Abstract
At the core of China’s rise lies the Chinese Communist Party’s ability to reinvent itself and its administration. This article investigates one aspect of the gradual overhaul of administrative institutions, processes, and strategies, namely the increasing prominence of neoliberal ideas emanating from the discipline of public management in the recent emphasis on ‘social management’ (社会管理) in government rhetoric and action. The article concludes that social management may ultimately entail a corporatist re-engineering of Chinese society that allows a considerable degree of pluralism while strengthening the leading role of the Party over society.
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) rebuilding of the socialist party-state in the past 20 years is at the centre of the epochal transformation of China into a modern, capitalist society and global presence. In China socialist governance and a capitalist economy are now locked in a symbiotic relationship. Authoritarian socialism as a form of practical government has made capitalism possible, while the future of socialist rule is predicated on the continued success of capitalist development. More than 30 years of ‘reform and opening up’ have allowed the party-state to reinvent itself, putting the rule of the CCP on an increasingly solid footing. Several decades of unprecedented state building are beginning to have a fundamental impact on the technologies, rationality, and objectives of government.
Currently, the presence of government in Chinese society is different from what it has ever been. It is both more powerful and resourceful and less direct and invasive. At the same time, China’s globalization has had profound repercussions both inside and outside China itself. From a hermetically sealed socialist state, the country has evolved to become an increasingly cosmopolitan one, especially in the coastal regions. Gone are the days of closed work units, neighbourhoods, and villages as the foundation of governance. China’s society has become much more complex and fluid. High levels of social, occupational, and residential mobility, social and economic stratification, and cultural, religious, and social diversity are setting fundamentally different challenges to government and civil society.
At the heart of the CCP’s strategy, lies the fact that it is prepared to reinvent itself, while retaining core Leninist principles that guarantee its authoritarian leading role over state and society. 1 The Party summarizes this orientation by saying that it is a ‘Marxist learning party’ (马克思主义学习型政党). For many years now, Chinese leaders, administrators, academics, and businesspeople have mined societies of the developed world (above all the United States) for clues, ideas, and models – many of them ‘neoliberal’ – that may help make China a better place. These are blended with indigenous socialist and reinvented traditionally Chinese ideas and practices. From a Chinese perspective, state building thus resembles a process of selective borrowing and mixing, producing a unique and evolving governmental rationality that I call neo-socialism. 2
Socialism continues to be a crucial part of the party-state’s ongoing quest to reproduce and reinvent itself; without socialism, the CCP’s rule would be nothing more than another form of authoritarianism. The Party’s survival is predicated on its Leninist charisma which in turn needs ideologically prescribed goals. In other words, the key to the Party’s ability to renew itself and its ‘organizational charisma’ 3 is its skill to redefine its mission to change China. Under neo-socialism, the communist utopia has been replaced by a technocratic objective of a strong, peaceful, and modern China that is almost synonymous with strong, effective, and forward-looking government. Socialist ideology is no longer the end served by communist party rule, but the mere means by which party rule is perpetuated. Ideology has become an aspect not of politics, but of public administration. Ideology is an indispensable aspect in the creation of regime support, no longer intending to generate ‘belief’ in the party, but to cultivate responsible, trusting, and ‘high-quality’ citizens who inhabit an active, autonomous, and governable society. 4
An intrinsic part of neo-socialist strategy has been the selective, partial, and gradual nature of the marketization of state and collective assets and functions. Gradually, markets have been created for a vast range of commodities, resources, and services, including labour, capital, insurance, housing, education, health care, and land. In none of these cases has the state fully retreated from the markets which its own policies have created, retaining a larger or smaller role for governments, state agencies, or state-owned enterprises as providers, regulators, and quite often also as major stakeholders. As I have shown in my recent work on Party schools and cadre training, 5 competitive markets also have been created at the very core of the party-state’s Leninist legacy, such as the training and recruitment of officials. Neo-socialism thus entails more than an old-fashioned Leninist party that puts neoliberal technologies to familiar uses. Under neo-socialism, innovative neoliberal and home-grown governmental technologies cut right at the heart of the party-state itself, serving to support, centralize, modernize, and strengthen the Party’s Leninist leading role in Chinese society.
