February 26, 2019
Dear Friends and Family,
This is Segment 17 of the series on Socialism, entitled “China Today: Governance.” The excerpts detail how the Communist Party of China is structured and how it governs.
My Takeaways
The structure and objectives of the Communist Party of China has some striking governance similarities to very large major U.S. corporations. These include:
It’s a model that has multiple benefits:
The model also has some significant drawbacks when used for government purposes:
From my perspective, when China’s governance system is compared to the United States democratic system:
In sum, it is very probable that China will remain a strong economic foe to the U.S. for the foreseeable future. The degree to which, will be determined by their ability to discern the will of the people and provide it.
Next:
Segment 18 is the last of the four segments on China. It will focus on some aspects of the changing culture within China.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
This is Segment 17 of the series on Socialism, entitled “China Today: Governance.” The excerpts detail how the Communist Party of China is structured and how it governs.
My Takeaways
The structure and objectives of the Communist Party of China has some striking governance similarities to very large major U.S. corporations. These include:
- A non-democratic single party system with a leadership team who is responsible for overall judgments/decisions (business or political) as well as overseeing the businesses (government agencies) for which they are also responsible. The members as individuals are responsible for the work under its direct jurisdiction.
- The members of the leadership team are judged by how well they manage their respective sector primarily by their contribution to overall economic growth (growth and profit).
- They are also measured on secondary criteria including the training of the next generation of officials, environmental protection, managing disturbances, responding to emergencies, and contribution within the leadership team.
- It’s a very competitive system and people rise within the organization based on performance (a meritocracy system). All positions are filled via selection by the hierarchy (the Party in case of China and the CEO in the case of business).
- Each locality (government, individual business, or production facility) operates with a great deal of autonomy, but within well spelled out rules and oversight relative to interaction with the public.
It’s a model that has multiple benefits:
- It puts the decision making, implementation, and performance accountability in the same people.
- It facilitates rapid decision making
- It affords a meritocracy leadership selection process, so if done properly results in a highly competent set of leaders at all levels.
The model also has some significant drawbacks when used for government purposes:
- There are few checks and balances.
- The people directly affected (citizens) have little input or representation into decision making.
- It’s prone to dictatorial rule.
- It’s prone to corruption as government makes decisions that affect businesses and political causes, hence those influenced seek political favors/rulings.
From my perspective, when China’s governance system is compared to the United States democratic system:
- China has a much higher probability of getting the best and brightest into government positions than does the U.S.
- The United States get substantially more input and direction from the citizenry on the objectives to pursue for the country.
- China will attain much greater alignment, specific accountability, and dedication to implementing the objectives than will the U.S. Further, China’s implementation will be faster and most likely more efficient than the U.S.
- China will be far more prone to corruption and dictatorial rule than the U.S.
- It is highly probable that the U.S. will have far greater civil liberties (in number and quality) than China as long as the U.S. citizenry value them and democracy prevails.
In sum, it is very probable that China will remain a strong economic foe to the U.S. for the foreseeable future. The degree to which, will be determined by their ability to discern the will of the people and provide it.
Next:
Segment 18 is the last of the four segments on China. It will focus on some aspects of the changing culture within China.
Happy Learning,
Harley
SOCIALISM – SEGMENT 17
CHINA TODAY: GOVERNANCE – EXCERPTS
CHINA’S TRANSFORMATION: When Deng Xiaoping became preeminent leader in 1978, China’s trade with the world totaled less than $10 billion; within three decades, it had expanded a hundredfold. At the same time, China was encouraging the United States to accept a few hundred Chinese students; by a decade after Deng’s death an estimated 1.4 million students had studied abroad and some 390,000 already returned to China. By 1992 the nation had already come a long way toward playing an active role in the global trading system.
Deng and his colleagues also believed that basing final decisions on the overall political judgments of top leaders would serve the interests of the country better than basing them on the evaluations of an independent judiciary in which laws determined what actions are permitted. They believe that a system that allows a legislative body to make laws without having the responsibility for implementing them is not as effective as concentrating law-making and implementation in one body.
