Informal Politics Reconsidered

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I am impressed by the very high intellectual plane of my colleagues' contributions to this special journal symposium on the nature of Chinese politics. In order to try to sustain the high tenor of the discussion and prevent the inherently competitive juxtaposition of views from eclipsing the search for truth (after all, this is no two-line struggle!), I intend to structure these concluding remarks around certain key issue areas rather than respond to each contributor in sequence. The point will be not merely to articulate the rationales and underlying assumptions of the different positions, but to try to find areas of emerging scholarly consensus. Let us turn first to methodological considerations. There seems to be a consensus among all of us that beneath the phenomenological surface of Chinese elite politics there is a pattern underlying the pattern: what Andrew Nathan, following the structural linguists, calls its 'deep structure'. There is disagreement about its importance, ranging from Teiwes' inclination to minimize its scope to Pye's proclivity to maximize it; there is disagreement about its conceptual bounds, its essential characteristics, its nomenclature, and much else, but there is a consensus that it exists. Its existence is inferred from political phenomena that defy explanation purely in terms of formal structures: for example, Deng Xiaoping's supreme power even after his resignation from all formal offices, as well as personnel gyrations seen, for instance, in the manner in which 'subordinates' and putative retirees ejected two Party General Secretaries from positions of formal supremacy in the late 1980s. Though the underlying patterns are rarely mentioned in formal documents (except polemically or in retrospect), they have long been duly noted by culturally attuned observers interested in the direction and fate of the Chinese political system, certainly in Hong Kong or Taiwan and to a more limited extent even domestically. But because these patterns are not officially