The lack of transparency surrounding the appointment of China’s new
Communist Party government later this year extends to basic political and
economic philosophy
The city of Beijing has installed
an interactive find-your-route kiosk with a touchscreen on the street from the
People’s University to Weigongcun underground station. On its sides, red
display screens show messages from the Communist Party of China (CPC), complete
with hammer and sickle, and photos of worthy workers and model officials. Is it
also intended to help people find their way around the world of communist
politics? The crowds of fashionable students (young women in hot pants or mini
skirts and young men in T-shirts with English slogans) seem unlikely to get the
message. In China, the latest hi-tech is often used alongside the most archaic
methods.
The CPC’s 18th national congress,
scheduled for “the second half of 2012” according to the official communiqué,
reflects this paradox. China’s sole political party, which has controlled the
country since 1949, has devised a system for renewing its central leadership.
The highest Party and state officials (the general secretary, who is also the
president of the People’s Republic, the prime minister, and the chairman of the
National People’s Congress) will be limited to two terms, or a maximum of 10
years, in office. For members of national authorities (the CPC’s Central
Committee and Central Politburo, and the Standing Committee of the National
People’s Congress), retirement age will be 68.
So 2012 will bring one of the
most extensive leadership transitions ever seen in a communist country. Seven
of the nine members of the Central Politburo Standing Committee (CPSC) (1), the
centre of political power in China, will be replaced, as will 60-65% of the
members of the Central Committee. Nobody knows how the new members will be
chosen. In a way that recalls imperial China, the CPC’s succession is being
prepared in secrecy, with obscure power plays, Machiavellian intrigues,
strategic alliances and low blows.
Over 2,000km away, in Guangzhou,
I met Yuehui (not her real name), a young woman typical of China’s middle
classes, fashionably dressed and made-up. Her mother is a primary school
teacher, her father a civil servant. She is taking a master’s degree in law at
the prestigious Sun Yat-sen University. Like her parents, she is a member of
the CPC. She is self-confident and at ease in discussions. After a little
hesitation, she was willing to talk politics (although her friends were not)
and immediately explained: “The Party is a kind of club, a network that can be
useful for your career — a bit like a professional association.” Being a member
will help her to get a good job and guarantee promotion. Blushing, she
admitted: “From my teens, I dreamed of joining the Party.” Like most young
people in China, she was a member of the Communist Youth League. “When the
Party leadership chose me to become a member, because I was a good pupil, I was
so happy. It was like winning a prize or having a birthday.”
Her enthusiasm has waned. “I
wouldn’t do it again. It creates all kinds of obligations. I have to go to lots
of meetings, which is very time-consuming, when I have many interests.” The
grassroots organisations, normally dormant, have been very active over the last
few months, following the dismissal of the politician Bo Xilai which uncovered
major divisions within the CPC. “Most of all, I have to toe the Party line. I
can’t say what I think. It weighs heavily on me, because I’m very
independent-minded.”
‘Close your eyes and carry on’
Nobody has told her formally not
to deviate from the official line. But if she did, she would have to explain
herself to “comrades” assigned to lead her back to the straight and narrow
path. Handing back her Party card would be impossible — political apostasy. She
might be able to distance herself from the Party if she left her neighbourhood
and kept quiet. But if she got a job in the civil service or a government
enterprise, she would be forced to comply with Party directives. In the words
of a Party veteran who despairs of the situation: “You don’t have to believe;
you just go to the meetings, close your eyes and carry on.”
It is easier to join the Party
than to leave it. Often, the secretary of the school, neighbourhood, company or
village branch of the Party chooses those felt worthy to join. Those who failed
to join at secondary school or university, and feel that being able to flash a
Party card would help their career, can apply to join, as long as they can find
a sponsor and are willing to submit to extensive inquiries into their career and
personal lives.
Between 2007 and 2012 more than
10 million people joined the CPC. It officially has 80.6 million members,
around 25% under the age of 35, with another 50% aged between 36 and 60.
Although the leadership (especially at local level) has never been so openly
criticised as it is today, there have never been so many applicants. Membership
opens many doors for young people (at least those who are not rich) and is a
kind of peace-of-mind insurance for the CPC, which hopes that it will help
control Chinese society.
Sons and daughters of Party
members are guaranteed membership, as are intellectuals and graduates —
yesterday they were reviled as “petty bourgeois”, today they are getting the
red carpet treatment. The aim is to make the CPC a “party of excellence” and,
since Party and state are one, to recruit trained people to govern the country.
