The Mandate of Heaven
and Performance
Legitimation in Historical
and Contemporary China
American Behavioral Scientist
Volume 53 Number 3
November 2009 416-433
© 2009 SAGE Publications
10.1177/0002764209338800
http://abs.sagepub.com
hosted at
http://online.sagepub.com
Dingxin Zhao
University of Chicago, Chicago, IL
This article argues that performance legitimacy, an aspect of state legitimacy neglected
by Weber in his original formulation of the theory of domination, played a particularly
important role in the history of China and has shaped not only the patterns of Chinese
history but also today’s Chinese politics. Yet, performance legitimacy is intrinsically
unstable because it carries concrete promises and therefore will trigger immediate
political crisis when the promises are unfulfilled. This problem is especially profound
for a modern state once its power is based primarily on performance because modern
states tend to be development rather than maintenance oriented and promise too much.
Therefore, although the current government expends much effort to heighten its legitimacy by improving its performance, it will face a major crisis when the Chinese
economy cools off unless it establishes legal-electoral legitimacy.
Keywords: mandate of heaven; performance legitimacy; harmonious society
I
n this article I argue that performance legitimacy, an aspect of state legitimacy that
was neglected by Weber in his original formulation of the theory of domination,
played a particularly important role in the history of China and has shaped not only
the patterns of Chinese history but also today’s Chinese politics.
People comply when faced with brutal coercion from the state. Yet, such compliance often entails the high costs of surveillance, resistance, and low efficiency. To
generate genuine cooperation, the state power has to been seen as legitimate by both
the rulers and the ruled. State legitimacy has been examined by scholars from two
different perspectives. The first is to analyze the legitimacy of the state from the
perception of the people. Lipset (1981) stated that legitimacy “involves the capacity
of the system [state] to engender and maintain the belief that the existing political
institutions are the most appropriate one for the society” (p. 64). Linz (1988) defined
legitimacy as “the belief that in spite of shortcomings and failures, the political institutions are better than others that might be established and therefore can demand
Author’s Note: Please address correspondence to Dingxin Zhao, 1126 East 59th Street, Chicago IL
60637; e-mail: [email protected].
416
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Zhao / Performance Legitimation in China 417
obedience” (p. 65). Friedrich (1963) argued that legitimacy is “a very particular form
of consensus, which revolves around the question of the right or title to rule” (p. 233).
A study of state legitimacy from this perspective reveals the ability of a state to generate consensual beliefs. Yet, the beliefs themselves could just be the product of false
consciousness to a more critical eye. Accordingly, critical theorists approach the
issue of state legitimacy from the problems of a political system and their own
visions of a better tomorrow (e.g., Habermas, 1975, 1984; Offe, 1973). Critical theorists’ analysis of state legitimacy can be very penetrating. At the same time, such
analysis also tends to be elitist and arrogant, producing conclusions that are often
empirically unverifiable and in some cases naively wrong. The discussion of state
legitimacy in this article follows the first perspective.
The Latin word legitimus means lawful and according to law. The concept was alien
to China because law in premodern China was only “an instrument for carrying out
certain of the designs of the state, rather than the justification for the state’s existence”
(Schram, 1987, p. x). Schram (1987) strongly suggested using foundation rather than
legitimacy in discussing the nature of state power in premodern China. Although
Schram made a reasonable point, in this article I still use legitimacy instead of foundation in the analysis for three reasons. First, the modern usages of the word legitimacy
as formulated by Weber and his followers comprise a much broader range of meanings
beyond its original connotation of the legal entitlement of the rulers. Second, as
Schram also acknowledged, although law was not the foundation of the premodern
Chinese state, issues such as mandated entitlement to power (zhen ming tian zi), the
valid successor to the crown (zheng tong), and justifiable conduct of the rulers were all
central in ancient Chinese political theory and fell squarely under the realm of state
legitimacy in its modern usage. Third, almost all concepts of Western origins have been
criticized as Eurocentric when they are applied to analyzing the social phenomena in
other cultural settings in recent scholarship, and many new localized concepts and
novel interpretations are preferred instead. Although such criticisms and practices
sometimes lead to other insights, in many cases the alternatives offered tend to be
much worse. As far as the concept of legitimacy is concerned, I believe it should be
saved rather than simply discarded.
Legitimacy became a central concept in sociological and political analysis after
Weber’s (1978) formulation (e.g., Blau, 1963; Connolly, 1984; Eckstein & Gurr,
1975; Huntington, 1991; Linz, 1988; Schaar, 1981). Weber believed that habit, affection, and rational calculation are three bases of human compliance. Accordingly, he
proposed three ideal-typical aspects of legitimacy as the basis of state power: A state
enjoys traditional legitimacy when its power is seen by the people as being inherited
or always existent. A state has charismatic legitimacy when the head of the state is
perceived by the people as having exceptional quality by virtue of some kinds of
mystical experiences and personal qualities. Finally, a state possesses legal legitimacy
when the power of the state is derived from a set of judicial and administrative principles that bind all members of a society (Bendix, 1962; Weber, 1978). To this highly
illuminating classification, this article ventures to add a few modifications to
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418 American Behavioral Scientist
facilitate the empirical analysis. First, I replace traditional legitimacy with ideological legitimacy to include any value-based justifications of the state power. Second,
I drop charismatic legitimacy as one of the ideal-types of state legitimacy. Although
charismatic legitimacy is very important, it tends to be an extreme form of ideological legitimacy. Third, and most important, I add performance legitimacy as a
major dimension of state legitimacy. In sum, legal-electoral, ideological, and performance are the three sources of state legitimacy in my modified scheme.
