The above writers took seriously the issue of the "new class," and there was a logic in the development of their analysis of that class. Initially, Yang's term "red capitalist class" identified the danger of capitalist restoration through the new class within the Party. The developments of the "Cultural Revolution," nevertheless, certified that it was impossible for a new privileged class to share its gains with the old overthrown landlords and compradors. Thus, the Li Yizhe group argued that a feudalistic despotism, rather than capitalism, was China's main danger. While this view was shared and followed by Chen, however, he was not satisfied with the Li Yizhe group's rhetorical and polemic condemnation of the new class. Thus, Chen developed an analysis of the economic root of the new class. Chen saw the "new class" as the result of socialist production which gave rise necessarily to a new polarization of class relations and the sharp antagonism between the working people and the bureaucrat-monopoly privileged class.
In short, all the writers contributed greatly to Milovan Djilas' theory of the new class and to the understanding of the nature of the communist system in terms of the identification of the serious problem of the new class,
22White (1976) has provided an excellent sociological analysis of the discourse of class in the early part of the Cultural Revolution. Also, my critique of a new class analysis is influenced by Hindess who has rejected the class analyses of politics by Marx and Weber, see Hindess, 1987.
the criticisms of that, and the explanation of its origin. These ideas m ay still be relevant to today's China at least for som e radicals. How ever, there are serious theoretical problem s associated w ith the p o p u list idea of the new class and the class analysis which underm ines the intellectual merit.
The first problem is th at it is very difficult, p erh ap s im possible, to define the "new class" and to identify its m em bers (Djilas, 1957, 39). W hat criterion can be used to define who are and w ho are not m em bers of the "new class" am ong all cadres? A political criterion, which regards those who hold pow er as m em bers of the "new class," does not w ork because it implies that ah officials are m em bers of the "new class" and should be sw ept away, thus it im plies an u to p ian anarchy. There is also an ideological criterion elaborated on by Chen Erjin, which regards those w ho do not comply w ith the correct line as m em bers of the "new class." But this ideological criterion is subjective depending on the explanation of w hat the correct line is, and carries totalitarian elements which I have discussed in Section 3.
The second problem w ith the idea of the "new class" and the class analysis is that it faces the problem of how to classify a society, and of how to define the w orking class. Li Zhengtian, one of Li Yizhe's group, rethought the concept of the w orking class in 1979:
Today, how should we divide Chinese society into classes? W ho should be included in the proletariat? If we say that the proletariat is the w o rk in g class, then can the p easan ts in collectives be considered w orking class? Then there are the intellectuals; can they be considered w orking class? H ow do you d raw the line? D o e sn 't the p ro b lem stem p recisely from o u r a tte m p ts to tran sfo rm the labourers' position from th at of p ro letarian s (Li Zhengtian, 1985, 159)?
Li Z hengtian also rejected the previously held concept of proletarian dictatorship or democracy. He denounced the concept of "dictatorship by the entire proletarian class," which his early colleague, W ang Xizhe still held, as groundless and unscientific, because, in Li's view , w hen a class is w ithout the m eans of production, it has no w ay of exercising dictatorship; and when it can exercise dictatorship, it has ceased to be p ro letarian (Li Z hengtian, 1985, 159). Li argued that so long as the proletariat in its original m eaning is p reserved, there is no w ay for it to exercise dictatorship. Therefore it is
unscientific and grossly inaccurate to propose the slogan "Strive for the Class Dictatorship of the Proletariat." Li said:
The proletariat should not, and cannot, exercise any sort of dictatorship for its own special class privileges; it can emancipate itself at the end only by liberating all mankind. . . . Irrespective of your subjective wishes, if you seek class dictatorship, it can easily be m ade indistinguishable objectively from totalitarian dictatorship (Li Zhengtian, 1985, 158).23
The third problem associated with the populist idea of class analysis is that it presupposes an ideal of a society without classes and hierarchy. Yang Xiaokai (Yang Xiguang) has challenged this assumption. In his article, "The Optimum Hierarchy" (Yang Xiaokai and Geoff Hogbin, 1990a, 125-40), Yang investigates the optimum number of layers in centralized and decentralized hierarchies. In doing so, he justifies the existence of a hierarchical system in terms of efficiency. For Yang, a hierarchical class society tends to be more efficient than an egalitarian society; and if a society lacks a hierarchy of classes it will break down. If his early work, Whither China expressed his romantic feeling towards an ideal of society, we may say that his "The Optimum Hierarchy" shows his cool-reasoning about a rational society; that is, for the rational society, class privilege and private property rights are useful to maintain social order and it is the privileged class that attempts to maintain the existing order through legal regulation. From Yang's Whither China to "the Optimum Hierarchy," Yang has completed his ideological transition from believing in the Paris Commune to believing in a decentralized hierarchical society which spontaneously emerges from fair competition and individuals’ free mobility across different layers of the hierarchy.
