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By Jamil Anderlini
As the economy slows and middle-class discontent grows, it is the question
that’s now being asked not only outside but inside the country. Even at the
Central Party School there is talk of the unthinkable: the collapse of
Chinese communism
http://im.ft-static.com/content/images/07b7be80-1ffd-11e3-8861-
Tiananmen Square, Beijing, last month
Tucked away between China’s top spy school and the ancient imperial summer
palace in the west of Beijing lies the only place in the country where the
demise of the ruling Communist party can be openly debated without fear of
reprisal. But this leafy address is not home to some US-funded liberal think
-tank or an underground dissident cell. It is the campus of the Party School
of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, the elite
training academy for the country’s autocratic leaders that is described in
official propaganda as a “furnace to foster the spirit of party members”.
The Central Party School was established in 1933 to indoctrinate cadres in
Marxism, Leninism and, later, Mao Zedong Thought, and past headmasters have
included Mao himself, recently anointed president Xi Jinping and his
predecessor Hu Jintao. In keeping with some of the momentous changes that
have occurred in Chinese society, the curriculum has been radically revised
in recent years. Students still steep themselves in the wisdom of Das
Kapital and “Deng Xiaoping Theory” but they are also taught classes in
economics, law, religion, military affairs and western political thought. As
well as watching anti-corruption documentaries and participating in
revolutionary singalongs, the mid-level and high-ranking party cadres who
make up the student body are given lessons in opera appreciation and
diplomatic etiquette.
A more significant change for an institution founded to enforce ideological
purity is its relatively new role as an intellectual free-fire zone, where
almost nothing is off-limits for discussion. “We just had a seminar with a
big group of very influential party members and they were asking us how long
we think the party will be in charge and what we have planned for when it
collapses,” says one Party School professor who asked not to be named
because he was not authorised to speak to foreign media. “To be honest,
this is a question that everyone in China is asking but I’m afraid it is
very difficult to answer.”
How long the heirs to Mao’s 1949 revolution can hang on to power has been a
perennial question since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and the
disintegration of the Soviet Union. Many dire predictions of imminent
collapse have come and gone but the party has endured and even thrived,
especially since it opened its ranks to capitalists for the first time a
decade ago. These days the revolutionary party of the proletariat is
probably best described as the world’s largest chamber of commerce and
membership is the best way for businesspeople to network and clinch
lucrative contracts.
In less than five years the Chinese Communist party will challenge the
Soviet Union (69 or 74 years in power depending on how you count it) and
Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (71 years until 2000) for the
longest unbroken rule by any political party. Modernisation theory holds
that authoritarian systems tend to democratise as incomes rise, that the
creation of a large middle class hastens the process and that economic
slowdown following a long period of rapid growth makes that transition more
likely. Serious and worsening inequality coupled with high levels of
corruption can add to the impetus for change.
All these factors now exist in China but some political |
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