Fifteen years ago, a friend who is in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) shared with me the topic of discussion for a day-long Saturday seminar exclusively for local party members: the book First Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently, published by the Gallup organization (!). Many observers of China have sought to explain such cognitive dissonance–inducing juxtapositions of the CCP alongside the rapid rise of a market-oriented economy. Few provide one as illuminating as Charlotte Lee does in Training the Party.

Single-party systems are sometimes puzzling to those who study competitive political parties, but they serve a very clear purpose to stakeholders of the system in which they are embedded: “parties lengthen the regime's time horizon for survival,” managing short-term setbacks against long-term gains, thus generating “expectations that [parties] will remain in power, which in turn promotes elites’ willingness to invest” in them (p. 3). Leninist parties comprise a set of elite “professional revolutionaries” that “coordinate political functions [and] distribute economic power” by managing the state (read, government) bureaucracy. In China—one of, if not the, most decentralized of authoritarian states—party control is particularly challenging, especially in the post-Mao era. As Lee writes, “organizations forged during and for a revolutionary context have limited purchase in the management of a state no longer bent on revolution but rather focused on routine” (p. 12). How to manage such tensions that exist within the very lifeblood of how such a complex system is politically organized?

Lee's answer is competition. Throughout the reform era, China's party schools have altered “incentives while leaving Leninist party organizations intact,” thereby bridging “however incompletely, the disjuncture between new realities and prior institutional arrangement” (p. 15). This has been accomplished, ironically enough, by introducing the logic of markets into the party school network itself.

As the book unfolds, it covers a number of fascinating dimensions. In chapter 2, Lee provides a useful history of party schools going back to Ruidian, Jiangxi, in 1933, describing the diversity of educational and professional services they provide and arguing that party schools have taken on many of the functions of Maoist campaigns in the post-campaign reform era. Chapter 3 shows how cadre training helps alleviate some of the organizational pathologies within the new institutionalist paradigm with a data-rich analysis demonstrating that party-school cadre training appears to enhance upward mobility at lower administrative levels, involving older cohorts than the conventional wisdom might have us believe, and that it is not simply a pro forma hoop for cadres already selected for promotion to jump through. Chapter 4 demonstrates that although “party schools would seem an ideal site for centralized dissemination of updated information on the party line and unifying beliefs throughout the system” (p. 89)—a key traditional function of the CCP—they have in fact become increasingly “marketized” through decentralization during the reform era in order to improve the quality of content and to expand training capacity. They have done so in two ways: adding service components (along the shiye jigou model) to existing party schools and allowing other organizations to compete for cadre training responsibilities (what Lee calls “redundancies”). These are examined in a more fine-grained analysis (“the entrepreneurial party school”) in chapter 5, and in the penultimate chapter Lee examines the content of party schools, showing how a focus on professionalization has largely supplanted (without fully retiring) the traditional preoccupation with politics and ideology, a concern that is discussed in more detail in the concluding chapter.

This is a wonderful book, full of fresh analytical insights and fly-on-the-wall descriptions. I hesitate to raise the unforeseen changes wrought by Xi Jinping as a critique because it is intellectually akin to shooting fish in a barrel, and Lee does briefly address some of them (pp. 48–49 and 99n23, for example). Nonetheless, given the scope and depth of organizational changes in China since 2013, they do question the durability of Lee's analysis by raising important questions. How has the configuration of party schools changed in the Xi Jinping era, particularly with regard to the decentralization and market competition central to Lee's argument? Are cadres trained within this more market-based phase of party indoctrination and training under different sorts of political clouds than those who underwent their training in more traditional or orthodox settings? How have anti-corruption efforts altered the bureaucratic signaling dilemmas that party schools seek to assuage in the first place? How has the “professionalization vs. indoctrination” trade-off changed?

Lee's book might only help us infer some of the answers, but, more importantly, it also primes us to ask much better questions about what is currently unfolding in China. As such, Training the Party should be required reading for students of Chinese bureaucracy and for scholars of authoritarian one-party systems more generally.