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

by Richard Mcgregor

  Wang struggled for years to get his hands on a full set of state statistics from within his own workplace. During the Cultural Revolution, access to the numbers recorded during the famine were restricted. Anything before 1958 was easy. Anything later was difficult. ‘At the time, the figures were very sensitive, and very few people were allowed to have them,’ Wang said. ‘Only the top five people in Shandong, for example, could see the Public Security Bureau figures–the party secretary and the governor and their deputies, and the police chief.’ When the political climate improved in the late seventies, Wang began quietly to collect materials and make his own calculations. Within the system, too, his expertise was called upon to reconcile the different sets of figures, between those collected by the census and those held by the police. In obscure demographic journals, he trashed the semi-official calculations favoured by the government. They were based ‘on false figures’, he said. But it wasn’t until Yang came knocking on his door in the nineties that he put forward for wider publication his own estimate of a death toll of 35 million.

  In person, Wang seems very much a bloodless functionary, approaching the tragedy as a professional demographer rather than someone with a political axe to grind. He sticks strictly to the numbers, telling the story by going through the tables of figures in an old government population book that sits in the corner of his office at home, covered in thick dust. Look here, he says, brushing the dust off and stabbing his finger at one column of figures showing the population of one province dropping by three million. He shrugged when I asked what the reaction had been in China in the eighties when the real death toll had started to leak out. ‘Because it was so long ago, people were rather indifferent,’ he replied. Wang’s professionalism made him invaluable to Yang. In a country where little is left untainted by politics, Wang sticks simply to the facts. He said he was happy to assist Yang. ‘For me, these are the facts and if someone wants to investigate, I will give them the facts,’ he said.

  To this day, the Chinese government has never given its own version of the death toll. It commissioned a study in the mid-eighties for internal circulation, in response to the publication overseas of the figure produced by the US demographers of 30 million premature deaths. The academic, Jiang Zhenghua, called on to prepare the study for the government had, for most of his life, been a lecturer in automated production systems in Xian before spending barely a year studying demography in Calcutta, India. He came up with a figure of 17 million premature deaths. The study has been widely dismissed, within China as well as outside, because it relied mainly on looking just at recorded deaths. ‘Half of the excess deaths did not get recorded at the time. People were focusing on survival, not statistics,’ said Judith Banister, a US demographer. Jiang, author of the study, was richly rewarded for his work and promoted eventually to vice-chairman of the National People’s Congress.

  Like Yuan Weishi in Guangdong after the furore on his article about the Boxers, Yang had steeled himself for a backlash from the authorities in the wake of Tombstone. He was certainly vulnerable. He still lives in an apartment provided by Xinhua and banks his government pension cheque every month. But so far, nothing has happened. He even gave a public talk in mid-2009 about Tombstone, at a bookshop in Beijing, without interruption by the authorities. His collaborators remain similarly unmolested by the Party. Wang Weizhi, the demographer, occupies the flat in west Beijing allocated to him by the state think-tank where he completed his career. Yu Dehong, in Xinyang, maintains–by Chinese standards–a spacious townhouse with a vegetable garden that he was given on his retirement by the city waterworks, his employer after he was sacked from his political advisory job. ‘The authorities are not as stupid as they used to be,’ said Yang. ‘If this had happened in the past, I would be a dead man, and my family would have been destroyed. But here I am, still writing books and giving talks. The fact that I have not been sent to prison in itself indicates there have been some changes.’

  Yang talked about the Party as if it were a wild beast that was gradually to be domesticated, but needed further nurturing before it could be confronted directly. China needed to make changes gradually, he said, to stop falling back into the ‘vicious cycle of violent regimes and violent mobs’.

  The Party has proved itself to be a crafty, protean beast in these latest rounds of the history wars, just as it has in managing the economy. Individuals who challenge it directly on their home turf are eventually sidelined and deprived of a public voice. The Party has realized that it does not need to kill its critics any more to silence or marginalize them. More to the point, the Party can no longer so easily get away with killing people who disagree with it. For party veterans like Mao Yushi, with vivid living memories of the murderous campaigns of the past, the lower body-count alone represents progress.

