A Problem

of Definition

IN THEIR ARTICLE on "The Chinese Political Spectrum," Michel Oksenberg and Steven Goldstein specify four opinion "clusters" that they believe have characterized China's response to the West during the past 100 years. While I agree that there is considerable merit in looking for intellectual continuity over a period of half a century or more in China, I found myself uneasy with the specific arguments they made.

First, it seems that the authors themselves are unclear as to what an opinion "cluster" really is. At a minimum, one would assume that it consists of a set of views that can be shown to have co-varied in the past-i.e., that people holding views A and B almost invariably also held views C and D. In the final section of their article, the authors imply that this is very much what they have in mind, as they speak of the "militant fundamentalists" and "radical conservatives" in terms of identifiable factions within the CCP. However, on pp. 9-10, they comment that "Individuals change over time. . . . Ambiguousness, vacillation, efforts to blur distinctions...these are the ways in which some Chinese seek to avoid commitment to a particular school. The result is a lack of a clear-cut self-identity, but also a capacity to shift as the prevailing opinion changes." Thus, individuals may in fact embody ideas from different "clusters" seemingly as political expediency demands. These "clusters," then, seem to be less than meets the eye, for they do not represent sets of ideas that for one reason or another most Chinese find individually compelling.

Second, the definitions of the four types themselves are not always clear. I instinctively recoil when I see an intellectual typology that places Mao Tse-tung and Chiang Kai-shek under the same rubric, as does category No. 2 (the radical conservatives) in this article. Upon closer examination, we see that the introductory sentence on this category defines "radical conservatives" as those who "seek to preserve the essence of China, but with selective borrowing from Western technology." By the final sentence of the definition,

"radical conservatives" have become "radical in their view of China's need for a restructured society and value system, but conservative in their determination to preserve Chinese autonomy, flexibility, and distinctiveness" (emphasis added). It is a peculiar type of "essence" that includes neither the social structure nor the value system. In fact, Chiang Kai-shek clearly slips in under the scope of the first sentence, while Mao Tse-tung fits more neatly under the latter. The attempt to reconcile these differences in paragraph 2 of page 7 is insufficient, given the severity of the problem. Indeed, if Mao and Chiang share a single classification, how many of China's 800 million people can be excluded from that category?

Third, given the definitional problem and the difficulty of specifying empirical referents for these opinion clusters, why try to categorize all Chinese leaders according to their response to the West in the first place? Here, Oksenberg and Goldstein are clear and consistent. They affirm that the question of a proper response to the West has been the key question of Chinese politics over the past 100 years (p. 3). I think that there is no doubt that this has been a key question over this entire period and perhaps the key question since the Sino-Japanese war of 1895. But this is in fact debatable, and there is a growing literature that casts doubt on the real importance of the West (unless one includes Japan in one's definition of "West") during the past century in China. Clearly, those who were most impressed with the Western impact were the Westerners themselves. Should we beware, then, when Westerners say that the best way to understand the cleavages in Chinese politics is to look at how the Chinese respond to us?

Lastly, I would quibble with the authors' assertion that "militant fundamentalists" and "radical conservatives" are "value neutral" terms (p. 2). They sound distinctively more negative to the Western analyst than do "eclectic modernizers" and "westernized Chinese."

I reiterate that I believe the idea of thinking in terms of cleavages based on clusters of opinion concerning basic political issues that have not changed substantially over many decades is fruitful way to gain insights into the contemporary Chinese political milieu.

The Oksenberg and Goldstein piece has, therefore, raised an important question for consideration by the scholary community. Much work remains to be done in providing a satisfactory answer.

Kenneth Lieberthal

Asst. Professor of Political Science Swarthmore College Swarthmore, Pa.

A REJOINDER

OUR REMARKS primarily respond to Mr. Michael Pillsbury, who rejects the usefulness of our approach. In the course of the rejoinder, we hopefully meet the requests of Professors Lieberthal and Chamberlain for greater conceptual rigor and clarity.

