THE PUSH TO REVAMP THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY FOR THE NEXT 100 YEARS / THE ECONOMIST

The push to revamp the Chinese Communist Party for the next 100 years

The world’s most powerful political party was founded a century ago. James Miles says it is projecting ever greater confidence, while fortifying itself against collapse

China in july 1921 was a poor country, racked by civil war. Most of its 400m people lived in the countryside. 

A famine had swept the north, killing hundreds of thousands. 

But foreigners in Shanghai led a charmed existence, living in self-governing enclaves of about 30 square kilometres. 

Their troops and police—turbaned Sikhs for the British and pith-helmeted Vietnamese for the French—kept order. 

The real China was far away.

That month the British staff of the North China Daily News had much to distract them. 

“The Old Lady of the Bund”, as expatriates called the newspaper, had just left the river-front strip from which it took its nickname. 

Its building was to be knocked down and reborn as the city’s tallest—nine American-designed storeys in a baroque and neoclassical style. 

Until then, Shanghai’s establishment newspaper would be in temporary quarters.

Those newsmen were missing one of the biggest stories of the century: a secret meeting that July of a communist political party in the French concession at 106 Rue Wantz, in one of Shanghai’s brick-walled houses known as shikumen. 

There were a dozen participants, including the home’s occupant and a tall activist from inland called Mao Zedong. 

Two foreign agents from the Comintern, a Soviet-controlled body dedicated to global communism, were present. 

The group had met for a few days when a suspicious-looking man walked in. 

Fearing he was a spy, they fled, though most reconvened in a tourist boat on a nearby lake. 

Their discussions marked the formal launch of the Chinese Communist Party. 

A century later not only would it be in control of every nook and cranny of this seemingly unmanageable country, but it, not Russia, would be the world’s pre-eminent flagbearer for communism.

The newspaper had in fact been paying much attention to the murky doings of Russian Bolsheviks in China. 

Foreign capital had turned Shanghai into a cotton-making powerhouse. 

Its mills were grim places; labour unrest was common. 

Strike leaders were suspected of communist sympathies. 

“It can no longer be ignored that here in Shanghai, efforts are being made to Bolshevise the industrial classes,” a sister paper warned three months before that first meeting. 

The communists in Moscow, fresh from winning their civil war, were stirring up trouble in China.

But “all manner of organisations and people” called themselves communist in China in 1920-21, writes Ishikawa Yoshihiro, a Japanese historian. 

The new party had only about 50 members. 

They had no weapons. 

Nobody could have predicted that a communist insurgency would later engulf the country, let alone that it would gather strength in the countryside, led by armies of peasants. 

It would have beggared belief that the same forces would, in 1949, topple a regime that had begun the war with an army of more than 4m troops, equipped by the Americans.

Mao had not studied much Marxism, as he later admitted. 

He cut his teeth as an activist in the May Fourth Movement of 1919, a wave of unrest triggered by the Western powers’ decision to hand Germany’s Chinese colonial territory to Japan after the first world war. 

That movement inspired both anti-Western nationalism and a search for the source of Western strength. 

Some saw it as liberal democracy. 

Others, inspired by Russia, turned to communism. 

In China, nationalism and quasi-Marxism became intertwined.

As China grows stronger, that mix causes anxiety in the West. 

But at home, many feel pride. 

Any Chinese will tell you that their country was scorned as “the sick man of the east” (in 1896 an article in the North China Daily News helped turn this into a household term in China). 

Today China bestrides the world. 

Surely there is a lesson in China’s rise, many Chinese argue. 

Sinified Marxism works, as does one-party rule. 

In 2018 China’s leader, Xi Jinping, said his country had produced a “new political-party system”—a combination of one-party rule with mechanisms for consulting the public. 

State media said the rest of the world should learn from it.

On July 1st the party will officially celebrate its 100th birthday. 

(The founding date was chosen in 1941 when the party was holed up in caves in Yan’an, and retained even after investigations found that the actual date was July 23rd.) 

It has much to crow about. 

The party controls the world’s second-largest economy and largest armed forces. 

A quarter of a century ago America showed little concern about China’s power. 

