Zeng Fanyue is a 24-year-old political science graduate student at Shanghai’s Fudan University. Politically speaking, she’s redder than red. “As a Communist Party member, I have additional social responsibilities. I should help people and do things for others,” she says, telling how she choked up with emotion during a ceremony in which she renewed her oath of loyalty to the party.
The government of President Xi Jinping, who’s also chairman of the Communist Party of China (CPC), says it wants more true believers like Zeng. At the same time, it wants to weed out the party’s corrupt members. Last year the number of Chinese joining the party dropped 25 percent as young people saw little to gain from joining an organization in convulsions over the prosecutions of party notables such as ex-Chongqing boss Bo Xilai and former Security Minister Zhou Yongkang. In just the first five months of this year, authorities investigated 26,523 officials, including seven at the ministerial level, for crimes related to their jobs, reported the official Xinhua News Agency on July 3. The CPC—now 87 million strong—is facing “severe dangers,” particularly from corruption, Xi warned in a June 30 speech.
Three weeks before Xi’s speech, the party had issued new recruitment rules, the first major revision in 24 years, that aim to further slow the growth of the world’s largest political organization. Only people likely to be so dedicated to party doctrine that they won’t succumb to the temptations of graft will be welcomed.
Ding Xueliang, professor of social science at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, says Xi and other top leaders became convinced China needed a smaller, purer party after close study of the collapse of Communist rule in the former Soviet Union. “The major problem they identified about the Soviet Communist Party was: No. 1, the senior cadres didn’t believe in party principles, didn’t believe in communism or socialism, and only believed in their own self-interest,” Ding says. “No. 2, within the cadre system—amongst the higher- and middle-level officials—there were extensive networks of corruption.”
via China’s Xi Enlists Party Recruiters in Anticorruption Effort – Businessweek.
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