Let us note, hopefully without appearing to be contentious, that Pillsbury distorts our argument. At no point do we "explicitly reject" the utility of a group-politics approach, as he claims. To the contrary, we say (pp. 2-3) that full explanations of Chinese politics require reference to bureaucratic politics and personality. Further, although Pillsbury claims we assert that "psychological variables are more important" than sociological groupings, in fact we carefully suggested that "psychological variables may be as important as sociological ones" (p. 10). These distortions cast us in an unfortunate light. As our other publications demonstrate, we clearly believe that structures, personalities, and ideas are all necessary objects of political analysis.1 Pillsbury is certainly correct, however, in concluding that we assign a lesser priority to studying personality than he does. And we certainly attach greater weight than he would to the intellectual milieu —i.e., the language of debate, the concepts of the era, and prevailing beliefs as to what is at stake-in which policy debate takes place.

1 Steven Goldstein, "Explaining Politics in China," Studies in Comparative Communism (Los Angeles) Winter 1975; Michel Oksenberg, "Policy Making under Mao, 1949-1968: An Overview," in John Lindbeck, Ed., China: Management of a Revolutionary Society, Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1971.

Here, in fact, is the real point of contention we have with Pillsbury. We consider knowledge of the broad intellectual concerns in China from the 1840's on to be essential for an understanding of contemporary Chinese politics. These concerns shape the ways in which Chinese leaders discern and evaluate the problems pressing upon them. After all, problems have to be seen before they become grist for political debate. Once the problems have become the subject of debate, leaders must define and weigh their choices. These steps in the decisionmaking process, as Harold Lasswell stressed years ago, involve perceptions, definitions, and values.

In sum, students of politics have long stressed the importance of the intellectual constructs used by the leaders and the led to structure and give meaning to their common environment. Perhaps the classic work along these lines is Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America, which illuminates the perceptual framework of the American political community for nearly two hundred years a framework which has done much to define the issues in American politics and to structure how the choices with respect to those issues have been perceived.

Approaching Chinese politics in this fashion, our article sought to explicate the underlying concerns which the Chinese bring to the challenges they face. Our approach is hardly alien to the China field. With far greater elegance and subtlety than we exhibited, Joseph Levenson, Benjamin Schwartz, William DeBary, and Donald Munro, among others, have demonstrated the necessity of intellectual history to understand the nature of issues and policy alternatives in contemporary China. That is the tradition that our article sought to follow, and that is the tradition which Pillsbury so blithely dismisses.

2 Joseph R. Levenson, Confucian China and its Modern Fate, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1958, 1965; Benjamin Schwartz, Communism and China: Ideology in Flux, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1968; William T. DeBary et. al., Eds., Sources of Chinese Tradition, New York, Columbia University Press, 1964; Donald Munro, "Man, State, and School," in Michel Oksenberg, Ed., China's Developmental Experience, New York, Praeger, 1973, pp. 121-43.

Instead, Pillsbury sketches a personal-faction model of Chinese politics, heavily oriented toward analysis of individuals. He proposes that the topic meriting his attention is Teng Hsiaop'ing. Need Pillsbury be reminded that 18 months ago he probably would have advocated study of Li Teh-sheng? And with the conclusion of the recent National People's Congress, he might now emphasize Chang Ch'un-ch'iao. One thinks of two earlier Rand studies growing out of Pillsbury-like assumptions. One was on Lin Piao and was completed just before Lin's death in a plane crash in Mongolia; the other was on Chou En-lai, whose role in Chinese politics has since declined because of ill health. Both were indeed valuable studies, illuminating the interaction between personality and policy, but they rapidly became dated. They pertained to the era when the individuals concerned were politically active. Even granted that Pillsbury's legitimate prime interest as a member of the intelligence community lies in prediction of Chinese short-run behavior, how useful can personality-oriented indicators be when China is in a situation of high elite instability and when the data on individual leaders is so absolutely sketchy? To repeat, we recognize the validity of Pillsbury's concern with personality, factions, and organizations, but we do not start there.

