The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers Read Free Page A

makes it even more jarring for a western world which, only a few years previously, was feasting on notions of the end of history and the triumph of liberal democracy.
    More than that, the Party’s momentous decision to change course in the late seventies has transformed the lives of literally hundreds of millions of its own people. According to the World Bank, the number of poor fell in China by half a billion people in the two decades-plus from 1981 to 2004. ‘To put this in perspective,’ the bank says, ‘the absolute number of poor (using the same standard) in the developing world as a whole declined from 1.5 to 1.1 billion over the same period. In other words, but for China there would have been no decline in the numbers of poor in the developing world over the last two decades of the twentieth century.’
    In just a single generation, the party elite has been transformed from a mirthless band of Mao-suited, ideological thugs to a wealthy, be-suited and business-friendly ruling class. Along with them, they have transformed their country and are helping remake the world. Today’s Party is all about joining the highways of globalization, which in turn translates into greater economic efficiencies, higher rates of return and greater political security.
    How did the Chinese communists do it, at a time when their fraternal parties were imploding around them? An old adage in journalism, that the best story is often the one staring you in the face, holds true in China. The problem in writing about the Party, though, is that, much as the Party might be staring you in the face, you can’t easily glare back. The Party and its functions are generally masked or dressed up in other guises. When it interacts with the outside world, the Party is careful to keep a low profile. Sometimes, you can’t see the Party at all, which makes the job of reporting how China is governed maddeningly difficult.
    The secrecy helps explain why news reports about China routinely refer to the ruling Communist Party, while rarely elaborating on how it actually rules. This book is an attempt to fill that void, by explaining the Party’s functions and structures and how political power is exercised through them. The book has no pretence to being comprehensive or definitive. It is simply the story of a curious journalist opening, or trying to open, the system’s many locked doors, and looking inside. In doing so, the book aims to place the Communist Party back firmly where it belongs, at the heart of the modern Chinese story.

The Red Machine
     
    The Party and the State
     
    ‘The Party is like God. He is everywhere. You just can’t see him.’
    (A University Professor in Beijing)
     
    Nine men strode on to the stage in the Great Hall of the People, the imposing Soviet-style structure on the west side of Tiananmen Square, in the heart of Beijing, at the close of the 2007 congress of the Chinese Communist Party. Once they were assembled, an untrained eye might have had difficulty telling them apart.
    The nine all wore dark suits, and all but one sported a red tie. They all displayed slick, jet-black pompadours, a product of the uniform addiction to regular hair-dyeing of senior Chinese politicians, a habit only broken by retirement or imprisonment. If anyone had had the chance to check their biographies, they would have noticed other striking similarities. All but one had trained as engineers, and all but two were in their mid-sixties. In any jobs they had occupied after graduation, the nine men had invariably doubled in party roles, making them full-time politicians for their entire working lives, even if that included undertaking or overseeing professional tasks for brief interludes. Their backgrounds varied slightly. Some had worked their way up from poverty. Others were princelings, the privileged offspring of former senior leaders. Their personal networks varied, but any fundamental political differences between them had been purged on their