Chapter VIII
EXTRA-POLITICAL FORCES
Government, wherever organized, is distinguished from other social institutions by claims to universality of scope and competence, and paramountcy of authority; the term political, on the basis of such a distinction, refers to activities, occasionally individual but more usually collective, involving access to the symbols of government; and the term governmental refers to the application of such symbols in governmental sanctions and services. The process of government is accordingly one wherein groups smaller than the totality of society seek ("politically") to obtain action in the name of the totality ("governmental"), for or against other groups according to shifting interests. In the West this politico-governmental process has been further characterized by ceremonial forms ("laws") and reinforced by conceptions of amoral omnicompetence ("sovereignty").
The cellular socio-economic structure of old China, plus the Confucian employment of ideological as opposed to governmental control, kept the entire process of politics and government at a very low level of intensity. Modern China, inheritor of an apolitical past, is still the most pluralistic society in the world, and modern Chinese government—despite recent gigantism—a frail legal superstructure above a flood of extra-political power. Western societies depend upon their states; the Chinese state depends upon a society which could, albeit uncomfortably, dispense with states altogether.
This condition amounts in international politics, to both a strength and a weakness. Chinese society suffers more political ruin with less social disturbance than does any comparable society; the guerrillas, for example, probably find government helpful when available, but regard it as a luxury rather than a necessity. Chinese society is near to an orderly anarchy; uniform conditioning from the past, or uniform present opinion, takes the place of mass organization and totalitarian government. The high death rate of traitors is probably not owing to activity on the part of Chungking, but to the spontaneous action of ordinary men; on one occasion a high pro-Japanese official was shot by his own bodyguard while the two sat in a sedan on a busy street: the bodyguard had experienced a revulsion of conscience. Fu Hsiao-ên, Wang Ch'ing-wei's Mayor of Shanghai, was also killed by a member of his own household. Spontaneous but uniform action applies not only to sensational political matters; it appears in less dramatic but equally important affairs, such as commercial rivalry, landlord-tenant relationships, and the police power of the community and the family. However, in a contest for power, while the Chinese lose little by defeat, their counter-attacks are correspondingly more difficult. The fluid autonomy of innumerable groups slows down the engines of formal power. The political-governmental process is apt to be sluggish in crises.
The Foundations of Chinese Government
The society upon which the National Government of China, its Left associates, and its Japanophile rivals rest is not a settled, stagnant society. An extraordinary ferment has gripped China for more than a century—arising from cadastral, agrarian, technological, economic, fiscal, ideological, political, and governmental change. The Chinese people have endured; they have also acted. Within a single century, three blazing revolutions have swept China: the T'aip'ing Rebellion, put down with Western aid after fifteen years of war; the Boxer uprising, deflected into xenophobia by the Manchus; and the Great Revolution, which succeeded in part. Between these, there have been changes, bloody but of secondary magnitude: the Moslem rebellions; the minor uprisings of Sun Yat-sen; the Republican Revolution; the 1919 movement; the tuchün wars; the Communist communes, which failed utterly in Shanghai and Canton; the Communist jacqueries, which continued; and the present rip tide of resistance. None of these was effectively mastered by organized government; each was exploited by one government, and opposed by another. Unlike a Western state, wherein government becomes the prime mobilizer during crises, Chinese society shifts its incalculable forces, and governments leap forward to take advantage of them.
This extensive, unorganized residue of opinion and power, outside the reach of government, keeps any modern Chinese government in a peculiar condition. Like a perpetual process of revolution, social changes demand that a government exploit them, deflect them, or employ them—but not launch or stop them. The Kuomintang has failed in its attempts to launch favorable mass movements, and also failed to stop antagonistic ones. The secret of the Chinese Communist power has lain in the skill of the Red leaders, who utilized available movements. Hence the continued development of Chinese government rests upon the wills, fancies, interests, mob action, enthusiasm or dispiritedness of a people who in their own communities do not read newspapers, listen to radios, or pay much attention to the national state. Despite attempts to bring society under the control of government, in order to make it possible to bring government under the control of society (constitutionalism), the decisive forces of modern Chinese life are outside the reach of propaganda or control.