# Party of One  ## Metadata - Author: [[Chun Han Wong]] - Full Title: Party of One - Category: #books ## Highlights - “Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? An important reason was that their ideals and convictions wavered,” Xi told officials at the Central Party School.1 “Their ideology became confused, party groups at all levels became virtually ineffective, even the military was no longer under the party’s leadership. In the end, a party as vast as the Soviet Communist Party scattered like birds and beasts, and a socialist state as colossal as the Soviet Union fell to pieces. This is a warning from the past!” ([Location 63](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHZXPT2Y&location=63)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The party’s slide toward this moral morass dated back to Mao’s death in 1976. After a brief interregnum, Deng Xiaoping became paramount leader and sought to inoculate the party from the perils of one-man rule. Senior leaders shared power, encouraged timely retirement, and made plans for orderly succession. Though Deng himself dominated politics until his death in 1997, he and his supporters tried to professionalize the government, fast-tracking capable cadres up the hierarchy. They seeded pro-market reforms that spurred China’s economic miracle, bringing about three decades of breakneck growth. Millions of rural Chinese rushed into the cities to fill jobs on expanding factory floors. Private businesses flourished and living standards soared. Hundreds of millions joined the country’s fast-swelling middle class. After China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, foreign investment flooded in while exports poured out across the globe. ([Location 93](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHZXPT2Y&location=93)) - Tags: [[blue]] - With time the ideological decay grew so worrisome that some within the party sensed looming disaster. A year before Xi took power, dozens of his fellow “second-generation reds” assembled in Beijing’s central business district for an unusual confab. It was a who’s who of Communist royalty, including descendants of party grandees, ministers, and generals, and even a half sister of Xi. Officially, the occasion was a seminar marking thirty-five years since the “Gang of Four”—a radical faction led by Mao’s wife—was arrested for fanning the bloody excesses of the 1966–1976 Cultural Revolution. But as with many political gatherings in China, discussing the past was a pretext for critiquing the present. Lu De, whose father had been a propaganda minister under Mao, lamented the loss of ideals and rectitude among officials, who he claimed were splurging some 37 percent of all government expenditure on personal perks like dining and travel.4 “The Communist Party is like a surgeon who has cancer,” said Ma Xiaoli, the daughter of a former labor minister. “It can’t remove the tumor by itself, it needs help from others, but without help it can’t survive for long.”5 ([Location 112](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHZXPT2Y&location=112)) - Tags: [[blue]] - “The efforts by international capitalist forces to subvert socialist systems through ‘peaceful evolution’ will get more and more intense,” wrote Xi in late 1991, as a municipal party boss.7 “They will never give up on subverting, infiltrating, damaging and disturbing a major socialist power like us.” ([Location 131](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHZXPT2Y&location=131)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The party imposed a political monopoly so complete that it has intertwined itself with almost every fiber of Chinese society. Party members overwhelmingly staff government agencies from Beijing down to remote village offices. They control the mass media, manage state-owned companies, supervise civic and religious groups, and preside over chambers of commerce and labor unions. They command the domestic security forces and the People’s Liberation Army, the ultimate enforcers of party authority. In the Chinese body politic, the party acts as the brain, nerves, sinews, and muscles. Its dysfunction imperils the state, but it can’t be easily replaced. For Xi, and others invested in perpetuating Communist rule, the only option is to heal. ([Location 147](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHZXPT2Y&location=147)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The maladies, as Xi diagnosed them, are multifold. He saw that a diffuse leadership was impeding the decisive governance that China needed to cope with twenty-first-century challenges. A corrupt and bloated bureaucracy was eroding the party’s moral standing and ability to govern. A better educated, more pluralistic, and increasingly complex society was tearing at the party’s levers of control. The main anchors of party legitimacy—economic progress and social mobility—were becoming harder to keep in place as China switched gears toward slower, more sustainable growth. Its abandonment of communism, in practice if not in name, meant new ideological glue was needed to unite its members. Such challenges, Xi warned, could “ruin the party and ruin the nation.” ([Location 152](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHZXPT2Y&location=152)) - Tags: [[blue]] - He began with a cleansing, launching a withering crackdown on corruption that punished more than 1.6 million people during his first five years in power. He targeted everyone from rank-and-file “flies” to top-tier “tigers,” including senior officials, executives, generals, and a retired member of the party leadership. He arrested China’s capitalist advance, reining in private entrepreneurs who strayed from the party’s interests, and reinstating the state’s visible hand in shaping the economy. His administration issued a directive, known as Document Number 9, that denounced Western ideas and demanded efforts to reinforce the party’s dominance of ideology. He revived Maoist slogans and practices, waging ideological purges and demanding officials engage in self-criticism. He