In this article, I explore the application of the concept of neo-socialism in the Party’s endeavour to establish and manage institutions at the interface of state and society. From the perspective of the party-state, state-society relations are increasingly a matter of facilitation and supervision, the object of the party-state’s ‘social management’, rather than the ‘politics’, ‘struggle’, or ‘propaganda’ of the Maoist and even the early reform periods. Since the Third Plenum of the 16th Party Congress in 2004, social management has become an increasingly prominent aspect of the ‘construction of a socialist harmonious society’ (构建社会主义和谐社会). 6 The 12th Five-Year Plan for 2011–2015 even devotes a whole chapter to ‘social management’, making it a ‘key target’ (主要目标) of the government’s work and a core political concept in Party discourse. 7 It brings out very clearly not only the main assumptions and features, but also some of the limitations of neo-socialist governance in the context of an administrative structure that still retains many of its pre-reform characteristics.
Under the leadership of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, CCP policymaking has incorporated viewpoints and knowledge from a much broader range of sciences than just the natural sciences, engineering, and economics. In the case of the discourse on social management, the influence of legal scholars and sociologists is clearly discernible, although direct evidence on their role remains very hard to obtain. However, in this article I focus on the similar, but arguably even less direct impact of the new discipline of public management. Its influence has, in my view, inserted foreign neoliberal ideas on ‘new public management’ that promise the possibility of de-politicized control over the public sector beyond the realm of the state. Non-state social forces and institutions are thus presented as no longer a threat to the CCP’s power monopoly, but as the object and tool of a concerted effort at social engineering that will ultimately strengthen Party rule.
I first describe the growth and development of the discipline of public management between 1996 and 2002. I then show how the ideas and viewpoints emanating from this new discipline in the period 2005–2011 re-emerge in government discourse and policymaking on social management. The analysis in this article is preliminary in the sense that it is based primarily on government and Party documentation acquired through the Internet and during earlier research on cadre training in China. The conclusions of the article should therefore not be read as final. They are hypotheses on the development of government thinking and the administrative practice of social management that will have to be tested in further fieldwork-based research in China itself.
Public administration and public management 8
Academic disciplines are not only a way of looking at and understanding a specific aspect of reality (for example, the economy, politics, or social structure); they are also centrally involved in the creation and maintenance of these aspects as separately knowable entities that can then be acted upon, managed, and controlled by governing institutions. Disciplines are the product and arenas of both academic and non-academic political agendas, debates, and turf wars. The subject matter, approaches, and impact of specific academic disciplines therefore have genealogies specific to the social and political characteristics of the society in which they are embedded. This is as true in China as it is elsewhere. 9 For instance, philosophy, a largely purely academic discipline in the West, is in China directly relevant to policymaking, because most of it is concerned with Marxism and its derivative ideologies all the way from Leninism to the ‘Three Represents’ (三个代表) and the harmonious society. 10 The central position of philosophy, for instance, is expressed very clearly in the 2007–2010 development plan of the philosophy department of the Central Party School. The plan states that the main characteristic of contemporary Marxist philosophical research is that it leads research on the big real issues. Moreover, on the basis of their philosophical research, ‘specialists in the department will continue to give advice on policymaking to the government both through their reports and internal consultation’. 11
The growth and indigenization of the new disciplines of public administration and public management progressed very rapidly in the 1990s and early 2000s. Presenting governance as more than government control over the population and endorsing the development of civil society, public administration, and public management are one of the arenas where modern, neo-socialist ideas are produced and inserted into the party-state’s governmental practice. In traditional, pre-Cultural Revolution cadre training, the closest thing to administrative science was the discipline of ‘party building’ (党建). This discipline continues to be taught in Party schools, and no other academic discipline in China may explicitly take the CCP and its role in government and administration as its object of study. By contrast, public administration (行政学, literally ‘administrative science’) and administrative management (行政管理) started out as subjects within political science which was reinstated shortly after the start of the reforms. Public administration and administrative management developed quickly from 1984 onwards, and public administration was officially recognized as a separate discipline in 1988. In the 1990s public administration became a mainstream discipline not only in universities, but also in Party schools and the then new schools of administration. 12 Public administration in China focuses on the institutions, the law, and the formal arrangements of government; it is not allowed to study the formal institutions of the judiciary, representative government, and the CCP nor the compromises and deals, influence peddling, and jockeying for power that constitute the messy side of politics. Furthermore, as a highly sanitized slice of political science, public administration approaches issues of governance as they appear to government officials, namely limited to questions of the government’s control over and management of society. Despite that, the growth of public administration has been an important component of the administrative reforms: by at least pretending that Party and government, and politics and administration can be separated, a vision of a stable Chinese state is presented as unencumbered by the factional competition, purges, and campaigns that were (and to certain extent continue to be) the mainstay of Party life.