We respond to Pillsbury's criticism vigorously for several reasons. First, he is hardly alone, and his position is to be taken seriously. Journalists, and many scholars as well, have attempted to analyze the current China scene in highly personal terms. Gossipy, intriguing, fun, such analyses have nonetheless usually proved wrong. Second we recall what happened in the Soviet field, where many heeded Pillsbury-like calls, only to have the further development of Soviet studies reveal the frequently superficial, noncumulative nature of the over-personalized approach. And, finally, it seems to us that the study of Chinese politics is at a crossroads. The governing models of the past the totalitarian model, the earlier

3 Thomas Robinson, "A Politico-Military Bibliography of Lin Piao, Pt. II, 1950-1971" (ms., August 1971); "Chou En-lai and the Cultural Revolution in China," in T. Robinson, Ed., The Cultural Revolution in China, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1972, pp. 165-312.

Almond model of the modernization process, and so on-have been tested and found wanting. Now, we wonder, in what direction should we strike out? What new areas seem to hold promise, in terms of both data and concepts? What “paradigm" should we use to order our research choices? We are attracted to intellectual history as the point of departure because of the insight it yields into the way the Chinese identify and perceive their choices.

To respond to Lieberthal and Chamberlain, let us clarify and amplify our views. If one examines policy debates in post-1949 China over specific issues, one is struck by the repetitive nature of the argumentation. In the sphere of public health, for example, many specific issues have been on the agenda, but differing views on two fundamental concerns have underlain much of the debate. First, how much technology should be borrowed from the West, and how useful is indigenous Chinese medicine? Second, should the Chinese public health system ultimately resemble the Western pattern, particularly the professionalism of the doctors, the large hospitals, the research orientation, and so on? Or should China seek to create distinctive "Chinese" system?

In military policy, similar issues have been at stake. First, to what extent should the military modernize and adopt Western modes of warfarefrontal war waged with advanced weaponry? Second, to what extent should the military adopt the professional values and play the roles of armies in other societies, including the Soviet Union? And to what extent should it preserve its distinctive guerrilla tradition and play a broader social role in Chinese society, without clear-cut distinctions between military and civilian professions?

In the cultural realm, the same issues have been highly visible. First, to what extent should the cultural leaders employ Western modes of cultural expression-in terms of the medium, the instrumentation in music, the style in literature or painting, and so on? And to what extent should they draw

4 See Michael Lampton, Health, Conflict and the Chinese Political System, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1974.

5 See particularly Ellis Joffe, Party and Army: Professionalism and Political Control in the Chinese Officer Corps, 1949-1964, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1965.

upon and adapt various traditional Chinese art forms? More important than the choice of techniques for achieving a cultural regeneration is the choice of goals: whether to create a distinctive Chinese moral order or, as in the early and mid-1950's, to create a culture that would facilitate exchange with other socialist countries.

On issue after issue-agriculture," industrial management,' the legal system, and so on-one sees similar debates over means (particularly, the utility of Western experience) and ends (particularly, the degree to which the goal should be to preserve a Chinese distinctiveness). Repeatedly, opinions have tended to cluster around three or four nodes the nodes we sketched in our article.

This does not mean that the same individual was at the same node on every issue. Chou En-lai in 1963, for example, appears to have supported the eclectic modernizer approach on economic policies while supporting a fundamentalist cultural policy.

So, our four descriptive categories are not "opinion groups" but political positions that reappear as leaders debate specific issues. What becomes even more striking is that the same nodes appear in monograph after monograph on modern Chinese history: in Lloyd Eastman's analysis of Ch'ing foreign policy during the Sino-French War of the 1880's,' in John Schrecker's

• Benedict Stavis, "The Political Implications of the Technological Transformation of Chinese Agriculture," Columbia University Ph.D. dissertation, 1972; Michel C. Oksenberg, "Policy Formulation in Communist China: The Case of the 1957-58 Mass Irrigation Campaign," Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1969.

