Review: The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers by Richard McGregor

If this book had been written just a little better, I'd give it 5 stars. The information presented is nothing but enthralling to a China outsider. The organization of the sections deftly enhances the content. In about 200 pages, McGregor successfully manages to give you a comprehensive intuition for how The Party operates, even if you have no prior knowledge of China. That's a towering achievement.

The language, on the other hand, leaves much to be desired: it's your typical, found-on-your-doormat-every-morning dry journalistic prose, a style which seems to require (1) repeating things often, (2) providing a mini-summary before launching into the details of an anecdote and then (3), immediately following up with the obligatory but completely unnecessary summary (once again!) of the same anecdote, even while it's still (undoubtedly!) fresh in your mind unless you happen to have the memory capacity of a jellyfish.

The book starts off slow but hits its stride in the third chapter and roars onwards from there on, leaving you sleepless and eager to see the complete picture of the innards of the thing most aptly described as "the organism that controls one quarter of the world's population". The anecdotes handpicked by McGregor range from internationally notorious scandals such as the Sanlu Milk tragedy to war stories of lesser known crusades against the Party by suppressed journalists from within. With each anecdote, McGregor reveals a side of The Party (these include organization, propaganda, army, economy, federal-provincial relations, anti-graft campaigns and other smaller ones) and how it exercises control over said side. Take the Sanlu Milk scandal. The infant poisoning incidents first came to the notice of the Sanlu board of the company right before the start of the Olympics, a momentous occasion for the nation and The Party. At the time, local state officials as well as the leaders of state-owned enterprises (including Sanlu) had been instructed very clearly by the Propaganda department in Beijing to specifically avoid any press mentions of food-related issues. And therein, arises the cruel catch-22 for local officials and the executives of Sanlu. On orders from Propaganda in Beijing, they were left with no choice but to cover up the incidents and silence, through pay-offs, the parents of the affected infants. When the scandal was eventually uncovered post-Olympics by Beijing, it reprimanded the local officials heavily and put many of the executives behind bars for life, demonstrating to the international community that it took its food safety measures seriously.

Perhaps, the biggest realization for me — fret not, this isn't a spoiler — was that a communist government does not necessarily do better at long-term planning than its democratic counterpart. I'd always thought the converse was true. Singapore, for instance, can clearly take certain hard-line actions only because its ruling party never has to worry about getting re-elected. However, in China, this is certainly not the case. The Party is a massive beast that's in constant threat of exploding from the inside due to the insatiable hunger and greed of its own officials. Here's an astonishing nugget: If you take yearly GDP numbers reported by each province and sum them up, you'll end with a result significantly higher than the GDP number reported by the central authorities. Why? Because there's a very strong incentive for provincial party bosses to do better than their neighbors so they can move up the power structure of The Party and government. The reason The Party has succeeded in the massive economic transformation of the last 30-odd years emerges from studying the affects of this intense competition among party men and state officials: it's not the self-less lack of greed and self-sacrificing noble actions of individuals that have paved way for a greater collective, but precisely the opposite, it's the effective harnessing by The Party of the lust for power and money among officials that has bred a competitive (albeit short-term focused) system that pushes itself forward at a tremendous pace. That's what scientific communism is, not quite communism at all.

The sociopolitical problems that plague China and the United States are so similar in many ways (and this is something that I really shouldn't be surprised about, but I did hold a rather naive view that human nature might be slightly different depending on cultural circumstances (perhaps, a victim myself of the boisterous Chinese self-posturing international propaganda)). The age-old conflicts between public service and personal wealth, between historical legacies and an uncertain future, between immediate gratification and long-term sustainability.

Essential reading for anyone interested in the future of the world. An illuminating and exciting journey.