A state is based on legal-electoral legitimacy when it takes laws as binding principles for all social groups, including state elites themselves, and when top leaders
are popularly elected on a regular basis. Ideological legitimacy means that a state’s
right to rule is justified by a certain value system in the forms of tradition, religion,
and political philosophy.1 Performance legitimacy means that a state’s right to rule
is justified by its economic and/or moral performance and by the state’s capacity of
territorial defense. Again, these are not pure types but impure constructions. A state
can never secure its survival with a single source of legitimacy. Nevertheless, in one
country at a particular time, one source of legitimacy tends to dominate, which
defines the nature of a state.
Weber’s original formulation did not include the performance aspect of state
legitimacy. Among Weberians, Lipset (1981) singularly emphasized the importance of
state performance to a regime’s stability. Yet, he also believed that state performance
should not be seen in legitimacy terms because “effectiveness is primarily instrumental, legitimacy is evaluative.” To me, however, the evaluative process is an essential
part of performance legitimacy because people naturally judge the performance of the
state through various means in a similar way as they assess state legitimacy based on
the other criteria. The only difference lies in the basis for conducting such an evaluation. In short, the legal-electoral legitimacy of a state brings into play a kind of
evaluation process involving theorized instrumental rationality (e.g., instrumental
rationality assisted by formal/theoretical reasoning). The ideological legitimacy of
the state leads to value-based evaluation and rationality. Finally, the performance
legitimacy of the state encourages the development of a kind of pragmatic rationality (e.g., instrumental rationality assisted by common sense rather than by formal/
theoretical thinking). Performance legitimacy is irreducible to the other three dimensions of state legitimacy.
The Mandate of Heaven and Rise of Performance Legitimacy
Performance legitimacy was not an important aspect of state legitimacy in ancient
China before the rise of the Western Zhou Dynasty (ca. 1045-771 bce). Its rise signified a fundamental change in the course of Chinese history, even though its
importance only began to be comprehended in the 20th century.
The performance dimension of state legitimacy was much less central to the state
power during the preceding Shang Dynasty than in the Western Zhou and later
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Zhao / Performance Legitimation in China 419
dynasties. The Shang people worshipped a plethora of nature gods, ancestors, Heaven,
and Di (the high god). They saw their rulers as a Di with great divine power. They
also practiced divination to communicate with the divine forces for almost every decision they were going to make (Hsu, 1994; K. Chang, 1980). Charismatic and traditional legitimacy were dominating forms of legitimacy for the Shang state. The
Shang Dynasty was eliminated by the Zhou people in the 11th century bce.
The Western Zhou was a small state with a population that possibly only ranged
between 60,000 and 70,000 before its conquest of the Shang (Li, 1962). Its military
success seems to have had more to do with the internal conflicts among the Shang
people than with Zhou’s military potential (Shaughnessy, 1999). The Zhou rulers
also faced serious threats from both ambitious family members and the remnants of
the Shang aristocrats (K. Yang, 1999; Shaughnessy, 1999). In response, the new
Zhou rulers did several things that could have been largely improvisations dictated
by the historical circumstances but nevertheless exerted a long-term impact on
Chinese history. What is most relevant to this article is the creation of the Mandate
of Heaven (tian ming) concept as justification for the Zhou rule. The founders of the
Western Zhou Dynasty argued that the Shang rulers had once possessed a sacred
mandate bestowed from Heaven, but now Heaven has taken away the mandate and
passed it onto the Zhou people because of the bad rule of the last Shang King and
the virtuous conduct of the Zhou rulers.
There is abundant evidence showing the importance of this political concept as a
legitimation tool at the time of its creation. In a chapter in the Remnants of Zhou
Documents (1996),2 it is repeatedly asserted that the Zhou as a small state was able
to conquer the larger Shang state because the Zhou rulers had received the mandate
from Heaven. The text in that chapter also told the Shang aristocrats that they would
be well treated as long as they submitted to the Zhou rule but would be severely
punished if they did not cooperate. The phrase the Mandate of Heaven also appears
very frequently in the Book of Poetry (1980) and the Book of Documents (1980), the
two most important extant written sources for the history of that period.3 Moreover,
when the concept appears in these texts, it is mostly used to boost the legitimacy of
the new Zhou rulers, as in such phrases as: “The Shang replaced the mandate of Xia”4
and “The Zhou took over the mandate from Shang.”
Although the Mandate of Heaven idea had a clear propaganda purpose at the time
of its creation, the Zhou rulers, facing the lessons from the demise of the more powerful Shang state, also used the same message to educate their own people on the
importance of being a good ruler (Chao, 1996). In an early Zhou proclamation issued
against excessive wine drinking, which the Zhou rulers claimed to have contributed
to the moral corruption and eventual downfall of the Shang, it is stated that
We should use the people instead of water as mirrors. Now that the Shang rulers had
lost their mandate bestowed from Heaven, why should not we treat history as mirror
and learn a hard lesson from the demise of the Shang state? (Book of Documents, 1980,
“Jiaugo” chapter)
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420 American Behavioral Scientist
In another early Western Zhou document, the Duke of Zhou held that
Heaven had ripped off the mandate from the Shang state and passed it to us, . . . but
I cannot count on the mandate resting with us and will respect the heavenly mandate
and our people forever. It is all contingent upon human conduct whether or not mistakes and evils will occur. . . . Heaven cannot be trusted. Heaven will not take away
the mandate that King Wen had received only if we carry on his virtuous conduct.
