The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers

by Richard Mcgregor

  The way the Party has grown at the expense of its leaders dictated Hu’s low profile long before his promotion to party secretary. After he emerged as the heir-apparent on his elevation to the Politburo Standing Committee in 1992, Hu’s lack of a Politburo power base afforded him no room for error in the competition for the party secretary’s job. By the time he took office ten years later, he had few of his loyalists in place as a result and no detailed political programme pre-positioned, which the bureaucracy could internalize and act on. Hu did not begin to gain genuine ascendancy over the vast party apparatus, both in Beijing and in the rest of the country, until well into the second of his two five-year terms. Most US presidents become lame ducks in the last years of their final term. So topsy-turvy is the Chinese political system that Hu, like Jiang Zemin before him, only really consolidated power by the time he was approaching the end of his period in office.

  With the public shut out of formal politics, few ordinary citizens could even recognize most of the nine men in the Politburo’s inner circle who lined up on stage at the congress’s closure. Hu, of course, was a familiar face, if not a familiar personality. Wu Bangguo, at number two, and head of the legislature, was a colourless Shanghai functionary who had risen without a trace to the near-top of the leadership. Wen Jiabao, the Premier, ranked number three, had skilfully cultivated an image as a man of the people, in contrast to the hard-earned notoriety of his wife and son for their business dealings.

  Jia Qinglin, who strode out in fourth position, was a big man, tall and flush, and bursting out of his suit like someone who had enjoyed too many banquets. Unlike most of his colleagues, Jia was well known, only because of his alleged corruption. Jia presided over Fujian province during one of China’s worst graft scandals, the Yuanhua case, a $6 billion customs fraud. Numerous officials have already been executed and jailed for their crimes, but Jia, and his wife, also the target of allegations, have never been called to account, either because there is not enough evidence against them, or, more likely, because they have been protected by political allies. As he stood on stage and stared out at the assembled media, many of whom had expected him to be toppled and disgraced in the lead-up to the congress, Jia’s ruddy face had the defiant sneer of a triumphant, well-nourished political survivor.

  Other members of the Standing Committee, including two in their fifties, who are Hu’s designated successors, were only vaguely recognizable in the provinces they once governed. By the time he joined the Standing Committee, Xi Jinping, ranked number six, and anointed as the heir-apparent, was less well known than his wife, a famous singer with a military rank in the People’s Liberation Army. Some of the men on stage had profiles in the sectors, such as the media and policing, that they had presided over. But for most Chinese, the Politburo was a distant body, bloated with power, but devoid of character and personality.

  Hu’s speech was brief and couched in the arcane political slogans that dominate all official public political discussion, about ‘scientific development’, the ‘harmonious society’, an ‘advanced socialist culture’, and so on. Heavy with import inside the Party and intellectual circles as the branding buzzwords of Hu’s administration, they are largely meaningless to the population at large. After concluding his remarks, Hu led his eight colleagues off stage. In the coming years, the Politburo’s inner circle would rarely ever appear in public as a group again. The whole ceremony had lasted about ten minutes.

  On the desks of the heads of China’s fifty-odd biggest state companies, amid the clutter of computers, family photos and other fixtures of the modern CEO’s office life, sits a red phone. The executives and their staff who jump to attention when it rings know it as ‘the red machine’, perhaps because to call it a mere phone does not do it justice. ‘When the “red machine” rings,’ a senior executive of a state bank told me, ‘you had better make sure you answer it.’

  The ‘red machine’ is like no ordinary phone. Each one has just a four-digit number. It connects only to similar phones with four-digit numbers within the same encrypted system. They are much coveted nonetheless. For the chairmen and women of the top state companies, who have every modern communications device at their fingertips, the ‘red machine’ is a sign they have arrived, not just at the top of the company, but in the senior ranks of the Party and the government. The phones are the ultimate status symbol, as they are only given out to people in jobs with the rank of vice-minister and above. ‘They are very convenient and also very dangerous,’ said an executive of a large state resources company. ‘You want to be sure of your relationship with whichever person you call.’ Down the corridor from the executive offices is an additional tool for ranking officials, an internal communications room which receives secure faxes from Zhongnanhai, the leadership compound, and other sections of the party and government system.

  ‘Red machines’ are dotted throughout Beijing in offices of officials of the requisite rank, on the desks of ministers and vice-ministers, the chief editors of party newspapers, the chairmen and women of the elite state enterprises and the leaders of innumerable party-controlled bodies. The phones and faxes are encrypted not just to secure party and government communications from foreign intelligence agencies. They also provide protection against snooping by anyone in China outside the party’s governing system. Possession of the ‘red machine’ means you have qualified for membership of the tight-knit club that runs the country, a small group of about 300 people, mainly men, with responsibility for about one-fifth of humanity.

