The popular perception of Mao’s China was that of a monolithic country where the entire state apparatus was under the total control of Mao. Indeed, Mao’s leadership was pivotal in shaping Chinese politics at the time. It was especially so when it came to decisions regarding external relations (Breslin, 2008b), as we have seen in his deciding to enter the Korean War and inviting Nixon for the icebreaking visit to China two decades later. Nevertheless, when it came to major domestic issues, far from having absolute dominance, Mao as the paramount leader was constrained from time to time by other founding fathers of the Party in advancing his policies. Including Mao, there were between thirty and forty men who made all the major decisions at the top through consensus building (Nathan, 1973; 1997). There were sometimes fierce debates regarding major policies.
Fingar (1980a) argued that policy making in the Mao era normally involved the formation and realignment of coalitions built around common or compatible stands on a number of policy issues. But this finding tended to be more applicable to bureaucratic politics at operational, budgetary and functional levels (Fingar, 1980b). Nathan instead argued that policy making in the Mao era was characterised by factional politics, especially at the top level. But the formation of factions were in flux because the alliances were formed on the basis of personal exchange ties in which personal prestige, position and contact within the system were of more importance than formal authority (Nathan, 1973). And, once the common enemies were defeated, the faction began to fall apart because of
the inherent flexibility and fluidity in factional politics in terms of membership (Nathan, 1973), and the diverse interests of the members (Breslin, 2008b).
If the centre was far from a monolithic bloc, the central-local relations deviated further from the unitary impression of the Chinese state. There was no doubt that in the Mao era China had a very strong capacity for national mobilisation, and the extensive array of mobilisation vehicles enabled the central state to penetrate its territories and logistically disseminate decisions, even to the remotest corners of this massive country. However, this did not necessarily mean that policies initiated at the centre would be fully implemented at all levels. To the contrary, the multilayered structure of the Chinese state more often than not encouraged incompliance or partial compliance at the local level, because the power structure of the state apparatus was made up of a ‘five-level hierarchy of dyadic principal- agent relationships’ (Wedeman, 2001:62), which created conditions that enabled cadres to manipulate central directives for local and self interests.
Within these multilayer principal-agent relationships and over-complex hierarchy, local officials had the incentives to prevent negative information from reaching the central government, and the culture of exaggerating the good while obscuring the bad prevailed. This could lead to wrong decisions being made by the central government because of misinformation. In the Great Leap Forward that ended tragically with a great famine, Mao was misled into believing that there were super-high grain yields as a result of local manipulation, misreporting and false reporting from the lowest administrative unit on the ground all the way up to the centre. This problem of misinformation is the legacy of the Mao era which has continued into the present day, as we will see in the SARS crisis in the next chapter.
In the Mao era, the system for policy making and information processing was closed, and there were very few channels through which policy inputs could be transmitted into
this system. A crucial source of advice was from the ‘masterminds’ within the Party. Although there were few professionalised research activities in the Mao era, idea exchanges between individual policy advisors and policy makers were more frequent. These advisors were senior staff who had already served in military, intelligence or economic administrative units and were very experienced. They offered their advice through a variety of internal channels, usually using interpersonal networks rather than following formal organisational procedures so as to get quicker access to senior leaders, in the expectation that their advice would be adopted. This ‘inside access’ model played an important role in shaping the leadership’s decisions regarding major strategic issues, e.g. the deployment of forces in the Korean War and the establishment of diplomatic relations with West Germany (Wang, 2008).
In addition, the state media also played its part in transmitting information into the system for policy making. State media was often considered a transmission belt which disseminated top directives to every locality on the ground. But it also performed some monitoring and supervisory functions resembling those of an Imperial Censorate. Its relative organisational independence from local governments enabled it to act as extra eyes and ears of the centre. For example, the Xinhua News Agency published its ‘classified references’ for a readership that consisted only of leaders above the ministerial level. These internal secret dispatches often carried sensitive topics about which the leadership should be informed but which were politically too controversial to be made public (Chen, 2005). In the Mao era, there were very few channels through which ordinary people could make their voice heard throughout the policy process. But the classified references system still occasionally made grievances on the ground known to the highest leadership, even though the coverage of these issues was limited and the selection criteria was very subjective.
In sum, policy making under Mao was highly leader-centric, and few channels existed to transmit ideas into the system from outside, because the near totalitarian state encompassed everything. As such, most of the interest articulation occurred within the state, especially at the central level. There were a number of policy making characteristics developed under Mao – namely, factionalism, the local manipulation of central policies (which then evolved into fragmented authoritarianism in the Deng era and into de facto federalism since Jiang), the inside access model of consultation and the classified reference system. These Maoist legacies have continued to shape policy making after Mao, and many of the characteristics of policy making in the present day are more or less rooted in the Mao era.