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Book: The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers by Richard McGregor
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Authors: Richard McGregor
Tags: nonfiction, History, Business & Economics, china, Asian Culture, Politics & Government, Communism, Military & Fighting
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sown the seeds of conflict and change, within the Party, the economy and society at large. According to the Leninist ethos, the Party infiltrates the government and society. Now the reverse is happening. Society, with all its rapidly evolving aspirations, demands and cleavages, is now infiltrating the Party, and the Party is struggling to keep up.
China is awash with people and organizations with evolving professional interests, codes and agendas which are antithetical to a repressive, busybody state. Entrepreneurs, lawyers, journalists, religious worshippers, teachers, academics, historians and even doctors who speak out about public health problems are increasingly demanding the right to simply do their jobs or pursue their beliefs, free of political interference. China’s most far-reaching reform of the past two decades, the creation of a private housing market, has also spawned a new class of potential political activists, middle-class investors who want to protect the value of their properties. To paraphrase the author, V. S. Naipaul, there are a million mutinies now, on the streets, in cyberspace, within companies and on farms, by people who want nothing more than the government to be accountable for its actions and to tell the truth.
Amidst China’s successes, there is failure aplenty. At the same time as China has got rich, its society has become more unequal than even the US and Russia. There are now more billionaires in China than in any country other than the US. The rich have not just been getting richer. In the boom times, they have been doing so at the expense of the poorest people in the land. In the two years to 2003, the average incomes of the poorest 10 per cent in China fell, at a time when the economy was growing rapidly, and the incomes of the top 10 per cent of the population were rising by more than 16 per cent annually.
The Party has no compunction about arresting opponents who openly challenge the system, and destroying their livelihoods and families, but it has little stomach for violent conflict on a large scale. Revolutionary parties do not hesitate to spill blood to hold power. Governing parties, as the Chinese Communist Party now styles itself, have to learn to live by a different set of rules. ‘It’s not just because Hu Jintao is not Deng Xiaoping. There is a growing demand for democracy,’ said Zhou Ruijin, the retired editor of the Liberation Daily , the official party newspaper in Shanghai. ‘You can see this by the way people are expressing their views within the Party, and outside. One-man rule no longer applies.’
As a political machine, the Party has so far proved to be a sinuous, cynical and adaptive beast in the face of its multiple challenges. As society has changed in the last decade, so has the Party’s membership make-up. Top leaders have systematically set about jettisoning the body’s proletarian rural roots in favour of an alliance with the richer and more successful classes emerging out of the market economy. Once dominated by workers, and then by peasants–who alone made up nearly half the membership until as late as 1978–the Party now seeks out star students and wealthy entrepreneurs. They are the fastest growing sources of new members, expanding their numbers in the Party by 255 per cent and 113 per cent respectively between 2002 and 2007. Many of them have been happy to embrace the Party, because it offers them in return access to a network that is crucial to furthering their careers.
When I met three students from China’s elite universities at a café in Beijing in early 2009 to ask them about the Party, they were unanimous about its attractions. ‘For many young students like me, to be a party member is a symbol of excellence,’ said Ni Hanwei, a maths student at Tsinghua University, known as China’s MIT. ‘The second reason is that if you are a party member, you will get more opportunities with government jobs.’ At both high school and
China is awash with people and organizations with evolving professional interests, codes and agendas which are antithetical to a repressive, busybody state. Entrepreneurs, lawyers, journalists, religious worshippers, teachers, academics, historians and even doctors who speak out about public health problems are increasingly demanding the right to simply do their jobs or pursue their beliefs, free of political interference. China’s most far-reaching reform of the past two decades, the creation of a private housing market, has also spawned a new class of potential political activists, middle-class investors who want to protect the value of their properties. To paraphrase the author, V. S. Naipaul, there are a million mutinies now, on the streets, in cyberspace, within companies and on farms, by people who want nothing more than the government to be accountable for its actions and to tell the truth.
Amidst China’s successes, there is failure aplenty. At the same time as China has got rich, its society has become more unequal than even the US and Russia. There are now more billionaires in China than in any country other than the US. The rich have not just been getting richer. In the boom times, they have been doing so at the expense of the poorest people in the land. In the two years to 2003, the average incomes of the poorest 10 per cent in China fell, at a time when the economy was growing rapidly, and the incomes of the top 10 per cent of the population were rising by more than 16 per cent annually.
The Party has no compunction about arresting opponents who openly challenge the system, and destroying their livelihoods and families, but it has little stomach for violent conflict on a large scale. Revolutionary parties do not hesitate to spill blood to hold power. Governing parties, as the Chinese Communist Party now styles itself, have to learn to live by a different set of rules. ‘It’s not just because Hu Jintao is not Deng Xiaoping. There is a growing demand for democracy,’ said Zhou Ruijin, the retired editor of the Liberation Daily , the official party newspaper in Shanghai. ‘You can see this by the way people are expressing their views within the Party, and outside. One-man rule no longer applies.’
As a political machine, the Party has so far proved to be a sinuous, cynical and adaptive beast in the face of its multiple challenges. As society has changed in the last decade, so has the Party’s membership make-up. Top leaders have systematically set about jettisoning the body’s proletarian rural roots in favour of an alliance with the richer and more successful classes emerging out of the market economy. Once dominated by workers, and then by peasants–who alone made up nearly half the membership until as late as 1978–the Party now seeks out star students and wealthy entrepreneurs. They are the fastest growing sources of new members, expanding their numbers in the Party by 255 per cent and 113 per cent respectively between 2002 and 2007. Many of them have been happy to embrace the Party, because it offers them in return access to a network that is crucial to furthering their careers.
When I met three students from China’s elite universities at a café in Beijing in early 2009 to ask them about the Party, they were unanimous about its attractions. ‘For many young students like me, to be a party member is a symbol of excellence,’ said Ni Hanwei, a maths student at Tsinghua University, known as China’s MIT. ‘The second reason is that if you are a party member, you will get more opportunities with government jobs.’ At both high school and
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