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Title: Governance and Politics of China : Second Edition (Comparative Government and Politics) by Anthony J. Saich ISBN: 1-4039-2185-7 Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Pub. Date: 03 April, 2004 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: The misery of political "science"
Comment: The anomaly of China is that it is a "successful" Communist state: entrepreneurs in the Hong Kong region are applying to join the Communist party. However, this book isn't organized around that anomaly although such organization would give it much-needed structure.
The misery of political "science" is the way in which it assumes thet men are easily understood and led if only we could get them to understand that we are post-ideological and therefore led by the desire for wealth alone.
The history of the Cultural Revolution as an epistemological crisis, in which the ground, it seems, was cut from the feet of political actors who, removing the Confucian authority of others to speak, found it returned from them in turn, is unwritten (and just as complex as the preceding, and rather tortured, construction). It is unwritten because we no longer let Simone de Beauvoir and other public-intellectual gasbags have a go, and instead, narrow specialists look though lenses of which they seem to be unaware.
Saich would be hard put to explain the Tai'ping rebellion and very easy to explain Tsu Hsi, empress dowager. The very idea of some clown failing his examinations and deciding that he's Jesus' kid brother, in fact rather like some clowns overcoming a flight crew with box cutters, is the sort of exogenous-to-our-neat-system that gives political "scientists" fits: whereas for all of her deep dealing, the motivations of Tsu Hsi were clear, and her 21st century counterpart-in-miniature, the matriarch of many a modern Chinese family, is both alive and well, and catered-to by the new system of devil, take the hindmost.
But the self-reflexivity of political science, albeit systematically ignored by the political scientist means that the system manufactures the self-seeking and the shallow.
Saich regards narratives ungrounded by economic policy-making and self-interest as an amusing form of casuistry, as if he has preselected his audience from the knowing who no longer deal in "grand narratives¡± because of the ease in which they can be continued to any pre-selected conclusion.
For example, he quotes and dismisses a Party member¡¯s comment that the state-sponsored programme for micro-lending small capital amounts to China¡¯s rural poor need not be financially ¡°sustainable¡± in Professor Saich¡¯s terms. The Party member argued that the programme would eliminate poverty and therefore not need to be sustainable.
The Party member may of course have been wrong. Grameen Bank microlending to poor women who pay their debts on time may not be a magic bullet.
The problem is that Saich delivers the anecdote without any argument to the effect it is wrong, as an objectified species of old-style Marxist B.S.
Another problem is that Grameen style lending has had to struggle, against the fungibility of the financial system itself, to preserve its communitarian ethos against a global financial system which could literally care less about poor women¡¯s lives, and is all too ready to ¡°tranche¡± the loans in such a way that the debtor never knows who she will deal with from month to month.
In the passage on micro-lending, Professor Saich just assumes without explanation that there are threshholds of risk and return which are ¡°sustainable¡±: but the whole point of the Grameen discovery was that the threshholds are themselves a product of narration. The Grameen narrative created the numbers.
The only way to protect the interests of the poor in a globalized system is in fact deep narrative because the poor have only a story to tell. It might not be elegant: it might be only ¡°I will gladly pay you Thursday for a hamburger today¡±. But it¡¯s all they have.
However, Saich dismisses narrative as kin, on the one hand, to Marxist stem-winders, and on the other to the sort of bunkum that corrupt officials come up to justify their excess perks.
This world-view itself isn¡¯t sustainable because it gets blind-sided by ¡°terrorism¡±.
The lack of any coherent world-view that dares speak its name makes this book hard going, because it generates incoherence on every page. For example, on the same page Saich praises, in Politically Correct terms, the successes of microlending, he calls microlending unsustainable as if we have to make pious noises in its direction to keep Hilary happy, but then return to the counting-house by the wharves, and return to squeezing every last drop out of the debtor class.
He does so because he believes that civil society institutions should operate micro-lending; but at this stage, this is a non-starter in China and he knows this.
Saich cannot, it seems, properly narrate China¡¯s foreign policy without returning to economic themes. He doesn¡¯t have the historical imagination to get in the shoes, of the jokers in the Forbidden City, and ask why their concept of China does include Xingjiang and Tibet but not Mongolia, let us say, or chunks of Vietnam.
China presents to the thoughtful a fascinating ethnic topos, in which the Han could reconcile themselves in 1644 to Manchu takeover but could never have done so had the Russians under Peter the Great gotten themselves a bit more organized, and invaded China in the same era.
As an American expat, I inform myself of these matters for the same reason British officers engaged obscure, and rather dotty, Cantabrigian specialists in Persian poetry and Sumerian pottery as they and their train stumbled about central Asia, and, for that matter, about China; apart from curiosity there is also an instinct, for self-preservation. As Edward Said has pointed out, the replacement of the humanities and the ¡°classics¡± as lenses for understanding, while in some areas an improvement, creates a new set of high-tech, night vision blinders that are worse than useless when they are broken.
It is disturbing, in other words, to be told that free markets bring ¡°freedom¡± in their train, only to have the ATV and Pearl news of the July 1 mass march in Hong Kong almost completely blacked out.
Rating: 4
Summary: Clear and Concise, but not deep enough
Comment: This is a well-rounded introduction of contemporary Chinese Politics. The book covers many asepcts of Chinese government and public policy like the structure of the government, political participation, civils society, foreign policy, social policy and a brief discussion of the economic system in China.
Howver, the contents are similar to a buffet: If you are looking for a deeper understanding of all the issues discussed in the book, you will have to look for them another book. Hence, this is a good book for first year undergraduates in courses related to Chinese politics, as well as the general public seeking a basic understanding of contemporary Chinese politics.
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