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lipset[e84,jmc]		The anomaly

Dear Marty:

	I have been continuing to think about your China trip report,
because something about it struck me as anomalous.  When we last spoke,
I still couldn't say precisely what it was.  A few days ago I saw an
elderly Chinese gentleman on campus wearing a gabardine Mao suit,
and this finally crystallized my idea.

	You are a sociologist and you met with sociologists in China.
However, you don't mention discussing with them the most striking
feature of the sociology of the countries of real socialism.  This
is the actual structure of privilege in these societies.  One can,
of course, treat privilege in these societies as a debating point,
scoring off the Marxists, who claim to be creating an equalitarian
society.  This is fine for winning political arguments, and this is
often worth doing.  However, once we have
noticed that China and the Soviet Union are not the societies
Marxists predicted, there is a lot more that must be done in order
to understand them sociologically.  Moreover, it seems to me that
the kind of methodology you have applied to American phenomena
are relevant.

	The man-in-the-street common sense sociology approach to
existing socialist societies notes the discrepancy between slogan
and reality and concludes that the slogans are a complete fake
and play no role whatsoever in determining who gets what.  Emigres
from these societies and dissidents in them rarely get beyond
this view of it in their conversation.  Indeed it is a reasonable
first approximation.  (It seems to me that you have used the
Marxist model as a first approximation and then measured the
deviations from it.  Anyone like me, and, I presume, you, whose
education and thoughts about socialism begin with the Marxist
model is inclined to think this way.  One then reacts with
indignation or with sympathy or both to the deviations from
the model.

	I cannot put all these ideas together coherently, but here
are some points.

	1. It is unfortunate that you or your companions didn't seem
to have raised the study of the existing structure of privilege
with the Chinese sociologists.  I would expect many of them to have
thought about it as individuals but that it would take great
courage, and perhaps foolhardiness, to propose it as a subject
for scientific study.

	2. Some of the journalists, e.g. Fox Butterfield, have
found out about the 26 formal grades of cadre that existed under
Mao and tried to uncover a little bit about the correlation
of responsibility and privilege with grade.  They don't even
mention the numbers in each grade and the mobility among grades.

	3. The nature of the feudal-like subvassal-vassal-lord relationships
is important.  How do these relationships evolve with time?  To
what extent do objective personnel searches exist.  It is a
striking feature of Western (especially of American) corporate
culture that often the highest official of an organization
may be selected by a search that often ends up with a person that
none of the members of the board of directors even knew
beforehand.  In principal this should also be true of socialist
societies, but is it?

	4. I seems likely that the ideology is still
relevant at least to the extent of providing a battleground
in the struggles for power.  However, this requires verification.
What we observe is that the overthrow and disgrace of an official
is usually accompanied by a statement of ideological fault, but
it isn't clear what role ideological arguments play
in the actual power struggles.

	5. Certainly there is a real ideological change in China
since the death of Mao, and this has had great importance
in reviving the economy and the society generally.  However, we
can ask how Deng's success depended on ideological argument, experience
with the Maoist disasters, and his ability to form coalitions
with other people who were or who expected to be on the wrong
side of the Gang of Four.

	Let me apologize for stating such definite views in an
area with which I am rather unfamiliar.

	I am most curious to know what would be the Chinese
social scientists' reaction to proposals to study the above
phenomena --- either by themselves or by outsiders.