Wang Liping
Federalism and the World Order (in chinese)
Beijing, Beijing University Press, 2000

A federal system of government is adopted by almost all the large countries in the world, with one notable exception: China, the largest of all. Why is it so? May this change in the future? Thanks to the country's recent accession to the WTO and increasing international visibility, these questions are achieving a new, global significance.

"Federalism and World Order" is among the first extended studies of federalism to be published in Chinese by an author from the People's Republic. Wang Liping is a young post-doc from the Department of Political Studies of Beijing University, a respected centre of learning which is also traditionally seen as a think-tank of the ruling Party. It is an ambitious 300-page work that builds on a one-year research visit by Dr Wang to the Department of Political Science of the University of California at Berkeley, and touches on issues as diverse as the origin of federalism in the Greek city states and the possibility of African unification.

The Chinese Communist Party has chosen a set of new leaders at the 16th National Congress in November, and the new formal government line-up will be announced at the national parliamentary plenum in March. It is an open secret that some of the new leaders have their own agendas for change, up to and possibly including political reform. China's current political culture does not encourage open statements of intent or unambiguous political campaigning, so it is difficult to know the real thoughts hiding behind the new faces. Hu Jintao, the new Secretary General, is acknowledged to be in favour of increased accountability and the rule of law. Some Pekinologists have even suggested that Zeng Qinghong, former Secretary General Jiang Zemin's right-hand man and a prominent power broker in the new hierarchy, may be in fact a closet admirer of the US federal constitution. In these times of change, as usual with a society as old and as complex as China, unconfirmed and sometimes even contradictory rumours abound.

Whatever the balances of power may be behind the red walls of Zhongnanhai (China's Kremlin), federalism is a subject of increasing interest in the much wider community of intellectuals that have always been receptive to trends in the wider world. For China, reforms of some kind might by now have become a necessity. The challenges that China's government will have to master in the next two years are exceptional and unique, and the country's leaders at this time may find themselves to be particularly in need of new ideas.

The book gives a detailed historical overview of federalism, and hints to its relevance to current affairs. "As the countries of the world gradually draw closer, both politically and economically, the political situation of one country inevitably influences the political situation of [...] the world as a whole. In this sense, no matter whether the principles of federalism are applied domestically or serve as guiding principles for regional, supranational integration or unification, the theory of federalism is fundamentally relevant to the political order of the world."

A common misconception, both in China and elsewhere, that "federalism is an euphemism for decentralization", is dispelled, and the author states on the contrary that "federalism historically arises as an answer to a need for unifying a polity; as such, it focuses more on how much power has to be placed in the centre, rather than on how much power has to be devolved away from it." For example, "the founding of the United States of America was a move from a situation where power was diffused to one in which it was relatively more centralized." In other words, federalism is not a blueprint for the degeneration of an existing central authority, but rather a sophisticated method for bringing together the members of a diverse community.

Wang argues that "federalism, as it also aims at unifying a country, is a historical descendant of 19th century nationalism, that had the objective of producing a unified nation state." She writes: "Nationalism is itself a product of history and, in fact, it served the purpose of gradually increasing the size of the community of shared interests; however, save for Utopian societies, this increase in size is not without limits, and the nation state is to this day the ultimate fortress of these shared interests." (Chapter 2: "Federalism as a special manifestation of nationalism").

Of the world's countries, only a small percentage adopts a federal system of government: the book surveys 28 of these, and notes that as many as 21 of them have experienced colonialism in the recent past. "Federalism, as a rational endeavour to build up a unified community from many different local centres, has gone far beyond the traditional theory of the nation state", and has developed an unusual ability to deal with complex societies and internal diversity. The social, economic and political differences that arose from years of colonial rule in many countries of the developing world, Wang argues, was just what made federalism almost an obligatory choice for these countries in the post-colonial era.

The author identifies seven elements that historically have made the choice of a federal structure of government more likely. These essentially boil down to the common perception of an external threat, a favourable economic environment, the existence of social and political similarities and the action of political leaders and the media.

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This sustained effort to extract the essence of the federal experience in many countries and regions of the world at different times in history naturally leads the author to look at its potential uses for today's world. In particular, she is ready to admit that the processes of regional integration present unique and new challenges to the classical theory of federalism.

The chapter on European integration is a very detailed, self-contained history of European political thought and of European institutions. The most important cases made in the 20th century for the political unification of the continent, from Kalergi's pan-European movement and Rossi and Spinelli's Ventotene Manifesto all the way to Joschka Fischer's talk given at Berlin's Humboldt University on May 12, 2000, are outlined.

