Read The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers for Free Online

Unit (popularly known as the Bodyguard Bureau), the Party’s secret service, makes up the remaining members. The Central Committee elects, or to be more precise, selects the Politburo, which has about twenty-five members. The Politburo, in turn, selects the Standing Committee, the inner sanctum of the leadership, which in its present incarnation has nine members.
    The nine men filing out onstage in 2007 might have been the only candidates on the list presented to delegates as eligible for election for the top leadership positions. It was a moment of great import nonetheless, because within this small group all of the levers of political power the Party deploys to maintain its hold on the government, the country and the 1.3 billion-strong population had been divided up and allocated to each individual. The core responsibilities of the Politburo inner circle are not what you might expect to top the agenda of the country’s elite leadership body, at least if you listened to the daily pronouncements of the central government in Beijing. The Politburo sets the general policy direction for the economy and diplomacy and has been preoccupied in recent years with China’s towering challenges in meeting exploding energy demand, environmental degradation and managing the mobile, 700 million-strong rural population. Politburo members are briefed on these issues and have the final responsibility for deciding related policies, but they do not manage portfolios day-to-day in the way that ministers in a cabinet system do.
    The Politburo’s overriding priorities lie elsewhere, in securing the Party’s grip on the state, the economy, the civil service, the military, police, education, social organizations and the media, and controlling the very notion of China itself and the official narrative of its revival from an enfeebled power, broken apart and humiliated by foreigners, into a powerful state and resurgent civilization. More than a century after the model’s invention and two decades since its pioneer in Moscow and its eastern European satellites fell apart, the core of the Chinese system, for all its indigenous modifications, still bears a remarkable resemblance to Lenin’s original design. Even the ‘red machine’ has Soviet antecedents. The Russians used a secure internal phone system, known as the vertushka , which loosely translates as ‘the rotater’, to connect the party elite.
    Mao initially adopted Soviet institutions but he always regarded the Party as bureaucratic and insufficiently revolutionary, complaining in the fifties that officials ‘were tottering along like women in bound feet, always complaining that others were going too fast for them’. Instead of the Party supervising the people, Mao decided the people should supervise the Party, a philosophy that triggered the ten years of madness of the Cultural Revolution from 1966, when Red Guards were authorized to terrorize anyone they decided had strayed from the righteous path of revolution. Mao unleashed ‘a revolution on a revolution that wasn’t revolutionary enough’, as a documentary described the period. After Mao’s downfall and death, the Party went back to basics. Deng Xiaoping threw out Mao’s destructive notions and returned the party organization to its Leninist roots, as an empowered elite providing enlightened leadership to the masses.
    The notion of a party controlling the government, especially when the same party effectively is the government, remains conceptually difficult for many to grasp. When I lived in Shanghai for four years from 2000, I would advise visitors confused about this concept to keep an eye out for the official cars whisking top municipal leaders in and out of the city leadership compound in Kanping Road, a stern, grey-marble low-rise carved out of the elegant, tree-lined backstreets of the old French Concession. The cars provided an easy first lesson about Chinese politics, Leninism 101, if you like, as their number-plates