  The modern world is replete with examples of elite networks that wield behind-the-scenes power beyond their mere numerical strength. The United Kingdom had the ‘old boy network’, originally coined to describe connections between former students of upper-class, non-government schools; France has ‘les énarques’, the alumni of the exclusive Ecole Nationale d’Administration in Paris who cluster in the upper levels of commerce and politics; and Japan has the Todai elite, graduates of the law school of Tokyo University, an entry point into the longtime ruling Liberal Democratic Party, the Finance Ministry and business. In India, the exclusive Gymkhana Club symbolizes the English-educated elite. The US has the Ivy League, the Beltway, K Street and the military-industrial complex, and a host of other labels to signify the opaque influence of well-connected insiders.

  None can hold a candle to the Chinese Communist Party, which takes ruling-class networking to an entirely new level. The ‘red machine’ gives the party apparatus a hotline into multiple arms of the state, including the government-owned companies that China promotes around the world these days as independent commercial entities. Critics of the Republican administration of George W. Bush decried what they said were the cosy links between Dick Cheney, the vice-president, and the energy industry, to take one example. Imagine the case the critics could have mounted if Cheney and the CEO of Exxon-Mobile, and America’s other big energy companies, had secure phones on their desks establishing a permanent, speed-dial connection with each other. In turn, to extend the analogy, what would they have made of the Exxon-Mobile CEO receiving a steady stream of party and government documents, available to the executives of Chinese state companies by virtue of their office and rank? The ‘red machine’ and the trappings that go with it perform precisely these functions.

  One vice-minister told me that more than half of the calls he received on his ‘red machine’ were requests for favours from senior party officials, along the lines of: ‘Can you give my son, daughter, niece, nephew, cousin or good friend and so on, a job?’ Over the years, he had developed a strategy to handle personal requests, welcoming them effusively, while adding that the potential applicant first had to sit the gruelling test required for entry into the civil service, which few were willing to do. The ‘red machine’ has other uses. In the days before mobile phones, well-connected investment bankers who could not get through to top officials would try to borrow the ‘red machine’ in offices they were visiting when the boss was out, to put through a call directl
y to a potential top client. Quaint as it may seem in the age of sophisticated mobile telephony, the ‘red machine’ remains a powerful symbol of the party system’s unparalleled reach, strict hierarchies, meticulous organization and obsessive secrecy. The phone’s colour, revolutionary red, resonates as well. During political crises, the Party frets about China ‘changing colour’, code for the red communists losing power.

  Top-ranked party members enjoy a social standing beyond the respect that officials get anyway in a country with deep bureaucratic traditions. Much as if they have been granted diplomatic status in their own country, they live in secure compounds, but also have their overseas travel restricted and mingle with people beyond official circles and their immediate family, according to strict security protocols. They answer to the Party first, not to the law of the land, if they are accused of criminal wrongdoing. But the benefits come at a cost, beyond the personal stress and the impact on families that public officials around the world complain of. Party membership is a commitment, not a simple enrolment. The Chinese who are promoted into senior positions must take whatever assignment they are handed, and cannot easily leave the Party without grave consequences. Above a certain level, senior officials are much like Michael Corleone in The Godfather, who lamented, after trying to leave the family’s mafia business, that every time he tried to get out, ‘they pulled me back in’.

  It is no coincidence that the Vatican is one of the few states with which China has been unable to establish diplomatic ties since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. The city-state, which is the administrative centre of the Catholic Church and the home of the Pope, is the only other organization of comparable dimensions to the Chinese Communist Party, albeit on a global scale, and with a similar addiction to ritual and secrecy. The Party guards the command of its catechism as zealously and self-righteously as the Vatican defends its authority over the faith. After years of on-and-off talks, the Vatican has not been able to reconcile its worldwide prerogative to appoint bishops with the Party’s insistence that it alone has the right to approve their choice for the Catholic Church at home in China. The on-and-off-again talks between Rome and Beijing have been punctuated, in private, by a self-aware black humour. One of the unofficial Chinese intermediaries with Rome joked about the uncanny similarities between the Party and the Catholic Church when he visited the Vatican in 2008. ‘We have the propaganda department and you have the evangelicals. We have the organization [personnel] department and you have the College of Cardinals,’ he told a Vatican official. ‘What’s the difference, then?’ the official asked. The Chinese interlocutor replied, to hearty laughter all round: ‘You are God, and we are the devil!’

  Like the Vatican, the Party has always made sure top-level decisions are kept in the family. Hu’s fantasy about being chosen by the ‘whole country’ skated around the fact that the delegates to the 2007 congress, and earlier such meetings, had been the only citizens allowed to vote. Even then, the 2,200-odd congress attendees were deprived of any choice. In the lead-up to the congress, Chinese political scholars had been teased with suggestions that the delegates would be presented with a slate of candidates, allowing them a genuine ballot to winnow down a larger list to the final nine. A more radical idea, copying the Vietnamese Communist Party’s decision in 2006 at its congress in Hanoi, to allow two candidates for the position of general secretary, had also been internally debated. Both options were quietly discarded for a traditional communist-style ballot.

