China - Comparing Environmental Policies in 16 Countries - page 252

was hard to do in a country at least 90% rural. In 1927 the party promoted
riots in Shanghai by workers, who briefly established a commune. This
failed and was quickly put down by the Republican forces. Soon after that
the Nationalists in Guangzhou turned on their Communist members,
whom they had encouraged to join only a few years before. Thereafter, the
Communists redirected their efforts and their ideology toward the peas-
ants. While living in Yan'an after the Long March, Mao devoted much study
and writing to reconciling this rural basis with the words of Karl Marx.
The People's Republic is, in theory, a unitary government, not a
federation. Authority is supposed to come directly from Beijing. There are
22 provinces, five autonomous regions, and four municipalities. Provinces
may be as large as Guangdong, with 95 million people. Sichuan in the
southwest has 87 million people. In turn, the provinces are divided into
counties. Beijing and Shanghai are independent municipalities. Hong
Kong and Macao became Special Administrative Regions after their return
from Britain and Portugal. Although the country is supposedly unitary, in
fact the various provinces and municipalities can often act autonomously.
Some have described the system as decaying centralism. On the other
hand, the so-called Autonomous Regions like Tibet and Xinjiang are not
really autonomous. Because of fear of ethnic independence movements,
they are strictly governed by Beijing.
In the early days of the People's Republic, and again toward the end of the
Cultural Revolution, the People's Liberation Army was supreme. Mao was
the Army commander from the time of the Long March until his death, and
his successor, Deng Xiaoping, was a commanding general. More recently
control has shifted to civilians and to those with backgrounds in engineer-
ing. While the Army has 2½ million troops, its power is less than its size
would suggest. The technocrats in Beijing work very hard to neutralize its
power. For example, the commander of one military base is not permitted
to simply telephone or visit the commander of a neighboring base. They
must communicate through Beijing. This restriction is to prevent the two
of them from plotting against the government. On a different dimension,
cooperation between major state-owned enterprises is not always encour-
aged so, for example, provinces compete in manufacturing automobiles.
The People's Republic of China has many of the outward forms of dem-
ocratic government copied from the West. The national level has a legis-
lature called the People's Congress that meets annually in the Great Hall
of the People on Tiananmen Square in Beijing. It has nearly 3000 mem-
bers supposedly elected to represent all parts of China. In addition there