In its 100-year journey from a revolutionary party to a governing party, the CPC has unfailingly asserted its identity as the ‘vanguard of the Chinese working class’. The centenary offers an opportunity to look at the reality of such assertions, the actual conditions of the working class and its political status in contemporary China. Party organisations were created in enterprises, as cadres forged concrete links with the industrial workers. Despite increasingly becoming the critical engines in China’s economic rise, the rural migrant workers remain largely excluded from the partyfold. The diminished status of workers is a grim reality and despite President Xi Jinping’s increasing reiteration of ideology, it is rooted in status quoism, shorn of any emancipatory promise or politics for the working class.

Source: The Hindu July 22, 2021 18:32 UTC