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The Party: The Secret World of China's…
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The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers (edition 2010)

by Richard McGregor (Author)

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
4271958,288 (3.76)15
This book again reiterates the very same points as the last book I reviewed being the massive investments in infrastructure without any real consumer demand backing it. It also highlights the massive levels of corruption that are for the most part hidden from the common man and the world in general. The members of the communist party at all levels are party to this. Only when the whole situation becomes untenable do these incidents become public like the Sanlu milk adulteration scandal.
  danoomistmatiste | Jan 24, 2016 |
Showing 17 of 17
McGregor's book is excellent. As a US-based businessman who traveled to China often in the 2010s to meet with partners, prospects and customers, I wish that I had read it then. He explains the structure of the Chinese Communist Party and how it influences and controls government, civil society, the military, business and the economy. All of that is new for Westerners like me who know our own governments and economic systems.

My only disappointment in the book is that it was published in 2010, during the tenure of Hu Jintao as President and Party General Secretary. Xi Jinping is mentioned only a few times, in no substantial way. The book predates the spread of autocratic regimes in the west generally, and the Trump Presidency in the US. It would be interesting to read an edition that covered the Party's role, and the shifting balance of power globally, over the last twelve years.

McGregor closes his afterword with this:

"China has long known something that many in developed countries are only now beginning to grasp, that the Chinese Communist Party and its leaders have never wanted to be the west when they grow up. For the foreseeable future, it looks as though their wish, to bestride the world as a colossus on their own implacable terms, will come true."

Pretty good prediction. ( )
  mikeolson2000 | Dec 27, 2023 |
Thesis is that the CCP is into self preservation and is the ultimate institution in China, above the state itself. ( )
  jcvogan1 | Jan 8, 2023 |
Useful for its overview as well as some of its anecdotes. But there is nothing particularly insightful or groundbreaking, and it is becoming dated.

> Most US presidents become lame ducks in the last years of their final term. So topsy-turvy is the Chinese political system that Hu, like Jiang Zemin before him, only really consolidated power by the time he was approaching the end of his period in office.

> When Jiang Zemin was appointed party secretary in May 1989, weeks before the tanks rolled into Beijing, he had to be smuggled into the capital to take up his position. A rattled Jiang was picked up at the airport in a VW Santana, China’s everyman car, instead of the Red Flag limousine then standard for top leaders. He was told to change into worker’s clothes for the ride into town to meet Deng, lest any of the angry demonstrators still filling the streets should spot him

> Jiang’s handover of power to Hu Jintao at the 2002 congress, held at around the same time as Xu Haiming received his first eviction notice in Shanghai, was a milestone event in the history of the Party. It was not just the fact that Jiang was replaced by Hu as general secretary, but that he agreed to step down without a public fuss. Hu’s displacement of Jiang was not only the first peaceful handover of power in China since the 1949 revolution, which was notable in itself, but the first in any major communist country at all. In addition, the transition from Jiang to Hu was carried out according to an evolving set of rules in the Party, setting retirement ages for top leaders and ministers, and establishing a new unofficial limit of two five-year terms for the party secretary and premier. … Each succession in the Soviet Union, from Lenin to Gorbachev, followed a death in office or a purge of the top leader. In China, Mao had nominated his own successor, the hapless Hua Guofeng, who in turn had been ousted by Deng Xiaoping. Deng declined to become party secretary himself but remained the paramount power behind the scenes, later overseeing the removal of two of his protégés, Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, the latter being then placed under house arrest in 1989 for the remainder of his life

> Baidu had long finessed its internet searches for the Chinese government, to block commentary critical of the Communist Party. It sold the same service to commercial clients, in the case of Sanlu for rmb 300 million, to limit or screen out searches linking the company’s products to sick babies and melamine. (Baidu later denied selling this agreement.)

