 a very warm welcome, very warm welcome to the Sousa China Institute seminar. Today I'm delighted that we have a very distinguished speaker who will be addressing a highly important subject and the subject is Carter Country, how China became the Chinese Communist Party. And the speaker is Professor John Fitzgerald, who is a distinguished historian of China and the Chinese diaspora. He was educated at the University of Sydney and the Australian National University. He had served as the head of the Asia Pacific Center for Social Investment and Philanthropy at Spinbond University. He had also served as the China representative of the Ford Foundation in Beijing and as president of the Australian Academy of Humanities. He is the author or editor of at least five books that I know of and I would like to underline that they include at least two award-winning books. And the first I would like to flag up is Big White Line, Chinese Australians in White Australia, which won the Ernest Scott Prize of the Australian Historical Association. And the other book which also had won the prize is Awakening China, Politics, Culture and Class in Nationalist Revolution. And that one's the Joseph Levison Prize of the Association for Asian Studies. The subject is based on, the subject he's taking on today is based on his new book by the same title. And it is a fantastic book, one that I think deserve a lot of attention and perhaps recognition like some of his earlier works. With that, let me hand over to you, John Professor Fitzgerald. Thank you, Steve. And thanks to the SOAS China Institute for inviting me. I'm absolutely delighted to have this opportunity to talk about this very pink book, Carder Country, How China Became the Chinese Communist Party. Putting this book together was a challenge and enjoyable, particularly as it involved reviewing what people in China have been saying about their own country in recent decades and then reviewing what they were saying about their country 50 years ago, but then 100 years ago and sometimes 150 to 200 years ago. And I tried to bring these insights together into an understanding where China's coming from and where it's heading. I hope readers find it approachable and engaging. It's not designed as an academic work, but more a work addressing a general public, but drawing on some of the finest research that others have undertaken in recent years. As we know, China has a remarkable history, many great thinkers and innovators and reading what they've had to say and hearing what they do say now is always enjoyable and informative. And much about China's unique, although a lot too. It has in common with other countries. The emphasis in this book is on what makes Xi Jinping's China different, different from historical China, different from Deng Xiaoping's China and the now bygone reform era and very different from a constitutional democracy. And to highlight these points of difference, I focus on the role and the world of China's party and government cadres, the tens of millions of bureaucrats loyal to the party who are in command of everything, as Xi Jinping says, from north to south to east to west and to center. Of course, center is the most important point on the compass of all in China at any rate. And in discussing cadres are right about difference in a kind of contrarian mode to counter those in China and abroad, who would say that Xi Jinping's China is a modern refit of its Confucian past. And also to counter those outside China who claim China is just another instance of an efficient authoritarian East Asian state becoming just like us in that momentable expression. Like Taiwan under Zheng Kai-shek or South Korea under President Park Jong-hee, that is playing development catch up with an interventionist authoritarian government, but eventually on the path to constitutional democracy. Well, that's not how it seems from where I sit. And certainly not as Steinring and pointed out in his book, The Perfect Dictatorship, certainly not how we should understand where China is today. It's not like South Korea. It's not like Taiwan. It's not like Japan, for that matter in the post-war period. I quote Professor Ringen, the party state is like no other state. The socialist market economy is like no other economy. China is different. And China under Xi Jinping is, I argue, not difference in this sense, not just and also rang among the world's authoritarian regimes, but a party state of unprecedented size engaged in an attempt to consume what is now a relatively liberal society and economy over which Xi Jinping has come to preside. So China today has achievements and problems of its own making. And the party leadership has decided to manage those achievements and those problems as a Communist Party would by sticking to its original intentions. Or as President Xi says, Chairman Xi says, that's a very important expression in contemporary China. And the party is very frank about this. It insists it's not following the East Asian authoritarian model, but adhering instead to its original intentions, its chosen as a Leninist vanguard party to ensure it achieves development while retaining sovereignty. That's another expression that's widely used, that this why China differs straight from Japan or Taiwan or South Korea is that it maintains Jutran, where they have long surrendered theirs in Beijing's view. Now what party theorists mean by this retaining sovereignty is that South Korea, Taiwan and Japan certainly developed along shall we say a similar model, but then turned democratic under pressure from the United States. That's not China's intention. But more importantly, in claiming to preserve national sovereignty, China's communists tell us that in their view, opening the country's political system to democratic participation, to civic freedoms, to electoral accountability, that is transitioning to a constitutional government which recognises equal citizenship, would amount to a loss of sovereignty within China itself. Because China is the Chinese Communist Party. The Communist Party identifies national sovereignty with itself. The Communist Party is China as far as it's concerned. It's the site of sovereignty and its carders make up what I call the political nation, or sorry, make up the political nation that I call China's carder nation. And the way this carder nation excludes and substitutes for ordinary people in China's political space is the underlying theme of this book. Now, of course, carders bureaucrats of a kind and bureaucracies are cinnamon for tedium. So I lighten the story with personal anecdotes and conversations with people I was privileged to meet or read about during my years in China, or my years learning about China. These anecdotes are largely based on my personal experience going back as a student, starting in 1976 where I studied classical language and history in Nanjing in 1976-7, through to more recent times working in philanthropy, particularly from 28 to 2013. A period, and I highlight this, bookmarked at one end in 2008 by the onset of the global financial crisis, and at the other by Xi Jinping's appointment as party secretary in 2012 and chairman of state in 2013. In retrospect, this was a very important transitional period between the reform era of the 1980s, 90s and early 2000s, and the post reform era, or what Xi Jinping calls China's new era. It's since today. And in the book, I try to leaven the tedium of bureaucracy, shall we say, by bringing imperial China and the old republic into conversation with China today, the China I met over that transitional period, exploring its way of doing government now and what they might have thought of it, and the way in which it manages people. That is, reflecting on China today in historical light, while focusing, as the title suggests, on the Communist Party's cadre system and the place or status of cadres and the party, among all this says about the status of people, ordinary people, commoners in China. So in this talk, I want to really focus on just three things from the book. Now, there are a dozen or more chapters, each quite short, and I hope are relatively readable, but I'll just focus on three. First is the cadre system itself. The second is the place of history