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

into the longtime ruling Liberal Democratic Party, the Finance Ministry and business. In India, the exclusive Gymkhana Club symbolizes the English-educated elite. The US has the Ivy League, the Beltway, K Street and the military-industrial complex, and a host of other labels to signify the opaque influence of well-connected insiders.
    None can hold a candle to the Chinese Communist Party, which takes ruling-class networking to an entirely new level. The ‘red machine’ gives the party apparatus a hotline into multiple arms of the state, including the government-owned companies that China promotes around the world these days as independent commercial entities. Critics of the Republican administration of George W. Bush decried what they said were the cosy links between Dick Cheney, the vice-president, and the energy industry, to take one example. Imagine the case the critics could have mounted if Cheney and the CEO of Exxon-Mobile, and America’s other big energy companies, had secure phones on their desks establishing a permanent, speed-dial connection with each other. In turn, to extend the analogy, what would they have made of the Exxon-Mobile CEO receiving a steady stream of party and government documents, available to the executives of Chinese state companies by virtue of their office and rank? The ‘red machine’ and the trappings that go with it perform precisely these functions.
    One vice-minister told me that more than half of the calls he received on his ‘red machine’ were requests for favours from senior party officials, along the lines of: ‘Can you give my son, daughter, niece, nephew, cousin or good friend and so on, a job?’ Over the years, he had developed a strategy to handle personal requests, welcoming them effusively, while adding that the potential applicant first had to sit the gruelling test required for entry into the civil service, which few were willing to do. The ‘red machine’ has other uses. In the days before mobile phones, well-connected investment bankers who could not get through to top officials would try to borrow the ‘red machine’ in offices they were visiting when the boss was out, to put through a call directly to a potential top client. Quaint as it may seem in the age of sophisticated mobile telephony, the ‘red machine’ remains a powerful symbol of the party system’s unparalleled reach, strict hierarchies, meticulous organization and obsessive secrecy. The phone’s colour, revolutionary red, resonates as well. During political crises, the Party frets about China ‘changing colour’, code for the red communists losing power.
    Top-ranked party members enjoy a social standing beyond the respect that officials get anyway in a country with deep bureaucratic traditions. Much as if they have been granted diplomatic status in their own country, they live in secure compounds, but also have their overseas travel restricted and mingle with people beyond official circles and their immediate family, according to strict security protocols. They answer to the Party first, not to the law of the land, if they are accused of criminal wrongdoing. But the benefits come at a cost, beyond the personal stress and the impact on families that public officials around the world complain of. Party membership is a commitment, not a simple enrolment. The Chinese who are promoted into senior positions must take whatever assignment they are handed, and cannot easily leave the Party without grave consequences. Above a certain level, senior officials are much like Michael Corleone in The Godfather , who lamented, after trying to leave the family’s mafia business, that every time he tried to get out, ‘they pulled me back in’.
    It is no coincidence that the Vatican is one of the few states with which China has been unable to establish diplomatic ties since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. The city-state, which is the administrative centre of the Catholic Church and the home of