During the closing ceremonies of the 18th Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), some of the attendees were seen weeping unabashedly. It could be they were swept up by the grandness of the event — or maybe they worry about the party’s future in a rapidly changing society.
The CPC today has 82.6 million members. Compare that with a party membership of just 73.3 million five years ago. No problem with recruitment, apparently.
At its present size, the CPC is larger than most of the world’s nations. There is a party member for every 15 citizens. They are deeply embedded in every aspect of Chinese society, a strong cadre of the most populous nation’s most talented and most committed to the goal of making China strong.
It takes months, sometimes years, of training and internship before one’s candidacy for party membership is approved. There is no compensation for the political work a party member does. Party membership hardly enhances one’s career prospects as the CPC guards against discrimination and ensures promotion on the basis of merit.
The CPC has long moved away from its old role of “arousing and mobilizing the masses.” That has become anachronistic for a ruling party whose principal concern is consolidating stability. No one sees the once ubiquitous hammer-and-sickle logo displayed anymore. Although largely a conglomerate of competing factions, the CPC interprets its role as the bulwark of meritocracy that supplies this large and complex society with leaders.
Stability is a cardinal concern in China, a complex society of hundreds of languages and a host of ethnicities. For centuries, dynasties and emperors saw as their first duty the prevention of a return to the chaotic conditions of the Warring States. The CPC is heir to this mindset.
This is a powerful mindset, one that inspired the construction of the Great Wall, a grand public works project that took hundreds of years to complete. It is the same mindset that somehow found the Tiananmen Massacre a justifiable state response. Note that this tragic, universally condemned suppression of student protestors did not result in a massive purge nor did it substantially undermine the CPC’s legitimacy.
Today, young Chinese citizens even say that if the state did not respond as drastically as it did when a million protestors massed at Tiananmen Square, China would not have achieved the impressive economic emergence of the past two decades.
The role the CPC’s monopoly of power might be likened to the regnum and sacerdotium — the complementary hierarchies of temporal and Church authorities — that dominated medieval Europe for an entire millennium. The Church hierarchy replicated the aristocratic hierarchy and provided it its legitimacy. That dual hierarchy conserved the feudal order, for better or for worse.
Critics of this unique complementarity between the CPC and the state in China, however, point to certain drawbacks.
The promotion of new leaders in the Chinese system is determined more by factional allegiance than by strict merit. Political personalities identified with the Jiang Zemin faction, for instance, dominate the powerful standing committee of the CPC installed at the close of last week’s 12th national congress. Jiang himself, who continues to wield power long after he stepped down as party and government leader in 2002, was a protégé of Deng Xiaoping. The new party leader Xi Jinping is a protégé of Hu Jintao.
This suggests strong networks of patronage powerful enough to negate claims the party operates strictly by the rules of meritocracy. Family connections appear to be the key factor influencing promotions. Add to that the prevalence of what is called the Red Aristocracy, children of former revolutionary leaders who occupy senior party positions. They are sometimes referred to as the “princelings”.
Most notable is the recently disgraced Bo Xilai and his wife. The once powerful couple are both children of revolutionary leaders. Xi Jinping himself is a “princeling.”
Political patronage cannot foster meritocracy. That is the contradiction between what the CPC claims its role to be and how promotion up the ranks actually happens. The contradiction is not about to be resolved in the foreseeable future.
To be sure, the complementarity between state and party hierarchies allowed a political arrangement that produced great leaps for China. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” lifted 500 million out of poverty in just over two decades of market-oriented reforms. It allowed the nominally socialist state to direct the boundless energies of the markets, creating the economic spectacle that elevated China to the status of the second largest economy in the world.
China’s economic growth is not about to collapse. In a few short years, China will inevitably have the world’s largest single economy. Some say that in a generation, this populous and diverse nation will be the only true superpower.
Growth, however, is not just a quantitative phenomenon. It is a qualitative one as well. As the economy modernizes, it generates new social forces that will eventually require a new power arrangement.
The question is: How will the role of the CPC transform as the social milieu it operates in changes?
Today, the CPC actually performs as the organized expression of a patrimonial state, attending to the concerns of all constituencies and conveying those concerns to the formal state agencies. It is in fact an apparatus for political communication between governors and the governed, expropriating a function that contending parties play in the more familiar electoral democracy.
New communications technologies, however, create networks for information and policy formation that are more horizontal. The traditional hierarchical apparatus for political communication the CPC represents will quickly become obsolete.