in this story, or what an historical perspective can offer that say political science can't. And thirdly, the largely unacknowledged role that political status plays in China today at every level, including status differences between party members and non-members, insiders and outsiders, and the importance of status in Chinese nationalism, an increasingly important topic of study, and the importance of status in China's evolving legal system and its marketized economy. So let's begin the cadre system. The book starts out explaining what this system is, how it came about, how it operates, who staffs it, without getting lost in the technical details. You know, I can leave that to the political scientists. So looking at the etymology of the word for cadre, for example, ganbu, we glean a sense of the roles that cadre's play in a communist party government. The word ganbu began life as a military term in China, borrowed from Japanese, referring to army officers in a hierarchical line of command. There you get a sense of its underlying meaning. It came to prominence in the 20th century when it was borrowed as a political term referring to officers in a Leninist party or government. Again, holding posts in a hierarchical line of command. Communists and nationalists, I should add. The nationalists used this term before the communists did. Now, hierarchical command is a common feature of Leninist vanguard parties where cadre's are held responsible to those above them in the hierarchical command structure, rather than being responsive or accountable to the people they manage or deal with in society at large at any level in the system. And I cover the numbers of cadre's in the PRC, upwards of 40 million, the distribution across different levels of the territorial system, and the place of women in the cadre system and the relationship between cadre's and the communist party, or this is set out fairly systematically in a brief summary introduction. But what emerges from this survey, I argue, is that China's cadre system is very different from a civil service of the kind that we find in a constitutional democracy. Its highest priority is loyalty to the party it serves. Its key posts are filled through the party's organization bureau. And popular complaints about cadre's are different from those we might level against civil servants in a constitutional democracy. And here in Australia, we often complain of pen bushes and red tape, and people covering their backs and so on in the public service. Well, China has plenty of that, I'm not suggesting otherwise. But people also complain about the special privileges that cadre's enjoy. Access to medical and hospital care, denied to ordinary people. Access to prized urban registration. To heavily subsidized and readily accessible housing and vehicles and children's education. Extra privileges reserved for retired cadre's. And, you know, the highest levels, clean and fresh produce, delivered through segregated supply lines to ensure the safety to ensure food security and safety. Now, cadre's are supported in these special privileged ways to ensure and to reward their loyalty and obedience. As they carry out the directions of the party and keep ordinary people in their place, literally and figuratively. So let me just touch on this literal notion of keeping people in their place. Because in an early chapter, who owns China, I explore naming and language practices in China today. Showing, for example, heard the word, China or the word for China, is owned, possessed, not by China's people, but by the party system and the cadre's who start it. None, but the party and its government and military arms and affiliated agencies can use this word, Zhongguo, China, in the name of anything. In this sense, the party owns China and stops common people using the name of the country when they brand their business firms or civic organizations or clubs, if they're permitted to open them at all. Indeed, any private or independent institution whatsoever. This signals, it seems to me, not just ownership of the term, but a determination to ensure that very few organizations outside the party system have any right to exist at all. So the party's exclusion of the people of China from civic life and politics starts with the name of their country and then curiously cascades right down through the country's territorial hierarchy. All five levels of a vast complex territorial administration where different levels and units of the party lay claim to different place names, each corresponding to its position in the territorial hierarchy. I don't want to go into great detail here, I covered some length in the book, but for example, where China belongs to the central party and government based in Beijing, and by the way the word Beijing belongs to the city administration of Beijing, not to the central government. Names like Hunan or Shanghai belong to the Hunan provincial or Shanghai municipal party and government systems. So ordinary people have no claim upon the names of the places they live in, which belong not to the people of the country, but to those that manage them. Now of course there are many, this is a symbolic or literal way in which the party puts people in their place. It's also institutional ways in which this happens, many other ways. And I'm referring here not just to the status, keeping people in their place in terms of status, but literally their place of residence or registration and I'm sure many of you understand how the Hukou registration system works, which again literally keeps people in their place, underpinning all localised rights, entitlements and welfare including health and education and social security. But people are kept in their place figuratively and just as importantly where the communist party presumes to act in their place, in place of the common people, to debut, represent the people in order that they not represent themselves. And there's a quasi constitutional rationale for this, for distinguishing that is those who govern from those who are administered, which is set out in the party constitution, in the party organisation and the privileged way of life that Cardo's and their families enjoy within the great organisational matrix, which is the territorial state of China. Enough on the Cardo system for the moment, what about history and why does this matter? As I said I'm not offering a detailed history of the everyday operations of the Cardo system here, nor do I propose to go into history in any detail in the book, in fact I don't. The everyday operation of the Cardo system I leave to political scientists and the details of history I leave to the many monographs on every subject under the sun and China's history. What I mean by approaching the system here as an historian is to say that I wish to approach it empathetically or largely on its own terms while being mindful of what other people in China make of it, and mindful as well of the broader histories of invasion, of war, of reform, of revolution, of economic and social development in which the Cardo system is and always has been embedded. So the book is clearly focused, I should say the book is clearly focused on the period from 2008 to the early 2020s, not on history as such, rather I try to apply what I think of as an historical sensibility to some of the questions arising out of developments over that period and ask questions for example about the persistence of historical institutions which may look very modern but perhaps have earlier precedence, and then by introducing things that people were saying and thinking in China a century and more ago and merging them with comments that I heard in Beijing while I was working there over that period. For example we just noted how the use of place names is tightly governed by party and state officials to keep people in their place, but this as I point out in the book has a kind of historical parallel or a certain institutional persistence in another sense. Just think how places have come to be named in imperial times and those names carry down to the present time. My point is this, all territorial units of imperial administration above the county level, that is the provinces and the prefectures and the circuits