even restored the centrality of Marxism as the party’s guiding philosophy, celebrating the two hundredth anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth and calling on party members and ordinary Chinese to study the Communist Manifesto. ([Location 174](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHZXPT2Y&location=174)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The party of Xi celebrates its Marxist roots, flexes its coercive powers, and hides behind no one. Its leader demands to be seen, heard, and obeyed. ([Location 187](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHZXPT2Y&location=187)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Xi sought similar preeminence by turning to the true source of the party’s power—its stories. Mao was a superlative storyteller, famously invoking the ancient Chinese fable “Foolish Old Man Moves Mountains” as a rallying cry against imperialist and feudal oppression and to build a powerful, prosperous “new China.” ([Location 199](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHZXPT2Y&location=199)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The Communist Party can retain power through coercion, but to flourish it must persuade. Xi emerged as storyteller-in-chief, promising a Chinese manifest destiny that only he could deliver. ([Location 207](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHZXPT2Y&location=207)) - Tags: [[blue]] - “Mao Zedong let the Chinese people stand up, Deng Xiaoping let the Chinese people get rich, Xi Jinping will let the Chinese people get strong.” ([Location 213](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHZXPT2Y&location=213)) - Tags: [[blue]] - “People who have little contact with power, who are far from it, always see these things as mysterious and novel.… I understand politics on a deeper level.” —Xi Jinping ([Location 273](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHZXPT2Y&location=273)) - Tags: [[blue]] - For the first time in thirty-five years, a Chinese head of state was inaugurated with no limits on his tenure. And in a departure from two decades of precedent, a Chinese president was starting his second term without a deputy young enough to be his successor. Xi could stay in office indefinitely, and was in effect telling the world that he would. ([Location 289](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHZXPT2Y&location=289)) - Tags: [[blue]] - China’s presidency is largely ceremonial. ([Location 292](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHZXPT2Y&location=292)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The head of state is China’s face to the world, presented to audiences abroad as “president,” a label shorn of the authoritarian aura that shrouds leaders of one-party regimes. And while he does possess the awesome executive authority wielded by counterparts in the United States and Russia, those powers come not from the presidency, but from two other roles he concurrently serves. ([Location 294](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHZXPT2Y&location=294)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The first is general secretary of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, the highest office in a sprawling political machine that boasts more than 96 million members and has governed China since 1949. The other is chairman of the party’s Central Military Commission, a council of mostly martial men who command the armed forces. These positions are the true keys to the Middle Kingdom, controlling the most powerful organs of state in one of the world’s most populous nations. ([Location 297](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHZXPT2Y&location=297)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The task of healing this generational trauma fell to Deng Xiaoping, a revered revolutionary who deposed Mao’s successor to become paramount leader. Already in his seventies when he took power, Deng devoted himself to stamping out the vestiges of Maoism and devising safeguards against one-man rule. In a landmark 1980 speech, he called for reforms to encourage power-sharing, promote succession, and ensure that no leadership post could be held indefinitely.3 His demands yielded China’s 1982 constitution, which imposed term limits on major offices of state—like the presidency and the premiership—that allowed appointees to serve no more than two consecutive stints of five years. But Deng operated above his own strictures, never serving as the titular party chief or head of state even as he wielded preponderant sway until his death in 1997. He fashioned himself a trustee of the nation, whose job was to deliver a stable and prosperous China by creating power structures conducive to collective leadership and peaceful succession.4 He allowed his protégés and peers to hold office as general secretary, premier, and president, while he kept control over the People’s Liberation Army as military commission chairman. This arrangement crumbled in the heat of crisis during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, when divisions within the leadership hampered a decisive response. Deng ultimately decided to crush the demonstrations with deadly force, and purged the incumbent general secretary—a protégé whom he blamed for supporting the protesters and splitting the party. Deng tried a different tack after sending the PLA to put down the protests in what became known as the June 4 massacre. He opted to centralize key powers with one man, who would be kept in check by influential peers. His choice of heir was Jiang Zemin, ([Location 313](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHZXPT2Y&location=313)) - Tags: [[blue]] - When Jiang assumed the presidency in 1993, he became the first Chinese leader since Mao to hold office as head of the party, military, and state concurrently. Even so, Jiang often found himself hemmed in by powerful rivals and had to govern as “first among equals.” He couldn’t even pick his successor, a choice all but made for him by Deng. ([Location 