Nature of the Chinese Communist Party

[Positivist]

Inspired by the recent thread on Chinese imperialism, as well as my own subsequent research of the party, I thought it would be good to have a thread on the nature of the Chinese communist party (CCP.)

From what I gather, amongst the left, there appear to be two competing ideas of who composes the CCP, and what its motivations are. There are those who believe that the CCP is composed primarily of Chinese capitalists (and capitalists are indisputably permitted to join the party) and therefore that the party acts in the interests of enriching the national bourgiose (i.e themselves.) Then there is the view that the CCP is composed of intelligentsia drawn from all ranks of society, the minority of which are capitalists, and that these intellectuals are motivated primarily by the securing of their own power, as well as by more moralistic concerns of setting up China as a superior society to the rest of the world.

In realiy the CCP consists of 80 million members, which are generally drawn from two different backgrounds. There is the "Shanghai clique" which are the party cadres who
come from the more priviliged provinces, and there is the "populist coalition" which are the cadres who rose up from the Communist Youth League (non-priviliged backgrounds.)

It is reasonable to assume that those party members who come from privilige are primarily interested in the enrichment of the Chinese bourgiose, and that those party members who advanced from the Communist Youth league are primarily interested in the expansion of party power, and the establishment of China as the worlds most advanced society.

My personal view is that Chinese policy is dictated by both factions of the party, and is directed in the interests of both groups when possible, and the dominant group when necessary. Though what I have been unable to uncover is which group is the dominant group. My own opinion is that it is likely from the Youth League as Chinese legislation is harsh towards capitalists at times (something which is uncharacterietic of capitalist rule) and that state enterprise still supercedes private enterprise in China (more privaization should be expected if the Chinese bourgiose reigned.)

Hopefully we can get a good and respectful discussion going on this, as it could help out with the Chinese imperialism thread, and our overall understanding of Chinese policy in relation to the Chinese population and the rest of the world.

[Positivist]

Really, no one?

[Yuppie Grinder]

The Chinese Communist Party leadership is not comprised primarily of capitalists, it is comprised entirely of them. The state is the executive branch of the ruling class, the ruling class in china is bourgeois.

[Positivist]

The Chinese Communist Party leadership is not comprised primarily of capitalists, it is comprised entirely of them. The state is the executive branch of the ruling class, the ruling class in china is bourgeois.

I would hope for some elaboration on this. I have already demonstrated that much of the CCP comes from poor living conditions. This being said it is of course possible for these members to change classes per se, but is this actually happening? Heavy state investment into athletics, ecological sustainability, social harmony and the like seem to indicate other motivations at play.

We must understand that ideology, though developed out of material conditions, can shape the conscioussness of people living in material arrangements that contradict those in which the ideology originally developed, especially if the people experiencing the moulding of conscioussness did at some point live in the conditions which their ideology was developed out of.

[Yuppie Grinder]

I'm not saying that most people in the party are bourgeois, that'd be silly.
I'm saying that that the party leadership is bourgeois and the party itself is a bourgeois tool of governance.

[IrishWorker]

80 million communists in one place at the one time, it must be a conspiratorial western plot.

[Teacher]

In my opinion China's Communist Party started playing a very dangerous game when they took the market socialist path in the Deng period and in the 1990s reverted to full blown capitalism.

Because socialist governments have mainly taken root in the non-industrialized world, communist parties have been vexed by a dual mandate: to create an equitable, socialist society on the one hand and to industrialize and develop the productive forces on the other. I do not believe these two goals are incompatible at all. The Soviet Union dramatically proved that you can do both. The Soviet Union also showed (through the NEP) that market socialism can produce growth but can lead to a retrenchment of capitalism that can be difficult and painful to root out in the future.

Many socialist societies have fallen victim to the temptation of reinstating markets or relying on foreign direct investment and loans. Eastern Europe became heavily indebted to Western financiers and this contributed to the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. China has attempted to reinstate capitalism in a much more piecemeal and cautious fashion, and by doing so it has managed to avoid the Eastern European catastrophe.

