Book review: Daniel C. Mattingly,The Art of Political Control in China

Civil society is considered, in existing literature, a stimulus to—as well as the product of—increasingly relaxed political control in China. ¹ In this book, Daniel Mattingly contests the assumption that the emergence of civil society is necessarily a positive sign for political liberalisation. By theorising ‘everyday methods of control’ and ‘grassroots social organisations’, the author argues, instead, that civil society ‘bolsters authoritarian control over citizens not just in China but across the world’ (p. 12). This is a provocative proposition.

The book takes as examples of civil society, three sets of social organisations—temple organisations, lineage associations and social clubs; organisations with vertical bonds of fellowship. By broadening the definition of civil society, the author includes a vast arena of associational life outside the formal state and party structures prevalent in China on par with organisations with ‘horizontal bonds of fellowship’ like various rights groups and Non-Governmental Organisations. Three engagement strategies are explained—namely the cultivation of civil society, co-option and infiltration—by contextualising them around outcomes of three policies vis-à-vis land requisition, the one-child policy and containing mass protests. The book makes an interesting departure from the trend in existing literature of undertaking intensive ethnographic case studies in that it seeks to generalise at a macro level. It blends intensive structured qualitative case studies of four pairs of villages in south and central China with quantitative data sets at the national level by using statistical experimental methods like triangulation. The data sets used include China Family Panel Studies and the Chinese General Social Survey, among others.

In chapter 3, the author establishes why the Chinese state needs these informal strategies of control. This chapter establishes that people’s trust in the local level state and party officials is significantly lower in comparison to community leaders with various characteristics like aged, male, same-community, clan or village, and lineage membership (p. 91). The lower level of trust is due to corruption among local cadres (p. 87–88), land requisition without adequate compensation (p. 83), and attack on socio-cultural values like ban on reproduction through the one-child policy. Given the low level of trust in local state political figures and officials, the major governance challenge for the Communist Party of China, (hereafter the CCP) lies in the choice of informal strategies of control which drive them to use social capital and the trust of community leaders to make up for lack of trust in state and party leadership at local levels.

While the CCP suppresses the spread of rights groups, it has encouraged informal groups such as those described above. As chapter 4 on cultivating civil society explains, the state cultivates such groups with two objects in mind, that is—one, to ‘make a society legible to the state’ by helping state collect information about individual behaviours, attitudes and activities; and two, to enhance the moral and social standing of state functionaries, as when they donate to religious activities or contribute to organising social functions, and so on (p. 19). Individual state functionaries like village heads use such moral social standing to persuade people to comply with the party’s policies. The choice of employing the strategy also depends upon the value compatibility between state policies and such groups. For instance, the book finds that one-child policy outcomes are negatively associated with the presence of lineage organisations because the latter subscribed to traditional family values that were antithetical to reproductive control (p. 109–110). But the presence of the number of lineage organisations is positively associated with the level of compliance with other policies like land requisition (p. 121–122). In short, two major factors have determined the employment of this strategy vis-à-vis, first, existing socio-cultural milieu wherein such groups find fertile social contexts to emerge, and second, the content of such policy.

China is a socially and culturally diverse country. As social contexts differ throughout the country, the policy outcomes and strategies of control also vary. The book’s attempt to extend data sets at the macro level by blending intensive qualitative structured case studies at the micro and the various quantitative data sets at the macro level is an insightful lens to see how policy outcomes and governance is shaped by local social contexts in China. Equally insightful is another strategy dealt with in chapter 5, that of the co-option of local elites, by integrating them into formal state and party apparatus or incentivising them materially when there are already strong social groups present. The use of this strategy is directly consequential for state legitimacy and the changes in ideological apparatus being brought in by the CCP to ‘reorient’ the party’s ideological basis of legitimacy (Perry 2017, 29), than just for particular policy outcomes at the local level. At the same time, the use of the co-option of local elites poses serious problems of control of the local state by them.

When it is not practical to employ either of the above-discussed strategies, the strategy of infiltration, discussed in the sixth chapter, is adopted. This strategy is more like traditional methods used especially in communist party states and is also the least subtle method. As the state loosens control over economy and society, this method is perceived as repressive, and hence, has serious negative consequences for state legitimacy, but is, nevertheless, used frequently.

As the CCP relaxed its control over traditional cultural organisations and practices, such organisations have spread rapidly, and therefore the focus of the book is timely. It explains why such groups help the local state to implement policies rather successfully despite a high level of distrust; an important way to understand the emerging state-society relations in China. Thus, the rise of non-state social groups does not necessarily pose threat or help citizens influence policies. Rather, the (local) state uses them to make society more legible and to establish tighter and effective control.

While the book’s explanation that the mere presence of non-state associational life is no guarantee for political liberalisation and citizens’ control over state policies is insightful, its definition of civil society is problematic. By equating such groups with rights groups, it makes a conceptual blunder. Because civil society and authoritarian political values and methods of governance are intrinsically contradictory to each other, its critique of the assumptions of existing literature becomes conceptually and methodologically weak. In this equation, the state has the upper-hand thereby making many of these organisations outside of the definition of civil society as an autonomous realm with horizontal bonds of fellowship. ² Second, the use of quantitative experimental tools to create data sets from surveys to generalise at the macro level by extending the research design used at the micro level depends upon the reliability of such survey data. Given the lack of reliable data, more such studies are required to experiment with diverse quantitative sources. Nonetheless, this volume represents a valuable addition to the literature on state–society relations in China and the nature of challenges the CCP faces.