The American Spectator : Party Animals

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Party Animals

By Joseph A. Harriss from the October 2010 issue

How does the Chinese Communist Party retain its implacable rule over one-fifth of humanity? Richard McGregor explains.

The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers
By Richard McGregor
(Harper, 302 pages, $27.99)

The question is, how do they do it? They starved some 35 million Chinese in the late 1950s during Mao's disastrous Great Leap Forward. They threw the country into social, economic, and political chaos in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution terror purges of the 1960s and '70s. They massacred pro-democracy student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in June 1989. Today their arbitrary arrests and denial of free speech and association continue. So how does the Chinese Communist Party, despite methodical oppression and denial of basic human rights, retain its implacable rule over one-fifth of humanity? With the implosion of the Soviet Union, total rejection of communism throughout Eastern Europe, and the theoretical end of history, the era was supposed to be over when a closed cabal of corrupt, self-serving goons could dominate a country so vast and diverse. Much less create, in only three decades, the world's second-largest economy and a geopolitical rival to the U.S.

Solving this conundrum is the task Richard McGregor has set himself in The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers. A Financial Times correspondent who reported from China for 20 years, McGregor calls on his long experience and solid reporting to produce this illuminating, detailed depiction of the hidden moving parts of the world's largest political machine. Along the way, McGregor is tough-minded enough to give the devil his due. "The Chinese communist system is, in many ways, rotten, costly, corrupt and often dysfunctional," he writes. "Somehow, it has outlasted, outsmarted, outperformed or simply outlawed its critics, flummoxing the pundits who have predicted its demise at numerous junctures. As a political machine alone, the Party is a phenomenon of awesome and unique dimensions."

It is also certifiably paranoid. Latest proof is its banning of McGregor's book this summer. Although no official list of forbidden books is published, it is not on sale in mainland China and potential buyers are blocked when trying to find it online. Chinese websites of international booksellers like Amazon respond "This page cannot be displayed," just as they do to requests for information on the Tiananmen massacre or the Dalai Lama. This for a specialist book published overseas in English and unintelligible to the great majority of Chinese citizens. McGregor calls the ban "perversely flattering, and very much confirmation of the secrecy I was writing about."

Not that he or anyone else should be surprised. The CCP's grip on power is based on a simple formula from Lenin's original playbook: complete control of personnel, propaganda, and the People's Liberation Army. However China's smiling face may look to the crowds of foreigners flocking to the 2008 Beijing Olympics and this summer's Shanghai World Expo 2010, the very names of the bodies exercising that power -- the Politburo, Central Committee, Presidium -- all reveal that China's system runs, as the author puts it, "on Soviet hardware."

The principal tool of control is the Party's Central Organization Department. A direct descendant of Lenin's 1919 Orgburo, it faithfully replicates the Soviet nomenklatura system of reserving prize jobs for the happy few among Party faithful. Little known abroad and even within China itself, it operates out of a huge unmarked building near Tiananmen Square, its phone number unlisted. Its secret deliberations decide who will hold what positions not only in government, but also in business, the judiciary, media, and academia. It's as if, McGregor writes, a single department in Washington arbitrarily appointed the entire U.S. cabinet, state governors, and mayors of all major cities; Supreme Court justices; the chief executives of GE, Exxon-Mobil, Walmart, and dozens of other companies; plus editors of newspapers and heads of TV networks; along with the presidents of Yale and Harvard and chiefs of think tanks like Brookings and the Heritage Foundation.

Such a secret, systematic spoils system can only lead to colossal corruption. Party officials rule their local fiefdoms like virtual marketplaces where government jobs are bought and sold under an unofficial "pay for play" system. McGregor's research turned up an official in Suihua who paid more than $100,000 to the local Organization Department to become a party secretary. Another paid "only" $44,000 to be party secretary in a smaller locale, but parlayed that in two years into nearly $740,000 in graft, a gratifying return on investment of some 1,700 percent.

Addressing the Party's token anti-corruption commission in 2006, General Secretary Hu Jintao went through the motions of warning, "This time-bomb buried under society could...lead to a series of explosions which could cause chaos through society and paralyze the administration." But as he knows better than any, the Party system allows top officials to supervise themselves. Thus bribes now routinely run into millions of dollars to procure even low-level jobs. The author compares CCP corruption to "a transaction tax that distributes ill-gotten gains among the ruling class. In that respect, it becomes the glue that keeps the system together."

