What About the Communist Party?

The Chinese constitution recognizes the Chinese Communist Party as the "sole leader" of the Chinese system. Even the major reform docu-

ments, such as Zhao Ziyang's speech to the Thirteenth Party Congress,^[45] reserve for the Party the responsibility of making all key decisions, of checking on their implementation, and of retaining the power of appointment of individuals to every important post. Yet the actual state of the Party—its organization, work methods, and to some extent even its bureaucratic identity—remain matters on which there is little information and much confusion among foreign scholars.

Discussion of the Party is bedeviled, of course, by the difficulty of gaining access to information. The Chinese press during the 1980s became relatively frank about problems in the government, but it treated the Party gingerly. Broad comments about difficulties in the Party tended to be supported only with flimsy anecdotal data. Solid research—if any has been done—remains unavailable to foreign analysts. Foreigners themselves understandably have felt that probing the details of Party organization and functioning would stretch too far the hospitality they have been accorded by their Chinese hosts. Yet, as Susan Shirk indicates in chapter 3, it is terribly important to clarify the role and dynamics of the Party in the Chinese political system.

More attention must be paid to career mobility within the Party, personal characteristics of Party members, personal ranks in the Party, and other factors that affect relative authority and that therefore contour behavior of Party officials. In addition, much more effort must then be made to understand the procedures by which issues are considered within the Party and the views of various Party bodies. It is, of course, quite possible that the extent of the Party's role varies considerably by sector—probably being more important in propaganda, organization, public security, and rural work, and less important in the urban economy and the military (although even this may vary considerably over time). Only empirical research can determine this. Until this research is considerably more advanced than at present, however, all comments about the functioning and evolution of the Chinese system—indeed, about the structure of authority within that system—must be made with some caution.

In sum, the fact that even a volume such as this, which investigates in detail the decision-making process in various bureaucratic arenas, basically is forced to give little consideration to the Chinese Communist Party should be put high on the agenda of research in the China field, although it is difficult to be optimistic about how much can be learned about the Party in the environment of the early 1990s. Given the fact that in most government units the top Party officials are also the top govern-

ment officeholders, it may be that lack of direct consideration of the Party itself does not seriously distort our understanding of policy process. But future research should seek to provide the empirical base for determining whether (or to what extent) this is the case. This volume does not satisfactorily accomplish this task.