[MUSIC] Now let's look at The Politics of Policy Making in China. The first topic that we're going to look at is really agenda setting. Now, how do issues get on to the agenda? And the first thing is that leaders themselves are usually the ones who decide what issues need resolving. And they could propose policies usually that enhance their own political strength that resolves social problems, fulfill promises they may have made while campaigning for office or match their ideology. It's interesting on the campaigning for office, that you could argue that even in a country like China, leaders have to a certain extent, lay out a program of what they'd like to do and that's a way of building support for themselves. Dung did that very clearly in the 1970s. Now even in non-electoral systems, elites are pressed to respond to society's demand. Now crises are often thrust onto the political agenda, coming in from the outside. The leadership has much less chance to prepare for them, and it's like boom, here it is, what are we going to do? We have to solve that problem right now and China, to date, has proven pretty good, at solving many of the financial crises that have hit China from the outside. Now finally, I would say whoever has the power, or the right to call the media, they get to set the agenda. Now, when I was at graduate school, back in the 1970s at the University of Michigan, one of the topics that we spent a lot of time talking about, was what we call non-decisions. So, things that don't happen, right? And non-decision really reflect political power. Where power really lies in a political system is highlighted by this idea of a non-decision. I defined a non-decision as an issue that needs to be resolve for the good of society. But remains off the leaders' decision making agenda. So, there's some sense that there's an issue out there that needs to be resolved, but it never quite gets onto the agenda. And in the older days, back in the 70s, they called non-decisions or they equated non-decisions with what they called the second face of power. What do I mean by that? Well if power is the ability to make A do B when she did not to do it, the "Second Face of Power" is the ability to stop A from doing B when she wanted to do it. So it's really much more about blocking and stopping. So, in a society, you may find vested interests in the political system that try and prevent these decisions and they prevent it by stopping it from getting onto the decision making agenda. Now an example of a non-decision, one of the most common ones today is environmental problems. Where everyone knows that there is a problem but the government just doesn't do anything about it. So for example we have know for years that Beijing has lots of dirty air. It's only recently that we see that somehow, it's really gotten onto the agenda for the leadership to try and resolve. We in Canada, for many years, screamed about the fact that lakes were dying in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec. Because acid rain was coming up from the United States but President Reagan and his administration just refused to admit that there was such a thing as acid rain so it could never be the topic of discussion. Only recently in India now, has the widespread sexual assaults of women become well known. But it is been on going for decades and so for some reason, it's been kept off the agenda. Now for my perspective and one you can think about if you want to do some research and write a paper about this issue, a really excellent methodology. Is to look at two cases of similar environmental problems, right? Two cities that maybe both are suffering equally from environmental problems. One city cleans up while the other doesn't. And the question then is why? And by understanding why, you will understand the nature of politics in that society. How strong the pro-environmental forces are and how strong perhaps the pro-energy forces are. Now, just as a afterthought, can you think of some kind of non-decision in your part of the world, in your country? Something that you think should be discussed, but for some reason has simply not been discussed. Another aspect of decision making and agenda setting, which I also like to talk about, something I also invented, let's say, is what I call policy winds. What I mean by a policy wind is that this is another way that issues get onto the agenda In Chinese politics, where it's not following the normal pattern of leaders sitting down, someone bringing in a document saying, okay, we want to talk about this. Policy wins are usually issues that leaders push onto the agenda by mobilizing support for their policy, they go out into society. They go find local leaders, mobilize them, and then have them push up, put pressure on the national leadership to put that policy on the decision making agenda and, in that way, get it to be discussed. Now you need that kind of mobilization when there is strong resistance to the policy by other top leaders. So let me give you two examples of this. One is, Mao's collectivization strategy in 1955. Now what was going on? In 1955, there was a big debate within the Chinese Communist Party over the pace of collectivization. Mao, wanted to speed up the move from what were called Mutual Aid Teams, where peasants only helped each other farm, into collectives with community owned land. Now, Liu Shaoqi, who was the number two person in the party, he worried that if the shift to collective agriculture happened too rapidly, the peasants who had some property would lose their enthusiasm for socialism. Because they would have to give up that property. So in spring 1955, he heard rumors coming out of the countryside that villagers were very disaffected with the push that had happened in 54-55 to build collectives. So he dismantled, he gave permission to dismantle 20,000 existing collectives. Well Mao didn't like that. And so Mao went off on his own, and he spoke to an organization of provincial party leaders, which really had no decision-making authority. Now in that meeting, he accused the opponents of his policy of what he called walking around with women of bound feet, right? In traditional China women had their feet broken. And had those feet tucked underneath, tied up. And so when they walked, they always walked very unsteady, slowly. And so this was a kind of metaphor that Mao used to say that the leadership was just really walking very slowly. And as he said falling behind, right? Falling behind the masses, who he argued, really had a desire for socialism. Now you can make that argument that there was a desire for socialism, because some provincial leaders who were at that meeting said, all right, I'm getting on board with Mao, they went down to the localities and they pushed for cooperatives. Mao's own personal secretary, a man named Chen Boda, who's helped Mao out before and will help him out again during the culture revolution, he collected ports from different locations showing that the peasants wanted collectivization. And actually, he put together a book called The Socialist High Tide in the Countryside, which is translated even into English. And so this created a kind of fervor in the local level and the word started coming up to Beijing that oh, there's all these places the peasants want collectivization. And so by October of 55, the meeting of the Central Committee proved a speed-up of rural collectivization and so in that sense you can see how Mao sort of flipped it and went down to society and then brought up. This policy to make the center do what he wanted. So we call that a policy wind. One other good policy wind is Deng Xiaoping southern trip. In Chinese, often referred to as the [FOREIGN], that's in 1992. Now what happens? You have Tiananmen 1989,. The fall of Eastern Europe. Then in August 1991, the Soviet Union collapses. And the conservative leaders in the party get very nervous that if China pushes further for reforms, it would destroy the Communist Party's dictatorship. Done looking ahead, and in some ways smarter than them, realizes and argues that it's the absence of economic reform that would ensure the CCPs collapse, and that Gorbachev's problem in Russia was that he did political reform but no economic reform. So Dung in late 1991 calls for a speed up or renewal of economic reform. Conservatives derivatives don't like this. They get nervous. Good friends of Dung say no, no, no. And they demonstrate the second phase of power and they blocked his efforts. So, what does Dung do? Dung goes South, right? He goes south to Guangdong and to Fujian provinces where the reforms had begun in 1978-79. Here's this little guy, right? He's about five foot four or something, 80 something years old, and he goes South. And he says to the leaders down there, you want to be bold, you want to take risks, you know. And in some ways he taps into their frustration because they want to develop their locality, right? But they're financially constrained by doing so. But Dung has made this trip. He starts to build up some momentum, but for several months, newspapers in Beijing do not report his trip. So here we can see that he cannot control the Politburo and the Politburo standing committee and get his policy approved. But then, like with Mao's collectivization strategy, pressure starts to build from below. The leaders in certain provinces start to speak out. And one or two leaders in Beijing who decide to take Dung's side come out in favor. And his trip is reported in the front page of the People's Daily, the most important newspaper In March of 1992 and then the reforms are off and running.