The core governing structure centers around the Politburo and the Secretariat. It is linked to local areas through a network of party leadership team that is present in every locality and at every level of every major office of government. Each leadership team is responsible not only for directing the work of the Communist Party, at its level, but also for overseeing the government office under it. The team is expected to make judgments about broad overall issues and see to it that work within its jurisdiction makes an overall contribution to the four modernizations. The higher levels of the party pass down rules for how the leadership teams should conduct their work and they send down endless numbers of directives to each level. They also hold meetings with lower levels, sometimes by inviting the lower-level leaders to attend higher-level meetings, but also by sending the higher-level officials on inspection tours of the lower levels. But it is difficult for them to monitor all developments at the lower levels, so the team ordinarily has considerable freedom.
The key leverage that Beijing has over the provinces is the power to appoint and dismiss the members of the leadership team. The several members of a party leadership team are given responsibility for different sectors and are judged not only by how well they manage their respective sectors, but also by how well the entire team and the unit it supervises perform. Those judgements were based overwhelmingly on how much the team contributed to China’s overall economic growth. Over the years, secondary criteria have become more important for judging the performance of the teams, criteria that includes the training of the next generation of officials, environmental protection, managing disturbances, and responding to emergencies. At each level, younger officials judged likely to excel because of their overall ability, reliability under stress, mature judgment, ability to work well with colleagues, and dedication to serving the party and the country are picked for special training, mentoring, and testing. Considerable time is spent mentoring officials at every level.
Deng established a system of highly competitive meritocratic examinations at each school level, from elementary school through university to officialdom. His goal was not to produce social equality but to sift out the ablest and provide them with the best education possible. Examinations were given for entrance to elementary, middle, senior schools (grades 10 to 12), and college, and those who made it into the most-competitive schools were given the best teachers and facilities. The ablest from the best universities would get jobs in the central government, whereas those who had gone to less competitive universities would start out at lower levels in the bureaucracy. Once selected as an official, however, one rose through the system not primarily by taking further examinations but on the basis of work performance.
During the Deng era, an estimated 200 million people migrated to towns and cities, movement that has since continued at a rapid pace. It is estimated that by 2015, scarcely two decades after Deng’s retirement, an estimated 700 million people, 51% of the population will be urban. When Deng stepped down, more than 90% of households owned television sets, which instantly brought urban culture to the countryside. The rapid diffusion of television in the late 1980s and the introduction of national channels that broadcast standard news in Mandarin, greatly expanded the public’s common base of information. The greater mobility of the population, and the diffusion of cell phones, computers, and the Internet helped to spread the national culture. During the Deng period, the growth of a truly national culture and greater awareness of foreign cultures greatly strengthened identification with the nation as a whole.
When China began opening in the 1980s, there were virtually no rules in place for food and drugs, product and workplace safety, working conditions, minimum wages, or construction codes. If an enterprising person found empty Coke bottles and filled them with a liquid of a similar color, there was no law against selling them as bottles of Coca Cola. The situation in China under Deng was reminiscent of the rapacious capitalism of 19th century Europe and the United States, when there were no anti-trust laws and no laws to protect workers. By the time Deng retired, rules and laws had been introduced in virtually every major sector of the economy by young Chinese legal scholars trained in the West. Conditions for Chinese worker, including work hours, environmental conditions on the factory floor, and safety standards, have often not been better than some terrible Western working conditions at the early stage of the 19th century Industrial Revolution. But for tens of millions of rural Chinese youth, life in the factories in the coastal areas, as hard as it is and as poorly as they are paid, is far better than the grinding poverty they know in the countryside. They have been willing to work long hours and even to hold back complaints for fear of being fired.
