Analysis | Growth in Chinese Communist Party membership slows to decades low
Decline points in part to President Xi Jinping’s gains in streamlining the party, analysts say
The Communist Party’s membership last year grew at its slowest pace since 1989, its Organisation Department said on Thursday in an annual bulletin ahead of Friday’s 95th anniversary of the party’s founding .
At the end of the year, the party had added 965,000 members, an increase of 1.1 per cent over 2014.
Between 1990 and 2012, the year President Xi Jinping came to power, membership grew by an average of about 2.2 per cent a year, according to the department’s figures. Since then, growth in new members has steadily declined.
Political analysts said the lower rates reflected some of Xi’s achievements in streamlining and weeding out unwanted elements. Xi became party general secretary in late 2012.
“Unlike his predecessors Hu Jintao and, especially, Jiang Zemin who encouraged leading entrepreneurs to join the party in the aftermath of the crackdown of the June 4 protests in 1989, Xi pledged to control the size of the party and purge ‘unqualified members’,” Shanghai-based political scientist Chen Diaoyin said.
Under Jiang’s “Three Represents” theory introduced in 2000, the party sought to represent the country’s booming private entrepreneurial class, among others while trying to counter the party’s critics.
