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

by Richard Mcgregor

  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.’

  No legal obstacle is so great that the Party cannot brush it aside. For the security services, the single line in the constitution about the Party’s leadership role of the country has always been sufficient legal basis to arrest any critic. Hu Jia, one of China’s bravest dissidents, used to ask the plain-clothes police who waited on his doorstep to stop him leaving his apartment under what Chinese law he was detained. Hu Jia’s questions enraged the police. Some were so angry they beat him up. One day, he said, one of them finally responded to his question, blurting out the grounds for detention. ‘Under the preamble to the Chinese constitution!’ the poli
ceman yelled, before dragging Hu away.

  Hu Jia was jailed in mid-2008 for allegedly working with foreigners to subvert the Beijing Olympics. The Party nailed Professor He in the end as well, with a little more subtlety. Tired by the endless politics of life in the capital, Professor He resigned from Peking University and took up an offer in 2008 to become the new dean of the law department at Zhejiang University. The authorities first strong-armed the institution in Hangzhou to withdraw the job offer. Then they forced He, who had been left in professional limbo, to take a temporary position at Shihezi University, a lowly ranked institution in Xinjiang, in far-western China. It was a deliberately humiliating transfer, akin to a Harvard Law School professor being reassigned to a small community college in rural Texas.

  If the Party, locked in its ossified Leninist ways, is secretive, corrupt, hostile to the rule of law and vindictive in the pursuit of its enemies, it begs the question: how on earth did it manage to preside over one of the greatest spurts of economic growth and wealth creation in recorded history?

  The Party’s genius has been its leaders’ ability in the last three decades to maintain the political institutions and authoritarian powers of old-style communism, while dumping the ideological straitjacket that inspired them. The Party’s conscious retreat from the private lives of Chinese citizens over the same period had a similarly liberating effect on society. The dehumanization of everyday life that characterized traditional communist societies has largely disappeared in China, along with the food queues. In the process, the Party has pulled off a remarkable political feat, somehow managing to hitch the power and legitimacy of a communist state to the drive and productivity of an increasingly entrepreneurial economy.

  In place of Mao’s totalitarian terror, the Party has substituted a kind of take-it-or-leave-it compact with society. If you play by the Party’s rules, which means eschewing competitive politics, then you and your family can get on with your lives and maybe get rich. But the deal does not exist in isolation. It is buttressed by a pervasive propaganda system which constantly derides alternatives to the Party. The underlying message is that the Party alone stands between the country and the kind of murderous, impoverishing instability that has engulfed China at numerous times in its history. Recalibrated along these lines, the compact also reads–get rich, or else!

  Even with this qualification, the space for individual Chinese to grow and prosper has expanded enormously since the late seventies. The rank and file of Chinese citizenry these days lead vastly different lives from their parents a generation ago. One by one, all sorts of things that once needed the Party’s permission–where you lived, worked and studied; how much you were paid; where you went to the doctor; who you married, on what date and when you started a family; where you shopped and what you could buy; and when and where you travelled and with whom–have become the subject of personal choice for urban Chinese citizens. All you need is the cash to pay for it. The rules that long restricted the movement of rural residents are also, slowly, being unwound.

  When the Party directly ruled over, and often threatened, ordinary Chinese, during Mao’s murderous campaigns in the fifties, sixties and seventies, people learned to pay close attention to its pronouncements. Many Chinese remain attuned to the stiff recitations of official newspeak on sensitive political occasions, such as the 2007 congress. Government and scholarly circles, and even stock market investors, who understand that policy changes dictated by the Party have the power to move share prices, still watch these pronouncements closely. Otherwise, party declarations exist in a kind of parallel universe, like a radio left on in the background, a constant presence, but for the most part easily tuned out and forgotten altogether.

  The Party’s removal of itself from the many areas of life and work of its citizens into which it once crudely and cruelly intruded has been as strategic as it has been enlightened. As intoxicating as these changes have been for the Chinese people, the retreat has also paradoxically empowered the authorities. The Party has been able to maintain its own secret political life, directing the state from behind the scenes, while capturing the benefits and the kudos delivered by a liberalized economy and a richer society at the same time.

