China casts light on unique brand of enterprising communism

China's ruling communists have cast light on their unique brand of market economics with the announcement that a substantial number of new party committees have been set up in private companies.

In a rare public disclosure, one of the party's most senior officials said yesterday that 85 per cent of private companies eligible to have a committee had established them.

Companies qualify to form a committee if at least three employees are party members.

The move underlines the growing convergence of interests between China's dynamic private sector and its communist rulers, who only began to allow entrepreneurs to join the party in 2002.

While party leaders are keen to entrench their authority in the most vigorous part of China's booming economy, companies want to extend their reach into the unparalleled network of influence formed by the country's 70.3 million party members.

"We hope to make greater progress in a short time in the future," Ouyang Song, vice-minister of the organisation department, the powerful party body in charge of top-level appointments to ministries and state enterprises, said yesterday.

"The purpose of establishing these branches is to promote the healthy and sound development of private companies and the private sector in the national economy."

Party committees are mandatory in state enterprises but vary greatly in their activities, with some playing a role in running political education campaigns, while others simply manage human resources.

In a sign of the evolving partnership between business and the party, a group of entrepreneurs in Shenzhen, a city near Hong Kong dominated by the private sector, formed an official delegation to the city's annual party congress last year, the first time this has happened, according to the local media.

The entrepreneurs promised in return to help the party establish itself in many companies throughout the country that had hitherto spurned it.

The acceptance of the Shenzhen delegation has since been criticised, with an editorial in May in the People's Daily, the party's mouthpiece, complaining of the "one-sided phenomenon" in which bosses took most party memberships in private companies.

"The composition of party members in private companies should be representative enough to include not only private businessmen and managers, but workers at the production line," the paper said.

Mr Ouyang was speaking at a press conference to announce the results of an 18-month re-education campaign for party members to ensure that they retained their position as the most "advanced" or "progressive" force in Chinese society.