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C HAPTER 7—C ONCLUSION AND F URTHER
C ONSIDERATIONS
At the beginning of the 21st century, sustainable development has become the new paradigm of development for developed and developing countries alike. From a political vantage point, China can be considered a late-comer in changing policies towards more social equity and environmental soundness. At the turn of the century however China has started to push harder for a transformation in development, and thus the protection of its environment and ecology.
In the 11th Five-Year Plans (2005), the environment gained unprecedented momentum. A growing body of environmental laws and the upgrading of the State Environmental Protection Administration to ministerial rank in 2008 increased the political leverage of the environmen-tal agenda. New innovative projects were launched that aimed at solving the conflicting inter-ests between economic and environmental policy goals. Yet, problems in policy implementa-tion and law enforcement have remained, and the environmental situaimplementa-tion in China is worri-some. Despite billions of investments and repeated acknowledgements at central level, Chi-na’s performance in sustainability remains weak. One of the main reasons is that economic development continues to be a pivotal objective for local governments, as many parts of Chi-na still poorly developed and the overall living standard relatively low. On the other hand, China’s economy is one of the fastest developing in the world, and the second biggest after the United States of America.
During the 1980s and 1990s, China achieved impressive development based on a strategy that favored economic development in terms of GDP growth. The restless exploitation of its natu-ral resources, and the recklessness for its natunatu-ral environment have had disastrous conse-quences upon rural and urban areas that are now affecting its economy. Having become aware of its vulnerability, China has been trying new ideas and concepts to overcome “GDPism” and turn toward a more socially equitable and environmentally sound development model. The leadership has repeatedly expressed its intention and will to transform development.
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From the viewpoint of China, sustainable development is a concept formulated from and for developed countries. It does neither fit Chinese circumstances, nor does it sufficiently give answers to the issues and challenges China is facing. This is why, at a crucial point in its development, China decided to adopt its own concept of development to which sustainability is inherent, as one goal, however it does abstract the growth imperative from China. The ideological framework of the Scientific Development View contains the parameters for change and transformation.
The party ideology consists of four meta-narratives: Putting the people first means to satisfy the basic needs, and the continuously rising material and cultural needs of the Chinese people.
Development has to be comprehensive and thus aims at the promotion of economy, politics, and culture, and the realization of economic development and social progress. It pursues coordinated development between city and countryside, regions, economy and society. Finally, it should help to harmonize the relationship between people and nature, and to coordinate population, resources and environment. The word ‘scientific’ can be rephrased as reasonable or effective. Since development is very complex, it is important to comprehend processes, establish and broaden understanding by investigation, research, and discovery. Hereby science and academics play an important role which is also reflected in a decision by the State Council in 2005 which requires government bodies to consult scientists and experts in preparing policy programs, laws and regulations. In order to foster the ecological awareness among the Chinese population and cadres, the party embarked on a campaign to build an Ecological Civilization. In spite of the need that all Chinese people join in, the main bearer of responsibility in the transformation efforts are the government and its agents at all levels of administration, in particular high ranking officials.
On practical level, conflicting interests between pursuing economic growth and environmental and ecological protection cannot be reconciled unless economy is restructured. Low carbon production modes have to be established, green industries fostered, and waste flows are to be reintroduced into the production cycle. Since the adoption of the Scientific Development View in 2003, local governments underlie more constraints in the political decision-making and implementation process. They are required to pay more attention to social and environmental factors, and to search innovative solutions to enhance the coordination and harmonization of development. Moreover, since 2009, local party committees have to incorporate the idea of the Scientific Development View into their cadre evaluation systems, and train cadres in party schools and cadre training institutions accordingly.
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The process of incorporating the new development view into the organizational apparatus can be discerned on central and local level; it has to be understood as an endless cycle with differ-ent interacting poles: the cdiffer-enter and its peripheries. We can see this cycle more clearly if we shift our focus on the process how the Scientific Development View was incorporated into the cadre evaluation system.
It started with the formulation and adoption of the party ideology at central level. The COD being the executive organ in cadre management then selected pilot regions were new methods were experimented and developed. After the termination of experimentation the central gov-ernment issued a formal document in which it requested all local party committees to develop new evaluation systems according to the new requirements and methods proposed. In 2008 and 2009, new cadre evaluation systems under the Scientific Development View scheme were implemented in various localities all over China. Targets and their weights were adjusted, the evaluation and assessment methods of leading cadres revised, the basis of evaluators expand-ed. The goal was also to make evaluation more comprehensive and objective.
Guangdong was one of the first provinces to implement a new evaluation system under the Scientific Development View scheme. Evaluation is composed of four separate appraisals, three of which concern the work style, performance and attitudes of leading bodies and cadres. They are subjective assessments of cadres on the evaluated subjects collected through questionnaires. The responsible organ is the Provincial Appraisal Office, which is a party group within the provincial-level Organization Department. Its members are exclusively CCP members. The fourth appraisal method evaluates policy performance, and is based on statistical data.
