McGregor's book is excellent. As a US-based businessman who traveled to China often in the 2010s to meet with partners, prospects and customers, I wish that I had read it then. He explains the structure of the Chinese Communist Party and how it influences and controls government, civil society, the military, business and the economy. All of that is new for Westerners like me who know our own governments and economic systems.

My only disappointment in the book is that it was published in 2010, during the tenure of Hu Jintao as President and Party General Secretary. Xi Jinping is mentioned only a few times, in no substantial way. The book predates the spread of autocratic regimes in the west generally, and the Trump Presidency in the US. It would be interesting to read an edition that covered the Party's role, and the shifting balance of power globally, over the last twelve years.

McGregor closes his afterword with this:

"China has long known something that many in developed countries are only now beginning to grasp, that the Chinese Communist Party and its leaders have never wanted to be the west when they grow up. For the foreseeable future, it looks as though their wish, to bestride the world as a colossus on their own implacable terms, will come true."

Pretty good prediction. ( )

Thesis is that the CCP is into self preservation and is the ultimate institution in China, above the state itself. ( )

Useful for its overview as well as some of its anecdotes. But there is nothing particularly insightful or groundbreaking, and it is becoming dated.

> Most US presidents become lame ducks in the last years of their final term. So topsy-turvy is the Chinese political system that Hu, like Jiang Zemin before him, only really consolidated power by the time he was approaching the end of his period in office.

> When Jiang Zemin was appointed party secretary in May 1989, weeks before the tanks rolled into Beijing, he had to be smuggled into the capital to take up his position. A rattled Jiang was picked up at the airport in a VW Santana, China’s everyman car, instead of the Red Flag limousine then standard for top leaders. He was told to change into worker’s clothes for the ride into town to meet Deng, lest any of the angry demonstrators still filling the streets should spot him

> Jiang’s handover of power to Hu Jintao at the 2002 congress, held at around the same time as Xu Haiming received his first eviction notice in Shanghai, was a milestone event in the history of the Party. It was not just the fact that Jiang was replaced by Hu as general secretary, but that he agreed to step down without a public fuss. Hu’s displacement of Jiang was not only the first peaceful handover of power in China since the 1949 revolution, which was notable in itself, but the first in any major communist country at all. In addition, the transition from Jiang to Hu was carried out according to an evolving set of rules in the Party, setting retirement ages for top leaders and ministers, and establishing a new unofficial limit of two five-year terms for the party secretary and premier. … Each succession in the Soviet Union, from Lenin to Gorbachev, followed a death in office or a purge of the top leader. In China, Mao had nominated his own successor, the hapless Hua Guofeng, who in turn had been ousted by Deng Xiaoping. Deng declined to become party secretary himself but remained the paramount power behind the scenes, later overseeing the removal of two of his protégés, Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, the latter being then placed under house arrest in 1989 for the remainder of his life

> Baidu had long finessed its internet searches for the Chinese government, to block commentary critical of the Communist Party. It sold the same service to commercial clients, in the case of Sanlu for rmb 300 million, to limit or screen out searches linking the company’s products to sick babies and melamine. (Baidu later denied selling this agreement.)

> Ask any genuine entrepreneur whether their company is private, or ‘siying’, literally, ‘privately run’, it is striking how many still resist the description in favor of the more politically correct tag ‘minying’, which means ‘run by the people’. In a people’s republic founded on a commitment to abolish private wealth, an enterprise which is ‘run by the people’, even if it is owned by an individual, is more favored than a company that parades itself as purely private. Most economists now skirt the issue, by dividing companies into two categories, state and non-state, and leave it at that. ( )

Fantastic, behind-the-scenes story of how China actually works.
( )

This book again reiterates the very same points as the last book I reviewed being the massive investments in infrastructure without any real consumer demand backing it. It also highlights the massive levels of corruption that are for the most part hidden from the common man and the world in general. The members of the communist party at all levels are party to this. Only when the whole situation becomes untenable do these incidents become public like the Sanlu milk adulteration scandal.