> Ask any genuine entrepreneur whether their company is private, or ‘siying’, literally, ‘privately run’, it is striking how many still resist the description in favor of the more politically correct tag ‘minying’, which means ‘run by the people’. In a people’s republic founded on a commitment to abolish private wealth, an enterprise which is ‘run by the people’, even if it is owned by an individual, is more favored than a company that parades itself as purely private. Most economists now skirt the issue, by dividing companies into two categories, state and non-state, and leave it at that. ( )
  breic | May 5, 2022 |
Fantastic, behind-the-scenes story of how China actually works.
( )
  richardSprague | Mar 22, 2020 |
This book again reiterates the very same points as the last book I reviewed being the massive investments in infrastructure without any real consumer demand backing it. It also highlights the massive levels of corruption that are for the most part hidden from the common man and the world in general. The members of the communist party at all levels are party to this. Only when the whole situation becomes untenable do these incidents become public like the Sanlu milk adulteration scandal.
  danoomistmatiste | Jan 24, 2016 |
This book again reiterates the very same points as the last book I reviewed being the massive investments in infrastructure without any real consumer demand backing it. It also highlights the massive levels of corruption that are for the most part hidden from the common man and the world in general. The members of the communist party at all levels are party to this. Only when the whole situation becomes untenable do these incidents become public like the Sanlu milk adulteration scandal.
  kkhambadkone | Jan 17, 2016 |
This is the best book I've read on modern Chinese politics. McGregor looks at how the Chinese Communist Party operates to maintain its rule. He presents a view of a Party that knows what it is doing and is adapting to maintain control. He suggests that both China and the Party will continue to grow stronger, despite many western experts saying its collapse is imminent. He also suggests that China will destabilize the existing world system whether it becomes dominant or collapses.

McGregor's chapters each provide insight into a particular aspect of the Party's control. He looks at the overlap between Party and government and then how the government supports big business (as long as it remains under Party influence). The Party always trumps government and business at any level, but the 21st century party realizes that collaborating with business is the best way forward. Economic growth is the key to its legitimacy, making business essential.

The most interesting party of the book (for me) was the internal politics of the Party, which McGregor was able to explore better than any western account I've seen. He looks at the human resources department, which handles appointments and is actually one of the most important ways to advance in the Party. Whoever controls appointments controls patronage by giving out the lucrative jobs. Yet he process is almost completely opaque. McGregor could not get deep into it, but was able to explain enough to show that this was where a lot of power was.

He also looks at how the Party deals with corruption and dissent. Corruption is tolerated, but is cracked down on quickly if it becomes disruptive or embarrassing. The Party investigates before it becomes public. If it makes it to the legal arena, that means the Party has approved the prosecution and whomever is on trial is guaranteed a conviction.

Dissent is also tolerated at very small levels. McGregor shows that the Party has learned that it does not need to use excessive force to quiet those who speak out against it. It quietly removes their voice within the country and punishes those involved, but it rarely makes a major issue of those cases. Instead, it inspires self-censorship in the media because they are never sure where the line is to be crossed. As a result, they are generally careful to stay far away from where the line may be and the central government does not have to do much actual censoring.

His overall point is that the Party is learning and will remain strong because of it. It seeks to co-opt the population (particularly the middle class) rather than scare it into submission. The tools it uses to control itself and society are becoming more sophisticated. That adaptability will make it a force for the foreseeable future, regardless of what western doomsayers predict.

I highly recommend this book. It offers great insight into the Party and its methods. It is also well written, making it easy to read. Anyone interested in modern China should give it a try. ( )
1 vote Scapegoats | Aug 18, 2014 |
To write about China, particularly, to write about the political culture of China, and the organs of its political system, which is far less transparent than any organization in the West, one would assume the author to have a thorough and long-time knowledge and interest of China, an academic in Sinology or at least Asian studies, knowledge of the Chinese language, and possibly many years of dwelling in China. However, Richard McGregor, author of The party. The secret world of China's Communist rulers has none of these qualities and qualifications. His only other book publication, Japan Swings: Politics, Culture and Sex in the New Japan (1996) suggests an flippant interest in the spectacular, and popular, cheap effect.

Knowledge of China's political system and the Communist Party of China (CPC) is widely available in the public domain to readers of Chinese. The merit of McGregor's book is that it brings a lot of facts and knowledge about China's political system and the CPC in particular together from many non-Chinese sources. The bibliography, at the back of the book, suggests that the author does not have a working knowledge of Chinese, and the book is based on a not even very impressive body of sources written in English, only.

The fundamental problem of The party. The secret world of China's Communist rulers is that the author's writing is based upon the idea that there is only one, unified ideology of Communism. However, while Mao Zedong and other early Chinese communists were certainly inspired by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and subsequently influenced by Russian Communism, the roots of Chinese Communist ideology are much less based in class struggle, and more in China's effort to free itself from foreign incursion and foreign powers trying to subvert China to a semi-colonial position. The strength and hold that the CPC has over China is its success in unifying and holding together China's territorial integrity, while successfully keeping foreign powers and influence at bay.

