China
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Chinese Communist Party wants to 'build' its presence inside foreign companies
Beijing: China will press to have a Communist party branch in place inside all foreign companies and joint ventures as part of its "new era" of Chinese socialism.
Vice minister of the party's organisation department, Qi Yu, says it is "a priority" to build the communist party within all companies, because the private sector employs 140 million working class Chinese.
By the end of last year, 71 per cent of foreign joint ventures in China had a communist party unit, compared to 93 per cent of state-owned companies.
The new push for more party involvement in foreign companies is part of Chinese president Xi Jinping's ideological push for a wave of "party building" to accompany a "new era" of Chinese socialism.
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The Chinese government’s marketing of the Belt Road Initiative has played upon myths and half-remembered facts about China’s past—“the glory of the silk routes,” in Xi Jinping’s words. And the narrative gives credence to the notion that, until the age of Western aggression, China was the master of the region. But China has enough problems on its own borders without dreams of reliving the achievements of the Ming dynasty master mariner Zheng He. Where will the BRI be in 2030?
Philip Bowring has been based in Asia for forty-four years writing on regional financial and political issues successively as correspondent for the Financial Times, editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review and columnist for the International Herald Tribune. He currently writes columns for the South China Morning Post, www.asiasentinel.com, a website of which he is a founder, and The Globalist. He has just completed a history of Maritime Southeast Asia, focused mainly on the pre-colonial eras, to be published in 2018.