In the several decades after Deng left the stage, his successors have been confronted by a series of challenges that are likely to remain in the decades ahead. These challenges include:
IS CHINA A COMMUNIST COUNTRY? Whatever China is, at this moment it is not a Communist country. No Communist country has ever owed so much to capitalism, or ever reduced central planning to such a marginal role, as China did in the 1990s. No communist country has even enjoyed such a profusion of photocopies, satellite dishes, private schools, talk shows, karaoke bars, hula hoops, and sex shops. No Communist country has even opened itself up so much trade and foreign investments, given out passports to its citizens so easily, or so gleefully sent tens of thousands of its students to the West. No Soviet Politburo member even sent his children to study in America; nearly all Chinese Politburo members do so. The economy is booming not because of Communism, because of the collapse of Communism.
Source: China Wakes by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn
THE MODERN CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY: China’s post-Maoist governing model, launched by Deng Xiaoping in the late seventies, has endured many attempts to explain it. Few described the model as communist any more, often not even the ruling Chinese Communist Party itself. The gap between the fiction of the Party’s rhetoric (“China is a socialist country”) and the reality of everyday life grows larger every year. China’s number one core interest is to maintain its fundamental system and state security. State sovereignty, territorial integrity and economic development, the priorities of any state, all are subordinate to the need to keep the Party in power. The Chinese Communist Party’s enduring grip on power is based on a simple formula straight out of the Leninist playbook. For all the reforms of the past three decades, the Party has made sure it keeps a lock-hold on the state and the three pillars of its survival strategy: control of personnel, propaganda and the People’s Liberation Army. When it interacts with the outside world, the Party is careful to keep a low profile. Sometimes, you can’t see the Party at all, which makes the job of reporting how China is governed maddeningly difficult. The secrecy helps explain why new reports about China routinely refer to the ruling Communist Party, while rarely elaborating on how it actually works.
THE PARTY STRUCTURE: The names of the bodies through which the Party exercises power, the Politburo, the Central Committee, the Praesidium and the like, all betray one of the most overlooked facts about the modern Chinese state – that is still runs on Soviet hardware. Vladimir Lenin, the leaders of the Russian Revolution, designed a system according to which the ruling party shadows and stalks the state by penetrating it at all levels. Lenin presented himself as the savior of the working class but the structure he devised was ferociously and brutally elitist. At the top of the system, Lenin prescribed “as much centralization as possible,” allowing self-appointed professional revolutionaries like himself to dictate downwards to a working class considered incapable of rising above their day-today struggles. In the bottom tier of the system, however, in the factories and grassroots party organization, he prescribed “as much decentralization as possible”, so that information flowed upwards to a Central Committee about even the smallest local developments. The Central Committee acts as a kind of enlarged board of directors for the Party with 370 members. The Central Committee selects the Politburo, which has about 25 members. The Politburo in turn, selects the Standing Committee, the inner sanctum of the leadership which has nine members. The Politburo sets the general policy direction for the economy and diplomacy. The Politburo’s overriding priorities lie in securing the Party’s grip on the state, the economy, the civil service, the military, police, education, social organizations and the media, and controlling the very notion of China itself. Under the Politburo sits a vast and largely secret party system which controls the entire public sector including the military, and the lives of the officials who work in all China’s five levels of government. The Party staffs government ministries and agencies through an elaborate and opaque appointments system; instructs them on policy through behind-the-scenes committees; and guides their political posture and public statements through the propaganda network. The tentacles of the state, and thus the Party, go well beyond the government. As well as sitting above state-owned businesses and regulatory agencies, these party departments oversee key think-tanks, the courts, the media, all approved religions, and universities and other educational institutions, and maintain direct influence over NGOs and some private companies.
The Central Organization Department is responsible for personnel appointments. The Central Propaganda Department handles news and information. The United Front Department has a brief to lock in support for the Party in power centers outside of its direct purview, like overseas Chinese business communities in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and social organizations at home. 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. No legal obstacle is so great that the Party cannot brush it aside.
MAJOR POLITICAL POLICY CHANGES: 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. If you play by the Party’s rules, 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 Party’s removal of itself from the many areas of life and work of its citizens has been as strategic as it has been enlightened.
