To meet the increasingly complex challenges of a developing China, the CCP has also professionalized itself, sought, with some success, to fight corruption, and streamlined its ranks.
Consequently, the 16th Party Congress in 2002 experienced its highest turnover of party members ever and resulted in the most educated CPP in the party’s history. Guided by the “Decision of the CPC Central Committee on Enhancing the Party’s Ruling Capacity” (2004), the party also implemented a series of unprecedented reforms at the ideological and organizational levels, introduced mechanisms, or “Opinions,” to evaluate party cadres, and imposed mid-career training.
Despite all this, the challenges to the CCP are rife. As China transforms, the top-to-bottom penetration of society under a Leninist system has become more difficult to achieve. Social and professional organizations that operate outside the CPP have proliferated, and as communist ideology loses its appeal with the masses and the private sector becomes increasingly independent, party committees have lost their strength as the sole source of legitimacy and purveyance. Rather than crack down or turn back the clock as we would expect of a monolithic authoritarian system, however, the CCP has chosen to experiment with consultative models (the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Congress) and tentatively introduced democracy within the party. It has also increasingly turned Marxist ideology, which the population sees with growing cynicism, into a more nationalistic discourse, and let reality guide ideology rather than the other way around.
There are, however, certain areas where CPP thought has remained inflexible. Its fear of China becoming a “bourgeois vassal state” and paranoid view of the US continues to inform its policies on mass media and non-governmental organizations, which it sees as Trojan Horses meant to topple it — a view that was reinforced by its assessment of the “Color Revolutions.” The CCP has also retained its zero-sum relationship with civil society and zero tolerance for organized opposition outside the party. As the challenges brought about by China’s industrialization and rapid development will only increase, the failure to allow more diversity in the political sphere — in other words to democratize outside the party — may very well be the seeds of the CPP’s demise, and the 60 to 100 years it says are needed before democracy can be fully implemented may just be too long a wait for a population whose demands, expectations and awareness will continue to grow.
But as Shambaugh demonstrates in this rich and extremely helpful guide to how the CCP has viewed itself and the world since the spring of 1989, we should not underestimate its capacity to see the challenges ahead and make the necessary adjustments to ensure the perpetuation of its rule. While the author’s views of the CCP’s successes — especially when it comes to ethnic minorities such as Tibetans and Uyghurs — may be overoptimistic, his book nevertheless makes predictions of the CCP’s inexorable collapse less plausible.
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