The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers (5 page)

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 complained, 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.

In a country which claims to be building a more open society based on the rule of law, the authorities do not appreciate anyone highlighting this embarrassing legal vacuum. Professor He, for one, was almost arrested after an attack he launched on the Party at a private meeting in 2006 was leaked on the internet. ‘The Party is an organization without legal basis that violates individual freedoms and tramples on the law,’ Professor He had said. ‘The Party is always clamping down on the media and grabbing power. What kind of a system is this? It seriously violates the [Chinese] constitution.’ A transcript of this private, informal gathering, known as the ‘west mountain meeting’, after the location where it was held in Beijing, was posted on the web by enthusiastic students who had attended and taken notes. The content of the meeting infuriated leftist critics of the reform camp. An anonymous reply posted soon after on the website of the China Academy of Social Sciences, one of the country’s leading state think-tanks, said Professor He and the reform group that organized the conclave had conspired to set up ‘a shadow political party, unregistered, but existing in reality’. In Chinese terms, this was a dangerous slander, akin to an accusation of subversion. It was also luridly hypocritical, because it so precisely echoes the criticism made of the Party itself.

Since Mao substituted revolutionary committees and arbitrary violence for due process and left the legal system in ruins, the Party has adopted a more sophisticated approach to the law, enlisting it as an ally to help manage a complex economy, rising social tensions and abuses of administrative power. Legal intellectuals increasingly have the ear of the leadership, which publicly espouses support for harmonizing Chinese legislation with global standards. The Politburo now includes law graduates and economists, chipping away at the overwhelming dominance of engineers. But while it promotes the law, the Party has made sure that it has expanded alongside it. About one-third, or 45,000, of the 150,000 registered lawyers in China as of May 2009, were party members. Nearly all law firms, about 95 per cent, had party committees, which assessed lawyers’ pay not just according to their legal work, but to their party loyalty as well. Far from being a weakness, the Party considers its penetration of the legal system to be a core strength. A retired judge in Chongqing, a vast metropolis in western China, recounted the response he got when he objected to interference of party officials in his court rulings. ‘You call it interference,’ the official replied. ‘We call it leadership.’

In the lead-up to the 2007 congress, former classmates of Li Keqiang, a provincial leader favoured by Hu Jintao to succeed him, spoke admiringly of his liberal legal education in the late seventies. A one-time university colleague from Peking University, Wang Juntao, recalled Li’s open-mindedness on campus and his support for ‘constitutional government’, code for backing the independence of the executive, the parliament and the judiciary. What might have seemed like a compliment to outsiders amounted to a political smear within the Party itself, akin to a candidate from the religious right in the USA being outed on election eve as pro-choice. The source of the compliment didn’t help either, as Wang Juntao had been imprisoned and then sent into exile for his role in the 1989 protests.

In pronouncements on the legal system the Party regularly reiterates the law’s place in the political pecking order. Judges must remain loyal–in order–to the Party, the state, the masses and, finally, the law, according to the report issued to the National People’s Congress in 2009 by the Supreme People’s Court. As Li discovered, up-and-coming leaders perceived to be toying with this hierarchy do so at considerable political risk. ‘This was hugely damaging for Li inside the Party,’ said another classmate. ‘The hardliners are very suspicious of such views.’ In the end, Li fell short of his ambitions at the congress, walking into place at the Great Hall of the People in the Politburo parade one step behind rival Xi Jinping, who became Hu’s heir-apparent in his place.

The career of China’s chief justice, Wang Shengjun, nominally the most senior judicial officer in the country, embodies the values of this legal system admirably. Wang has never studied law, and ascended to the post in 2008 through a career in provincial policing in central Anhui province and then the state security bureaucracy in Beijing. Apart from a degree in history, interrupted by the Cultural Revolution, Wang’s only other education has been at the Central Party School in Beijing. To use an American analogy, it would be like appointing a former bureaucrat in charge of policing in Chicago to be the US Supreme Court Chief Justice on the basis of his success, first at fighting crime in the mid-west city and then managing a division of the Justice Ministry as a partisan political appointee in Washington. The analogy is not exact. The Chinese Supreme Court is not like its US counterpart. It has hundreds of judges and performs administrative functions as well. But, broadly speaking, the comparison holds. In the Party’s view Wang’s political credentials made him perfectly qualified for the senior legal job.

Wang performs another important role at the court, by hosting foreign judges and lawyers visiting China, as their nominal counterpart in the legal system. To arrange meetings with the most senior and powerful figure in the legal firmament, Zhou Yongkang, is awkward, as he does not occupy any formal government office that publicly identifies him as the country’s chief law officer. Zhou, who sits on the nine-member Politburo Standing Committee, is responsible for the vast state security apparatus, including the police. He also chairs the Party’s Central Politics and Law Committee, the country’s supreme legal authority which supervises the courts, the police, the Justice ministry and the legislature, the National People’s Congress. His appointment as head of the committee was announced cursorily in the state media after the 2007 congress, but otherwise his work and speeches are largely directed internally, to party organs, not the public at large.

Senior leaders stand constant guard against encroachment on the Party’s power through western notions of competitively elected parliaments and an independent judiciary. In the space of a few months in early 2009, two members of the Politburo inner circle made highly critical speeches about western democratic governance. In one, Jia Qinglin warned that China needed to build a ‘line of defence to resist western two-party and multi-party systems, a bi-cameral legislature, the separation of powers and other kinds of erroneous ideological interferences’. Luo Gan, a member of the Politburo Standing Committee until 2007, was even more explicit. In a speech published before his term finished, Luo conceded that Chinese courts had to keep pace with international trends but rejected the argument that judges and lawyers had to be independent as a result. ‘Enemy forces’, he said, were trying to use the law to undermine and divide China. ‘There is no question about where legal departments should stand,’ he said. ‘The correct political stand is where the Party stands.’

Chinese leaders have long debated the merits of a Chinese-style separation of powers doctrine that would put greater distance between the Party and the state. After years of largely fruitless discussion, they simply gave up, because a single-party state cannot countenance such a reform. The idea of a genuine split has now become a little passé, because to pursue the notion to its logical conclusion would risk gutting the Party’s control over the state. ‘Deng talked a lot about the separation of the Party and government and great efforts were made in this area,’ said Hu Jintao’s adviser. ‘But basically, after it reached a certain stage, the idea stalled.’