The Party

The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers

By Richard McGregor

“Few outsiders have any realistic sense of the innards, motives, rivalries, and fears of the Chinese Communist leadership. But we all know much more than before, thanks to Richard McGregor’s illuminating and richly-textured look at the people in charge of China’s political machinery.... Invaluable.” — James Fallows, National Correspondent for The Atlantic

 The Party is Financial Times reporter Richard McGregor’s eye-opening investigation into China’s Communist Party, and the integral role it has played in the country’s rise as a global superpower and rival to the United States. Many books have examined China’s economic rise, human rights record, turbulent history, and relations with the U.S.; none until now, however, have tackled the issue central to understanding all of these issues: how the ruling communist government works. The Party delves deeply into China’s secretive political machine.

Book Description

An eye-opening investigation into china's communist party and its integral role in the country's rise as a global superpower and rival of the united states

China's political and economic growth in the past three decades is one of astonishing, epochal dimensions. The country has undergone a remarkable transformation on a scale similar to that of the Industrial Revolution in the West. The most remarkable part of this transformation, however, has been left largely untold—the central role of the Chinese Communist Party.

As an organization alone, the Party is a phenomenon of unique scale and power. Its membership surpasses seventy-three million, and it does more than just rule a country. The Party not only has a grip on every aspect of government, from the largest, richest cities to the smallest far-flung villages in Tibet and Xinjiang, it also has a hold on all official religions, the media, and the military. The Party presides over large, wealthy state-owned businesses, and it exercises control over the selection of senior executives of all government companies, many of which are in the top tier of the Fortune 500 list.

In The Party, Richard McGregor delves deeply into China's inner sanctum for the first time, showing how the Communist Party controls the government, courts, media, and military, and how it keeps all corruption accusations against its members in-house. The Party's decisions have a global impact, yet the CPC remains a deeply secretive body, hostile to the law, unaccountable to anyone or anything other than its own internal tribunals. It is the world's only geopolitical rival of the United States, and is steadfastly poised to think the worst of the West.

In this provocative and illuminating account, Richard McGregor offers a captivating portrait of China's Communist Party, its grip on power and control over China, and its future.

The permanent party

An entertaining and insightful portrait of China’s secretive rulers

Jun 17th 2010

ANY study of the Chinese Communist Party today will soon confront two jarring questions. The first is how a party responsible for such horrors—the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, the death of some 35m-40m people in the worst-ever man-made famine from 1958-1960—has stayed in power without facing any serious threat, the 1989 Tiananmen protests aside. The second is why it still calls itself “communist”, when China today seems closer to the cut-throat capitalism of Victorian England than to any egalitarian dream.

The second question is easier. In 1979 Deng Xiaoping, the pragmatic founder of the new China, answered it in “four basic principles”, the most important being “the leading role of the Communist Party”. Richard McGregor’s masterful depiction of the party today cites a less pompous tautology, from Chen Yuan, the son of a Long March veteran and hero of central planning, who is himself a leading state-banker: “We are the Communist Party and we will decide what communism means.”

This willingness to jettison ideological baggage while clinging to Leninist first principles also helps answer the first question, about the party’s surprising durability. Flexibility has been essential as the party has both led and adapted to wrenching change since 1978. It has had, as Mao Zedong, a less pragmatic communist, might have put it, to “manage contradictions”. In the process, Chinese people have learnt to enjoy freedoms and prosperity unimaginable under Mao. The system, Mr McGregor rightly points out, still relies, ultimately, on terror. But no longer are party rule and terror absolutely synonymous.

Through anecdote and example, Mr McGregor, a longtime correspondent in China for the Financial Times, illuminates the most important of the contradictions and paradoxes. There is the obvious one, for example, between the demands of the market and party control. Mr McGregor describes one almost comical battlefield—the overseas stockmarket listings of Chinese state-controlled companies.

Wall Street bankers scratched their heads over how to describe the role of a firm’s party committee. John Thornton, a former boss of Goldman Sachs, describes an “eye-opening” lecture he received as a member of a Chinese board: the committee was responsible for six functions “and they were the ones that mattered.” Prospectuses tend to solve the conundrum by avoiding mention of the party’s role.

A more stomach-churning example of this contradiction was the discovery in 2008 by Sanlu, a dairy firm, that some of its products had been contaminated and were harming and killing children. Commercial logic, not to mention basic humanity, demanded an instant recall. But the boss’s first loyalty was to the party, which had demanded that bad news be suppressed so as not to spoil the atmosphere at that year’s Beijing Olympics.

Then there is the tension arising from the party’s dependence—shown most graphically in Beijing in 1989—on the army to keep it in power. This has led to booming army budgets, as the generals acquire high-tech kit. But this in turn leads them to think of themselves as professional soldiers defending China when their job is to serve the Communist Party. Tensions surface in the mysterious occasional harangues in the press against those calling (though not in public) for the “depoliticisation” and “nationalisation” of the armed forces.

