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Mao's Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance . Edited by Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth J. Perry . Cambridge, MA, and London : Harvard University Asia Center , 2011. viii + 320 pp. $24.95 ISBN 978-0-674-06063-0
Book Reviews
Mao's Invisible Hand is a collection of ten essays discussing Maoist-style governance strategies in contemporary Chinese policy-making. The contributing authors are primarily qualitative political scientists, but perspectives from history, law and communications are also represented. I would strongly recommend this book to social scientists studying contemporary and Maoist China. Contemporary China scholarship describing the modern influence of Maoism is sparse and Mao's Invisible Hand helps fill this gap.
The lead chapter, written by Elizabeth Perry and Sebastian Heilmann, argues that policy-making in the PRC is influenced by the CCP's revolutionary origins. Born as a guerrilla movement, the revolutionary CCP could not apply a rule-bound approach to governance. Instead, policy was inherently local and situational, emerging from ideology and guerrilla leaders' goal-oriented and tactical experimentation. The modern CCP has sought to preserve the ruthless adaptability of a revolutionary organization. Perry and Heilmann argue that this flexibility has helped the CCP transition from Marxist ideology to economic pragmatism. Under Maoism and under reform, the CCP has consistently stressed the experimental search for local models of socialist development. Reform-era search objectives have shifted dramatically and the celebrated models of recent decades bear little resemblance to those of...