However, I think the Chinese experience has mirrored the difficulties of the Soviet NEP but on a much larger scale. Trying to introduce capitalism and market mechanisms in a context of global capitalist dominance and imperialist encirclement is not a good strategy. Capitalism takes root like a cancer and begins to eat away at the efforts to build socialism. This is what I see happening in China.

The trend since the 1970s has been to make China more capitalist in nearly every conceivable way. Privatizations have massively increased. Many of the Party elite's children are going into business (Hu Jintao's son, for example). The "iron rice bowl" is basically gone. Workplace democracy obviously does not exist anymore. Inequality, especially urban/rural equality has skyrocketed as the massive population of rural migrant workers are exploited in factories and sweatshops.

I don't see any trends in China today that suggest it will take a left turn like the Soviet Union did under Stalin. All signs point to capitalism becoming increasingly dominant as China moves to rival the U.S. as a capitalist world power.

[Prometeo liberado]

Mark this thread comrades Im about to say the unthinkable. Big Bad Bob Avakian actually came to a clear analysis for the RCP. And that was his very early opposition to Deng and what he would bring to an already decaying CCP. Yup, Bob(I can call him that) had one right.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Heavy state investment into athletics, ecological sustainability, social harmony and the like seem to indicate other motivations at play.

Really? Those are your indicators of socialist currents in a state's body politic? :confused:

[Geiseric]

The CCP didn't really rise from a workers revolution, it was from a peasant guerilla war, so their politics aren't oriented towards the proletariat, it's oriented towards the bourgeoisie.

The issue with peasantry is that it has been proven impossible for them to organize seperately from the bourgeoisie. Populism is a bourgeois ideology, and there's alot about Maoism that screams Populism, such as the Bloc of Four Classes. Besides he started normalizing relations with the U.S. Mao was more reactionary than i'd dare to say any leader of a revolutionary movement.

But if you want to see what's wrong with the CCP, simply look at the slave labor going on, and the state's actions towards protesters and other class conscious strikers. Since he took power, there's been oppression on a scale unheard of. Tienamen square is just the tip on the iceburg on how the chinese working class is oppressed.

[islandmilitia]

I would hope for some elaboration on this. I have already demonstrated that much of the CCP comes from poor living conditions

This isn't really of any significance however. There are individual members of the Conservatives in Britain who come from working-class backgrounds and place a great deal of emphasis on that fact, but obviously we would still see the Conservative Party as an aggressive proponent of capitalist interests, because being originally from the working class does not mean that individuals are incapable of moving into other classes, or that they will always seek to represent the interests of the working class. In much the same way, just because the Chinese state sometimes hands out harsh judgments against individual members of the capitalist class, be they party members or not, that doesn't really say anything, because similar events take place in other countries where the government is headed by parties which do not even have a tenuous historical link to the socialist tradition, as in Russia, where the Putin government has occasionally ranged itself against individual oligarchs. The targeting of individual capitalists and officials in that way is not at all in tension with the basic priorities of capitalist rule, in fact it is a precise expression of capitalist rule, and an effective ideological move on the part of the state, because it makes it seem as if corruption is a problem of individual moral failings and something that can be combated by making an example of high-profile individuals, whereas, of course, corruption in China is endemic to the whole reform process, especially in connection with the privatization of SOEs in the 1990s, and exists primarily at the base level.


In realiy the CCP consists of 80 million members, which are generally drawn from two different backgrounds. There is the "Shanghai clique" which are the party cadres who
come from the more priviliged provinces, and there is the "populist coalition" which are the cadres who rose up from the Communist Youth League (non-priviliged backgrounds.)