(Book of Documents, 1980, “Junshi” chapter)
Here, the Zhou rulers saw the heavenly mandate as precarious and believed that the
only way to hold on to the mandate was by governing well.
The Mandate of Heaven is arguably the single most important political concept
that the early Zhou rulers created. By creating the Mandate of Heaven concept, the
Zhou rulers “drew their lesson from earthly, historical precedent rather than from
theological or philosophical argument” (Hsu & Linduff, 1988, p. 109). Although
they preached the significance of the Heavenly Mandate, it was right conduct among
men that they actually emphasized. This way of thinking later entered the teachings
of Confucius and his followers during the Spring and Autumn (770-481 bce) and
Warring States (480-221 bce) eras and was then canonized to become the foundation
of state legitimacy during imperial China (Creel, 1970; Shaughnessy, 1999). The
Mandate of Heaven concept gave China a tradition of humanism and historical rationalism that was quite unusual in comparison with the other traditional societies
(Wang, 2000). It was the beginning of a major divergence between Chinese culture
and other civilizations before the rise of modernity.
One of the key components of the Mandate of Heaven concept is that although a
ruler cannot entirely determine his own destiny, he is able to influence Heaven’s will
by good and moral conduct, and when Heaven is unhappy about a particular ruler, it
will send messages to him in the form of natural disasters. Throughout Chinese history, drought, flood, earthquakes, epidemics, and so on were all treated by the rulers
and rebels as messages from Heaven. They cautioned the rulers to work harder and
inspired the suppressed to rebel. Before the rise of modernity, traditional states in
other civilizations tended to derive their legitimacy largely from some traditional
and divine sources, whereas in China, state legitimacy had always had a very important performance dimension ever since the Western Zhou.
Performance Legitimacy and Patterns of Chinese History
The domination of performance-based state legitimacy shaped people’s understanding of the power of the rulers and the state in Chinese political culture.5 In
China, ever since the early Western Han Dynasty (206 bce-23 ce), the dominant view
on the role of the ruler in the state and the state-society relations had been shaped by
the writings of Confucian scholars, particularly Xunzi (ca. 313-238 bce) and
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Zhao / Performance Legitimation in China 421
Mencius (ca. 372-289 bce), two renowned Warring States philosophers. Their ideas
about the role of the rulers and relationships between the state and society can be
exemplified by the following two quotes: “The king is a boat and the people are
water. Water can carry the boat and overturn it, too” (Xunzi, 1888, “Wangba” chapter) and “The people are the most crucial and important, the next is the state, and the
least is the king” (Mencius, 1980, “Jinxinxia” chapter). Under this kind of view of
state power, as Karl Bünger (1987) insightfully pointed out, “the Chinese emperor
had no ‘right’ to rule, but only a ‘Heavenly Mandate,’ i.e., a duty to fulfill. It was his
duty to keep the human society in a good order” (p. 316). If the ruler did not perform
his duties well, he would lose the mandate to rule.
The aforementioned views on the relationships among the ruler, the state, and
society placed a great constraint on the roles that a Chinese emperor was expected
to perform. The many duties that an emperor needed to fulfill vary to a certain degree
across Chinese dynasties, but in general, a good emperor needed to act according to
moral principles prescribed in the Confucian teachings, maintain the functioning of
the government administration and public order, lead the defense of the state in time
of foreign attacks, and take responsibilities for the people’s welfare and associated
public works, including but not limited to flood control and irrigation projects, road
construction, and famine relief during natural disasters. The premodern Chinese state
assumed responsibility for providing many public goods that were not supplied by
most other premodern states.
To perform his role well, a Chinese emperor needed to receive many years of
intensive education in Confucian classics, history, calligraphy, and statecraft from the
best scholar officials from a very early age. Ray Huang’s (1981) masterful reconstruction of the childhood life of emperor Wanli (r. 1563-1620 ce), a late Ming Dynasty
emperor, offers a glimpse of the training that a Ming emperor received and the tasks
that he should perform. Because the state was expected to perform certain tasks and
perform them well, the emperor also took responsibilities for faults in the actions of
the government and even for the consequences of natural disasters. In historical
China, we see countless cases in which an emperor blamed himself in an imperial
edict (zui ji zhao) for failures in public administration, social disorders, or even flood,
drought, earthquakes, and the breakout of epidemic diseases or insect pests. Although
some of these self-accusation edicts read like propaganda to contemporary eyes, they
clearly reveal the responsibilities that an emperor needed to assume and the significance of performance as the basis of state legitimacy in historical China.
The strong performance aspect of state legitimacy allowed the ancient Chinese
people to judge their ruler in performance terms. In historical China, the people
viewed natural disasters and famines, therefore, as signs of unfit rule and perhaps
even a coming dynastic change. This kind of mentality inspired thousands of peasant
rebellions throughout Chinese history. Although most rebellions were ruthlessly
repressed, the idea of rising to rebel against an unfit ruler had a legitimate position in
Chinese political culture. That was why Chinese were always ready to accept a rebel
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422 American Behavioral Scientist
leader as the new ruler as long as he was able to stage a successful uprising. That was
also why rebels in China were romanticized and glorified in masterpieces like as All
Men Are Brothers.6 This way of thinking was so pervasive that even the successful
nomadic invaders justified their conquest of China by claiming that the rulers of the
overthrown Chinese dynasty had lost the mandate to rule because of their poor performance. The Chinese proverb “winners are kings and losers bandits” says it all.
