Routledge Contemporary China Series, 61. New York; London: Routledge, 2013, c2011. xx,180 pp.(Figures, Tables.) US$44.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-415-85526-6.
Gore’s book represents a renewal of scholarly interest in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), a topic which has been neglected for two decades. This persuasive study analyses the transformation of the largest ruling communist party in the world, which, despite its contradictions with marketization, and unlike its Eastern European counterparts, gained 72 percent of its current membership in the past thirty years (4). However, the CCP is experiencing an atrophy of its grassroots organizations in urban and rural areas, undermining its vertical integration. The CCP’s role in enterprise is declining, although, unlike the East Asian developmental state, it plants itself inside the businesses (128). The CCP is adapting by reformulating its goals and roles along pragmatic lines, and picking up the characteristics of market institutions. However, the different living conditions of party members make ideological unity impossible, as party membership holds no common meaning beyond its role as a label. The party is independent of any class, as, despite its rhetorical claims to represent and focus on the recruitment of the proletariat and peasants, these groups have been the biggest losers in the reform era and have not been a source of party expansion since the 1950s (20, 57). The CCP is no longer an avant-garde party. It is evolving into a corporatist-elitist party of the middle class, striving to serve the community in exchange for loyalty.
In one theoretical and four empirical chapters, Gore approaches the transformation of the CCP through the sociological lens of institutional isomorphism on the basis of a wide range of materials, both central and local, from across the country. These include newspapers, statistical reports, and party-building publications, as well as materials from government and quasi-governmental non-profit organizations, state-owned business corporations, and local party organizations, such as party-building websites, investigative reports, recruiting plans, meeting minutes, self-evaluation forms, online courses for potential party recruits, and works by scholars from party schools and research institutes.
Gore examines the adaptation of the CCP in China’s new mass society, new market-era institutions and job and residential patterns. Except for on college campuses, which are a focus of CCP recruitment efforts and which provide over one-third of new members each year, the party is struggling to stay relevant in corporate governance, in the private sector, and among the middle class, that is, the “managerial personnel” and “technical and professional specialists,” i.e., professional intellectuals who have always been crucial for party building (66). The CCP has adapted by professionalizing party cadres and creating interlocking positions in party- and state-owned enterprises. As the motivation for party membership among students is often not ideological but nationalist, pragmatic (for recruiters, party membership indicates quality and connections), and social (due to family pressure), Gore raises the question whether the CCP still recruits communists (79). The CCP’s efforts to recruit capitalists who can provide jobs and stability—and one-third of whom are party members (65)—present the danger of creating a hybrid ruling class, not unlike the “bureaucratic capitalist class” that the CCP overthrew in 1949, that can undermine the party’s autonomy in policy making (127).
Gore’s conclusion that the CCP is now pressed to revive the tactics of the United Front, which it used against the GMD before coming to power in 1949 (65), brings to mind other commonalities with that time of struggle for survival of the underground CCP in China proper and overseas. These similarities are the synergy of lineage and religious associations with grassroots party organizations in the countryside (50–56); the dilution of ideology; the struggles to overcome the party’s irrelevance to the private sector; and the attempts to relate the party to this private sector through social organizations and public events, finding new “carriers” among market and administration organizations (such as trade associations) (62–65). Much like the Malayan Communist Party—which was, organizationally, a branch of the CCP—did in the 1930s, the CCP now facilitates employment, as well as business ties among mobile party members whose mobility today challenges party recruitment strategies (113). Moreover, this synergy of the party with migrant associations was not only manifested in the organizational and functional similarities between the Malayan Communist Party and Chinese associations which I found in my own research, but in some of the early party organizations in mainland China, which emerged as adaptation organizations among youth migrating from rural areas to the city for their studies (Yeh Wen-hsin, Provincial Passages:Culture, Space, and the Origins of Chinese Communism, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
Gore concludes that the future direction of the CCP’s current transformation is uncertain. The CCP is once again becoming, as in its pre-1949 underground times, a nationalist party with large student participation and flexible ideology, facilitating migrant adaptation, and recruiting capitalists. This important study of the CCP adaptation shows the need for new questions about the organizational nature of the CCP, as well as about Chinese organizations broadly, since the CCP’s structure is already being appropriated as an organizational model for other institutions, such as protestant home churches (Karrie J. Koesel, “The Rise of a Chinese House Church: The Organizational Weapon,” The China Quarterly 215, Sept. 2013, 572–589).
Anna Belogurova
University of Oregon, Eugene, USA
pp. 571-573