The Chinese Communist Party is both the most powerful and the most secretive political organisation on the planet, leading the country that aspires to become the world’s leading power: China. For the first time, insiders reveal the secrets of the party and describe the backstage of a «black box» where unlimited capitalism meets totalitarianism and forced confessions. From the economic opening of the late 1980s to the nightmare of «zero Covid», the party and its leaders have inherited the cult of secrecy, the obsession with control and paranoia as their reasons for being.