Performance Legitimacy and Chinese Politics After Mao
With the arrival of Western imperialism and the collapse of China’s last dynasty,
China experienced a series of fundamental sociopolitical transformations from the late
19th to the early 20th centuries, which ended in the rise of Mao’s communist regime
in 1949. Even though the communist regime during Mao’s era emphasized modernization and the importance of outperforming China’s real or imagined rivals, performance was not a primary basis of state legitimacy. The Maoist regime was largely
founded on communist ideology and on Mao’s personal charisma. The Chinese had
such blind faith in Mao and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that they tried to
follow the party line frequently at the expense of their own well-being.7 The high level
of ideological and charismatic legitimacy that the state enjoyed allowed Mao to bring
China into such disasters as the 3-year famine between 1959 and 1961 and the
Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976. Millions of people died tragically during
Mao’s era, but most Chinese trusted Mao and believed that those tragedies, including
their own suffering, were the necessary costs on the road to paradise.8
After the death of Mao, the Chinese economy was on the verge of collapse and
the Chinese people suffered extreme impoverishment. The whole situation pushed
the new state headed by Deng Xiaoping to initiate reforms (Meisner, 1986). The new
open-door policy allowed Chinese to have better access to information, which
opened the eyes of the ordinary Chinese and shattered their trust in Mao and the CCP
(D. Zhao, 2001). It was amid this legitimacy crisis that the Chinese government
gradually evolved from an ideology-based revolutionary regime into a performancebased authoritarian regime. Post–Mao Chinese politics to a great extent has been
shaped by this transformation of state legitimacy and the return of performance as
the primary basis of state legitimacy.
Resistant Reemergence of Performance Legitimacy
The reemergence of performance legitimacy in China, however, was not a smooth
process. During the 1980s, with the deepening of the reform and open-door policy,
the Chinese increasingly knew more about events in the outside world through newly
translated books, relatives from overseas, or the eyewitness accounts by visitors to
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Zhao / Performance Legitimation in China 423
the West. The old propaganda that claimed the superiority of state socialism was no
longer persuasive. In the meantime, a much freer political environment encouraged
the Chinese to speak out. As the result, the deaths during the great famines, the
atrocities during the Cultural Revolution, and the personal suffering of those who
were persecuted during the Anti-Rightist Campaign and other political movements
gradually became common knowledge. By the mid-1980s, most urban Chinese no
longer believed in communism, and moral and economic performance reemerged to
become an important criterion of state legitimacy (D. Zhao, 2001). Many novels
became bestsellers in the 1980s not because of their artistic qualities but because
they showcased a morally upright official as the protagonist. This was also why
popular sayings such as “If an official is not able to stand up for his people, he should
go home to sell sweet potatoes” reached proverbial status in China in the 1980s.9
This crisis of faith and shift of state legitimacy, however, did not take place among
the top echelon of the Chinese officials. In this regard, China was significantly different from the former Soviet Union. In the former Soviet Union, World War II
delayed the decay of state socialism. By the time that Soviet state socialism faced
major crises in the 1980s, most Soviet leaders were technocrats without pre–Soviet
revolutionary experience and without a deep faith in the regime’s ideology. In China,
however, the disastrous consequences of Mao’s Cultural Revolution sped up the
regime’s deterioration. When China’s reform started in the 1980s, most top Chinese
officials were still revolutionary veterans who had joined the CCP and the revolution
in the 1920s. These people had fought hundreds of battles and witnessed the deaths
of many of their comrades. Their distinctive experience greatly contributed to their
loyalty to the CCP. These top state officials knew that China’s economic performance
was poor when compared, for example, with that of Taiwan and South Korea, but
they tended to attribute China’s poor performance to inexperience and Mao’s personal mistakes (Deng, 1983). In the end, they all firmly believed that communism
was the ideological base of the regime’s legitimacy.10
The discrepancy between the state and society in the understanding of the basis of
state legitimacy had grave consequences. During the 1980s, as China opened up, more
and more Chinese started to question the performance of the Chinese government
during Mao’s era and proposed alternative interpretations of Marxism. Although most
such activity was initiated by people who still considered themselves to be loyal to the
regime, top officials tended to regard these people as challenging the CCP’s ideological hegemony. As a result, they were repressed. Moreover, because the top CCP
leaders still had great faith in the communist ideology, they also attacked unorthodox
political activities in ideological terms. During the so-called Anti-Spiritual Pollution
Campaign in 1983 and the Anti-Bourgeois Liberalization Campaign in 1987, the statecontrolled media published lengthy articles attacking the unorthodox views as anti–
Marxist and demanded that people study these propaganda pieces. Because most
urban Chinese no longer believed in communism, these attacks were counterproductive; they turned the dissidents into widely respected heroes. In consequence, although
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424 American Behavioral Scientist
the Chinese society increasingly opened up in the 1980s, the state-society relationships deteriorated in the process (Cherrington, 1991; D. Zhao, 2001).
