V isitors who don’t read or speak Chinese may spend weeks, months, and even years in China without directly encountering the Communist Party. The experience of arriving at any of the country’s major international airports—Beijing, say, or Pudong in Shanghai, or Guangzhou’s Baiyun—is politically neutral. The posters calling for international proletarian unity were taken down long ago, and the symbols of communism largely discarded. The uniforms of immigration, police, and other security officials are hard to differentiate from those of many other countries.
Two decades of nonstop construction have created dynamic urban landscapes of steel, concrete, and glass—the sort of landscape that is typically associated with aggressive capitalism. China may have 5,000 years of history as a nation, but comparatively few places remain that evoke the past. Instead, downtown streets in large cities are lined with towering banks, hotels, and shopping plazas. Beijing has its magnificent stadium built to host the Olympics, Rem Koolhass’s Central China Television headquarters, and the French-designed National Centre for the Performing Arts, more commonly known as the Egg. Not to be outdone, Shanghai has the Jin Mao Tower, designed by Chicago’s Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and its Grand Theatre, designed by France’s Jean-Marie Charpentier.
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Perhaps more astonishing than these architectural marvels is the view from the top of the taller buildings in any mid-sized Chinese city, such as Qingdao, Ningbo, Hohhot, Nanjing, Changsha, or Changchun. The vast majority of the buildings spread out below, certainly anything over five stories, have sprung up since Deng’s southern tour in 1992. Even to those of us who have lived here and watched it take shape, China’s newness is utterly startling.
The Chinese outlook on life mirrors its architecture. The politics that permeated everyday existence when Mao was alive have been put aside in the rush to create and enjoy prosperity. No longer are the Chinese people required to participate in one political campaign after another; no longer must they search out class enemies or counterrevolutionaries. Their interests and energies are concentrated on personal matters: work and study, travel and leisure, buying and maintaining a home, shopping for and enjoying the goods that pour forth from China’s factories. Consumerism is as rampant here as in any capitalist country; the Chinese are increasingly being encouraged to spend more to help speed recovery from the global recession, and, to date, they haven’t been remiss in their rush to purchase cars, computers, mobile phones, and flat-screen televisions.
Psychologically, this focus on and faith in the future has contributed to the intensity driving China—the urge to catch up with the world and once again become a leading center of global achievement. This is not to say that the country’s past has been forgotten. The Chinese have enormous pride in the achievements of their country’s inventors and explorers, artists and calligraphers, poets and novelists, and the grand sweep of its history. But the urge to move on is understandable. Many of the events of the past two centuries have been painful: China’s nineteenth-century treatment at the hands of other countries and their armed forces, and then the internecine terrors of Mao’s rule, particularly during the great step backward of the Cultural Revolution. China’s progress, particularly since the early 1990s, can be attributed to the willingness of its people to put this history behind
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them, rightly or wrongly, rather than scrutinize the past to attribute blame or exact retribution.
Where’s the Communist Party in all this? Its role in everyday life has declined enormously as the trend toward liberalization has extended far beyond the economy to the decisions of ordinary people. Throughout the past three decades, the party’s desire to control every part of people’s lives—from where they live to the career they choose to their lifestyles—has receded. It no longer assigns jobs and homes, restricts overseas travel to only a handful of people, or prevents the movement of people within the country. Of course, officialdom still exists, with all its myriad rules and regulations. But that is bureaucracy, which has a long and rich tradition in China, as opposed to outright control. Constraints remain, but these are mostly the economic limits of a developing nation; the political forces that from 1949 to the early 1980s took decision making out of the hands of most people have largely disappeared.
To many observers, especially Westerners, China’s embrace of a market-based economy seems to have made the country capitalist in all but name and reduced the power of officials to control every aspect of people’s lives. The country remains authoritarian, they argue, but surely where economic freedoms lead, political freedom will follow. After all, a population with a rapidly emerging middle class, exposed to external influences and ideas, and with an ever greater diversity of interests demanding some form of representation must inevitably move away from communism and toward democracy.
But they are wrong. China will remain a communist nation, at least for the foreseeable future. The Communist Party may be invisible to visitors and it may be less controlling that in the past, but its more than 70 million members continue to dominate every level of government and society, including universities, companies, the media, the army, police, and every civic body. If there’s one thing its leaders are committed to, it is remaining the country’s sole holders of political power. As unwaveringly as ever, they believe that China’s development, both
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socially and economically, can only be achieved under the auspices of the Communist Party.
Thus, in addition to economic liberalization and the market and business environments, any China strategy must take into account the one other force determining the country’s trajectory: official China. The role played by the government, and the Communist Party within the government, is immense. Officials continue to direct the country, both socially and economically, in ways that often seem opaque to foreigners. The starting point for a better understanding is the goals, motives, and methods of China’s leaders.