McGregor rarely attempts to analyze or describe the ideological substrate of Chinese politics. Rather, his book merely describes events and symptoms, brought together from other sources. As with many other publications by non-academic authors, McGregor is negatively biased toward China, trying to find fault more than anything else.

The description of the milk scandal in 2008 shows up some curious holes and inconsistencies. While the author writes that he lived in China at the time, it is peculiar how he sketches the impression that Sanlu Company was the only company that had problems with its milk during the 2008 melamine milk scandal (chapter 6). While Sanlu was the only company singled out to take the blame for the milk scandal, it was clear at the time that all other milk producing companies were involved and had similar problems on a comparable scale.

Obviously, the author feels compelled to stir the pot of political dissent and refer to incidents and actions of Chinese political leadership which have been broadly meted out in other publications. It is a pity that publications like these, in their hunger and greed for sales and success, rather repeat the old stories rather than point out that Chinese people and leadership are also deeply saddened by such events, but that Chinese culture forms an obstacle to admit and face reality. It takes every nation time, at its own pace, to come to terms with its own history. ( )
2 vote edwinbcn | Dec 1, 2013 |
If the Chinese Communist Party's Central Organisation Department had an analogue in Washington, it would "oversee the appointment of the entire US cabinet, state governors and their deputies, the mayors of major cities, the heads of all federal regulatory agencies, the chief executives of GE, ExxonMobil, Wal-Mart and about fifty of the remaining largest US companies, the justices on the Supreme Court, the editors of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, the bosses of the TV networks and cable stations, the presidents of Yale and Harvard and other big universities, and the heads of think-thanks like the Brookings Institution and the Heritage Foundation."

This readable book argues that a lot of analysis of China today completely misses out the importance of the Party, partly because outsiders find it hard to imagine the reach of the Party through society, partly because we have nothing in our own systems to compare it to. (Estimates of the size of the private sector in China range from below 30% of GDP to over 70%, because of this lack of clarity about the Party's role.)

Through separate chapters dealing with the Party and different aspects of Chinese society (state, business, military etc), McGregor gives us a picture of how the Party ensures control - especially through its power to hire and fire, and its ability to transmit its messages down through the system so everyone knows the official line and the priorities that they need to deliver.

Unlike too much stuff written about China, this is nuanced: McGregor has a sense of the historical changes over the last decades and explains how the Party has drawn back from the involvement it had in private lives, to a situation where it controls only what it needs to control. He also shows how some of the things the Party promotes leave it increasingly open to challenge: the desire for economic growth leads to a more international and professional approach to management of state enterprises, but managers may then see themselves more as businesspeople and prioritise their bottom line, rather than the party line. A more professional and effective army gradually becomes more of a national army than the Party's army. And the Party uses regional competition to drive economic growth; but the Party's own power and the high priority given to development mean that local officials, whose writ is law, pursue economic growth so strongly that they trigger popular resistance (eg over land rights or polluting factories).

Finally, McGregor points out that it's very easy to imagine scenarios in which the Chinese system collapses or loses power. But in reality… the 2008 economic crisis demonstrated China's strength, not its weakness; Chinese people are aspirational in the face of inequality, like Americans; the growing middle class is a conservative bulwark of Party rule; and the Party has managed to develop in responsive ways, ruling less by terror, improving services, getting out of private lives, getting better at preventative policing and settling protests quietly and peacefully, allowing some negative news as a safety valve. He quotes Yang Jisheng (the author of Tombstone): "The system is decaying and the system is evolving. The system is decaying while it is evolving. It is not clear which side might come out on top in the end." I welcome this refusal to come down on one side or the other - how can we possibly be confident about the future of China?

In conclusion, perhaps his argument was a little overstated, but I agree with McGregor that the role of the Party is often underestimated. I would have liked to see the book talk a little about ideology, which I do think remains important, although it's not always easy to know exactly how. But overall this book was nuanced, interesting and readable. It's not exactly for the general reader but I would recommend it for anyone with an interest in China. ( )
5 vote wandering_star | Jul 23, 2013 |
This is a very well informed book about the current state of modern China. However, (as AC has helpfully said), this book is poorly organized and the author seems to change his mind over several pages. Nothing wrong with changing your mind over the course of an investigation, of course, but the book, as a finished product, should reflect that.