  The names of the bodies through which the Party exercises power, the Politburo, the Central Committee, the Praesidium and the like, all betray one of the most overlooked facts about the modern Chinese state–that it still runs on Soviet hardware. Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Russian Revolution, designed a system according to which the ruling party shadows and stalks the state by penetrating it at all levels. Lenin presented himself as the saviour of the working class but the structure he devised was ferociously and brutally elitist. At the top of the system, Lenin prescribed ‘as much centralization as possible’, allowing self-appointed professional revolutionaries like himself to dictate downwards to a working class considered incapable of rising above their day-to-day struggles. In the bottom tier of the system, however, in the factories and grassroots party organizations, he prescribed ‘as much decentralization as possible’, so that information flowed upwards to a Central Committee about even the smallest local developments. ‘For the centre to actually direct the orchestra,’ Lenin wrote, ‘it needs to know who plays violin and where, who plays a false note and why (when the music begins to grate on the ear), and how and where it is necessary to transfer someone to correct the dissonance.’

  The Central Committee acts as a kind of enlarged board of directors for the Party in China. With about 370 full- and part-time members, the committee includes ministers and senior regulatory officials in Beijing, leaders of provincial governments and large cities and a large bloc from the military. Some, but not all of the heads of China’s big state-owned enterprises are Central Committee members. An array of other interests which make up the leviathan of the Chinese state, ranging from representatives of minority communities, like Tibetans, to the head of Hu Jintao’s Central Guards Unit (popularly known as the Bodyguard Bureau), the Party’s secret service, makes up the remaining members. The Central Committee elects, or to be more precise, selects the Politburo, which has about twenty-five members. The Politburo, in turn, selects the Standing Committee, the inner sanctum of the leadership, which in its present incarnation has nine members.

  The nine men filing out onstage in 2007 might have been the only candidates on the list presented to delegates as eligible for election for the top leadership positions. It was a moment of great import nonetheless, because within this small group all of the levers of political power the Party deploys to maintain its hold on the government, the country and the 1.3 billion-strong population had been divided up and allocated to each individual. The core responsibilities of the Politburo inner circle are not what you might expect to top the agenda of the country’s elite leadership body, at least if you listened to the daily pronouncements of the central government in Beijing. The Politburo sets the general policy direction for the economy and diplomacy and has been preoccupied in recent years with China’s towering challenges in meeting exploding energy demand, environmental degradation and managing the mobile, 700 million-strong rural population. Politburo members are briefed on these issues and have the final responsibility for deciding related policies, but they do not manage portfolios day-to-day in the way that ministers in a cabinet system do.

  The Politburo’s overriding priorities lie elsewhere, in securing the Party’s grip on the state, the economy, the civil service, the military, police, education, social organizations and the media, and controlling the very notion of China itself and the official narrative of its revival from an enfeebled power, broken apart and humiliated by foreigners, into a powerful state and resurgent civilization. More than a century after the model’s invention and two decades since its pioneer in Moscow and its eastern European satellites fell apart, the core of the Chinese system, for all its indigenous modifications, still bears a remarkable resemblance to Lenin’s original design. Even the ‘red machine’ has Soviet antecedents. The Russians used a secure internal phone system, known as the vertushka, which loosely translates as ‘the rotater’, to connect the party elite.

  Mao initially adopted Soviet institutions but he always regarded the Party as bureaucratic and insufficiently revolutionary, complaining in the fifties that officials ‘were tottering along like women in bound feet, always complaining that others were going too fast for them’. Instead of the Party supervising the people, Mao decided the people should supervise the Party, a philosophy that triggered the ten years of madness of the Cultural Revolution from 1966, when Red Guards were authorized to terrorize anyone they decided had strayed from the righteous path of revolution. Mao unleashed ‘a revolution on a revolution th
at wasn’t revolutionary enough’, as a documentary described the period. After Mao’s downfall and death, the Party went back to basics. Deng Xiaoping threw out Mao’s destructive notions and returned the party organization to its Leninist roots, as an empowered elite providing enlightened leadership to the masses.

  The notion of a party controlling the government, especially when the same party effectively is the government, remains conceptually difficult for many to grasp. When I lived in Shanghai for four years from 2000, I would advise visitors confused about this concept to keep an eye out for the official cars whisking top municipal leaders in and out of the city leadership compound in Kanping Road, a stern, grey-marble low-rise carved out of the elegant, tree-lined backstreets of the old French Concession. The cars provided an easy first lesson about Chinese politics, Leninism 101, if you like, as their number-plates clearly spelt out the ruling hierarchies in the city. The Shanghai party secretary’s plate is numbered 00001; the mayor and deputy party secretary’s plate is 00002, one rung below; and that of the executive vice-mayor and the next most senior member of the city’s party committee is 00003; and so on. The number-plates are a banal illustration of the most important guiding principle of Chinese politics, of the Party’s ascendancy over the state in all its forms. Political language faithfully reflects the hierarchies, by referring to ‘party and state leaders’ in all official announcements.