However, in the latter half of the 1990s, administrative science was increasingly criticized as an anodyne enterprise ill-suited to China’s changing administrative and social reality. Inspired by Western scholarship on civil society and the public sphere and World Bank support for non-governmental organizations, scholars such as Liu Xirui at the National School of Administration argued that administration amounted to much more than the work of government. With the growth of a market economy, a public sphere has emerged in which the government was just one of many providers. Governance, moreover, was not chiefly a matter of control over the population. The preoccupation with control, Liu argues, is something that China’s feudalism and state socialism have in common. Modern governance should aim at providing services for the population in ways that are democratically controlled by the people. As a result, China no longer needs mere public administration, but the practice and study of public management (公共管理). The argument fitted very well with the restructuring of the administration and cadre system under the leadership of Premier Zhu Rongji from 1997 onwards. This was an important factor in the rapid ascendancy of the new discipline. 13
Compared to public administration, what does the discipline of Chinese-style public management mean? According to an authoritative textbook authored by the Shanghai-based political scientist Zeng Jun, the management of public affairs most importantly involves policymaking. Public management is principally interested in how policies impact on behaviour and public projects and the functionality of the institutions of public management. Unlike public administration, the discipline is much less concerned with the details of the administrative setup and organizational adjustment of such institutions. 14 Public management extends its scope from the administrative apparatus of formal government to the whole public sector. This includes the legislative organs and the judiciary, state-owned enterprises and political parties, and societal organizations that are part of the ‘third sector’ (between the public and private sectors), such as service units (hospitals, schools), mass organizations, community organizations, charitable foundations, popular and professional associations, and other non-governmental and non-profit organizations. However, the discipline also recognizes the special role that the government plays in Chinese society. Government is the core and main part of the public sector and public organizations, with other organizations playing a supplementary role. 15 Zeng also points out that in the few years of its existence the discipline of public management has yet to develop a robust distinct identity. Western concepts are borrowed without concern for the need for adaptation to the Chinese context (本土化, ‘indigenization’). Conversely, research in public management still tends in many ways to behave as the successor discipline of public administration. Non-government organizations are often simply looked at through governmental eyes, ignoring their special character, role, and functions that set them off from governmental organizations. 16
The introduction of public management as the future of Chinese governance illustrates a clever use of a foreign neoliberal discourse on ‘new public management’ – which in itself is an application of the language of business administration to public administration – to depoliticize calls for the development of civil society and democratization. Instead of antagonistic Western impositions aimed at destabilizing the CCP, democracy and civil society are presented as intrinsic to the CCP’s own vision of a modern Chinese state and society. As Liu himself puts it:
Western new public management … has drawn on the experience of business administration and the market mechanism … for the development of a movement for government reforms that emphasizes efficiency. However, [when] we [in China] talk about new public management, in addition to considerations of efficiency, we are even more concerned with questions of the public nature of management, such as democratic participation, democratic management, democratic supervision, democratic investigation and so on. This is something that we must pay attention to when establishing a system for public management in our country.
17
Rather than antagonistic calls for democracy beyond the established administrative system, democracy here is de-politicized by its inclusion in the larger neo-socialist project of technocratic administrative reform. The fusion of technocracy and democracy may strike Westerners as odd or naive. In the Chinese context the professionalization of administration and the depoliticization of democracy both aim to limit the direct and arbitrary power of the CCP and its individual leaders over society. In China, the promotion of technocratic rule serves enduring and often conflicting political agendas, such as the strengthening of CCP leadership or, conversely, grass-roots democracy and the autonomy of non-state organizations.