327](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHZXPT2Y&location=327)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The party now recounts Xi’s rise with the teleological certitude it uses for proclaiming China’s inexorable return to greatness. But there was nothing preordained about his ascent. Xi suffered political persecution during his formative years, his career in local and regional government appeared undistinguished, and his rivals sometimes seemed likelier to succeed. When he first emerged as heir apparent, some observers argued that the party’s kingmakers saw in Xi a pliable puppet, crediting his rise to his perceived weakness. ([Location 373](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHZXPT2Y&location=373)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The misjudgment of Xi was no accident. To ascend the byzantine world of Chinese politics, where officials who advertise allegiances too firmly expose themselves to reprisals when orthodoxies change, Xi made himself inoffensive and inscrutable in his early career. He appeared amenable to friends and rivals alike, with his public remarks seldom straying from perfunctory praise for party policies and routine condemnation of corruption and red tape. Unvarnished accounts of his personal life are rare and patchy. In 2000, while he was a provincial governor, Xi said he had rejected more than one hundred interview requests.13 Even some of Xi’s fellow princelings concede to having misjudged a longtime friend. ([Location 392](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHZXPT2Y&location=392)) - Tags: [[blue]] - as the celebrated American biographer Robert Caro observed, power reveals. “When a man is climbing, trying to persuade others to give him power, concealment is necessary: to hide traits that might make others reluctant to give him power, to hide also what he wants to do with that power,” Caro wrote in the fourth volume of his biography of U.S. president Lyndon Johnson. “But as a man obtains more power, camouflage is less necessary. The curtain begins to rise. The revealing begins.”14 ([Location 398](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHZXPT2Y&location=398)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Many second-generation reds, or hongerdai, grew up in a bubble of relative luxury in central Beijing. Families of senior officials typically lived in large courtyard homes, enjoyed access to foreign books and films, and sent their children to top schools. Privileges were pegged to rank, and those who qualified could enjoy perks such as official cars, security details, superior health care, and access to exclusive entertainment venues and summer resorts. ([Location 414](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHZXPT2Y&location=414)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The patriarch told so many stories about his revolutionary exploits that his children’s ears “grew calluses,” Xi Jinping later recalled.20 “Among the children in our family, Jinping was the most mischievous and the smartest,” Xi’s half brother Zhengning told an acquaintance. “Father loved him the most.”21 ([Location 425](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHZXPT2Y&location=425)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Xi Zhongxun was a strict and frugal parent. He often declined gifts for his children. He taught them to save water and electricity. ([Location 428](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHZXPT2Y&location=428)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The elder Xi instructed his personal aide not to indulge his children if they asked for extra cash.24 “Sometimes,” Qi later wrote in an essay, “I really felt that you were too demanding of our children.”25 ([Location 434](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHZXPT2Y&location=434)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Mao praised Xi for his selfless service to the revolution, and in 1943 gifted him a piece of calligraphy: “The party’s interests come first.”29 ([Location 447](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHZXPT2Y&location=447)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Notwithstanding Xi’s efforts to shield his children from morally corrosive privilege, they received some of the best schooling that Maoist China had to offer. ([Location 453](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHZXPT2Y&location=453)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Mao’s security chief, Kang Sheng, denounced the novel as a manifesto for Xi Zhongxun and his alleged co-conspirators. “Making use of a novel to carry out anti-party activities is a major invention,” Kang wrote in a note to Mao, who read it aloud during a Central Committee meeting and effectively condemned Xi.38 Despite Xi’s protests of innocence, the party stripped him of his posts and revoked almost all the official perks that his family had enjoyed. Xi struggled emotionally with his downfall, and Zhou Enlai told Qi Xin to make sure that her husband didn’t try to harm himself, according to historian Joseph Torigian, who cited memoirs, unpublished diaries, and interviews with friends of the family.39 In an essay, Qi recalled her husband sitting silently in the living room with the lights off, a puzzling sight for their younger daughter An’an, who asked: “Daddy, what’s the matter?” Their younger son, Yuanping, asked: “Daddy, why aren’t you going to Zhongnanhai?”40 ([Location 483](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHZXPT2Y&location=483)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Historians believe Mao’s goals were twofold. Stung by his loss of prestige from the Great Leap Forward, the Chairman wanted to reclaim his authority that other party elders had siphoned from him. The movement, as Mao envisioned, would also tear down the party’s ossifying bureaucracy, cleanse its ranks of self-serving apparatchiks, and restore revolutionary fervor to China. ([Location 500](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHZXPT2Y&location=500)) - Tags: [[blue]]