Strong Institutions in Weak Polities: State Building in Republican China, 1927-1940 (review) (2001)

Reviewed by: Strong Institutions in Weak Polities: State Building in Republican China, 1927-1940 Xiaoqun Xu (bio) Julia Strauss . Strong Institutions in Weak Polities: State Building in Republican China, 1927-1940. Studies on Contemporary China. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. viii, 263 pp. Hardcover $70.00, ISBN 0-19-823342-6. "In environments characterized by resource scarcity, small pools of potentially qualified personnel, and/or widespread external hostility to an increased central government presence, . . . how can pre-existing administrative organizations be reconstituted and transformed to build a new type of state when institutional capacity is inherently fragmented, ambiguous, and weak?" Starting with this important question on page 2 of Strong Institutions in Weak Polities, Julia Strauss examines the efforts at state and institution building in Republican China and offers illuminating answers, with case studies of several central state organizations. Based on archival materials, secondary sources, and interviews with former Republican government bureaucrats, Strauss' study significantly advances our understanding of the inner workings of central government bureaucracies in terms of their institution-building strategies. In so doing it also provides institutional contexts for understanding such issues as civil service appointment, revenue extraction, government finance, and foreign policies in Republican China. In spite of a title that suggests otherwise, the book covers more than the period 1927-1940. For one thing, the "how and why" analysis of the successes and failures of the state organizations that are examined actually goes to 1945. More importantly, Strauss effectively lays out the historical background to state- and institution-building goals and strategies under the Guomindang and emphasizes the continuity and consistency from the Xinzheng reformers through the Beiyang [End Page 225] centralizers to the GMD state-builders in trying to achieve centralization, rationalization, bureaucratization, effectiveness, and efficiency. Chapter 1 presents a useful overview of contradictions and dilemmas in Chinese state and institution building from the late imperial period through 1927. Informed by secondary literature, Strauss characterizes the late imperial Chinese state as being committed to the stability, order, and cosmic harmony of the empire but constrained in fulfilling its goals because of the contradiction between a universalistic, cosmopolitan bureaucracy and the localized, diverse, and highly particularistic society in which it operated. The crises in the second half of the nineteenth century brought about a limited movement for military modernization (self-strengthening enterprises) and a proliferation of ad hoc administrative organizations from the bottom up without resolving the contradiction. The Xinzheng reform of 1902-1911 marked a fundamental reorientation of the central state agenda: to transform an agrarian empire into a centralized, commercial, and modern country. Yet, the environment did not favor the agenda: "[W]eak central institutions, the perennial tension between universalism and particularism, substantial power concentrated in the hands of provincial viceroys, a weak fiscal base, and limited direct projective capacity" continued to plague the state (p. 21). The 1911 revolution ended imperial rule but did not bring about either "a convincing set of replacement political institutions" or the "other anticipated goods of republicanism" (p. 22). While the goals of the Beiyang centralizers were similar to those of the Xinzheng reformers, the gap between the goals and the implementing capacity of the state was equally persistent. When Chiang Kai-shek's National Government was established in 1927-1928 after purging the Communists and the left and co-opting warlords, industrialists, and various local elites, it turned away from the bottom-up social mobilization of the mid 1920s. Instead it adopted a top-down, elitist approach of centralization and co-optation to achieve the national goals of unity, wealth, and power. The circumstances were, again, not favorable. Limited control of territory, a hostile international environment, military and fiscal weakness, divisions within the regime, and an undefined relationship between center and region and between the Party and the National Government were some of the major problems faced by the Guomindang state when it launched its state-building efforts. In chapter 2 Strauss analyzes the fate of the Examination Yuan in order to illustrate the difficulty posed by the GMD co-optation strategy in state and institution building. The Nanjing government inherited from the Beiyang governments the personnel classifications and basic structure of the civil-service system, including...