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By Root 522 0

means that the party no longer can build broad-based social coalitions to pursue its policies and defend itself. Instead, it has to rely more than ever on economic performance to maintain legitimacy and use the repressive power of the state to defend its power. The best example to illustrate the political consequences of the CCP’s declining political mobilization capacity was the party’s suppression of the quasi-spiritual movement, Falun Gong, in 1999. During the Maoist era, the CCP could have easily mobilized its loyal supporters, such as workers and peasants, to contain and even destroy a nationwide social network like Falun Gong without resorting to the use of police. But in 1999, the only effective instrument the CCP could mobilize was the police. Despite a massive official propaganda campaign against Falun Gong, the CCP could not mobilize a single social group to support its crackdown. In the end, it was the application of brute force, not the mobilization of the masses, that enabled the CCP to destroy the movement inside China.

Economic Reform and the CCP’s Organizational Decline

The organizational decline of the CCP, in retrospect, was almost predetermined. Leninist parties like the CCP have maintained their durability only in economies dominated by the state. Such economies provide the economic infrastructure (SOEs and collective farms) that form the organizational backbone for the ruling parties. By pursuing market reforms that gradually eliminated collective agriculture and privatized a large number of SOEs, the CCP may have become a victim of its own economic success. The new economic infrastructure, based on household farming, private ownership of capital, and individual labor mobility, proves inhospitable to the organizational presence of the CCP. The sign that market reforms were undermining the party’s organizational health first emerged in the rural areas, which spearheaded China’s economic reforms.

Economic reform weakened the party’s hold in the countryside through two mechanisms. First, the dismantling of the people’s communes and the return to household farming directly reduced the power of the CCP because the party’s grassroots cells lost much of their relevance in the social and economic activities of rural residents. Economically, individual farmers, not local CCP officials, make most daily decisions. Competitive market forces have also compelled the majority of rural CCP members to devote their energy to the demands of their own household farms, instead of the political requirements of the party. To the extent that the CCP’s rural cadres continue to inspire loyalty and support, it is mainly due to these cadres’ ability to create economic opportunities and improve the standard of living of their villages—not to their political status as the representatives of the ruling party.79 In addition, the amount of social services provided by local governments has steadily contracted. Prior to reform, the party had played an indispensable role in mobilizing rural resources in supplying social services, such as maintaining public health and building rural infrastructure. After the reform, most local rural governments either withdrew from providing these services or forced rural residents to pay for them.80

Second, the gradual opening of the labor markets to rural migrants in the urban areas has allowed the younger, more educated, and entrepreneurial rural peasants to move to the cities in search of better jobs, thus reducing the pool and the caliber of potential party recruits. 81 These new opportunities have also encouraged many rural CCP members to move into the cities.82 A survey of party officials in five hundred poor townships in Sichuan in the late 1990s found that about 40 percent of them were unwilling to stay in the villages. Of the 300,000 rural CCP members in four impoverished prefects in Sichuan province, half of them had less than a primary school education as of 1998.83

Consequently, the CCP has suffered severe organizational degradation in the rural areas. A report by the Shanxi CCP