Communist Party Membership Research Articles

Double-Edged Sword: Persistent Effects of Communism on Life Satisfaction

Communism was a two-edged sword for the trustees of the former regime. Communist party members and their relatives enjoyed status and privileges, while secret police informants were often coerced to work clandestinely and gather compromising materials about friends, colleagues, and neighbors. We examine the long-term consequences of such connections to the communist regime for life satisfaction in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. We also calculate a monetary equivalent of those effects and empirically test mechanisms. The findings underscore that past communist regime connections have a persistent but differential effect on life satisfaction.

Expelled members of Communist Party of Czechoslovakia: Their careers and perspectives during the beginning of the Normalisation era in South Bohemia

The following study deals with those members of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (Komunistická strana Československa, KSČ) who had to face expulsion from the Party at the beginning of the 1970s. It aims to present the perspectives of the rank‑and‑file members of the KSČ who were excluded or expelled after the military intervention of the Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968. Using the example of those expelled from two districts in South Bohemia (Český Krumlov and Prachatice), we will try to show the communist regimeʼs principled openness to redress among those affected who demonstrated their loyalty to the normalisation regime. The Party sanction, or rather the hope of improving their disadvantaged position, thus motivated some of those affected to various expressions of loyalty, manifested not only in official requests for re‑admission to the Communist Party, but above all through increased activity and public engagement. Also, many highly qualified workers were not significantly affected by the vetting due to their privileged status.

Social Capital and Self-Rated Health: Empirical Evidence from China.

This study assesses the relationship between social capital and self-reported health (SRH) by comparing different genders and ages. It utilizes data from the 2016 China Family Panel Study data with a sample of 30,657 adult individuals from 25 provincial-level administrative regions in China. This was a cross-sectional study conducted with computer-assisted face-to-face interviews to assess social capital and self-rated health among Chinese adults. A multi-level Poisson regression model is employed to model social capital-related dependent variables using the independent variable of fair/poor health status. In terms of social relations, mobile phone use can improve men’s health. However, this effect is insignificant for women. Moreover, gender and age interact with the relationship between social capital and individual health. The relationship between trust and self-rated health is not significantly different between men and women. The frequency of feeling lonely and the lack of feelings for the community in which they live have a negative impact on self-rated health, but there are no obvious differences in terms of gender. The number of meals per week with family members is negatively correlated with men’s SRH, but there is no correlation with adult women 41 and above. Lack of help from neighbors is negatively correlated with men’s health, but not with that of adult women 40 and below. Being a member of the Chinese Communist Party or a member of the Chinese Communist Youth League is positively correlated with SRH for women 60 and above.

Party membership and charitable giving in China: the mediating role of resources, networks, prosocial values and making compulsory donations

Previous studies suggest that Communist Party members in China are more likely to give and give more to charity than non-Party members, but why this is remains unclear. Using the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS, 2012), this article develops and tests hypotheses about the potential mechanisms that influence the relationship between Party membership and charitable giving. Uniquely, total charitable giving in China includes both voluntary and compulsory donations. Generalised structural equation modelling results indicate that Party members donate more overall, because they have higher levels of human resources, larger formal networks and higher prosocial values and are more likely to make compulsory donations than non-Party members. Interestingly, our results show that making compulsory donations crowds out voluntary giving. Therefore, Party members donate only marginally more than non-Party members in terms of voluntary giving.

More than a theory: ‘a guide to action!’ Theses on Marx (on reading Ernst Bloch, the principle of hope)

The article argues that Marx's materialism has not been understood by Marxists, and that, without a radical reorientation, a new beginning – essential today – is impossible. Marx departed from all earlier materialism because it omitted ‘the active side’, missing the essential understanding that the ‘being’ which determines consciousness has been, continues to be – and now demands to be – changed by human practice. The proletariat is the agency of the socialist change corresponding to ‘the standpoint of socialised humanity’, the future. The depths of the earlier materialism's failure were epitomised by Joseph Stalin's Dialectical and Historical Materialism, circulated world-wide, to Communist Party members at the time of the Moscow trials. A suitable background to the state murder of tens of millions, it ignored completely ‘the active side’. Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope rescued Marx's materialism, showing that the proletarian standpoint encompasses the struggle for the whole of the arts and sciences.