The key traits of the party, as McGregor finds out, are a sort of adaptive soft authoritarianism. From my perspective (at the lowest rungs of academia, as well as having visited the place twice), he's mostly right. The anecdotes are nice, especially the Shanghai group, but they're nothing terribly revealing to me.

The Party may yet endure. Although I'm hearing very recent (as in, this week) news about the vulnerability of the Real Estate bubble (20-30% of GDP growth is in real estate now.) Once the Party loses its economic legitimacy, then the whole thing may look very shaky. Although people have been predicting the imminent collapse of the PRC since before I was born. So. We'll have to wait and see.

If you're relatively new to China-watching, then this is not a bad place to start.

( )
  HadriantheBlind | Mar 30, 2013 |
An absolute must-read for anyone who is doing business in Asia. Provides a rare look at how extensive the reach of the Chinese Communist party really is. ( )
  MBDudley | Sep 30, 2012 |
"A phenomenon of awesome and unique dimensions"

The quote in the title proofs that Mr. McGregor, a former journalist of the Financial Times, does not really play down the importance of his subject. But if the book is recommended by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, it might be worth taking notice.

Officially, the Communist Party in China still follows socialism. It has so far survived every one of its numerous existential crises. It has now reached a point where its ideology is one of power and therefore a defence of power. "State sovereignty, territorial integrity and economic development are all subordinate to the need to keep the Party in power".

Under the hood, China is still Leninist. The Party maintains its lockhold on the state and three pillars of its survival strategy: control of personnel, propaganda and the PLA. Party members are at key levels in every arm and at every level of the state (one in every twelve Chinese adults is a member).

China's top political leadership consists of men mostly in their sixties that dye their hair black and were trained as engineers but had been full-time politicians during their whole working life. Hu Jintao, their current leader, is General Secretary of the Party, President of the country and head of the military. The party leadership is the most important of Hu's roles. Hu is much more low-key than his predecessors: the party has grown at the expense of its leaders.

Below the top leaders is a group of politicians and leaders of state companies distinguishable by an encrypted red phone with a four digit number. Top ranked party members are restricted in the people they mingle with and in their overseas travelling. The party controls the entire public sector, but also the media, think tanks and approved religions. 95% of law companies have party committees that assess staff salaries, among others by party loyalty. Judges must remain loyal to - in order - the party, the state, the masses and, finally, the law (p.24). The party is also present in the background of state enterprises. Still it is not registered as an organisation. The party relies on its "leading role" in the preamble of the constitution. People cannot sue it. A liberal economy is however open to debate as an engine to get rich. China considers the visible hand of the state and the invisible hand of the market far from contradictory. In the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, Deng Xiaoping tightened political authority while free-market reforms continued. The party did the hiring and firing of executives in state-owned enterprises, and changed the structure so that these enterprises could go bankrupt. Zhu Rongji wretched central control over the banks from the regions at the time when 45% of loans were unrecoverable, with loans given in return for patronage as an important factor. The government had to bail out the banks twice at a price larger than TARP. Still, banks serve "social stability" and "macro-economic policy", as they proved in the aftermath of the 2008 credit crisis. Through its business-friendly policies, the (majority) state-owned companies have hoarded billions of profits.

In a radical version of the Soviet nomenklatura system, the Central Organisational Departments oversees all party appointments of a certain rank (but the Politburo overseas the most senior ones). The vetting process takes place behind closed doors and no explanation is given to the outside world. It keeps tabs on job performance and political reliability, as well as black market operations and sexual misdemeanours. It is the place of the toughest political battles. Your position is a test for your relationship with the bureau and the seniority of your patron. The system is not without corruption either. To reach the top you get shifted around the country on various levels; the communist party operates like a multinational company. Heads of rival state companies in a sector may also be shifted.

Jiang and Hu are the first civilian leaders in a century with control over the civilian and military hierarchies. Deng had advised Jiang to spend four out of five working days on the top bras. Deng had also convinced the military that competition with the West had brought Soviet communism down, so economic growth was given priority. Under Jiang and Hu military expenses rose with double digit numbers. The party never takes the military's loyalty for granted. And it shouldn't: the leader of the army unit that had to crush the Tiananmen Square protests was court-martialled to four years imprisonment, supposedly for refusing orders. The required modernisation creates alienation between party and forces and military best practice opposes a commanding officer and a political commissar of equal rank. The armed forces also have many business interests, which mainly benefit "venal generals and their cronies", although that role is being reduced.

