High Ranking Communists

[Zinjanthropos]

How do they achieve high status within their party?

Is it ruthlessness or intelligence?

I’m not a political person by any means. However it appears to me that China for instance, has more intelligent people running the show than USA or CANADA. Perhaps I’m influenced by the way Democratic elections are run these days, idk. 

Naturally I would want my military leaders to be ready to do what it takes to protect the country and in the same vein have the brightest minds in government top to bottom. Is that more likely in a communist state? 

I have a feeling democratic states are falling behind their communist rivals. I look at Trump, Biden, Trudeau and his cronies and wonder if we’re getting what we deserve, world class butt kissers.

[Syne]

What the actual fuck?

China is run by more intelligent people? You mean people who censor jokes about Winnie the Pooh, sterilize (slow genocide) Uighur Muslims and condemn them to concentration camps, delay warning the whole world about a potential pandemic so they can hoard PPE? What is wrong with you?

[C C]

How do they achieve high status within their party?

The well over 2,000 Communist Party of China delegates elect the Central Committee members (circa 200 in number). The Committee then chooses the Politburo (over 20 members) and the latter selects its Politburo Standing Committee (usually less than ten in number, but that can vary like the rest).

The Central Committee elects the country's top leader, such as current Xi Jinping. In five year intervals the CCP holds its congress to approve, maintain, and choose (new) members. Every ten years it tries to jumble personnel up enough to deter a cult of personality from arising like Caesar or Castro or the North Korean Kim dynasty.

Apart from the basic absolute loyalty to the Party and accumulating experience, it's hard to say what their other standards are for moving someone up or down.

Switching from China to NK, it's probable that Kim Jung-un dreamed of running away and visiting Disneyland like the rogue brother he eventually had assassinated -- BEFORE he got selected to be the successor to his father. After that happened, just to survive he had to continually impress other Party members of his allegiance, dedication, and credentials for being a leader. That meant doing some bad-arse things right out of the starting chute. Including no hesitation in whacking suspect relatives (Party comes before family, IngSoc style). And displaying a fixation with big missiles to demonstrate that he could vicariously exude the image of such himself.

[Zinjanthropos]

What the actual fuck?

China is run by more intelligent people? You mean people who censor jokes about Winnie the Pooh, sterilize (slow genocide) Uighur Muslims and condemn them to concentration camps, delay warning the whole world about a potential pandemic so they can hoard PPE? What is wrong with you?

I don’t know, what’s wrong with you? You seem on edge.

[Yazata]

Apart from the basic absolute loyalty to the Party and accumulating experience, it's hard to say what their other standards are for moving someone up or down.

My guess is that it works much as it did in ancient Rome - patronage.

Lower level people aspiring to rise in the hierarchy attach themselves to a more powerful senior figure and become his man. So the patron acquires an army of clients distributed through the hierarchy ready and able to do their patron's bidding, spying on their ostensible boss wherever they are stationed or whatever it happens to be. And in return the patron pulls strings to direct opportunities to his clients. After all, their rise serves his interests too.

We still see this system in many Latin American countries today.

So real lines of power often bear little resemblance to formal organizational charts.

I believe that early in his presidency, Xi started what he called an anti-corruption campaign intended to root out these many networks. What the idiot American press cheered as reforms were really designed to make everyone dependent on and loyal to him. Then everyone in the press suddenly seemed shocked when Xi rolled out a cult of personality. It should have been foreseen.

But patronage systems are very hard to root out. Especially in a hierarchical system as large as Chinas. They tend to arise spontaneously at all levels, from the local office with certain employees who are obviously the bosses pets, to entire corporations and governments.

[Syne]

What the actual fuck?

China is run by more intelligent people? You mean people who censor jokes about Winnie the Pooh, sterilize (slow genocide) Uighur Muslims and condemn them to concentration camps, delay warning the whole world about a potential pandemic so they can hoard PPE? What is wrong with you?

I don’t know, what’s wrong with you? You seem on edge.

You seem to be enamored with genocidal, anti-freedom people. That's a you problem, mate.

[C C]

... So real lines of power often bear little resemblance to formal organizational charts. [...] But patronage systems are very hard to root out. Especially in a hierarchical system as large as Chinas. They tend to arise spontaneously at all levels, from the local office with certain employees who are obviously the bosses pets, to entire corporations and governments.

Yah -- cronyism, nepotism, fraternal (guild, club, union, etc) and leisurely sports buddy-ism, and just plain sycophancy are the undocumented aspects of career advancement pervading all political, business, and security/defense administration. (Oops -- left out bribery, which arguably includes accommodating a lobbyist and receiving a cushy, ludicrously high-paying job or position in an industry after retirement from government service. A kind of "afterlife" transition from one to the other.)

[Secular Sanity]

How do they achieve high status within their party?

