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

by Richard Mcgregor

  The front stage of Chinese politics, or Lenin’s orchestra, are the government and other state organs, which ostensibly behave much like they do in many countries. The Ministry of Finance frames a budget each year amid age-old jockeying between rival claimants for limited funds. Ministers meet collectively as a cabinet to battle over their policy priorities. The many fine scholars in Chinese think-tanks produce voluminous, and often influential and incisive, research reports. The courts deliver verdicts on the matters before them. The universities teach and dispense degrees. Journalists write stories. And the priests in the state-approved churches solemnly say Mass and administer the sacraments. But it is backstage, in the party forums, where the real stuff of politics is transacted.

  Under the Politburo sits a vast and largely secret party system which controls the entire public sector, including the military, and the lives of the officials who work in all of China’s five levels of government, starting in Beijing. The Party staffs government ministries and agencies through an elaborate and opaque appointments system; instructs them on policy through behind-the-scenes committees; and guides their political posture and public statements through the propaganda network. The officials working in public institutions are trained, and re-trained, at regular intervals, through the Party’s extensive nationwide network of 2,800 schools, before they are eligible for promotion. Should they be accused of bribery, fraud or any other criminal conduct, they are investigated by the Party first and only turned over to the civilian justice system on its say-so. Even then, any punishment meted out by the courts is at the behest and direction of party organs, which ultimately control the judges directly, and the lawyers indirectly, through legal associations and licensing.

  China retains many of the formal institutional trappings that give it a superficial resemblance to a pluralist system, with executive government, a parliament and courts. But the Party’s pervasive backstage presence means the front-stage role of these bodies must be constantly recalibrated against the reality of the power that lies, largely out of sight, behind them. The tentacles of the state, and thus the Party, go well beyond the government. As well as sitting above state-owned businesses and regulatory agencies, these party departments oversee key think-tanks, the courts, the media, all approved religions, and universities and other educational institutions, and maintain direct influence over NGOs and some private companies. The Party also directly controls China’s eight so-called ‘democratic parties’, by appointing their leaders and financing their budgets.

  The front-stage and backstage roles are blurred in government, as most of the senior behind-the-scenes directors, producers and script-writers in the Party also star in public government roles. Hu Jintao is party secretary but he also carries the more junior title of state president. Likewise, the Politburo, headed by Hu, sits above the State Council, China’s equivalent of a cabinet, which is headed by the Premier, Wen Jiabao, who is also on the Politburo. When Hu visits Washington and other western capitals, he is always billed as President, and head of state, at the insistence of the Chinese, and not as the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, which is his most important position. Hu only flaunts his party title on trips overseas to the handful of surviving fraternal communist states, like Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea. To do it in places like the White House lawn would be unnecessarily embarrassing to his host. It would also lift the public profile of the Party, which Hu and other leaders have no interest in doing.

  The division of roles between the Party and government is more than just perplexing for outsiders. It is a huge source of hidden tension within the system itself, as illustrated by the political blow-up over the spread of the deadly SARS virus in 2003. The crisis over SARS, which threatened to bring the country and the economy to a standstill, was brought under control when Hu Jintao stepped in to sack the health minister and the Beijing mayor for covering up the true extent of the virus’s spread. The leadership had been shamed into action by a retired army surgeon in Beijing. The surgeon faxed details of the correct number of people afflicted with the virus to foreign journalists to circumvent the propaganda department diktats, which had deliberately minimized the figures of those affected.

  Hu’s dramatic intervention was hailed by local and foreign commentators as a watershed, a moment when a hitherto closed and unresponsive system was forced to be open and accountable. That was not how the sackings were viewed from the inside. The minister and the mayor, both occupying government posts, were not responsible for the cover-up, critics argued. In the case of the mayor, he was answerable to the Beijing party committee. The health minister was subservient to internal party bodies governing health policy. Neither operated with autonomy. ‘Many government officials were extremely upset about this because they said they had simply been carrying out decisions made by party committees and party bosses higher up than them,’ an adviser to Hu told me. ‘These two were scapegoats.’

  Aside from a few largely symbolic exceptions, every senior government minister or official is a party member. By contrast, every senior party official does not always hold down a government post. Many instead work for the key party departments, which outrank mere government ministries. The Central Organization Department is responsible for personnel appointments. The Central Propaganda Department handles news and information. The United Front Department, as its name suggests, has a brief to lock in support for the Party in power centres outside of its direct purview, like overseas Chinese business communities in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and in social organizations at home.

  Throughout the system, the Party has positioned itself like a political panopticon, allowing it to keep an eye on any state or non-state agency, while shielding itself from view at the same time. The panopticon was the innovative penitentiary designed by Jeremy Bentham, the eighteenth-century English philosopher, which allowed a handful of wardens to watch inmates without being observed themselves. China is not one giant prison, as Qian Qichen, the former foreign minister, used to say in an acid rebuttal of western criticism of the country’s human rights records. By many measures, China is freer than it has ever been. But the Party, in retreating from the private lives of Chinese, has made sure it secures the heights of the political battlefield along the way. Like the panopticon, the Party is omnipresent in the country’s politics, with the benefit of remaining largely unobserved itself. ‘The Party is like God,’ a professor from the People’s University in Beijing told me. ‘He is everywhere. You just can’t see him.’

