Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Networking and change

William Wan and Zhang Jie, writing in the Washington Post, put a lot of their emphasis on that old bogeyman, guanxi (China's version of networking, which is nothing new). What seems at least equally important is the goal of maintaining Communist Party power while adapting the official ideology to structural change in the economy and globalization.

Can a party with an official version of reality (ideology) be flexible enough to maintain power in the 21st century?

China’s mid-level party officials spend professional training time cultivating allies

For decades, professors at the Central Party School have safeguarded the ideology of China’s Communist Party, indoctrinating each generation of officials in the teachings of Marx, Lenin and Mao.

Central Party School

The school has persevered in its mission despite massive changes in society and the economy…

The students — largely middle-age government officials looking for promotion — no longer see their mandatory time at the school as a chance to immerse themselves in the wisdom of communism. Instead, it’s become a prime place to cultivate allies with whom they can trade future favors and backdoor deals to further their careers and wealth…

To counter such pressures, the school has strived in recent years to modernize its Marxist theories, overhaul its curriculum and enact stronger controls over students…

At stake, some teachers at the school believe, is nothing less than the ideological soul and future of the Communist Party… The students are mostly in their early 40s to late 50s. And campus life sometimes resembles a communist reality show gone awry — middle-aged men shoved into campus dorms, largely confined to campus and forced to discuss their ideological forebears.

The most elite students at the central school are those officials handpicked for their potential to fill the country’s highest offices. Enrolled in a year-long program, they are carefully assessed by party representatives, who often live among them and sit in on their classes…

[L]eaders in recent years have strived to overhaul the schools’ curriculum.

While Marx’s Das Kapital still appears on most reading lists, officials now spend much more time on subjects such as international monetary policy, management theory and even the realms of leadership style, psychology and the importance of personal health amid the pressures of governing.

Teaching methods have also changed drastically.

“The old way used to consist entirely of you lecturing from a platform,” said one frequent guest speaker. “It’s much more dynamic now. Students get case studies. They bring in problems from their own provinces for study.”…

“Modern knowledge is taught in the hope that it will be useful to maintaining party rule,” said Alan P. Liu of the University of California at Santa Barbara…