The creation of a succession of new academic disciplines since the early 1980s thus follows a logic that is highly political and that explicitly depoliticizes governance in China. What is remarkable about this is that first public administration and now public management have been so readily endorsed by the party-state. Since the turn of the century, almost all major universities and Party schools in China have included public management as a core discipline. The establishment of new Master of Public Administration (MPA) programmes in the late 1990s and early 2000s is the most prominent example and important driver behind the rapid ascension of the discipline of public management. 18 In Chinese the MPA is called Master of Public Management (公共管理硕士). The English name of these programmes retaining the word ‘administration’ has simply been copied from the practice in the United States, where the MPA programme is modelled on the well-known Master of Business Administration (MBA) programmes. 19 By drawing on foreign experience and China’s specific circumstances, the MPA programmes aspire to produce a new type of high-level managers, administrators, and policymakers for state and non-state organizations, who possess practical, useful and specialized skills. The MPA programmes are intended to break through the conventional barriers between existing disciplines: their training must be practical, comprehensive and strategic. The flexible structure of MPA programmes will allow students and their work units the freedom to create a programme of training tailored to most to their needs.
The creation of public management and its pre-eminence over the older discipline of public administration is only partially the achievement of progressively minded scholars and their foreign supporters. It suited the party-state’s administrative reform agenda in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As a gift of the state, public management has continued to serve its ultimate master. Paradoxically, by the mid-2000s once the Hu–Wen leadership was firmly established, the ideas on governance promoted by the discipline were enlisted to serve another, statist agenda. Rather than serve to break through the old habits and structures of the party-state, they were deployed to establish a set of new ones.
From public management to social management
Despite the continued importance of the discipline of public management in academic or cadre training settings, the term ‘public management’ itself only rarely, if ever, appears in key Central documents. A reading of such documents nevertheless reveals the influence of the basic ideas associated with public management, in addition to those from sociology and legal studies. Governance is increasingly seen as management rather than politics involving both state and non-state institutions. However, at the hands of the party-state these originally neoliberal ideas of public management have morphed into tools of building a state that has increasingly corporatist ambitions and a fixation on social stability and security.
The key term here is ‘social management’ (社会管理). In the 12th Five-Year Plan published in March 2011 this concept was elevated to one of the eight ‘key targets’ of the plan. It included public service, democracy, and legal system, a ‘social management system for greater social harmony’ and the use of volunteers. 20 Despite its rather sudden prominence, the concept in its current, inclusive meaning goes back at least to 2005. The term social management itself dates from 1998 as one of the three basic functions of government (the other two being macro-economic control and public services), 21 and was subsequently briefly mentioned in Jiang Zemin’s final report as CCP general secretary to the 16th Party Congress in 2002 as more narrowly an aspect of maintaining public order. 22 As we will see, the public order reading of the word remains important, despite its apparent contradiction with the much more inclusive and tolerant aspects added by the Hu–Wen regime. In policy documents both meanings occur together, including in the 12th Five-Year Plan, indicating that techniques of governance borrowed from public management (and sociology and legal studies) ultimately are simply an aspect of (or perhaps even a later addition to) an enduring agenda of social stability, public security, and CCP leadership.
At a study session of the CCP Politburo on administrative reform and the economic legal system on 21 October 2005, General Secretary Hu Jintao opened the proceedings with a few observations on the role and function of public administration. With the growth of a socialist market economy, Hu said, the main functions of the government have become economic regulation, market regulation, social management, and public service. These government functions, he added, will have to be carried out strictly according to the law. 23 The earlier aspiration of the Party and government to manage all of the economy and society according to the plan was no longer feasible or desirable. But for the government just to manage the economy, like Hu Jintao’s predecessor Jiang Zemin had done, was not enough. It had led to widespread social dislocation and unrest that directly threatened (and continued to threaten) social stability. Society has to be managed in order to uphold social stability, but the law would have to play a key role in providing the framework and ground rules. The management of society included guiding and shaping autonomous mechanisms that help the government resolve the tensions, conflicts, and dislocations caused by the market economy, supplemented by the modernization of more conventional law and order approaches to unrest, crime, and disorder. To the leaders of the Chinese party-state, social management has become a vital government task and part of the project to establish a harmonious society in a scientific fashion.