and districts and so on, were named after their geographical locations or features or their administrative functions. That's where they got their names from, that's why we call Guangdong, Guangdong and Guangxi, Guangxi, Hubei, Hubei and Hunan, Hunan and so on, Hebei, Henan. The same goes for Beijing and Shanghai, we know these names are telling us something about the administration of China, not about who's living there. Now I say this conscious that I'm in a city called, talking in a city called Sydney and I live in another called Melbourne, each of them territorial units, fairly large in a four to five million size, but they're named after aristocratic families in England for heaven's sake. There's nothing like that in China, you don't find a major administrative unit named after the family or an individual. And yet, just push down a little below these large administrative units and you find family names everywhere branded on the tens of thousands of villages and townships where most people live, Lin family village, Chu family township and the like. So this long standing sort of differentiation between bureaucratic administrative place names at one level and then family or lineage names at the very very local sub-state level really is a window on one of the extraordinary constitutional assumptions governing state and society under the old empire which persisted a kind of perverse way down to the present. And it's this that the patriarchal lineages that gave family names to villages were the foundation of course of China's organised society which enjoyed few structural relations with the imperial state. As the saying goes, the emperor's authority reaches no further than the county seat, Huang Quan, Buzha Xian. Now below the Xian or the county patriarchal families ruled the roost, but from county up it was imperial bureaucrats and their retainers all the way to the top where the imperial family presided. So it was a kind of constitutional compact. After they came to power in 49, the communists retained core features of this state society compact but turned it to their own purpose. Basically they preserved that part of it separating state and society, the administrative from the social, but altered the balance by doing away with organised society completely, eliminating patriarchal lineages and their organisations in total and substituting what they called the people, the renmin in their place as the social counterpart of the party state. In place of organised society, that is the society and the institutions they destroyed, they created a system of local party mass organisations where the renmin lived and worked, that is at village and township and district levels. This was the collective level and the collective in effect substitutes for that old lineage system which was in place in the imperial period. So in this way the party state relates to its own simulacrum of society, structured as a collective people rather than to an organised society outside itself. The people are not technically part of the state, so separation between state and society under the imperial compact was in principle preserved but now transferred to relations between the state and collective units within the party state itself. It was a complete hermetically sealed unit. It replaced organised society with its own mass organisations and lineage leaders with that matrix of carders that staffed this massive organisation and of course no organisation was permitted outside of it. So what you might ask, well my model for these kinds of historical reflections is the work of the late American historian Philip Kuhn. Steeped as he was in Qing imperial documents and statecraft debates, Kuhn raised constitutional questions about the Mao period that echoed questions raised in the 18th and 19th centuries on the scope of political participation that is who could not participate in public discussion of policy and so on. And whether and how state power and revenues could be expanded at the expense of social wealth and social organisation. Those debates go back a long, long ways Philip Kuhn showed in his book The Origins of the Modern Chinese State published two decades ago but which I think needs to be reprinted every year. Kuhn shows how fiscal problems of the late empire were related to late agricultural collectivisation in the 50s among many other insights. Now it's true some political scientists would dismiss this broad historical approach asking what possible bearing the concerns of writings in the late 19th and early 20th centuries particularly unconstitutional thinkers of that time could have to do with Xi Jinping's China. In fact though we're increasingly finding communist party theorists themselves resorting to some of those earlier writers and personalities in their debates and policy prescriptions and in the book I referred several points to Xi Jinping quoting long dead imperial efficiency and scholars on the subject of bureaucracy in his efforts to master this cardus system that he's inherited and that he wants to make work to work efficiently. And there's good reason for that because the cardus system insofar as the communist party is a medically sealed state society system it's encountering similar problems to those that set the imperial bureaucracy around things like corruption, loyalty and obedience to higher authority because it shares some pitches in common with that earlier system not many but some and I detailed two or three of these in the book. In fact the final chapters of cardus country focus on these institutional continuities and discontinuities in the bureaucratic management of the territorial state. Why this is really coming to a head now as an issue in China is because Xi Jinping has added to the three confidences a fourth confidence and that is China's culture and history and whereas you know the previous leadership of Hu Jintao urged the party to rest confident in you know the party and socialism and what was the third one I can't recall Xi Jinping has added culture and history and this is for you know designed for party functionaries to consider how to make this system work and whether there are solutions in China's history because solutions can no longer be found or borrowed from the West for the problems that China is currently confronting. Now I should say that the risk of taking this historical approach too broadly is just as dangerous as ignoring it entirely we could find ourselves like Stephen Hawking searching for a theory of everything to account for every observation under a single paradigm I think that's just not worth trying so with this risk in mind I try to divide my so we say historical perspective into two breaking my historical reflections into two lines of inquiry one focusing on history as institutional persistence of the kind we've just been discussing about places and place names and substituting people for lineage and so on and the other focusing on history as a narrative history is memory public memories in stories that find their way into textbooks non-film and television programs in museums and I then show or try to show how these institutional persistence that is you know history as institution and historical narratives are increasingly entwined in China today and less and less separable just to highlight this point I'd note the book pivots around halfway on a conversation that I recall with leading party historian Zhang baija on how the communist party won the civil war now this question how channel how the communists won and why it matters goes to the heart of the party's claim to legitimacy as vice premier Wang Qishan famously said a few years back quote the legitimacy of the chinese communist party derives from history he said a little more but I think the nut of the matter was there the communist party's legitimacy derives from history as far as the party leadership is concerned at some core level china's people made their choice once and for all 1949 end of story move on from professor jung I learnt that foreigners to really appreciate the role that old elite families from imperial times including his own I should add continue to play in ensuring and justifying persistent central bureaucratic rule from the late Qing through to