Is it ruthlessness or intelligence?

I’m not a political person by any means. However it appears to me that China for instance, has more intelligent people running the show than USA or CANADA. Perhaps I’m influenced by the way Democratic elections are run these days, idk. 

Naturally I would want my military leaders to be ready to do what it takes to protect the country and in the same vein have the brightest minds in government top to bottom. Is that more likely in a communist state? 

I have a feeling democratic states are falling behind their communist rivals. I look at Trump, Biden, Trudeau and his cronies and wonder if we’re getting what we deserve, world class butt kissers.

How to get to the top of China's Communist Party

[Zinjanthropos]

Thanks SS. Corruption is a common political denominator no matter where you go.

[Yazata]

How do they achieve high status within their party?

Is it ruthlessness or intelligence?

Probably both.

I’m not a political person by any means. However it appears to me that China for instance, has more intelligent people running the show than USA or CANADA.

I'm not sure that I want to agree with that. How do you know that they are intelligent? How do you know that party members in China rise on account of intelligence, as opposed to conformity, butt-kissing and back-stabbing? Or the ruthless elimination of anyone who dares to audibly disagree with anyone with more power or influence?

China might present an illusion of stability and unanimity (stability and conformity don't necessarily = intelligence), but remember that it's a dictatorship, a totalitarian system where all media are tightly controlled and where all public opinion is required to present a consistent rosy image of the country and its leadership. We saw what might be simmering right under that surface at Tiananmen. And we saw the response to it and how all references to that massacre have been erased inside China where it never happened. (Hong Kong and Taiwan remember that it did.) I suspect, and I think that Beijing thinks as well, that Chinese stability might be a lot more fragile than it seems to outsiders.

Perhaps I’m influenced by the way Democratic elections are run these days, idk.

Democracy has certainly become more disfunctional here in the United States, I'll grant you that. (Hopefully Canada not so much.) I think that there are lots of reasons for that and many things that can be done about it, but that's a subject for a different thread.

I have a feeling democratic states are falling behind their communist rivals.

Yes, it's a real concern and I definitely share it.

Keep in mind that communism isn't what we are facing in China, since China's been moving away from communism since the 1980's with great success. Today China most closely resembles fascism, something like Nazi Germany. A dictatorship up on top, a police state to enforce conformity, a cult of personality, yet with private wealth and enterprise allowed as a system of rewards, so long as it serves the interests of the rulers and the state.

In the short term it can be a very effective system. Germany went from the deepest depression imaginable in the 1920's to being the world's foremost military power in the late 1930's. China has risen from some of the world's most abject poverty in the middle 20th century to challenge the United States. Nazi Germany might still exist very powerfully today if Hitler hadn't been crazy and hadn't attacked every country that bordered Germany, eventually inducing the rest of the world to combine to overwhelm him before he was ready. China isn't making that mistake. China has very strained relations with most of its neighbors (India, Japan, Vietnam, Taiwan...) but it hasn't made the mistake of going to war with everyone at once.

I think that here in the United States, there's a political faction that hopes to reproduce that kind of fascism. They already control the mainstream news media. They control education, from K-12 through the universities, hence the indoctrination of the next generation. They have already politicized the secret police (Justice Department lawyers, FBI, CIA) and used them against political enemies. They are in the process of taking over the internet (Facebook, Twitter, Google), they have their brown-shirts terrorizing anyone who tries to use the Constitutional rights of free-speech and free-assembly to disagree with them (antifa), they declare people non-persons (cancel-culture) and they even try to control the words we say and hence the ideas we are allowed to think... If they can get control of the White House and Congress, if they can pack the Supreme Court, then I fear that American democracy is probably finished and we have seen our last free election. It will be like Hitler being elected Chancellor in 1933. One and done. The result will be enforced conformity that might indeed make things more efficient. But at what cost?

I truly fear for the future of American democracy and liberty, and hate to think that I might see the end of them in my lifetime. I fear for the future of what until recently was thought of as Western Civilization (now that phrase is probably politically incorrect). 

Becoming a totalitarian fascist state might make whatever might still call itself the "United States" stronger in the short term, but I think that doing it comes at too high a price. I'm very much with Syne on that.

And I'm inclined to think that freedom of speech, ideas and thought have their own strengths, especially when it comes to intelligence. There's a reason why the US remains the world's intellectual leader in so many fields, not least of them science and technology. There's a reason why despite its huge population China has been so unproductive in those areas and why it's reduced to stealing any American development that they possibly can. In some ways China continues to exist as the world's largest parasite, draining the United States of its wealth and its strategic manufacturing industries, while stealing its intellectual productivity in whatever areas that they believe won't threaten their system. There's a reason why the best American universities are filled with Chinese graduate students while the reverse isn't true.