Life of the Party; With a glitzy new cadre school and a 'rejuvenation' campaign, the Chinese Communist Party is scrambling to remain relevant in a fast-changing society.(Cover Story)
Newsweek International; 5/30/2005
http://www.furl.net/item.jsp?id=3337994
Byline: Melinda Liu and Jonathan Ansfield (With Craig Simons in Beijing and Duncan Hewitt in Shanghai)
At first, the place looks like an American business school. The new China Executive Leadership Academy dominates a manicured campus covering 40 hectares of Shanghai's Pudong district.
The massive chrome-and-mirrored-glass buildings are accented by architectural features in bright red. The color is appropriate: CELAP is actually a training center for the best and brightest cadres of the Chinese Communist Party. In a country where party elders traditionally run the show, the average age of CELAP's 128 instructors is a mere 34 years. "The central government wants us to be creative, to get away from routine. So we choose young teachers instead of famous names who might have fixed ideas that are hard to change," says Prof. Xi Jieren, executive vice president of the academy. And here--especially here--what the party says, goes. "Our first graduates were easy to control," says Xi, beaming. "When teachers told them to line up, they lined up."
The Chinese Communist Party is scrambling to remain relevant--and dominant--in a society that's liberalizing and commercializing at warp speed. Forget about Mao Zedong's "Little Red Book." Today, cadres study everything from B-school case studies to speeches by former British "new left" imagemeister and current EU Trade czar Peter Mandelson to policy books from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. In February, the party launched an 18-month rectification campaign to "stay advanced" in a fast-changing world--and to retain tight control over its 68 million members. In addition to Shanghai, the CCP recently opened national-party schools in Jinggangshan and Yanan--the cities where Mao's historic Long March began and ended, respectively. What's more, the party is actively wooing many "society" (nonparty) individuals--especially promising private-sector executives--with, among other things, refresher courses for M.B.A. s. "No matter whether you're in government or business, you need leadership qualities," says Xi. <...>