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

by Richard Mcgregor

  With the paramount emphasis on politics, the hierarchies are upended in China. From its very beginnings, the PLA has had a dual leadership system in its officer ranks. Much like a single person with two heads, one watching the other, each senior position is filled by two officers of equal rank, one a commander and the other a political commissar. Discerning the division of responsibilities between them, and who defers to whom and when, is not easy. ‘They can’t get their heads around our NCO system, in which a commander can defer to a subordinate,’ said a foreign military officer. ‘And we can’t get our heads around their system, with these two equally ranked commanders.’ (The PLA now has an NCO corps, but its soldiers have none of the authority or esprit de corps of the western variety.)

  The political commissar system was inherited from the Soviet Red Army, but comes with a strong whiff of Imperial China as well. Chinese emperors would send supervisors to the battle front to check on the loyalty of their military commanders. In a similar fashion, the Party uses Soviet-style commissars to monitor the military from the inside, oversee appointments through the PLA’s own organization department and root out graft. Whereas the NCOs embody all the hallmarks of a high-trust system, in which superiors trust their subordinates to make decisions on their own, the political commissars model, like Chinese society, banks on little trust at all.

  The modern PLA political officers spread throughout the ranks are part cheerleaders, part indoctrinators and part administrators. ‘They go to great lengths in conversation to emphasize they are not political hacks running around with little red books, but fulfilling a professional administrative role,’ said the foreign military officer. On the rare occasions that information does leak out involving their work, however, the controversies involving the commissars are overtly personal and political.

  The most famous recent public act of rebellion against a commissar involved a troubled lieutenant stationed at one of the Beijing garrisons in 1994. After going through his subordinate’s private correspondence, the commissar discovered the lieutenant’s wife was pregnant with their second child, and first son. He informed the lieutenant’s hometown authorities, who ordered the baby aborted. The enraged lieutenant went on a shooting rampage, starting at the barracks, where he killed the commissar and other officers, before heading into a diplomatic district in the heart of the capital, 2 kilometres from Tiananmen Square. All in all, he shot about seventeen people before being killed himself. The army’s own stained reputation post-1989 contributed to the carnage. The soldiers delayed their pursuit of their rogue colleague from the barracks in order to change from their uniforms into civilian clothes–in the words of one report, so as ‘not to disturb the public’ with their appearance.

  The indifference of younger officers to mandatory political education and their bewilderment at its relevance to modern military duties seeps through persistently in official documents. Yung Chunchang, an officer of the Military Science Academy, complained in 2008 about how rising officers had become influenced by ‘purely military viewpoints’ and no longer thought political work was important. ‘Once, when we were gathering opinions, one [young] comrade suggested–“Now that we have a market economy, and the profit incentive is being used, and the impact of rules and institutions is being emphasized, why do we still [say] political work is the ‘lifeline’?”’

  ‘Is there any doubt on this?’ Yung had snapped back at the young comrade. After consulting with his superiors, the answer that came back from on high was that the pre-eminence of politics was ‘the scientific conclusion left by the last several decades’ and could not be changed. ‘In 1954, someone deleted the sentence on “lifeline” [from political work regulations in the military], but Chairman Mao reinstated and approved it. Leading comrades such as Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao have time and again emphasized the importance of the lifeline issue.’ The political commissar system, pioneered by the Soviet Union, had in fact been abolished by Stalin because it was considered no longer useful in motivating the troops. In China, with the Party still in power, it was there to stay.

  For the vocal neo-nationalists, there is no question the military could be anything but under the direct control of the Party. ‘I have never thought about this. Is it important?’ replied Song Xiaojun, when I asked him about the issue. I met Song when he was at the end of a tour in 2009 to promote Unhappy China, co-authored with Wang Xiaodong and other patriotic stirrers, sometimes collectively known as the ‘New Left’. Song was a former navy officer who had lectured at the national submarine college before leaving the services in the mid-eighties. He now edited a military magazine catering to enthusiasts tracking the latest in modern weapons.

  For the likes of Song, there is no need to justify or explain the right of the Communist Party to rule the military, or the country for that matter. It is, in a phrase you hear again and again, simply ‘the verdict of history’, a fact of life after a revolution in which the military played a pivotal role. ‘If you must talk about such a topic, we have to consider that after China was bullied, the Communist Party emerged with its military arm,’ he said. ‘The period of 1927 [when the PLA came into being] to 1949 [when the Party took power] is so particular. Unlike the UK or anywhere else, the people at the very bottom rung of the society rose up and regained the pride and dignity of the country, through military means.’

  Over time, and away from the ritual hubbub about the military’s loyalty to the Party, the PLA has evolved in recent years in line with the job it has been given, becoming a more professional force, with its own ethos and values. Even if they pay lip service to party control, younger officers are more focused on developing their military skills than their elders ever were. ‘You hear junior officers complaining a lot about the quality of the military leadership,’ said Andrew Yang, a Taiwanese scholar and regular visitor to Chinese military academies. ‘They are extremely concerned that the world is changing fast. They want to be integrated into the global system. This second tier of the officer corps is more global.’