the present the party attracted old elite families I was advised and built a leadership group that included younger offspring of that old elite as the nationalist party never could there were both leninists but the nationalists failed to realize the importance of china's elite bureaucratic tradition and to recruit you know the scions the bright young sons and daughters of that elite into its ranks the communist party did so and as I was told they merged with the masses and led the revolution now that's obviously another instance a suggestion of a kind of institutional persistence of a kind of elite commitment to its own status what ever regime was in power and an association of that elite status with the status of china itself but here's the thing the same elite families and networks that feel it's their sacred duty to preserve the state and their place within it also control the historical narrative the history of modern china as it's told for public consumption and heaven forbid anyone should dissent from this approved narrative and engage in historical nihilism that's now a crime so this narrative carries weight this official narrative an old elite family members sit atop the pyramid of party history from which the party derives that political legitimacy it's a circular mutually reinforcing arrangement those as I call them insiders who command the state structure which history delivered to them in 1949 according to Wang Qishan also patrol and police what can and cannot be said about it about themselves and about their country so kata country is in part a story of these intergenerational strategies of elite families not all of the mold I should add many of them post-revolutionary red families from the empire to the republic to the people's republic all seeking to ensure they retain their status as leading families and at the same time preserve the status of china as a unified territorial state governed top down I have a chapter on families and the increasingly popular historical narrative of the party as one big family you know sing down so many things happen to be called family these days and called family actually means to belong to the party family to the party lineage and there's a related idea the state itself is a great big family and this is often traced now in china and to some traditional chinese way of doing government I I really think that's nonsense and I try to explain why but that's best left for another talk and so are the chapters on the party's use and abuse of very powerful historical narratives around the century of humiliation and the brutal manzing massacre of 1937 to delicate and complicated matters deserving close and careful scrutiny again at another time and another place but I refer them to you here the point I want to stress is that these narratives are policed and controlled by those who won they're about status and about firming the special status of the party in the in china now concerned with status as some have argued lies at the heart of nationalism everywhere but in the people's republic I argue it's refracted through a lens of party humiliation and pride not national humiliation and pride they've been ample grounds for pride and shame in china's history and I list some of them the deepest source historically in recent times the deepest felt source of national shame involved Japan starting with the major emperor's defeat of the Qing and the jiao war of 1894 5 through to the surrender of german concessions in china to japan under the visi the visi agreement in 1919 of course on to the military occupation of china by the imperial japanese army the brutal occupation from 31 to 45 never forgotten and the terms don't forget national humiliation which we now hear quite often an avenge national humiliation ended common currency in relation to these japanese humiliations not through communist party propaganda they're very much part of the nationalist story as I point out now curiously the term century of humiliation was introduced not by the nationalist but by collaborationist forces in china to celebrate pearl harbour the japanese attack on pearl harbour said to mark the end of the century of humiliation from 1841 to 1941 that's a true century um there's barely another use of the term which actually describes a century although it's been appropriated in recent years particularly by the communist party as a mainstay of its patriotic education campaign so the communists have deployed this collaborationist term sent true humiliation to mock jangkai shek's achievements by associating him bizarrely with the wartime collaborationist regime and it was revived after the brutal massacre of students and workers in beijing in 1989 which triggered the patriotic education campaign in other words the center of humiliation is rather strange motif on which to focus the national humiliation narrative because it has its origins in collaboration I argue that the communist leadership's insistence on upholding the status of the party that accounts for the persistence of the national humiliation narrative it's got nothing about national humiliation it's not the historical persistence of humiliations but the humiliation of the party which is ensuring its persistence now this brings us to the third part of our talk here which is to do with status I circle around status throughout the book partly to explain how the system works but also to highlight some of the drivers pushing the current administration away from opening and reform that is elevating the party above all crushing independent social organizations quashing the legal profession corraling private capital calling a hawk to market opening and rule of law now we know that sociologically China like any other country was driven with every kind of class caste and ethnic distinction or discrimination that's true of all countries but China has an additional status barrier and that's the party itself and it goes without saying in China that this is the case it can't be said publicly but it's widely acknowledged this less visible status difference begins with party membership so the profile of party members when we look at it is pretty consistent with China's ethnic gender and workforce demographics it's fairly representative questions of status in relation to party membership arise less over the social categories selected or admitted but over the act of admission into the party which lifts an applicant over the threshold from politically inert subject to active membership of the political nation to becoming party citizens as it were within party and government ranks status is further marked by Carter's place up and down the many layers of the territorial hierarchy also by the relations with their patrons and again by their revolutionary genealogies genealogies notably how deep red genes run in the family and this is a very interesting expression which has been revived in recent years after it circulated in the cultural revolution and I elaborate on this question of red genetic inheritance at some length as well as popular opposition to it but then there are the status barriers separating insiders from outsiders insiders occupy positions in the system of what American scholar Fran Sherman calls the organization the great matrix of a party state and the status barriers separating those inside and out the organization outside it would ascribed as follows by one Chinese observer I quote in recent years two terms redolent with Chinese characteristics have entered into circulation inside the system t-dronay and outside the system t-dronay some 1.3 billion descendants of the yellow emperor have been artificially separated into these two camps insiders and outsiders insiders refers to the who play leading role refers to those who play leading roles in the organizational systems of state organs enterprises and service units everyone else can generally regard as an outsider now reformers were pressing hard in the reform era against these kinds of status against these kinds of status barriers in the 80s and again in the early 2000s pressing for reforms in the legal and judicial systems and in the market economy which in fact threatened the status of the party and the insiders with respect to rule of law