In the late 1980s, China’s reform faced major difficulties. Inflation soared and
corruption became rampant. Associated with these problems was the declining economic status of intellectuals and professionals. Political protests erupted in urban
China, culminating in 1989 (D. Zhao, 2001). The 1989 pro-democracy movement had
many twists and turns, but it ended with a bloody confrontation between the army and
the Beijing residents during which hundreds of people died and thousands more were
wounded. This tragic event has been interpreted in a number of ways (Black &
Munro, 1993; Calhoun, 1994; Lin, 1992), but it can also be understood as the result
of the widening gap in understanding the basis of state legitimacy between the
Chinese leaders and the ordinary people (D. Zhao, 2001). During the 1989 movement, due to the decline of the regime’s ideological legitimacy, the students were
inclined to challenge the state in moral and economic terms (with respect to inflation,
corruption, etc.). Because performance legitimacy has its deep roots in historical
China, this shift in the basis of state legitimacy rekindled dormant cultural elements.
Students expected government officials to respond to their protests and demands like
those good officials whose behaviors were prescribed in traditional Chinese political
culture. However, the students’ demands were viewed by the top officials as a challenge to a regime that held the high moral ground based on its communist ideology.
The Chinese government responded by invoking the ideological and legal dimensions of state authority to control the movement (e.g., by publishing a People’s Daily
editorial on April 26 to label the protests as turmoil agitated by a small number of
hooligans and by implementing martial law). Most Beijing residents did not consider
the state’s reaction to be legitimate. A bloody confrontation ensued.
Post-1989 Revival of Performance Legitimacy
The military repression in 1989 saved the regime but shattered the confidence of
the Chinese toward the government. The top Chinese officials were well aware of
this. Immediately after the repression, instead of promoting Li Peng and Yao Yilin,
the two Politburo members who had played key roles during the repression, the CCP
veterans who controlled the party promoted Jiang Zemin, Zhu Rongji, and Li
Ruihuan to Beijing to the highest positions in the government. Jiang and Zhu were
the party secretary and mayor of Shanghai, and Li Ruihuan was mayor of Tianjin.
They were all local reform stars who had had little to do with the 1989 repression.
By promoting them instead of those who had played a key role in the repression, the
Chinese government obviously wanted to give Chinese people new hope. Even so,
the government employed all three major forms of performance legitimacy available
to stabilize its rule (D. Zhao, 2001): moral performance, economic performance, and
the defense of national interest (calls to patriotism and nationalism).
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After 1989, in a panicked response, the government initiated several patriotic campaigns on university campuses to boost its legitimacy (D. Zhao, 2002a, 2002b; Zheng,
1999). The key goal of the patriotism campaigns was to persuade students to support
the government and identify it as the vanguard of the national interest (S. Zhao, 1998).
These campaigns raised the nationalistic consciousness of the younger generations
and contributed to the rise of several anti–Japanese and anti–United States protests
that the government found difficult to control. At the same time, rising nationalism
also limited the Chinese government’s autonomy in foreign policy and distracted the
attention of the CCP leadership away from the economic development, much to their
displeasure (D. Zhao, 2003). The Chinese government gradually shifted its policy focus
away from nationalistic issues after the mid-1990s.
By the late 1990s, most CCP veterans had either passed away or completely
retired. The new wave of the market-oriented reform after 1992 had a sustained success. Chinese society was fundamentally changed. Since then, the less ideological
younger generation of Chinese officials made serious efforts to shift the basis of state
legitimacy from ideology to moral and economic performance. In the 1980s, as mentioned earlier, the government frequently used the state-controlled media and presses
to publish articles and books criticizing unorthodox writings in ideological terms
(labeling them as anti–Marxist, anti–Four Cardinal Principles, or liberal bourgeois).11
These denunciations publicized dissident ideas otherwise unknown to the larger
urban population and antagonized those who no longer believed in communism.
Ironically, most of the widely known heroes in the 1980s were actually created by
the government itself through this kind of public criticism. Since 1992, the Chinese
government has tried to avoid similar blunders. They began to tolerate the unorthodox views published in academic and other outlets with limited circulation. When
dissidence attains greater visibility, however, the state tries to control it under a less
ideological “national interests” discourse. A well-trained professional police force is
always just off stage. Dissident activity is no longer openly criticized in the CCP
mouthpieces and thus receives much less public attention.
The government has also started to become more conscious in remodeling
performance-based state legitimacy. Top officials in China all know that economic
development is now most crucial for maintaining the state’s power. They not only
strongly promote market-oriented reforms but also try hard to prevent economic
overheating and high inflation. Knowing that inflation (particularly on staples)
affects the daily life of ordinary people and induces dissatisfaction and political
instability, the government regards it as a political issue to be treated with great
caution. Although the Chinese economy has its share of problems and seems—at
least by Western standards—as if it will collapse at any time, so far it has been
carefully managed by a highly effective bureaucracy.
In the 1980s, Chinese top officials had a tendency to think and behave like intellectuals. For instance, Zhao Ziyang, the general secretary of the CCP between 1997
and 1999, once suggested that although corruption is bad, it is also a lubricant to the
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426 American Behavioral Scientist
economy and thus has positive, if unintended, consequences. Apparently he was not
thinking of the impact that such a scholastic half-truth might cause coming from the
mouth of a top state official. After the 1990s, corruption has been revealed to be deep
and large scale. Top Chinese officials now take not only a clear-cut anticorruption
stance, but they also relate anticorruption measures to state legitimacy. They frequently make speeches linking the anticorruption policy to the regime’s survival. They
also promote the slogan “rule of virtue” (de zhi), a key political concept in China’s
traditional rulership,12 to buttress the moral basis of state legitimacy. Finally, they have
established many regulations and strengthened bureaucratic censorial mechanisms to
combat corruption.