THE SYSTEM IS COMMUNIST to the core, but the rigid ideology that purportedly underpins it -- and led to the collapse of Soviet Communism -- has been carefully airbrushed out. After the Tiananmen Square massacre, Deng Xiaoping, who had launched China's early market reforms in 1978, laid down the flexible new Party line: "On economic matters, relaxed controls; for political matters, tight controls." Party leaders quickly learned to talk out of both sides of their mouths, preaching Marxism in public statements while prodding businesses to keep getting bigger and richer.

The sleight of hand often works with foreigners: during a visit to Beijing some years back, Rupert Murdoch declared he hadn't met a single communist in China. Actually he could have found no fewer than 78 million card-carrying Party members, many multimillionaires. As for the Party's ideology, Chen Yuan, Party member, senior banker, and son of a Long March veteran, puts it succinctly: "We are the Communist Party, and we decide what communism means."

Above all, they try to avoid looking like communists. Leaders keep their Mao suits in the closet except for big Party occasions. When Hu Jintao travels abroad on state visits, he wears a Western business suit and is officially described not as general secretary of the CCP, but as president of China. This lowers his ideological profile -- communist, moi? -- and gives the superficial impression he was democratically elected instead of picked by the Politburo behind closed doors. As a professor at Beijing University explained to McGregor, "The Party is like God. He is everywhere. You just can't see Him."

To be sure, Chinese citizens still feel the Party's presence everywhere, but it is less heavy-handed. Although its thugs will strong-arm any person or group perceived as a challenge to its primacy, today it prefers persuasion, co-opting, and seduction rather than coercion. The most striking recent example of this more relaxed attitude is Tombstone, a 2008 book by the Xinhua News Agency journalist Yang Jisheng.

After years of clandestine research, Yang details for more than a thousand pages the horrors and suffering of Mao's Great Leap Forward, a strictly taboo subject for the Party. Though no mainland bookstore or publisher would touch such a scorching condemnation of Chinese communist brutality, the book is available in Hong Kong. And, mirabile dictu, Yang has not been arrested or even harassed. The Party prefers to try to obscure it by banning mention of it in the media. "The authorities are not as stupid as they used to be," Yang says. "If this had happened in the past, I would be a dead man and my family would have been destroyed."

AS A FINANCIAL REPORTER, McGregor is especially strong on the Party's ambiguous relations with business. Although the government has laid off nearly 50 million workers in state enterprises in its economic reorganization, he cautions Western observers not to confuse this with free market privatization -- the Party retains ultimate control of state businesses. "The corporate animal that emerged from the protracted and painful birth of China Inc. was a strange new beast," he writes, "both commercial and communist."

For one thing, the state still owns either 100 percent or a majority of key sectors from oil, petrochemicals, mining, and banks to telecoms, steel, electricity, and aviation. For another, all heads of large businesses are Party members and jump to it when Beijing gives an order -- as when it told bankers to flood the market with credit, often against their better judgment, to deal with the current financial crisis. On the desks of about 50 of the most important sits a "red machine," a special encrypted telephone linking them to top Party, government, and business players. The ultimate Chinese status symbol, the phone will be answered, promptly, by a loyal Party member.

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About the Author

Joseph A. Harriss is The American Spectator's Paris correspondent. His latest book is About France.

Letter to the Editor View all comments (32) | Leave a comment

David W| 10.12.10 @ 7:45AM

After watching the behaviour of the current adminstration (as well as some past Republicans) you wonder how long it will be before this become us. some would say it is already happening.

Alan Brooks| 10.12.10 @ 10:53PM

Finally, a good article in AS; you have to wait a week until another one comes along.

