Brett Warnke Providence Journal Review of "The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers"

The Party by Richard McGregor

By Brett Warnke

When my friend Jen Jen drove me past Beijing’s Tiananmen Square I was unsure where we were going. She was a college friend but also a “princeling,” one of the Party’s privileged elite. In New England, there is “old money,” and in China there is “old Party.” Her grandfather, Hua Guofeng, had been Mao’s immediate and short-lived successor (1976-1980). What couldn’t Jen Jen get away with, I thought, when her grandpa was once called “Chairman Hua”? She drove her sleek Honda into Zhongnanhai—a central and secretive Party leadership compound near the Forbidden City. The walls were high and guarded and the homes were gray but elegant. I clearly remember a sentinel with an assault weapon standing outside her home. Jen Jen dismissively told him I was a friend as she ran inside to get a scarf. He flashed a light my way, leering at me like a hungry owl. How long, I thought, would Party members in Zhongnanhai hold sway with soldiers like this and thus, control China’s monopoly of violence? Would this Central Guard, issued to all internal Party members, support the Politburo leaders until the end or would he, like the forces in the Shah’s SAVAK, the Tsar’s Okhrana, Honecker’s Stasi, disappear into the crowd upon the regime’s collapse?

The longevity and resourcefulness of the Communist Party is the subject of “The Party,” Financial Times journalist Richard McGregor’s revealing new book about China’s shadowy leadership. McGregor warns us in the prologue that the book “has no pretence to being comprehensive or definitive.” Yet, the scale and interest of McGregor’s interviews—most interestingly with progressive activists—as well as the many secrets he reveals about the Party’s self-serving maneuvers, tactics, and actions, renders this an important book.

             To MacGregor the Party is a “colossus”, a “secretive hulk”, a “grand puppeteer”, a “Board of Directors”, a “panapticon”, a “consensus,” a “sinuous, cynical and adaptive beast.” It is an unelected cabal of apparatchicks as secretive as the Vatican who operate in unmarked buildings, speak on red Party-only phones, and live along a political knife-edge. 

To outsiders the Party seems a gray, stony fixture of Chinese society. But MacGregor reveals—like David Shambaugh’s Atrophy and Adaptability—the struggles of the world’s most insecure leadership. The Party dips its toes into every sector of society and culture to maintain its relevance. “You call it interference,” an official tells McGregor, “We call it leadership.” But its Leninist leadership—corrupt, authoritarian, nepotistic, inefficient, extra-legal, and top-heavy.

The thirty years of opening markets, initiated by the wily reformer Deng Xiaoping, has sustained the Party and doubled China’s economy every eight years. But Deng also led the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen. MacGregor falls short in explaining the reasons for the brutal backlash. He doesn’t even mention Chairman Liu Shaoqi, whom Mao jailed and essentially killed during the Cultural Revolution. Mao and the history of his radicalism were a dagger pointed at reformers throats. The history of the Great Helsman’s mid-century convulsions—which MacGregor deftly details—as well as the state-socialist failure of the USSR showed how far China could devolve and how weak the Party could be. Never again, seems the unspoken Party slogan.

(Appeared in Providence Journal on Aug. 27, 2010)