Wang sees the different approaches and interests of European political élites as a formidable obstacle towards the establishment of a true federation. "... in Europe, on one hand, within each state, the collective sense of belonging to a common entity is extremely well developed, so that European countries have been the first in the world to give birth to democracy; however, this sense of communion is almost entirely lacking between different nationalities, so that Europe has known conflicts and confrontations for most of its recorded history." In particular, she believes that Europe lacks a consensual élite, with a sufficient degree of internal cohesion and persuasion power to bring about a constitutional process similar to the one that established the United States of America.

This vision of Europe is in a sense typical of those who are outside of Europe, and see it most importantly as the cradle of the nation state. Whether Europe will be able to overcome the burden of its own history, is a question that the author of "Federalism and World Order" raises several times but on which she remains mostly uncommitted. By giving a detailed and up-to-date account of the history of the idea of Europe, and by hinting at the relevance of federalism to this question, Wang does however a good service to China's understanding of Europe at a crucial time.

For a foreign readership, the most interesting chapter must be the one on federalism in China. Since the decline and fall of the Qing dynasty at the beginning of the 20th century, China has gone through many turbulent stages of reform, and the option of choosing a federal system of government has come up several times.

Sun Yat-Sen, the father of modern republican China, revered on both sides of the Taiwan Straits, was a strong advocate of a federal system of government right up to the revolution of 1911. At the founding of the "Revive China Society" in 1894 he called for a "US-style union government" to replace the imperial system. However, at the time the focus was more on revolutionary action than on theoretical debate, and this particular issue was dealt with only in general terms.

After the revolution, the discussion became tangled up in factional struggle. In the words of famed US sinologist John K. Fairbanks, "the 1911 Revolution was to a good extent a struggle for power between Beijing and the provinces." According to the opponents of federalism at the time, Wang recalls, "all the countries in the world with a federal system of government, like Germany and the US, had first been divided, and then only later united - in other words, they first formed as individual states, then, only when they had a need to unify did they form a federal union. China, on the contrary, has long been a unitary state (...) They also believed that the country was too backward, and too easily prone to instability if a federal system were set up too quickly." Similar arguments were readily used at the time also to argue in favour of restoring the empire (the country not being "ready" for republican government and democracy), and echoes of this gradualistic logic still recur today whenever the subject of political reform is brought up.

In the three decades before the Communist revolution, there were some isolated attempts at creating loose political federations from the semi-independent provincial governments that were sprouting up all over the country. After the founding of the republics of Hunan and Zhejiang in 1921, and the beginning of constitutional processes in the provinces of Sichuan and Guangdong, local independence movements started up in Yunnan, Guangxi, Guizhou, Jiangsu, Jiangxi and Hubei. At this time, the famous revolutionary and intellectual Zhang Taiyan "took a step further and proposed to form a Confederation of Provincial Governments of China to be made up of representatives of each provincial government." Eventually, the regional power plays of the warlords and an increasing consensus on the need for a unitary government to mantain stability and national unity made Zhang abandon the project.

"In fact, the leaders of these [early] federal movements went too far in their rejection of central authority, to the extent that to them a federation was not really suitable for China, and that only a confederation which gave the centre almost no power whatsoever would do." Wang argues that this precedent lies at the foundation of many modern misconceptions about federalism in China.

Any discussion of China and federalism after 1949 arguably requires a stretch of the imagination. In a country where the ruling Communist party runs a nomenklatura system and adheres to Lenin's principles of "democratic centralism" and party supremacy, a federal system of power balances is a formal exercise. The author's analysis of the constitutional provisions that allow for minimal minority representation at local level, while interesting, inevitably leave some fundamental questions unanswered. The formula "One country, two systems", that was originally proposed as a blueprint for reunification with Taiwan and later adopted in 1997 for Hong Kong and in 1999 for Macau, also tends to be a statement of intent rather than an effective constitutional arrangement in the European sense.

More significantly, Wang argues against a federal system of government for China in the near future, and concludes that "a transition from a unitary to a federalist system is a fundamental change in the relationship between local and central government, that leads to an increase of the actual cost of safeguarding national unity. This is something that the Chinese government cannot tolerate." This argument resembles that made by opponents of federalism in the first half of the century: that since China had been under a strong unitary government before, changing to a federal system may only encourage centrifugal tendencies and be detrimental to stability.

As open discussions of political reform have been essentially non-existent throughout the '90s, it is hard to assess whether this belief enjoys unanimous or broad support within the ruling élite, or whether there are any alternative views. In any case, the theory and practice of federalism will reach a wider audience thanks to Dr Wang's work, and, as the country as a whole gradually opens up and deals with the possibilities of reform, these issues will hopefully give rise to a more informed intellectual debate both within the Chinese-speaking world and in the larger global community.