Melvin| 10.12.10 @ 7:59AM

Whatta ya mean, the Chinese are still Communists? No way, because they showed the world during the Olympics, during the opening and closing ceremonies that they weren't Communists anymore, because they have embraced the West's free market principles so therefore that makes they're Communism null and void.
Mao, was a great leader like Castro, Lenin, Stalin, and oops I almost forgot, Che Guevara. "Mom! Where is my Che T-shirt? I want to wear it at the Student Union rally, we're showing our solidarity with the Palestinian Liberation Organization against the Zionist Pigs." "It's in your desk drawer next to some little red book written by a guy named Mao...Dear what is a Zionist pig" "It's complicated mom you wouldn't understand, I'm taking the car see you later."
"My god, he's forty years old and a professor at the college and he still lives at home. !Honey, when are you going to have that talk, with junior and ask him when he is going to go out on his own?"
This is why the Chinese...are Chinese. As long as the Chinese Communists convince the world that they are the victim of the Imperialist West, they will continue to get sympathy, from the apathetic West, who feel that China was and still is a victim, and somehow deserving in a little leeway in dealing with billions of it's citizens or should I say, Slaves?

Alan Brooks| 10.27.10 @ 12:21AM

One can do fine in China as long as one keeps one's mouth shut.
But if you get out of line, they don't have to arrest you, they can merely lock you out of your abode and confiscate everything of yours.
My cousin taught English in Guangzhou, and married a Chinese woman. When he decided to go back to America, he found his passport was missing from his room.
He had to sneak out of China by way of Taiwan, leaving his wife in China-- until she died.

Steve A| 10.12.10 @ 8:50AM

I am dead serious when I ask this question. How is it that, if the Chinese Communist model is such an opressive, corrupt, morally bankrupt set of values, that these are the guys who are bankrolling our debt?? I mean, why & how do they have the resources to finance us??

Mel Torme| 10.12.10 @ 9:43AM

Steve, it's because the Chinese Han people are hard-working, they lack diversity, which is pretty cool, they save money instead of blowing it, the government encourages exports, discourages imports like the plague, and they have had their money, RMB, pegged at the same exchange rate to the dollar for so long (encourages imports, but keeps cost of consumer goods still relatively high in China).

The government there isn't stupid when it comes to protecting the financial health of the country. Unfortunately, the average Chinese "middle class" city person or the poor rural people (almost by definition, if you live in out in the country there, you are poor) doesn't really get their fair share of the wealth produced. This is due to a huge amount of corruption by people in all levels of government. Many of the government people, be they Beijing rulers or local county gov't people, send their bribe money back to the US to keep it safe, or in the form of college tuition for their kids in California.

Steve A| 10.12.10 @ 9:48AM

Thanks for the info. Mel.

Tim| 10.12.10 @ 9:28AM

A peaceful and prosperous China is one of the greatest success stories of the last twenty years. It could have been otherwise-just look at North Korea.
For all the warts, the Chinese Communist Party chose to join the rest of the world and that's a good thing.

PJ| 10.12.10 @ 9:37AM

Come again?

The Communist Party of mainland China is destroying China's most precious resource: its people. You may think its prosperous now but if China doesn't change its attitude about its people, it's economy will surely collapse!

Tim| 10.12.10 @ 9:44AM

Easy PJ, All I'm saying is that I'm glad that we no longer face a Maoist China, isolated and on a hair trigger for nuclear war.
2010 could have been a world where CHina has 50,000 warheads aimed at us and the south China sea is the new Fulda Gap.

George True| 10.12.10 @ 11:26AM

The South China Sea IS the new Fulda Gap. Just as the expansionist Japanese government claimed all of Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific as their "economic co-prosperity sphere" prior to WWII, so is China doing likewise today. China is gearing up militarily to challenge and defeat the US Navy in the Western Pacific. Just as Russia is now claiming the "near abroad" as their own and brooking no foreign intervention there, so is China essentially claiming all of Asia and the Western Pacific as their own.

Don't for a moment think that communist China is not as great a threat as they have ever been. The still are and always will be as long as they are communist.

Mel Torme| 10.12.10 @ 12:49PM

George, I disagree. I don't see the parallel that you do between the expansive of Chinese power to that of the spread of Communism during the cold war. I'm not arguing against maintaining a strong Navy and Air Force for defense, BTW. I'm saying it's time we quit being the world's police.