  The officer class was once dominated by military families who grew up together in the same compounds and exchanged reciprocal favours as they rose through the ranks. For young officers these days, it pays as much to be expert as it does to be red. Promotions have been tied to technical and professional skills; career paths are highly specialized; educational requirements more strict, through custom-designed military academies; and an old-fashioned ranking system has been restored, replacing a revolutionary-era distinction between ‘commanders’ and ‘fighters’ reintroduced by Mao in 1965. The striking thing missing is actual combat experience. ‘It is the most over-educated army I have ever come across in my life,’ said a part-time lecturer at a PLA school. Many military princelings, the offspring of veteran Chinese leaders, still rise through the ranks but they rarely get to the very top. Far from their pedigree ensuring promotion, the PLA’s princelings are increasingly falling short in competitions for top positions. ‘Instead of moving up to become chief military leaders, the majority of the princeling generals ended their career in deputy positions,’ said Bo Zhiyue, a Chinese academic, who combed through decades of military records for his study. ‘The fact that they hit a glass ceiling in the military and the Central Committee means their family background could be a liability.’

  The PLA has also quietly developed a system where commanders take primary responsibility for their units, even though they are in theory ranked on a par with the political commissars. ‘Effective command of the troops requires the concentration of power in one centre,’ says You Ji, a Chinese military specialist. ‘The PLA is no exception to this iron rule.’ The only way that commanders and commissars can get on, he says, is through subordinating ‘political affairs to the combat command system’. Foreigners who deal with the PLA have noticed the gradual sidelining of the political commissars. ‘I have been on Chinese ships when the captain will not answer questions without first deferring to the political officer,’ said Bud Cole, of the US
National War College, a visitor over many years to Chinese naval vessels, ‘and on others, when the captain doesn’t really seem to care what the political officer thinks at all.’

  If the symbiotic relationship between the Party and the PLA has faded, the new order, to quote David Shambaugh, an authority on Chinese politics, favours a ‘more corporate, professional, autonomous and accountable military’. Ultimate control rests firmly in the Party’s hands. But much as the Party has stepped back from micro-managing large state enterprises, the PLA enjoys greater freedom in managing its day-to-day duties. Far from subverting political control over the PLA, the redefinition of the relationship arguably displays the Party at its sinuous best. ‘There is still more of a political direction than a strict military philosophy,’ said the foreign military officer. ‘But party work is adapting to societal change.’

  The propaganda system is adjusting as well. On the PLA navy’s sixtieth anniversary in May 2009, China invited naval officers from around the world to view its new nuclear submarine fleet off the port of Qingdao. For the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the republic in October that year, Zhang Yimou, the once cleverly subversive film-maker who joined the establishment when he oversaw the 2008 Olympics opening ceremony, was hired to direct the military parade through Tiananmen Square. The first major foray far offshore for the PLA navy earlier in the year, to conduct anti-piracy patrols off Somalia, was another important moment, as it displayed a tangible connection between the surging military budget of the previous two decades and China’s growing international economic clout.

  The Central Propaganda Department makes sure it keeps distinctive military voices out of public debates, to minimize the chances of damaging public splits between the PLA and the Party. ‘The military is not allowed to have a position. They are forbidden [by the Party] from expressing their view,’ said Yan Xuetong, of Tsinghua University, who has close ties with the military. Instead, the Party promotes a narrative of its own construction, of shiny new hardware, selfless patriotism and an expanding global role. All three of the made-for-TV military events in 2009–the Somalia mission, the navy anniversary and the Tiananmen parade–were carefully managed to engender pride and confidence in the forces at home in a way that reinforces the prevailing system of the Party’s control over the PLA. Abroad, the Party’s expansive message is a much harder sell. Nowhere is this more evident than with the battle it has long planned for, closest to home, over Taiwan.

  For the PLA, preparing for war over Taiwan has been the single most persuasive lever for squeezing more money out of the government. For senior party leaders, it has always been an easy way to wrap themselves in the flag. Reunification with Taiwan stands rhetorically as the PLA’s divine mission, in which the military means must serve the political objective. ‘The Party has always seen Taiwan as the final part of the jigsaw puzzle,’ said Andrew Yang, in Taipei. ‘There is no way to persuade them to let Taiwan go.’

  Most commentary on the fate of Taiwan focuses on the balance of military forces, counting the missiles in China trained on the nearby island, or tracking the political controversy over the latest US arms package on sale on the other side of the straits. As important as this may be, much of this debate misses the point. The greatest impediment to Taiwan acquiescing to Beijing’s rule has little to do with military firepower, or the prospect of a bloody war and the economic disaster that would doubtless accompany it, although both are crucial considerations for Chinese policy-makers. The obstacle in Taiwan is avowedly political. In a word, it is the Party itself.

  When Joseph Wu was studying computer science at university in Taipei in the early seventies, he was pressed constantly to join the ruling party. The advantages of signing up were laid out before him. He could get to the front of the queue for an overseas study visa. If he joined the army, promotions would come more easily. Job-openings in party-owned firms would be his for the taking. ‘Everyone was always trying to recruit me,’ he told me years later in his study at Chengchi University in Taipei. ‘I was told you would have a better life if you enrolled in the Kuomintang.’