Different Perceptions of Belief: Predicting Household Solid Waste Separation Behavior of Urban and Rural Residents in China

An unprecedented Household Solid Waste (HSW) separation program was launched in 46 cities and some pilot rural areas in China in 2019. This study examines the antecedents of waste separation behavior using the extended theory of planned behavior (TPB) to identify beliefs that are useful targets for interventions, and compares the urban-rural differences. Based on interviews with rural and urban residents, we identified residents’ beliefs influencing waste separation behaviors, including four behavioral, seven normative, and eight control beliefs. Then, we tested the conceptual model with a two-stage questionnaire survey using a sample of 604 residents from urban and rural areas. Evidence from structural equation modeling supports the extended TPB in that it predicts waste separation intention and behavior on the whole. Moral norm and self-identity were found to independently predict intention and may prove a useful addition to the TPB; however, the path from attitude to intention is not supported in both urban and rural models. Moreover, the specific difference of belief between urban and rural residents was examined. The behavioral beliefs associated to money, including earning, free waste bin or bag, and fine, are significant only in the rural group. The normative beliefs of family, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members, and government can affect residents’ subjective norm in both urban and rural, while the beliefs of relatives, friends, and neighbors are significant only in the rural group. Implications for managers of operating waste separation programs were discussed. Further investigation into the potential of the model to intervene in waste separation behavior is required.

Political Capital and Household Income: Evidence from Twenty-Four Transition Countries

Using data from 24 transition countries, we investigated the impact of political capital on household income and further examined the role of market transition. We found that households with Communist Party members had higher income, but market transition could mitigate the effect, and it persisted after addressing endogeneity concerns. Household members’ work in state sectors, social networks, and trust level of households’ heads were impacting mechanisms. Heterogeneity analyses demonstrated that each member’s political capital could heighten household income and market transition could weaken the effect. Market transitions reduced the advantage of political capital in both urban and rural areas, though the effect was larger in rural areas.

Duress in Immigration Law

Throughout diverse areas of law, the duress doctrine offers a way to understand culpability for criminal conduct, carving out space to reduce blame for those who acted under threat of imminent and severe consequences. Within immigration law, however, the doctrine is utterly incoherent — applicable in some areas (from criminal law to terrorism to Communist party membership), and sharply contested in others (asylum). Someone whom the immigration law defines as a trafficking victim in one context could be barred from immigration status in a different context, only because the law has no consistent understanding of the role or definition of duress. This article contrasts the remarkably consistent definitional approach to duress in both criminal law and international law, with the chaos in immigration law. That chaos is exacerbated by the unusual political power the Attorney General has in setting the course of immigration common law jurisprudence. The article sees this conceptual disarray as further proof of the need for a Congressional remaking of immigration law, and calls for a unified approach to duress within the adjudicatory spheres of immigration.

Market Transition, Multidimensional Socioeconomic Status, and Health Disparities in Urban China

Synthesizing the theory of fundamental causes in the health literature with the stratification research on transitional economies, this paper investigates how the multidimensional socioeconomic status (SES), especially education and communist party membership, is associated with three self-rated health outcomes in urban China. Using data from the 2013 Chinese General Social Survey, we find that party membership is associated with better self-rated health, higher health-related quality of life and work, and lower levels of self-rated depression, whereas the effect of education is somewhat more elusive than it usually is in Western societies. Our findings suggest that the effects of socioeconomic indicators are better understood by being contextualized in a sociopolitical environment. It is also fruitful to include both global (education, income, employment status, and subjective SES) and local measures of SES (party membership and housing ownership) in exploring their associations with health in the world’s largest transitional society.

Transition welfare gaps: One closed, another to follow?

AbstractRespondents from post‐communist countries have been found to systematically report lower levels of happiness and self‐rated health. While the first welfare gap in happiness has closed recently, the second transition gap in self‐perceived health only started to close. Specifically, this paper shows that treating all transition countries as a homogeneous group may be misleading and therefore divides 28 transition countries into three groups. As a result, in the most recent 2016 round of the ‘Life in Transition’ survey, transition countries in Southern Europe are no longer found to be different from non‐transition nations in terms of their self‐rated health. Although the gap in self‐perceived health for transition nations in Eastern Europe is present in a basic model, it becomes less statistically and economically significant when subjective beliefs and macro‐level variables are added. Countries from the former Soviet Union and Mongolia remain the only group in which respondents report 16.5%–29.1% lower probability of ‘Good’ or ‘Very Good’ health compared to other transition and non‐transition countries. Controlling for communist party membership, ideological beliefs and macro‐level variables somewhat reduces the gap for the former Soviet Union and Mongolia but it remains significant in multiple robustness checks. Although the gap in self‐rated health now applies to only one group of transition countries, it remains an important empirical puzzle with far‐reaching implications for health policy, demand for healthcare and the process of transition.

