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

the Pope, is the only other organization of comparable dimensions to the Chinese Communist Party, albeit on a global scale, and with a similar addiction to ritual and secrecy. The Party guards the command of its catechism as zealously and self-righteously as the Vatican defends its authority over the faith. After years of on-and-off talks, the Vatican has not been able to reconcile its worldwide prerogative to appoint bishops with the Party’s insistence that it alone has the right to approve their choice for the Catholic Church at home in China. The on-and-off-again talks between Rome and Beijing have been punctuated, in private, by a self-aware black humour. One of the unofficial Chinese intermediaries with Rome joked about the uncanny similarities between the Party and the Catholic Church when he visited the Vatican in 2008. ‘We have the propaganda department and you have the evangelicals. We have the organization [personnel] department and you have the College of Cardinals,’ he told a Vatican official. ‘What’s the difference, then?’ the official asked. The Chinese interlocutor replied, to hearty laughter all round: ‘You are God, and we are the devil!’
    Like the Vatican, the Party has always made sure top-level decisions are kept in the family. Hu’s fantasy about being chosen by the ‘whole country’ skated around the fact that the delegates to the 2007 congress, and earlier such meetings, had been the only citizens allowed to vote. Even then, the 2,200-odd congress attendees were deprived of any choice. In the lead-up to the congress, Chinese political scholars had been teased with suggestions that the delegates would be presented with a slate of candidates, allowing them a genuine ballot to winnow down a larger list to the final nine. A more radical idea, copying the Vietnamese Communist Party’s decision in 2006 at its congress in Hanoi, to allow two candidates for the position of general secretary, had also been internally debated. Both options were quietly discarded for a traditional communist-style ballot.
    The names of the bodies through which the Party exercises power, the Politburo, the Central Committee, the Praesidium and the like, all betray one of the most overlooked facts about the modern Chinese state–that it still runs on Soviet hardware. Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Russian Revolution, designed a system according to which the ruling party shadows and stalks the state by penetrating it at all levels. Lenin presented himself as the saviour of the working class but the structure he devised was ferociously and brutally elitist. At the top of the system, Lenin prescribed ‘as much centralization as possible’, allowing self-appointed professional revolutionaries like himself to dictate downwards to a working class considered incapable of rising above their day-to-day struggles. In the bottom tier of the system, however, in the factories and grassroots party organizations, he prescribed ‘as much decentralization as possible’, so that information flowed upwards to a Central Committee about even the smallest local developments. ‘For the centre to actually direct the orchestra,’ Lenin wrote, ‘it needs to know who plays violin and where, who plays a false note and why (when the music begins to grate on the ear), and how and where it is necessary to transfer someone to correct the dissonance.’
    The Central Committee acts as a kind of enlarged board of directors for the Party in China. With about 370 full- and part-time members, the committee includes ministers and senior regulatory officials in Beijing, leaders of provincial governments and large cities and a large bloc from the military. Some, but not all of the heads of China’s big state-owned enterprises are Central Committee members. An array of other interests which make up the leviathan of the Chinese state, ranging from representatives of minority communities, like Tibetans, to the head of Hu Jintao’s Central Guards