7 Steve Andors, "Factory Management in China: The Politics of Modernization in a Revolutionary Society," Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1974.

• Victor Li, "The Evolution and Development of the Chinese Legal System," in Lindbeck, op.cit., pp. 221-55.

• Throne and Mandarins: China's Search for a Policy during the Sino-French Controversy, 1880-1885, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1967.

10 Imperialism and Chinese Nationalism: Germany in Shantung, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1971.

11 Joseph R. Levenson, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao and the Mind of Modern China, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1953, and New York, Harper and Row, 1969; Hao Chang,

study of Chinese nationalisms in Shantung, 10 in the different Levenson and Hao portraits of Liang Ch'i-ch'ao's intellectual migration," and in biographies of leading Chinese intellectuals of the 1920's and 1930's. 12 Indeed, in this context, the similarity between the Chiang K'ai-shek of China's Destiny and Mao Tse-tung can be fruitfully stressed. For, in their responses to most problems, both have been reluctant but willing to borrow from the West and Japan, while insisting that the purpose is to cultivate China's distinctivenessalthough for Chiang the distinctiveness to be acquired through spiritual transformation has been Confucian, 13 whereas for Mao it has been, in large measure, the virtues of the peasantry.

The research directions toward which our approach points can be summarized in this way: Why have so many policies been radical-conservative? What has made fundamentalist solutions so appealing, particularly in cultural policy but even in such matters as rural organization or national security? Have particular occupations, regions, or economic strata proven prone to support one view more than another?

These questions can be asked in the aggregate for a particular moment in time: Why do radical conservative solutions predominate? What is the social basis of each view? But perhaps even more fruitful would be to explore policy debates with respect to one problem

Liang Ch'i-ch'ao and Intellectual Transition in
China, 1890-1907, Cambridge, Mass.,
Harvard University Press, 1971.

12 E.g., Charlotte Davis Furth, Ting
Wen-chiang: Science and China's New Culture,
Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press,
1970; Jerome Grieder, Hu Shih and the
Chinese Renaissance: Liberalism in the
Chinese Revolution, 1917-1937, Cambridge,
Mass., Harvard University Press, 1970;
Laurence Schneider, Ku Chieh-kang and
China's New History, Berkeley, University of
California Press, 1971.

13 Note the praise bestowed on Chiang K'ai-shek by Chou En-lai in talking to James Reston "a man who can stand up to American pressure . . . [and] has a sense of national respect." Cited in Gene Hsiao, "Prospects for a New Sino-Japanese Relationship," in The China Quarterly (London), No. 60 (December 1974), p. 733. 14 See Ralph C. Crozier, Traditional Medicine in Modern China: Science, Nationalism, and Cultural Change, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1968.

such as public health or agricultureover a long period of time. We suspect that while a fundamentalist position in medicine has been espoused throughout, it has also evolved over time.14 Certainly in debates on educational policy, the eclectic modernism position has been voiced throughout, but the position itself has changed slowly. Indeed, this is where we suspect that major payoffs await researches on Chinese politics: in tracing the evolving political spectrum on specific issues over a very long period of time. This will enable current policy debates to be placed in their appropriate historical context and will sensitize the researcher to the long-term underlying forces at work in China. Only in this way can the "After Mao, what?" question be placed in proper perspective. If Mao's concerns on educational policy, for example, long preceded him and have had strong social support for over a century, the chances of their surviving Mao are much greater than if Mao's views were a historical anomaly.

Here, then, is our final disagreement with Pillsbury. Not only does an approach to Chinese politics that pays proper attention to the intellectual milieu generate interesting avenues of inquiry for academics, but it maygiven the current insufficient level of our knowledge about Chinese personalities, factions, and structures— yield better intelligence estimates about the future contours of the China scene. We can identify the major problems that will be facing the Chinese leaders in the years ahead: to increase agricultural production, to hasten industrialization, to adjust party-army relations, to acquire and deploy an adequate defense system, and so on. A sense of the intellectual climate and of the historic debates on these issues provides perhaps the best clues about where the Chinese will come out on these issues. This sense persuades us that, though not easily or irreversably, the eclectic modernist response to most but not all of these problems will increasingly prevail. If the analyst's concern is what policies rather than which individuals will dominate in the years ahead, an approach rooted in intellectual history seems to have its merits.

