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  • 5 - Modalities of State Building

  • from Part II - Domestic Governance
  • Edited by Anja Blanke, Freie Universität Berlin, Julia C. Strauss, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Klaus Mühlhahn, Freie Universität Berlin
  • Book:
    Revolutionary Transformations
    Published online:
    06 April 2023
    Print publication:
    13 April 2023, pp 127-152

  • Summary

    After laying out the substantial challenges faced by the young People’s Republic of China in 1949, this chapter focuses on the particular ways in which revolutionary policies were implemented: by an ever shifting mix of bureaucratic and campaign modalities that were supported by a range of public performances. Bureaucracy was characterized by hierarchy, order, precedent, the strengthening of formal state institutions and a mania for classification, thus radically simplifying complex realities through a process of disaggregation; campaigns mobilized moral commitments through a different type of radical simplification – fusion into morally charged narratives and popular mobilization. Both modalities were in evidence in the two signature campaigns of 1951: the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries and land reform. While, in the early 1950s, bureaucratic and campaign modalities were co-constitutive, after the mid 1950s, they were more often in stark tension with each other.