for example I draw on an extended essay about China's journey toward rule of law by Wang Chengguang writing toward the end of the reform era in 2008 I refer that to you it's an excellent essay he characterized the country's historical movement in the reform era as a transition from and I quote rule by status to rule by contract eagle scholar not a market economist by that is he's referring to rule by privileged stratum of people whose privileges are converted by conferred by customary law or sovereign authority such as the party a contract contract referring to rule by mutual consent among people of equal standing law reform and market reform complemented each other in his view this is not a western view but I should add Professor Wong's view laying a solid system foundation for the development of rule of law founded on the principle of equal citizenship now when he took command Xi Jinping called an immediate halt to this kind of evolving rule of law he has his own version of rule of law which I shan't discuss here but he arrested and tortured hundreds of practicing lawyers to send a message that he was reverting to rule by status the party was it what the party said goes and party members took priority over all others his is a style of rule that privileges some over others at the discretion of the party and this return to rule by status plays out in the economy as well and I devote a chapter to that which I think I call capitalism without capitalists to explain how status is playing an increasing role in China's move away from a market economy the party in the end broke away with the practice of the former and lending even greater weight to politics and its economic interventions and prioritizing its own survival over every other consideration so in that chapter capitalism without capitalists I point out that seeing coaches on private business and entrepreneurs in ways that do not conform with any known development model and I suggest this is because the party is constitutionally incapable of distinguishing national interests from its own or of breaking away from its customary understanding of the nation which is down to certain classes of people and not others and associates sovereignty with itself implicit constitutional assumptions of this kind superimposed on a marketized system yield a form of party capitalism that must reassert the status of the party relative to independent business people so in conclusion I refer to a particular essay or two by Professor Tsai Xia while she was still in China working at the Central Party School when I was reading her work and I'll conclude just by referring to some of her writings of that time 2013 which to my mind capture the message I try to convey throughout the book about that period I quote to speak of democracy we must first treat people as people that is equals she wrote she wrote the party's self-appointed role in substituting for the people as their representatives denies China's people agency sorry this is my summary of her argument now and this bait and switch between party and people the one stepping in to substitute for the other obscures the distinction between subjects and citizens which and I quote her again is the most basic difference separating modern from traditional political communities subject she writes are the tools of power citizens are the masters of power the party's failure to acknowledge equal citizenship and share power with citizens as a relic of the imperial times she continues as is the prevailing view among leading carters I quote those who conquer the land rule the land some in the party continue to claim the right to rule by virtue of conquest which is to say their inherited status in this case political inheritance not by royal bloodline but I quote as relatives of the early leaders and martyrs of the revolution to justify their inherited positions and a claim to rule by virtue of revolutionary lineage justifies special privileges for carders of every rank not enjoyed by ordinary people in ruling by right of conquest and asserting the right to rule by pedigree I quote again the ruling party becomes the country party organization takes over government organization and leading carters gain even greater centralized powers and special privileges in this sense China is truly doubling down as a party nation made up of its own cadres thanks for your attention that's just a brief introduction to some of the themes raised in the book and I welcome your questions and I hope I might even be able to answer some thank you fantastic John thank you very much for this arrogant arrogant presentation and wonderful summary of some of the key fundings of your amazing book before I opened the seminars to Q&A let me remind everybody that this event is being recorded and when you would like to raise a question or make a comment please use the Q&A function it would be helpful if you indicate who you are that will simply help me to choose and pick questions but if you would like to stay anonymous please say so and I will not without any information that will identify your identity and as I say to raise questions please use the Q&A function not the chat function that will make things a lot easier I noticed there is already one question in the Q&A box but before I get to that let me kick off by asking John the first questions as I normally do the one that I picked to put to you John is that you talk about the overlap of the communist party and China making China the communist party implicitly it would implies that China the communist party exists in a kind of concentric circles which one is the outer which one is the inter inter I think it's up to you to decide but then implicit in such a view would of course we'll have to take into account of course the existence of a core of the communist party or the core and the core is none other than supreme leader Xi Jinping himself so are you saying in the fact that if we try to understand what China is and therefore what China's national interest is ultimately we're looking at three concentric circles with the innermost one being the core Xi Jinping perhaps the middle one being the communist party and China as the outer circle would that work for you let me unmute thank you Xi and yes your way of putting this is new to me so I'd like to just think through that slowly if I may when I say that China is becoming the Chinese communist party or has become it I'm not referring of course to ordinary people I'm referring to China as a territorial state and the institutions that make it up these are territorial institutions the five layers of administration but then all the state enterprises and so on as well the mass organizations and the social institutions under party rule it also goes to state banks and so on so it's this institutional matrix that I say has become basically the communist party the communist party has penetrated every one of them or is identical with many of them I see this I have a sense in which this organizational matrix if you took it away from China if you could just imagine that there'd be a whole lot of people a lot of you know very busy intelligent active and energetic people but barely little structure left apart from organized crime and underground religion in an organizational sense the rest has been largely policed out of existence now the contrast I would draw is with the reform era where there were within the existing party state structure civil society organizations clubs and societies and what have you that were developing often at a very local level but which were independent in their actions which were not anti-party but which were acting as they saw fit to fulfill some of the duties the party itself could not fulfill and I in the book I prefer particularly to some of the issues that have been thrown up by reform for women and how the you know the existing mass organizations for dealing with that we're incapable of doing so it's a number of pioneering women lawyers led cases to defend women's rights and so on the same goes for a number of other minorities or disadvantaged groups so in the reform era we saw not thinking here of concentric circles but rather new institutional architecture forming within China alongside and