There are these different factional arrangements (or, at least, they are the factional arrangements that are talked about and assumed in most discussion of Chinese politics) but it is not the case that they correspond to radically different social backgrounds or different policies. Hu Jintao is often to seen as a member of the CYL faction but he came from an urban background (which, in the Chinese context, and given that Hu was born before 1949, is enough to make Hu's family relatively privileged) and under his leadership the CPC has pursued basically the same policies that characterized other phases of the reform period, including Jiang Zemin's leadership. They are primarily client-patorn faction arrangements that have little social or ideological basis. The same is true of Bo Xilai, who has sometimes been regarded as representing a different political project within the CPC, not least by sections of the Chinese left - Bo's economic policies whilst he was head of Chongqing replicated the same policies and priorities that have been applied in other Chinese provinces (especially the eastern and southern seaboard provinces like Guangdong) throughout the reform period, in that Chongqing was set up to become a base for foreign investment, especially for electronics companies. The overall trend of the CPC since the end of the Mao period has been for the reduction of ideological differences within the party and the closure of spaces and procedures which might allow for ideological debate.

The Chinese bourgeoisie is not in any case something that is external to the party, because individual private capitalists have since 2001 been allowed to become party members, and even those party members and cadres who do not also formally own private enterprises still receive the privileges of exploitation by making use of their political authority to open up economic opportunities for their family members. So I would agree with the argument that we should not look at the issue in terms of capitalists entering the party having already developed wealth outside of it, rather, the entire party-state system is a collective capitalist because the privileges of its members are thoroughly based on exploitation, in different ways and to varying degrees. The wealth of top leaders is especially striking. For example, with Wen Jiabao, who otherwise tries to portray himself as a populist and sympathetic leader, his wife is reputed to control the jewelry industry in China, and his son was formerly the head of a hedge fund with one billion US dollars in assets, having more recently become the CEO of a major state-owned telecommunications company in China. You can see the general nature of this trend from the recent media revelations about the wealth of the members of the National People's Congress, as it was revealed that the 70 richest delegates had a combined wealth of 95 billion US dollars, meaning more than the total wealth of almost the entire US political elite.


The CCP didn't really rise from a workers revolution, it was from a peasant guerilla war, so their politics aren't oriented towards the proletariat, it's oriented towards the bourgeoisie.

This is really a poor argument, it makes the entire history of the CPC and the PRC dependent on an original sin, which is the absence of a socialist revolution of the Bolshevik type. Yes, the lack of working class leadership in the Chinese Revolution did result in certain problems for what followed, but if we want to understand the current state of Chinese politics and the current state of class relations in China, it is not enough to rely on that historical fact, you have also to look at the specific kinds of changes and shifts that have occurred since 1949, particularly in terms of the transition from the Maoist period to the reform period, and individual decisions like the 2001 admission of private capitalists into the party. From what I have seen all your posts on China are a disservice to Trotskyism.

[Positivist]

Really? Those are your indicators of socialist currents in a state's body politic? :confused:

Did I say that they were indicative of socialists currents? No. You at as if anything that isn't explicitly bourgiose must be socialist by default. That's not what I'm arguing. I think that even the left of the CCP is moralistic nationalists, but this is not the same as straight up capitalist (though they are not incompatible.)

[Positivist]

Islandmilitia, in the second paragraph of your response you touched on something which I was wondering about quite a bit myself. The execution of capitalists in China. Reading over your assessment of those acts leads me to consider the CCP as a centralized organ of collective bourgiose rule, though there also seems to be some elements of nationalism within their governance. Examples of this are state investment into athletic, ecological, and social harmony projects. I'm looking for the source but I recently read the testimony of a Chinese business owner who was participating in the construction of one of the new eco-cities, and he said something along the lines of, "the order comes down from Beijing that China is a harmonious, sustainable society and we have to try to make it that way regardless of the cost." I'll try to find the source as that isn't exact but it is a pretty good summary of it.

What is obvious is that the CCP is nationalist. Then what the question boils down to is it a nationalist expression of collective bourgiose rule, or is it a nationalist expression of deformed workers rule. As of now I tend toward considering it to be the former but I am interested in hearing arguments for the latter if there are any.

[right to left]

In my opinion China's Communist Party started playing a very dangerous game when they took the market socialist path in the Deng period and in the 1990s reverted to full blown capitalism.