Michel Oksenberg Steven Goldstein

NOTE: Readers are welcome to comment on matters discussed in this journal. Letters should be addressed to the Editors, Problems of Communism, US Information Agency, 1776 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20547.

UKRAINIAN DISSIDENTS

TO THE EDITORS: May I point out one or two misconceptions and imprecisions in Professor Teresa RakowskaHarmstone's otherwise excellent and perceptive article, "The Dialectics of Nationalism in the USSR" (Problems of Communism, May-June 1974)? Referring to my article, "The Western Republics" (Ethnic Pressures in the Soviet Union: Conflict Studies, No. 30, London, December 1972, p. 4), she states that

CORRECTIONS

"a number of . . . underground groups existed in the Ukraine in the 1960's, some as a continuation of wartime independence-seeking groups, as exemplified by the Ukrainian National Liberation Front" (p. 17). Actually, the Ukrainian National Front (its correct name) is the only group about which there is positive knowledge that it was "conceived as the continuation of the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists)" (see M. Browne, Ed., Ferment in the Ukraine, New York, Praeger, and London, Macmillan, 1971, p. 233). Professor Rakowska-Harmstone also adds that "the Front reportedly attempted to enlist Chinese aid to appeal to Western journalists to protest political arrests in the Ukraine in the summer of 1973," and further on (pp. 21-22) that "in at least one case, nationalist dissidents have sought Chinese approval," this time again referring to

my article, pp. 6-7. This is definitely a misunderstanding, which is to be found also in the work of certain other scholars.

The facts, as far as they can be ascertained, are as follows. The Ukrainian National Front, organized in 1964 and based around Ivano-Frankovsk in the Western Ukraine, was uncovered in 1967. Its members were given sentences of between 11 and 17 years (see Browne, op. cit., pp. 233-34), and there is no reason to suppose that any part of the organization has survived. Four years later, in 1971, a "Ukrainian National Front" leaflet was reported to have been distributed in the Soviet Far East, north of the Chinese border; though obviously produced by Ukrainians, the leaflet had a definite Chinese Maoist orientation, and it stated that the UNF was "composed of Ukrainian patriots, including Ukrainian Marxists-Leninists." Subsequently, sporadic broadcasts of UNF statements over Radio Peking have been reported. This fact, together with a detailed examination of the text of both this leaflet and an appeal by the UNF in the summer of 1972, lead to the conclusion that this particular UNF is apparently centered in China and most likely consists of Ukrainians resident there. There is so far no evidence of its being active in the Soviet Ukraine. There is

also no evidence whatsoever of any connection between this UNF and the IvanoFrankovsk UNF of 1964-67 (see my article, pp. 6-7)— no evidence, that is, if one disregards their common name. But then, "National Front" is not an unusual appellation; it recurs, for instance, in the Estonian National Front formed in 1972 (see my article, p. 9). One would surely not suppose, on the evidence of the names alone, that the latter was connected with a UNF in the same way as, say, the Communist Party of Estonia and the Communist Party of the Ukraine are connected within the CPSU.

There also seems to be no samizdat evidence of any Ukrainian dissidents being connected with China or even favorably disposed toward Maoism; the few references to Mao's China found in Ukrainian samizdat are either neutral or critical, as for instance in Valentyn Moroz's "Report from the Beria Reservation," or in Vyacheslav Chornovil's 1968 letter (see Browne, op. cit., pp. 150-52, 171).

Finally, Professor Rakowska-Harmstone remarks (p. 13) that "the formal complaint [against Piotr Shelest] was his hard-line opposition to the policy of détente with the West." Surely, in order to be called formal, a complaint (or a charge, or an accusation) has either to be