The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers (4 page)

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 that 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.

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 MacKenzie, 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.