parallel to the party in my judgment no threat to it at all but which the party was determined to eliminate and it was that arose because there was a need for it a very real need thrown up by market reform in any country going through accelerated growth like China you have these kinds of new new religions and new organizations forming in order to overcome the alienation of workers moving from city from countryside to city or separated from families and children separated from parents and so on the party wasn't performing those functions the mass organizations were not designed to them so new institutions emerged what's happening again it seems to me is as Mao Zedong did in the 1950s that Xi Jinping is seeking to partify all of these once independent bodies and in that sense that institutional sense China is becoming the Chinese Communist Party now my book has been criticized by some as suggesting that I'm ignoring the Chinese people or the ordinary people of China because I'm who are not communist and it's focusing exclusively on the state that's not the case at all what I'm saying is that China the way the Chinese Communist Party imagines it is the party it goes to the name and the institutions and the policing and everything now what is not the party is the 1.3 billion people who aren't party members and I spend quite a few chapters detailing there how they how their lives are panned out under on this in terms of concentric circles I'm not sure I would see three concentric circles I don't see the party is sitting inside a larger circle I see it constituting the architecture of the of China is there is no other circle that I can see institutionally rather this structure sits on top and matches the the contours of the actual Chinese nation as opposed to the Cardinal nation and I think focusing solely on Xi Jinping and his leadership much as he'd like to think that's what it's all about does little justice to the extraordinary diversity even if the Communist Party is a structure and it's territorial you know unit all the units that go to make it up he runs the system it's not like Putin in Russia you know he's truly core because there's not much else I mean Xi Jinping sits in the middle of this vast institutional network and is trying to make sense of it in fact the greatest challenge of government is running the government not running the country in my judgment and that's what he's caught up in at the present time unless we equate the country with government look I haven't really answered your question I've sort of sidestepped it but chiefly because I'm not I suppose I'm suggesting that I'm not really operating in a concentric circle mode but in an institutional mode thank you John there are three questions on the Q&A box two of them in a sense are associated with how that can allow us to what I have raised with you so I'll pick them for and then get to the other one later the two questions are also both put in anonymous way the first one is that in the 10 years of Xi Jinping his anti-corruption campaign has taken down many carders and powerful relatives of carders or eldest many princeling have lost power and influence as the carder country become a Xi Jinping country very good question and very difficult to answer it's clear that when Xi Jinping came to power China had a major problem with corruption I spent several chapters trying to deal with this issue and there's a sense in which any administration coming in not just Xi Jinping would had to have dealt with that if you recall the final speech by the outgoing party secretary Hu Jintao at that party congress where he stepped down in 2012 he mentioned corruption was it 30 something times basically saying look the next leadership is going to have to deal with this problem sure we've selected this man Xi Jinping but the fact of the matter is this is how I read that whoever comes in is going to have to deal with this it's out of control the party was at risk of losing or had lost considerable popular support and its achievements were being undermined by its failings and corruption so Xi Jinping had to do something about it now there's no doubt that in doing so he shook up the entire system the carder system he instilled the fear of Marx into every person in a leading administrative role by taking out many of their friends and by breaking the backs of some of those you know internal factions and lineages or families that were exercising independent power within the party what he did was restore hierarchical control to a hierarchical structure which had lost its effective command and control mechanism from the top now the question I think the the question was asking then if that's the case do we now have and what was the last part of the question Xi Jinping is it now effectively a Xi Jinping country what is interesting Xi Jinping country oh yes so I'll revert to my earlier response Xi Jinping actually sits at the center much as he does control the center and the center now has greater control of the provinces and the prefectures and the cities and counties and what have you that's an oversimplification to suggest it's Xi Jinping rules all that's not the case it's very very difficult to undertake research at the local level in China at the moment particularly to interview carders but allow me to speculate that there's a great deal of disaffection with Xi Jinping's administration not just among ordinary people who might have supported him on his anti-corruption campaign but have now been dismayed by what happened in that the last phase of the covert zero policy but of course also among carders and carder families who've suffered greatly in in the book I point out that much as carders enjoy privileges it comes at high risk and it always has from malted from the 1950s through the the anti-rightist movement the great leap forward the cultural revolution the carders occupy the riskiest positions in the systems as well as the most profitable it comes with the job that's not to say they're happy with that and resistance can form I'm not sure that it is but I know that there's widespread disaffection within carder ranks about the way in which Xi Jinping is managing the system okay next question also from somebody who likes to stay anonymous how does this cardered China with Xi Jinping as supreme leader different from how North Korea is run with Mr Kim as the supreme leader apart from Kim's personal blood lineage to the previous Kims well again one is scale China of course is so much larger that there's so much more diversity and so much more possibility shall we say of diverse opinion diverse judgments than is possible in in Korea look I hear some old friends from China telling me that you know China is now what is it west western Korea the suggestion being that Xi Jinping's methods are very very similar to those of the Korean intergenerational lineage I mean one of the big differences of course is that much as Xi and his ilk have drawn upon their red genes they they are unable to institutionalize single party single family party rule and I think that's likely to do the case into the future so being a ruler in China always involves reaching out beyond family and patronage networks to larger networks to ensure the continuity your your own security and safety as a political leader beyond that I'm not prepared to speculate I'm sorry okay let me encourage anyone else who have any questions that likes to post with Professor Fitzgerald to do so in the meantime let me put to you the question from Natasha Locke how do you think the discourse of enemy has changed through different communist party leaders in China was that said as an essay who was asking that question sorry Natasha Locke Natasha thank you Natasha that sounds like a good thesis dissertation it's not a subject on which I focused exclusively so let me just think or particularly I guess the first up I've been struck along with many others and the revival of Carl interest in Carl Schmidt in China in the 2010s now Schmidt as we know was you know an advisor in the National Socialist Administration in Germany or a theorist and scholar who developed ideas around the priority of the interests of state and the idea of enemies and friends is the primary feature of