The formation of the elite favours recruitment in Chinese and foreign
universities, now a popular career path. But that doesn’t exempt would-be
leaders from attending Party schools.
Those appointed to senior posts
at provincial or central level must pass through these important political
institutions, where they study Marxism and the subtleties of current policy,
while acquiring high-level public administration skills. The China National
School of Administration, established in 1994, sometimes shares premises with
the Central Party School (CPS), founded at the time of the Revolution. Chinese
and foreign scholars with excellent reputations are invited to teach at this
institution; the Guangzhou branch has attracted major US economists. Access to
the internet is unrestricted. No foreign book, even the most critical of China,
is forbidden. The Party will do anything to make sure its leaders get the
training they need.
I was not allowed to visit the
Beijing branch of the CPS, headed by Xi Jinping, the future president of China.
But two China Daily journalists, Chen Xia and Yuan Fang (2), have immersed
themselves in this strange world, which brings together the Party elite from
every level of government. Students are cut off from the outside world (their
secretaries and drivers are not allowed to enter the school). During their
first week, they take placement tests to assess their knowledge of political
theory, including the basic theories of Marxism. They are then divided into
groups taking classes on different subjects: Party history, religions,
minorities, corruption, HIV/AIDS prevention. After classes, the students meet
again for free discussions. But there is still a hierarchy: students from the
prefectural government level eat in different canteens and sleep in different
dormitories to those from the provincial or central level.
‘Future backbone of the government’
According to Chen and Yuan, there
is also a special class of officials aged between 45 and 50, who are the
“future backbone of the Chinese government”. Their course lasts a year, and the
first three months are devoted to reading classics such as Marx’s Capital and
Engels’s Anti-Dühring. The students receive in-depth tuition in all areas of
government, including the legislative system, budget drafting, financial
control, foreign policy, management, personnel management, eradicating
corruption and conflict resolution. China’s leadership is getting a highly
specialised training.
The CPS also helps to select
future leaders. The CPC Central Committee’s Organisation Department, which has
a strong influence on Party affairs, and on appointments in government, the
media (with the Party Publicity Department, formerly the Propaganda
Department), universities and state enterprises, sends observers to sit in on
student discussions and identify candidates for future promotion. A member of
the teaching staff told Chen and Yuan that a student had been suspended for his
negative attitude in class, and that this had virtually ended his political
career. Understandably, those who aspire to high position are reluctant to
voice criticism.
A Party official I met in Beijing
told me, on condition of anonymity: “Nothing has changed; the emphasis is still
on obedience.” There are 70 official criteria for promotion (3), including
academic achievement, seniority and (if the candidate is in a position of
responsibility) performance — measured, for example, in terms of return on
investments or improvement in air quality. Not forgetting “stability”: any
public scandal attracting national attention will impact on the official’s
career. The lack of transparency means that decisions are arbitrary,
perpetuating a standardised elite.
“After China opened up, until the
mid-1990s, anyone at the bottom of the ladder could better themselves. That’s
no longer possible,” said the economist Yang Jisheng, a former reporter for the
Xinhua (New China) News Agency. We met in a café beyond the fourth ring road,
south of Beijing, where he told me about his book Analysis of Social Classes in
China (4), published in Hong Kong (and distributed illicitly), then on the mainland,
where it was twice banned before being published in its current edition in
2011. Yang, who is still a Party member, never got into trouble, even though he
had uncovered a fault in the Chinese system: the creation of a class of people
who inherit wealth and power.
According to Yang, “there is no
longer any social mobility. Basically, all the jobs are reserved for the
children of Party or government officials, who are better educated. For the
generation born since the reforms, you could say that social class is being
perpetuated: children of officials become officials; the children of the rich
become rich, the children of the poor stay poor.” This may seem commonplace in
the West, but, in a country that claims to be built on “the power of the
people” and “socialism” (albeit Chinese-style), many feel it is intolerable.
The “princelings” (taizi dang) —
children of senior Party figures and heroes of the Revolution — occupy
positions at the heart of the Party apparatus (about 25% of current members of
the Politburo), and especially at the head of major public and semi-public
companies. They compete with the “youth leaguers” (tuanpai) — people from more
modest backgrounds who started their careers in the Communist Youth League — such as China’s current president Hu Jintao
and his prime minister Wen Jiabao. Future president Xi Jinping, son of Zhou
Enlai’s former right-hand man, is a “princeling”; Li Keqiang, expected to be
the next prime minister, is a “youth leaguer”.
