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Friends and Enemies: The Past, Present and Future of the Communist Party of China by Kerry Brown
For an organisation that wields so much power over so many people, and now affects all of us even outside China, remarkably little has been written in accessible form about the Chinese Communist Party. It is this gap which KERRY BROWN has set out to fill with FRIENDS AND ENEMIES: THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF CHINA.
It ought to be obvious that an understanding of the Party is essential for an understanding of contemporary China but sadly there are those, including many who deal with China on a regular basis, who would rather pretend otherwise. Brown quotes a businessman with long experience of China as saying that he will go to great lengths to avoid having to deal with the Party. This is, as Brown shows, futile: the Party is everywhere. It is much better to recognise this and think through how one then deals with it than somehow pretend that it isn't relevant.
The challenge for those writing about the Party is that while an understanding of its workings is fundamental for an understanding of contemporary China, the Party has itself deliberately cultivated public dullness. No Blackberries and Town Hall meetings here. The Party seeks to present an image of stolid managerial competence.
Any book which seeks to explain the Party to a wider audience therefore tends to oscillate between explaining something of the way the Party is organised and describing the often lurid details of life at the top. The eccentricities of Mao, Deng and Jiang Zemin, however, should not distract the reader from trying to get to grips with the apparently more prosaic but actually far more important issue of how the Party rules. As Brown shows, that rule has been, and still is, underpinned by three elements: a strong nationwide organisation, relentless propaganda control and the ruthless exercise of power. Beijing and Shanghai today may look gleaming and modern but it is a modernity firmly in the grip of the Party through its organisation, control of what people think and, for those who break away, ruthless punishment.
Brown begins and ends his book with the theme of legitimacy. He starts with the student demonstrations in 1989, but he might equally have focused on another event from that time, the visit by the General Secretary of the CPSU, Mikhail Gorbachev. At the time the Chinese leadership regarded Gorbachev's visit as turning the page symbolically on thirty years of a troubled relationship but subsequently it came to pose an entirely different question. What had caused the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and how could the CCP avoid the same fate? In its early days the Party claimed legitimacy from its struggle to rid China of foreign oppression. To this it added Socialist ideals. But now the simple conclusion was that economic growth would keep the masses happy. It is this conclusion which has supplied the political basis for China's exponential growth since the early 1990s.
Brown ends by making the bold forecast that it is the issue of legitimacy which will bring about radical political change in China. He argues that the growing fragmentation and complexity of Chinese society will force such change shortly after 2020. The transition, he adds, is unlikely to be smooth but ultimately it will be successful. It will be driven by what he calls "an amazing instinct for self-preservation" or, to pick up a phrase from the beginning of the book, the Party's "strategic foresight". This is dangerous ground. There can be a tendency to ascribe almost superhuman powers to a leadership elite that is as prone to error as any other. Expecting any elite to take orders from historical necessity is akin to playing for high stakes in game of blackjack. You only bet if you don't mind losing.
Although the book is not helped by sloppy editing, with several mistakes in the Romanised spelling of Chinese names, it covers an important subject for anyone who has any reason to deal with China.
Brown ends by thundering that China will set the agenda for the coming century. This has become something of a cliche, but true for all that and one which cannot be repeated too often.
Peter Wood
27/09/2009
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Dr. Peter Wood is an independent China consultant based in Hong Kong and former Chief Business Advisor China for HSBC. |
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