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. The Party’s control over personnel was at the heart of its ability to overhaul state companies, without losing leverage over them at the same time. So important does the Party rate its power to hire and fire government officials that it places it on a par with its control of the media and the military. The Party body with ultimate power over personnel the Central Organization Department, is without a doubt the largest and most powerful human resources body in the world.
THE CENTRAL ORGANIZATION DEPARTMENT: 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, ExxonMobil, Wall-Mart and about fifty of the remaining largest US companies, the justices on the Supreme Court, the editors of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, 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.
THE PEOPLE’S LIBERATION ARMY (PLA): 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 grades, 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. The Party uses Soviet-style commissars to monitor the military from the inside, to oversee appointments through the PLA’s own organization department and to root out graft. 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 the view.”
THE PROPAGANDA DEPARTMENT: The censorship part of the Propaganda Department mainly relies on self-censorship. There are no censors sitting in the newsrooms running their red pens through stories, as in the former Soviet Union. “Editors right down to people at the bottom of the newsroom don’t need to be told,” the editor said. “There is a red line in their head.”
On of the areas that it most strives to control and where it least tolerates dissent – the teaching of history. More to the point, the propaganda department makes sure that patriotism is not disconnected from the Party itself. The major content of the present patriotism campaign is to promote passionate love for the Chinese Communist Party. On events such as the Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, the suppression of the Tibet uprising in 1959, the pro-democracy protests in 1989, and so on, the Party simply announced its verdict after internal deliberations. Party officials are bound by these pronouncements on history, whatever they think as individuals. You either support the decision wholeheartedly, or you are out. The Party’s verdict then, in theory, becomes the collective opinion of the entire country and its 1.3 billion people. Chinese who wish to agitate publicly for an alternative view do so at their own risk.
PRIVATE ENTERPRISE: The Party interests have promoted private companies as an engine of employment and reined them in when they have grown too big; invited entrepreneurs to joining the Party, while intimidating and jailing business leaders who fall foul of it; and supported more secure property rights, while muddying the rules surrounding ownership of companies, assets and land. A broad consensus as now developed at the top of the Party, that far from harming socialism, entrepreneurs, properly managed and leashed to the state, are the key to saving it. Luckily for China, Deng learned early on, a lesson that nearly every other failed socialist state neglected to heed, that only boisterous private economy could keep communism rule afloat. The private sector now contributes more than 70% of GDP and employs 75% of the workforce, creating the foundations of the vibrant middle class.
Chinese law allows employees to form a union. Under communist rule, the job of China’s sole legal trade union body, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, has always been to stop the emergence of an independent labor movement. Rather than representing workers inside state companies, the union worked for the Party. The fundamental objective is to reassert a lost control mechanism over the large number of employees that are now working in foreign firms, as opposed to state enterprises. It gives the Party a new set of eyes and ears within foreign firms. The Party’s efforts to infiltrate and control foreign companies was only one small part of a much larger strategy. The ultimate aim was to have a permanent party presence in every large private company in the country.
LOCAL GOVERNMENTS: The pivotal role of local governments in promoting their own economies means that each locality operates in a way like a stand-alone company. Localities promote investments, strong-arm banks for financing and often hold shares in the businesses themselves. They operate much like a company might. Policies on health, pensions and land reform have all been stress-tested at local levels before being expanded nationally.
The golden age of decentralization under communist rule (1978 – 1993) was also the apogee of private sector growth and wealth generation. China’s GDP increased by 280% in these fifteen years; absolute poverty was cut by 50% in the first half of the eighties alone and real incomes rose rapidly. If each of China’s provinces was taken as an economy about 20 out of the top 30 growth regions in the world would be in China.
CORRUPTION: The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection has a modest 800 full-time staff at head office. Much like the organization and propaganda department, anti-corruption work is decentralized, with smaller branches at each level of government and in each organ of the state. Every province, city and country government and any state organization under them, all have their own anti-graft commissions or representatives to keep an eye on party members. Corruption in modern China with its surging wealth, proliferating business structures, walled-off government empires, massive vested interests and global reach, has simply left the commission’s traditional methods behind.