On this occasion Hu did not elaborate on how exactly social management would deliver the desired harmonious society. However, earlier in 2005, in an elaboration on the Decision of the Fourth Plenum of the 16th Central Committee in November 2004, he commented on the place of social management in the overall strategy for the strengthening of Party leadership and government:
[w]e should give full play to the role of grass-roots Party organizations and Party members in serving the people and [promoting] cohesion among the people. We should bring into play the role of urban and rural self-ruling grass-roots organizations in the coordination of interests and the resolution of contradictions and problems.… Governments at all levels should further improve social management and public services, and improve the quality of public services. They should improve the ability and level of the management of society according to the law. Governments should promote the interconnection … and complementarity of government administrative functions with social self-administration … to create an effective coverage and complete management setup for society. [They] must strengthen urban and rural grass-roots organizations and make a start with constructing harmonious communities to assist in the improvement of living standards and quality. [They] must play a bridging role in the close relationship of Party and government with the people, and [they] must play a facilitating role in upholding social stability and in creating a favourable environment for the people to live and work in peace and happiness.
24
Social management in this early explanation involves a state corporatist strategy in which local Party, government, autonomous organizations, and the people work together. The main focus of this effort should be the construction of communities (社区) – at that time still quite new – that are both the lowest level of formal government and self-governing organizations of local residents. 25 Social management here, in fact, is very close to and, I would suggest, borrowed from the main ideas promoted by public management scholarship discussed in the previous section. Social management and public management include governance beyond the limits of the formal administration. Social management adds a proactive agenda for the creation of institutions and mechanisms of a non-state public sector compatible with the needs and vision of the CCP.
Social management and corporatist rule
Social management combines two seemingly incompatible elements: a neoliberal emphasis on the autonomy of the public sector borrowed from public management and a continued Leninist emphasis on the leading role of the Party and government. 26 In the remainder of this article I will explore the nature and possible implications of this paradox.
Continued Party rule based on Leninist principles in China does not simply entail suppression of individuals, organizations, or ideas deemed a threat to the Party. Persecution of criticism, opposition, and dissidence do of course happen, and often very harshly. However, more common is that neo-socialist social management techniques constrain the autonomy of the public sector through a deliberate depoliticization of conflicts of opinion or interests. These are not given unfettered room for expression in the policymaking process, but in classic corporatist fashion are managed by the party-state to prevent them from doing harm to the organic harmony of society. Corporatism is based on the assumption of class harmony and organic unity of society. Segments and institutions of society have a right to act autonomously, but also have the duty to maintain social discipline to safeguard the needs and interests of the nation-state as a whole. Although corporatism is often associated with fascism and Nazism, it continues to feature explicitly or implicitly in political discourse and practice in many different nation-states, including many liberal democracies. 27
The concept of corporatism does not feature very much in discussions on the current changes in the Chinese party-state and society, although this may very well change in the near future. In the early 1990s Jonathan Unger and Anita Chan published an article that pioneered the usefulness of the concept to the understanding of the state’s relationship with the many professional and other associations that had started to emerge in China. 28 At the time, however, the debate was mainly over whether such associations could be seen as the sprouts of a semi-independent civil society in China, the exact opposite therefore of what Unger and Chan tried to argue. Around the same time Jean Oi much more successfully proposed the concept of local state corporatism to describe the local state’s involvement in business. Despite appearances, the concept of local state corporatism describes something very different from what the present article is about. The term ‘local state corporatism’ is grounded in the metaphor of the local state as a business corporation. Social management discussed here is akin to ‘classic’ corporatism that is based on the image of society as an integrated and coordinated corporate body. 29
Social management and social order
Absent from the early vision of Hu Jintao was the coercive side of social management to keep non-harmonious expressions of dissatisfaction in check. This, as we have seen, had been the main focus of Hu Jintao’s predecessor Jiang Zemin. Yet social management as the maintenance of public order would soon resurface. The development of social management in subsequent years was mainly left to Zhou Yongkang, who until 2007 was the minister of public security, after which he was elevated to the CCP’s most powerful body, the Politburo Standing Committee, where his responsibilities include the oversight of public security affairs.
