Cambridge, UK; Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2018. x, 195 pp. US$24.95, paper; US$16.99, ebook. ISBN 978-1-5095-2456-3.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is a much-researched organization, but the reasons for its survival after the collapse of the Soviet Union are still a matter of heated academic debate. With his monograph, Kerry Brown makes a refreshing contribution to the study of the CCP’s resilience and way of ruling. However, while the academic questions that lie at the heart of this book are not new, Brown takes a rather different perspective in his discussion of them and offers answers to what the CCP is and how it works. He wants to understand the CCP in its own right and bridge “the dichotomy between the party’s inner language and the language of the world about it” (13). He thereby aims to analyze the way the party understands itself and what it aims for rather than simply provide an outside perspective.
Following this approach of uncovering the party’s self-understanding, Brown argues for seeing the CCP not solely as a political entity but rather as a social cultural movement. By transcending the view of the party as a purely political organization, he claims that it is necessary to understand the factors that matter to the party, define its goals, and drive its actions. Such a perspective is important because it not only allows for understanding how the party sees itself, but also how it wants to legitimize its rule, as well as examine the changes in political approaches and ideological narratives over the last seventy years since the foundation of the People’s Republic of China. For doing this, Brown offers a framework of four narratives—historic, moral, ideological, and aesthetic—at the core of the party’s self-understanding and mission. The historic narrative that is supposed to legitimate the rule of the CCP has its roots in the party’s promise to deliver justice and redemption to China after being wronged at the hands of Western imperialist powers. It is also this historic narrative and mission of achieving a national renaissance that he sees as the basis of the party’s moral narrative. The moral narrative centres on the idea of remobilizing party members’ spirit of self-sacrifice and service for the greater mission—the goal of which lies in the historic narrative. In addition to these two, Brown argues that there is also an ideological narrative that revolves around the Sinicized version of Marxism-Leninism and the teleological view of historic progress that is embedded in Marxism. He discusses in detail the adaptations and ideological developments of Chinese leaders and sees this narrative as an element legitimizing a sometimes contradictory, yet forward-looking and progressive, ideological discourse. The last narrative he proposes is an aesthetic one, where the task of art is to reflect the party’s view of reality and serve its political goals and larger mission.
The contribution that Brown’s book makes to the large field of studies on the CCP is a twofold one. The first important contribution, which deviates from the approach of most other authors, is that he wants to analyze how the CCP sees itself and what the party considers important for its rule. While, as he acknowledges himself, this undertaking is largely descriptive, his approach is nevertheless quite relevant. Considering that a lot of mainstream theories of the social sciences seem to be of limited explanatory power when trying to understand why the CCP remains in power, when its demise has been predicted at ample opportunities, it is a promising approach to analyze the party through its own discourse. Offering this new lens of looking at the party is one of the major contributions of Brown’s book. The second contribution is an analytical one as well, and follows from the first. In arguing for seeing the party as a social-cultural movement (as it understands itself) and not only as a political organization, Brown proposes a broader and deeper way of understanding the party. While researching the involvement of the party in social and cultural activities and organizations is not a new strand of research, Brown’s analysis moves beyond the analysis of institutional structures. He rather focuses on the party’s narratives and the discursive impact it wants to have on both its members and on Chinese society more broadly for legitimizing its rule. While this is of course a much less tangible element in which to view how the party works, he thereby proposes a new and very valuable lens for understanding the CCP.
These two major strengths of this book, however, also contain the main issues that the book grapples with. Brown compellingly discusses the manner in which the party understands itself, and identifies four narratives for understanding this legitimizing discourse; yet, the way he interlinks these narratives seems to suggest that they, with all their twists and turns, were always supposed to serve an overarching goal—the goal of the historic narrative. Because this goal is the delivery of justice and redemption for a wronged nation—and under Xi Jinping ultimately the creation of a rich and strong China—the reader sometimes wonders how far this narrative is different from an outright nationalist discourse. The second issue in this context is the question of the ideological narrative and how far it is a narrative in which to believe. In different parts of his book, Brown seems to propose different answers to the question of what exactly party members have to believe, and whether it is more than just the party’s mission to create a rich and strong China. These issues are admittedly closely linked to Brown’s approach since such tensions are embedded in the CCP’s discourses themselves. While he does not entirely dissolve these tensions, Brown’s book is nevertheless an innovative contribution to the academic debate on the Chinese Communist Party and offers a novel and promising analytical lens for understanding it.
Carolin Kautz
Goettingen University, Goettingen