i) A CCP official recently disclosed that for most civil servants, the Party dues are between 1.5
and 2 per cent of their after-tax salary. The party constitution stipulates: ‘Without justifiable
reason, members who do not participate in the party’s organisational life, or do not pay party
dues, or do not perform the work assigned to them for six consecutive months, will be expelled
from the party.’
ii) A small number of ‘elite’ party members study full-time for a period in special schools. This
year (2021), the Central Party School accepted more than six hundred senior cadres, selected
by the central and provincial governments, to study for five months at its campus in the northwest corner of Beijing. One of (the official's) acquaintances took part and changed a lot in five
months. He now eats healthy meals three times a day, drinks no alcohol, goes to bed early and
works out all the time. There wasn’t much else to do at the school. He walked for an hour each
day around an artificial lake, with shining koi carp and an island of black swans. He lost five
kilograms. His experience is said to be common. Before they are allowed to graduate and leave
the campus, the CCP CC Organisation Department interviews the cadres to find out whether
they have reached their study targets and expressed full loyalty to Xi Jinping and the party.
Their spiritual harvest is intangible right now, but it may become tangible later on when they
progress up the party ladder. This summer, most party members, have had to study Xi Jinping
Thought using newly developed websites. The branch secretary gives the students ID card
information to a website developer: to log on, all the student needed to do was to enter the ID
number, using the last six digits as the password. Every citizen of China has a
unique ID number, 18 digits long, which serves as both medical insurance and social security
number. It is made up of the codes for a person’s household registration province, city, district,
county, date of birth and the police station under whose jurisdiction they live. The penultimate
digit is for gender identification (odd numbers are male, even numbers are female).
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