This book is an empirically rich illumination of Carl Schmitt's notion that “the political” rests ultimately on a friend/enemy distinction. It depicts “the birth, life and death cycle” of this ever-shifting dynamic in modern Chinese history (303–4), through the lens of the coupling of the political with policing. The result is a tale that must enhance the reputation of this already-respected political scientist.
Schmitt's conception of politics aligns readily with Mao's own preoccupation with the friend/enemy distinction. But, as Dutton argues, Mao's question was “never theoretical. It was a visceral, existential, and lived question of intensity. The communists therefore responded to it from the heart, not from the mind” (32). Where history complicates, politics—especially Chinese politics—simplifies: Chinese “commitment politics” was always accompanied by mass political passion. The Party constantly had to mobilize, harness and simultaneously tame this political passion.
Any reader familiar with Chinese politics will be aware of its violent and tumultuous nature. The question is always how to explain it. Many Sinologists treat political campaigns as histories of intra-Party factionalism and personal rivalries. The recent publication of Chang and Halliday's Mao: The Unknown Story (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005) is in many ways the latest example, focusing on the psychology of Mao himself to understand Chinese politics. But in Dutton's hands, the viciousness of Chinese politics goes beyond personalities or factionalism: politics instead becomes a technique and a way of life. “Commitment politics” meant that political purges, far from immoral, would be perceived at the time precisely as moral. The more enemies killed, the more revolutionaries would be saved to fight for the revolution. As one Party slogan put it, “you die, I live” (nisi wohuo). Students of Michel Foucault will doubtless recognize the logic of “make live, and let die,” the Foucauldian formulation that defines the bio-political. In short, Dutton is exposing a dynamic that was not unique to China.
Each of the book's five chapters follows a period in the history of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) politics and policing. Friend/enemy politics are analyzed in each period, driving home the central message that they have been the norm throughout, despite intermittent relaxation.
Beginning with the Party's brush with extinction in 1927, the party's security forces have had the vital task of policing the boundary between the Party's friends and enemies. It was an ever-shifting boundary, and for a long time the enemies of the revolution, and later the regime, were “the enemies within.” The identification of particular enemies and friends always tended towards coerced confessions and subjective, telltale stories. The result was almost always a politics of excess.
The Jiangxi Soviet saw the birth of Communist policing and of “commitment politics” (chapter 1). Isolated from each other, these bases were surrounded by enemies, and thus by the fear of betrayal and death (28). The Political Protection Bureau was charged with hunting down enemies, almost all of whom were “from within.” A politics of friend and enemy, pushed to excess, necessarily led to terror.
The Yan'an period is known for its political moderation in the face of the Japanese invasion of China (chapter 2). The friend/enemy boundary becomes objective, visible and primarily national. But even during the United Front, the constant fear of Guomindang infiltration remained, whether real or imagined. Moderate and radical politics and policing coexisted in Yan'an, in a tense dialectic.
When the Party moved to government, binary politics was reoriented to consolidating the new regime (chapters 3 and 4). The Party and the military continued to lead policing work. But mass-line organizations, work units and neighbourhood committees also helped. Popular policing campaigns lasted right into the 1950s, and indeed reached their most extravagant excess during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
This mass-based policing style was flexible, spontaneous and radical: by comparison, the Soviet style was portrayed as rational, professional and moderate. Both models had their supporters within the Party and its security organs. Each would be used, sometimes in combination, but mass politics and popular policing dominated. They involved mass-line organizations and the masses themselves in policing. This in turn meant that nothing could escape politics. Even in their life world, politics consumed people's lives.
In the current reform period, binary politics are officially discredited, and the overall national task has shifted from political to economic development (chapter 5). Corresponding to the official shift to “economics in command,” the Chinese police force has attempted to distance itself from the Party in order to become a more conventional law-enforcement agency. Statistically, political crimes have been in decline; a de-coupling of politics and policing seems to be underway, even if popular policing continues to be an appealing anti-crime technique. However, in the market economy, popular policing can no longer draw on political activists for its base, but must work instead on the principle of contract. As the Chinese government de-legitimizes antagonistic politics, stability becomes its overriding priority, a priority that itself may prove to be stifling. The question that remains is this: How to envision a politics permitting contestation without permitting the trap of the friend/enemy distinction? Over five decades since the birth of “commitment politics” in defence of a Communist revolution, Dutton states that we may be witnessing “the demise of the political” (300), brought on by the market economy. History does have its ironies.
Evaluating this important book will be the work of years: it makes a unique structuralist contribution in a field too often dominated by court politics and political psychology. It clearly explains the urgent priority that current Chinese leaders give to deradicalized politics, and to technocratic and market based problem solving. But its biopolitical themes give the book a significance well beyond the study of Chinese politics. To cite but one example, many themes resonate powerfully with the politics and policing of the current “war on terror.” Anyone concerned about the implications of friend/enemy politics for the fate of democracy and popular politics should read this book.
A final caveat is in order. The cardinal contribution of the book to scholarship is its rich empirical material in an area where few scholars can ever tread. Dutton had rare access to China's Public Security officials and to highly classified materials. This creates a methodological problem that may leave some scholars uneasy. So classified are these materials, that, as Dutton puts it, they are not even mentionable. He thus asks his readers to trust the veracity of these materials for the safety of his Chinese colleagues and friends: another irony in China's continued political evolution.
