Three days before she was to be admitted as a full member of the Chinese Communist Party in early June, graduate economics student Li Yingzi was blunt about her reasons for wanting to join the ruling party.
“It’s a good idea to ensure a better future for myself,” she said. “It will be easier if I want to become a public servant — because membership of the party will show my loyalty.”
That is an attitude that Yang Jisheng, a veteran party member, finds deeply disappointing. When he joined the party in 1964, he said: “I wanted to devote myself to social justice. The party stood for justice and equality and for ordinary people suffering hardship”.
But as the party celebrated its 90th anniversary on July 1, it was a very different animal indeed from the secretive, illegal group that 13 Chinese revolutionaries, including Mao Zedong, founded in Shanghai in 1921 at their first national congress.
“The party has the same name as before but the old party is destroyed,” said Sidney Rittenberg, an American who joined Mao’s forces in 1946 and remained a party member for 33 years. “It used to be a moral presence representing a vision of the future and a set of ethics for today. You don’t have either of those any more.”
It was only three years ago that Xi Jinping, tipped to be the party’s next general secretary and Chinese president, acknowledged formally that the party was no longer a revolutionary force. For decades, it had abandoned communist ideology, and today preached “a harmonious society” instead of a traditional class struggle, while claiming to represent all Chinese people and not just the proletariat.
The party’s primary goal today, say critics inside and outside the membership, is to maintain its monopoly on power at all costs.
Rittenberg said the party had attained “undeniable achievements” for the country in economic terms, “but the leaders’ core view is ‘après nous, le deluge‘ [after us, the flood] and you must not challenge the Communist Party’s absolute right to rule.”
On reflection, Li, who underwent an arduous two-year apprenticeship before being allowed to join the party, couched her ambitions in more idealistic terms than mere careerism. She said being a party member would “make it easier for me to become a major force in Chinese society and contribute to society”.
China’s nominally communist leaders have initiated a headlong rush for economic development that has led to the polar opposite of the dream that motivated the first party members, namely, the Marxist ideal of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”.
China today displays one of the world’s most unequal wealth distribution patterns. Its Gini coefficient, which measures relative wealth in a society, stands at 0.47, well above the level generally thought likely to provoke social conflict.
More worryingly for those who look to the party to preserve social stability through honest leadership, party membership has become the single most important route to personal wealth and corruption is endemic.
“Officials’ basic interest is in mainÂtaining their power because, if they lose it they lose their ability to make financial profit,” said Yang Jisheng, the deputy editor of Yanhuang Chunqiu, a magazine published by reform-minded Communist Party members.
Party leaders from President Hu Jintao down publicly and regularly go on about the evils of corrupt officials — while using their positions to enrich themselves. But there is no sign that internal party investigations, public trials and the occasional execution have done much to control the problem.
“The machine is viewed as so corrupt — that they have no moral appeal to make whatsoever,” said Rittenberg.
Once, he recalled, “corruption just was not allowed because they understood that this was the moral basis of their leadership. As long as people saw their leaders were clean, they were willing to suffer. Today, people with power are almost expected to use it to their own advantage.”
Li would not go that far. But like many of her generation, she found official corruption particularly abhorrent and feared the threat it posed to the party’s standing and future. “I’m quite concerned that corruption may harm the party’s legitimacy,” she said. “Absolute power leads to absolute corruption and that leads to absolute failure.”
But Li was confident that “the party will warn itself and stimulate itself to avoid failure”.
Rittenberg is not so sanguine but hopes the party can cauterise the rot – “because one hopes to see a relatively easy transition rather than let things get so bad it leads to turmoil”.
What a transition from one-party rule might look like is unclear and the Communist Party is not publicly entertaining any such idea.
Indeed, since the “jasmine” revolutions broke out earlier this year in North Africa, the party has seemed more jealous than ever of its grip on power and the government has launched a particularly harsh crackdown on all criticism and dissent to ensure that it does not face similar unrest.
Eventually, Yang said, the force of public opinion and civil society would force the party to change its ways, allowing more space for opponents and risking losing power. But he did not expect this to happen for decades — and he did not want to see the party relinquish power too suddenly.
“The ruling party has been in power for decades,” he said. “It has government experience. In a power vacuum, the future would be very hard to predict.
“We have to carry out reform within the framework of one-party rule and move forward gradually to avoid great disorder.”
Whatever the Communist Party might become in the future, said Rittenberg, one fact stood out: “At this point, there is absolutely no alternative.” — Christian Science Monitor News Service