The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers
- ISBN13: 9780061708770
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An eye-opening investigation into china’s communist party and its integral role in the country’s rise as a global superpower and rival of the united states
China’s political and economic growth in the past three decades is one of astonishing, epochal dimensions. The country has undergone a remarkable transformation on a scale similar to that of the Industrial Revolution in the West. The most remarkable part of this transformation, however, has been left largely untold—the central role of the Chinese Communist Party.
As an organization alone, the Party is a phenomenon of unique scale and power. Its membership surpasses seventy-three million, and it does more than just rule a country. The Party not only has a grip on every aspect of government, from the largest, richest cities to the smallest far-flung villages in Tibet and Xinjiang, it also has a hold on all official religions, the media, and the military. The Party presides over large, wealthy state-owned businesses, and it exercises control over the selection of senior executives of all government companies, many of which are in the top tier of the Fortune 500 list.
In The Party, Richard McGregor delves deeply into China’s inner sanctum for the first time, showing how the Communist Party controls the government, courts, media, and military, and how it keeps all corruption accusations against its members in-house. The Party’s decisions have a global impact, yet the CPC remains a deeply secretive body, hostile to the law, unaccountable to anyone or anything other than its own internal tribunals. It is the world’s only geopolitical rival of the United States, and is steadfastly poised to think the worst of the West.
In this provocative and illuminating account, Richard McGregor offers a captivating portrait of China’s Communist Party, its grip on power and control over China, and its future.
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Review by Duane McMullen for The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers
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Through a series of anecdotes and interviews, largely drawn from his eight years in China as correspondent for ‘The Financial Times’, Richard McGregor illustrates ‘the Party’, a remarkable social organization which subordinates 1.3 billion people.
It is a journalist’s treatment rather than academic, so instead of explicitly offering analysis, Richard McGregor lets his interviews and stories largely speak for themselves. This provides a range of interesting characters, quotes and anecdotes. However, a side-effect is that many remarkable insights are either buried innocuously in the text or left to the reader’s inference. The story is no less fascinating for it.
The picture that emerges is of a creative, adaptable, self-aware and resilient social network. Made up of 75 million party members, one in twelve adult Chinese, this self-perpetuating elite has no legal form beyond a mention in the preamble to China’s constitution. The party exists outside the regular state apparatus and operates like a controller chip grafted into China’s governing structures through party cells throughout government, the military, public companies and even private firms.
Grounded in its near ubiquitous presence in the state, military, public and private spheres, the Party maintains its grip via a number of interconnected and synergistic processes. Its personnel system allows any individual to be replaced, transferred or expelled at the will of the organism. Party control of the military provides ultimate coercive sanction. The Party’s discipline system places members above the law even as it strengthens Party control of the behaviour of its members. The propaganda department uses sophisticated story telling to sculpt the narrative around events to conform to the Party’s best interests.
Few join the party for ideological reasons. Rather, achieving party status is to gain membership into an elite club which, provided you stay within its unwritten bounds and contribute to the goals of the organism, gives a member a form of immunity from the law and other powers and abilities not available to the average citizen. In the corruption that is endemic in the system, everyone is guilty of something serious – from taking bribes, to tax evasion to sexual impropriety to failing to get proper permits. Members that stray out of bounds need not be punished for the real fault, but instead for one of the many more routine transgressions that hang over the heads of almost all party members. Were one not able to normally get away with routine transgressions, there would be little benefit to party membership. Yet simply knowing that straying too far will result in being punished for something entirely different is enough to self-censor unwanted behaviours, in particular the unwritten ones.
Self-reflexive and analytic, the party is alert to the internal and external dangers it faces and has proven able to respond to challenge with remarkable agility, creativity and effectiveness.
Though the book is very much about the Party at present, in 2010, glimpses of party history serve to illustrate the nature of the organism and its ability to adapt and reinvent itself.
For example, Richard McGregor declares a historic milestone the Party’s peaceful and administrative transfer of power in 2002 to a new top grouping of apparatchiks. For the first time in over 2000 years of Chinese history, China was no longer ruled by a single individual seen as a sort of a god. Instead, the apex of China became a committee atop an organism which permeates into the whole society, with the next shifting of interchangable personalities at the top scheduled for 2012.
