The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers (7 page)

Gathered in a huddle at the Thinker’s Café in Beijing’s university district, the students scoffed at old-style ideology, derided the political education classes that came with party membership and freely admitted they downloaded from the internet the essay required for their joining application. One expressed outrage at the 1989 Beijing massacre. The two others warily dismissed the event as being in the past. All of them had had drummed into them by their parents and teachers, and seemed to accept without reservation, that the state would retain a powerful role in their lives. ‘The foreign countries say the Communist Party has made a lot of mistakes and maybe after several years, it would collapse,’ said Huang Hongfang, a political science student at the People’s University. ‘But my teacher said: “Do not underestimate the government’s power. The president or the members in the central government are really very clever, and they can use their power and policies to control the whole country.”’

When the allure of the elite network is not enough, the Party tosses money into the mix. To attract private entrepreneurs into the club, the Party offers cash incentives for business leaders and workers who sign up new members, much as Amway and other pyramid-sales companies do for sales people who recruit new associates. In Sanxiang, southern Guangdong, the township party committee set aside a rmb 5 million bonus pool for membership drives, an example replicated across the country. Villagers who set up new party committees in private enterprises where none had existed before were paid rmb 5,000, a huge sum, equivalent to about three to four months’ salary for an ordinary factory worker.
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Many entrepreneurs are like Zhu Peikun, who runs his own property and education company in southern China. Zhu said he never considered having a party committee when he set up his business in 1994. Mutual suspicion, between the Party and business, abounded. Now, he speaks of the Party with solemn respect and sees it as essential to the relationships he needs if he is to expand and prosper. ‘The greatest success of the Party is its ability to adapt itself to the change of environment,’ he said. ‘All the best people join the Party.’

To buttress its legitimacy, the Party has also cloaked itself in Chinese governing traditions. The revival of Confucius in the last decade, the ancient sage reviled under Mao as a symbol of backward feudalism, and the methodical refurbishing of other cultural canons, is symbolic of a broader trend, of the Party re-packaging its rule as a natural continuum of the most enlightened eras of China’s imperial history. With no ideology left to speak of, selective historical antecedents provide single-party rule with an indigenous imperial lustre.

The idea that the Communist Party, far from landing in China in a Leninist spaceship, could draw on the country’s deep traditions of authoritarian central bureaucracy, might be obvious to outsiders. Countries do not shed their histories so easily, despite efforts by zealots like Mao to wipe them out and start with a blank slate. In China itself, however, it was dangerous for a long time to say so. ‘Many years ago, I would have considered this question a provocation,’ said Fang Ning, a prominent conservative political scientist. ‘We were meant to have made a fresh break with the past with communist rule.’ Now, Fang insists, without a strong central bureaucracy there would be ‘independence in local regions and then chaos’. ‘The secret of the government in China is that all hats are controlled by the emperor,’ he said. ‘He can take them off and put them on. I don’t think this part of the system has ever changed.’

Since Mao’s demise, the Party has refreshed its Leninist roots, gingerly built up the legal system and set about co-opting wealthier, more educated members of society. In the same way that some western political parties like to style themselves as big tents, the Party now markets itself as an inclusive organization with uniquely Chinese roots. China can, in theory, have it all–democracy, a functioning legal system, a vibrant civil society, disputatious think-tanks, innovative universities and a blossoming private sector–as long as they develop within the boundaries the Party lays down for them.

China is often fêted as an economic miracle, the latest of a string through Asia. The Party’s astounding survival skills make it more of a political miracle, albeit one built on economic growth. The Party has managed to refurbish its base and build its legitimacy as a governing body, all the while hanging on tightly to the core assets of its wealth and power. But without a fast-growing economy, it would have mattered little what the Party controlled. This was never more true than in the aftermath of the 1989 Beijing massacre, which shook the Party to its core.

