Bureaucratic behavior, praetorian behavior, and civil-military relations: Deng Xiaoping's China (1978-1989) and Gorbachev's Soviet Union (1985-1991)

The predominant theories explaining civil-military relations in China and the Soviet Union are the factionalism and interest group models for the former and the bureaucratic congruence model for the latter. When factionalism and interest group models conceive a severely fragmented politico-military leadership along cleavages based either on historical ties or on functional lines, the bureaucratic congruence model assumes a high degree of value consensus among politico-military leaders. This study demonstrates that politico-military reform in Deng Xiaoping's China had transformed a fragmented configuration of civil-military relations into a bureaucratized one, and that politico-military changes in Gorbachev's Soviet Union had transformed a bureaucratized structure of civil-military relations into a fragmented one. Specifically, it shows that the conceptual redefinition of the People's Liberation Army's political role in Deng's China had led to (1) its extensive withdrawal from the societal politics as it was drawn into during the Cultural Revolution, reducing the scope of military politics; (2) the replacement of mobilizational methods of military politics (which stresses "line" struggle within and outside the PLA) with bureaucratic methods, negotiations and consultations; and (3) shifting of the role of commissar system from mobilizational "line" struggle to demobilized, routinized military administration. All these measures had contributed significantly to the politico-military bureaucratization. In contrast to the Chinese reform, Gorbachev's democratizing measures in 1988 had led to (1) the drastic expansion of the scope of military politics, evident in the active participation of military personnel in legislative, social and ethnic politics; (2) the replacement of bureaucratic methods, negotiations and consultations with confrontational methods such as personalized rhetorical attacks, the war of laws, and even the use of force; and (3) the shift of the demobilized, administrative role of the commissar system to a remobilized one of struggle against other political groups in the military as a result of the constitutional abolishment of the CPSU political hegemony. All these changes had severely fragmented the politico-military realm.