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

by Richard Mcgregor

  ‘The system is all from the Soviet Union, but the CCP has taken it to an extreme.’

  (Yuan Weishi, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangdong)

  ‘Li Gang paid 300,000 [for his position], but within two years, netted in 5 million. The return is 1,500 per cent. Is there any other profession as profitable as this under heaven?’

  (An official from the Central Discipline Inspection Commission, quoted in China News Week)

  The moment I sat down in the coffee shop of the party leadership compound in Changsha, I handed over my name card. It was a polite, reflex act, part of an introduction ritual so seemingly indispensable in Asia that business consultants still solemnly peddle advice about the culturally correct way of making the exchange. Wang Minggao, the man sitting opposite me, initially played out his role to a tee, studying my card from all angles, and nodding intently at its contents, but then did not round out the ritual by offering his in return. When we had finished chatting and were about to leave for dinner, I asked directly if I could have one of his cards, to contact him in the future. ‘I don’t carry a name card,’ he replied, folding his arms to end the matter. From his point of view, there had been no slight. Mr Wang didn’t use a card when dealing with outsiders. His employer, the Organization Department of Hunan, only faced in one direction, inwards, at the Party.

  Wang had picked me up at the gates of the sprawling complex in Changsha, the capital of Hunan, in central China. Like entrances to all official estates in China, the security reception was officious and intimidating for obvious outsiders, but seemingly porous for privileged people and their vehicles, the status of which was indistinguishable to the untrained eye. The green-uniformed paramilitary guards at the gates glared at my assistant and me on approach, lifted their hands stiffly in the form of a stop-sign and barked directions to stand to one side, together with other assorted ne’er-do-wells congregating nearby. While we waited, the local elite, in sharp, late-model cars, often with no number-plates, glided into the compound without braking, let alone pausing to acknowledge the guards. Mr Wang whisked us inside in his vehicle unchallenged as well, a tell-tale sign of his own elevated status, driving past the stately red-brick government buildings abandoned by the former Nationalist administration of Chiang Kai-shek in their flight into exile in Taiwan ahead of the communist victory in 1949. In a moment, he had deposited us at the compound coffee shop for our interview.

  The appointment with Wang had taken many months, and much gentle flattery and harassment, to secure. ‘As long as it is nothing to do with state secrets, it should be OK,’ he eventually said. Wang had endured our courting with impeccable politeness and sat cheerfully through the two-hour interview before inviting us for dinner. To have not invited his guests to eat with him would have been inexplicably rude in China, where any out-of-town host will instinctively ask visitors for a meal, and protest noisily if the invitation is refused. But in failing to hand out his name card, Wang breached just about every other protocol for first meetings. A trivial issue at the end of the day, his handling of his cards was symbolic of how his employer viewed the world. The rest of the universe outside of the organization department was peripheral for Wang. Any cards that he had were handed out inside the communist club, and nowhere else.

  It was rare to secure a meeting with an official from a department which keeps itself firmly out of sight even in China itself. The national headquarters of the Central Organization Department occupy an unmarked building in Beijing, about a kilometre west of Tiananmen Square along the broad sweep of Chang’an Avenue. No sign hangs outside indicating the business of the building’s tenant. The department’s general switchboard number is unlisted. Calls from landlines in the building to mobile phones do not display an incoming number, as is customary for ordinary phones, just a string of zeros. The only way a member of the public can make contact with the department in Beijing is through its sole listed number, 12380, which has a recorded message, allowing the caller to report any ‘organizational’ problems above the county level. From early 2009, a website was launched, offering the same complaints service. Around the same time, the department appointed a spokesman. But for the first six months of his tenure, he did not utter a single word in public. Friends of the latest head of the department in Beijing, Li Yuanchao, a relatively liberal figure appointed at the end of 2007, once joked that they wanted to ask him about what they considered to be the absurd level of secrecy surrounding the body. ‘Are we still an underground party?’ exclaimed one of his longtime friends, before admitting he could talk to Li about anything except his work.

  The department is accurately, if blandly, described as the human resources arm of the Party, but this does not do justice to its extraordinary brief and the way it is empowered to penetrate every state body, and even some nominally private ones, throughout the country. The best way to get a sense of the dimensions of the department’s job is to conjure up an imaginary parallel body in Washington. A similar department in the US would oversee the appointment of the entire US cabinet, state governors and their deputies, the mayors of major cities, the heads of all federal regulatory agencies, the chief executives of GE, Exxon-Mobile, Wal-Mart and about fifty of the remaining largest US companies, the justices on the Supreme Court, the editors of the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, the bosses of the TV networks and cable stations, the presidents of Yale and Harvard and other big universities, and the heads of think-tanks like the Brookings Institution and the Heritage Foundation. Not only that, the vetting process would take place behind closed doors, and the appointments announced without any accompanying explanation why they had been made. When the department knocks back candidates for promotion, it does that in private as well.