The Party and Business

The deep personal and political wounds of the 1989 Beijing massacre were still raw when a small group of officials, academics and newspaper editors gathered in a hotel conference centre a few hundred metres from Tiananmen Square, a little over two years after the event. Soon after the meeting was held in late 1991 and its manifesto written up, some of the patrons of the event at the Beijing Hotel rushed to disown it. Years later, the list of attendees was still contested, especially the presence of Chen Yuan, then the deputy-governor at the central bank and the princeling son of China’s pre-eminent central planner. The subject matter which caused a vituperative reaction was not in dispute, however. Nor was there any doubt about the morbid political atmosphere in which the gathering was held.

The Party’s decision to use the military to clear the square and the broad avenues feeding into it had cast a chill over the Chinese body politic. Economic policy was fixated on a fight between hardliners, who saw the crackdown as a chance to reassert old-fashioned state controls, and the liberalizers, under Deng Xiaoping, who were plotting to grab back the initiative to entrench market reforms. Many intellectuals remained bitter and sullen about the brutality used to suppress dissent and the punishment meted out for involvement in the protests.

Rolling over the whole system were the shock waves of the gradual dismemberment of the Soviet bloc. Just prior to the Beijing gathering, Mikhail Gorbachev had been deposed in a military coup, to great initial glee in China, and then annoyance when he was restored shakily to power a few days later. In Chinese eyes, Gorbachev more than anyone was responsible for undermining the global communist cause. His political reforms had not only fatally weakened the Communist Party at home in the Soviet Union. He had also abandoned fraternal ruling parties throughout eastern Europe as they imploded around him.

The meeting in Beijing that day had considered all these events with a single objective in mind. With communism around the world collapsing, what would ensure the Party’s survival in China? The clarion call which emerged from the meeting, contained in a 14,000-character manifesto, was radical in its own way, but also prescient. ‘The Party must grasp not only the gun,’ the document said, in reference to the Party’s control of the armed forces, ‘but the asset economy as well.’ In other words, the title to the vast, sprawling assets of the Chinese state, everything from giant energy and industrial companies and land-holdings, should be held not in the name of the Chinese government but of the Party itself.

In today’s powerful and outwardly confident China, with its fast-expanding economy and bulging pockets of prosperity, it is easy to forget that success was never guaranteed. On the contrary, China was mired in pessimism and political gridlock in the wake of 4 June and isolated internationally by western sanctions. In the intervening years, the Party suppressed any domestic discussion of the crackdown in numerous cities across China so successfully that the event is widely dismissed these days by young Chinese and many foreigners alike as being of little import. When Zhao Ziyang, the party secretary toppled in 1989 for his opposition to the use of military force, died in early 2005, many Chinese under the age of thirty did not even recognize him, as the propaganda department had kept his image out of the media ever since his fall, for a full sixteen years.

The Party’s unyielding line on its decision to send in the troops has strangled the public memory of the extent of the crackdown that followed, and the bitterness it engendered. By some accounts, nearly one in ten of the Party’s then 48 million members were investigated, in the government, media, universities, think-tanks, and in art and literary circles, in the eighteen months that followed 4 June. If they weren’t jailed, sacked or demoted, they were forced to write self-criticisms explaining their stance during the protests, and pledging fealty to the Party’s actions, all of which was ominously recorded on their personal employment files. This was a purge of Stalinist dimensions, albeit without a comparable body count at the end. Song Ping, a party elder and the most important early patron of Hu Jintao, backed a campaign to force potentially suspect members to re-apply to join the Party to ensure ‘they would be communist in reality’ as well as in name. ‘They’ll be the people who really want to struggle for communism to the end,’ Song said. ‘The Party’s fighting ability will be obviously enhanced.’

The decade before the protests had been genuinely revolutionary for China. Rural households had been free to sell on the market anything they produced above the quota demanded by the state, a reform which generated a surge in new wealth in the countryside, where most Chinese live. The growth of the rural free market had come in tandem with a retreat in the power of the traditional planners in Beijing and a more decentralized and competitive economy generally. Top political leaders, like Zhao Ziyang and Hu Yaobang, encouraged discussion of political reform, including grassroots elections, a more open media and a scaling back of the role of party committees that directly managed government ministries and state businesses. Unlike today’s stiffly staged photo-ops, foreign reporters were allowed to chat informally with the Politburo’s inner circle at a cocktail party at the conclusion of the 1987 party congress.

