Explainer | Joining China’s Communist Party: how and why so many people do it, ‘secret’ members and expulsion
- Since its founding 100 years ago, China’s ruling party now has almost 92 million members
- Almost 5 million local-level party organisations pervade every aspect of Chinese society, from villages and schools to private companies
This is the fifth in the South China Morning Post’s series of explainers about China’s Communist Party, in the lead up to the party’s 100th anniversary in July. In this piece, Jane Cai and Qin Chen shed some light on why so many people in China join the Communist Party, and what this entails.
The party they founded has since grown to become the second-largest in the world – after the Bharatiya Janata Party, one of India’s two major political parties – with almost 92 million members.
After the party won the civil war and established the People’s Republic of China in 1949, membership grew to 22 million in the next two decades and continued to rise.
In this century, membership rose at an average of 2.4 per cent annually under Hu Jintao, who served as the party’s general secretary from 2002 to 2012 before growth slowed markedly to about 1 per cent a year in the past decade, according to official data.