  A courtly 80-year-old liberal economist, Mao was approached in late 2008 by political activists to sign a petition called Charter 08. The name of the document deliberately echoed the name and credo of a Cold-War-era petition circulated by Czech dissidents, led by Vaclav Havel, called Charter 77 after the year in which it was released. Like its forerunner, Charter 08 was an unflinching call for democracy in China with full legal protection for human rights. It was just the sort of document to send the Party into a rage. After it was released, state security detained the individuals blamed for writing the document and collecting signatures, and attempted to visit and interrogate every one of the 1,000 or so signatories to the document.

  Mao was listed as a signatory to the document. He insisted, when state security turned up on his doorstep seeking an explanation, that he hadn’t signed it, although he had been approached to do so. He said later that his first reaction when the petition’s organizers visited him with a draft was to tell them to make the document less confrontational, and to inject into it some recognition of how far the Party had come compared to its dark past.

  ‘So many people were killed for having different views,’ he said. ‘I estimate 50 million people were killed by the government [under communism]. Every day, they killed 5,000. But these days, the government has trouble killing one person. I lived in circumstances of fear. There was no protection at all. Now I don’t live in fear.’

  Not everyone involved in Charter 08 was treated so gently. One of the initiators of the petition, Liui Xiaobo, was kept in detention for six months before being formally charged in June 2009 with ‘inciting state subversion’. Liu was just the sort of dissident whose seemingly simple-minded adherence to his beliefs both flummoxed and infuriated the authorities. A literature graduate of Beijing Normal University, Liu was first jailed for his role in the 1989 Tiananmen protests. His fearless impertinence in persisting in criticizing the Party in public after his release saw him detained numerous times thereafter. With Charter 08, however, he went one serious step further than his past agitation. He committed the mortal sin of organizing against the Party.

  The Party made its displeasure known by sentencing Liu to eleven years in jail, the longest term ever given to someone convicted for state subversion since the offence was created in the late nineties. To drive the message home to western governments who had protested against Liu’s detention, his trial was held in late December so he could be sentenced on Christmas Day, 2009. In a perverse way, Liu’s jailing bore out Mao Yushi’s thesis. Once upon a time in communist China, the system might have eliminated Liu for standing up to it. Now, leaving Liu to languish in prison provided an example sufficient to deter anyone foolhardy enough to follow in his footsteps. Such is the measure of political progress in China.

  Afterword

  I spent my final days in Beijing, in between packing up the house and preparing to move countries, dodging police and looking for a lawyer.

  The police were not just chasing me. The compound where I lived was located along China’s main east–west thoroughfare. A few minutes in a taxi up the road landed you in Tiananmen Square, the political and spiritual heart of the city. For the most part, it was a
n enormously convenient, central location. Ahead of the sixtieth anniversary of the communists taking power, on 1 October 2009, however, the compound had become a more perilous place. The police were going from door to door, interrogating the occupants of each apartment and checking their papers to secure the route for the massive parade planned to mark the anniversary.

  After vacating our apartment, we had temporarily shifted to a friend’s flat inside the compound. Our passports had been dispatched to the British embassy, awaiting a visa. This simple set of circumstances, the kind of short-term relocation that afflicts many families moving country, was far too complicated for the local police at a politically fraught time. After one futile attempt to explain why we could not produce our passports, the best course was to hide from the police altogether, to avoid further visitations and a possible expulsion from the compound. The police had already warned residents to keep their windows closed and to stay off their balconies on the day of the parade and during the dress rehearsals leading up to it. The apartments that had the best view in town for the extraordinary parade, a display meant to demonstrate enormous national pride, were to be sealed off for its duration.