The Tiananmen crackdown prompted a brutal reassessment of the free-wheeling eighties and a ruthless reordering of the leadership’s priorities, drawing a dividing line between two eras of reform in China. The vanities of the relatively open political and economic atmosphere fostered by Zhao and Hu were out. With the political and fiscal power of Beijing seemingly inexorably in retreat and communism around the world in crisis, from the early nineties onwards the party centre was resolved to reassert its authority once and for all.

Chen Yuan seems to have realized long before, well ahead of 4 June, that the traditional methods would no longer do the trick. The Party needed more than old-fashioned ideology and a return to central planning to get its governing legitimacy back. At a lunch in Washington at the Cosmos Club in the mid-eighties, Tom Robinson, the late political scientist, and the host of the meal, had badgered Chen about the apparent contradictions between the state’s official Marxist ideology and the free-market reforms then unfolding in China. After a while, Chen tired of the inquisition, ostentatiously put down his knife and fork, and firmly put a stop to the questions. ‘Listen, Mr Robinson,’ he said, ‘we are the Communist Party, and we will define what communism is.’

The Party’s leaders had already redefined communism more than once since taking power in 1949. Now, in the wake of the 1989 uprising and its suppression, they did it again. The latest definition had an old-fashioned spin, with an audacious twist. Instead of trying to protect the moribund state sector which was threatening to sink the economy and the political system along with it, the Party decided on a new, high-risk course of action. The Party resolved to ruthlessly streamline government enterprises, place the survivors atop the commanding heights of a profitable industrial economy under its control and pilot them into the global business arena. Chinese leaders wanted worldly enterprises that were both communist and commercial at the same time. If they could bring it off, the Party would emerge stronger than ever.

If anyone had the communist credentials to be a patron of the 1991 Beijing Hotel meeting, it was Chen Yuan. On top of the heft that his own position carried, he bore the mantle of his father, Chen Yun, a one-time close colleague of Deng Xiaoping in the early days of post-Maoist reforms. Chen Snr. was a conservative on many levels, constantly on guard against malign influences which he feared could undermine the Party. He refused to allow Chen Jnr. to study overseas, his son complained to friends years later, because of his suspicion of foreign ideas. In his famous depiction, Chen Snr. argued that the Chinese economy had to be managed like a ‘bird in a cage’, a metaphor for the centrally planned system. The cage could be enlarged, aired out and other birds let in, but never unlocked and dispensed with altogether. Chen Snr. eventually fell out with Deng over the pace of free-market reforms, which he worried would chip away at the powers of the state. His son proved to be more skilful at straddling both sides of the emerging policy divide.

Visitors to Chen Jnr.’s office in Beijing in the late nineties recall how he kept on his desk a photo of Deng and himself taken during the final days of the Cultural Revolution. Deng had made a point of personally visiting senior colleagues and their families in the wake of the upheaval, to check on their health and reassure them it was safe to return to Beijing. For sharp-eyed observers, the picture was a reminder not just of Deng’s gesture. The palm trees in the background were a tell-tale sign that Chen had been spared the worst of the movement’s excesses for at least part of the period. The photo had been snapped in tropical Hainan, a more pleasant place to pass the period than the arctic north-east provinces, where many internally exiled people ended up.

Chen Jnr. and his fellow-travellers considered themselves to be conservatives as well, but of a more modern kind. They backed the gradual introduction of market reforms and western-style institutions, side-by-side with strong party controls and intensified patriotic education. They opposed a return to Maoist policies pushed by people they described as ‘romantics’, or ‘traditional diehard conservatives’. In their own words, they were ‘new conservatives’, a tag inevitably shortened to ‘neo-cons’, years before the phenomenon took root in George W. Bush’s administration in the US. Above all, they supported the pre-eminence of the Party as the only body with the capacity to hold the country together against the ever-present threat of subversion by the west and troublemakers at home. What was once a revolutionary party, they said, should now be retooled, and entrenched in power as the ‘governing party’.

