The Party and the People

Chinese Politics in the 21st Century

Bruce J. Dickson

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691216966
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Communisme, post-communisme et socialisme

How the Chinese Communist Party maintains its power by both repressing and responding to its people Since 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has maintained unrivaled control over the country, persisting even in the face of economic calamity, widespread social upheaval, and violence against its own people. Yet the party does not sustain dominance through repressive tactics alone—it pairs this with surprising responsiveness to the public. The Party and the People explores how this paradox has helped the CCP endure for decades, and how this balance has shifted increasingly toward repression under the rule of President Xi Jinping.Delving into the tenuous binary of repression and responsivity, Bruce Dickson illuminates numerous questions surrounding the CCP's rule: How does it choose leaders and create policies? When does it allow protests? Will China become democratic? Dickson shows that the party's dual approach lies at the core of its practices—repression when dealing with existential, political threats or challenges to its authority, and responsiveness when confronting localized economic or social unrest. The state answers favorably to the demands of protesters on certain issues, such as local environmental hazards and healthcare, but deals harshly with others, such as protests in Tibet, Xinjiang, or Hong Kong. With the CCP's greater reliance on suppression since Xi Jinping's rise to power in 2012, Dickson considers the ways that this tipping of the scales will influence China's future.Bringing together a vast body of sources, The Party and the People sheds new light on how the relationship between the Chinese state and its citizens shapes governance.

1

WHAT KEEPS THE PARTY IN POWER?

The CCP has led China since 1949. During its seven decades in power, the party has faced elite conflict, economic calamity, and dramatic tensions with the Chinese people. And yet it has presided over the fastest economic growth in China’s history and, with no significant organized opposition, appears secure in its status as China’s ruling party. How has a party that has often seemed so fragile managed to survive for so long? And how much longer can it remain in power?

To understand the durability of China’s political system, we must understand the CCP—and understanding the CCP means going back to the roots of communist thought.

Communism in theory is based on the ideas of Karl Marx, who provided the rationale for a worker-led revolution to overthrow the capitalist system of his day and for a vision of a communist utopia. But Marx had little to say about how the communist revolution would happen or what a communist government would look like. As a result, communism in practice relies on the ideas of Vladimir Lenin, who recognized that a “vanguard party” led by intellectuals like himself was necessary to organize the workers, to lead the revolution, and—once the revolution was over—to lead the new communist government. If Marx provided the ideology of communism, Lenin provided the organization.¹

Leninism was the basis not only for leading a communist revolution but for leading the communist government once the revolution was over. Marx expected the communist state to eventually “wither away,” but Lenin made sure it did not. In a Leninist political system, the party has a monopoly on political organization; it does not compete with other parties for power and influence, and it suppresses efforts to create new organizations autonomous from the party. It makes all important policy decisions and oversees the work of the government through the appointment of party members to all leading posts. Similarly, it puts party members in control of the military and security forces. Moreover, it creates party organizations known as “cells” throughout the government, military, workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods to monitor activities and to provide ideological education to party members working and living there. The party remains a vanguard party even after it becomes the ruling party: only a small percentage of the population become party members (in the former Soviet Union and Soviet Bloc countries, about 10 percent of the population were communist party members).

The CCP has survived as China’s ruling party for more than seventy years because it was built on Leninist organizational principles and continues to abide by them. As a ruling Leninist party, the CCP sits atop the political system, controlling appointments to government and legislative posts, and ensuring that its policy priorities are enacted into law and implemented. It has a network of party cells throughout the government, workplaces, and neighborhoods to monitor and influence what happens in those places. The role of the CCP in day-to-day life has waxed and waned since it took power in 1949, but in recent years it has been increasingly dominant. As CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping said at the 19th Party Congress in 2017, “government, military, society, and schools—north, south, east, and west—the party is leader of all.”

Subsequent chapters will detail the different dimensions of the party’s relationship with the people, but, to begin, it is important to have an understanding of the ebbs and flows of party rule in China and how the party controls the political system.

