The Danish Newspaper Berlingske Tidende Reports on the "Nine Commentaries on the Chinese Communist Party"

On September the 16th 2005, A Danish newspaper Berlingske Tidende published an article written by its Shanghai correspondent, Christina Boutrup about the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese society. The contents are translated as follows:

The trick of Guan Xi. (personal networking)

Although very few people in China believe in communism nowadays, there are still many young people joining the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) because it is a way for these young people to secure a better social position. However, social instability remains to be a potential threat to China.

In China, communism has long vanished and has been superseded by capitalism. However, the elite role of the communist party members in China does not fade. According to the CCP-controlled Xinhua News Agency, the CCP now has 696 million members, making it the largest political party in the world. Among the population, 2.4 million members joined the CCP not long ago.

A survey conducted in 1994 indicates that only eighteen percent of the Chinese people believed in communism. Therefore, the number of party members may not reflect the actual situation even though additional people enrol themselves into the CCP. Apparently, the intent of joining the CCP for the Chinese people is based on the consideration of “Guan Xi” (personal networking).

“The majority of the Chinese people have no choice but to join the CCP if they want to achieve certain influence in the social and political system. It is a way to access public resources,” commented Nis Hoyrup Christensen of The Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS). “It is also a manifestation that this person is part of the system, not a potential threat.”

However, not all of the Chinese people support the CCP. According to a report in the Epoch Times, a medium that holds an aggressive criticising position against the CCP, the overall situation has been totally different. In the report, it is proclaimed that 2.5 million Chinese people had withdrawn from the CCP during recent months. The wave of party withdrawals started in November 2004 after the Epoch Times published the nine articles in a series (“Nine Commentaries on the Chinese Communist Party”) to scrutinise the CCP. In Hong Kong alone, more than a million copies were sold, and some of them were brought back to China by Chinese tourists. The Epoch Times attributed the party withdrawals to people’s shocking reaction after they realised the facts exposed by these articles.

Since China opened herself to the market economy, Chinese society has been gradually divided into two extremes. Especially for the seven hundred million farmers, their life quality falls far behind the economic growth. The degree of poverty gap in China has surpassed that of India and become the worst in all countries of the world.