[Haha, this is funny<g>]--More powerful than ever: How China’s Communist party is firming its grip
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By Richard McGregor
Published: October 11 2007 19:38 | Last updated: October 11 2007 19:38
On their first day of class at the Communist party’s management school in Shanghai, students make a pilgrimage to a small museum commemorating the 1921 meeting of 13 activists who founded what has become the world’s largest political organisation.
But the museum does more than teach the students, all up-and-coming party officials, about the history of communism in China. Getting there provides an education of a different kind, as the students must first wend their way through a smartly refurbished city district, crawling with upscale eateries and expensive apartments.
In 21st-century China, such apparently glaring incongruities – allowing one of communism’s “sacred sites” to sit amid a yuppie wonderland – barely generates comment, let alone criticism. What once might have been seen as a fatal contradiction in values has been turned by the party into one of its core strengths.
“People can see the progress of the party,” says Xia Jianming, the school’s director general. “This [setting] is a kind of harmony. In our society, people of different levels may have different ways of meeting their requirements.”
With 73.4m members, the Chinese Communist party does more than just rule a country. Besides having a grip on every arm of government, the media and the military, the party now also presides over large and cash-rich state businesses, a control exercised by monopolising the selection of senior executives.
The party’s dominance of both the political and business landscape has made it more powerful than ever. On the eve of its five-yearly congress, which opens in Beijing on Monday, Chinese leaders sit atop not only the biggest political party in the world but the richest as well.
As recently as a decade ago, much of the state sector was moribund and lossmaking. Its transformation since then has produced Fortune 500 behemoths such as China Mobile, Sinopec and Bank of China. Many have listed their shares abroad, giving the party a seat at the table in global capital markets.
In the past five years, the party has sought to add another set of strings to its bow by bringing the private sector, the most dynamic part of China’s economy, firmly into its purview through the establishment of member committees inside non-state companies (see below). Entrepreneurs, in turn, have been officially welcomed as party members since the 2002 congress.
The party is not monolithic when it comes to the economy. State-owned companies and city and provincial governments all compete against one other. Different factions, clustered around personalities and policies, vie for power, as in any political system. But ultimately, they all report to a single master and must eventually come to heel.
The party’s control of the key assets of state business and its attempt to colonise the private sector have made the organisation “the world’s biggest holding company”, quips Ding Xueliang, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in Beijing. Others joke that it is more like a chamber of commerce than a political party.
But such notions are taken seriously by the party itself, which is grappling with ways to merge an intensely hierarchical political culture with the demands of transparency and corporate governance.
The wealth generated by China’s economic boom has also bought with it a new set of problems: breathtaking corruption and huge incentives for the party, and its officials, to enrich themselves by taking over the role of government.
Although party members occupy virtually every key government position, the party as an organisational entity is theoretically separate from executive government positions and day-today decision-making. All Chinese cities and counties have a party secretary, who has primarily political duties such as supervising the media, appointing the heads of state companies and ensuring officials conform to the national line on key issues such as the renegade status of Taiwan.
The mayor, who ranks below the party secretary, has executive duties such as arranging the building of infrastructure and managing the budgets of the local health and education systems. In Shanghai, the hierarchy is evident even in the official cars they are allocated. The party secretary’s number plate includes the numbers 00001, while the mayor’s displays 00002.
But in recent years, says Prof Ding, “there has been an enormous intrusion of the party into the government administration” because of the huge amounts of money at stake. “The government bureaucrats are often rendered powerless, useless and irrelevant unless they are, at the same time, members of the standing party committee,” he says. “The level of corruption these days is shocking, not just for ordinary people but for senior party officials as well.”
The distinction between party and government is often less than clear. In big state enterprises, for example, the company chairman may be the party secretary. The make-up of the party committee may also virtually replicate the board. But the question is whether party groupings, unaccountable and out of sight, should be directly controlling government budgets.
Certainly, the party makes no pretence of transparency. In a country that has embraced the internet and mobile telephony (China had 162m estimated internet users by the end of June and about 450m mobile phone accounts), the party does not even have a website.
Lu Weidong, who teaches at another party school – in Yan’an, an old revolutionary base – dismisses an internet presence as redundant. “All the important media are owned by the party, so we have no need to set up a website,” he says.
Such an answer is telling in itself. The party has an unparalleled ability to spread its message, through any information outlet in the country, but little real interest in coming out of its protective shell to engage more genuinely with the masses.