  In the late 1990s in Beijing, I attended a small dinner with Rupert Murdoch, where he declared he had yet to meet any communists during his trips to China. On the face of it, it was an odd statement, because any Chinese government official of any consequence is nominally communist, or at least a member of the Party. If Murdoch wanted to do business in China, especially in the media, among the most sensitive sectors for private foreign capital, he could not avoid the Party. In fact, he would have to embrace it, as he eventually tried to do. It took many years, and much supplication, for Murdoch to secure a meeting with the then propaganda chief, Ding Guan’gen, a key figure ranked number eight in the party hierarchy until 2002. Later, Murdoch joined forces in an expensive business venture with Ding’s son in an effort to find a way around China’s tight restrictions on foreign broadcasting, all to no avail. By 2009, Mr Murdoch had all but given up on China altogether.

  Murdoch is not alone in remarking on the absence of communists in China. It is something I have heard over many years from streams of sophisticated, no-nonsense foreign businessmen and women passing through China, mostly after coming directly from a meeting with a senior party official. Their statements are understandable, in one respect. The sole experience of Chinese communism for many business leaders who have invested in, and profited from, the transformation of the country into an economy that often appears on the surface to be a uniquely unbridled form of capitalism, are officials who want to do business. One of Murdoch’s most powerful editors, Kelvin Ma
cKenzie, was stunned by China’s development under communism when he visited Beijing with a British delegation in 2000. As the one-time editor of the Sun, the best-selling tabloid which famously features a topless girl on page three of every edition, MacKenzie had been a scourge of the left and a champion of Thatcherism. In China, he told his bemused hosts in a booming voice over lunch that, on returning home to Britain, he was going ‘to become a communist too’ to invigorate his homeland. For visitors like MacKenzie, the only time they might stumble across the Little Red Book would be on an excursion to a weekend flea market en route to the airport to fly home.

  Western elites were once familiar with the order of battle in communist politics, mainly through study of the pioneering model in the former Soviet Union, and the mini-industry in academia, think-tanks and journalism known as Kremlinology. The collapse of the Soviet empire in the early 1990s took with it much of the deep knowledge of communist systems. Sinology has always been a different beast in any case, as much dedicated to Chinese history, culture, science and language as to modern politics. The transformation of China’s economy and society and its impact on the rest of the world during the same period has diverted attention from formal politics in Beijing even further. Political journalism thrives on partisan competition and the potential for regime change, both absent as day-to-day issues in China. Scholarly studies, which are enjoying a boom along with its subject, have also felt the pull of China’s economy and the demand from governments and the corporate sector for insights into the once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon of the resurrection of the fortunes of one-fifth of humanity.

  That the media and academia should focus overwhelmingly on economic and social change in China is hardly surprising. Compared to China’s vast political apparatus, which operates underground, the country’s extraordinary economic growth manifests itself in the daily life of consumers and their political representatives around the world. China makes the clothes people wear, the toys they buy their children, and often even grows the food they eat. For politicians, China is at the heart of economic trends that both create and destroy jobs in their constituencies. In the last decade in the west, the number of column inches spent reporting just the controversy over the value of China’s currency has far outweighed detailed scrutiny of the inner workings of the Communist Party.

  Increasingly, it has become intuitively difficult for western visitors to China to square the razzle-dazzle of its gleaming new cities with notions of Communist Party rule. The glum Maoist state that once greeted investors and tourists, with its grim Soviet architecture, mirthless officials, surly service staff and chronic shortages of consumer goods, neatly fitted preconceptions of traditional Cold War communism. The front stage of new China, which seems to have been built from scratch in just a few years, bears little resemblance to the old model. In the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the New York Times architecture writer, Nicolai Ouroussoff, compared arriving at the city’s new airport ‘to the epiphany that Adolf Loos, the Viennese architect, experienced in New York more than a century ago. He had crossed the threshold into the future.’ More than just the grandeur of the space, ‘it’s the inescapable feeling that you’re passing through a portal to another world whose fierce embrace of change has left western nations in the dust’. Ouroussoff tempered his enthusiasm slightly on the drive into the city. Nevertheless, such bounding new-world optimism about a country still under authoritarian rule is a tribute as much to the Party’s ability to mask the trappings of its power as it is to Beijing’s adventurous developers, and their largely foreign-designed landmarks.

  For western politicians, the denial of Communist Party rule can be deliberate. Before Richard Nixon set out on his historic trip to China in 1972, he worked with Henry Kissinger to expunge the use of the term ‘communist’ when talking about the Chinese, because of the embarrassment the word caused him with his traditional base at home. Mao Zedong was called simply the Chairman, rather than the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. The State Department’s official record of the trip, including the speeches, toasts and press conferences, did not mention the word ‘communist’ once. Foreigners in China in the twenty-first century can be forgiven for thinking they are not in a communist state. Nixon, however, landed in Beijing when China was mired in the mass bullying, death and destruction of the Cultural Revolution.