Former Communist party membership and present-day entrepreneurship

After the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe, former party members were particularly likely to start businesses and become entrepreneurs. What remains unclear, however, is whether this entrepreneurial activity was driven by the resources, information, and opportunities provided by former party membership or because individuals with specific individual attributes were more likely to become Communist cadres (self-selection). This study is the first to separate the causal effect of former Communist party membership from self-selection. Using individual-level Life in Transition-III survey data and a control function approach, we find that former Communist party membership has facilitated business set-up but not business longevity in Central and Eastern European countries. We also show that people who joined the former ruling party had fewer of the traits associated with entrepreneurship such as unobservable personality traits, ability, motivation, and entrepreneurial aptitude, and as such were negatively self-selected. We show that former Communist party membership still matters for business practices, business ethics, and the nature of doing business in transition economies.

Marketing Communist Party membership in China

The selection of political officials is under-studied in economic analysis of authoritarian politics. In the absence of elections, the autocracy alone is burdened with the task of selecting the right candidate for every political position. This paper tries to empirically investigate an authoritarian political selection market where a dictator “sells” potentially valuable political membership to eligible supporters who have to pay a “price” in terms of screening cost. We highlight one dilemma that many contemporary autocracies face, namely the need to recruit educated elites who usually have better options in the private sector and are less dependent on the regime. This paper argues that autocracies can minimize this challenge by actively screening for unobservable loyalty conditional on observed technical skills. Using micro-level Chinese Communist Party college recruitment data, we show that the party adopts a discriminative strategy of lowering (but not removing) the screening cost for high-ability students and more intensively screening for loyalty among low-ability students. Using brainwashing course scores as a measurement of loyalty provides suggestive evidence that party members of a given ability level have more loyalty than nonmembers at the same ability level.

Impact of work ethic on proactive work behaviors: The moderating roles of education and party affiliation in China

This study examined the relationship between work ethic and proactive work behaviors by focusing on the moderating roles of education and party affiliation. The theoretical model was tested using data collected from employees in China. Analyses of 746 usable questionnaires collected at two phrases were used to empirically test the relationship between the work ethic and proactive work behaviors. The relationship between work ethic and proactive work behaviors was more pronounced for those with lower education. It was also founded that the work ethic had a significantly stronger positive influence on proactive work behaviors among non-Party members than among the Chinese Communist Party members. Finally, we discussed the theoretical and practical implications of this study, future research directions and limitations at the end of this article.

Who loses income during the COVID-19 outbreak? Evidence from China

The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed every facet of society. In addition to directly affecting population health, the economic impact of this social shock has begun to be palpable at the individual level. Situated in this context, this research note draws on data collected from Mainland China in March–April, 2020 to examine the individual-level economic toll of the COVID-19 outbreak. We investigate how individuals’ income (when surveyed) has changed relative to before the outbreak, and pay particular attention to the potentially unequal distribution of economic vulnerability based on structural (dis)advantages and COVID-19 related conditions. We show that education, family economic status, Communist Party membership, state-sector employment, and urban hukou—all long-standing status markers in China—mitigate the adverse effects of the COVID-19 outbreak on individuals’ income losses. In addition, people who live in families or regions that were hit harder by COVID-19 are more likely to experience income losses. Taken together, this study shows that the COVID-19 pandemic not only exacerbates pre-existing social inequalities but also creates new forms of disparities. Therefore, instead of acting as a great equalizer, the pandemic may well magnify the social distribution of economic vulnerability. To alleviate inequality and aid post-pandemic recovery, public policies need to be oriented toward vulnerable and marginalized populations.

Grain exports and the causes of China's Great Famine, 1959–1961: County-level evidence

This study quantitatively evaluates the relative importance of different causes of China's Great Famine, especially for the importance of grain exports. We exploit county-level over-time variations in crop specialization patterns to construct Bartik-style measures of export shocks. Using county-level panel data from 1955 to 1963, we regress death rates on the Bartik export measures with county and province-year fixed effects as well as time-varying effects of county-level observables. We use weather shocks to instrument for output and consumption. The regression results suggest that increases in grain exports substantially increase death rates. This effect is larger in counties that are further from railways and with fewer local Chinese Communist Party members. To examine the relative importance of different mechanisms, we also estimate the effects of the procurement policy, the determinants of grain output, and the relationship between death rates and county-level average caloric consumption during the famine period. The counterfactual experiments indicate that the fall in agriculture production, the increase in procurement partly driven by grain exports, and the increasingly progressive and inflexible procurement policy collectively increased the number of excess deaths, where no single factor dominates. In particular, grain exports explain 15 percent of excess deaths, which is one-fourth of the effect of the increase in procurement rates between 1957 and 1959.