The fourth problem is that the concept of class-based democracy is not compatible with a liberal concept of democracy. The former undermines the idea of universal protection of basic human rights for all as shown in Chen Erjin's definition of "people" and "enemy" which I have discussed in Section 3.
Drawing on the above criticisms, I would argue that the populists' class analysis has little of a constructive nature to contribute to a practical and
positive solution to the socialist problems. And the populist's idea of a "new class" will not produce powerful effects in reality and a proper policy to deal with the concrete class relationships in political life. The application of class analysis to the resolving of China's practical problems is simplistic and misleading. In short, as Graham Young and Dennis Woodward have argued, the analysis of the emergence of a "new class" in socialist society has been superficial and fragmentary with some confusion, or at least vagueness, on the main points of the new-class argument (Graham Young & Dennis Woodward, 1978, 43).
6. Decline of the Populist Idea of Democracy and Possible Revival?
In the past 10 years or so, there has been a gradual weakening of the Chinese populist Marxist-Maoist model of democracy and an increased awareness of the individualistic and institutional model of democracy. The same is true in Poland and Hungary where in the 1950s there was a major thrust for direct democracy, whereas today nothing of the sort can be observed (Ference Feher and Agnes Heller, 1990, 17). Also among sinologists in the West there has been a similar shift from regarding Maoist democracy as an alternative to liberal democracy, to taking liberal democracy as a second best choice for China.
Chinese officials have suppressed cruelly and put in jail those who hold the populist view of democracy such as Yang Xiguang, Li Yizhe's group and Chen Erjin. Suppression, however, is not the main reason why populism has declined in popularity; there have remained followers of the populists among a few intellectuals and workers despite official Chinese suppression of their ideas.^ A more plausible explanation of that decline is that Deng's reforms and soft cultural environment made it difficult for the radical-populist ideas of democracy to become widespread and acceptable throughout the country. Also, violent revolution such as the form of the "Cultural Revolution" to achieve populist democracy is commonly regarded as impractical, and as something which would create a new dictator. People are also tired of civil fighting from the "Cultural
was very impressed by a worker, 40 year old, who attempted to develop the idea of Chen Erjin in 1981 when I was undergraduate in Hangzhow University. The most impressive fact is that after I presented my analysis of the impractical elements of Chen's idea of democracy in the future of China, the worker cried, because he lost his personal value: populist democracy was his life and his "religion".
R evolution." M ost people d em an d a stable social o rd er and are m ore in terested in im proving their m aterial lives. Take the exam ple of Yang X iguang w ho, even after a stay in jail (1968-78), has criticized his ow n advocacy of violent revolution and realized that violence only creates a new dictator and that only through non-violence and political com prom ise, can dem ocracy be achieved. In his article en titled "On Political Reform s in China" p u b lish ed in 1987, Yang p o in ted o u t the logic of violence: a rev o lu tio n w hich w ants to ov erth ro w a tyrant, has to centralize pow er which is required to be m uch stronger than that of a tyrant. Thus, in the process of overthrow ing an old tyrant, w hat em erges at the sam e time is a new tyrant of revolution w ho is not able to be controlled by people. This new tyrant will produce a new revolution. Thus violent revolution im plies a vicious circle (Yang Xiaokai, 1987, 35). Since the June 4th Events in 1989, there has been a call for violent revolution to overthrow the rule of the C o m m u n ist P a rty in C hina. Yang has w o rried a b o u t the n eg ativ e co nsequences of v io le n t re v o lu tio n a n d has stro n g ly criticized this advocacy.
Li Z hengtian, one of Li Yizhe's group, provides a good exam ple of explaining the effect of D eng's reform an d soft policies. Li Z h en g tian believed in 1979-80 th at the Party was carrying out reform s. He therefore preferred to w rite for the official press and sought to persuade governm ent leaders to reform adm inistrative and legal institutions that w ould safeguard the due process of law an d freedom of expression. Li Z hengtian disagreed w ith the pessim istic view of W ang Xizhe, another of Li Yizhe's group, that P arty refo rm ers w o u ld n o t act sp o n ta n eo u sly to b rin g ab o u t e ith er dem ocracy or any significant extensions of freedom . Thus, in 1979-80, Li refused to join the p o p u list actions of W ang Xizhe w ho p articip ated in a national netw ork of d issid en t organizations th at w ere totally in d ep en d en t from the Party's sway; for w hich W ang was sentenced to 14 years in prison on April 20, 1981.
