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A whole load of Communists: 

The number of Communist Party of China (CPC) members has exceeded 80 million, a senior CPC official said Friday.

Which is the UK’s population plus twenty million leftover communists floating on gigantic rafts in the North Sea.

The two leading groups in new members were college students and people at the frontline of production or work, such as industrial workers, farmers, herders, and migrant workers, both accounting for more than 40 percent of the total new Party members.

There’s been a big push to get more industrial workers into the CPC over the past few years, especially in foreign owned enterprises. It’s odd to think that every Walmart in China has its own CPC cell.

Party organizations had been established in nearly all government agencies, state-owned and private enterprises, and social organizations.

They had also been set up in 99.9 percent of villages and urban communities and in all associations of lawyers and certified accountants, Wang said.

Regarding the 3 million migrant worker Party members, Wang said that the Party had managed to have them join Party organization activities in their current place of residence so that they could stay connected with the Party.

And there’s the rub. Assuming around 150 million migrant workers in China, that’s coverage of 2% as opposed to something like 8-9% of the population as a whole. And “joining Party organization activities” is not the same thing as actually joining the Party, so that’s a lot fewer.

Peter Hessler’s good on this in Country Driving in the section about the industrial zones in southern Zhejiang, where both factory managers and workers – the latter being people right at the bottom of the pile – regard the Party with a kind of amused contempt. They’re loose if not exactly free. This doesn’t appear to be a problem for the CPC in Zhejiang, but when you get huge riots by Sichuanese migrants in suburban Guangzhou, it very much is a problem.

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A whole load of Communists: The number of Communist Party of China (CPC) members has exceeded 80 million, a senior CPC official said Friday. Which is the UK’s population plus twenty million leftover communists floating on gigantic rafts in the...