all state politics the preeminence of that and the its place in contemporary political theory in China isn't paralleled to my knowledge by anything earlier any other earlier western borrowing in Mao Zedong's time or Deng Xiaoping's and it seems to have come about really in the Hu Jintao period in the transition to the current administration now some in the current administration draw on the work of Carl Schmidt directly inside him in their work if I could I mean we were all conscious that Mao Zedong of course was quite a brilliant strategist and his strategy involved identifying friends and enemies and the wavering middle and the so the object of politics was to attract the wavering middle in order to overcome the enemy and the enemy could be hierarchically structured in ways again perhaps concentric circles as the way to describe enemies there's a primary enemy and there are subordinate enemies and then there are those who are wavering it could be brought over to overcome the primary enemy that kind of logic is very Mao's that's not particularly Carl Schmidtian but certainly off the top of my head it strikes me that it's a distinctive Chinese political contribution a contribution to political philosophy about around friends and enemies and of course internally Mao Zedong and others use the notion of the people and enemies of the people in order to distinguish the politically acceptable from pretty unacceptable citizens of China and targeted enemies of the people for destruction or imprisonment for death or imprisonment now it seems to me if there's a transition overall in the idea of enemy in recent times and one I actually trace in the book it took place around 2010 where the domestic enemies of the party that is those who are proposing constitutional reform and you'll note that Xu Zhiyong has recently been jailed or was you know in recent years jailed for a very long jail term for his promotion of constitutional reform these had been seen as you know domestic enemies of the party for some time although they'd been tolerated now it was after the party announced in 2010 that the first priority what was it the first core interest of state was the preservation of the Chinese Communist Party's rule and this was told to the visiting American delegation at the strategic and economic dialogue at that year that claim then became a statement in effect to the Americans to keep out of China's domestic ideological conflicts but then to China's domestic ideological to the party's domestic ideological opponents that if they continued in that spirit they would be agents of the Americans and so this notion of domestic conversations reflecting some global conflict between China and its enemies in the West intensified the complexity of political opposition in China before that time it was possible to be a loyal Chinese advocate of constitutional reform after that time anyone who proposed it was an agent of the United States of a foreign power that's a sense in which enemy came to take on a new complexity look I'm just thinking of the top of my head here Natasha I'd really like to hear if you've written on this yourself or proposing to do so and what you'd suggest thank you next questions come from Grace Gao where do you see women in the Chinese Communist Carter system Marjorie Dome's half the sky narrative is mostly an empty promised female carters obtained power mostly by sleeping with their party bosses as evidenced by public reports and rumors Zhang Qing Mao's own wife obtained and held power this way has this changed much since 1949 Yibso Ha this is a very important question Grace look I spent a good part of the book of several chapters rather addressing this question without adequately answering it for a start if we look at the Carter system and where women sit in it we find they're very well represented at the lowest levels but I'm here talking about the territorial hierarchy of the Carter system so county and you know perfectural level relatively oh township level very well represented not quite 50% but a substantial number of party members doing the hard work at that level and remember at that level the town sorry the district and urban district and township level that's where carters actually meet real people and have to deal with them all the other layers of carters are just dealing with one another they don't actually deal with real real people so at that level where people are being engaged women are very actively involved in the party as gumbo as you make your way up they diminish in number at the county level at the perfectural level then at the provincial level then at the central level and at the central level within the central level they diminish to the point where there are none and never have been any on the actual decision-making body of the party to put the central the standing committee of the Politburo so that's telling us something that's that women do the work and then make the commands or issue the commands the that said the etiology of women's liberation is such an important part of the early history of the communist party the marriage law and so on had such an impact not just in china but abroad among feminist thinkers julia cristaver i said at several points and this is because women's liberation was packaged or the liberation of women was packaged with agrarian reform you know there are very few laws passed in the early 1950s and the two most prominent were the agrarian reform or the marriage reform and they were related because why the party wanted to liberate women was to break the back of the patriarchal lineages that ran the villages and counties so that they could replace them with mass incorporating party organizations and they did that very successfully haven't done so women were largely ignored they performed their role they'd undermined the patriarchal system now the party was taking over and the party was not giving adequate space to women now these arguments have been made in china again and again and by very fine women historians outside of china and i'm sure you've read a lot of their work and i refer to them in the book for guidance because their research is quite outstanding and it's very very clear that while women were relieved from one sort of patriarchal system they're inducted into an equally patriarchal one of the mass organizations party organization which provided very very little relief at any time from 1949 onwards well the next question is in a sense a follow-up question from grace and the question is that now that's the political standing committee does not have any female member how does the party continue to subjugate women and yet still claims to promote the idea of equality equality is a very important trope in the communist party ideology it's the one i address most expressly in the book and if that didn't come across in my presentation i'm sorry what i'm trying to suggest is that the way in which we normally think of equality is around social categories but in china equality and inequality organized around the party itself this isn't widely acknowledged within china and it's difficult to grasp outside it but it's admission into the party and making your way into the organization being tigernay which gets you to which is sort of ideal for those aspiring to some kind of status in life um so the aspiration to equality on the kachan part of the chinese communist party is not in my judgment to be taken seriously because the party won't address the core foundational issue of its failure to acknowledge the fundamental civic equality of citizens before the law in the economy are relative to the party of the power of the party in power that being the case women are among many social categories including other ethnic including ethnic groups and other disadvantaged groups which will find no resolution in my judgment in that system which is fundamentally unequal in failing to acknowledge the equality of citizens mind you i'm not suggesting acknowledging the equality of citizens is the solution for women far from it but it's the foundation for the struggle for equality on the part of women themselves without that fundamental equality others are difficult to fight for thank you um let me just encourage people to