The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers (13 page)

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.

A man who would later become a well-known author, Liu Baiyu, became delusional during his vetting in the middle of this counter-revolutionary campaign, known as the Yan’an rectification. At the direction of a party school official, he wrote and rewrote an autobiography of thousands of characters in length, starting from the day of his birth. He feverishly detailed all he could remember about his past exploitative behaviour, recalling eventually even his remorse at pulling, as a child, the skirt of a maid when she was doing the family washing. Liu later claimed to have seen the light as a result of this treatment. He said the enforced writing of a total of nine drafts of his life story had been the ‘right medicine for the sickness’ of intellectuals like him, and forced him to see the world ‘objectively’. ‘Spiritually, I had undergone my own personal revolution,’ he wrote. The Party approved of his transformation. Under Mao, Liu would later become a vice-minister for culture and party secretary of the Chinese Writers Association.

For all its imperial antecedents, Mao’s organization department replicated what was known in the Soviet Union as the
nomenklatura
system. This was the ‘list of names’ of party members who formed the communist ruling class and were eligible to fill prized jobs in government, industry and elsewhere. The system allows the Party to control ‘the appointments, transfer, promotion and removal of practically all but the lowest ranking officials’. China differs crucially from the Soviet Union in one respect: the system is far more pervasive, penetrating deeper into lower levels of government and other state-controlled institutions. ‘China is more radical,’ said Yuan Weishi, of Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangdong, because of the way the Chinese Communist Party exercised authority down to the lowest residential committees and schools. ‘It wants to lead everything. This is the greatest difference.’

In universities and other key education institutions in the Soviet Union, for example, the party secretary’s job was to oversee party members. In China, says Yuan, the party secretary has the ability to control both party members and appointments and also oversee the curriculum, outranking the titular head of the institution, the president. ‘Things in China are quite ludicrous. Take the hundredth anniversary of Peking University in 1998. Jiang Zemin gave a speech in the Great Hall of the People, instead of at the campus itself. And the person chairing the meeting was not the president, but the party secretary,’ Yuan said. ‘Many of the professors there told me what a funny spectacle it was. The party secretary was waving his hands and moving his feet, at the centre of the action, while the president sat in the corner like a mouse. The system is all from the Soviet Union, but the CCP has taken it to an extreme.’

Everything from the leadership of associations for the elderly and disabled to appointments of scientists and the heads of national engineering projects, such as the Three Gorges Dam, must pass through the department. The head of the umbrella group for the private sector, the All-China Federation for Industry and Commerce, is part of the elite
nomenklatura
, making the body a poor independent advocate for business, which, of course, it is not meant to be anyway. On top of its responsibility for appointments, the department acts as a kind of mini-ministry of multicultural affairs, helping allocate positions in government to well-behaved members of China’s 55 designated ethnic minority communities. Tibetans, Uighurs from Xinjiang, Muslim Hui people and the like, all pre-screened for their loyalty to the Party, are handed a small number of largely symbolic posts to give the vast sprawling state a more inclusive lustre. The department also oversees the allocation of the small quotas set aside in government and academia and elsewhere for members of China’s eight so-called democratic parties. These jobs are allocated, without irony, as a reward for the acquiescence of the democratic parties to single-party communist rule.

The genesis of the unseemly spectacle witnessed by Yuan Weishi at the Peking University anniversary, of the bossy party secretary and the craven president, can be traced to the Party’s response to the 1989 upheaval and the way it played out through the bureaucracy. The department had begun to exercise a lighter touch in the eighties with institutions of higher learning, only requiring universities and the like to consult with the Party on senior appointments. That leeway did not give them a free hand and turn them into hotbeds of democratic liberalism, but it did help to keep direct political pressure at bay. By a single stroke of the Party’s pen in May 1991, the
nomenklatura
list was expanded to give the department greater control over universities. Around the same time, the Party gained extra leverage over students and intellectuals, by requiring university leaders to attend an annual conference to strengthen party-building in their institutions. This last measure offered some added-value for the Party, by giving it a better platform from which to recruit the brightest up-and-coming brains in the country to its ranks as new members.

A flurry of other diktats issued around the same time increased the department’s grip of the propaganda network, elevating the journalists’ federation and a number of media outlets into the formal
nomenklatura
register. The various party bodies controlling trade unions, the youth league and the women’s federation returned to the organization department’s high-level watch-list. The party groupings in government departments, which had been scaled back and in some instances abolished by Zhao Ziyang, were also revived to replenish the political core of the system.

