It seems counterintuitive. But the book I have read recently which has most helped me understand the Communist Party of China (CPC) has zero connection with the country. It is not about China or produced there, nor written by a scholar of China outside the country, nor does it belong to the vast corpus of material published on the CPC in the nine decades since it was formed (including the six-and-a-half since it came to power on 1 October 1949).
In fact, reading this book made me aware of a gap in much of this literature: an answer to the question of what the essence of the party was and is. A recent case in point, among many excellent studies, is Andrew G Walder's China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed. In elegant and succinct fashion it covers the whole sweep of post-1949 Chinese history and the CPC’s role in it. It also makes clear the deep division between the CPC's very significant political achievements in the Maoist period, at least in its foundation stages, and the tragedies that flowed from a system weighted so heavily towards the powers of one overbearing leader.
Yet for all its excellence and lucidity, as a work of history it leaves this anterior issue - what sort of entity the Chinese CPC is, its relationship with power and inner worldview - unexamined. And this is where a book that predates by centuries the communist movement and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) brings unexpected insight: Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, born out of the civil war that racked England and its neighbours in the mid-17th century, a conflict that the historian Robert Tombs describes as one without a clear cause or real enemies. Leviathan may emanate from the remote cultural and historical context of the "wars of the three kingdoms", but it holds up a mirror to the deep character of modern China's ruling party and system.
