STATE institutions are not built overnight, nor does a state come from nowhere. Scholars of international relations often trace the beginning of the modern state to 1648 when the Peace of Westphalia began the end of the Holy Roman Empire. In England, the year 1648 witnessed the climax of the civil war between the king and Parliament, an event that signified the modern institution-building in England. In France, the 1789 Revolution represented a direct challenge by the Third Estate in the National Assembly to King Louis XVI's power and his great great-grandfather's claim, “L'état, c'est moi!” France since then has experienced several alternations between empires and republics, coupled with revolutions and wars. The American state-building has also gone through what Stephen Skowronek describes as “patchwork” during 1877–1900 and as “reconstitution” during 1900–20. All this suggests that state-building is a long and often bloody process.

China came late to this process of state-building. In the 1640s, the Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty had just begun their reign of more than two centuries in China. By the late eighteenth century, the Qianlong emperor, while reaching the end of his reign, was still capable of waging wars against Vietnam and Nepal and of suppressing a series of rebellions at home. Since the mid-nineteenth century, however, China had entered a long period of political chaos, national disintegration, foreign invasion, and civil wars.

THE turmoil of the Cultural Revolution and the ensuing succession struggles created a large number of victims as well as a nation of cynics and dissidents. When Mao died in September 1976, his revolutionary ideology practically died with him. In February 1978, the National People's Congress convened its first meeting after Mao's death and called on the nation to achieve “four modernizations” in agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology. The modernization program gained momentum after Deng managed to return to the power center. The Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee in late 1978 decided to abandon Mao's slogan – “Take class struggle as the key link” – and to change the priority of the Party from political campaigns to economic development.

Along with the call for economic modernization, the post-Mao Chinese leaders devoted tremendous attention to reestablishing a legal system. The Third Plenum proposed to improve the “socialist democracy” and strengthen “socialist legality.” The communiqué of the Plenum affirmed, “[I]n order to safeguard people's democracy, it is imperative to strengthen the socialist legal system so that democracy is systematized and written in such a way as to insure the stability, continuity and full authority of this democratic system and the laws: there must be laws for people to follow, these laws must be observed, their enforcement must be strict and law breakers must be dealt with.” This chapter analyzes the legal institution-building under a reformist party.

MILITARY modernization was one of the fundamental issues during the Deng Xiaoping era. Deng first intended to tackle the problems in the People's Liberation Army (PLA) in 1975 when he returned from disgrace and assumed the posts of vice chairman of the Party Central Military Commission (CMC) and chief of the PLA General Staff. In January 1975, Deng pointed to two major problems in the army: factionalism and lack of discipline. He concluded that the PLA did not “act like an army.” Deng's efforts to rectify the army were soon aborted when he was purged for the second time in April 1976. After he returned to power in 1977, Deng had placed army rectification high on his agenda. In a speech to the Party CMC in August 1977, Deng, in his resumed official capacity as the new vice chairman of the Party CMC, pointed out: “Now we simply have to admit that by international standards, our science and technology have a long way to go. We must also admit that our army is not sufficiently capable of conducting modern warfare, and that although it is numerically strong, it is of relatively poor quality.” Deng's worries were mostly confirmed by the PLA's poor performance in the 1979 “punitive war” against Vietnam. The Vietnam War was for Deng what the Korean War was for Mao.

MODERN state-building is more than designing a national flag, choosing a national anthem, and designating a capital city. Establishing a legal system and building legislative and judicial institutions are some of the essential innovations that modern state-building requires. In the 1950s, the Chinese Communists were no strangers to this thinking. After all, constitutionalism had already been debated and experimented with in China for decades. The state of the Nationalists before 1949 had established an elaborate and sophisticated legal system. The Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had also installed a constitutional and legal system. Furthermore, laws and regulations seemed to have a magic appeal to many sectors of the society that the CCP's ideology and organization did not have. Yet, by definition, revolution and law must be the two most incompatible ideas in human conceptualization. Hence, how the CCP as a revolutionary organization dealt with a legal system of its own is our main focus. This chapter begins with the CCP's initial efforts at establishing a new legal system in the early 1950s. It analyzes how the legal development challenged the power and privileges of the CCP and how a major crisis led to a fundamental reversal in the late 1950s.

THE main theme in this book is that the Chinese Communist Party has become the major obstacle to state-building in post-1949 China. After the imperial institutions collapsed in the first decades of this century, China was plunged into social chaos and political disintegration. In a desperate search for a modern form of state, the Chinese political elite and intellectuals experimented with many opposing ideological and organizational discourses. However, severe socioeconomic conditions, structural problems of governance, and frequent foreign invasions overwhelmed China. By 1949, only a strong revolutionary mass party had emerged from the civil war as the organizational force of China.

As the social and economic situation in China changed from war and revolution to economic construction, state institution-building became necessary, if not inevitable. The CCP leaders in the 1950s recognized this need and embarked upon ambitious plans for building a new Chinese state. Meanwhile, in a new environment, the Party's revolutionary ideology, organizational principle, and methods of mass mobilization, which had spelled the Party's success before 1949, became increasingly counterproductive to economic construction and political institutionalization. These features, however, proved to be difficult to change because they had been deeply built into the Party organization over many years of revolutionary warfare.

ALONG with the renewed efforts at economic modernization, the post-Mao regime launched an equally ambitious program for reestablishing an effective and efficient government administrative system at both central and provincial levels. As the Chinese economy and society were undergoing dramatic transformation, the reformist Party leaders faced four institutional challenges: how to redefine the relations between the Party and government in a new situation; how to reorganize the government institutions; how to establish an effective civil service; and how to balance the interests of the center and localities. None of these challenges were new, but market reform and the rapid economic and social changes in China have rendered the old responses obsolete and demanded new innovations. This chapter examines the CCP's responses to these challenges and evaluates the successes and failures of administrative state-building in the Deng era.

REFORM AND RETREAT

The Chinese state-building accelerated in 1979. At the central government level, the Finance and Economic Affairs Commission was the first to reemerge in the State Council. Two veteran central administrators, Chen Yun and Li Xiannian, quickly took the control of the national economy. Other central government agencies followed. Within less than two years, thirty-eight central administrative agencies were either restored or established. The State Council agencies grew from fifty-two in 1976 to seventy-six in 1978, and then ninety-four in 1979 and ninety-eight in 1980 (including fifty-one ministries and commissions, forty-two administrative bureaus, and five State Council offices).