FAILURE APLENTY: Amidst China’s successes, there is failure aplenty.
CONCLUSION: Economic growth is the single most important pillar supporting the Party at home and the force behind the power that China now projects around the world. Growth sustains living standards, policy flexibility, the internal patronage network and global leverage. So, for all its rising global interests, the scale of China’s domestic problems, in their depth, multiplicity and variety, means central government leaders will remain preoccupied at home.
In the absence of democratic elections and open debate, it is impossible to judge popular support for the Party with any degree of accuracy. But it is indisputable since Mao’s death that the twin foundations of the Party’s power – economic growth and resurgent nationalism – have been strengthened. China has long known something that many in developed countries are only now beginning to grasp, that the Chinese Communist Party and its leaders have never wanted to be the west when they grow up. For the foreseeable future, it looks as though their wish to bestride the world as a colossus on their own implacable terms will come true.
Source: The Party – The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers by Richard McGregor
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
CHINA TODAY: GOVERNANCE – EXCERPTS
CHINA’S TRANSFORMATION: When Deng Xiaoping became preeminent leader in 1978, China’s trade with the world totaled less than $10 billion; within three decades, it had expanded a hundredfold. At the same time, China was encouraging the United States to accept a few hundred Chinese students; by a decade after Deng’s death an estimated 1.4 million students had studied abroad and some 390,000 already returned to China. By 1992 the nation had already come a long way toward playing an active role in the global trading system.
Deng and his colleagues also believed that basing final decisions on the overall political judgments of top leaders would serve the interests of the country better than basing them on the evaluations of an independent judiciary in which laws determined what actions are permitted. They believe that a system that allows a legislative body to make laws without having the responsibility for implementing them is not as effective as concentrating law-making and implementation in one body.
The core governing structure centers around the Politburo and the Secretariat. It is linked to local areas through a network of party leadership team that is present in every locality and at every level of every major office of government. Each leadership team is responsible not only for directing the work of the Communist Party, at its level, but also for overseeing the government office under it. The team is expected to make judgments about broad overall issues and see to it that work within its jurisdiction makes an overall contribution to the four modernizations. The higher levels of the party pass down rules for how the leadership teams should conduct their work and they send down endless numbers of directives to each level. They also hold meetings with lower levels, sometimes by inviting the lower-level leaders to attend higher-level meetings, but also by sending the higher-level officials on inspection tours of the lower levels. But it is difficult for them to monitor all developments at the lower levels, so the team ordinarily has considerable freedom.
The key leverage that Beijing has over the provinces is the power to appoint and dismiss the members of the leadership team. The several members of a party leadership team are given responsibility for different sectors and are judged not only by how well they manage their respective sectors, but also by how well the entire team and the unit it supervises perform. Those judgements were based overwhelmingly on how much the team contributed to China’s overall economic growth. Over the years, secondary criteria have become more important for judging the performance of the teams, criteria that includes the training of the next generation of officials, environmental protection, managing disturbances, and responding to emergencies. At each level, younger officials judged likely to excel because of their overall ability, reliability under stress, mature judgment, ability to work well with colleagues, and dedication to serving the party and the country are picked for special training, mentoring, and testing. Considerable time is spent mentoring officials at every level.
Deng established a system of highly competitive meritocratic examinations at each school level, from elementary school through university to officialdom. His goal was not to produce social equality but to sift out the ablest and provide them with the best education possible. Examinations were given for entrance to elementary, middle, senior schools (grades 10 to 12), and college, and those who made it into the most-competitive schools were given the best teachers and facilities. The ablest from the best universities would get jobs in the central government, whereas those who had gone to less competitive universities would start out at lower levels in the bureaucracy. Once selected as an official, however, one rose through the system not primarily by taking further examinations but on the basis of work performance.
