Summary |
The political and economic growth of china in the past three decades is one of astonishing, epochal dimensions. The country has undergone a remarkable transformation on a scale similar to the industrial revolution in the west. The most remarkable part of this transformation, however, has been largely left untold-the central role of the Chinese communist party.
As an organization alone, the party is a phenomenon of unique scale and power. With more than seventy-three million members, it does more than just rule a country. The party not only has a grip on every aspect of government, from the largest, richest cities to the smallest far-flung villages in Tibet and Xinxiang, it also has a hold on all official religions, the media, and the military. The party presides over large, wealthy state-owned businesses, and it exercises control over the selection of senior executives of all government companies, many of which are in the top tier of the fortune 500 list.
In the party, Richard McGregor delves deeply into china’s inner sanctum for the time, showing how the communist party controls the country, and how it keeps all corruption accusations against its members in-house. As the world’s new geopolitical force, the party makes decisions that have a global impact, yet it remains a deeply secretive body, hostile to the law, unaccountable to anybody or anything other than its own internal tribunals, and primed to think the worst of the west.
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