  The Kuomintang (KMT), or the Nationalist Party, was in many ways the mirror image of the Communist Party, its bitter rival in China, or the mainland, as they call it in Taiwan. Like the Party in China, the KMT had been established on Leninist lines. It had its own organization department for doling out jobs in the state sector. The KMT directly owned some of the largest businesses in the country when it governed Taiwan, rather than just controlling them behind the scenes like the Party in China. The KMT also directly controlled the armed forces. By a small quirk of history (which the Communist Party is reluctant to highlight these days), one of the first political commissars of the KMT army on its founding in 1924 was Zhou Enlai. Later the long-serving and long-suffering premier under Mao, Zhou worked with and alongside the KMT during the brief periods when the two parties were allied or co-operating, in the twenties and in the forties.

  The generation that grew up in Taiwan after 1949, the year the KMT fled the mainland to set up government on the island, have a striking clarity about the way China works, because they grew up in a system with so many similarities. The same cannot be said of the Chinese view of Taiwan. From the early nineties when Taiwan began to hold open elections for its national government, a process that has seen the KMT in and out of power ever since, the Party has struggled to come to grips with the idea of the Chinese democracy born and raised next door.

  Throughout this period, Chinese leaders incessantly lectured the Taiwanese about the need to accept Chinese sovereignty, reviled their democracy as corrupt and hounded its diplomatic representatives around the world. For good measure, Beijing periodically threatened Taiwan with war, once or twice firing missiles near the island’s northern and southern tips to drive the point home. Ahead of the first three presidential elections beginning in 1996, China issued dire warnings about the consequences of the island going down the path towards independence. All the while, through the bluster and intimidation from the mainland, voting for their leaders in Taiwan became part of people’s lives.

  Joseph Wu is just one of many people whose fate has fluctuated with the electoral tides, as careers do in democracies all around the world. Spurning the KMT’s offer of membership in the seventies, he got involved in opposition politics after returning home from gaining a PhD in political science in the US and joining academia. On the re-election as president in 2004 of Chen Shui-bian, leader of the Democratic Progressive Party, he appointed Wu as his chief adviser on mainland affairs and, in 2007, as Taiwan’s de facto ambassador to the US. Wu had a brief, ill-starred stint in Washington, where he struggled for attention in the US capital which was fixated on a powerful, rising China and annoyed with President Chen. After the KMT returned to power, Wu, as a political appointee, was instantly out of a job. When I met him in early 2009, he had returned to work in a small, cluttered office at Chengchi, near the end of the train line on the outskirts of Taipei.

  The KMT, back in power from 2008, was a different animal from the one that had ruled Taiwan for more than fifty years from 1949. Its big businesses had largely been sold off, or reverted to state control. The KMT’s old organization department was used to nominate candidates for elections rather than place people in government jobs. The KMT’s control over the military, control which had been withering away since the early nineties following the lifting of martial law, had gone altogether. The old political commissars in the military had been renamed political welfare officers, with different duties to match their new title. The military, once the KMT’s army, was now firmly the country’s army. ‘Chen made a clear order to get the [KMT] out of the military,’ said Wu. ‘Many of the military officers were relieved they no longer needed to report to two bosses and lead a double life.’

  In short, the KMT had shed all the powers that once made it so similar to the Communist Party. As such, the KMT’s transformation was an inspiration to reform-minded people in China, as much as it was
an embarrassment for the Party, provoking constant comparisons between democracy on the island and the zealous commitment to authoritarian rule at home. He Weifang, the Peking University law professor, said Taiwan was a living example of how Chinese people were not fated from birth to be ordered around all the time. ‘Taiwan today,’ he said, ‘is the mainland tomorrow.’

  For the Party, the fact that the KMT had temporarily lost power was evidence enough of its shortcomings. ‘They failed,’ said Song Xiaojun, the author, who traced the KMT’s problems to their splits with the communists decades before. ‘They made two huge errors. One took place in 1927, when they stood on the side of the warlords and landlords. The second one occurred in 1946, when they sided with rightist forces and attacked the zones liberated by the communists.’ For others, however, modern Taiwan offered the chance for a running commentary on the divergent political systems.

  At the opening of the annual session of the National People’s Congress, China’s docile legislature, in Beijing in 2007, Li Zhaoxing, the bumptious former Foreign Minister and spokesman for the body, was asked about Taiwan policy.

  ‘All policies follow the will of the motherland and the will of the people,’ Li replied.

  ‘Do you mean you want them to vote?’ a Taiwanese journalist piped up.

  ‘This question is a tricky one,’ laughed Li uncomfortably. ‘The answer is No. No!’

  The KMT has come and gone and come again in Taiwan, but one thing has remained constant on the island through all the elections and changes of government from the early nineties onwards. In public opinion surveys, in which a consistent set of questions has been asked throughout, about 70 to 80 per cent of respondents have consistently supported, in different forms, the island’s current political status. Even those people sympathetic to reunification don’t want to join hands with China while it remains ruled by the Communist Party. Most Taiwanese prefer the status quo, with Taiwan as a self-governing territory, independent in all but name.