Power Play

The

Chinese Communist Party has come a long way since its first congress in 1921; a conspiratorial gathering that took place in a houseboat near Shanghai. It now appears before the world as a modern ruling group, a confident technocracy in suits and ties, complete with a high tech press center. But on closer inspection, the Party is only half-modernized, just like the country's economy—part skyscraper, part feudal village.

The successors to Jiang Zemin and Co. chosen this week rose through a deliberate, meritocratic process of promotion that favors skillful politician-administrators. Yet the final list of the Party leadership was settled against the backdrop of a bitter power struggle comprising backroom lobbying and furtive corruption investigations that continued till the last possible moment. Modern information technology and a windy propaganda blitz coexist with the utmost secrecy about everything that matters: who will be elected to lead the country, how they got where they are, and what they stand for.

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Why the obsessive control of information? Mystery, for the Chinese Communist Party, is a tool of power. The ability to spring a surprise on the world cultivates an aura of command—over the people, the media, and, as the Party pretends to believe, over the very course of history. Keeping internal processes secret also prevents lower-ranking Party members and the public mobilizing to alter the course of events.

The Party thus remains a self-perpetuating Elite, a board of directors that appoints its own successors. All the incoming leaders are insiders, picked 20 years ago by senior patrons for promotion, then rotated through a series of jobs in Zhongnanhai and the provinces to test both their loyalty and their skill in insider maneuverings. The process has generated a roster of presentable technocrats, intelligent and well-informed, but for the most part cautious, committed more to policy continuity than to renewal and change.

Secrecy is part of an old-fashioned pattern of repressive rule that survives just beyond the hotel coffee shops and soaring flyovers of China's booming cities. This kind of government is the opposite of the transparency that characterizes truly effective regimes in the new era of globalization. To be sure, there are sprouts of democracy here and there—village level elections, investigative media, and citizen suits against government offices. Even the Party Congress will see contests for some five percent of the seats in the central committee, which may—if the past is a guide—produce a few upsets.

But Chinese communist rule remains essentially repressive. Political opposition has been virtually crushed by arrests and long jail terms, and just to make sure, the Party rounded up its critics on the eve of the congress. Undesirables were pushed out of the cities through a system of "custody and repatriation." Internet denizens are closely supervised and occasionally arrested for what they post or read.

According to documents released in New York by the Committee for Investigation on Persecution of Religion in China, over the past year police in cities around the country ordered stepped-up repression of unofficial religious groups "to guarantee social and political stability during the opening of the congress." The leaked materials revealed that the Party Organization Department praised security chief Luo Gan for presiding over 15,000 executions a year in the past four years as part of the effort to keep the lid on social unrest.

The new group of leaders, like the old, believes that a healthy dose of repression is good for stability. They are also aware that repression has its dangers. Stifling opposition leaves room for the growth of official corruption and hurts the government's international prestige. So the new leaders have some reforms in mind. These include: revising the country's inequitable household registration system that discriminates against rural residents; strengthening the rules for investigating Party members who abuse their positions; and reinforcing the institutions that allow popular "supervision" of local cadres. But they have no plans to alter the fundamental character of Party rule through real sharing of power and information. Whatever the leadership lineup that parades before the cameras this week, the message will be the same: leave the driving to us.