China's Communist Party - Atrophy and Adaptation

Bought David Shambaugh’s book China’s Communist Party Atrophy and Adaptation (Woodrow Wilson Centre Press, 2008) in Hong Kong in March 2009 mainly because 1) I could not agree more with the title and 2) Shambaugh was a former professor.

Probably one of the best books that I have read on the CCP. And I am saying this not because of (2).

The central conclusion of Shambaugh's book is that the CCP is adapting fairly (but not entirely) effectively in meeting many of its challenges, has learned the negative lessons of other failed communist party states, and is "proactively attempting to reform and rebuild itself institutionally – thereby sustaining its political legitimacy and power."

But whether the CCP can continue to make the necessary adaptations and enact the necessary reforms is, in Shambaugh’s words "an open question. So far, so good – but this is no guarantee of continued success."

One way the CCP had adapted was by co-opting the entrepreneurial class into the party. Citing an analysis conducted by Bruce Dickson, Shambaugh noted that the co-optation pre-dated Jiang Zemin's 2001 high-profile speech. Apparently, the policy was experimented with at a sub-national level for some time before being adopted as a national policy.

"In fact, this policy had apparently existed in the late 1980s but was suspended in August 1989," Shambaugh wrote.

Co-opting entrepreneurs is said to be new in China but not to other communist parties. Several East European parties, especially those in Hungary and Romania, had earlier adopted such a policy.

"Even Nikita Khrushchev spoke of making the Soviet Communist Party "a party of the whole people." Such an "inclusionist" tactic, to use Kenneth Jowitt's terminology, is politically astute because if such advanced and progressive classes are not included in the party-state, they are likely to form the basis of external opposition to it. Thus, such a move by the CCP is to be interpreted as a preemptive tactic as much as it is an adaptive one."

Good for the CCP I suppose, especially since both Dickson and Kellee Tsai, author of Capitalism Without Democracy came to the similar conclusion that private entrepreneurs and the emerging middle class “are not going to demand regime change.”

Drawing experience from the collapse of the Soviet Union, the CCP attempted to be more flexible and adaptable but while doing so, it "finds itself coping with a constant cycle of reform-readjust-reform-readjust, whereby each set of reforms triggers certain consequences (some expected, others unexpected) that in turn cause readjustments and further reforms."

"It is an inexorable dynamic in which the party is simultaneously proactive and reactive, and is only partially in control of its own fate."