PARANOIA

As part of the newspaper's coverage of the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China, Richard MacGregor in the Financial Times describes the Chinese Communist government's formidable and all-encroaching "Central Organization Department," the third component (with the army and the media) of its absolute control:

The department replicates what was known in the Soviet Union as the nomenklatura, the “list of names” of party members who formed the Communist ruling class through their eligibility to fill prized jobs in any sectors the state controlled. “The system is all from the Soviet Union, but the CCP has taken it to an extreme,” says Yuan Weishi, of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangdong. “China is more radical. [The party here] wants to lead everything.”

To glean a sense of the dimensions of the organization department’s job, conjure up a parallel body in Washington. The imaginary department would oversee the appointments of US state governors and their deputies; the mayors of big cities; heads of federal regulatory agencies; the chief executives of General Electric, ExxonMobil, Wal-Mart and 50-odd of the remaining largest companies; justices on the Supreme Court; the editors of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, the bosses of the television networks and cable stations, the presidents of Yale and Harvard and other big universities, and the heads of think-tanks such as the Brookings Institution and the Heritage Foundation.

All equivalent positions in China are filled by people appointed by the party through the organization department. With a few largely symbolic exceptions, the people who fill these jobs are also party members. Not only that, the vetting process takes place behind closed doors and appointments are announced without any explanation about why they have been made. When the department knocks back candidates for promotion, it does so in secret as well.

The patronage dispensed through the department, in the form of the most powerful party and government positions in the country, has turned it into a forum for the system’s toughest internal political battles. Politburo members, factional groupings, the centre and the provinces, and individuals aligned to different ministries and industries all struggle to place their people into positions of influence in state institutions. [...]

Officials holding posts such as governor or mayor are rated according to a lengthy list of numerical indicators that look like they were drawn up by management consultants. Economic growth, investment, the quality of the air and water in their localities and public order all theoretically count in the performance metric.

Richard MacGregor's article is "The party organiser," from the September 30, 2009 FT.

On a completely unrelated note, Gareth Hanrahan continues to work on High Programmers, the third of the PARANOIA 25th-Anniversary rulebooks, this one for players of ULTRAVIOLET Clearance. The elevator pitch was "Yes, Minister with lasers and a high body count."