While waging protracted anticorruption campaigns, the current regime also seeks
a more systematic performance-based justification for CCP rule. Two most significant developments are the advocacy of the “three representatives” idea by Jiang
Zemin and the “harmonious society” concept by Hu Jintao.13 According to traditional
Leninist ideology, the communist party is the vanguard of the working class. Yet in
today’s China, most state industries have gone bankrupt and many workers have
been laid off. The social status of the workers whom the CCP supposedly represents
has sharply declined, whereas foreign and joint ventures and private businesses in
China have boomed. The young and well-paid professionals in the foreign and joint
venture companies, together with the owners, managers, and skilled workers of the
newly rising private companies, now comprise the backbone of China’s new upper
class, upper-middle class, and middle class. Incorporating these new elites into the
political system is a serious issue for the regime. Facing the challenge, the Chinese
government not only allowed private business owners to join the communist party
but also created “three representatives” to justify the CCP rule in the new era. The
concept of three representatives was formally presented by Jiang Zemin in 2001 in a
meeting that celebrated the 80th anniversary of the founding of the CCP. Jiang
argued that in order to be accepted by the people: “The CCP must always represent
the development of China’s advanced forces of production, the orientation of China’s
advanced culture, and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the
Chinese people.” This statement implies that if the CCP leaders believe that private
businesses now represent China’s advanced forces of production, they will promote
private businesses and stand for their interests. This highly pragmatic and even
opportunistic posture clearly shows that the new generation Chinese leaders have
abandoned traditional CCP ideology. Interestingly enough, the CCP leaders and
theoreticians who supported the idea see this new development precisely in the
legitimation perspective discussed in this article. As soon as Jiang made the speech,
the CCP-controlled media hailed the three representatives as a new milestone in
Chinese history and argued that the three representatives are “the foundation of the
Party, the basis of government legitimacy and the sources of state authority.”14
Market-oriented reform in China widened the gap between rich and poor, which
has been a major source of tension leading to an increasing number of riots and
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Zhao / Performance Legitimation in China 427
protests in recent years. A few riots and protests even ended with bloodshed, which
antagonized the people, embarrassed the top Chinese officials in the international community, and destabilized the regime. Therefore, in the 4th Plenary Session of the 16th
Congress of the CCP Central Committee held in September 2004, Hu Jintao called for
the creation of a “harmonious society.” Associated with the development of this concept was also a set of new state policies geared toward the underprivileged Chinese
population. In rural China the government abolished all agricultural taxes, provided
subsidies for farming, and tried to stop the local governments’ sale of peasant land and
the implementation of the one-child policy. In an attempt to channel the expression of
people’s grievances into institutionalized petitions rather than riots and protests, the
government greatly strengthened the Letters and Petitions Bureaus in the State Council
and People’s Congress. The government launched a Western China development project aimed at ameliorating the otherwise widening regional disparities. The supporters
of the programs have also tried to link the harmonious society idea with performancebased Confucian culture to buttress its importance. It is hailed, for example, by Gan
Yang (2007), a renowned public intellectual, as the “new reform consensus” and a
major step toward the establishment of a “Confucian socialist republic.” The harmonious society is now a key political concept in addition to the three representatives.
The CCP party congresses have always been the most ideology-charged moments
in the past. Yet, the revival of performance legitimacy was also clearly manifested in
the 17th CCP Congress held in October 2007. During the entire party congress, which
I closely followed while in China, the speeches of the congress participants and the
news reports were filled with such slogans aimed at boosting the government’s performance legitimacy as three representatives, harmonious society, anticorruption,
enhancing governmental capacity, reform and open door, solving environmental problems, and diminishing regional economic disparities. Even in Hu Jintao’s speech to
the members of the 17th CCP congress, which was supposed to be the keynote statement of the party congress, there was little ideological preaching. Although Marxism
was still mentioned in Hu’s speech, it was no longer associated with a utopian project
but with the concept of “Sinified Marxism.” Hu’s speech stressed that the three representatives embodied a new stage of the Sinification of Marxist theory, which clearly
reveals that the so-called Sinified Marxism actually means good governance.
Obviously, the CCP is trying to get rid of the ideological burden of Marxism, redefining it so that it can now be used to justify the performance legitimacy on which the
regime increasingly depends.
Performance Legitimacy and China’s Political Development
Performance legitimacy pushes China’s top officials to work harder, behave like
moral leaders of the society, and bring measurable benefits to the people. A common
perception is that officials of an authoritarian regime tend to work much less diligently
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428 American Behavioral Scientist
for the people they rule because of the lack of checks and balances in the political
system. Current China, however, seems to be an exception to the rule. Although quite
a few Chinese officials at times have been implicated in behind-the-scenes corruption,
the majority also work very hard, perhaps much harder than, for example, their
American counterparts. When I met with Chinese officials, I was frequently solicited
for business opportunities or new ideas and “advanced” (by which they actually always
mean “Western”) way of governance. Their eagerness to perform well, superficially or
substantively, is there for all to see. This has been, among other things, a major factor
behind China’s ongoing economic miracle. Within only 15 years, China has virtually
turned itself from one of the poorest countries in the world to the world’s center of
economic growth. Since 1980, China accounted for 75 percent of poverty reduction in
the developing world (Source: http://www.finfacts.com/irelandbusinessnews/publish/
article_10003611.shtml). Most urban Chinese, especially those in coastal regions, now
live a life that they were even unable to dream about back in the early 1980s.
