Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Parallel Chinas

I've long tried to understand China by envisioning two Chinas. No, not the PRC and Taiwan, but the PRC government and PRC party. They are nearly parallel institutions and at the grassroots and at the highest levels, equivalent government and party positions are held by the same people. Consider Chinese President Hu Jintao and Communist Party General Secretary Hu Jintao.

In China, a sometimes opaque divide between power of party and state

When Hu Jintao visits the United States… he'll have a regal entourage of aides, bodyguards and limousines. But the Chinese leader will leave behind in Beijing the most potent totem of his power: the title of general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party.

He's not giving up his day job as head of the world's largest political organization, but during his four-day U.S. trip, he'll assume an alternative identity. He'll be greeted at the White House and a Chicago auto-parts factory as Mr. President, a made-for-export alias used mostly for encounters with foreigners…

Hu travels to the United States to represent China as a nation, not just its ruling party. But the shift obscures the true nature, and also curious limitations, of Hu's authority - his stewardship of a sprawling party apparatus that stands above all formal institutions of government but is no longer a rigid monolith obedient to a single leader…

As China has grown stronger and wealthier, however, its leadership has grown more diffuse and harder to locate, and in some ways even weaker…

The diffusion of authority… reflects both the growing complexity of society and governance and the personalities of senior leaders forged not by revolutionary struggle, but by the give-and-take of bureaucratic consensus.

The party… is itself a collection of different and often competing interests. It is not held together by ideology but by the glue of nationalism, a force that ranges from low-key pride in China's past and current achievements to strident jingoism.

"The U.S. always hoped that China would become more diversified," said Jin Canrong, vice dean of the School of International Studies at People's University in Beijing… Competing voices mean that Chinese decision-making on foreign policy "will be more and more like that in the U.S. in the future."

A big difference, however, is that some of China's most powerful voices are heard only in secret. "This is one of the great frustrations and paradoxes about China," Susan Shirk, a deputy assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration, said. "It has a vibrant market economy that is open to the world, but a decision-making process that is very, very opaque."

America's confusion extends to Hu himself, who stands at the apex of a highly centralized party structure but is sometimes kept in the dark and even defied by those he nominally controls, particularly the People's Liberation Army…

The party and state often overlap, as in the case of Hu, who, like his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, is both general secretary and "state chairman," a title that China renders into English as "president." He's also head of the Central Military Affairs Commission, a party body that is far more important than the largely powerless Defense Ministry, which hosted Gates's trip to China.

The mixing of functions makes it difficult for outsiders to locate where exactly policy is set, particularly as the party, while far removed from its Marxist roots, retains many of the secretive habits of its origins as an underground organization…