During the Deng era, an estimated 200 million people migrated to towns and cities, movement that has since continued at a rapid pace. It is estimated that by 2015, scarcely two decades after Deng’s retirement, an estimated 700 million people, 51% of the population will be urban. When Deng stepped down, more than 90% of households owned television sets, which instantly brought urban culture to the countryside. The rapid diffusion of television in the late 1980s and the introduction of national channels that broadcast standard news in Mandarin, greatly expanded the public’s common base of information. The greater mobility of the population, and the diffusion of cell phones, computers, and the Internet helped to spread the national culture. During the Deng period, the growth of a truly national culture and greater awareness of foreign cultures greatly strengthened identification with the nation as a whole.
When China began opening in the 1980s, there were virtually no rules in place for food and drugs, product and workplace safety, working conditions, minimum wages, or construction codes. If an enterprising person found empty Coke bottles and filled them with a liquid of a similar color, there was no law against selling them as bottles of Coca Cola. The situation in China under Deng was reminiscent of the rapacious capitalism of 19th century Europe and the United States, when there were no anti-trust laws and no laws to protect workers. By the time Deng retired, rules and laws had been introduced in virtually every major sector of the economy by young Chinese legal scholars trained in the West. Conditions for Chinese worker, including work hours, environmental conditions on the factory floor, and safety standards, have often not been better than some terrible Western working conditions at the early stage of the 19th century Industrial Revolution. But for tens of millions of rural Chinese youth, life in the factories in the coastal areas, as hard as it is and as poorly as they are paid, is far better than the grinding poverty they know in the countryside. They have been willing to work long hours and even to hold back complaints for fear of being fired.
In the several decades after Deng left the stage, his successors have been confronted by a series of challenges that are likely to remain in the decades ahead. These challenges include:
- Providing universal social security and health care
- Redefining and managing the boundaries of freedom
- Containing Corruption
- Preserving the Environment
- Maintaining the Government’s Legitimacy to Rule – reducing corruption and inequality, providing a reasonable level of universal medical care and welfare, and finding a way to show that public opinion is being respected in the selection of officials.
- Source: Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China by Ezra F. Vogel
IS CHINA A COMMUNIST COUNTRY? Whatever China is, at this moment it is not a Communist country. No Communist country has ever owed so much to capitalism, or ever reduced central planning to such a marginal role, as China did in the 1990s. No communist country has even enjoyed such a profusion of photocopies, satellite dishes, private schools, talk shows, karaoke bars, hula hoops, and sex shops. No Communist country has even opened itself up so much trade and foreign investments, given out passports to its citizens so easily, or so gleefully sent tens of thousands of its students to the West. No Soviet Politburo member even sent his children to study in America; nearly all Chinese Politburo members do so. The economy is booming not because of Communism, because of the collapse of Communism.
Source: China Wakes by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn
THE MODERN CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY: China’s post-Maoist governing model, launched by Deng Xiaoping in the late seventies, has endured many attempts to explain it. Few described the model as communist any more, often not even the ruling Chinese Communist Party itself. The gap between the fiction of the Party’s rhetoric (“China is a socialist country”) and the reality of everyday life grows larger every year. China’s number one core interest is to maintain its fundamental system and state security. State sovereignty, territorial integrity and economic development, the priorities of any state, all are subordinate to the need to keep the Party in power. The Chinese Communist Party’s enduring grip on power is based on a simple formula straight out of the Leninist playbook. For all the reforms of the past three decades, the Party has made sure it keeps a lock-hold on the state and the three pillars of its survival strategy: control of personnel, propaganda and the People’s Liberation Army. When it interacts with the outside world, the Party is careful to keep a low profile. Sometimes, you can’t see the Party at all, which makes the job of reporting how China is governed maddeningly difficult. The secrecy helps explain why new reports about China routinely refer to the ruling Communist Party, while rarely elaborating on how it actually works.