The main targets of the neo-cons were not the Maoist romantics, who even in the dark days of the early nineties carried little weight. The greatest danger to the Party came from the political liberals, the right wing in the Chinese political lexicon. The neo-cons blamed the liberals’ relentless lobbying in favour of the private economy, and their unstinting criticism of the Party, for inflaming the 1989 protests in the first place. The liberals, the manifesto said, had demanded ‘total reform of the property system and finally set their sights on the political system, focusing on the Communist Party of China, unwilling to stop short of destroying the entire present order’. The neo-cons’ solution was not to back off from this fight, but to up the ante by having the Party take over the ownership of large state assets in its own name.

Stamping the Party’s name on the title-deeds of state assets would have multiple benefits, they argued. Ownership had been a vexed and confused issue for years. The multiple forms of state ownership, by ministries, enterprises, the military and government entities, plus the murky and entangled rights to different assets and revenue streams on top of that, made it all but impossible to trade and extract value from any public goods. The neo-cons argued that direct ownership by the Party would clarify all of these issues with the stroke of the pen. It would be politically beneficial as well, simultaneously aligning the Party directly with growing state businesses and heading off nascent political competition from entrepreneurs.

The emerging private sector, the neo-cons noted curtly, ‘had nothing to do with the Party’ and had to be kept in check. As for experiments in privatization and diversifying the ownership of state companies, that was dismissed. Such changes could be restricted to ‘smaller enterprises with severe deficits’. In other words, the dross of the state sector which was beyond salvation could be sold off, with the big companies in key sectors being kept for the state.

The privileged line-up of the group credited with the manifesto is one reason it was so enthusiastically denounced by their liberal opponents. Along with a long-time party activist, Yang Ping, the main organizer of the meeting was Pan Yue, then a deputy-editor at the
China Youth Daily
, who spent his days at the paper ‘disregarding his editor’s responsibilities, instead waving around his mobile phone everywhere’. This was in the days when ownership of a mobile phone, then nearly as large as a brick, was a sign either of privilege or of membership of a Hong Kong Triad gang. The first wave of cell-phones in China were known jokingly as ‘Big Bros’, an echo of the title given to Hong Kong mafia bosses. Pan Yue had no underworld connections, but he did have a privileged entrée into the system, through marriage to the daughter of a high-ranking army officer. Pan proved to be an energetic policy entrepreneur in his own right. He retooled himself in the late nineties as the most outspoken voice in the bureaucracy on the environment, before his influence began to wane after the 2007 congress.

A bevy of the sons of revolutionary immortals and senior leaders attended the seminars organized by Pan and Yang over more than a year, culminating in the Beijing Hotel gathering in late 1991. The final 14,000-character document was later drafted under the patronage of Chen Yuan. The intellectuals and liberal commentators, languishing in internal exile or banished overseas in the wake of 4 June, took delight later at lambasting the pedigree of the attendees. They labelled them ‘the Playboys’ Club’ and the manifesto itself as a ‘White Paper for the Princelings Faction’ in the Party. The proposal, one critic wrote, ‘would, without ado, transfer the assets nominally belonging to 1.1 billion people to a Communist Party making up just 4 per cent of this number’. The criticisms were damaging, and the sponsor, the
China Youth Daily
, distanced itself from the conference and its papers. But the idea was killed by a more practical political objection–that direct ownership of state assets would send a fatal signal about the Party’s weakness, not its strength. ‘This kind of suggestion could be very risky,’ said one of the meeting’s attendees. ‘If the Party takes over ownership, it’s a signal that it is preparing a safety net, because the ship is starting to take on water and sink.’