Because socialist governments have mainly taken root in the non-industrialized world, communist parties have been vexed by a dual mandate: to create an equitable, socialist society on the one hand and to industrialize and develop the productive forces on the other. I do not believe these two goals are incompatible at all. The Soviet Union dramatically proved that you can do both. The Soviet Union also showed (through the NEP) that market socialism can produce growth but can lead to a retrenchment of capitalism that can be difficult and painful to root out in the future.

Many socialist societies have fallen victim to the temptation of reinstating markets or relying on foreign direct investment and loans. Eastern Europe became heavily indebted to Western financiers and this contributed to the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. China has attempted to reinstate capitalism in a much more piecemeal and cautious fashion, and by doing so it has managed to avoid the Eastern European catastrophe.

However, I think the Chinese experience has mirrored the difficulties of the Soviet NEP but on a much larger scale. Trying to introduce capitalism and market mechanisms in a context of global capitalist dominance and imperialist encirclement is not a good strategy. Capitalism takes root like a cancer and begins to eat away at the efforts to build socialism. This is what I see happening in China.

The trend since the 1970s has been to make China more capitalist in nearly every conceivable way. Privatizations have massively increased. Many of the Party elite's children are going into business (Hu Jintao's son, for example). The "iron rice bowl" is basically gone. Workplace democracy obviously does not exist anymore. Inequality, especially urban/rural equality has skyrocketed as the massive population of rural migrant workers are exploited in factories and sweatshops.

I don't see any trends in China today that suggest it will take a left turn like the Soviet Union did under Stalin. All signs point to capitalism becoming increasingly dominant as China moves to rival the U.S. as a capitalist world power.
I was thinking something similar, that there had been a long-standing conflict between what in the West called "hardliners" and "moderates" for several decades in the Chinese Communist Party. And from what I recall, Deng Tsiou Peng was brought into leadership by the Premier - Zhou En Lai earlier in his career, before being purged by Mao's so called hard line followers. And then Deng came back and the rest like they say is history!

Today, from what I understand, there are serious and growing gaps in income and wealth disparity in China, and there is also unrest that is rarely reported when peasants are forced off their land for some major private development, and become migrant labourers looking for work in the southern sweat shops. So, aside from the Communist Party label, there doesn't seem to be much in the sense of ideological purity in most of the leaders of the Party.

One possible exception, and a story I would like to learn more about if someone has the answers is related to the recent sensational trail and conviction of murdering a British businessman by the wife of a former mayor and high ranking member of the Politburo - Bo Xilai. My only familiarity with the story of his purge last year was from an NPR feature that mentioned that Bo was a harsh critic of capitalism and the growing wealthy class that owned new businesses and real estate; and he was considered the leader of those within the Party who wanted to move away from laissez-faire capitalism and uncontrolled economic growth. And, I guess his purge and removal from office indicates that the capitalists within the Party have little opposition within.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

I'm not sure how much it's worth that there is a 'populist' faction in the CCP.

Wasn't Bo Xilai the pin up boy for this populism? And, talking of living conditions, isn't his son Oxford educated with a ferrari? I'm really not sure the difference between the 'national bourgeoisie' and 'populist' factions in the CCP amounts to much more than petty politicking, akin to the Democrats and Republicans, the Tories and the Liberal Democrats, the CDU and SPD.

[Die Neue Zeit]

The issue with peasantry is that it has been proven impossible for them to organize seperately from the bourgeoisie.

Actually, the opposite has been quite true. Peasant populism in Eastern Europe wasn't exactly friendly to bourgeois interests.


Populism is a bourgeois ideology

No it isn't. By and large it is petit-bourgeois, and only those populisms that aren't communitarian tend to be susceptible to bourgeois influences.

[Positivist]

Actually, the opposite has been quite true. Peasant populism in Eastern Europe wasn't exactly friendly to bourgeois interests.



No it isn't. By and large it is petit-bourgeois, and only those populisms that aren't communitarian tend to be susceptible to bourgeois influences.

Thank you, enough with this anti-peasant bullshit.