what does party control mean in china

This is a good moment to remember this quirk of Chinese rule. The annual session of the National People’s Congress (NPC), the country’s largely formal legislature, is underway from March 5 to March 13. This year’s NPC meeting follows a major party congress last October. At that gathering, China’s supreme leader, President Xi Jinping, secured a rule-breaking third term and filled the top ranks of his party with loyal aides. Now Mr Xi’s new team has grabbed headlines with a bureaucratic shake-up that takes away powers from several government ministries and agencies, including those charged with making China self-sufficient in high-technology and regulating data and financial markets . Many of those powers will now be handled by party-led commissions.

NPC delegates applauded the change to their marble-pillared, crystal-chandelier simulacrum of parliament, because they know the drill. Soon they will rubber-stamp Mr. Xi’s latest move to impose the Party’s will, that is, on China’s vast bureaucracy. When they do, outsiders have a right to recall those black-and-red signboards and ask an innocent question: in a country where government and party functionaries can share the same building – and even That there can be only one people – what does this really mean? State to hand over power to the party?

In China’s opaque political system, one way to understand a new policy is to study the old ideas it contradicts. Mr Xi’s power grab challenges the lessons his predecessors learned from the chaotic rule of Chairman Mao Zedong, when loyalty to the leader and ideological fervor took precedence over good government. In the years following Mao’s death in 1976, economic reformers diverged from the party and the state. He sought to free enterprises from the stifling hand of central planners and free farmers and factory managers from micromanagement by party committees. He took political cover from paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, who, despite being no political moderate, publicly warned that “excessive concentration of power is liable to give rise to arbitrary rule by individuals.” As far back as the late 1980s, reformist Harvard University professor Anthony Satch, who interviewed reform officials in China in those years, recalls that the notion of a “vanguard party”, a small, nimble party whose role was that of an overall ideological line, not “trying to control everything”.

Over time more power was decentralized to local governments, whose officials were rewarded for presiding over rapid development. In the late 1990s, when entrepreneurs could no longer be ignored, the party moved to co-opt businessmen, accepting them as members. Then Mr. Xi came. Soon after becoming leader in 2012, he declared the Communist Party dangerously corrupt with money and disconnected from the everyday lives of the masses. He has spent the past decade re-establishing the party’s authority over every aspect of public life. This week Mr Xi declared that more “ideological and political guidance” was needed for entrepreneurs to understand their obligations to the party and country.

Mr. Xi talks about the party’s roughly 97 million members as if they were missionaries in an atheistic church, emphasizing their self-sacrificing “red spirit” and paying tribute to “martyrs” who died for the revolution or for the people. died in the service of That faith-tinged language is usefully elucidating. Most senior officials in ministries, the mayor’s office, state-owned enterprises or universities are party members. One way to think of them is as believers with varying degrees of faith. Then there are party cadres whose careers take them from say a city party committee, to a position as party secretary of a county or other public institution. They are more like priests with a life dominated by doctrine, discipline and secrecy.

When ideology trumps expertise

Jing Qian of the Asia Society Policy Institute, a New York-based think-tank, describes some key differences between state and party offices. China’s government bodies (some) are subject to institutional and legal constraints. Party bodies are self-governing and their powers are limited only by the party constitution. He contrasts the professionalism of technocrats with political incentives guiding party workers. As an example, he imagines an official with 20 years’ experience at the People’s Bank of China debating policy with party cadres on a short posting at the central bank. Perhaps the banker urges caution in the name of financial stability. But the party cadre wants to please the political superiors and get promoted. So the technocrat is ruled out.

China’s “Zero-Covid” campaign offers real-world evidence of professional decisions fueled by politics. After the Omicron variant arrives in 2022, some prominent scientists call for a much greater effort to vaccinate older and vulnerable citizens and stockpile antiviral drugs. But Mr Xi had declared that lockdown and quarantine could defeat the virus, so suggesting ways to co-exist with Covid-19 was heresy. Experts were silenced or sidelined. As a result, when zero-Covid collapsed last December, the country was unprepared. After hiding several Covid deaths, China’s rulers now call their epidemic control “a miracle in human history”. All governments make mistakes. What matters is whether they learn from them. Mr. Xi’s record is not reassuring.

Read more on China from Chaguan, our columnist:

Why are China and America not more afraid of war? (2 March)

China’s people are fed up, but not on the verge of rebellion (23 February)

China is losing the hearts and minds of Taiwanese (16 February)

Subscribers can sign up drum towerOur new weekly newsletter to understand what makes the world China—and what makes China the world.

© 2023, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under license. Original content can be found at www.economist.com