The secrecy surrounding the precise number and identity of elite positions covered by the Central Organization Department has been tightened at the same time. John Burns, an academic at Hong Kong University, obtained the 1990 list of
nomenklatura
positions in the early nineties, through access to material from the Ministry of Personnel, the agency which acts as the government front for the party department. A second academic, Hon Chan, also of Hong Kong University, obtained a later list, of the 1998
nomenklatura
jobs, but he had to get it through his own sources, as the Ministry of Personnel no longer publishes the information. The increased secrecy, Dr Chan noted, is counter to the Party’s ‘professed interest in increased transparency and open administration’ and the commitments made on its accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. Dr Burns estimated that in the early nineties the centre directly controlled about 5,000 key party and government posts. Dr Chan, perhaps hamstrung by the heightened secrecy, did not make any estimate at all.

Outwardly, the twenty-first-century organization department is a very different animal from the arm of state security as conceived in Yan’an. The rules for appointments are codified in more than seventy articles that read much like legislation. Promotions are tied to length of service, education levels and mandatory classes at a party school every five years. Officials holding government posts, such as a governor or mayor, are rated according to an impressively lengthy list of numerical indicators which look like they were drawn up by management consultants. Economic growth, investment, the quality of the air and water in their localities, and public order all theoretically count in benchmarking performance.

The department has all the trappings of a sophisticated, multinational headhunter, using psychological tests, lie detectors and confidential interviews with colleagues of officials up for promotion. Judging how these rules work in practice, however, is more difficult. The same regulations contain loopholes large enough to push the numerical benchmarks aside. Officials judged to be ‘exceptionally talented young cadres’, for example, can be promoted regardless of seniority. ‘It all depends on whether you get noticed at the end of the day,’ said an adviser to the department. ‘There is no scientific system. Nearly everyone gets the same points in all of these elaborate assessments anyway, because for you not to do so would reflect badly on your superior.’

Senior leaders in China have long held sway over jobs in select ministries and industrial sectors. Li Peng, the Premier who declared martial law in 1989, was the longtime tsar of the energy sector, in which two of his children rose to hold powerful jobs. Zhu Rongji held sway in the finance sector, which allowed him great influence in choosing the heads of large Chinese banks and also helped his son become the highly paid head of China’s largest investment bank. And Jiang Zemin reigned over the technology sector, ushering numerous loyalists into important jobs, and allowing his son to become a key wheeler-dealer within the sector in Shanghai in the early part of this century. More recently, Zeng Qinghong, together with Zhou Yongkang, from 2007 the Politburo member in charge of the law and state security, have been key players in the so-called petroleum mafia and influential in senior appointments in China’s energy sector.

When the Politburo chooses to focus on an issue, the benchmarks set from Beijing can matter a great deal. Jiang Zemin’s directive to wipe out the Falun Gong spiritual movement in 1999 after its followers surprised the leadership with a sit-in outside its Beijing compound galvanized regional party chiefs. Handed responsibility for breaking the movement and preventing its practitioners from coming to Beijing to protest, city and provincial leaders resorted to brutal methods, including torture and murder, to crush Falun Gong at the grassroots. The Politburo has pressed so hard on another issue in recent years–improving mine safety standards–that the city of Linfen in the coal-rich Shanxi province was left without a party secretary for six months in 2009. The potential candidates for the position were all too scared to take it up. A county governor from the city, which regularly disappears from satellite photos because of extreme pollution, said the pressure from Beijing to prevent mine accidents had made being an official in the province ‘a profession of extreme danger–you could go to jail or to your death if not careful’.

Economic growth, which in the Party’s eyes translates into job creation and social stability, is the most important benchmark throughout China, but it is not enough by itself to ensure a stellar career. If growth alone was the main criterion for promotion, officials from the localities which have outpaced the rest of the country for years, like Wenzhou in Zhejiang province, where the private sector rules the economy, would dominate the senior ranks of the central government. In fact, very few officials from these areas have advanced into the top echelons in Beijing. The performance benchmarks are kept in reserve, to be enforced when they are needed, a Chinese academic explained. ‘Above a certain rank, these tables do not mean much,’ he said. ‘It is in the interest of senior officials to keep it that way, because they can enhance their own individual power and standing. Otherwise, they are hostage to the system.’ The regulations are much like laws in China, he said, for reference purposes only.