By Frederick C. Teiwes
Limited source material is an unavoidable problem for all students of CCP elite politics both inside and outside of China. The availability of material varies significantly for different periods in CCP history, but whatever the period the research must be very detailed to have any validity. If the material is too thin, then the research should be put on hold until more evidence is available. Unfortunately, many Western scholars have proceeded on the basis of inadequate information, often filling the gaps with unreliable sources, the logic of official (or quasi-official) Chinese viewpoints, or simply intuitive speculation. A particularly insidious aspect of this shortcoming is the belief that certain 'facts' are beyond dispute, when it is often the case that such 'facts' are official distortions which have been recycled from one scholarly study to another.
Suspect Sources
Western studies of elite politics have frequently used sources that
have not been verified and in some cases are demonstrably false.
This is the case with certain alleged CCP neibu documents
that have been published in Hong Kong or Taiwan. The problem is
complicated in that some documents published by the same agencies
are clearly genuine. Yet serious scholarship requires an attempt to
verify such documents before using them rather than simply citing
them and building analyses around them because they have come to
hand. A particularly vexing variant of this tendency is the
extensive use of Hong Kong press reports concerning alleged power
struggles within top CCP circles in analyses of the reform period.
Such reports are notoriously unreliable, even if specific reports
may be true, yet they are used indiscriminately in many studies.
Cultural Sensitivity
Many Western studies assume that politics in the Politburo and
other peak CCP organs must bear great similarities to politics in
their own cultures. A clear example is the inability of many
Western scholars to conceive of the totally dominant position of
Mao in the post-1949 period. If even Roosevelt, Churchill, and De
Gaulle had significant limits to their power, they find it hard to
accept a Mao who could dismiss anyone with a word or have any
policy adopted merely by insisting on it. Similarly, since
political leaders in the West deal in the coin of policy positions
and given the coincidence in timing with his fall, analysts have
insisted that Lin Biao must have opposed the opening to the US
despite the virtual absence of evidence to this effect, or indeed
that Lin advocated any foreign policy position, in order to
fill the gap in explaining Lin's differences with Mao. A final
example concerns the argument made in David Bachman's book,
Bureaucracy, Economy, and Leadership in China (Cambridge
University Press, 1991), that the Great Leap Forward had its
origins in the victory of a 'planning and heavy industrial
coalition' in a bureaucratic conflict, with Mao only playing a
secondary role. This is based on Western assumptions concerning the
importance of bureaucratic institutions, but it ignores both
extensive evidence pointing to Mao's decisive role and the strong
leader oriented nature of CCP elite political culture in that
period.
Chinese Interpretations
Western studies have repeatedly adopted official Chinese views in
analysing CCP politics. The clearest example, one which resulted in
repeated erroneous interpretations in the studies of the 1970s, was
the uncritical use of the 'two line struggle' model of elite
politics which dominated official and Red Guard sources during the
Cultural Revolution. While Western interpretations were recast into
social science language, they basically accepted the notion of a
bitter long-term struggle between Mao and his alleged opponents in
the Party apparatus and attempted to fit inadequately understood
'facts' into this perspective. Although criticism of this model has
meant that few Western scholars now use 'two line struggle'
analysis in its crude form, the idea of significant political
opposition to Mao at various points during the post-1949 period is
still influential. Indeed, even the memoirs of Mao's doctor (Li
Zhisui, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, Chatto &
Windus, 1994) adopts this perspective in many respects despite
overwhelming evidence to the contrary from his own personal
experience, undoubtedly to a large extent due to the influence of
his American collaborator and other US scholars.
American Academic Fashions
The shift in the balance of power towards disciplinary departments
and away from area studies centres in leading American universities
over the past two decades has meant an increasing emphasis on
'theoretically relevant' analyses, often to the extent of forcing
Chinese realities into inappropriate Western models reflecting the
latest academic fashions. A case in point is Bachman's study of the
origins of the Great Leap Forward which clearly reflected the
influence of the 'new institutionalism' literature in Western
political science in the 1980s, but had the effect of ignoring the
overwhelming evidence of Mao's central role. Another aspect of this
tendency, reflected most clearly in Avery Goldstein's highly
regarded book, From Bandwagon to Balance-of-Power Politics
(Stanford University Press, 1991), is that the emphasis on
theory undermines the importance attached to empirical research.
Goldstein, who attempts to explain the differences between the
'hierarchical' elite politics of the pre-Cultural Revolution period
and the 'anarchical' structure of 1966-76 politics, does no
primary research but instead relies on existing Western secondary
sources to illustrate his theories. While the result is interesting
and in some respects closer to the mark than many previous Western
studies, nothing new is uncovered concerning events or the
underlying dynamics of elite politics. The gaps in knowledge are
filled by Western theories of questionable relevance rather than by
intensive empirical research.
The above shortcomings have seriously limited the value of many Western studies of CCP elite politics. Only when a relentless pursuit of all available information is linked to a refusal to use questionable sources except as guides to possible questions, an end to imposing Western preconceptions on Chinese developments, a questioning approach to all official and unofficial Chinese interpretations of events, and an insistence on a sound empirical basis for any theoretical speculations, will Western scholarship dealing with Party history reach its full potential.
Professor Frederick C. Teiwes (University of Sydney) was an Affiliated Fellow at the IIAS from 1 April - 1 July 1996.