Since the death of Mao the Chinese Communist Party has initiated extensive political reform, including strengthening the socialist legal system and reviving the system of People's Congresses. These reforms are significant, but occur within the Leninist state. Leninist states are distinguished from bureaucratic-authoritarian states and pluralist states by their relative autonomy from society. Their extensive organization dominates society, and they can mount policy initiatives with minimal regard for their social consequences. However, important limits to the autonomy of Leninist states can be understood in terms of Max Weber's three types of rulership. The strength of Leninist states is usually understood in terms of charismatic authority, i.e., ideology, and rational-legal authority, i.e., organization. However, the state's domination of ideology and organization isolates it from society. This leads to spectacular policy failures following the lack of feedback on the consequences of state policy, and generates informal patrimonial or patron-client organization as society and lower-level cadres attempt to adjust state policy to local conditions. While some accounts portray the Cultural Revolution as an attack on the state, investigating the Shanghai Commune and the Nanjing Incident demonstrates that Mao attempted to manipulate state power to bring about a charismatic revival of revolutionary virtue. Political campaigns mobilized social interests--demonstrating that society still exists--but ferociously repressed these interests, further alienating the state from society. Following Mao's death, a reform leadership struggled to bridge the gap between state and society, but first had to redefine key terms in the language of Chinese politics. This created opportunities for society to assert autonomy, but eventually the state re-asserted Leninist definitions. Subsequent reforms to the People's Congresses and the legal system created important channels of communication, but can also be seen as attempts to strengthen the state's rational-legal organization. The Leninist context of these reforms made informal patrimonial resistance by lower-level cadres inevitable. While the current reforms are more hopeful than the policies of the Cultural Revolution, there are serious limits to the kind of democracy that will result.
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