Third, there is the paradox that China’s leaders recognise that the main threat to their authority is corruption, yet their power rests on a system that makes it almost inevitable. Indeed, as Mr McGregor puts it, corruption has become a sort of “transaction tax that distributes ill-gotten gains among the ruling class…It becomes the glue that keeps the system together.” No outside body is allowed to have authority over the party. An independent anti-corruption campaign, as Mr McGregor notes, “could bring the whole edifice tumbling down”.

This is part of what the author calls the “fundamental paradox”: “That a strong, all-powerful party makes for a weak government and compromised institutions.” This leaves it ill-equipped to cope with the next change, as China “rebalances” its economy to stimulate domestic consumption, provide a decent social-security net and “take on the vested interests now profiting from the distortions”.

An Interview with Richard McGregor, Author of The Party

June 25, 2010 in Interview by mcunningham

By Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

Richard McGregor is the former Beijing bureau chief for the Financial Times and author of the newly released The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers. I recently conducted the interview below with McGregor via e-mail; you can read excerpts from the book here and here and also find a “Why I Write” profile of McGregor at the Urbanatomy site.

What is The Party about? What new knowledge do you hope readers will come away with after they’re finished?

My purpose was simply to describe the political system as it really is. I think few people, even foreigners living in China, appreciate just how vast and resilient the party apparatus that underpins the government in China is, and how deeply its tentacles extend into all manners of institutions, like universities and the media. And often people who do know a lot about the party will attempt to explain it away, as a product of Chinese culture or some such. I wanted to describe in an unflinchingly fashion a system that is the product of resolutely political arrangements.

The other major theme of my book is secrecy. Once you begin to describe bodies like the Central Organisation Department, which is really the world’s most powerful human resources outfit, you can convey just how absurdly secretive the CCP is. This body controls the lives and careers of a vast elite in China, and it has no sign outside of its office and no listed phone number! To me, simple facts like this don’t need dressing up. Just tell it as it is and hopefully readers will get a sense of what a strange pre-modern body the CCP is.

I think a lot of western journalists do have a sense of how pervasive the party is but it is quite a hard thing to explain in day-to-day news stories. Frankly, it is also hard to explain to editors back in head office at all. It is kind of like – “The Central Organisation what?!”

How did you penetrate “the secret world” of the CCP leadership? What kinds of sources did you draw on to write The Party?

I am not sure I did really penetrate it. A friend of mine once compared reporting on China as like knitting a sweater. You get one strand of wool here and one there. Eventually you have enough for a sleeve. A few years later, you have a full sweater. Once I settled on the topic, I discovered there was all sorts of strands of information out there but you rarely get to sit down with a government official who will give you box-and-dice about how the system works from the inside. There is lots of stuff, much of it new, in my book. But in truth, I think I have barely scratched the surface.

In a recent Huffington Post piece, you wrote that “the remarkable and largely overlooked truth about China is that it is still governed on Soviet hardware.” What challenges do you imagine that might create in the years to come?

The system is both rigid and flexible. Rigid because of the party’s insistence on a monopoly on political power. And flexible, because it is an administrative system, not subject to the law. The system has proved much more adaptable than many people thought it would, but I think the path has been made easier by the success of the economy. Once the economy slows and there is less money to pass around, it is not clear how the system will manage except by ramping up the repression. Expectations have been raised in China along with living standards. If the party has to fight to hang onto power, I think large sections of the population will push back.

In your opinion, what has held the CCP together in the face of massive social changes over the past two decades?

On top of economic growth, nationalism is the stickiest glue binding the people and powerholders together. The Chinese are quite rightly proud of what they have achieved in the last three decades. They have a chip on their shoulder about the developed world, but equally, the way the imperialist west, and Japan, trampled over China in the 19th and 20th century gives the nationalist lobby lots of ammunition. The party has been very cynical and canny in the way they have used this to scrub up their own image. China gives free rein to anyone who wants to publicise Japanese wartime atrocities but heaven help anyone who turns the mirror of history onto the CCP’s own record!

What is your sense about the relationship between the Chinese people and the CCP today? Do you think your book says anything that would surprise a Chinese reader?

I wouldn’t pretend to know what the Chinese reader might think, except that a number of Chinese have been quite thrilled to read about their system in a way they are constrained from saying or writing themselves.

As to the relationship between the CCP and the people, it is a highly sensitive topic. In some ways, they have little to do with each other directly. People deal with the system through the government rather than the party. The party in turn has a rather patronizing daddy-knows-best attitude to the people. By and large, they leave each other alone in day-to-day life. But once anyone crosses that red line into organized politics, the party can turn into a very brutal beast indeed.