Senior party members cannot be arrested by civilian law enforcement bodies until the crime has been investigated by the Party's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. The Commission alone can investigate and detain them. For an investigation, clearance from one level up is a prerequisite. The higher up, the more difficult (and political) this is. Politburo members are practically above the law and so are their immediate family members ("follow the family" is the Chinese equivalent of "follow the money"). When an official falls the propaganda department likes to publicise his sexual indiscretions to stress individual moral degeneracy, rather than a systemic problem. In China, the official pay is paltry, but people are still interested in careers in government as a way to enrich themselves. Jobs in the tax and customs bureaux are more in demand than in the Foreign Office or the statistics bureaux.

China is no supertanker, but "a vast armada of small, headstrong commercial ships". The power of the Party causes a weakness of government, the author argues. The lack of open media and checks and balances in the system gives almost dictatorial powers to local officials. China's size helps too. This weakness also leads to cut-throat competition between localities, which is one of the causes of China's economic surge. This leads to great incentives for investors, from building sites to cheap electricity to licenses. The Party's overwhelming power effectively makes a district a jurisdiction. Often holding shares, localities operate like businesses. This is one reason for China's excessive investment ratio. When Hu Jintao recentralised taxation to get a better grip on budgets, localities increasingly propelled into business and exploited workers and the environment to retrieve funding for healthcare and education. The sale of land was another source, but is decreasingly available.

The Party accepts the need for the private sector to create wealth and employment, but reigns in any executive’s political aspirations through party membership. For the same reason corporate ownership is kept legally opaque, unlike land ownership. The purely private sector makes up only about 20% of the economy. The private sector first rose in the countryside, but after 1989 it was more heavily taxed and funds were reallocated to the rebellious cities. In industries whole sectors were reserved for the state.

The Party has extended its historical inevitability back to the time of the Opium Wars. The Party treats history as an issue of political management in which the preservation of its prestige is paramount. Sensitive historical debates are settled within the organisation itself. The propaganda department enforces the line: nothing less than national security is at stake. In textbooks, China's culture is superior and unmatched and "any kind of dictatorship or mob violence could be used to eraser 'outside evils' to protect it". The department's word is also final when it comes to news. News organisations get weekly guidelines and for day-to-day issues there are phone calls and text messages. Self-discipline is key. There are no censors with red pencils, like in the Soviet Union.

The Party's adaptive capabilities should not be underestimated. The author of a book calculating the 35 million who died in the Great Leap Forward can live in China undisturbed. Human rights activists may be thrown in jail, but they are not killed. In many cases protesters are given money to get off the street. Without irony, the author claims that the middle class has become "a conservative bulwark of Party rule".

The Minister was right, this book is recommended reading. ( )
2 vote mercure | Feb 6, 2012 |
“...The most astounding development success the world has ever known.” (China)
— Dani Rodrik The Globalization Paradox (Oxford: OUP, 2011:149)
Small wonder that the ANC greatly admires the CPC. Mc Gregor's book is a highly interesting profile of the Party including haw it relates to state owned enterprises. There is a chapter on the Great Leap Forward, the most astounding development disaster the world has ever known. ( )
  mnicol | Feb 5, 2012 |
A very interesting and non judgmental book on the role of the Chinese Communist Party behind the scenes in every aspect of Chinese life. McGregor doesn't cast judgement - he just points out that despite the veneer of capitalism, China is run in a very different way to any democracy. Although given the willingness of Europeans in 2011 to throw away democracy at the first sign of trouble and hand power to unelected technocrats (Greece, Italy) much like those running China perhaps there is less difference than we think. But I digress. McGregor's book is notable because he is the one of the few Western writers who neither fauns over Chinese success - he praises the party for lifting 10s of millions out of grinding poverty but points out some of the social problems this has caused - nor sees China as a threat , not is looking to undermine, belittle or sneer.

The most interesting part - and it was news to me - is how deeply involved the Party is in the big state run companies such as Chinalco or China Mobile, and how their execs must juggle both the need for conventional capitalist success with the need for harmony with Party policy and the wider "social" interest. A fascinating juggling act

All in all very informative and insightlful ( )
  Opinionated | Dec 30, 2011 |
Napoleon dubbed China the “sleeping giant” and I remember back in the 1980’s, studying China in college, when it was still stuck with that moniker. Well, China is wide awake now and quickly becoming the dominating global power. In just a 15 year span, their GDP grew 280% and their poverty level was cut by 50%. Following Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” which disastrously resulted in nearly 40 million deaths caused by starvation, the Chinese Communist Party has a new and improved outlook on governing their 1.3 billion people. No longer interested in being a welfare state the “3 Irons” were dismantled; the “Iron Chair” – a life-long job, the “Iron Rice Bowl” – a promise of employment, and “The Iron Wage” – a guaranteed income and pension. No longer are entrepreneurs shunned and labeled “subversives”. Today 20% of all GDP is generated from privately owned companies. The new China: entrepreneurs, cosmopolitan cities, capitalist business ventures, foreign investments and a Chinese stock market, labor unions, and lawyers.

