Foreign Perspective

No 'faith crisis' in CPC, official says

By Zhao Lei (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-07-01 07:13

BEIJING - One of the senior personnel officials of the Communist Party of China (CPC) on Wednesday denied there is a "faith crisis" among Party members and those who have applied to join the largest political organization in the world.

Spokespersons from 11 departments of the Communist Party of China (CPC) made an unprecedented group debut on Wednesday in front of Chinese and foreign media. The group debut was staged one day ahead of the 89th anniversary of the founding of the CPC, which now has nearly 80 million members. [China News Service]

Only a few applicants "may not have very correct motives for seeking Party membership," said Deng Shengming, the secretary general and spokesman of the CPC Central Committee's Organization Department, which handles the Party's personnel affairs.

"But those people are absolutely a small minority. The Party has a very strict procedure for selecting and educating its members. Most of our Party members are from the working class and believe in the Party's faith as well as its cause."

Deng made the remarks in response to a question from US-based media CNN at a press conference, asking whether many, if not most, people seek to join the Party to advance their careers instead of to demonstrate their faith in communism.

Spokespersons of 11 Party organizations made a group appearance at the press conference on Wednesday.

Moreover, Deng said, after a person joins the Party, he or she should still go through moral and ideological enhancement education.

"I think the Party's personnel mechanism has functioned fairly well so far," he said.

Some more concrete concerns were raised at the press conference, indicating the eagerness of the more than 120 journalists, who swarmed the main hall of the CPC Central Committee International Communication Office's building, to take the rare opportunity to feed their curiosity on the operation of the Party's previously low-profile departments.

Answering a question from a reporter with State broadcaster CCTV on the eye-catching corruption cases in the country's construction industry, Wu Yuliang, secretary general and spokesman for the CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, said more than 5,800 officials have been penalized for disciplinary violations related to construction projects since last August.

The officials were implicated in more than 9,900 cases of alleged corruption. Some 3,400 officials involved in the cases have been referred to judicial authorities for further investigation, he added.

The CPC Central Committee decided in July last year to launch a two-year campaign to tackle corruption in the construction sector, Wu said.

As of May, discipline authorities had probed more than 340,000 construction projects and uncovered disciplinary violations in 140,000 of those projects, he said.