Empire of Lies

by Guy Sorman

  There is nothing more to say; the interview is over. We bid one another a curt farewell, with Sino-French friendship a notch lower.

  How to make a career in the Party

  It is commonly said in the West that all Chinese look alike. The Chinese think the same about Westerners. The fact remains that all the Communist Party’s cadres do resemble one another. One obvious reason is that there are no women among the students at the Party School, as far as I can tell. There may be one or two, but they are discreet and could be mistaken for the ladies who serve tea. As for the men, they have all adopted the Western suit, which in China is the symbol of modernity. The suit is always black, even in summer; it is worn with a white shirt and tie. Outside the Party, not many people wear suits. Perhaps the suit and tie will one day become the uniform of the Communist Party.

  It is also easy to recognize a cadre by his body language. He has a way of asserting himself while remaining in the background; he is arrogant and calculatedly modest, excessively polite—politeness is the exception in China—while making it amply clear that he represents power. These clonelike attitudes cannot be learned; but they are quickly acquired through constant repetition. This is one of the purposes of the school: teaching cadres to look alike, to form one body.

  Exchanging business cards is another obligatory ritual. Everywhere in China, in powerful circles, cards are exchanged at the beginning of any meeting. One is always running out cards. You have to be well stocked if you don’t want to be taken for a boor. At the Party School, cards are exchanged at a feverish pace, a way of building a network—the Party is both a sect and a network—and increasing one’s social stock, or guanxi (one’s influence and capacity to get things done). Thanks to guanxi, the cadres can bypass hierarchical circuits; through it, they prosper. A cadre with guanxi is respected by his subordinates, his colleagues, and the people he administers. If he doesn’t have enough guanxi, no one will listen to him, and he will become an object of ridicule. By resolving the problems of his department, a cadre proves he has guanxi. Guanxi gives him an aura of invincibility. So one goes to the Party schools to be reprogrammed ideologically—what the Party calls “being at the avant-garde”—and to accumulate guanxi. In a country in which laws are not worth the paper they are written on, guanxi can get things done; administrative and legal decisions depend on it. This is openly admitted. There are three more career principles, not stated but known to the initiated. I got to know about them from a Party renegade—a rare species, for it is not easy to leave the sect. When one joins the Party, one takes the following pledge: “I wish to become a member of the Communist Party to support the Party line, respect the Party statutes, ... apply the decisions of the Party, work with all my might and fight all my life for the cause of communism, . . . remain faithful to the Party, keep the secrets of the Party, and never betray the Party.” So the Party has its secrets.

  “To move up in the Party, you have to stick to three principles,” Cao Siyuan explains to me. Cao, who used to have a great deal of influence in the Party, is a jurist and the author of China’s first law on the bankruptcy of enterprises. He was nicknamed “Cao the Bankruptcy,” a nickname of which he is proud, for the 1988 law enabled the restructuring the public sector. The first principle, says Cao, is “to love one’s chief”: love him and he will love you. You must always say yes to the boss, agree with him, never criticize him, never contradict him; your duty is to admire him. You must speak to him in a low voice and be duly modest. The second principle is to give discreet gifts to the boss. Generally speaking, “It is recommended that you apply principles one and two to everyone close to the boss, his friends, his family.” Cao comes to the third principle and has a nice way of putting it: he calls it the “boss has a headache” principle. The boss doesn’t want any trouble, he doesn’t want to hear about anything, and he doesn’t want his bosses to hear about him. To keep the boss from suffering a migraine, his subordinates make sure that no protest or petition reaches him. The area committees are there, backed by the police, to see that the people keep mum. No one in the Party is particularly bothered about the methods used, provided the bosses don’t get to hear of it. By applying these three principles, a cadre can climb to the top.

  Cao is right. At the Party School, I had been told that a cadre’s career depended on the number of petitions recorded at the various offices. If the number is small, you get a good score. The teachers at the school view this as proof of the department’s having been well managed. Cao says it shows only that the cadre has been terrorizing people so much that they don’t dare lodge a complaint. Which is true? Cao’s version, undoubtedly.

  How the Party is getting Americanized

  While criticizing this farce of an education to a leader of the new generation, Westernized and with an apparently modern outlook, I was surprised to see him share my analysis. True, the training of the cadres had failed to keep up with the needs of the times and the complexity of new Chinese society. He suggested that I visit another avant-garde educational establishment, an illustration of the modernized Party’s radiant future.

  The Leadership and Management Academy is the school that will lead the Party’s elite, the governors, the mayors, and the heads of ministries, into the twenty-first century. The Party expects the Academy to transform it into a modern and global technocracy. Just like the École Nationale d’Administration (ENA), the director says, a veiled compliment to France. I dare not tell him that we in France are trying to dismantle the institution. The Academy is located in the Pudong area, a new Shanghai locality, on the right bank of the Huangpu River. A French architect, Antoine Béchu, was chosen to design it, no doubt on account of this fascination with the ENA.