Yes, the goverment of China is communist, but I don't think their goal in life is to "spread communism throughout the world", as was the Soviet's (and 1950's-60's China) idea. The leadership in China may be evil, but they are not stupid (I guess you could call them "smart democrats"). The only reason they have a serious amount of power is due to the enormous economic progress made only via free enterprise, especially in the southeast provinces. It is real free enterprise when you get past the bribery and crap, and small business there puts small business in the US to shame (not any fault of our small businesses here, but due to our overbearing regulation and taxes). People in the central government over there, being not as stupid (but equally evil) as their counterparts here, do not want to do any more political "programs" to kill business.

The Chinese really like to do business, and they are good at it. Somehow, it did not get brainwashed out of them during the hard-core Commie days. The spread of Chinese people around the world is not the same as the spread of Communism. There are Chinese ventures in Africa, for instance. Yeah, that gives China a leg up there, but so what? Let them colonize the place for all I care. The continent could not get any worse anyway. Let another power get blamed for all the world's problems instead of the US, and, previously, the UK.

The US had a good reason, I think, to project power around the world when the Soviets were trying to make the whole world go to the dark side. There was a reason Americans fought in Korea and Vietnam. However, I don't see the Chinese expansion as the same thing.

The US can't remain an empire any longer if we are to survive. It is time to worry about our own defense and our own problems. It's not like we have a big surplus of funds over here, right?

Metl Torme| 10.12.10 @ 12:51PM

"The only reason they have a serious amount of power ..." oops, that may not have been clear.

I meant "power in the world", not "power over their own people". The first requires a decent economy, while the 2nd just requires that you keep all the guns in the government.

George True| 10.12.10 @ 2:09PM

Mel: I agree with much of what you say. ANd I don't necessarily believe that the current evolution of the ChiCom government has a goal of "spreading communism" worldwide. But the do have a goal of challenging and ending US hegemony in the Pacific and elsewhere.

They absolutely plan to and intend to take Taiwan by force. It is not a matter of if they will attempt to do so, but only a matter of when.

They also plan to keep the US Navy at least 200 miles away from the entire 11,200 mile coastline of China, as well as denying the US Navy access to the East China Sea and the South China Sea. That encompasses almost all of Southeast Asia.

Within the next year, their new Dongfeng DF-21 carrier-killer missile will become operational. This is the weapon they will deploy if we try to intervene when they go for Taiwan. It is a weapon designed to defeat our ability to project power with our carrier battle groups.

So no, their purpose is not to "spread communism". But is is, in my humble opinion, most definitely their purpose to end US global hegemony and establish their own hegemony. And while not spreading communism per se, their endgame is to remain in power, as communists, and make sure that that power is never seriously challenged. And that requires that they eliminate our ability to dictate terms and replace it with their ability to dictate terms to us instead.

I agree that the Chinese are great entrepreneurs and businessmen. But that does not mean that their government has any benign intentions, either for us or for their own people. They (the government of China, not the people) are dangerous, and will remain so as long as they believe they have the right to subjugate their own people.

Since the day they invaded and occupied Taiwan in the 1950's nothing has really changed with their outlook. Sure, they have gotten smarter, very much evidenced by their decision to integrate free enterprise into their version of communism. But in the end, they still believe than might makes right, and that they can do whatever they want to simply because they want to. That means they will always be dangerous in the same way that all communists are, and that they can never really be trusted.

George True| 10.12.10 @ 2:12PM

Sorry, meant to say since the day they invaded and occupied TIBET, not Taiwan. Reminder to self: next time proofread before posting.

George True| 10.12.10 @ 2:12PM

Sorry, meant to say since the day they invaded and occupied TIBET, not Taiwan. Reminder to self: next time proofread before posting.

Mel Torme| 10.13.10 @ 8:09AM

George, sorry for the late reply (if you are reading this at all). I agree with most of what you say.

China does indeed want to take Taiwan, and they don't like hearing of it as anything but another province. However, I see only one reason that we should defend that island, which is that our government made promises to defend it. Of course, our government has made a lot of promises that it can't keep, many to US citizens. We'd all be better off if everyone inside and outside the US knew not to trust the Fed. Gov't (example, the fools who are buying up the treasury bonds, which will be defaulted on or inflated away to nothing).

As for Taiwan again, we shouldn't feel any moral obligation to fight for them. Keep in mind, the guy that moved the nationalists there in 1949 or so, Chang Kai Shek (American spelling) was not a the Chinese Ronald Reagan or something. He was highly corrupt and did not do enough to fight the Japs with American-sent materiel. They redistributed the American aid (meant for the war effort) among themselves. If the Nationalists had done a better job against the Japs, then the Commies may never have had the support they had to take over the country later. Anyhow, f__k em - again we can't be the world's police.

