760 { China’s Quest
agriculture and heredity, with strict rules of marriage and imperial ennoble-
ment governing admission into that closed elite. Commoners and capitalists
could and sometimes did manage ennoblement into the Junkers, but those
cases were rare. The typical path of advance for CCP members has been via
promotion by the CCP’s nomenklatura to ever higher levels of power and
responsibility in China’s state and party administrative systems. Virtually
none of the top CCP leaders are from capitalist families—although that may
change in years ahead. There are great differences between the Junker and
the CCP elites in terms of openness of recruitment and the role of profes-
sional meritocracy. The point here, however, is that in terms of social com-
position, neither Junkers nor CCP leaders were linked to capitalist economic
success, although with both it can be argued that political success required
fostering and assisting capitalist industrialization. In China, the relation
between the CCP and successful capitalists was modified in 2000 when Jiang
Zemin persuaded the CCP to open to party membership successful private
sector entrepreneurs. To date, however, this had had little impact on the top
levels of power.
The formal legitimizing ideology of both the Junkers and the CCP is
anti-capitalist. The Junker claim to legitimacy was based on the antiquity of
enfeoffment, long loyalty and service to the liege lord and later the sover-
eign, military prowess, family heraldry, and simple tradition. Junkers typi-
cally disdained commercial activity as beneath their status. As for the CCP,
its formal ideology remains Marxism-Leninism–Mao Zedong Thought, with
its belief in the evil nature of capitalism, the superiority of socialism over
capitalism, and so on. This creed serves today largely as a device for strength-
ening intraparty unity and for solemn high rituals legitimizing the CCP’s
permanent domination of the state. Yet is remains the formal ideology of the
CCP, embodied, for example, in the Four Cardinal Principles.
The Junkers of Wilhelmine Germany and the post-Deng CCP are similar
too in that they are essentially extrastate elites that maintain permanent con-
trol over the state. The mechanisms through which they do this differ. The
devices used by the CCP were enumerated in note 1 in chapter 1. Regarding
Germany, the Junkers ensured their dominance via the Hohenzollern dy-
nasty, control over the top levels of the state bureaucracy, and the domination
of the officer corps of the German army. Prussia also had a privileged pos-
ition within the Wilhelmine state via certain constitutional arrangements.
Repression was a key ruling strategy relied on by both the Wilhelmine and
the CCP states. In both, opponents of the established order were subject to
harassment or imprisonment. Police powers were great and informants were
pervasive. There was the ever-present threat of martial law. In Wilhelmine
Germany and perhaps in the PRC today, over all loomed the threat of a “coup
d’état from above” in which the rulers would suspend constitutional forms
and rule by direct dictatorship.