Richard McGregor is a veteran reporter for the "Financial Times" and has been documenting facts about Northern Asia for the past two decades. "The Party" provides an in-depth explanation of how the Communist party members think, act, govern, and maintain control over the masses; the courts, the press, religion, the police, and all major industries: oil, petrochemicals, steel, railways, airports and aviation, electricity, health care, banking, education, and the civil service. It is impossible for an outsider to break the code of secrecy that surrounds the party, but McGregor shares a wealth of information about the party leaders, the corruption within the system, the “pay-to-play” mentality of those in power, and the frenzied crusade for total control. Despite China’s thriving “capitalism with Chinese characteristics” market economy, the country is not leaning towards a republican government. The communist party has more control today than ever before. Learn about their likes and dislikes, their strengths and weaknesses. It won’t surprise you that they are rewriting history to eliminate negative things about the party, and censoring textbooks: obliterating all reference to Jesus, the protest and massacre at Tiananmen Square, and the famine caused by Mao’s “central planning policy”.

I can’t say for certain there is no other book on the market with such a comprehensive, in-side view of China’s government elite, but if there is, I have yet to find it. Impersonal and dispassionate, as one might expect a professional reporter to write, McGregor educates the reader about modern China and the all-powerful and mysterious Communist Party and it’s life-time politicians in this fascinating documentary. ( )
  LadyLo | Oct 7, 2011 |
Fascinating insight into the Communist Party and how it operates in China. The book highlights the amazing contradiction of how powerful the party is but also how impotent the central leadership is over the local organisation. ( )
  BrianHostad | Nov 1, 2010 |
Page after page, The Party reveals the ugly, unvarnished details about how the Communist Party of China stays in power, It has nothing to do with ideology, nothing to do with communism. It's just all about power. Checks and balances are a horrifying prospect. All power must be concentrated. This is institutionalized Mafia. Things might look dismal in the US Congress. But there is simply no such thing as an honest Chinese government official. There can't be, by the rules. Online kibitzers argued to let the Beijing Olympics Manager go free because he "only" scammed $1 million out of it. He was as close to an honest politician as they could imagine. Or just not good at it.

Incredibly, despite the constant bleating to root out corruption, the simple truth is corruption is a designed-in feature and function of the Party, and it simply would cease to be without it. "Corruption makes our political system more stable," explains a government official on p168. Central government cabinet ministers are paid less than $1400 a month. Do you need to know more?

Fighting the system is useless. Corruption investigations must be approved by the next higher level, so they will only take place if 1) there is no way it could tarnish that next higher level, and/or 2) if someone wants to "get" an up and comer below him. So by the rules, you will never see a corruption investigation at the Politburo level. They are "made", in Mafia terms: It's all laid out very neatly in one sentence very early on (p.24):

"Judges must remain loyal - in order - to The Party, the state, the masses and, finally, to the law."

This in a report from The People's Supreme Court in 2009. So good luck you shareholders and property owners. The city can and does sell your building out from under you without warning. The state can and does swap CEOs at will among "competing" firms.

After I read Hungry Ghosts many years ago, I thought that nothing could ever shock me about China again. Hungry Ghosts is an excellent book detailing for the first tine, the Mao-engineered famine that killed or ruined nearly 60 MILLION Chinese - and was covered up! The Party tells the gripping story of how this will always be possible in China. It's must reading if you hope to understand.

Although the book is extremely well documented, and written from personal interviews, sometimes the language is a bit awkward and clumsy. And I got annoyed when, for the the fourth time, the author cited Exxon-Mobil as Exxon-Mobile, as if it were a telecoms firm instead of the oil giant. Once is a typo, but four times? So it's not perfect, but it's as haunting as anything yet. ( )
  DavidWineberg | Aug 5, 2010 |
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Penguin Australia

2 editions of this book were published by Penguin Australia.

Editions: 0141038853, 0141975555

 

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