Harmonisation in China: A Window into the Party's biggest problems

Harmonisation joined the pantheon of CCP buzzwords partly as a way to make the pill of the end of class struggle and the cradle-to-grave economic support of state industrial workers go down more easily; yet the idea behind this and similar concepts has turned into a challenge in itself to the Party's ability to bring meaningful change to the ordinary worker.

One thing that the study of China has brought home to me is just how Herculean the problems of governing so populous a country really are.  Where I live, healthcare and education are regulated at the provincial level.  In China, they are regulated at the township and village level, because that is the difference in the scale of the population.  Harmonisation provides a window into the nature of these problems.

Harmonisation itself is a disputed concept.  As with a great deal of Party rhetoric since 1978, it advances an inclusive agenda, wherein the Party represents everyone, not merely the working class.  This, however, is where consensus ends.  Many authors note that the concept of harmonious society references Confucius, and claim that the Party is hearkening to the values of the past in order to compensate for the ideological void left by the demise of Marxism.  Holbig and Gilley disagree, noting that the CCP has faced a series of ideological challenges to Marxism through Confucian revivals over the past two decades.  In this context, they interpret harmonisation as a ‘sterilisation’ of Confucianism as a potential rival to Party doctrine.  

Some authors go so far as to argue that harmonious society rhetoric is the logical link between current phase of China’s development and still-desired yet distant communism, taking Deng Xiaoping’s line, reiterated by Hu Jintao, that China is in the primary stages of socialism, and that realising the goal of the Party will take generations.   One need not take this argument at face value to appreciate the value of harmonisation as a means of seamlessly weaving together the traditional ideological demands of the Party and the politics of the present.  Harmonious society can be all things to everyone, precisely because it is not much of anything by itself.  Harmonisation nicely accommodates every viewpoint without saying much about any of them, while simultaneously introducing an unhealthy atmosphere of conformism.

We will see that the same indeterminacy applies to the programs subsumed under the umbrella of harmonisation; while these are promising in many respects, it is difficult to make the case that they would not have occurred without harmonisation.  Neither do they have any observable coherence among themselves which would suggest a planned, unified reform program that could be called “harmonisation.” 

While programs designed to alleviate rural and regional inequality were not new to the party, it has been argued that harmonisation coincided with a new willingness to deal with labour rights issues, as part of a shift away from low-end manufacturing.  The All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) functioned up to this point mainly to prevent the rise of an independent labour movement, thus depressing labour costs,  a stance that appears to have moderated to some degree.  This is probably one of the best-documented original reforms claimed for harmonisation, and so deserves some attention.

At the level of labour relations, there has been a rise in rhetoric surrounding the role of the ACFTU, with Chairman Wang Zhaoguo calling for the unions to “organise the unorganised and fight for worker rights.”   What effect this may have is unclear.  Such symbolic victories as the Wal-Mart unionisation have so far been just that; the Wal-Mart union essentially pledged never to strike at its inception, and the avoidance of economic disruption is seen by the ACFTU as essential.  


The 2007/8 Labour Contract Law made some advances in employment security, and the consultation process for that law included an unprecedented cross-section of civil society, including NGOs, workers and entrepreneurs.   The Labour Contract Law drew over 200 000 online comments from the public following the release of the initial draft, and was extended as a result to cover part-time, contract and farm labour.  The law shifted the basis of contract law in favour of employees by encouraging collective bargaining and indefinite-term written contracts.   Despite employer resistance to the law, it has had the definite effect of sharply raising the number of employee litigations throughout China,  thus providing a new pressure valve for labour discontent. 

Part social policy, part macroeconomic tool, the Party’s new labour advocacy seeks to regularise the extremely tenuous position of the workers under market transition.  There are many possible contributing factors to this policy, such as a desire to shift to higher-end skilled industries, the need to develop the internal market through a decently-paid workforce, and even latent guilt over the role of the Party of the working class in suppressing the interests of the working class.  Yet there is one key factor, namely the increasing awareness and ability of the working class to organise and protest.  The Party would have had no choice but to deal with labour irrespective of harmonisation for this reason alone.  Further, despite the significant and disruptive effect of the Labour Contract Law, there is no evidence of a coordinated harmonisation plan, either between labour and other areas or within labour policy itself, and the Party organ involved, the ACFTU, remains the least effective aspect of labour policy.

Harmonisation is commonly understood as implying a renewed focus on problems arising as byproducts of economic growth, particularly “rural poverty, income inequality and environmental degradation.”  The Sixth Plenum resolution “Major Issues Concerning the Building of a Socialist Harmonious Society” specifies that the Party’s major focus until 2020 will be redressing inequalities, rebuilding medical care and improving access to education, while attempting to balance economic growth with environmental concerns.   Other programs nominally associated with harmonisation include rural education and healthcare schemes and a rural minimum living stipend.