In 2006, immediately after the Sixth Plenum of the 16th Central Committee in October of that year, Zhou published an article in the People’s Daily (人民日报) ‘Strengthen and improve social management – promote social stability and harmony’ (加强和改进社会管理 促进社会稳定和谐). 30 In the article, Zhou starts with the observation that the decision of the Sixth Plenum has established strengthening and improving social management as a historical duty, and then proceeded to give a detailed outline of the tasks ahead. According to Zhou, the Party and government face momentous changes in China’s social structure that involve new social contradictions and differences of interest (利益格局, literally ‘pattern of interests’). Only by strengthening and improving social management can these interests be planned as a whole and coordinated and thus social contradictions resolved, social stability and order guaranteed, and the social base of the rule of the Party consolidated.
Zhou observes that the problems that accompany conflicts of interest between different social groups and strata in society were caused by the fact that administrative reform lagged behind economic development. Unlike in the earlier pronouncements of Hu Jintao, social management becomes a catch-all solution for all kinds of issues that have to do with social stability. For instance, the general promotion of fairness: more even economic development across China, access to education and health care, and resolutions to environmental degradation. Strengthening of government according to the law, self-government, and public participation and public service are mentioned repeatedly. But Zhou also gives similar prominence to an ‘equal emphasis on prevention and rapid response’ in resolving both ‘ordinary and extraordinary social contradictions’. His call for a combined central and local, territory-based emergency management system with a unified command that can effectively respond to disasters, accidents, and security incidents has been echoed in several other Central policy documents since. However, Zhou also goes into detail regarding what presumably are the more ‘ordinary’ ways to maintain social stability. These include mechanisms for the expression of demands and opinions, conflict mediation and resolution, and what he terms ‘normal mechanisms for striking hard’ against crime, including reforms to the judicial system.
In Zhou’s article, social management comes across as an awkward combination of a long-term vision of the engineering of whole new society with the management of the normal problems and crises that are just a normal part of the job for China’s top policeman. Zhou’s final paragraph on what he terms the ‘weak links in upholding social stability’ brings this out very clearly. One of these weak links is the fact that in China more and more people have changed from ‘work unit people’ (单位人) to ‘social people’ (社会人). The long-term project of the construction of self-managing communities is seen as the way to deal with that. Other weak links seem to be of an altogether different order, such as management of the floating population and foreign visitors and residents, education of homeless children and the children of prison inmates, rehabilitation of drug addicts, the reduction of crime and, finally, management of the Internet.
Zhou’s article still is some way off from a coherent and internally consistent policy statement. It clearly caters for several different political agendas, such as upholding the rule of law, strengthening grass-roots democracy and civil society, improving public security and social stability, and a more general desire to build the Party and the state. These contradictions have not prevented the Chinese leadership from sticking with the idea of social management. In 2010, the 5th Plenary Session of the 17th Central Committee focused on strengthening and innovating social management. According to the resolution of the Plenum, ‘the general principle of social management is Party leadership, government responsibility, social coordination and public participation’. 31 As said at the start of this article, in 2011 the 12th Five-Year Plan put social management right at the centre of the government’s tasks. The whole of part 9 (out of a total of 16 parts) of the plan is devoted to social management, which starts with the by now familiar observations on the changes that require new ways of managing Chinese society to ensure social vitality, harmony and stability which are based on the principles of multi-stakeholder involvement, corporate governance, an integrated approach, and dynamic coordination. Social management mechanisms ought to be based on the central role of Party and government and should be a combination of communication and consultation with an emergency control to solve people’s legitimate complaints and resolve social tensions.
