To Govern China

de Vivienne Shue, Patricia M. Thornton

"Governance under the PRC bespeaks an inventiveness born of decades of experimentation. In a co-edited volume with Sebastian Heilmann, Mao's Invisible Hand, we propose that the revolutionary past of the CCP continues to exert a significant influence on contemporary policies. The achievements of the post-Mao economic reforms, we suggest, are due not only to Adam Smith's invisible hand of market forces, but also to Mao's invisible hand of "guerrilla policy-making": a pragmatic, trial and error method of handling crisis and uncertainty that characterized the Communist wartime base areas. Thanks to its unusual revolutionary origins, the Chinese Communist political system allows for more diverse and flexible input and response than would be predicted from its formal political structures, which remain for the most part standard Leninist institutions"--