A Short Course on Communism in China

To follow the dramatic changes that have taken place in China after 1949, it is useful to think of five generations of leaders, each with distinctive leadership styles, policy priorities, and slogans that characterized their generation (see figure 1.1).² Two key trends are important to follow: first, the evolution of the party’s economic development policies from a Soviet-style state-owned and centrally planned economy to Mao’s radical leftist policies to an increasingly marketized and globalized economy, and second, the resulting impact on the party’s relationship with the people.

Mao Zedong (1949–76): “It Is Right to Rebel”

Under Chairman Mao, the CCP alternated between periods of radical leftism, when it pursued the utopian goal of building a communist society, and periods of development, when the goal was economic growth and building an effective state. When Mao veered left, the party appointed ideologues (or “reds”) to run political campaigns and implement policies with a mix of propaganda and coercion. When it switched to economic development, it appointed people with technical expertise and offered material incentives to achieve policy goals. These policy swings created conflict between reds and experts: reds appointed in leftist phases would be replaced by experts during developmental phases. Because policy priorities lurched between these competing goals and methods, neither officials nor members of society knew how long a policy would last or what was expected of them. Supporting a policy today could lead to punishment tomorrow when the policy changed.

The swings between leftist and developmental goals can be seen in the campaigns that characterized the Mao era. Upon taking power in 1949, the CCP embarked on a developmental period of rural and urban policies that were designed to restore the economy after several decades of civil war and the war against Japan. It undertook land reform in the countryside, taking property from landlords and redistributing it to the farmers who actually worked the land. In the cities, it allowed the continuation of private ownership of industrial and commercial firms. To smooth the transition to communist rule, it allowed many of the bureaucrats from the old Nationalist regime to remain in their posts.

FIGURE 1.1. Five “generations” of Chinese leaders (clockwise from top: Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Hu Jintao, Xi Jinping, and Jiang Zemin) (photo: courtesy of Matt Rivers / CNN)

By the mid-1950s, the party replaced these development-oriented policies with more orthodox communist policies based on the Soviet model. It nationalized industry and commerce, although the former owners were often allowed to remain as managers of the new state-owned enterprises. The CCP took ownership of the land it had given to farmers a few years before in order to engage in collective farming. A central planning bureaucracy replaced markets as the basis for distributing goods and services. Thousands of Soviet advisers moved to China to supervise the development of an industrial base. For Mao, simply adopting the Soviet model was not enough. He grew frustrated with this planned and methodical approach to development and veered toward radical policies to yield more rapid economic growth. During the Great Leap Forward (1958–60), launched by Mao but opposed by most other CCP leaders, the CCP created rural communes for both agriculture and industry. Party propaganda replaced material interests as the motivation to work harder, and enthusiastic reds replaced industrial and agricultural experts. This proved disastrous: the combination of policy mistakes and bad weather led to a large-scale famine in which an estimated 30 million people died.

In the early 1960s, the CCP switched to developmental policies to restore the economy. Farmers were given financial incentives to produce more and were allowed to farm both the collective fields and their own small plots (these policies became the basis for the post-Mao reforms in agriculture in the late 1970s and early 1980s). Reds appointed to party and government posts during the Great Leap were replaced by experts to spur industrial and agricultural production. The result was a period of improved living standards and political calm.

Mao was unhappy with these growth-oriented policies, despite their success; he believed it was better to be poor and communist than rich and capitalist. In 1966, he began the Cultural Revolution to prioritize his utopian goals. The slogan that characterized this period was “It is right to rebel,” encouraging groups of young people known as Red Guards to criticize and “seize power” from party and government leaders who were “taking the capitalist road” by relying on material incentives instead of mass mobilization to promote growth. Numerous leaders, including Deng Xiaoping, the architect of the developmental policies that provoked Mao’s ire, were purged from their positions. Many of them were sent to prison or to work in the communes or factories.