  The fruits of reform in China since 1978 are palpable. China crammed into thirty years the kind of brutish, uplifting makeover that took as long as a century in the industrial revolutions in the UK and the US. The economy has doubled in size every eight years. In a comparatively short space of time, the Party has presided over an epic migration of farmers from the countryside to the cities; an explosion in private ownership–of houses, cars, businesses and shares; the creation of a middle class twice the size of the population of the United Kingdom; and the lifting out of poverty of hundreds of millions of people. In the last decade, China has managed to gallop or drag itself through multiple calamities: the Asian financial crises in 1997 and 1998; the downturns in the US in the wake of the bursting of the internet bubble and the September 11 terrorist attack; and the homegrown SARS emergency in 2003, which threatened to bring businesses inside the country to a halt. When the credit crunch hit the global economy in 2008, China was better equipped than just about anywhere in the world to handle the sudden downturn.

  While the Party’s political conclaves operate opaquely, the economy has been nourished by a relatively open debate. All the issues on the table in most developed countries, about the value of open markets, the cost of state ownership, the perils of protectionism and the impact of floating currencies, are up for discussion in China as well. Liberal economists are still subject to occasional waves of intimidation, because of the sense that their ideas ultimately threaten the dominance of the state. But the Party’s restless search for a formula that matches its dual objectives–to stay in power and get rich at the same time, or to stay in power by getting rich–means their views are often heeded anyway.

  The Party has not drawn one obvious lesson from the success of the economy–that the public policy sector that has been most open to debate and competition has produced the best outcomes. In the Party’s view, liberal economics have only succeeded in China because they have been married with authoritarian politics. China’s instincts in this respect are like those of much of Asia. The visible hand of the state and the invisible hand of the market, far from being contradictory, are made to complement and reinforce each other. These days, Chinese officials treat questions of any inherent contradiction between a communist political system and a capitalist economy as almost banal. In real life, China is full of symbols of how the Party has merged the two systems to its advantage. At the Shanghai party school, one of the top four in the country, this convergence of interests is part of the curriculum.

  The school, opened in late 2005 on a 40-hectare campus in the newly built Pudong district, luxuriates in modern buildings designed by Paris-based architects to resemble a red painting table, consciously echoing the place where ‘the master teaches the student’ in traditional Chinese culture. As ever, the Party has calibrated the way the school presents itself at home, to its Chinese students, and, separately, to the outside world. The official name of the school in Chinese, properly translated into English, is the ‘China Pudong Cadre College’. In English, the communist connotations of the word ‘cadre’ have been excised to render the centre’s name as the ‘China Executive Leadership Academy in Pudong’, making it sound more like an MBA factory than a pillar of the party system. The subtle name change underlines the central purpose of the party school system, which is as much about enforcing and benchmarking loyalty as imparting modern management skills.

  On the first day of class in Shanghai, the students, all up-and-coming officials, with a few private entrepreneurs sprinkled into the mix, make a ritual pilgrimage to the small museum commemorating the place where thirteen activists met in secret in 1921 to found the Communist Party in China. On the way, the students pass through a late nineteenth-century city district, smartly refurbished by a Boston architect, and crawling wi
th upscale eateries and expensive apartments with prices to rival global capitals like New York and London. Since the mid-nineties much of old Shanghai has been knocked down and replaced by high-rise developments. In 2001 a Hong Kong property tycoon was allowed to refurbish this small district, called Xintiandi, or ‘New Heaven on Earth’, because he agreed to preserve some of the old low-rise houses, and upgrade the party museum alongside them.

  The workers and their families who used to live in the old laneway residences complained bitterly about the meagre compensation they received for being ejected for the development. The uproar over the same kind of issue in areas across the whole city led to the downfall of the powerful Shanghai party secretary, a Politburo member, several years later. But the idea that one of the Party’s sacred sites should sit proudly amidst a yuppie wonderland generated much less controversy. What once might have been seen as a fatal clash of values has been turned into an advertisement for the Party’s fundamental strengths. ‘People can see the progress of the Party,’ Professor Xia Jianming, the Shanghai party school’s director-general, said. ‘This [setting] is a kind of harmony. In our society, people of different levels may have different ways of meeting their requirements.’