The new evaluation scheme divides criteria into four categories (economic development, social development, people’s livelihood, environment and ecology). Before, environmental and ecological targets were subordinated to economic and social development targets, now they have become a category on their own with a whole set of targets. Furthermore, the province differentiates between four development areas (urban development areas, optimized development areas, key development areas, and ecological development areas). Targets and their weights are set according to the developmental states, needs, and prospects of an area.
The analysis on party school curricula in Jiangsu has revealed the variety of cadre instruction contents, and how external and internal challenges are being translated into the curricula of party schools. Training in Scientific Development is not limited to preaching principles of party ideology, but is moreover expressed in a diversification of approaches and training
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contents. A strong emphasis is placed on capacity training, and the diffusion of knowledge such as modern public administration techniques, theoretical approaches, and technical knowledge. Cadre training tries to convey managerial skills such as modern administration, e-governance and new communication technologies, and tries to link theoretical concepts with real political problems. By doing so, local party schools tackle the issues of income disparities, integration of rural and urban development, as well as environmental sciences and climate change technology. Teaching approaches such as case study sessions on experiences of other jurisdiction in particular on successful models of coordinated economic and social development have been adopted in instruction.
Party schools appear to adopt a strategy of benchmarking or profiling. This tendency is suggested by the numerous classes in management theories in Nanjing Party School, and the promotion of the Suzhou development model at Suzhou Party School that hosts training sessions for cadres from all over China. By using this strategy, models and approaches are diffused among cadres of different provinces; the flow of information in turn incites emulation in other provinces and jurisdictions.
In order to understand the role of cadre education and training, we have to analyze it from the vantage point of its function for a single-party regime. Among scholars in China the training system is widely recognized as an essential component in China’s transformation efforts; it increases the educational level of cadres and serves the goal of knowledge diffusion in general.
Transformation in China is buttressed on innovation (technology) and administration. The improvement of the educational level and knowledge diffusion are important prerequisites therefore. Hence, to dismiss party schools as mere institutions of indoctrination or academic degree providers is—in my point of view—a terrible mistake, since this assumption hinders us to fathom an important element how new ideas are transported to the different levels of administration in the country, and how China is trying to push for transformation.
Organizational theories provide a useful framework to reflect on the institutional change and the way how China responds to the changing environment and the newly emerging challenges.
The asymmetry between the time of reaction, the time of investment into discontinuous change, and the time when change becomes effective in the Chinese CMS is more pronounced in environmental and social politics. This is due to the nature of their specific nature: while economic development increases revenue extraction, social and environmental policies mostly eat up these resources. The long-term benefits of a healthy environment are often disregarded.
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Furthermore, proposed intentions to give more weight to social and environmental factors are more rhetorical than real. Local evaluation system still largely value economic criteria over social and environmental factors.
Local protectionism is a strong force that the central leadership is not able to compete with under the current regime. The Chinese authoritarian political system that continues to exclude society from participating more substantially in the political decision-making process exacer-bates the problem of resource dependency (i.e. cadres as the source and object of transfor-mation) and the resulting rigidity. Still, this resource rigidity can have two possible outcomes for changes on the implementation level: in the case of economic development the enormous resource of party and government cadres and the attraction of new and young cadres have contributed to the fastest economic development of a country the world has witnessed so far.
In the environmental realm, the Chinese leadership has not yet found an equivalent alternative incentive for wealth creation. It is therefore pushing for a change of mind-set through educa-tion and training that eventually could curtail or contain obstinate economic accumulaeduca-tion.
In this regard, the role and importance of cadre education and its expansion become more pronounced. According to Lovas et al. (2000: 755), external influence in the decision to re-spond to discontinuous change increases the likelihood that leaders structurally differentiate and thus set up new ventures from their parent organization. In the case of the Chinese CMS, the leadership is determined to foster transformation by means of changing the mindsets of its agents. By doing so, it further refrains from substantial political reforms towards democratiza-tion. According to the Chinese leadership, the root of the problem is its sources of variations, i.e. cadres. Only by changing the concept of development in their minds, China can transform its development.
Organizational and public management theories are useful in the investigation of the Chinese CMS, however they cannot fully explain the reasoning behind structures, nor the mechanism at work. The CMS is as a form how China organizes its state-society relations. For a more complete analysis we have thus to broaden the historical perspective and consider traditional Chinese philosophical approaches that explain the function of institutions and the role of the State. It is also necessary to draw on the long tradition of the imperial examination system, on Confucian approaches of state doctrine and imperial administration. How contemporary China handles the legacies and experiences of China's past, both imperial and communist is an exciting but under-researched topic.
