The Political Economy of Party Recruitment in China

• In Event: Authoritarian Durability & Adaptability

Abstract

Co-opting outsiders into regime-parties has a great influence on authoritarian rule. The ideal type of regime-party monopolizing political power consolidates the authoritarian rule through buying supporters and organizational absorption. The ruling party recruit new members to maintain political control, and individuals compete for potential social and economic rewards by attaining party membership. However, in countries undergoing marketization endorsed by the state, regime-parties are faced with the dual tasks of promoting development and taking control. Economic liberalization reduces the proportion of economic resources controlled by the party and then limits the party’s ability of exerting social control. The failure to stop elites joining the opposition caused Leninist parties in Eastern Europe lost a large number of members after economic reform. However, there has been a case of controversy in China. The party-state’s shrinking from economy and rising number of new members joining the party have been long coexisted, which even distinguish China itself from its marketized communist counterparts.
Previous literature explain the puzzle with society-centered explanations which regarding party membership as political capital to bring higher return, broaden party members’ career choice and bring more non-cash benefits to rank-and-file members, However, party-centered research highlights changes in the party recruitment criteria and political logic behind. The party wishes to recruit specific groups for fulfilling its policy goals and indirectly controlling social and economic resources through the affiliation between the organization and people. Although the explanations from perspectives of life chances and party adaption have been supported by a lot of empirical evidence, little studies can simultaneously incorporate both society and the party approaches into the analysis, and offer a middle range theory to explore the political economy of party recruitment in single party regime like China.
The Chinese Communist Party membership has tremendously increased 140% since the economic reform. However, party recruitment dynamics rarely has been investigated at meso-level because of data scarcity. we propose a new internet data based method, which is able to estimate both the supply-side and demand-side number of the communist party membership among subnational regions across years. Based on user generated Baidu searching data, we develop a new method to estimate the number of applicants and admissions for communist party membership along the recruiting procedure with in Chinese prefectural cities. Based on an original dataset generated from this method, for the first time, we examine the selection dynamics in recruiting stages, and political and economic logic behind the authoritarian party recruitment in China.
We find that the party recruitment of the CCP is characterized by mobilized recruitment, which monopolize party membership, designs and refines its ration system for distributing membership quotas. When the party membership becomes less attractive, the party intentionally tightens the membership quotas in general terms but restructures the distribution for more selective recruitment. In addition, the more restrictive recruitment policy in 2013 has re-stimulated the public's interest in joining the Party. Meanwhile, the party has selectively customized and fine-tuned its recruitment policy for different regions. The logic of the recent party recruitment policy change is to strengthen party’s co-optation in more economically developed and state-dominated regions. This focused strategy has been well received in some parts of those target areas, but also got some decoupling reactions from the society. The findings provide some new evidence for understanding regime-party’s strategies to stabilize authoritarian rule, especially when market-oriented reforms are endorsed by the regime party.

Authors

• Tianguang Meng, Tsinghua University

• Zesen Yang, Tsinghua University