Yet, although performance legitimacy has encouraged officials to promote
China’s economic development, it is also a major source of potential political crisis.
Performance legitimacy worked well during imperial China because it was supported by Confucianism (D. Zhao, 2006). Today, communist ideology, with which
the CCP is still somehow associated, is a liability rather than a source of legitimacy.
Government performance stands alone as the sole source of legitimacy in China. If
the state becomes unable to live up to popular expectations, the government and
regime will be in crisis.
Performance legitimacy also sufficed in imperial China because the state’s role in
society was limited. In imperial China the state was oriented to maintenance rather
than economic development. Today, the Chinese state will not be able to sustain its
rule based solely on its performance simply because it will promise to deliver too
much welfare to too many people. No economy can sustain China’s current rate of
development over the long run. Even if China’s current economic growth rate could
be sustained for several decades, this would not secure the regime’s political stability.
Without ideological and legal-electoral legitimacy, the Chinese government has to
act paternalistically. For instance, many underprivileged Chinese indeed have benefited from the social programs under the new harmonious society policy. Because
these gains have not been attained through political struggle, it is difficult for the
beneficiaries to have a clear sense of their own efficacy, let alone of the power and
interests of others groups in Chinese society. In the end, such handouts are likely to
be taken for granted and will set the stage for the emergence of new demands that
will be more difficult to satisfy.15
It could be argued that people will blame the government in any kind of regime
when social problems become serious. However, if a regime is based on legal-electoral
legitimacy (as in a multiparty democracy),16 grievances can be allayed by a change of
government. Because the system always entails the possibility of an alternative government, this dissuades opposition to the regime. The current Chinese state offers no
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Zhao / Performance Legitimation in China 429
such alternative. Moreover, because the state relies heavily on its performance, any
challenge to the moral and economic performance of top officials or specific state
policies directly challenges the regime’s legitimacy. This situation offers extremely
limited opportunities for compromise between citizens and the government.17
Currently, the Chinese regime still enjoys a high level of performance legitimacy
because most Chinese still have a clear memory of the chaotic politics and miserable
experiences during Mao’s era and thus greatly treasure the more regulated politics
and much better life they now share. In another 20 years or so, the people with firsthand experience of the Cultural Revolution will either have died or grown very old
and by then the Chinese will take affluence and political stability for granted. The
regime will face serious challenges if it does not shift its primary basis of legitimacy
to a more durable basis. In short, the return of the several-thousand-year-long tradition of performance legitimacy has been so far a blessing for the Chinese people, but
it may not be so for the current regime in the long run.
Notes
1. Because legal-electoral legitimacy has democracy as its ideological base, one may suppose that
there are similarities between legal-electoral and ideological legitimacy. However, they are different in
two aspects. First, democracy promises only a procedure to select leaders, not a concrete future. Most
important, in my definition, legal-electoral legitimacy emphasizes procedure, not ideology. Although
legal-electoral legitimacy can be justified by democratic doctrines, over time it is the commonly accepted
procedure of leadership selection, not the value system, that legitimizes such a state. I want to stress that
stability is an important feature of legal-electoral legitimacy. Because election itself constitutes the basis
of this form of legitimacy, a government can rule such a society without a grand ideology and policy
mistakes and scandals can lead to governmental change without a legitimacy crisis. In this system, elite
conflicts and electoral changes still systematically provide opportunities to political outsiders, which lead
to conflicting opening of society or democratic consolidation (Rueschemeyer, Stephens, & Stephens,
1992). However, this extension of pluralism encourages individuals to organize themselves on a sectional
or sectoral basis that further lowers the possibilities of mobilization on the national level. Therefore, if we
treat Western electoral democracy as a culture, its “hegemony” is pervasive.
2. The text contains several important Western Zhou documents that many historians consider as
creditable.
3. Fu (1951) reported that the phrase Mandate of Heaven appears 73 times in the 12 Western Zhou
documents collected in the Book of Documents (1980).
4. Xia was supposedly the first Chinese dynasty. However, we know very little about its history
except some mythological accounts and unearthed artifacts that date back to that era.
5. To be clear, the nature of the Chinese states differed from one dynasty to another. The dynasties
of nomadic or seminomadic origins such as Liao (907-1125 ce), Jin (1115-1234 ce), Yuan (1279-1368 ce),
and Qing (1644-1911 ce) had many differences in comparison with the dynasties of Han Chinese origins
such as the Han, Song, and Ming dynasties (Crossley, 1999; Frank, 1987; Perdue, 2005). Moreover, the
early dynasties such as the Han and Tang also differed from the dynasties of later imperial China such as
the Yuan, Ming, and Qing. Yet, in terms of the basis of state legitimacy, all these dynasties shared a strong
performance dimension. It also has to be pointed out that performance legitimacy is only an ideal type.
No state ever bases its legitimacy on a single ground. In the beginning of almost every Chinese dynasty,
for example, the rulers tended to invoke some kind of supernatural aura to justify their rule. Yet, it was
also a general tendency in imperial China that such mystical aura faded very quickly and came to be
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430 American Behavioral Scientist
replaced by a mixture of the tradition- and performance-based legitimation (Bastid, 1987). By the Song
Dynasty, as Gernet (1987) noted, the importance of the magical and religious justification of state power
had further diminished even at the beginning of each new dynasty.
