impact of Reform on Elite Politics”((4), in which the writer replies to the question he raised in the previous chapter. He takes a different perspective, looking this time, not at institutions, but at political elites. The new generation in power is made up of technocrats rather than ideologues: they turn away from ideological debates, so as to concentrate on the concrete problems threatening the stability of the country. Meanwhile, they are gradually introducing to politics the rules of competition; and they are more inclined to settle their differences by means of institutions, these representing a form of legitimacy since the new elites do not benefit from the revolutionary aura of their predecessors.

Still remaining to be seen are the challenges that Chinese leaders must confront. Fewsmith sums them up in “Historical Echoes and Chinese Politics: Can China Leave the Twentieth Century Behind?”((5), his fifth and final chapter. And that is where the shoe pinches. We may recall that, in his introduction, the writer likened his methods to those of Tang Tsou in being composed of two stages: first, examine minutely the facts, and then on that basis work out a paradigm. Now, however, he leaves the reader disappointed. Putting the subject into perspective, however timely the moment, has never been a substitute for offering a conceptual approach to it. And one might have expected that, while Fewsmith was recasting his articles into a new publication, he might have had in mind to give us something theoretical, however lightly sketched. That would have rounded off his book magnificently, raising it from the status of a nicely arranged textbook to that of something more stimulating and also more difficult to achieve: a work on societies in transition.

With that reservation, however, we must not overlook the book's many qualities. It is remarkable for the keenness of its analyses, even though they do fall under the heading of “Pekinology”. The conclusions they arrive at, while awaiting the confirmation of events, have already been partly endorsed by more recent studies and in particular by that of Li Cheng, whose field study is a landmark of its kind((6).

Translated from the French original by Philip Liddell