Thomas Heberer and Gunter Schubert (eds.), Regime Legitimacy in Contemporary China: Institutional Change and Stability, London, Routledge, 2009, 308 pp. This is a timely collection of mostly solidly-researched papers addressing a number of significant questions in understanding contemporary China. Readers may expect too much, however, if they read the book because it is about “legitimacy” and authored by scholars who are Max Weber’s countrymen. The volume under review has difficulties meeting..

Wu, Guoguang

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 China Perspectives 
2010/4 | 2010
Rural Migrants: On the Fringe of the City, a Bridge to
the Countryside
Thomas Heberer and Gunter Schubert (eds.), 
Regime Legitimacy in Contemporary China: Institutional
Change and Stability
Guoguang Wu
Édition électronique
URL : http://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/5360
ISSN : 1996-4617
Éditeur
Centre d'étude français sur la Chine contemporaine
Édition imprimée
Date de publication : 15 décembre 2010
ISSN : 2070-3449
 
Référence électronique
Guoguang Wu, « Thomas Heberer and Gunter Schubert (eds.), Regime Legitimacy in Contemporary
China: Institutional Change and Stability », China Perspectives [En ligne], 2010/4 | 2010, mis en ligne le 15
décembre 2010, consulté le 28 octobre 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/
5360 
Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 28 octobre 2019.
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Thomas Heberer and Gunter
Schubert (eds.), Regime Legitimacy in
Contemporary China: Institutional
Change and Stability
Guoguang Wu
1 Thomas Heberer and Gunter Schubert (eds.), Regime Legitimacy in Contemporary
China: Institutional Change and Stability, London, Routledge, 2009, 308 pp.
2 This is  a  timely collection of  mostly solidly-researched papers addressing a
number of significant questions in understanding contemporary China. Readers may
expect too much, however, if they read the book because it is about “legitimacy” and
authored by scholars who are Max Weber’s countrymen. The volume under review has
difficulties meeting the high standards of Weberian scholarship, but the editors fulfil
their promise of providing “sound analyses and in-depth case studies of a wide range of
political, social and economic reforms in contemporary China” (p. 2). Perhaps because
of  the  breadth of  its  range,  from rural-tax-for-fees  reform to  the  media  market  in
transition, the editors have not had an easy task focusing the 12 individual chapters on
a  central  theme.  They  have  chosen  “legitimacy”  as  this  theme,  but  considerable
attention is paid to the connections between institutional change and political stability.
What is the conceptual relationship between those connections and regime legitimacy?
The editors seem to follow the line of research opened by Samuel Huntington in Political
Order  in  Changing  Societies,  which  emphasises  order  and  stability  in  the  process  of
modernisation,  more  than  Max  Weber's  conceptualisation  of  legitimacy,  which
explores how rulers gain acceptance by the ruled. In this sense, the title of the book is
somehow misleading.
3 Efforts are made, of course, to connect institutional change and stability with
legitimacy, particularly in empirical analyses of politics. These analyses take up one-
third of  the volume,  as  the entire  book is  evenly divided into three parts:  politics,
political  economy,  and  society,  with  each  part  containing  four  chapters.  A
Thomas Heberer and Gunter Schubert (eds.), Regime Legitimacy in Contemporary ...
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1
contradiction  between  the  different  understandings  of  “stability”  that  the  volume
employs  does  not  strengthen  the  conceptual  coherence:  the  Introduction  cites  the
concept of stability contributed by German political scientist Wolfgang Merkel, listing
five  very  useful  indicators,  but,  as  in  the  paragraph  that  immediately  follows,  the
application  of  “stability”  in  the  Chinese  context  often  slips  from  this  notion  to
something  closer  to  the Chinese  party-state's  understanding  of  “stability,”  which
emphasises the sustainability of one-party rule.   
4 The quality of individual chapters varies,  but most are well-researched and
well-written. Part I, which deals with “politics,” starts with a discussion of ideological
change,  and  the  author,  Holbig,  places  her  major  focus  on  Jiang  Zemin’s  “Three
Representations.” That is followed by Gobel’s well-researched chapter on China’s rural
tax-for-fee reforms based on fieldwork in Anhui Province.  Schubert,  one of  the co-
editors, tries to synthesise studies on China’s village elections, but his argument that
village  elections  replace  “complain  villages”  with  “trust  villages”  lacks  empirical
support. The chapter by another editor, Heberer, deals with a parallel subject in urban
China, namely the election of residential committees, and his approach is more careful
and cautious than his co-editor's. Taken together, they provide insufficient evidence to
bolster the assumption that the Chinese Communist Party has successfully avoided a
“legitimacy crisis” based on the fourth of Merkel’s five indicators of stability, which is
“political participation of the population.”    
5 Merkel’s fifth indicator is “a fair distribution of GNP by state intervention.”
This is apparently a question of political economy, and perfectly applicable to analyses
of the Chinese case. Part of the volume is dedicated to “political economy,” and all four
of its chapters explore significant issues. But they seldom touch on either the issue of
stability and legitimacy or on Merkel’s fifth indicator. Through the single example of
Zhejiang Province's Hengdian Enterprise Group, Taube examines institutional change
of township-village enterprises in terms of property rights. The next chapter, authored
by Herrmann-Pillath, tries to deal with a number of cases, its scope rather broad for an
article. The subject of the following chapter is China’s capital market, which author
Schlichting analyses from two sides: those of the market players and the regulators.
The reader then comes to one of the best chapters in the collection, in which Fischer
highlights  how  “marketised”  financial  incentives  are  harnessed  by  the  political
authorities to reinforce media self-censorship.
6 The section on “society” begins with an examination by Darimont of China’s
social security system. Hebel and Schucher then explore the emergence of a “socialist”
market labour regime in China. Gransnow’s paper looks at the role of NGOs in China’s
anti-poverty campaigns,  while the last chapter,  contributed by Oberheitmann, deals
with China’s environmental policy, telling us that, regretfully, environmental policy is
still  a  minor  consideration,  even  though  China  is  increasingly  challenged  by
environmental issues both domestically and globally. The author attributes this mainly
to China’s priority on economic policies. Indeed, in the view of this reviewer, a political
economic approach, as taken by the authors of Part II, would be much more powerful in
explaining the nature and character of China’s environmental situation.
7 The  collection  justifiably  applies  the  term  “institutional  heterogeneity”  to
characterise transitional China, and this quality increases the challenges faced by China
scholars in grasping the essence of the transition. As in the Chinese folk tale, some may
highlight  the  gold  side  and  others  the  silver  side.  This  collection  is  no  exception,
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2
including  two types  of  papers  oriented through different  research strategies:  some
emphasise officially announced changes and construct optimistic predictions on that
basis; others look at institutional operations and policy implementation. Both sides are
important for understanding China, but in this reviewer’s humble opinion, the latter
type  of  research  is  often  more  solid  and  convincing.  No  single  collection  is  broad
enough to cover all the important and relevant issues, but I regret that this volume
does  not  touch  on  topics  such  as  governmental  corruption,  popular  protest,  and
distribution  inequality,  all  of  which  have  an  enormous  impact  on  stability  and
legitimacy.
Thomas Heberer and Gunter Schubert (eds.), Regime Legitimacy in Contemporary ...
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3


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