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In addition to forcing rural governments to cut services, the distressed local public finance is viewed by many in China as directly responsible for the rural political decay and rising tensions between the state and the peasantry.74 For example, village governments and party cells grow progressively weak as local elites become more reluctant to serve in these heavily indebted villages.75 In township governments, high debts and unpaid wages demoralize officials.76 In early 2001, for example, unpaid salaries for township officials and workers in Jilin totaled 46 million yuan, or about half the province’s unpaid salaries. Similar situations were reported in Anhui. The rural public finance crisis is also a major contributor to rising tensions. In heavily indebted townships, tensions between cadres and rural residents are high. Local government officials often meet strong resistance in implementing government policy and collecting revenue.77

Erosion of the CCP’s Mobilization Capacity

In measuring a state’s governing capacity, a crucial variable is the mobilization capacity of its major political parties. As institutions to aggregate different social and political interests and build coalitions, political parties play a crucial role in generating support for the legitimacy and policies of the government. The political party’s role in mass mobilization and governance is perhaps even more critical in authoritarian regimcs than in democratic politics. As Samuel Huntington observed, “The one-party system is the principal modern form of authoritarian government.” And the strength of an authoritarian regime depends on the strength of its party.78 The key to the viability and durability of the ruling party in an authoritarian regime is its capacity to mobilize mass political support and maintain legitimacy. Despite the conventional wisdom that authoritarian regimes depend mainly on repression for survival, monopolistic ruling parties actually use a mixture of ideological appeal, redistributive economic policies, organizational penetration, and repression in governing their societies.

In the Mao era, the CCP had an unusually strong capacity of mass political mobilization. The combination of a charismatic leader, a sinicized communist ideology, a youthful revolutionary party tested by decades of war, a development strategy that maximized the control of the state, and the ruthless application of mass repression enabled the CCP to rally the Chinese nation behind its causes. Although weakened by the catastrophic failure of Mao’s radical policies, the CCP retained a measure of mobilization capacity in the early years of the reform era thanks, in large part, to Deng’s progressive policies. Post-Mao reforms launched by Deng managed, in the immediate aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, to repair the tarnished image of the CCP and build a broad proreform coalition. More important, the CCP’s extensive organizational infrastructure in Chinese society and economy had yet to experience the impact of market-oriented reforms.

A quarter century of economic reform later, however, the extent of the atrophy of the CCP’s mass mobilization capacity began to be visible, even as it had grown more adept in using selective repression and targeted co-optation to maintain its rule. Market-oriented reforms have undermined the economic infrastructure upon which the CCP’s organizational system was built, leading to the party’s decline, first in the countryside, and later in the cities. Within the party itself, the breakdown of discipline and institutional norms has caused widespread corruption and degraded the party’s organizational integrity. The party’s mass appeal practically disappeared, as well, mainly because of exclusivist and proelite policies pursued by the party and its subsequent transformation from a mass revolutionary party into a group of self-serving elites.

In practical terms, the erosion of the CCP’s mass mobilization capacity