Settling differences
Is there a class struggle within
the Party? Though some believe there is, the divides do not seem to bear any
relation to the backgrounds of the leaders. Before being ousted from public
office, Bo Xilai, CPC committee secretary for the city-province of Chongqing
(population 32.6 million) and son of one of the early leaders of the
revolution, was a champion of the rights of migrant workers and the enemy of
property developers, but also advocated trials that showed little regard for
human rights. Wang Yang, CPC committee secretary for Guangdong Province, where
major exporters are based, was not born with a silver hammer and sickle in his
mouth. He has made himself a prophet of economic liberalism, while preaching
political opening-up and public liberties. This shows how difficult it is to
analyse Chinese society on the basis of western political concepts — reformers
versus conservatives, right versus left — even if some (including both Mao
Zedong nostalgics and intellectuals who defend social rights) like to call
themselves the “new left”.
Differences can be settled with
(symbolic) violence, as in the Bo affair. After gaining a reputation as an
enemy of corruption, Bo was himself accused of corruption and Maoist nostalgia
and removed from office. According to China’s prime minister Wen Jiabao, “The
risk of a return to the Cultural Revolution is a real one.”
This official version is often
questioned in private. When the Party brings the charges — rather than an
independent legal system — it is hard to disentangle truth from falsehood. But
corruption runs so deep in Chinese life that it is not implausible that the
boss of Chongqing should have replaced officials with his own supporters. He
made “red songs” fashionable again, but to claim that he wanted to return to
the worst excesses of Maoism and the Red Guards is a big step. Yan Lieshan, an
editor-in-chief of the Guangdong-based newspaper Nanfang Zhoumo (Southern
Weekend) said: “It doesn’t make sense. Some of the things he did may recall the
Cultural Revolution, but the people have learned; they are better informed,
more open-minded. We won’t be going back to those times.”
Feng Yuan, an architectural
historian at Sun Yat-sen University specialising in the Cultural Revolution,
was born in 1964, during the Maoist madness: “Some of the older generation may
be given to nostalgia. But their numbers are negligible. Among young people,
references to Mao reflect two things: dissatisfaction with no outlet for
expression and no resolution, coupled with a belief that society at the time
was more egalitarian and less harsh; and an insufficiently critical assessment
of that period.” The official verdict on Mao Zedong and his regime is “70%
good, 30% bad”, and critical studies are not easily accepted. Two of Feng’s
articles on that period, published in a book of his lectures, have been banned.
He insists on rigorous historical research, free from ideological manipulation,
even in a good cause.
The Bo Xilai scandal would not
have turned out as it did if China had freedom of debate and if currents of
opinion were recognised, as Hu Jintao promised at the start of his second term
as president. That promise was forgotten, but the ideological standoff within
the state apparatus could still explode: it turns on the role of the state (and
of the Party), and the content of social and political reforms (see Party
rivals dispute change).
And what of Chinese-style market
socialism? The official pamphlet “How much do you know about the Communist
Party of China?” describes it as a creative application of socialism as created
by Marx and Engels and states that the design of the system is that of a
Marxism under development. No Communist will admit to this fossilised way of
thinking, but the problem remains. He Gaochao, an expert on industrial
relations who works in Guangzhou and lectures New York, admits that “there is
really very little difference between American capitalism and Chinese
capitalism,” but says that, in China, “a real effort is being made to improve
the lives of workers and peasant farmers — it’s congenital.” There is no sign
that this is true, and it’s a bit too simple as a definition of socialism.
(This may explain China’s efforts to promote an alternative ideology:
Confucianism.)
Liu Jinxiang, former deputy mayor
of Guangzhou in charge of finance, agrees: “If, by socialism, you mean more
equality, then Sweden is more socialist than China. Many aspects of the old
Chinese society have survived. People don’t really know they are aiming for any
more. We have no criteria, no model to follow. How should we define our system
— market economy, socialism, state capitalism? None of these concepts really
fit. That’s why there is such confusion over which direction we should go in.
We have a lot of theoretical work to do. You could say that we are in the phase
of state capitalism as a means of building a socialist society where there is
more room for individuality.” This is a worthy goal, but the preparations for
the 18th national congress give no hint of any change of course.
Martine Bulard
Business & Investment Opportunities
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