4 { China’s Quest
were linked by Mao and his minions with Moscow. Even during the post-Mao
era there have been manifestations of this domestic-international linkage.
In the early 1980s, Deng Xiaoping launched a campaign targeting Japan’s
history of aggression as a way of placating opposition within the Politburo to
the accumulating consequences of China’s opening. Several years later, con-
servative opponents of moderate Secretary General Hu Yaobang in the 1980s
charged him with weakness in dealing with Japan to undermine his posi-
tion. Still later, campaigns of hostility toward the United States were used to
anathematize liberal democratic ideas espoused by the United States and in-
timidate people from advocating those ideas. As Skocpol points out, Leninist
parties and regimes are very good at mass campaigns mobilizing popular ac-
tion and passions. The adaptation of such campaigns to foreign relations has
become a key survival mechanism of the PRC.
Legitimacy is another idea useful for understanding linkages between
PRC foreign relations and domestic politics. Legitimacy refers to the wor-
thiness of political authority as recognized by those subject to that authority,
that is, the willingness of citizens to give loyalty and obedience to the ruling
authority. Thus defined, legitimacy refers not merely to de facto acceptance
of ruling power and the existing political order, but to the normative reasons
given for being loyal to that ruling power.^9 During the Enlightenment, the
concept of legitimacy was democratized, making it congruent with notions
of popular sovereignty and shifting the focus from law or accordance with
some divine or natural moral order to assent by the citizens of a polity. Max
Weber further outlined three sources of legitimacy: tradition, charisma of the
leader, and a rational-legal basis. During China’s Mao era, the legitimacy of
CCP rule came from the charisma of Chairman Mao plus an ideological but
rational-legal claim that China was building socialism, moving toward the
transition to communism in accord with “scientific laws of historical materi-
alism” while re-establishing China as a great, if revolutionary, power. During
the post-Mao period, legitimacy claims have been rational-legal: raising stan-
dards of living during the 1978–1989 period, and defending the nation against
predatory powers during the post-1989 era.
A paradigm proposed by MIT professor Lucian Pye in 1967 provides
a framework that can encompass CCP legitimacy claims of both the Mao
and post-Mao periods.^10 As explicated by Pye, Chinese political culture cen-
ters around a deep-rooted belief in the grandeur and greatness of China’s
three-millennia-long imperial era, a period when Chinese thought of them-
selves as the very definition of civilization. Juxtaposed to this living recollec-
tion of China’s past grandeur is China’s low status in the contemporary world,
a situation which Chinese attributed to the myriad injuries inflicted on China
during the “Century of National Humiliation” extending from the start of the
first Opium War in 1839 to the founding of the PRC in 1949. The actual main
reason for foreign disesteem of China had to do, Pye argued, with China’s