The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers by Richard McGregor Page B

but rejected the argument that judges and lawyers had to be independent as a result. ‘Enemy forces’, he said, were trying to use the law to undermine and divide China. ‘There is no question about where legal departments should stand,’ he said. ‘The correct political stand is where the Party stands.’
    Chinese leaders have long debated the merits of a Chinese-style separation of powers doctrine that would put greater distance between the Party and the state. After years of largely fruitless discussion, they simply gave up, because a single-party state cannot countenance such a reform. The idea of a genuine split has now become a little passé, because to pursue the notion to its logical conclusion would risk gutting the Party’s control over the state. ‘Deng talked a lot about the separation of the Party and government and great efforts were made in this area,’ said Hu Jintao’s adviser. ‘But basically, after it reached a certain stage, the idea stalled.’
    No legal obstacle is so great that the Party cannot brush it aside. For the security services, the single line in the constitution about the Party’s leadership role of the country has always been sufficient legal basis to arrest any critic. Hu Jia, one of China’s bravest dissidents, used to ask the plain-clothes police who waited on his doorstep to stop him leaving his apartment under what Chinese law he was detained. Hu Jia’s questions enraged the police. Some were so angry they beat him up. One day, he said, one of them finally responded to his question, blurting out the grounds for detention. ‘Under the preamble to the Chinese constitution!’ the policeman yelled, before dragging Hu away.
    Hu Jia was jailed in mid-2008 for allegedly working with foreigners to subvert the Beijing Olympics. The Party nailed Professor He in the end as well, with a little more subtlety. Tired by the endless politics of life in the capital, Professor He resigned from Peking University and took up an offer in 2008 to become the new dean of the law department at Zhejiang University. The authorities first strong-armed the institution in Hangzhou to withdraw the job offer. Then they forced He, who had been left in professional limbo, to take a temporary position at Shihezi University, a lowly ranked institution in Xinjiang, in far-western China. It was a deliberately humiliating transfer, akin to a Harvard Law School professor being reassigned to a small community college in rural Texas.
     
     
    If the Party, locked in its ossified Leninist ways, is secretive, corrupt, hostile to the rule of law and vindictive in the pursuit of its enemies, it begs the question: how on earth did it manage to preside over one of the greatest spurts of economic growth and wealth creation in recorded history?
    The Party’s genius has been its leaders’ ability in the last three decades to maintain the political institutions and authoritarian powers of old-style communism, while dumping the ideological straitjacket that inspired them. The Party’s conscious retreat from the private lives of Chinese citizens over the same period had a similarly liberating effect on society. The dehumanization of everyday life that characterized traditional communist societies has largely disappeared in China, along with the food queues. In the process, the Party has pulled off a remarkable political feat, somehow managing to hitch the power and legitimacy of a communist state to the drive and productivity of an increasingly entrepreneurial economy.
    In place of Mao’s totalitarian terror, the Party has substituted a kind of take-it-or-leave-it compact with society. If you play by the Party’s rules, which means eschewing competitive politics, then you and your family can get on with your lives and maybe get rich. But the deal does not exist in isolation. It is buttressed by a pervasive propaganda system which constantly derides alternatives to the Party. The underlying message is that the Party alone