6. All Men Are Brothers is a Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 ce) novel that romantically depicted the
lives and activities of a group of Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127 ce) rebel leaders. It is one of the four
most famous novels in premodern China.
7. For example, this is how Fang (1990), one of the most renowned dissidents during the 1980s,
recalled his personal experience in the 1950s:
Immediately after Liberation and in the fifties I firmly believed in Marxism. When I joined the
CCP [Chinese Communist Party] in 1955, I was convinced that Marxism should show the way in
every field and that the Communist Party was absolutely good. . . . When I was expelled from the
Party during the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1958, I made a sincere self-criticism. I was convinced
that I had wronged the Party. (pp. 208-209)
Many autobiographies written in English by Chinese now living in the United States have given similar
accounts (e.g., J. Chang, 1991; Liang, 1984).
8. It must be made clear that most Chinese only partially knew about the tragedies that happened
during Mao’s era because of the state control of information. Nevertheless, they must have seen what
happened around them and somehow learned what happened elsewhere by the word of mouth. Many of
them were also victims of the Maoist policies themselves.
9. This sentence is from a play about an upright official in imperial China who risked his career to
serve his subjects. The play became extremely popular as soon as it came out.
10. During the 1989 pro-democracy movement, the retired or semiretired CCP veterans who otherwise lived in different cities rushed back to Beijing to support a hardliner approach to the student movement. For example, this is what Yun Chen (1990), the number two veteran in the CCP ranks, told his
comrades in a speech justifying the government’s hardliner approach to the protesters: “Everyone knows
that the Chinese revolution went through decades of hard struggle and saw the sacrifice of more than
twenty million people, and only then was the People’s Republic of China founded” (p. 331-332).
11. The Four Cardinal Principles include adherence to socialism, adherence to the leadership of the Party,
adherence to Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong thought, and adherence to the dictatorship of the proletariat. They were included in the preamble of the Chinese Constitution as the ideological basis of the state
and were frequently and actively used by the state as the basis of their arguments and actions against
unorthodox writings and activities.
12. The phrase rule of virtue was first used by Jiang Zemin in 2000 in a CCP propaganda conference.
According to the authoritative comment in People’s Daily, the virtues include work ethics, social ethics,
and family ethics. It was created by the CCP based on lessons learned from Chinese history.
13. Jiang was the president of China and general secretary of the CCP between 1989 and 2002, and
Hu was promoted to the same position in 2002 after Jiang’s retirement.
14. From, among other sources, the People’s Daily (Internet edition).
15. Let me just provide one example to illustrate this point. A few years ago, urban Chinese were still
living in very congested homes, but today living in a modern apartment has become commonplace in
urban China. Yet, this great improvement in housing does not make those who can afford to buy a modern
apartment happy. Last year a cab driver in Beijing told me that if Mao were still alive and were to organize
a rebellion, he would immediately join it. After some probing, I learned that the driver was upset because
he had just got a 20-year mortgage for a very well-located three-bedroom two-bath apartment in Beijing.
He told me angrily:
Twenty years. Twenty years! My apartment would be taken away by the bank if anything goes
wrong on my side in the next 20 years. What kind of system is this! What kind of government is
this! Rebellion is the only way out in this kind of situation.
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Zhao / Performance Legitimation in China 431
Similar feelings that may sound strange to Western readers are widespread among Chinese for various
reasons, and many Chinese these days who take a 20-year bank loan are likely to pay off the mortgage in
less than 5 years.
16. Here I assume that all the political forces accept the same rule of the game and compete only for
the office not the ideology.
17. In the same issue of this journal, Rothstein argues for the importance of performance legitimacy and
convincingly concludes that in many instances electoral democracy can lead to low efficiency. At the same
time, nondemocratic decision-making mechanisms and institutions such as bureaucracies, professions,
interest groups, and lotteries can provide greater fairness and efficiency than purely democratic institutions.
I completely endorse his argument and see our arguments as complementary rather than contradictory. Yet
at the same time, I must stress that the efficiency of the nondemocratic decision-making rules proposed by
Rothstein may only work well when these institutions are autonomous enough to resist state intervention.
This kind of institutional environment is best provided by legal-electoral democracy. The decision-making
procedures and institutions that Rothstein recommends are all potentially good legitimation tools only when
they are backed up by a state that already enjoys legal-electoral legitimacy. They are unlikely to function
well under an authoritarian regime, however. Moreover, even if an authoritarian regime could enhance its
performance by implementing better decision-making rules and institutions, the regime’s political stability
is still at risk. When people enjoy the “fairness” rendered by the decision-making procedures suggested by
Rothstein, they will naturally demand the same fairness principle in selecting their leaders.
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Dingxin Zhao is professor of sociology at the University of Chicago. His research covers the areas of
social movements, nationalism, historical sociology, and economic development. His interests also extend
to sociological theory and methodology. His publications have appeared in journals such as American
Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Sociology, Mobilization, China
Quarterly, and Problems of Post-Communism. He has published an awards-winning book titled Power of
Tiananmen (2001) and two books in Chinese (Social and Political Movements, 2006, and Eastern Zhou
Warfare and the Rise of the Confucian-Legalist State, 2006). He is working on a project that, based on a
comparison with the European experience, tries to explain China’s precocious rise of bureaucracy around
7th bce, unification in 221 bce, the emergence of Confucian state around 140 bce, and the pattern of the
Chinese past in the last two millenniums.
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