The idea that the Party can redress economic inequalities is predicated on the increase in central government revenue and a desire to redistribute some of that wealth.  The central obstacles remain the lack of accountability mechanisms at lower levels of government, which are responsible for administering social programs, and a broken fiscal system.   What seems to be lacking at the moment is a comprehensive plan to improve control over local administration, or conversely, to centralise these services.  Rather, a series of initiatives that would have been necessary in any case have been brought under the umbrella of the harmonious society, without significant evidence of coordination or an overall plan.

It is most likely that the program of harmonisation is foremost a matter of internal CCP housekeeping.  Despite decades of anticorruption work and the removal of high-ranking cadres, corruption remains endemic at every level of administration.   Various methods of holding cadres accountable to the people, including local elections,  failed.  During the past two decades of reform, performance evaluations have had a primarily economic basis, thus encouraging cadres to involve themselves heavily in local business enterprises.  The harmonisation paradigm offers the potential to reorient toward good governance, rule of law and responsiveness to public needs, all of which CCP leadership sees as crucial to the Party’s continued ascendancy.

In short, harmonious society is less of a policy and more a state of mind, a marker for what was certainly an inevitable shift in the Party’s legitimation strategy in a more advanced stage of economic development.  At best, it is a direction that may lead the CCP to fulfill the promises harmonisation has made; at worst, it is a placebo designed to inspire unity while distracting the public from the truth that the Party still has no comprehensive program to deal with the rising tide of inequality, and the people’s rising demand for better services.  In either case, harmonisation has certainly set high expectations, if not scientifically testable ones.  The Party’s future may depend on its ability to follow through.


Richard McGregor, The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers  (New York: HarperCollins, 2010)

Baogang Guo and Sujian Guo, “China in Search of a Harmonious Society” in Baogang Guo and Sujian Guo, eds. China in Search of a Harmonious Society, (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2008)

Haiyan Wang,  Richard Appelbaum, Francesca Degiuli and Nelson Lichtenstein, “China’s New Labour Contract Law: Is China moving toward increased power for workers?” Third World Quarterly 30 No. 3 (2009)

Alice Miller, “Hu Jintao and the Sixth Plenum,” China Leadership Monitor 20 (Winter 2007)

Joseph Mahoney, “On the Way to Harmony: Marxism, Confucianism and Hu Jintao’s Hexie Concept,” in Baogang Guo and Sujian Guo, eds. China in Search of a Harmonious Society, (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2008)

Heike Holbig and Bruce Gilley “Reclaiming Legitimacy in China,” Politics and Policy 38 no. 3 (2010)

Malcolm Warner and Ying Zhu, “Labour and Management in the People’s Republic of China: Seeking the ‘harmonious society’” Asia Pacific Business Review 16 no. 3 (2010)

Christine Wong, “Rebuilding Government for the 21st Century: Can China incrementally reform the public sector?”  The China Quarterly 200 (2009)

US-Russian Relations in Post-Cold War Retrospective: Could the United States have won Russia over?

Whether the United States “won” the Cold War by spending the USSR into the ground, or whether it was won for them by the great awakening that spread across Eastern Europe in the 1980s is a matter of continuing debate; that the end of the Cold War was a complete shock to exactly that group of scholars which now embraces the former theory is not.  Whichever the case, one thing that is clear in retrospect about that historical moment is that the United States and its European allies failed to secure the peace as well as they should have.

By now, we are all used to seeing the weekly Russian-American spat.  Yes, there are historical and psychological factors behind this, going back as far as Ivan the Terrible, who taught his successors to unite Russia through fear of the West.  And yes, Putin is a masterful manipulator of this psychological tendency.  But the West made it easy.  How many Russians after the humiliating decline and poverty of the 1990s looked back to the Soviet Union with nostalgia, the good old days when poverty at least had a defined bottom?  And how easy to blame the change on the West, which gained everything by Russia’s decline and no doubt stood by laughing.  And then, how tempting to look back on the military might of the Soviet Union and think, “They were afraid of us then!” 

From there, militarisation and nationalist bellicosity become embedded in Russian politics, and with them the price that Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great and Lenin and Stalin have all taught their people to accept: a strong boss at the top of a strong state which will tax the people in order to defend them and spy on them and repress undesirable elements in order to keep them safe.

Could this regression have been prevented?  Could the West have prevented it?  No one can answer that question.  But the West certainly could have done more.  Consider the following scenario.

