China's Communist Party academies are drawing upon new ideas from formerly taboo places like business schools in the United States and Europe and sending delegations to absorb lessons from around the world, Charlotte Lee, associate director of the China Program at Stanford's Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center writes in a book.
In her new book ‘Training the Party: Party Adaptation and Elite Training in Reform-era China’, Lee concludes that those seemingly static parts of the party have adjusted and that it is no longer “revolutionary,” but has become, in its own words, a “learning party.”
Lee's 264-page work draws on field research, datasets and trips to the party-run academies where party recruits and elites are trained.
Through conversations with people at the academy campuses she visited around the country Lee discovered the extent to which the schools, and the party, were changing.
For example, the schools are using as one of their core teaching methods the case method approach pioneered by Harvard Business School, which Lee described as a “force of inspiration” for the students.
As a sign of another change, Lee noted that the schools, once almost shrouded in secrecy from the rest of society, are now renting out their office parks to other organizations as a way to raise revenue.
Lee said the party schools are dynamic and entrepreneurial in the way they seek out new student populations and craft new programs, both educational and political.
Read the whole story here .