CCP Recruitment: Another Look

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As we read in Bruce Dickson’s “Who Wants to Be a Communists? Career Incentives and Mobilized Loyalty in China” membership recruitment into the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has evolved and changed since the origins of the party. During the beginning of the establishment of the CCP, party officials looked to recruit citizens who had unyielding loyalty to the party and wholeheartedly supported the communist ideology.

With the motivation of the CCP shifting away from a Maoist era concept of mass mobilization campaigns emphasizing Marxist theories of class struggle to promoting economic development, the profile of a typical party member has changed. Originally, the communist party was made up of the proletariat, or revolutionary classes; workers, farmers and soldiers.

The problem with the recruitment during this time was that the party excluded and essentially ostracized those considered “intellectuals.” In doing so, the party lacked the members who were educated with college degrees and industry experts; the CCP lacked the members who could make sound decisions in shifting the ideology from class struggle to economic development.

As the CCP evolved over time and the intellectual bias of the party officials waned, a new class of members looked to join, changing the overall make-up of the party. Dixon explains how today the CCP looks to recruit young, well-educated, elite men. They begin recruiting members while they are studying at university, looking for those who can be groomed into the party.

According to Shannon Tiezzi’s article “CCP Changes its Recruitment Policy,” the party has approximately 80 million members and is growing rapidly as recruitment from universities increase greatly. The issue Tiezzi sees with recruiting so many young people into the party is whether or not they are qualified to join the CCP. Although there are various obstacles and tests to join the CCP to weed out unqualified individuals, party officials look to raise the standards even more for new members to avoid this misconception in the future.

While Dixon claims that the ideology of the party is shifting away from Marxist theory, which is true in certain situations, Tiezzi states that Xi Jinping is “renewing the CCP’s emphasis on ideology, particularly socialist core values.” Xi still wants to further economic development, however due to the misconceptions about the quality of CCP members, he is also trying to reemphasize ideological conformity as a key requirement to join the party (Tiezzi).

Moreover, it is clear that the CCP is looking to finesse their party membership through introducing new standards that focus on ideological conformity and commitment to the party.

Is this move forward-thinking or just a revert back to the Maoist Era of the CCP?

Tiezzi, Shannon. “CCP Changes Its Recruitment Policy.” The Diplomat. Accessed May 29, 2015.

Dickson, Bruce J. “Who Wants to Be a Communist? Career Incentives and Mobilized Loyalty in China.” The China Quarterly, 2013, 42-68.