  In Beijing, the Politburo decides on the most senior of appointments but the organization department is the gatekeeper that all candidates must get past to take office. ‘All official positions of a certain rank on the public payroll are covered by the organization department,’ Wang said, with the kind of pride that comes from being a member of an elite, powerful and secret club. ‘From 1949 onwards,’ he added with a wink, ‘we even covered some journalists.’ Wang and his ilk at organization departments across China have no problem in distinguishing who can come and go from party compounds like the one in Hunan. Encoding and decoding hierarchies and the privileges attached to them is their daily bread. The Party has been tentatively experimenting with ways to make the system more transparent, by allowing the public into some areas of the local people’s congress to express an opinion about officials up for promotion, a process that has been creatively labelled ‘democratic recommendation’. By and large, though, the department works in a shroud of secrecy.

  If I needed any reminder of the closed universe the department and its officers lived in, it came when I suggested to Wang that the body was unnecessarily mysterious. The question left him nonplussed, as though he had never even considered the issue. ‘Government departments hang their plaque outside their buildings because they have to face the public. We are only here to service the cadres,’ he said. ‘The cadres all know where we are. It’s a bit like knowing where your parents live.’

  The department maintains files on top-level officials in the public sector, to keep tabs on their political reliability and past job performance, making it indispensable to the Party’s control of the country and the nation’s vast public sector. With their colleagues in the Party’s anti-corruption unit, the department cross-checks for any black marks recorded for graft or sexual misdemeanours. The breadth of the department’s role is a source of pride. ‘Our Party’s organizational working resources have no equal with other political parties in the world,’ internal documents boast. The system is replicated in China at each of the remaining levels of government. To simplify a complicated system, the centre supervises appointments in the provinces; the provincial organization departments supervise the cities, and so on, right down to the lowest tier of government, at the township l
evel. In practice, the party secretary at each level retains a huge amount of power over appointments in the area over which he or she rules.

  A Chinese official-turned-private-equity-investor once compared the department’s work in conversation to the confirmation process officials nominated to work in the US administration go through. In both cases, potential candidates for jobs are interviewed: in China by members of the department, which also sends teams of people around the country vetting potential candidates for promotion; and in the US, by congressional confirmation panels. Otherwise, it was a slyly misleading analogy, in the way that direct comparisons between western and Chinese governing systems usually are. One process unfolds in a partisan public forum and the other takes place almost entirely behind closed doors, buttressed by a managed media which is not allowed to report details of appointment battles, even if they find out about them. The ghostly, undocumented presence of the Party, which sits behind the government in China and manipulates its staffing, makes most of such comparisons redundant.

  The patronage dispensed through the department, in the form of the most powerful party and government positions in the country, have turned it into a make-or-break forum for the system’s toughest internal political battles. Politburo members, factional groupings, the centre and the provinces, and individuals aligned to different ministries and industries–all struggle to place their people into positions of power and influence in state institutions. ‘If the job of a bureau chief becomes vacant, then a lot of senior officials in Beijing will want to have it filled with their person. In times like this, the organization department will have a very difficult task,’ said Wu Si, the editor of a prominent liberal magazine, Annals of the Yellow Emperor. ‘It is meant to be about virtue and talent but it becomes a test of your relationship with the department and the seniority of your patron. At the end of the day, the department cannot be bypassed.’ In the absence of elections or any overtly public competition for government posts, the behind-the-scenes battles to secure appointments are the very stuff of politics in China. As the clearing house for these disputes, the organization department has become the institutional hub of the entire political system.

  The alumni of former leaders of the organization department are testament to its status. Deng Xiaoping and Hu Yaobang both headed the body during their careers. Zeng Qinghong, a political fixer who acted as a kind of cardinal-at-the-elbow for Jiang Zemin during his years in power, also led the department. When Hu Jintao began to gain control of the party apparatus by the start of his second term in late 2007, he was able to secure leadership of the body for a loyalist of his own, Li Yuanchao.

  Scratch the surface of this colossus, however, and you find incipient panic at the way the system is being subverted by multiple trends outside of the department’s control. Since the upheavals of 1989, the organization department’s oversight of potentially suspect institutions, especially universities, has been formally tightened, but the ideological foundation of its work has drifted. Party members are ‘losing belief’, the department’s own secret documents complain. ‘Some individual party members and even cadres in leadership positions no longer have a clear head and doubt the inevitability of the ultimate triumph of socialism and communism.’ Many individuals have begun to believe in ‘ghosts and deities instead of Marx and Lenin’, a reference not just to the spread of western religions, but to the revival of traditional Chinese superstitions stamped out after 1949.

  The department is plagued by a constant tension that bedevils most political systems. The Politburo has striven to professionalize the selection of top officials through the department, while undermining the process at the same time by fixing appointments in favour of loyalists and relatives. Powerful officials presiding over local fiefdoms have swept aside the rules even more crudely, establishing market places in which government positions are bought and sold for huge financial gain. ‘The older senior officials who survived the wartime were different from the younger officials who tend to think about themselves and are mainly after power, salary, status, housing and medical care,’ said Zhang Quanjing, who headed the department for five years until 1999. ‘This thinking triggers jealousy and encourages the buying of official posts to get promoted.’