THE PARTY STRUCTURE: The names of the bodies through which the Party exercises power, the Politburo, the Central Committee, the Praesidium and the like, all betray one of the most overlooked facts about the modern Chinese state – that is still runs on Soviet hardware. Vladimir Lenin, the leaders of the Russian Revolution, designed a system according to which the ruling party shadows and stalks the state by penetrating it at all levels. Lenin presented himself as the savior of the working class but the structure he devised was ferociously and brutally elitist. At the top of the system, Lenin prescribed “as much centralization as possible,” allowing self-appointed professional revolutionaries like himself to dictate downwards to a working class considered incapable of rising above their day-today struggles. In the bottom tier of the system, however, in the factories and grassroots party organization, he prescribed “as much decentralization as possible”, so that information flowed upwards to a Central Committee about even the smallest local developments. The Central Committee acts as a kind of enlarged board of directors for the Party with 370 members. The Central Committee selects the Politburo, which has about 25 members. The Politburo in turn, selects the Standing Committee, the inner sanctum of the leadership which has nine members. The Politburo sets the general policy direction for the economy and diplomacy. The Politburo’s overriding priorities lie in securing the Party’s grip on the state, the economy, the civil service, the military, police, education, social organizations and the media, and controlling the very notion of China itself. Under the Politburo sits a vast and largely secret party system which controls the entire public sector including the military, and the lives of the officials who work in all China’s five levels of government. The Party staffs government ministries and agencies through an elaborate and opaque appointments system; instructs them on policy through behind-the-scenes committees; and guides their political posture and public statements through the propaganda network. The tentacles of the state, and thus the Party, go well beyond the government. As well as sitting above state-owned businesses and regulatory agencies, these party departments oversee key think-tanks, the courts, the media, all approved religions, and universities and other educational institutions, and maintain direct influence over NGOs and some private companies.
The Central Organization Department is responsible for personnel appointments. The Central Propaganda Department handles news and information. The United Front Department has a brief to lock in support for the Party in power centers outside of its direct purview, like overseas Chinese business communities in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and social organizations at home. 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. No legal obstacle is so great that the Party cannot brush it aside.
MAJOR POLITICAL POLICY CHANGES: 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. If you play by the Party’s rules, 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 Party’s removal of itself from the many areas of life and work of its citizens has been as strategic as it has been enlightened.
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. The Party’s control over personnel was at the heart of its ability to overhaul state companies, without losing leverage over them at the same time. So important does the Party rate its power to hire and fire government officials that it places it on a par with its control of the media and the military. The Party body with ultimate power over personnel the Central Organization Department, is without a doubt the largest and most powerful human resources body in the world.
THE CENTRAL ORGANIZATION DEPARTMENT: 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, ExxonMobil, Wall-Mart and about fifty of the remaining largest US companies, the justices on the Supreme Court, the editors of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, 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.
THE PEOPLE’S LIBERATION ARMY (PLA): 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 grades, 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. The Party uses Soviet-style commissars to monitor the military from the inside, to oversee appointments through the PLA’s own organization department and to root out graft. 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 the view.”
THE PROPAGANDA DEPARTMENT: The censorship part of the Propaganda Department mainly relies on self-censorship. There are no censors sitting in the newsrooms running their red pens through stories, as in the former Soviet Union. “Editors right down to people at the bottom of the newsroom don’t need to be told,” the editor said. “There is a red line in their head.”
On of the areas that it most strives to control and where it least tolerates dissent – the teaching of history. More to the point, the propaganda department makes sure that patriotism is not disconnected from the Party itself. The major content of the present patriotism campaign is to promote passionate love for the Chinese Communist Party. On events such as the Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, the suppression of the Tibet uprising in 1959, the pro-democracy protests in 1989, and so on, the Party simply announced its verdict after internal deliberations. Party officials are bound by these pronouncements on history, whatever they think as individuals. You either support the decision wholeheartedly, or you are out. The Party’s verdict then, in theory, becomes the collective opinion of the entire country and its 1.3 billion people. Chinese who wish to agitate publicly for an alternative view do so at their own risk.