Without a functioning party and government apparatus, China verged on the brink of civil war. Rival groups of Red Guards and other supporters of Mao faced off against each other in armed battles. By 1967, Mao grew disenchanted with the chaos he had unleashed and called in the People’s Liberation Army to restore order. New revolutionary committees consisting of young radical leaders, local military commanders, and veteran officials were formed as temporary replacements for party and government organizations throughout the country. Beginning in 1970, party committees began gradually to reform, many of them staffed with the very people who had been ousted during the Red Guard phase of the Cultural Revolution.³ After all the turmoil his Cultural Revolution had unleashed, it became apparent that Mao lacked an alternative vision for organizing political power. He simply rebuilt the previous party committees, often with the same people he had previously displaced.

The CCP now had to restore the economy once again. Leaders like Deng were rehabilitated and put back in their old positions, much to the resentment of the radicals who had risen to power during the Cultural Revolution. The radicals competed with the veteran officials for Mao’s support, and Mao in turn swung between supporting one policy approach and then the other.

As Mao grew increasingly frail in his later years, the CCP was divided into rival camps: those like Deng Xiaoping who had been victims of the Cultural Revolution; those like Hua Guofeng (who became China’s leader upon Mao’s death) who had benefited from it; and the radical ideologues who had provided the ideas for it, above all the so-called Gang of Four, a group that included Mao’s wife.⁴ They convinced Mao to purge Deng a second time in April 1976 to prevent the continuation of his development-oriented economic policies. In September 1976, Mao died, and in October the Gang of Four were arrested by Hua and other senior leaders. This constant alternation between leftist and development policies, along with the resulting leadership strife, was dizzying; people did not know from one day to the next what was expected of them. By the time of Mao’s death, both the state and society were exhausted from the policy swings and political turmoil.

Although Mao disliked the bureaucratic nature of his political system, by the time of his death the command economy had given the party control over society in three important ways.⁵ First, with markets largely eliminated, people were dependent on the party for their jobs, housing, food, education for their children, and other life necessities. Housing was often linked to where you worked: workers who lost their jobs (which most often happened for political reasons, not for quality of work) also lost their housing, and their children could no longer attend their schools. There was no real estate market; a one-bedroom apartment that was appropriate for a newly married couple would become more and more crowded as the family grew. If workers wanted to move to another job or another city, they had to apply to the party for transfer, and their applications were usually denied. Desired consumer goods—bicycles, washing machines, clothing, even food—were strictly rationed. During leftist upheavals, not only markets were eliminated but money as well. People received monthly coupons for certain amounts of meat, grain, fabric, soap, and other daily necessities. These types of goods were in short supply because the centrally planned economy was geared toward heavy industry and not consumer goods. Those who ran out before the month was over had no way to restock their cupboards; they simply had to do without.

This dependence made it easy for the party to control society in a second way—by monitoring people’s behavior. Each individual was registered to live in the place they were born, and moving was virtually impossible without the party’s permission. This household registration system, known as the hukou, determined not only where people lived but also where they worked and what social services they were entitled to. In the countryside, most people were stuck in their villages and communes. Under these conditions, people were not free to come and go without being noticed. The party used its grassroots organizations in neighborhoods and workplaces to monitor what people said, what they did, and even the attitude with which they said and did things. During times of Maoist upheavals, such as the Cultural Revolution, the party also tried to control people’s thoughts and leisure-time activities. Being able to monitor society gave the party tremendous control over even the most mundane parts of life. How people dressed, what they read, and what music they listened to suddenly took on political meaning. People could lose their jobs and even be imprisoned for politically incorrect speech and behavior.

As a consequence of this dependence and monitoring capability, the party had a third way to control society—by sanctioning individuals, rewarding certain behaviors with promotions, bonuses, and extra rations of desired consumer goods, and punishing unwanted behavior by cutting rations, demoting and firing workers, and even sending some to prison. With recurring political campaigns, party officials had frequent opportunities to punish their enemies and rivals, whether due to ideological apostasy or petty personal slights. But the repeated campaigns were also opportunities for payback, as the victors of one campaign became the victims of the next. In these three ways—dependence, monitoring, and sanctioning—the party had tremendous control over most members of society. In the post-Mao period, these three modes of control were weakened by Deng’s economic reform policie...