The Good Communist

by Frank N. Pieke

Has China become just another capitalist country in a socialist cloak? Will the Chinese Communist PartyAos rule survive the next ten years of modernization and globalization? Frank Pieke investigates these conundrums in this fascinating account of how government officials are trained for placement in the Chinese Communist Party. Through in-depth interviews with staff members and aspiring trainees, he shows that while the Chinese Communist Party has undergone a radical transformation since the revolutionary years under Mao, it is still incumbent upon cadres, who are selected through a highly rigorous process, to be ideologically and politically committed to the party. It is the lessons learnt through their teachers that shape the political and economic decisions they will make in power. The book offers unique insights into the structure and the ideological culture of the Chinese government, and how it has reinvented itself over the last three decades as a neo-socialist state."

Genres: China

229 pages, ebook

First published November 1, 2009

Reviews

[Jie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book offers a unique perspective on the CCP and its personnel management&education system(the party school). A few important concepts to pay heed to: the neo socialism; ritual of passage; informal connection. The deficits are as follows: first of all the materials are unsystematically organized and the notes collected from the field are just too shallow and coarse; second, to some points in the book as the author claims to reveal the myth of the CCP’s magic like personnel management, wherein usually a lot anthropological concepts intertwined, the explanation is not persuasive and to some extent even arbitrary, like kind of compensation made in a hurry, devoid of consistency. It seems the author tries to place himself as neutral but he is somehow exaggerating the charismatic trait of the party school, as the incubator for leadership and legitimacy, and this conclusion, without the subtle ness of historical context and sensitive cynicism, can be misleading. In short, the effect of party school is inflated here, seemingly unauthentic.

[versarbre]

It makes a very good point that the CCP creates a group of "cadres" which may be considered as a charismatic institution (to use Weber's term). However, the ethnography is too much limited to the actual walls of the specific party schools; as a result, the author gradually loses track of broader social analyses.