PRIVATE ENTERPRISE: The Party interests have promoted private companies as an engine of employment and reined them in when they have grown too big; invited entrepreneurs to joining the Party, while intimidating and jailing business leaders who fall foul of it; and supported more secure property rights, while muddying the rules surrounding ownership of companies, assets and land. A broad consensus as now developed at the top of the Party, that far from harming socialism, entrepreneurs, properly managed and leashed to the state, are the key to saving it. Luckily for China, Deng learned early on, a lesson that nearly every other failed socialist state neglected to heed, that only boisterous private economy could keep communism rule afloat. The private sector now contributes more than 70% of GDP and employs 75% of the workforce, creating the foundations of the vibrant middle class.
Chinese law allows employees to form a union. Under communist rule, the job of China’s sole legal trade union body, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, has always been to stop the emergence of an independent labor movement. Rather than representing workers inside state companies, the union worked for the Party. The fundamental objective is to reassert a lost control mechanism over the large number of employees that are now working in foreign firms, as opposed to state enterprises. It gives the Party a new set of eyes and ears within foreign firms. The Party’s efforts to infiltrate and control foreign companies was only one small part of a much larger strategy. The ultimate aim was to have a permanent party presence in every large private company in the country.
LOCAL GOVERNMENTS: The pivotal role of local governments in promoting their own economies means that each locality operates in a way like a stand-alone company. Localities promote investments, strong-arm banks for financing and often hold shares in the businesses themselves. They operate much like a company might. Policies on health, pensions and land reform have all been stress-tested at local levels before being expanded nationally.
The golden age of decentralization under communist rule (1978 – 1993) was also the apogee of private sector growth and wealth generation. China’s GDP increased by 280% in these fifteen years; absolute poverty was cut by 50% in the first half of the eighties alone and real incomes rose rapidly. If each of China’s provinces was taken as an economy about 20 out of the top 30 growth regions in the world would be in China.
CORRUPTION: The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection has a modest 800 full-time staff at head office. Much like the organization and propaganda department, anti-corruption work is decentralized, with smaller branches at each level of government and in each organ of the state. Every province, city and country government and any state organization under them, all have their own anti-graft commissions or representatives to keep an eye on party members. Corruption in modern China with its surging wealth, proliferating business structures, walled-off government empires, massive vested interests and global reach, has simply left the commission’s traditional methods behind.
FAILURE APLENTY: Amidst China’s successes, there is failure aplenty.
- Income Inequality: At the same time as China has gotten rich, its society has become more unequal than even the US and Russia. The extreme poverty that exists in China alongside great and often ill-gotten wealth is more than just embarrassing for a state that professes to be built on the principles of socialism.
- Terror: Terror was the system for extended periods of Mao’s rule. In the last three decades, the Party has turned that formula around. Terror is just a side-effect these days, used relatively sparingly and reluctantly. Even so, terror remains essential to the system’s survival and is deployed without embarrassment when required.
- Corruption: China is deeply corrupt, but corrupt regimes can last a long time.
- Health, education, and welfare
- Environment: After decades of largely ignoring the issue, the central authorities have now attempted to take hold of a national environment policy. They have done this not by suppressing development but by turning the environment into an economic opportunity, by giving huge incentives to business to invest in alterative energies.
CONCLUSION: Economic growth is the single most important pillar supporting the Party at home and the force behind the power that China now projects around the world. Growth sustains living standards, policy flexibility, the internal patronage network and global leverage. So, for all its rising global interests, the scale of China’s domestic problems, in their depth, multiplicity and variety, means central government leaders will remain preoccupied at home.
In the absence of democratic elections and open debate, it is impossible to judge popular support for the Party with any degree of accuracy. But it is indisputable since Mao’s death that the twin foundations of the Party’s power – economic growth and resurgent nationalism – have been strengthened. China has long known something that many in developed countries are only now beginning to grasp, that the Chinese Communist Party and its leaders have never wanted to be the west when they grow up. For the foreseeable future, it looks as though their wish to bestride the world as a colossus on their own implacable terms will come true.
Source: The Party – The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers by Richard McGregor
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| 17_soc_china_governance.pdf |