The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers (6 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the story does not end there. The flipside of the single-party state are the multiple, and multiplying, realities of twenty-first-century China. The upheaval of the last three decades has sown the seeds of conflict and change, within the Party, the economy and society at large. According to the Leninist ethos, the Party infiltrates the government and society. Now the reverse is happening. Society, with all its rapidly evolving aspirations, demands and cleavages, is now infiltrating the Party, and the Party is struggling to keep up.

China is awash with people and organizations with evolving professional interests, codes and agendas which are antithetical to a repressive, busybody state. Entrepreneurs, lawyers, journalists, religious worshippers, teachers, academics, historians and even doctors who speak out about public health problems are increasingly demanding the right to simply do their jobs or pursue their beliefs, free of political interference. China’s most far-reaching reform of the past two decades, the creation of a private housing market, has also spawned a new class of potential political activists, middle-class investors who want to protect the value of their properties. To paraphrase the author, V. S. Naipaul, there are a million mutinies now, on the streets, in cyberspace, within companies and on farms, by people who want nothing more than the government to be accountable for its actions and to tell the truth.

Amidst China’s successes, there is failure aplenty. At the same time as China has got rich, its society has become more unequal than even the US and Russia. There are now more billionaires in China than in any country other than the US. The rich have not just been getting richer. In the boom times, they have been doing so at the expense of the poorest people in the land. In the two years to 2003, the average incomes of the poorest 10 per cent in China fell, at a time when the economy was growing rapidly, and the incomes of the top 10 per cent of the population were rising by more than 16 per cent annually.

The Party has no compunction about arresting opponents who openly challenge the system, and destroying their livelihoods and families, but it has little stomach for violent conflict on a large scale. Revolutionary parties do not hesitate to spill blood to hold power. Governing parties, as the Chinese Communist Party now styles itself, have to learn to live by a different set of rules. ‘It’s not just because Hu Jintao is not Deng Xiaoping. There is a growing demand for democracy,’ said Zhou Ruijin, the retired editor of the
Liberation Daily
, the official party newspaper in Shanghai. ‘You can see this by the way people are expressing their views within the Party, and outside. One-man rule no longer applies.’

As a political machine, the Party has so far proved to be a sinuous, cynical and adaptive beast in the face of its multiple challenges. As society has changed in the last decade, so has the Party’s membership make-up. Top leaders have systematically set about jettisoning the body’s proletarian rural roots in favour of an alliance with the richer and more successful classes emerging out of the market economy. Once dominated by workers, and then by peasants–who alone made up nearly half the membership until as late as 1978–the Party now seeks out star students and wealthy entrepreneurs. They are the fastest growing sources of new members, expanding their numbers in the Party by 255 per cent and 113 per cent respectively between 2002 and 2007. Many of them have been happy to embrace the Party, because it offers them in return access to a network that is crucial to furthering their careers.

When I met three students from China’s elite universities at a café in Beijing in early 2009 to ask them about the Party, they were unanimous about its attractions. ‘For many young students like me, to be a party member is a symbol of excellence,’ said Ni Hanwei, a maths student at Tsinghua University, known as China’s MIT. ‘The second reason is that if you are a party member, you will get more opportunities with government jobs.’ At both high school and university, all of their classes in different parts of China had quotas for party membership, with positions offered as a prize for the top students.