| This is a study of the impact of the Communist Party on the state-building in post-1949 China. By comparing the Mao Zedong era of 1954-64 and the Deng Xiaoping era of 1979-89, it seeks to find out why and how the existence of a single strong revolutionary party may hamper the process of state-building. This thesis suggests that because of the limits of "party-state" concept and the "revolution" paradigm, the issue of Chinese state-building has not been adequately studied. It argues that it is conceptually constructive to distinguish the state from the party in order to reach a better understanding of the state-building problem.; The study examines the contradictions and conflicts between the party organization and the state institutions, such as in the 1957-58 Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Leap Forward of 1958-60, the Lushan Conference of 1959, the post-Mao reform and 1989 Tiananmen incident. Built upon an institutional perspective, the analysis in this thesis develops around a central hypothesis: a revolutionary party organization that was originally the solution to the problems of government and order in twentieth century China, became the main cause of the state-building problem after the revolution.; This thesis reaches three conclusions: (1) The Chinese state-building problem had much to do with the sequence of institutional development: a single strong revolutionary party emerged well before the state was established; (2) As a revolutionary organization surviving many years of military struggles, the Communist Party had developed a set of organizational features that proved to be difficult to change after the revolution, even though they became increasingly irrelevant and counterproductive; and (3) The Communist Party has paradoxically become a major obstacle to state-building in post-1949 China. |
