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

university, all of their classes in different parts of China had quotas for party membership, with positions offered as a prize for the top students.
    Gathered in a huddle at the Thinker’s Café in Beijing’s university district, the students scoffed at old-style ideology, derided the political education classes that came with party membership and freely admitted they downloaded from the internet the essay required for their joining application. One expressed outrage at the 1989 Beijing massacre. The two others warily dismissed the event as being in the past. All of them had had drummed into them by their parents and teachers, and seemed to accept without reservation, that the state would retain a powerful role in their lives. ‘The foreign countries say the Communist Party has made a lot of mistakes and maybe after several years, it would collapse,’ said Huang Hongfang, a political science student at the People’s University. ‘But my teacher said: “Do not underestimate the government’s power. The president or the members in the central government are really very clever, and they can use their power and policies to control the whole country.”’
    When the allure of the elite network is not enough, the Party tosses money into the mix. To attract private entrepreneurs into the club, the Party offers cash incentives for business leaders and workers who sign up new members, much as Amway and other pyramid-sales companies do for sales people who recruit new associates. In Sanxiang, southern Guangdong, the township party committee set aside a rmb 5 million bonus pool for membership drives, an example replicated across the country. Villagers who set up new party committees in private enterprises where none had existed before were paid rmb 5,000, a huge sum, equivalent to about three to four months’ salary for an ordinary factory worker. *
    Many entrepreneurs are like Zhu Peikun, who runs his own property and education company in southern China. Zhu said he never considered having a party committee when he set up his business in 1994. Mutual suspicion, between the Party and business, abounded. Now, he speaks of the Party with solemn respect and sees it as essential to the relationships he needs if he is to expand and prosper. ‘The greatest success of the Party is its ability to adapt itself to the change of environment,’ he said. ‘All the best people join the Party.’
    To buttress its legitimacy, the Party has also cloaked itself in Chinese governing traditions. The revival of Confucius in the last decade, the ancient sage reviled under Mao as a symbol of backward feudalism, and the methodical refurbishing of other cultural canons, is symbolic of a broader trend, of the Party re-packaging its rule as a natural continuum of the most enlightened eras of China’s imperial history. With no ideology left to speak of, selective historical antecedents provide single-party rule with an indigenous imperial lustre.
    The idea that the Communist Party, far from landing in China in a Leninist spaceship, could draw on the country’s deep traditions of authoritarian central bureaucracy, might be obvious to outsiders. Countries do not shed their histories so easily, despite efforts by zealots like Mao to wipe them out and start with a blank slate. In China itself, however, it was dangerous for a long time to say so. ‘Many years ago, I would have considered this question a provocation,’ said Fang Ning, a prominent conservative political scientist. ‘We were meant to have made a fresh break with the past with communist rule.’ Now, Fang insists, without a strong central bureaucracy there would be ‘independence in local regions and then chaos’. ‘The secret of the government in China is that all hats are controlled by the emperor,’ he said. ‘He can take them off and put them on. I don’t think this part of the system has ever changed.’
    Since Mao’s demise, the Party has refreshed its Leninist roots, gingerly