After these general observations, a range of more concrete aspects and measures are discussed in the 12th Five-Year Plan. These include developing and improving urban and rural communities which are self-governing, democratically managed according to the law and which involve community service, public welfare, and mutual aid through home-owners committees, property management agencies, volunteer participation and other local organizations. Communities should also deliver a range of local government functions and services, including population control, employment, social security, civil affairs, health, culture, social stability, and petitions. In addition, autonomous social organizations should further be developed, their internal governance structure improved and strictly managed according to the law. Rights, interests, and property of people should be guaranteed. Conflict mediation, complaints, and the expression of public opinion should all be improved, including through the Internet.
However, just as in Zhou’s article more than five years earlier, the rub comes with what happens if all of this fails to deliver the social stability which is the overriding concern. Social management then simply translates into the improvement of public security work, an aspect that the five-year plan develops in considerable detail. By no means is all of this simple policing, and the Party clearly has learned from some of the problems and scandals of the recent past with poisonous baby formula, counterfeit foodstuffs and medical drugs, and collapsing buildings. Food and drug safety, for example, features prominently, as do safety and working conditions at work, and quality and safety standards in construction. However, the idea of an emergency response system, which has already existed for several years, is considerably further developed here as one of the main pillars of social management and upholding social stability. Again, a specialized and professional rapid response system with a unified command structure is promised, one that can deal with disasters, social upheavals, and other crises. Such a rapid response setup ought to have a core of specialized forces to which are added a backbone and assault force of the police, armed police, and army. They are supposed to be supplemented by forces from expert teams, enterprises, and volunteers in cracking down on emergencies, strengthening prevention of disasters and social unrest, and beefing up law enforcement. Law enforcement encompasses an extremely wide range of measures that include community policing and ‘comprehensive management of social order’, a national population database and intelligence and information gathering, in addition to aid, assistance, education, and medical work, and the general improvement of public order. 32
Within the discursive space created with the concept of social management, many political agendas and images of China’s future compete with each other. These include ruling China according to the law, strengthening and modernizing public and national security, developing a non-state, self-governing public sector, the retreat of the state from society and the economy, the strengthening and centralization of the state, and the promotion of the Party as the pivot of the nation. Social management in contemporary China is therefore many different things, whose common denominator is the corporatist idea that the interests of society ought to override those of any group, segment, organization, stratum, or individual. The state as the representative of the collective will of society is tasked with upholding unity and social harmony, either voluntarily and through consultation or, if that fails, by force. Social management is therefore somewhat of a magic wand, the cure to the many ills that still plague Chinese society and government, and even includes repeated references to social management as a way to ensure the ‘people’s livelihood’ (民生), a vague and paternalistic concept favoured by the ‘father’ of the Chinese nation Sun Yat-Sen 100 years ago. Yet we are well advised not to underestimate the discourse of social management that since 2005 has rapidly become a major aspect of the CCP’s pursuit of a harmonious society, and is set to be developed further in the years to come.
Conclusion
In a little over 10 years, the CCP and its neo-socialist project have travelled far. Borrowing from social science disciplines such as legal studies, sociology, and – as discussed in more detail here – public management, new ideas regarding the rule of law, strengthening of the non-state public sector, social security and fairness, and the retreat of the state have been firmly co-opted into a statist corporatist strategy to strengthen and professionalize the rule of the Party in line with the requirements of a rapidly developing capitalist economy and society. Social management has been the catch-all phrase under which a variety of ideas and measures have been brought together – regardless of their mutual inconsistency and possible incompatibility – to serve a more important end: upholding social stability.
Perhaps the best way to capture this effort is the phrase social engineering. The CCP’s faith in social management reveals not only its preoccupation with upholding stability, but also its belief that society can indeed be made into anything one wants it to be. Social management is likely to become an increasingly prominent part of the Party’s neo-socialist project, entailing a corporatist re-engineering of Chinese society. Through the application of selected neoliberal ideas the Party allows both a considerable degree of pluralism, while simultaneously modernizing and strengthening its leading role over society. Viewed from this angle, whether or not China will become a police state or whether communist dictatorship has managed definitively to squash any hopes of democratization and human rights are perhaps not the most important issues. The question really is whether the CCP will indeed manage fully to shape Chinese society according to its own bland blueprint of a happy, prosperous, and harmonious society. That future might still seem to be very far away, judging from the many persistent problems and issues remaining in Chinese society and the Party’s rule.
But, is it really?