In 1992, only ten years prior to the 2002 milestone, again demonstrating forward looking pragmatic realism, the party transformed itself on entrepreneurs – the most extreme enemies of communism – not just by allowing them to join the party, but by actively recruiting them. Binding China’s rapidly emerging entrepreneurial elites to the party provided benefits to both sides, allowing entrepreneurs more freedom from the stultifying strictures of state apparatus while reinforcing and renewing Party control on an element of Chinese society that may have come to threaten the Party’s very existence.
Prior to that, the shock of Tiananmen square and the fall of the former Soviet Bloc caused a wave of realistic threat assessment and self-reflection within the Party. This lead to further creative and pragmatic changes, though not in the ways that analysts in the west might have guessed or hoped for.
Given the importance of the Party in China and the growing importance of China in the world, it behooves us to better understand it. Richard McGregor’s fascinating and informative book is recommended reading for those interested in understanding not just the Party, but the modern China within which it operates.
Review by Duncan L. J. Clark for The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers
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I’ve been doing business in China for over a decade and this book is highly valuable even to a ‘China hand’ – essential reading for anyone dealing with China, or China’s impact. Olympics? Expo? Those are the trappings, this book gets to the core. Read this and understand…
Review by Serge J. Van Steenkiste for The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers
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Richard McGregor renders a great service to his readers by shedding light on the inner workings of the ruling Chinese Communist Party which is keen on secrecy. The transformation of China’s economy and society and its impact on the rest of the world in the last three decades has too often deflected attention from formal politics in Beijing.
Highly pragmatic, cynical, and adaptive, the Party has succeeded in the last three decades in linking the power and legitimacy of a communist state with the drive and productivity of an increasingly entrepreneurial society. The party’s legitimacy still depends largely on the economy and its accompanying resurgent patriotism and nationalism. For all its increasingly international presence, China and, therefore, the Party will remain focused mainly on solving the country’s problems due to their scale, depth, multiplicity, and variety.
McGregor shows systematically how high secrecy, tolerance of non-embarrassing corruption in its ranks, resolute hostility to the rule of law, and vindictive pursuit of enemies are all vital for the Party if it wants to remain at the core of the modern Chinese narrative through its tight grip on 1) personnel, 2) propaganda, and 3) People’s Liberation Army.
At the same time, the Party has traded in Mao Zedong’s totalitarian terror for a seductive modus vivendi with Chinese citizens. As long as ordinary Chinese accept the enlightened leadership of their empowered elite and do not ask for either accountability or the rule of law, they can pretty much lead their life and career as they see fit and eventually get rich. McGregor also shows clearly that although the Party has adapted its membership make-up to ongoing changes in China, it is struggling to keep up with the rapidly evolving aspirations, demands, and cleavages of the Chinese society. However, the bargain that the Party has struck with ordinary Chinese does not exist in a vacuum. The Party’s propaganda system has to constantly remind Chinese citizens that there is no serious alternative to the Party in order for it to remain at the top of Chinese society.
The Party is also keen to minimize its profile abroad. For example, the Party likes to promote the largest state-owned enterprises (SOEs) that are publicly traded in Hong Kong and outside mainland China as independent commercial entities. The Party’s myriad functions, starting with its control over top management of these SOEs, have been downplayed systematically.
In summary, McGregor convincingly demonstrates that the Party is determined to pursue its own model of economic, political, and social development on its own implacable terms. The rest of the world, especially the West, has no other option but to adapt to the reemergence of China, regardless of the ultimate outcome of this metamorphosis.
Review by M. G. Zink for The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers
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I spent the last four years living in China, serving as the president of a Chinese bank. That role took me to 44 cities all across China, where I met hundreds of government officials and Party members. I worked daily with the General Secretary of the bank’s Party Committee. During my time in China I read every major book by any foreigner who had lived and worked in China. Richard’s book, The Party, is the most insightful book I have encountered. If you wish to understand how China is run today and you only have time to read one book, then read this one.
Review by BD for The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers
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A readable book explaining how the Communist Party rules China in the 21st century is long overdue. Richard McGregor delivers on the promise of the subtitle to unveil the secret world of the party. Many people dismiss the idea that communism still has traction, assuming that “a Starbucks on every corner is a sign of political progress.” It’s not so: “The Party is like God. He is everywhere. You just can’t see him,”a Beijing university professor tells McGregor. My favorite part so far is about the the red telephones on the desks of ministers, editors of party newspapers, CEOs of state-run companies through which the party issues its instructions. There are few enough of these red machines that the phone numbers have only four digits and when the phone rings, you’d better answer.