Does the CCP Still Attract Young People? Evidence from the Labor Market

• In Event: Political Recruitment and State Capacity in China

Abstract

In this paper, we address a research question that why the Chinese communist party (CCP) still attract the young generation to join the party? The CCP has 93 million party members in 2019. Each year, almost 70% college students submit their applications to join the party. The existing literature emphasize that the motivation to join the CCP is because the party is the dominant political power and monopolize the social resource in China. However, we provide a different theory to explain why the young generation still eager to join the CCP under the market economy, and use both the empirical analysis and a field experiment to provide the evidence to support our theory.

Our theory indicates that college students want to join the CCP is because its rigorous recruitment process provides an informative signal to the labor market about the party member’s non-cognitive ability. The CCP has a long and rigorous recruitment process. It takes at least two years for an applicant to join the party. During this process, an applicant needs to exhibit their openness, conscientiousness and extraversion to gain the acceptance of the party. These non-cognitive abilities are also valued in the labor market. However, in the labor market, no enterprise can spend the same resource as the CCP does to identify applicants’ non-cognitive abilities. Therefore, a party membership becomes an informative signal of high non-cognitive ability in the labor market.

We utilize the Chinese College Student Survey (CCSS) to analyze the party recruitment for college students and college graduates’ labor market performance to test our theory. Our results indicate several interesting results. First, party members have significant high cognitive and non-cognitive abilities than non-party members in colleges. This result indicates the party recruits more talented students. Second, measuring by the offered salary in the labor market, party members do not have more advantage than the non-party members in the public sector’s recruitment. Third, party members’ salaries are significantly higher than non-party members in the private sector by 5%, and 20% this salary premium can be attributed to the signaling effect of the non-cognitive ability.

Authors

• Junjian Yi, National University of Singapore

• Congyi Zhou, New York University