The difficulty the party faces in opening itself up to any kind of robust scrutiny should not be underestimated. The party already stands above the law, with its own internal police and legal system, which investigates and delivers verdicts on corruption cases before they are passed on to ordinary courts.
The party is alert to public sentiment, constantly fine-tuning policies in response to the information it receives through feedback, the media and reports written by state journalists and circulated privately. But whether it can keep pace with the increasing complexity of Chinese society without undergoing fundamental changes itself is questionable. The days of strongmen such as Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, whose directives were disobeyed at significant risk, are gone.
“It’s not just because [president] Hu Jintao is not Deng Xiaoping. There is a growing demand for democracy,” says the longtime editor of a party newspaper, asking not to be named. “You can see this by the way people are expressing their views within the party. One-man rule no longer applies.”
Xie Tao, a former vice-dean of People’s University in Beijing, is one of a ginger group of “old cadres” who have been agitating for limited democratic reform. “Joining the World Trade Organisation [in 2001] required China to establish a law-based society,” he says. “If political reform fails to keep up with economic development, it will harm the economy.”
Mr Xie says such changes will provoke a “process of conflict” because the interest groups and party officials who currently profit from the system will be losers. “They will obstruct political reform because otherwise they would have to make some sacrifices.”
Thus far, Mr Hu, who is party secretary as well as state president, has shown little tolerance for genuine political competition. He said recently that China should “cherish socialism” – a coded rebuke, says the newspaper editor, for people like Mr Xie who have been pushing for “social democracy”.
Mr Hu’s interest in democracy seems to extend solely to using it as a management tool inside the party itself. “Internal democracy” manifests in a number of ways: in a tighter review process for officials and allowing more candidates than there are positions for party posts. For the 20-odd places on the politburo, for example, the party may permit more than 20 candidates to stand in an internal election at this month’s congress – a first if such a poll goes ahead.
Some members of the larger central committee have been selected at previous congresses by secret ballot, but never the politburo. China has also studied closely the congress of the fraternal Vietnamese Communist party last year, when there were two candidates for the top position in the country, of party secretary. Cheng Li, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, says it is still not certain that the limited election for the Politburo will go ahead. “But I think the trend is very clear. There is a huge demand from the political establishment for such an election,” he adds.
Mr Hu’s strategy rests on two legs: to maintain the party’s monopoly on power, while pushing to make officials more professional and accountable. The anti-corruption campaigns fit this strategy, as do the party schools, built at Mr Hu’s initiative.
The two schools, in Shanghai and Yan’an, which opened in 2005, are housed in dazzling newly-built campuses, both of which have won a string of design awards. Their curriculum, however, is somewhat more traditional. “The focus of the education is on revolutionary history and on China’s basic national conditions,” says Guo Chunle, a deputy director of the Yan’an school. “We want to make sure our leaders do not forget the best of our party.”
The school has had about 7,000 students so far, mostly mid-level party administrators and a few private business people, who do courses of a few weeks or sometimes just days. Classes include a “field study” to meet farmers, “to make sure our students get a personal feeling about our traditions”, says Mr Guo.
Shanghai, in keeping with its position as China’s gateway to the world, has a marginally more modern method, focusing on building “leadership qualities”, but also indoctrinating younger officials with the party lore. “At the last party congress, none of the new entrants into the central committee was born before 1949 [when the Communists took power] and only 140 out of the 2,000-plus delegates were born before 1949,” says Mr Xia. “Officials are becoming younger. They are well-educated people but lacking in knowledge of traditions and the party’s theories.”
The Shanghai school also includes a media training centre with equipment including a mock-up television studio and a device to simulate a mass of flashing cameras, as if an official has run into a horde of paparazzi. Yet the party schools (there are three, with a number of other “executive training centres”) are more about reinforcing networks and loyalty than they are about education and training.
The newspaper editor says the focus on raising productivity and expanding gross domestic product, without political reform, will inevitably see the existing huge gaps between the haves and have-nots in China widen further. “We must have a fresh idea about what society is,” he says. “Hu Jintao cannot solve every problem in China, but the real establishment of a democratic system in China will take 10 years.”
Mr Hu, however, is unlikely to give a western-style democratic system a moment’s thought during next week’s congress. For him, and for most Chinese leaders, no such notion is on the agenda.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007 |
