Historically the role, power and bureaucracy status in China varies in
the terrain of state-society interaction. In imperial times, while the throne
managed to assert its superiority by effectively controlling component parts
of the imperial bureaucracy, it bestowed great autonomy to social forces.
The formal bureaucratic organ of the central government stopped at the
county level. Below the county level, the local society had a definite role to
play (Lieberthal 1995).
The collapse of the imperial system and the ensuing efforts to
restructure the state-society relations gave rise to a state that sought to
penetrate society and re-create it in its own image. The party-state was able
to create a web of bureaucratic organization by the late 1950s which
covered all Chinese society and infiltrated deep into its fabric (Schurmann
1968: 17). The boundaries between state and society faded away under this
“totalistic” institutional structure. Yet unlike the former Soviet Union,
which consistently sought to co-opt technical specialists into the ruling
elite, Mao’s belief that politics and the masses, rather than bureaucratic
cadres, were the primary driving force of socialist transformation which led
him to suppress and deny bureaucratic authority, shown in the Great Leap
Forward campaign and the Cultural Revolution. The bureaucratic status did not change much until the late 1970s, when the regime shifted its focus
from revolutionary transformation to economic development. Under Deng
Xiaoping, China not only allowed greater autonomy for bureaucrats in
policy through the reduced use of purges and labeling, but also raised the
quality of civil service by shifting to a more competitive, merit-based
recruitment and promotion system (Lee 1991).
Since public administration serves as an instrument of state power
vis-a-vis civil society (Neocleous 1996), change in the bureaucracy
naturally has important implications for state-society relations. In view of
the post-Mao state-rebuilding, how does the bureaucratic capacity affect the
pattern of state-society interaction in China, where a robust civil society is
still missing? Using China’s population control as a case, this paper
examines the relationship between bureaucratic capacity and state-society
relations. After an assessment of the policy effectiveness, we analyze how
bureaucratic capacity is associated with two types of social control. This is
followed by an empirical analysis of the relationship between bureaucratic
capacity and state coerciveness. The conclusion reflects on the study of
state-society relations in post-Mao China