The Chinese Communist Party celebrated the seventieth year of its rule in October 2019. The 90-million strong party has thus far defied many Western observers’ expectations that it would implode. Led by Xi Jinping at the helm, the party appears to be stronger and more penetrating than ever. Why? Daniel Koss’s book tackles such fundamental puzzles about the organizational infrastructure of the Chinese Communist Party from a historic and comparative lens. At a macro level, Koss’s empirical study of grassroots party-building in China asks the question of how parties contribute to authoritarian rule. It also seeks to explain the unevenness of party infrastructure across different regions of the country. Comparing “red areas” where there is high party penetration with “pink areas” where the party has failed to fully penetrate, the book explains variations in governance outcomes as a function of party penetration.
The book’s overarching point is that grassroots party politics is a key variable in explaining the durability of authoritarian rule. An authoritarian regime party can effectively penetrate society at a grassroots level through its local party branches that serve as “capillaries that enable the microcirculation of information” (p. 5). Every party-state depends on its foot soldiers to collect taxes and to implement unfavorable policies. China is no exception. Koss provides compelling evidence that, in achieving both governance goals, the state succeeded in those places that had a strong party presence at the local level.
This makes intuitive sense. After all, if rank-and-file members are the eyes and ears of the party, they are more likely to fulfill their missions in places where there are more members and better-developed party infrastructures. Similarly, the extractive capacity of the state is higher in places with more party members who can provide valuable information to the government about local taxpayers. In other words, the degree of party penetration is directly linked to certain governance outcomes at the local level.
The second part of the book traces the historical origins of a strong grassroots party in China. This is where Koss’s argument connects most directly with a broader comparative literature on revolutionary struggle and the birth of authoritarian parties. Why is it that some regions in China are more “red” than others? Why did the party not penetrate each region evenly? Koss finds the answer in an important historical event: the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45. Confirming findings by comparativists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, he finds that violent revolutionary struggle heralded the birth of a strong party in China.
Yet, he goes a step further to analyze subnational variations in China according to their exposure to the violent anti-Japanese struggle. This is a worthwhile inquiry, because it disaggregates the impact of revolutionary struggle across regions, an analytical task that scholars of China have long emphasized. Koss finds that the party is much stronger in regions that underwent violent struggle against the Japanese than in those that did not. Treating individuals as rational beings, Koss argues that people living in regions that the Japanese occupied were more likely to support the Communist Party because doing so was a viable survival strategy. As a result, occupied regions saw much deeper party penetration that persisted long after the war, constituting a path-dependent outcome. Thus, the origins of the Chinese Communist Party can be traced to the revolutionary struggle, one that created an uneven party infrastructure across the country.
Yet, it is one thing to have a strong party and quite another to have one that can rectify itself. One of the most intriguing analyses comes at the end of the book when Koss interrogates the ability of the party to auto-correct. Here, the book addresses a central debate in Chinese politics on whether the authoritarian regime is truly adaptive. Koss does not simply opine: he digs into historical archives to present evidence that the Communist Party not only survived the crises of the Cultural Revolution (1967–69) but that it also emerged even stronger and more capable of dealing with crises writ large.
This poses an intriguing question: Does the Chinese Communist Party today have the same adaptive capabilities that it did in decades past? Analysts have long speculated that the party-state may not survive an economic shock, because the regime’s legitimacy has been tied to its economic performance. Koss does not answer this question. Instead, he raises a provocative proposition that the survival of the party may not be tied directly to that of the state. He suggests that it is possible for the party to outlast the state. That is, even if the top echelons of the party collapse, the grassroots tentacles of the party may persist. Moreover, these party foot soldiers may have much to offer in terms of information and practical experience to rulers.
These propositions leave readers wanting to know more about party politics in contemporary China and beyond. To what extent has the party infrastructure at the lowest levels transformed or expanded in the past decade? One of the party-state’s hallmark projects under the current leader Xi Jinping is its poverty alleviation campaign, which seeks to eradicate extreme poverty by the end of 2020. The party has sent more than 770,000 officials to far-flung, poor villages to implement programs to meet these development targets. If party penetration is uneven, as Koss suggests, how can the government ensure equality in poverty alleviation across the country? The party has also increased its presence inside universities and enterprises. This ensures even deeper and broader control of all sectors of society, aided by high-tech surveillance. Meanwhile, internal party struggles are refracted through political campaigns such as Xi’s anticorruption drive, which targeted two million officials.
The manner and extent to which the Chinese Communist Party has changed have implications beyond Chinese politics, which points, as Koss suggests, to the importance of studying the evolution of parties in a comparative light. Whether authoritarian or democratic, Koss reminds us that political parties and their grassroots members play a crucial role in everyday governance.