In the chapter on the literature review I referred to the study by Zheng Yongnian (2010), The
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Chinese Communist Party as Organizational Emperor: Culture, reproduction and transformation. Zheng sees the nature of the CCP expressed in a continuous struggle for
hegemony and domination that crosses the borders of its historical setting (xv). Cultural connotations, historical continuity and discontinuity are embedded in the CCP as political facts. The organizational emperorship is a reproduction of China's traditional imperial political culture in modern times (xivf). Some scholars might find this argument fairly exaggerated, and even inside the Chinese scholarly community approaches in modern political science dismiss the possibility to search the roots for contemporary problems in traditional China. However, we should not disregard the fact that China does have a history before the communist idea was brought into the country, and the current regime founded in 1949. The strain of thought that imported concepts and ideologies cannot be enough to explain and analyze politics of modern and contemporary China is also adopted by Julia Strauss (2003). She finds that the organizational model of modern Chinese bureaucracy grounds on the xingzheng reforms (literally translated: administrative reforms) between 1902 and 1911.“[They] laid down a basic agenda for central state action that virtually all of the Qing's successor regimes of the twentieth century would imitate and struggle to achieve, albeit through a variety of different tactics.” (833)
Literature on imperial bureaucracy displays the similarities in the constituents of today's CMS. In imperial China, special rules and procedures were devised to insure honesty among officials: the frequent rotation of officials to avoid the development of attachment to localities or associates, a merit review system in which every official was appraised each triennium, promotion, demotion and dismissal depended on evaluation ratings; periodic examinations demonstrated scholastic capacity (Sterba 1978: 72).
When analyzing political institutions in a country we should be aware of its cultural traditions and predisposition that determine the choices made in politics and in the establishment and reorganization of institutions. Suzanne Ogden (1989) defined three competing values which undermine political decisions in China: Chinese culture, socialism, and development.
Aufrecht and Bun (1995) found this framework very useful to examine the establishment of the Chinese CSS for the purpose of determining its “Chinese characteristics”. The factors that reflect tradition are: Confucianism, civil service examinations and scholar rulers, and guanxi.
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Socialist values are expressed in: the CCP, cadres, work unit and equity. Development values are: China’s size, poverty and education (176). The two studies support the efforts to pose further research questions that eventually help us to better understand the mechanism of the CMS. The approach opens up an interesting perspective and framework which should not be discarded.
We face this issue in the study of cadre evaluation and in respect with the claim on objectivity.
Faced with the problem of policy implementation at local level, and rampant corruption within the Chinese bureaucracy, the quest for standardization and objectivity in order to make cadres more accountable for their actions is clearly serving the Party’s interests. Trust into leadership and into the fairness of their designed performance appraisal systems are important considerations that the leadership does not ignore as they are vital for its further survival. In the efforts to solve the principle-agent problem and the dictator’s commitment problem, two factors pose obstacles: The cultural predisposition of guanxi, and the lack of transparency in the promotion process. In this respect, the research on the Scientific Development View becomes even more interesting as the party ideology proposes a higher degree of objectivity.
Two questions become paramount and should guide further research: How does guanxi influence subjectivity and bias in evaluation practices in China? To which degree is guanxi being considered helpful or problematic in the matter of cadre performance appraisal and promotion decisions? Is guanxi considered a disease that should be eradicated within the system, or should it be controlled to a certain degree in order to prevent moral hazard. If we tackle these questions, we cannot neglect Chinese culture and tradition.
The question of ideology and organization has drawn the interest of scholars coming from various disciplines. In spite of the general assumption that ideology as a belief system affects politics and behavior, the concept still bears some weaknesses in establishing a clear relationship between motives, purposes, and political action.50
50 For a critical account of the concept of ideology in the empirical study of political behavior see Minar 1961;
for a study of the multidimensionality of the motivational basis of political party activism see Constantini et al. 1996
In China, ideology is intrinsically linked to the CCP’s historical claim on power. However, the central value of ideology has changed over the last 60 years. Under the leadership of Mao Zedong, politics were ideologically driven. The Party assumed supreme ideology by shifting external to internal, and economic to political control (Schurmann 1968: 17). A major caesura came with the Reform and Opening Policy in 1978. After its launch, economic development became the ultimate goal and priority for the Chinese party-state, and the CCP’s new legitimization basis.
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Scholars asserted a rising importance of the government as the manager of economic affairs, and a concomitant declining importance of Party and ideology; they even heralded the demise of ideology and the retreat of the CCP (Lowell 1984; Burns 1989). The sources for this
“unsteady retreat” (Burns 1989: 739) were reformers within the party eager to improve efficiency and effectiveness. The place of ideology in Chinese politics today is often dismissed as pure rhetoric not worth to delve into. It is not more than a façade of a political regime that is trying not to lose its face. Already in 1988, Lucian Pye countered the prophesized atrophy of ideology with his book The Mandarin and the Cadre: China’s
Political Culture. In his passionate writing style he tried to remind Western scholars that many
Chinese including the Chinese leadership still took ideology seriously and held on to their loyalty to Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. This is also what I experienced in my research. The claim that the Party should serve the people and that party cadres should act only and exclusively in the interest of the Chinese people was expressed by many of my interview partners. Even though we have to handle these statements with cautiousness and look how these statements find their realization in practice, we still should not dismiss this value as simple hypocrisy.On political level, party ideology today still serves the dichotomic function of unification and transformation. Furthermore, it reflects economic, social and other challenges in historical periods and bears the ideas of their leaders. Examining ideology also means examining Chinese politics, especially if we place our focus on the gap between ideology and praxis.
What explains the ambiguities? What are the reasons for party ideology to fail on the level of
What explains the ambiguities? What are the reasons for party ideology to fail on the level of