A nother reason w hy the idea of populist democracy is in decline is that Chinese intellectuals have been dom inating the field of political th o u g h t in the last decade, w hereas little has been heard from the w orkers and peasants at a theoretical level. Thus the dem ocratic idea is confined to intellectual discourse. It has also served as an ideology for the intellectuals' road to pow er, and to legitim ize their political actions for pow er. The point is that
the "big intellectuals" of China are becoming members of a privileged group. That is why some Chinese intellectuals enter into the "new class" discourse only reluctantly, and accept the official Chinese criticism of the populist ideas of a "new class."
Also, the Paris Commune as a particular form of government was the sole theoretical choice in the "Cultural Revolution." However, in the 1980s the Western liberal idea of democracy became an option. Take the example of Yang Xiguang (Yang Xiaokai). After spending several years in the USA working on his Ph.D, it seemed to Yang that liberal democracy, particularly, private property rights, is practical and relevant to Chinese reality, while the Paris Commune is but a utopian ideal. Thus Yang Xiguang himself, let alone others of his generation, abandoned the idealistic dream of a polity shaped on the model of the Paris Commune. Yang, within the past decade, writing under the name of Yang Xiaokai in journals and newspapers such as Shanghai's World Economic Herald (e.g., Feb 20, 1989), has developed a reputation in China as a champion of "bourgeois democracy" and of a decentralized, indeed privatized, economy (Unger, 1991, 34).
Now let me turn to the question of the possibility of the revival of the model of populist democracy through m odification and creative transformation. Certainly, the radical and romantic idea of democracy is able to provide some radicals with a theoretical basis for the populist and revolutionary strategy calling for violent revolution to resolve political problems in China. Even before these 1989 June 4 events, there had already been such calls (Cheng Shi, 1988, Yang Jiying, 1988). After the events, a radical common sense has been growing among overseas Chinese dissidents that there indeed exists a privileged class within the communist party, and that this "new class" can only be overthrown by revolution. Some Chinese in the USA and Japan are preoccupied with hatred of the CCP, rethinking the issue of the "new class" and the possibility of revolution, and adopting the more radical strategy for democratization in China. As Da Luren argues, the June 4th events demonstrate the failure of "reform within the system," and necessitate violent revolution "outside the system" (Da Luren, 1990).25 Following Da's line of thought, one might argue further that the June 4th Events in 1989 were the result of the failure of reforms dealing with the
25Also see the strategy of the Chinese Liberal Democratic Party overseas, in C entral D a ily
problem of a new class; and it was this new class, its corruption and the social gap betw een the new class and ordinary people that led to p o pular su p p o rt for the stu d en ts' dem o n stratio n in 1989. F urther, Ni Yuxian, a radical, argues that the reason w hy the democratic m ovem ent in 1989 failed was its com m itm ent to non-violent strategies. He fu rth er argues th at the students were m isled by reform ers so that they could not see the true nature of the Party. He also poin ts o u t th at the ev o lu tio n ary or n on-violent approach has failed; and it has blocked the process of dem ocratization in China. Finally, Ni claims that the execution of Ceausescu and his wife Elena in Rom ania evidences the possibility of successful violent revolution, and th at the failure of the Chinese dem ocratic m ovem ent necessitates violent revolution in China (Ni Yuxian, 1990, 85-7).
Thus these claims m ade in 1989, I think, return to the conclusion that Chen reached m ore than 13 years ago. Chen claim ed th at reform ism is no so lu tio n because the refo rm ist line seeks n o t the d e stru c tio n of the bureaucratic-m ilitary m achine, b u t m erely its passage from the control of one group of individuals to that of another group of individuals. H ow ever, the basic contradiction in socialist society at the crossroads, in Chen's view, is an antagonistic one, an irreconcilable one. The reform ist line, therefore, is doom ed to failure from the outset (Chen Erjin, 1984, 120-22).
N evertheless, those w ho hold the radical view are a m inority at the m om ent. F u rth er, the p o ssib ility of rev iv al of the p o p u lis t m odel of d em o cracy d e p e n d s on the fo llo w in g c o n d itio n s: th a t the refo rm program m e fails in the end, and that liberal ideas of politics and dem ocracy prove an im practical solution d u rin g serious political crises. So far, the cu rren t regim e still carries o u t reform s, an d the ev olutionary m ethod of changing the system is the dom inant strategy of both leaders and opposition organizations. As this is so, there is less likely to be a revival of the idea of populist dem ocracy in the near future.
Conclusion
The p o p u list dem ocratic ideas of Yang Xiguang, the Li Yizhe gro u p and C hen Erjin, in term s of theoretical construction, fall into the trad itio n of M arxism an d M aoism. Initially, the p o p u lists believed Mao on his w ord that the "C ultural Revolution" was a m ovem ent to com bat the rise of the "new class" am ong the Party and State bureaucracy. But, later on, they felt