  When a panoramic picture of the parade was later posted on a China-watchers’ email list, showing the soldiers, tanks and happy Tibetan and Xinjiang minorities and the like, all lined up in exquisite order for miles along the avenue, a contributor pointed out what he thought was an obvious error. The picture must have been of the dress rehearsal, the eminent Sinologist said, because the streets were empty of cheering citizens joining in the celebration. Quite the opposite was the case. The absence of ordinary people joining in the event was precisely what confirmed the picture as a photo of the official parade. Not for the first time, the people had been excluded from the celebrations of the people’s republic.

  Around the same time, I had been doing some sleuthing of my own. Before leaving China, I wanted to track down Li Fanping, the lawyer who had taken on the cases of the children in the Sanlu milk scandal, to check on the progress of the lawsuits. But Li had gone to ground. While he had been working on the Sanlu case, Li and a bunch of like-minded activist lawyers had taken on some other sensitive causes. They had sought to defend Falun Gong believers and to provide legal representation for ethnic Chinese and Tibetans accused of fomenting unrest during the riots in Lhasa and beyond in 2008, infuriating the authorities.

  A month before the Party’s party, a group of the Sanlu parents were warned off when they tried to travel to Beijing to mark their own anniversary, one year since their children’s poisoning. The police rounded them up and informed them they were members of an illegal organization. The police message was clear–the parents could either stay at home, or go to Beijing and risk ending up in jail. With the sixtieth anniversary on the horizon, the emerging lawyers’ network was also a hot target for state security. Li himself was afraid to come into central Beijing in this period, a time when the city was crawling with security police. Occasionally, Li would surface and call in on his mobile, promising to meet me. But for most of the time, he kept his phone switched off, so the authorities couldn’t use its signal to track him down.

  The harassment of a small-time lawyer and the intense security surrounding the Party’s anniversary might seem like trifling matters when measured against what else was happening in China. While the US, Europe and Japan stagnated in the wake of the financial crisis, the Party had by mid-2009 engineered a stunning bounce-back by flooding state businesses with credit. A surge in economic growth in China is no small thing, as it feeds directly into the lives of tens of millions of people throughout the country, however unfairly. Abroad, China’s voice was being heard with greater respect and deference than ever before in global forums. But for the Party, lawyers like Li and the ordinary families he represented were still considered enough of a threat to require constant surveillance by a massive security apparatus.

  China under Mao Zedong had much in common with other totalitarian systems. To borrow the oft-used phrase, terror was not just a side-effect of the system. Terror was the system for extended periods of Mao’s rule. In the last three decades, the Communist Party has turned that formula around. Terror is just a side-effect these days, used relatively sparingly and, in large part, reluctantly. In modern China, the system runs on seduction rather than suppression. It aims to co-opt, not coerce, the population. But even so, terror remains essential to the system’s survival and is deployed without embarrassment when required. An official once told me: ‘People need to fear the government in China, otherwise the country will fall apart.’ The way the state targets even lawyers like Li and his clients is evidence that behind the Party’s boisterous, boasting exterior lies a regime with a profound appreciation of its limited legitimacy and fragile mandate.

  In the days after the parade, Liu Shihui, a lawyer in Guangdong known for representing human rights activists, had gone bike-riding with a T-shirt he had made himself. On the front was the slogan, ‘One-party dictatorship is a disaster’, cribbed from an editorial written by Xinhua in 1940, before the communists took power. On the back was another pre-revolutionary quote, by former president Liu Shaoqi: ‘The CP [Communist Party] opposes the Kuomintang’s one-party dictatorship, but the CP will not establish a one-party dictatorship.’ The local police didn’t get the joke. They pulled Liu over and detained him for questioning for four hours. ‘They said that I was disturbing the public order with such a T-shirt and the slogans were misleading to the public,’ Liu said. The police cut the T-shirt into pieces and threw it in the rubbish bin. They then bought him a new one, without slogans, at the local supermarket, before sending him on his way.