  At the local level, the party secretaries and the heads of the organization department run the grassroots administration like a franchise, selling government jobs for vast sums of money.

  The value of the market was illustrated by a case in Sichuan in 2007, when a man passing himself off as an organization department official secured a payment of $63,000 from a local bureaucrat under the guise of finding him a senior government post. ‘While they jeered at the miserable unlucky bureaucrat who paid the bribe,’ the local media reported, ‘people were astonished by the influence of the department over Chinese officials.’

  Enamoured of its rituals and privileges, the department is still powerful and feared. But it is resented in equal measure, as a static relic of a bureaucratic system that has battled to keep pace with a more fractured and open society, and the demands and temptations of the moneyed new world that has grown up around it. One vice-minister who has to jump through the department’s hoops every year to stay in his job used a Chinese aphorism to describe the body: ‘It’s not good enough to make for a success, but more than enough to make for failure.’ Much of the debate about China focuses on how the Party can control the people. The organization department is at the heart of an even bigger challenge–of whether the Party can control itself.

  Soon after the Red Army holed up in Yan’an after the Long March in the thirties, Mao Zedong decided he needed a body to ascertain the political reliability of the supporters flocking into the mountainous retreat to join the communist cause. A fraternal model for such a gatekeeper was close at hand, in the Soviet Union. The Orgburo in Soviet Russia was one of the two original bodies established by Lenin under the Central Committee in 1919, to direct the daily business of the Party. Stalin was quick to see its usefulness. He made the Orgburo his ‘first base of operations in building his own machine’ in the early 1920s, as he began to steal power away from an ailing Lenin. Stalin’s command over the personal dossiers of senior party members earned him the nickname, ‘Comrade File Cabinet’.

  Mao feared, not without justification, that the scores of outsiders arriving in Yan’an from outside the Party’s battle-hardened ranks included spies dispatched by the rival Nationalists. Mao staffed the department with acolytes and instilled in it the culture that still survives today, as a gatekeeper that ensures the total loyalty of senior cadres to the Party and its leaders. As the initial revolutionary idealism of Yan’an gave way to vicious infighting within the small band of communists bunkered down there, Mao found the body similarly useful in consolidating power in his own hands.

  The Orgburo was one of the most important Soviet imports used by the Party in China to establish communism at home. But far from landing in China like an alien being, the organization department found fertile soil in the middle kingdom. In China, the tradition of using a single body to systematize central control over government officials dates back nearly 1,000 years. Through long periods of Chinese history, provincial rulers have been appointed from the capital. ‘There were no professional guilds which formed cohesive forces and structured society, no self-governing units as in medieval Europe,’ according to Laszlo Ladany, the veteran China-watching Jesuit. ‘There were no balancing forces that could mould their own opinions in the face of a central power. China could only be kept together by a powerful central ruler.’

  As early as the Han Dynasty (ad 25–220), the imperial system had something resembling an organization department, a body which later came to be known as the ‘Li Bu’, or the Civil Service Ministry. The head of the ‘Li Bu’ was known respectfully, because of his power, as ‘the Heavenly Official’. Throughout successive dynasties, the department was one of six core ministries advising various emperors on appointments, dismissals, civil service entrance
exams, promotions and transfers. Tang Dynasty (ad 618–907) histories record officials being benchmarked on nine different grades, which checked their diligence, virtue, integrity and the like. Magistrates were similarly scrutinized on whether they ‘judged and sentenced with equity and sincerity’ according to a checklist known as the ‘Twenty-Seven Perfections’.

  The Party increasingly likes to conjure up the past, as if to display an unbroken thread in Chinese political culture tying its rule to imperial officialdom. The organization department these days cites a Tang Dynasty maxim about the need to promote officials in the capital only after they have had experience in rural areas. ‘No experience at the local level, no nomination for the centre,’ the phrase goes. ‘If the [old Tang] saying is better followed in the future, it could revitalize the bureaucratic system and support development of the countryside and national prosperity,’ the department said in a 2008 paper.

  In modern China, the Central Organization Department as we know it today did not come into its own until 1937, when the communists and nationalists formed their second united front against the Japanese. The fledgling organization department in China began to build thick files on individual party members, who were forced to write and rewrite their personal biographies, some hundreds of pages long, providing detailed histories of their family members and friends. The evaluation by the department, in tandem with the Party’s intelligence arm, was brutal for anyone considered potentially suspect. In this respect, it was at one with the temper of the times. Yan’an is often idealized as an all-hands-to-the-wheel pitstop for a youthful band of revolutionaries before they were able to relaunch their campaign to unite China. In reality, it was the venue for waves of power struggles, followed by deadly purges. Party members who had been jailed by the Nationalists, and then released under the temporary ceasefire and allowed to travel to Yan’an, had to provide written evaluations of their behaviour in prison and also of their fellow cadre inmates. Each was then cross-checked against the other and any differences pursued mercilessly in interrogation.