Unexpected Conscience

Worth a read

I have a strong recommendation for a lengthy study worth reading if you want to understand how the CCP has governed China over the past three quarters of a century. Bob Suettinger, former National Security Council staffer and intelligence officer, published an extremely insightful volume earlier this year entitled The Conscience of the Party: Hu Yaobang, China’s Communist Reformer.

You do not either have to be a China scholar or an academic of any type to enjoy this easily accessible subject as Suettinger presents it. If you simply want to know one view on how we got to the tensions we currently have with the CCP and the people of China, this is a strong starting place.

Many China skeptics will deny that the Communist Party ever had a conscience. Suettinger indeed discusses in almost 400 page detail (replete with another sixty pages of citations) the cruelties, the lies, the self-justifications, and assorted other repugnant behaviors. It’s seductive to forget that the Party won the Civil War against the Kuomindang, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, because they too engaged in pretty abominable behavior while the dominant rulers for twenty years. Suettinger (nor I) justify the horrors unleashed by leadership against the opposition during this struggle nor, more importantly, against the public caught scraping through horrible conditions.

Suettinger, hardly “soft” on China, delved into archives (before Xi Jinping closed them à la the behavior I discussed yesterday regarding closing virtually any form of transparency under CCP rule), to provide considerable clarity for why Chinese youth were so angry at the leadership’s treatment of this founding figure in the PRC as upon his passing from leadership. Indeed, too often forgotten in the west is that it was Hu’s April 1989 death and resulting Party elder fears of how his memory galvanized students that ultimately led to the 4 June massacre in Tian’anmen; the “goddess of democracy” and student protests followed demands that Hu receive appropriate respect for his role as a reformer and a CCP political denizen.

The Conscience of the Party is especially valuable for its detail on the shifting political relationships within the CCP elite between the 1930s in Yan’an and the late 1980s. Suettinger is direct and harsh in discussing many of the confrontations between Mao and those who opposed his never ending efforts to assure his own dominance, regardless of the ridiculous nature of many of the Great Helmsman’s policy prescriptions. But the author also manages to unwrap details on Party debates beyond Mao’s determination to dominate.

These details offer a clearer understanding of how China reached the “reform era” while illustrating to me, at least, why that era likely could not continue in perpetuity. Mao was narcissistic but far from the only Party senior figure of who neither brooked other opinions nor tolerated policies seen as fraught for the CCP hold on power. Hu’s role in offering prescriptions tinged with supposed danger to absolute CCP control became problematic, ultimately career-ending.

Suettinger’s confident style opens the reader’s understanding into a system too often discussed in grandiose all-or-nothing terms. He is sympathetic to his subject but honest about this complicated figure doubting the CCP’s commitment to the new China it so often predicted.

It’s winter, you likely live somewhere you will have some dreary cold days ahead (we certainly did yesterday). If you want to learn more about both a society and governing Party mowing down that country’s educated children, it’s worth reading Suettinger’s perceptive work. Or, if you simply want to know more about a country with whom we have the potential for on-going turbulence in the years ahead, take a look. I don’t write book reviews often though I have occasionally mentioned some of what I read. I definitely encourage you to consider this study.

I welcome your thoughts, questions, comments, or rebuttals on Hu Yaobang, this volume or the six overtime sessions required for the University of Toledo football squad to defeat the University of Pittsburgh the other night. I don’t have all of the answers but am keenly interested in hearing what actions and consequences you are following these days.

Thank you for your time today or any other day. I also greatly appreciate the subscribers who support Actions with their contributions as every bit of it advances our discussion.

You may well be somewhere rainy, snowy, or warm enough for a backyard swim today. In any case, I wish you a delightful Sunday as we round the bend for this final weekend of 2024. Be well and be safe. FIN

Robert L. Suettinger, The Conscience of the Party: Hu Yaobang, China’s Communist Reformer. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2024.