In the early 1990s, after the fall of the Union, American economic advisors were sent to advise Russia on how to manage the transition to capitalism.  From the perspective of these advisors, the Russian political establishment was so caught up in its internal problems that it implemented their advice haphazardly and clumsily.  From the Russian perspective, the Americans were suspect representatives of a foreign ideology who gave a lot of advice and did little besides. 

Suppose the United States had sent a high-level envoy to Russia with a whole package of economic incentives, including trade concessions and widespread industrial collaboration.  Many Russian industries which simply could not compete on an open market could have been easily updated through industrial partnerships rather than sold off in bulk to corrupt predators.  Above all, the United States should have tried to sustain the existing economic structure, and advised the Yeltsin government to do so, until it could be consciously and carefully privatised, rather than the disastrously rapid sell-off that actually occurred.  The concessions on offer would have been the guarantee of the government’s attention.

The United States, realising that Russia’s massive military industrial complex represented its only sound manufacturing industry and that it could easily represent a threat to the peace if left to itself, could have invested in industrial partnerships designed to convert large parts of this sector to civilian use, giving Russia the incentive of access to up-to-date computers and electronics.  The remainder of this sector could have been safely sustained by giving it US defence contracts (in partnership with US firms).  This would have benefitted the US military enormously by giving them cheap access to the systems they are most likely to face in future conflicts, as well as advances in areas such as ground-based surface-to-air and supersonic anti-ship missiles, artillery and so on in which the United States has always lagged behind.  Imagine a defence establishment with the insight to redirect the billions of dollars wasted in the past two decades on cancelled and overbudget programs into partnerships with Russian industry, which had the foresight to buy Su-30s to supplement the USAF’s ageing F-15 fleet, which bought Sovremenny-class destroyers before China could get to them, which for a fraction of today’s defence budget had unlimited access to cheap, highly-effective systems.  Russia would gain access to the world’s biggest defence market, all for the low, low price of first crack at every product they made and the occasional under-the-table veto of a purchase to a hostile country.

All of the above could have meant that American aid dollars, rather than doping the Russian economy, could have been used to sustain it until it reached profitability.  Even if the project failed (and since trying to keep a lid on Yeltsin, let alone his various governments, would at best have been an exercise in bull-riding, it very likely would have), the United States could have bought itself enormous capital, and given Russia enormous face, by placing such importance in the project.  Blame for any failure would have more than likely landed in Yeltsin’s lap, as long as the US were smart enough to make a point of deferring to him on a regular basis.

Face is the important quantity here.  Russia’s abiding inferiority/superiority complex is one of the more prominent and remarked-upon aspects of its national character.  The country that built the world’s biggest submarine, biggest nuclear-powered cruiser, biggest ICBM, biggest strategic rocket force and biggest bomber has a burning need to be recognised as an equal among equals, to be respected. That is precisely what it did not feel during the 1990s, and it is that omission for which we are now paying.

As for Europe, giving Russia face could have been as simple as an offer of access to the Internal Market, probably combined with an intimation that EU membership was a future possibility.

Of course, very little of the above would have been politically possible.  Asking the US Congress to abandon pork-barrel politics long enough to place major defence orders overseas, asking the US to actually build up an economic competitor, asking France and Germany to risk adding Russia to the list of their competitors for EU leadership- it’s all quite impossible.  So, you may ask, what is the point of this indulgence in counterfactual history if it couldn’t have happened? 

The point is that the sort of strategic short-sightedness demonstrated by the United States in its relationship with Russia arises from the same political defects that continue to diminish its position in the world today.  Anyone remember the Asian Financial Crisis back at the turn of the millennium?  That was America’s golden opportunity to make friends in Asia.  The US wasn’t paying attention, and it was China that swooped in and bailed out its neighbours, gaining very substantial goodwill and laying the groundwork for the China-ASEAN Free Trade Agreement.  That agreement came about because China was willing to make substantial unilateral economic concessions, tailored country by country, on the basis of a principle called “giving six, taking four.”  It was about the long game.

The entire scenario spelled out above was inspired by the strategies of the Chinese Communist Party, both in its internal economic policies and in its so-called “Charm Offensive.”  These people are incredibly smart, enjoying the world’s oldest and most sophisticated strategic culture, and unlike the United States political establishment, they play the long game as a matter of habit.  And yet, the West remains predisposed through political dogma to regard the Party as a relic, an impediment to China’s progress, rather than the architect thereof.  All that the Party needs to continue winning in international politics is to continue being underestimated.  It has found a basic weakness of the American system, and is both exploiting it directly, and profiting by the fruits of it- the Sino-Russian arms relationship has been a prime example.  So long as the United States lacks the political will to address the strategic shortcomings of its current lucre-greased electoral system, any great power lacking that liability will be able to exploit it.