BOOK REVIEWS

Lü Xiaobo, Cadres and Corruption - The Organizational Involution of the Chinese Communist Party

The publication of Lü Xiaobo’s book could not have been timelier. Indeed, its appearance coincided with the launch of Peking’s anti-corruption drive early last year, a campaign that was marked by two key events.

One was the release of the film Shengsi Jueze (Fatal Decision)((1), highly recommended by central government to members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the former seeing in the film a way to discourage the latter from falling foul of the law. And, for those who might have failed to learn from the fate of the film’s protagonists—it was only fiction, after all—the other big event, namely the sensational trial arising out of the Yuanhua affair in Xiamen, and its outcome (14 people condemned to death and 12 to life imprisonment((2) were there to remind them that the leaders of the CCP will not hesitate to inflict the most extreme penalties on offenders.

Yet, preventive and punitive measures, however necessary, could not erase the scourge of corruption, because they counter only its symptoms. As Sun Zi has said, to emerge victorious from battle you have to know yourself and know your enemy. It amounts to saying that the anti-corruption campaign, such as is being conducted at present by the Chinese authorities, is bound to fail as long as the latter make no attempt to understand the whys and hows of the phenomenon. This is precisely what Lü Xiaobo is doing in his book.

It opens with an introductory chapter in which the writer begins by discussing the definition of corruption and what is at stake. At the end of a cleverly handled account, exhaustive yet concise, he presents his own definition of corruption among cadres. It ranges very widely, and includes not only criminal acts but also every form of individual and collective deviation from the organisational standards to which the regime hopes its cadres will conform. Furthermore, starting off from the principle that one cannot understand the corruption of cadres while limiting one’s study to the phenomenon itself, the author underlines the significance of the social and political context in which it arises. He himself takes the decision to single out one aspect of that context, that is to say, the regime’s organisation.

So he runs through the stages by which the structures of the Party and its membership were changed since they came to power, according to the following arrangement: the regime’s early years (Chapter 1), the Great Leap Forward (Chapter 2), the 1960s and the Cultural Revolution (Chapter 3) and then the period of the reforms (Chapters 4 and 5). Chapter by chapter he develops his thesis: he contends that the corruption of Party officials, that began well before the period of the reforms, takes different forms according to the changing economic environment. He takes issue thus with all those who implicitly attribute the origins of this problem only to the malfunctioning of the market in communist economies during periods of transition. In his view, the corruption of cadres results from the way in which the Party developed over the past fifty years; for a post-revolutionary regime, he believes, these were years of involution. They led to “neo-traditionalist” practices—the fatal word!—characterised by informal methods of operating, cellular institutions, personal networking and corruption of a non-economic nature.

Let us be clear. Involution is, on the one hand, the opposite of evolution—in which revolutionary integrity is maintained—and, on the other, it is distinct from what the writer calls “devolutionary” theories (p. 233). These would predict that, once a revolutionary movement is in power, it becomes bureaucratic and abandons its ideology and its aims. Involution, however, is seen as a “dynamic process” and “happens when a revolutionary movement refuses to become bureaucratised and yet is unable to continue to integrate the organization by means of revolutionary modes such as mass mobilization […] and ideological indoctrination” (p. 230). This explains the book’s supplementary title, The Organizational Involution of the Chinese Communist Party. The reader will note that Lü Xiaobo’s thesis is in direct line with the work by Kenneth Jowitt((3) and Andrew Walder((4) on communist neo-traditionalism.

After his analysis of the different types of corruption among officials, Lü Xiaobo moves on also, in his final chapter, to other more theoretical questions, such as the evolution of relations between Party and state in the post-revolutionary period, the dynamics governing relations between leaders and their teams within a communist regime as well as the transformation of the role and characteristics of the state and the administrative elite. Lü Xiaobo’s book is founded on rich documentation, made up of a vast collection of hitherto unpublished sources and interviews; and it offers, in consequence, a new conceptual framework that helps us to perceive the trajectory of China, in particular, and that of communist societies, in general. The whole enterprise is well argued and succinctly written.

Returning to the subject of Sun Zi. If the Chinese government could only keep the master’s teaching in mind, it would realise that it is no good struggling against the corruption of its cadres by merely treating the symptoms. By contrast, if it tried to understand the Party’s evolution, or should one say “involution”, it would discover that the causes of the scourge are structural. There is only one solution for Chinese leaders: they must read Cadres and Corruption, and reflect on it at length.

Translated from French by Philip Liddell