  With its office and residential towers and network of highways, it is a kind of slapped-together Manhattan, a theatrical representation of the Party as conceived by a Westerner. The central building housing the conference rooms is built under a red steel table. Red is the color of dynamism, and the table represents the man of letters, I learn. The office tower looming over the monumental complex is supposedly the brush pot of the learned man. An American name, French architecture, the fusion of modernity with quotations from the classics—all this is part of an expensive symbolism. One dare not ask the price of this “creation” set amid Chinese landscaped and formal gardens. So much for the outer shell—a vision of the Party as it sees itself in the future. But inside, no one knows what purpose it serves. Such is the passion for building that you build first and then ask why you’ve built. A case in point is the Beijing Opera, designed once again by a French architect, Paul Andreu. Yet another example of mindless construction: the building first, the program later.

  In spite of the Academy’s international name, I didn’t come across anyone who spoke English or any other foreign language, except the man in charge of public relations. The students have passed the age of learning; they are all senior cadres with successful politico-administrative careers. What is the point of the training, which lasts no more than a few weeks, imparted to leaders who are very busy with their administrative duties? The unspoken vocation of the Academy, it appears, is to cast the cadres in the mold of modernity, a task at which the Party’s schools have failed. Here they learn how to behave like Westerners, get rid of their provincial habits—clearing one’s throat or pulling up one’s trousers to cool oneself in public, for example—and become initiated into Western ways. To acquire a cosmopolitan veneer, provincial cadres interact with company managers and senior officials in Shanghai. Chinese and modern, they are good models to emulate. As part of their training, cadres visit enterprises and public offices and take inspiration from their “avant-garde” style. “Avant-garde” is the politically correct term, though “American” would be more appropriate. For the cadres, there is only one model: America—the American way of being, the American style of management. The Party makes no bones about it.

  Won’t a mayor from a western province get overawed by the lavishness of the Acad
emy and the opulence of Shanghai’s public offices and enterprises? The Academy’s director, apparently unaware of the Marxist concept of alienation, tells me that the very purpose of the Academy is to impress provincial cadres so that they, too, emulate Shanghai and Pudong. Thus the Academy functions along exactly the same lines as the model villages and factories that have characterized Communist education since the Maoist era. Yesterday, one had to imitate the brave workers of the Daqing oilfields; today, one has to copy the Americanized managers of Pudong. Learning to think for oneself is out of the question.

  I expressed my uncertainty about the cadres’ ability to manage social movements before they turned violent. The Academy had provided for this eventuality, I was told. Just outside Shanghai was the model village of Wuyiang, where Party cadres successfully managed the “peaceful coexistence” of peasant demands and modernity. Groups of students are taken to see this showcase.

  The director of the Academy invited me to give a few lectures. When I asked what he would like me to speak on, he said it hardly mattered. The main thing was that the cadres from the provinces would get to see what a French speaker looked like. I thought to myself that on the appointed day I would have to pay more attention to what I wore than to what I said, for evidently people wouldn’t come to listen to a speaker but to look at him. If what the Party wants to become is so much like what it used to be, it has no future, I concluded—somewhat hastily, perhaps.

  The Party in search of a lost legitimacy

  The history of the Party is the story of its constant search for legitimacy, a legitimacy that has become weaker and weaker over the years. To begin with, it posed as a patriotic movement fighting Japanese invaders and the corruption of the nationalist state. The truth is less heroic, Mao’s army avoiding as far as possible direct confrontation with the Japanese, which would have been disastrous for his troops. When he seized power in 1949, the Party restored law and order and promised democracy. As in Eastern Europe after Soviet colonization, liberal movements supporting the Party believed that the communists would keep their promise of free elections. But Mao changed his discourse: like the Soviet Union, China needed an authoritarian regime to modernize herself. But the Great Leap Forward proved to be an unmitigated disaster. First liberation, then second-wave industrial modernization, and finally permanent revolution were to provide legitimacy to the regime. Mao Zedong began the systematic elimination of old China and its elite. On his death, the Revolution was suspended, and Deng Xiaoping took control. He provided the fourth legitimization for the dictatorship through the credo of individual prosperity.

  Will economic development be enough to guarantee the Party the eternity that it seeks? Westerners, who underestimate the desire of the Chinese people for freedom and justice, are ready to believe that it will. But the Party, taking note of the rising number of religious protests, worker demonstrations, dispossessed peasants, and petitions of intellectuals, has concluded that development alone will not suffice—all the more so since it doesn’t benefit three-fourths of the nation. The Party is now trying to invent a fifth reason for its own legitimacy. It could well be nationalism and war, the invariable culmination of belligerent nationalist discourse.

  How are the Chinese to be made nationalist? Left to themselves, they are hardly so. In this traditionally agrarian empire, solidarity is first and foremost with the family, the clan, the village, or the province. Being Chinese is an enduring phenomenon not requiring aggressive assertion. The past few centuries’ massive migration is testimony to the precedence that people give to individual and family welfare while remaining very much Chinese, even far from national territory. There is the nationalism of the elites, which first appeared after the Opium Wars in 1840. A mixture of humiliation and revanchism is the common theme running through contemporary history until the rise of the Communist Party. In the nineteenth century, China, as a sovereign state, was close to annihilation. “A corpse ready to be dismembered, putting itself before the scalpel” is how Paul Claudel, France’s consul at Fuzhou in 1897, described her in his diplomatic correspondence. Claudel, who was looking to expand the French empire, seemed to be caught between regret and jubilation.

