China’s Communist Party- Per McGregor
Posted by wtdevflnt on December 4, 2010
| The following are three quotes from the book The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers (Richard Mcgregor) It is a great book and an excellent read. If you wish to do business here, or just to understand what the rise of China means, it may be a good choice to read. excerpt: The communists also once despised the pre-revolutionary comprador class of Chinese businessmen, but rushed without shame into an alliance with Hong Kong tycoons when taking back the British colony in 1997. The gap between the fiction of the Party’s rhetoric (‘China is a socialist country’) and the reality of everyday life grows larger every year. But the Party must defend the fiction nonetheless, because it represents the political status quo. ‘Their ideology is an ideology of power and therefore a defence of power,’ said Richard Baum, a China scholar. The Party has made strenuous efforts to keep the sinews of its enduring power off the front stage of public life in China and out of sight of the rest of the world. For many in the west, it has been convenient to keep the Party backstage too, and pretend that China has an evolving governmental system with strengths and weaknesses, quirks and foibles, like any other. China’s flourishing commercial life and embrace of globalization is enough for many to dismiss the idea that communism still has traction, as if a Starbucks on every corner is a marker of political progress. For all the reforms of the past three decades, the Party has made sure it keeps a lock-hold on the state and three pillars of its survival strategy: control of personnel, propaganda and the People’s Liberation Army. |