Now it is openly worried. 

Not only is China an authoritarian state, but it is also a communist one wedded to an anti-Western ideology.

Party games

And the party’s grip at home is getting stronger. 

Digital technology helps. 

Ask residents of Xinjiang, where data scooped up by police using artificial intelligence, scans of mobile phones, surveillance cameras and an army of internet monitors are being used to round up hundreds of thousands of ethnic Uyghurs and put them in camps for “deradicalisation”. 

Technology, says Kerry Brown of King’s College, London, has been a “game-changer” for the party.

What is this organisation and how does it operate? In his 2010 book, “The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers”, Richard McGregor, an Australian journalist now at the Lowy Institute, a think-tank, wrote that communism had been “airbrushed out of the rise of the world’s greatest communist state”. 

He described how the party made strenuous efforts “to keep the sinews of its enduring power off the front stage of public life in China and out of the sight of the rest of the world”. 

But that was before Mr Xi became party leader in 2012. 

He flexes those sinews openly, at home and abroad.

His predecessor, Hu Jintao, had already begun this process. 

As party leaders saw it, the global financial crisis of 2007-09 had laid bare the weakness of Western-style capitalism. 

China’s turn had come. 

Mr Xi sees it as his mission to make the West accept this. 

China is “moving to the global centre-stage”, he said in 2017. 

The West worries that China will bring with it the party and its political values, too.

As Mr McGregor put it: “Peek under the hood of the Chinese model...and China looks much more communist than it does on the open road.” 

This special report will describe how Mr Xi is souping up the old model. 

It will argue that this is a cause for concern, for people in both China and the West. 

Mr Xi is not trying to revive Maoist Utopianism. 

Like his post-Mao predecessors, he is a pragmatist whose policies bear little relation to Maoist or Marxist ideals. 

But he stresses the importance of ideology, hoping that ritual incantation of communist classics will keep party members in lockstep. 

Mr Xi’s revamped party has trappings that communism’s most brutal dictators, including Mao, would recognise.

Yet he also betrays anxiety. 

His warnings about threats to the party are more open than those of any Chinese leader since the crushing of the Tiananmen protests in 1989. 

In 2023 China’s party will have ruled for the same length of time as the Soviet one did before it fell in 1991: 74 years. 

Mr Xi frets that the engine has flaws: corrosion by Western political ideas, corruption, factionalism and disloyalty. 

Nearly a decade into his rule he is still conducting purges to keep the party in line, as if he does not fully trust it.

History weighs heavily on Mr Xi, who keeps mentioning the Soviet collapse. 

He is waging a campaign against what he calls “historical nihilism”—that is, any grumbling about communism’s past. 

One Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, is held up as the archetypal nihilist for denouncing Stalin’s brutality in 1956. 

That event haunts Mr Xi. 

Party literature says it led to the Soviet Union’s demise. 

Much of Mr Xi’s energy is focused on making sure the party learns the Soviet lesson. 

Mao must remain a saint.

The party has 92m members, or about 8% of the adult population. 

It is not an easy group to join, and admission is getting harder. 

Mr Xi wants to fashion it into a super-loyal elite, capable of taking on any task at the drop of a hat. 

Deng Xiaoping, who launched China’s “reform and opening” in 1978, spoke of separating the roles of party and government. 

Mr Xi has fused them, putting the party more firmly in charge. 

Ordinary members are now first responders to disasters such as covid-19, as well as eyes and ears in workplaces, neighbourhoods and campuses, alerting officials to potential trouble.

In Xinjiang Mr Xi has used party committees to build gulags where more than 1m Muslims from ethnic minorities have been detained. 

It is party secretaries, not courts or legal panels, that have the final say over who is imprisoned and when they are released. 

Police and prison officials run the facilities, but they are the party’s camps, beyond the purview of the law.

Often the word “party” is used as shorthand for China’s government. But the party also has its own, separate identity. 

As Mr Xi boasts: “The party-government, the armed forces, society and academia; east, west, south, north and centre; the party leads everything.” 

That is why understanding how Mr Xi is changing it is more important than ever.