  The Chinese have sowed further confusion in recent years by appropriating concepts at the heart of the liberal traditions in the west more firmly into their own political rhetoric. Mao used the term ‘democracy’ in his writings but the system became deeply hostile to the word’s connotations in the wake of the 1989 protests. When the internet gained popularity in China, state security initially added ‘democracy’ to the list of banned words for web searches. Anyone searching for the words ‘democracy in China’ on Microsoft’s Chinese site in 2005 received an error message saying, ‘please delete forbidden speech from this item’. Wen Jiabao blindsided many by switching tack in 2007, declaring at his annual press conference that ‘democracy, law, freedom, human rights, equality and fraternity’ did not belong exclusively to capitalism, but were ‘the fruits of civilization jointly formed through the entire world’s slow course of historical development’.

  Wen’s pronouncement produced the usual flurry of stories in the foreign media about how China seemed to be embracing western-style political reform. But most missed the fact that, mindful he was addressing an international audience, Wen had left out the all-important rider carried in official documents on democracy in China, including the Party’s own 2005 White Paper on the topic. ‘Democratic government is the Chinese Communist Party governing on behalf of the people,’ the paper said. Within the system, the reaction to Wen’s 2007 pronouncement was more hard-headed. As a former senior official ousted after the 1989 Beijing crackdown joked to me, ‘You need a new dictionary to understand what Chinese leaders mean when they talk about democracy.’

  Like communist and revolutionary parties throughout history, formed and nurtured by underground cells and violent conflict with the regimes they sought to overthrow, the Party in China is secretive by habit and inclination. In a country which has embraced the internet and mobile telephony with gusto, the Party still does not have its own stand-alone website. Lu Weidong, who teaches at the party school in the old revolutionary base of Yan’an, dismissed my query about its absence as redundant. ‘All the important media is owned by the Party,’ he said, ‘so we have no need to set up a website.’

  It would seem difficult to hide an organization as large as the Chinese Communist Party, but it cultivates its backstage role with care. The big party departments controlling personnel and the media keep a purposely low public profile. The party committees (known as ‘leading small groups’) which guide and dictate policy to ministries, which in turn have the job of executing them, work out of sight. The make-up of all these committees, and in many cases even their existence, is rarely referred to in the state-controlled media, let alone any discussion of how they arrive at decisions. The membership of these groups can only be deduced by painstaking Kremlinological compilations from scouring the Chinese press, sometimes over years. ‘The only instance in the entire post-Mao era in which the [Chinese] media listed the current members of any of these groups was in 2003, when the party-controlled newspaper Wen Wei Bao in Hong Kong publicized a membership list of the Central Committee Taiwan Work Leading Small Group,’ said Alice Miller, of the Hoover Institution.

  In Hong Kong, the Party has remained underground even since China regained sovereignty of the former British colony in 1997, defying local laws which require political parties to register. Tsang Yok-sing, the normally chatty longtime leader of the pro-Beijing party in the former colony, still refuses to say directly whether he is a party member. In October 2008, ahead of elections for the presidency of Hong Kong’s legislature, Tsang said he wouldn’t answer such questions because the attitude of people in the territory to the Party ‘is very negative’. He complaine
d, when he founded his own party in the early nineties, that anyone associated with Beijing was branded a ‘commie thug’.

  The Party has been careful, too, to minimize its profile in international business, systematically playing down its presence in the large state enterprises that have been listed offshore in New York, Hong Kong, London and elsewhere. The bulging prospectuses used to sell Chinese state companies ahead of their offshore public listings are crammed with information from every conceivable angle about their commercial activities and board roles, but the Party’s myriad functions, especially control over top personnel, have been airbrushed out altogether. ‘The Party is very much present in these companies but the government is savvy enough to keep it in the background,’ said a Beijing-based western lawyer who has advised on offshore listings of big Chinese companies. ‘There is a tacit understanding among western intermediaries to play down the Party’s role because people understand that it is not going to sell well in the west.’ The bankers and lawyers argue they have little to disclose in any case, because the Party has never provided them with any information or documents about its role in state companies, let alone in business generally. ‘There is no basis for disclosure, because there is never anything to disclose,’ said another lawyer. ‘It’s like a phantom.’

  Over time, the Party’s secrecy has gone beyond habit and become essential to its survival, by shielding it from the reach of the law and the wider citizenry. Ordinary citizens can sue the government in China these days, and many do, although they may stand little chance of success. But they cannot sue the Party, because there is nothing to sue. ‘It is dangerous and pointless to try to sue the Party,’ He Weifang, at the time a law professor at Peking University, one of China’s oldest and most prestigious educational institutions, told me. ‘As an organization, the Party sits outside, and above the law. It should have a legal identity, in other words, a person to sue, but it is not even registered as an organization. The Party exists outside the legal system altogether.’ The Party demands that social organizations all register with government bodies, and punishes those which don’t. The Party, however, has never bothered to meet this standard itself, happily relying on the single line in the preamble of the constitution, about its ‘leading role’, as the basis for its power.