A rare inside portrait of the Chinese Communist Party as an operating institution rather than an abstraction. Richard McGregor, a longtime Financial Times correspondent in Beijing, set out to answer a question that most China coverage skips: how does an organization of tens of millions of members actually exercise control over a country of 1.4 billion and an economy that appears, on the surface, to be capitalist? His answer is a tour of the Party's hidden architecture. He describes the red machines, the encrypted phones on senior executives' desks that connect them to the Party hierarchy; the Organization Department, which appoints the leadership of every major state enterprise and would be equivalent to a body in Washington naming the CEOs of the largest American corporations; and the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, which handles Party members outside the ordinary legal system. McGregor is especially good on the Party's relationship to business, showing how the chairmen of nominally independent giants like Sinopec and China Mobile hold Party rank and can be reassigned overnight. He also traces the Party's management of its own history, including the deliberate forgetting of the Great Leap Forward and Tiananmen. Written before Xi Jinping's consolidation of power, the book has aged into an essential baseline, explaining the institutional machinery that Xi inherited and then tightened. Its clarity about the gap between China's market surface and its Leninist core remains its most valuable contribution.