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

successors, were only vaguely recognizable in the provinces they once governed. By the time he joined the Standing Committee, Xi Jinping, ranked number six, and anointed as the heir-apparent, was less well known than his wife, a famous singer with a military rank in the People’s Liberation Army. Some of the men on stage had profiles in the sectors, such as the media and policing, that they had presided over. But for most Chinese, the Politburo was a distant body, bloated with power, but devoid of character and personality.
    Hu’s speech was brief and couched in the arcane political slogans that dominate all official public political discussion, about ‘scientific development’, the ‘harmonious society’, an ‘advanced socialist culture’, and so on. Heavy with import inside the Party and intellectual circles as the branding buzzwords of Hu’s administration, they are largely meaningless to the population at large. After concluding his remarks, Hu led his eight colleagues off stage. In the coming years, the Politburo’s inner circle would rarely ever appear in public as a group again. The whole ceremony had lasted about ten minutes.
     
     
    On the desks of the heads of China’s fifty-odd biggest state companies, amid the clutter of computers, family photos and other fixtures of the modern CEO’s office life, sits a red phone. The executives and their staff who jump to attention when it rings know it as ‘the red machine’, perhaps because to call it a mere phone does not do it justice. ‘When the “red machine” rings,’ a senior executive of a state bank told me, ‘you had better make sure you answer it.’
    The ‘red machine’ is like no ordinary phone. Each one has just a four-digit number. It connects only to similar phones with four-digit numbers within the same encrypted system. They are much coveted nonetheless. For the chairmen and women of the top state companies, who have every modern communications device at their fingertips, the ‘red machine’ is a sign they have arrived, not just at the top of the company, but in the senior ranks of the Party and the government. The phones are the ultimate status symbol, as they are only given out to people in jobs with the rank of vice-minister and above. ‘They are very convenient and also very dangerous,’ said an executive of a large state resources company. ‘You want to be sure of your relationship with whichever person you call.’ Down the corridor from the executive offices is an additional tool for ranking officials, an internal communications room which receives secure faxes from Zhongnanhai, the leadership compound, and other sections of the party and government system.
    ‘Red machines’ are dotted throughout Beijing in offices of officials of the requisite rank, on the desks of ministers and vice-ministers, the chief editors of party newspapers, the chairmen and women of the elite state enterprises and the leaders of innumerable party-controlled bodies. The phones and faxes are encrypted not just to secure party and government communications from foreign intelligence agencies. They also provide protection against snooping by anyone in China outside the party’s governing system. Possession of the ‘red machine’ means you have qualified for membership of the tight-knit club that runs the country, a small group of about 300 people, mainly men, with responsibility for about one-fifth of humanity.
    The modern world is replete with examples of elite networks that wield behind-the-scenes power beyond their mere numerical strength. The United Kingdom had the ‘old boy network’, originally coined to describe connections between former students of upper-class, non-government schools; France has ‘les énarques’, the alumni of the exclusive Ecole Nationale d’Administration in Paris who cluster in the upper levels of commerce and politics; and Japan has the Todai elite, graduates of the law school of Tokyo University, an entry point