  The last time I had spoken with Yang Jisheng about Tombstone, he had summed up China and the Party’s progress with words that stuck in my head. ‘The system is decaying and the system is evolving,’ he said. ‘It is decaying while it is evolving. It is not clear which side might come out on top in the end.’ David Shambaugh, the American Sinologist, had reached a similar conclusion in his research. He called his 2008 book on the Communist Party Atrophy and Adaptation, but gave the formula a more positive spin. The Party has constantly adapted to stave off atrophy, he argued, somewhat like athletes who keep changing their training regimes to keep pace with the demands of their sport. The athletes may have to be pumped up on steroids now and again, to get through the really tough competitions, to be sure. But so far, Shambaugh’s thesis has been borne out.

  It has always been easy to construct scenarios under which the Party loses power. A financial crisis was a favoured one for years. As it turned out, the great financial crisis of the early twenty-first century came to symbolize the eclipse of the west, and China’s rise, rather than the other way round. Beijing’s entry into the World Trade Organization was another moment when China’s weaknesses were going to be exposed, as the ferociously competitive western multinationals swept aside their feeble Chinese rivals. Once again, the reverse was the case. China’s trade surplus increased eightfold in the first five years following its fully fledged entry into the world trading system in 2001. By 2008, the trade surplus has risen thirteen times compared to 2001.

  Many predicted that the rise of the middle class spelt the end of authoritarian rule, as it had, in very different ways, in Taiwan, South Korea and elsewhere in Asia. But as one Chinese academic noted, China seems to have turned upside down the late US political scientist Samuel Huntington’s argument that the middle class in developing countries is revolutionary first, before becoming conservative later. In China, the middle class has become a conservative bulwark of Party rule. The middle class en masse hasn’t dared rise up against the state, because they have so much to lose.

  Inequality is another of the Party’s often stated Achilles heels. The extreme poverty that exists in China alongside great and often ill-gotten wealth is more than just embarrassing for a state that professes to be built on the principles of socialism. The Party talks incessantly in public about addressing inequ
ality, because it knows how corrosive the rich–poor gap is to its standing. But it doesn’t follow that the issue will break the Party asunder. China has become a remarkably aspirational place, not unlike the US. America has not fallen apart because incomes in Mississippi and West Virginia have no hope of ever catching up with rich Maryland and Connecticut. The economy has been energized by people who want to emulate the wealthy rather than pull them down. Similarly, enough Chinese have faith in their ability to build a better life for their families to keep the issue of inequality at bay, for now.

  Then there is corruption. Certainly, China is deeply corrupt, but corrupt regimes can last a long time. The Chinese officials who do get arrested for graft generally fall into two categories, or sometimes both. They are the losers in political power struggles, or their corruption has become so outrageous that it embarrasses the system, and thereby jeopardizes the game for everyone else. Corruption in China seems to operate more like a transaction tax that distributes ill-gotten gains among the ruling class. In that respect, it becomes the glue that keeps the system together.

  For all the hullabaloo surrounding the perennial anti-graft campaigns, the risk of going to jail remains small even for officials caught with their hands in the till. Since 1982, about 80 per cent of the 130,000 to 190,000 officials disciplined annually for malfeasance by the Party received only a warning. Only 6 per cent were criminally prosecuted, and of them, only 3 per cent went to jail. ‘The odds of an average corrupt official going to jail are therefore at most 3 in 100,’ said Minxin Pei, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who calculated these figures, ‘making corruption a high-return, low-risk activity.’

  Fighting corruption aside, the Party has proved to be a responsive beast in the face of the challenges that confront it. The state-owned industrial and financial sectors are unrecognizable from a decade ago. They are still under political control, but they are also subject to a whole range of other performance criteria. The federal taxes collected during the fat years of the economy are now finally being spent on health, education and welfare, areas that were grotesquely neglected in the late nineties and early years of this century. Finance in rural areas, where most Chinese still live and work, has been slowly liberalized, partly by freeing up the trade in the small plots of land farmers were once tied to for life. The Leninist bureaucracy survives, but the Party has added a touch of McKinsey to ensure it performs. As meaningless as many of the performance benchmarks for officials might be in practice, they have at least instilled the notion that government must respond to community opinion.