Cadre Country: How China became the Chinese Communist Party

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His books include Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia, awarded the Ernest Scott Prize of the Australian Historical Association, and Awakening China: Politics, Culture and Class in the Nationalist Revolution, awarded the Joseph Levenson Prize of the US Association for Asian Studies. One of the most important books on China written since Xi Jinping assumed power, Cadre Country is a forensic and profound explication of the true nature of the Chinese Communist Party. Award-winning historian John Fitzgerald focuses on the stories the Communist Party tells about itself, exploring how China works as an authoritarian state and revealing Beijing’s monumental propaganda productions as a fragile edifice built on questionable assumptions. Party committees at all levels (broadly, local, provincial, and national levels) take responsibility for cadre management, usually through the Organization Department, and generally one or two administrative levels lower than the committee.

Subsequent regulations included establishing a cadre retirement system, age limits for leading cadres, and new recruitment and promotion rules.Peasants and laborers, while forming the core ideological base of the CCP, were largely illiterate and uneducated, and thus not well suited for the work of some higher-level cadre positions. The management of cadres is one of the ways the CCP controls the state and influences wider society.

The cadre system is one of the few organs of the party-state which have functioned continuously during the PRC's history. The CCP in particular sought to avoid any manifestation of "bureaucratism" ( simplified Chinese: 官僚主义; traditional Chinese: 官僚主義; pinyin: guānliáo zhǔyì), a general term referring to potentially undesirable traits that would hinder cadres' ability to effectively work toward achieving socialism. Across issues such as the use of language, the availability of services, the role of the legal frameworks, migration, corruption, history and memory, he charts how the Party-State operates distinct from the People State. Organization Department branches at all levels keep a "leading cadre reserve list" ( Chinese: 领导干部候补名单; pinyin: Lǐngdǎo gànbù hòubǔ míngdān) from which capable cadres may be selected to fill leading positions as they become vacant.The China Yan'an Executive Leadership Academy in Yan'an, and the China Jinggangshan Executive Leadership Academy in Jinggangshan, both of which provide "training on revolutionary traditions and conditions" in China. Even if it's not the whole story, it offers a way of viewing which is powerful and compelling about a country we all need to know more about.