  The official history of the Party in school textbooks holds the West squarely responsible for all the country’s woes. There is no attempt at critical analysis to find out why the Empire fell so easily or how the corrupt Chinese leaders failed to modernize their country. Conversely, every xenophobic—or nationalist, depending on how you view it—revolt, especially the Boxer Uprising, is sanctified as a redeeming moment, a precursor of the 1949 “liberation.” It was the Party that avenged the affronts of the Japanese and the Americans and even the Taiwanese. A noncommunist Taiwan is the betrayal of nationhood, for communism is the nation.

  Now the Chinese had to be taught this rewritten history. Every ideology requires a starting point. The new nationalism, it was decided, began at Xian, the first capital of the Chinese Empire twenty-two centuries ago. The Empire was founded by Qin Shi Huangdi, one of the worst tyrants history has ever known.

  The invention of nationalism

  As the legend of Mao falls apart, Emperor Qin gains in stature. In the 1980s, schoolchildren and pilgrims from all over China would stand in line for hours at Tiananmen Square in Beijing before being allowed to enter Mao’s mausoleum. Pushed by guards, they had only a few seconds to walk around the refrigerated glass coffin in which the Great Helmsman lay, with long lines outside clamoring to get in. They did not have time to observe that Mao dead bore little resemblance to Mao alive. The Vietnamese embalmers, we are told, made a mess of the mummy. The face was an unhealthy pale green, but the famous wart under the chin was preserved. The mausoleum has now become a palace visited only by the wind. Schoolchildren and pilgrims—the same or their descendants—are now packed off to Xian in central China. Here, archaeologists and architects have restored (or, to be precise, reconstituted) the necropolis of the first emperor.

  Every public monument is a political manifesto. The colossal dimensions of Qin’s tomb, its grandeur, underscore his newfound legitimacy. The founder of the Empire has ousted the father of the Revolution. Qin was no more a humanist than Mao. This barbaric warrior, who descended from the upper plateaus of Tibet or the Mongolian steppes, conquered all the kingdoms in China in the third century B.C., amalgamating them into a single empire. In the north, he built the Great Wall, in the construction of which a million enslaved masons are said to have died, their bones mixed with the lime. He ordered the burning of all books written before his time, thus fixing the first year of a new era. He decreed that all Chinese belonged to the same race and nation, the beginning of the ethnic myth of the Han people. When he died, several thousand soldiers and servants were buried next to him to escort him to the nether land. The troops were depicted in clay as well. In the 1990s, inspired by massive Communist monuments in Russia and North Korea, huge granite and marble porticos were built to overhang the necropolis. The first emperor was to become the new national cult figure. For this purpose, the Beijing government roped in its quasi-official film director Zhang Yimou, the Chinese Leni Riefenstahl. In his epic movie Hero, a propaganda masterpiece, Qin is shown venerated by his enemies, yet misunderstood by his own people, for having unified China.

  The visitor is invited to Xian to celebrate the might of China, before which, his individuality annihilated, he feels no bigger than an ant. Tourists, untroubled by this Chinese fascism, take photos of themselves: the Chinese, they think, are not individuals but a great yellow mass. Overwhelmed by the giant statue of Qin in white stone, I was lost in thought when a tourist guide who spoke a smattering of English accosted me. Before melting into the crowd, he murmured: “Qin was like Stalin.”

  Qin, the emblem of China, is also the symbol of all its instability. He claimed to have founded a dynasty that would continue for “10,000 generations.” Two years after his death, his inheritors were overthrown. Thereafter, imperial power passed to twenty-six successive dynasties
, often non-Chinese. The Party would do well to keep its distance from this founder.

  Looking for a scapegoat: Japan

  In the spring of 2005, as the sixteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising approached, foreign journalists noted, as they did every year at the same time, the heavy buildup of police. It was difficult to approach the square, and any gathering, no matter how small, was dispersed. Each year, the Party fears a commemoration that could reignite the democratic movement, but for the past sixteen years the only people to gather here have been members of the Falun Gong. Crowds did assemble in Hong Kong to commemorate the June 4, 1989, repression.

  Protest came from an unexpected quarter: “students” carrying anti-Japanese banners marched in procession not just in Beijing but also in Shanghai and Shenzen. They attacked Japanese consulates and destroyed goods bearing the Japanese trademark (even though they were made in China and belonged to the Chinese). Were they really students, as the media claimed? They seemed very young to me, and those leading them, too old. Were these demonstrations spontaneous? That was the official version. Anti-Japanese associations supposedly had convened their members through the Internet and text messages. Knowing how closely everything is monitored in China, including electronic messages, I found it unlikely that the authorities were caught by surprise. The demonstrations went off without any major trouble, under the benevolent eye of the antiriot police. No demonstrator was arrested. The “students” returned in waiting buses. The agitation went on for three weeks before the government decided to end it. University professors were called upon to calm their students. The demonstrations stopped as “spontaneously” as they had begun.