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.
Newspaper editors and TV producers also get frequent calls, even
if they don’t have red machines on the desk. It will be from the
Central Propaganda Department giving the angle on the day’s news.
Here again, the Party now uses a soft sell, relying on the media’s
“self-discipline.” Chinese newsmen don’t really need to be told how
to play a story, one editor explained to McGregor. “There is a red
line in their head.”
Americans will soon be getting more of the Party’s perspective
on current affairs as an increasingly media-savvy Propaganda
Department develops Chinese news media overseas. The Xinhua agency
recently announced plans to open a prominent newsroom in New York’s
Times Square, with Reuters, News Corp., and the New York
Times as neighbors. It will provide a Chinese-slanted news
feed to CNC World, the agency’s new 24-hour channel. This is part
of the Party’s decision to spend billions of dollars to create a
global media empire to offset what it considers biased coverage of
China.
Having banned it, the Party clearly considers McGregor’s
masterful study to be biased coverage indeed. All the more reason
to buy it, in order to learn what the Party would rather we did not
know about how it really runs the country and how its hybrid
Leninist capitalism works. The book also should be required reading
as an antidote to the coming wave of 90th-anniversary CCP hoopla
next year. The Party already has thousands of researchers working
up a propaganda barrage of its official history since its creation
in 1921. The world is about to hear more than it wants to about how
the Party “successfully united and led the Chinese people to
achieve miracles,” as Central Committee Vice President Xi Jinping
recently put it.
When will the Party be over? On that inevitable, probably
bloody, day when Chinese citizens decide that it’s not enough in
life to get rich, if they don’t have the right to live free under a
democratically elected government. They may already be partway
there, having manifestly lost their communist faith. As a professor
at Tsinghua University in Beijing told McGregor, “Party leaders
realize that they don’t have a dominant ideology they can use to
run the country any more. The sole ideology shared by the
government and the people is money worship.”
