Rowan Callick is Asia-Pacific Editor of The Australian newspaper. Following some two decades in Papua New Guinea, he moved to Australia in 1987 after which he worked for The Australian Financial Review for some twenty years during which time he was that paper’s Hong Kong-based China correspondent (1996 to 2000). In 2006, he joined The Australian as its China correspondent. He is the recipient of the Graham Perkin Award for Journalist of the Year (1995) and his work on Asia and the Pacific has also been acknowledged with the prestigious Walkley Award (1997 and 2007).
Rowan’s career is also marked by a strong engagement with the policy community: as member of the National Advisory Council on Aid Policy (1994-1996); of the Australia Indonesia Institute (2001-2006); of the Foreign Minister’s Foreign Affairs Council (2003-2006); and, since 2012, as an honorary fellow of the Australian Institute of International Affairs.
In his first book, Comrades and Capitalists: Hong Kong since the Handover (Freedom Publishing, 1998), he examined the impact of China on Hong Kong and looked at the possible effects of the handover on China itself. In his recently published Party Time: Who Runs China and How (Penguin Books Australia, 2013) Rowan offers an in-depth analysis of the Chinese Communist Party along with an insightful portrait of today’s China. The book and the multiple stories of power and humanity that it relates inspired the following interview.—The Editors
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Question: Your recent book Party Time is fascinating, informative and insightful. What made you want to write about the Chinese Communist Party?
Answer: I have been writing substantially about China for almost twenty years, including two spells as a China correspondent – from 1996-2000 for the Australian Financial Review, based in Hong Kong, and from 2006-2009 for The Australian, based in Beijing.
There are three common threads in this task: an understanding of history, personal empathy, and the pervasiveness of the party.
Yet I kept discovering that visitors to China found the party invisible, that when asked to speak to groups – chiefly but not only from Australia – ranging from teachers to share traders, they expressed puzzlement that I should mention the party prominently in my talks.
I realised then, that there was a huge party-shaped hole in understanding about China, even among people sufficiently motivated to visit the country. So I began to plan and interview for my book, while I was working in Beijing.
Q: Many people regard knowledge of the Communist Party as absolutely essential for understanding contemporary China. In your view, is this true? Or, do you now see some aspects of contemporary China developing in ways beyond the Party’s control?
A: The final chapter in my book is titled: ‘China Beyond the Party’, so I certainly feel that while it remains a jealous party, reluctant to share space, to operate in genuine partnership with individuals or organisations it does not control, China is bigger than the People’s Republic. People have more space to constructive private lives and family lives.
The Party began under Deng Xiaoping to concede space – as a result of its already being exercised – to people doing business for themselves. During and after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, the Party began also to concede space for altruism.
The Internet has also opened space beyond Party control. Despite the deployment of thousands of ‘net police’ and massive investment in supervisory software, persistent ‘netizens’ find ways to communicate information and ideas around and beyond the Party.
But the Party remains at the centre of contemporary China. It does not have to control directly every institution and activity; it does retain though the capacity to do so, which remains crucial, a level of authority that marks China’s governance out as unique in the twenty-first century world.