put whatever questions or comments you would like to uh professor fistero in the meantime let me put to you a second question if i may i mean you make a really eloquent case to explain how china has become the communist party what you have not quite addressed is how the people in china feel about it have they accepted it or have they not accepted it how do we know how do we see the existence of courageous decisions some of whom you have named people like shu qirong implied so the communist party is not engaged in a popularity contest it's not as if the people didn't want it there tomorrow would it go that's not what it's about nevertheless the communist party is you know it's transactional behavior is eased if it has compliance the compliance of people and so it monitors what people think and what they want and where it can it is consistent with its own status maintaining its own power it might deliver some of those things that people want so i think there is a sense in china that the party is responsive to popular demand not that it it's seeking to win the appeal of the approval of people but that it finds it very handy to secure it how do people feel we know that there are surveys undertaken in china a very limited number but some of them reasonably reliable and what they tell us in relation to this card donation idea is this and i think it's very important that the central leadership comes out of popular surveys in china very favorably people look upon beijing remote as it is and its leadership whoever it is on the on the whole quite favorably but the level of support or favoritism diminishes each level down the five levels of the hierarchy so the provincial level are regarded you know a little less favorably the professional level less the city level less so by the time you get to the village and township and street level there's great great dissatisfaction with government well this comes to the point i made earlier that's the only government people actually deal with in their daily lives very few people have an opportunity to meet anyone outside in government or the party in a management role outside this sort of corraled unit whether it's a an enterprise or an urban district or a rural village or township and at that level people are not at all satisfied with the government or the carders they deal with that said Xi Jinping in the popular mind because it you know he's five levels removed comes out pretty well as have all previous central administrations it doesn't matter who's there because it's structural the it's as if they're in heaven so to speak so remote that they're untarnished now the risk of an anti-corruption campaign on the scale that Xi undertook was that it could undermine some of those high level you know some of the esteem in which high level carders were held i don't think adequate research has been taken on that people admire Xi Jinping for what he's done but it may well have diminished the standing of those other levels which used to be held in high regard which is to say the national ministries the provincial level leaders and the perfection of the prefectural and city administrations which people didn't come into contact with every day but which they held in reasonable regard because they didn't quite appreciate how corrupt they truly were thank you joined i'm well aware that it's very late in australia if people have no other questions i might just know there's one more question just came through i think with graduates with graduate unemployment rise a growing number of young people are taking the civil service examinations how would this if any impact the future of the Carter system especially those who fail to join the civil service and those would destabilize the Carter system similar to how previous imperial dynasties were overthrown by failed civil service tickers i love a historical question thank you for that one yes it's widely and commonly known at least among historians that you know the leaders of the typing rebellion and other civil servants other potential civil servants who fail the exams proved a real thorn in the side of imperial administrations i'm not quite sure that's the case here i'll say why because the civil service examination today is not like the old administrative the the imperial examinations administered by the throne these were undertaken those were undertaken at the local level and then you know as you progressed up the system you ended up in Beijing in a great hall with a thousand others and some got through and some didn't and so on the civil service exams are quite different in that respect i'd suggest the old civil service examination is more like contemporary university examinations and universities replace the study halls that were the site of confusion learning back in the day what's more i really question whether the number of students taking the civil service exam is all that much higher now than it was 10 years ago i mean i may be wrong but there was exceptionally high participation in those exams 10 years ago now i might have doubled by now you might be right but even then only one in a hundred you know got past the first stage so for 20 200 now i don't think that the scale is vastly vastly different from then that's not to say that the problem of youth unemployment particularly graduate youth unemployment isn't serious it is and it's one of the problems Xi Jinping is and his administration are trying to deal with not least by reorganizing the countryside by thinking about sending youth down to the countryside again you might remember that's what Mao Zedong did when he had a youth an educated youth problem back in the 1960s youth don't remember that experience very well but that's always a solution in the background there's a lot happening at the moment in relation to rural administration and its reform and as we know taking the what are called the what is it the Nongguan the experimenting with um you know civil police in the countryside on the model of the notorious Chengguan in the cities who were despised by urban residents and the risk is that whatever it's done to impose order on the on the countryside and perhaps send youth down to the countryside will not be popular in the countryside itself one last question just um also from grace how and when will the communist carder system collapse well done grace give yeah so it strikes me that many in the west talk of china's imminent collapse and they have been for a long time i'm not one of those i think china is a fairly stable system and i think that the fishery lines are not around issues of freedom as many in the west might imagine but around issues of equality and i think given the communist party's own rhetorical emphasis on equality its failure to deliver on that could be its achilles heel equality of you know equal right to participation in public life and politics but also social equality economic equality and what have you it's clear that the parties it seems to me the parties in their own polling is showing this is a major issue but as i argue in the book it's really impossible to address the core issues of equality in china without addressing the issue of equal citizenship which goes to rule of law and which goes to enabling content real contestation for political authority if not between political parties at least between very real political rivals uh and that without that this problem of equality could become a a truly major issue for the party to deal with that said it will go on dealing with it as long as it possibly can there's no doubt the survival of the party is the number one core interest of state as it said and it won't go down and the carter system won't change without a struggle and that struggles possibly underway right now well thank you for that what a cheery note for the communist party perhaps not for everybody else um let me draw this to a close i'm well aware that we are pressing midnight in melbourne australia and therefore i will let you go and just on behalf of all the participants thank you very much uh professor john fistero and also thank you to the other participants of the sewers china institute webinar we will continue to hold a few of our events online as we move forward thank you goodbye