If we can't sail in the S. China sea, so what? I do understand the advantages of having bases all over the world such as in intelligence gathering and quick deployment. We've got to get over that. Bring the soldiers, sailors and airmen home from Okinawa (if we are still there?), S. Korea(and the old Garand rifles should be free to US citizens), Germany, and an hundred other places.

Lastly, I agree that the citizens cannot control the government, so the powers that be may decide to get warlike without the will of the people. For that matter, due to their strong control of the media, the government could find a way to rile up the people to where they want war. Oh, wait, am I writing about China or the US now?? It's getting really hard to tell now.

Have a good morning.

PJ| 10.12.10 @ 9:46AM

I swear if I didn't know better, I would think that Joseph Harriss was describing a book on various past Chinese dynasties.

The name may have changed, but the player remains the same.

Peter McGrath| 10.12.10 @ 9:48AM

The overthrow of the Chinese communist system would fundamentally transform the world economy. Such an event would spark of a renaissance of intellectual capital that boggles the mind with its implications.

PJ| 10.12.10 @ 9:52AM

I agree whole heartedly!!!!

fundamentalist| 10.12.10 @ 12:41PM

There is a branch of economics called the New Institutional School that explains the survival of the Party very well. The Party follows the traditional form of closed government identified by the NIS: the ruler grants power and privilege to an elite in exchange for loyalty. It's the oldest, most enduring and most common form of government. The elite are allowed to plunder the masses in exchange for loyalty, but they can't steal from each other.

Brian B| 10.12.10 @ 1:03PM

And flathead Tom Friedman thinks it's just the ticket for us too.

Melvin| 10.12.10 @ 1:30PM

People, my wife went attended a Chinese school. The one main thing that she remembers is that the faculty pushed the philosophy that the Dragon was going to crush the Eagle.
Last time I checked we're the Eagle.

sasob| 10.13.10 @ 12:33AM

Last time I checked eagles eat snakes like earlybirds eat earthworms.

Dave Williams| 10.12.10 @ 2:50PM

As usual, Monty Python nailed it:
"If Darwin is anything to shout about,
The Chinese will outlast us all, without any doubt."

kerry| 10.12.10 @ 2:59PM

So, the Chinese, a country with no bill of rights and a history of mass murder, is now going to spew it's propaganda in the USA with full support from the marxist media empire.
Perhaps our unbalanced, unfair trade agreements have benefited China and strengthened it economically far beyond what it would have been otherwise, is that the tradeoff for avoiding a prolonged cold war? Will it prevent a hot war? I think the economic success WE have brought the Chinese will make them even more aggressive in the years to come.
..meanwhile we have to buy Chinese crap that is literally killing us (google chinese drywall and sudden infant death syndrome), are losing all of our jobs to them, and now our tyrannical leaders have sold our souls to them with unsustainable debt and IOU's. God forbid they have to pay tariffs and buy something we make...

Redstateboy| 10.12.10 @ 5:27PM

One of the ironies of History.. If Mao came back to China today and began organizing the Peasants, preaching to the Proletariat Soviet equality... He'd find himself sitting in a Jail Cell while here in the United States of America we've got a Community Organizer preaching redistribution of Wealth..

Richard Baker| 10.12.10 @ 6:48PM

Regardless, they are STILL Communists. Look at the history since 1917 and only the names and propaganda methods have changed. I also understand that their Military Press have many correspondents who, in essence, want/advocate a brawl with us. Hope it doesn't come to that but I'm not sanguine.

PCP Smoker| 10.12.10 @ 6:54PM

No mystery here. They adopted free market principles, at least the important ones -- property rights, to do what communism can't do, pay for the inefficient state.

User72| 10.12.10 @ 10:11PM

I am a Chinese currently in China and I decided to verify if it is true that I can not search to book on amazon.com, and I COULD find the book without any problems.
When you lie, you loss all your credibility.

PCC| 10.13.10 @ 5:06AM

I live in Hong Kong. I checked, too. No problem getting Mcgregor's book on Amazon.

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