Temporary migration of Palestinian students to the former USSR: motivations, conflicts and impact

ABSTRACT The article traces Palestinian Arab graduates in Israel, who acquired HE in the former USSR. The article clarifies the unique contribution of these studies to social, economic and political aspects of Palestinian Arab society in Israel. Qualitative methodology was employed, eliciting data from semi-structured interviews with 20 Palestinian Arab graduates, selected by ‘snowball’ method to represent two generations of students that migrated temporarily to the USSR for their studies. The findings indicate that the financial factor was a decisive motivator to study in the former USSR.As active communist party members, they received full scholarships for USSR universities. A ‘push’ factor was that the difficulty involved in gaining acceptance for prestigious disciplines in Israeli universities, free professions desiredby Palestinian students from Israel to free them from reliance on Israeli establishment employment. On graduation, the students returned to Israel, where they underwent a re-integration into a traditional Arab society that had hardly altered since they left. It is concluded that the former USSR supported and reinforced the economic, social and political fabric of Palestinian Arab society in Israel, training skilled academics and professionals who provide essential services and support for their society.

Shapurji Saklatvala, the Workers' Welfare League of India, and transnational anti-colonial labour organising in the inter-war period

This article focuses on the transnational organising of Shapurji Saklatvala, the communist MP for Battersea North during the 1920s. It examines his role in popularising the cause of Indian independence and the Indian labour movement within the heart of the metropole, demonstrating that he was capable of developing solidarity efforts through drawing together a border-spanning network of students, lawyers, journalists, and labour activists into his organisation, the Workers Welfare League of India. His independent practice, which relied more on Battersea's radical milieu and his own personal connections than communist party members, is demonstrated to have prompted rivals within both the social-democratic and communist camps to approach anti-colonial activism on the subcontinent with greater vigour, and facilitated connections that were forged between the wider British and Indian labour movements. As the Third Period unfolded, Saklatvala's organisation gained greater support within the Comintern, but conversely lost the autonomy which had defined its early years. The ecumenical network he had developed splintered owing to the proscription of key figures by the Comintern, and the Labour Party's invigorated attempts to build alliances with labour activists on the subcontinent, ultimately undermining the basis of the Workers Welfare League and leading to its demise.

“Identity premium” on subjective well-being: Evidence from the Communist Party membership in China

ABSTRACTJoining the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is often associated with material returns, but whether and how this contributes to better subjective well-being remains under-researched. Using data from the 2012 Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS), this paper examines the effect of party membership on Chinese residents’ subjective well-being. This paper has found that CCP membership, as a prestigious social identity, has a pure effect on subjective well-being. This happiness effect – termed by this research as identity premium – is greater when party membership is subject to scarcity. These findings suggest that it is the enhanced sense of self-regard brought by the relative value of party membership that boosts people’s satisfaction with life.

The rise of red private entrepreneurs in China: Policy shift, institutional settings and political connection

This article examines the relationship between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) membership and private entrepreneurship in China since 2002, the year when the party revised its constitution and officially removed ideological discrimination against private entrepreneurs in member recruitment. Drawing on the data from the six waves of a nationwide survey on privately owned enterprises in China from 1997 to 2008, we find that, while very few private entrepreneurs were recruited into the CCP during the decade we examine, the constitutional change had encouraged many party members to enter the private sector. We also show that party members who became entrepreneurs after the 2002 policy shift tended to be more senior than those who had started their business before the constitutional change. Furthermore, our difference-in-difference estimation demonstrates that the phenomenon of party members turning entrepreneurs was more prominent in regions where the level of marketization was lower, legal protection was less available, and local governments were prone to more corruption, since political rents were generally larger in environments with weaker market-supporting institutions. This study suggests that party members in general and especially the elite among them were quick to sense the opportunity and knew how to translate their political influence into economic power.

Wage premium of Communist Party membership: Evidence from China

AbstractSocial status and political connections may confer large economic benefits on an individual. Previous studies focused on China have examined the relationship between Communist Party membership and earnings and have revealed a positive correlation. However, the correlation could be partly or totally spurious. Using data from three surveys spanning three decades, we estimate the causal effect of Chinese Communist Party membership on monthly earnings in China. We find that, on average, membership in the Communist Party of China increases monthly earnings and the wage premium has grown in the last three decades. We explore potential causes and discover evidence that improvements in social networks and social rank, acquisition of job‐related qualifications and greater life satisfaction play important roles in increased earnings.