The RAS Book Club will meet to discuss The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Ruler’s by Richard McGregor. Copies of the book will be available at RAS events prior to this meeting. You may also obtain a copy of the book by contacting the RAS Book Club (see below).
N.B. RESERVATIONS ESSENTIAL AS SPACE IS LIMITED AT THIS EVENT.
ABOUT The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers
In 2011, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) celebrated its 90th Birthday. Founded with a mere 50 members in July 1921 in Shanghai, it has now burgeoned to 78 million. Since 1949, it has been the ruling party in the new country it created, the People’s Republic. In its nine decades of existence (two thirds of that in power), it has passed through Japanese and then Nationalist assaults in the 1940s, self-inflicted economic implosion and mass starvation in the 1950s, and the internal purges of the Cultural Revolution from 1966, which almost decimated it. Today, it presides over one of the planet’s great economies, making its mark on regional and global issues such as security and climate change, with not even the weakest organised political opposition at home.
It has done this, McGregor shows, by controlling three crucial areas: information, the military (the People’s Liberation Army still reports to the party, not to the government), and a vast, countrywide network of party-related organisations and positions that shadow the government.
The CCP has turned its back on a history in which it had a predisposition to violence when in a tight spot.
The acceptance of a capitalist class is a mystery that McGregor spends much time explaining. Democracy, from all the evidence in this book, is a long way off in modern China but would destroy a remarkable hybrid that is, at the moment at least, delivering. Not all things are problem-free. Corruption has ravaged the CCP in recent years.
At the next major party congress in 2012, seven of the nine slots on the standing committee (the apex of power in modern China) will need to be filled with new faces. With no clear rules for how this is done, and no precedents, the CCP will have to undertake what McGregor argues is its biggest challenge: governance of itself.
While the CCP looks strong and impregnable today, one cannot help sensing small signs of decay. The issue of the future is whether it will end in the same bloodshed and catastrophe as that which it started, or whether the CCP will be able to come up with a unique structure that preserves its own interests, but allows Chinese society to modernise and develop.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard McGregor is a reporter for the Financial Times and the publication’s former China bureau chief. He has reported from North Asia for nearly two decades and lives in Washington, D.C.