Product Details

The Washington Post - Andrew Higgins

…a lively and penetrating account of a party that, since its founding in Shanghai as a clandestine organization in 1921, has clung to secrecy as an inviolable principle…McGregor adds flesh to dry bureaucratic bones through interviews with Chinese who know the system from the inside…

Publishers Weekly

McGregor, a journalist at the Financial Times, begins his revelatory and scrupulously reported book with a provocative comparison between China’s Communist Party and the Vatican for their shared cultures of secrecy, pervasive influence, and impenetrability. The author pulls back the curtain on the Party to consider its influence over the industrial economy, military, and local governments. McGregor describes a system operating on a Leninist blueprint and deeply at odds with Western standards of management and transparency. Corruption and the tension between decentralization and national control are recurring themes--and are highlighted in the Party’s handling of the disturbing Sanlu case, in which thousands of babies were poisoned by contaminated milk powder. McGregor makes a clear and convincing case that the 1989 backlash against the Party, inexorable globalization, and technological innovations in communication have made it incumbent on the Party to evolve, and this smart, authoritative book provides valuable insight into how it has--and has not--met the challenge. (July)

Library Journal

McGregor (China bureau chief, Financial Times) reveals the inner workings of China's political structure and the mechanisms that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) needs to manipulate the country's business, government, courts, media, and military. Not only, as McGregor shows, is the CCP pervasive in almost every aspect of citizens' lives, but it also carefully conceals corruption and human rights abuses by sheltering its own members from any hint of criticism. Although a superpower second only to the United States in global influence and modernization, China continues to be ruled by men in an anachronistic bubble reminiscent of the country's imperial past, reticent and mysterious to its people and the rest of the world. In tracing the bureaucracy and its leadership, from Mao Zedong to current president Hu Jintao, McGregor documents how such an extraordinary political machine—it has over 73 million members—with complete control of all areas from the largest cities to the tiniest hamlets, is run like a modern-day corporation, from selecting its own senior managers for all government offices to rewarding its card-holding members through a patronage system. VERDICT McGregor's portrait unravels the ambiguities surrounding this secretive state's party apparatus. Recommended for all seeking to keep current on Chinese political history.—Allan Cho, Univ. of British Columbia Lib., Vancouver

Kirkus Reviews

A remarkably in-depth infiltration of the shadowy organization of Chinese leadership. Expert observers of China's astounding economic explosion do not agree on what kind of model the country seems to be following: Is it Western, Eastern or something entirely of its own making? In this careful study, McGregor, former China bureau chief at the Financial Times, asserts that just "under the hood" of the Chinese model is the classic "Leninist playbook" embracing the "three pillars of its survival strategy: control of personnel, propaganda and the People's Liberation Army [PLA]." The author examines each in turn, using archival material and a skillful deployment of interview subjects, including a provincial member of the "Central Organization Department," which oversees appointments and maintains files on all top-level officials in the public sector. McGregor manages to penetrate the "pathological secrecy" surrounding the inner workings of Chinese power, exploring how the leadership has managed to loosen and gain control at the same time ("grasp the big, let go of the small"), both in terms of businesses and the private lives of the Chinese people. After the debacle of Tiananmen Square in 1989, which ushered in a nationwide mood of democracy, the PLA was purged and modernized, at huge expense. Emerging as "an instrument of international statecraft for China," it continues to employ hostility toward Taiwan as a useful way of holding down an anti-imperialist threat. The author delves into corruption-and the accepted belief that one must employ corruption to be successful-the cut-throat "Darwinian internal competition" within the far-flung localities, recent product scandals such as Sanlu's tainted infant formula and attempts at confronting the tragedy of the Cultural Revolution. An astute, well-crafted work that should be enormously useful in understanding China's role in the world. Agent: Gail Ross/Gail Ross Literary Agency

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Table of Contents