China Communications Intelligence | Weekly:

1. 20 million people are on the waiting list to join the Chinese Communist Party

2. Beijing Winter Games: To boycott or not?

3. Xi's halt on tutors - what's the real reason?

20 million people are on the waiting list to join the Chinese Communist Party. Why?

The Australian reports Xi Jinping's Chinese Communist Party is the most sought-after private members' club globally.

Its perks are life-changing: better jobs, more pay, and higher status.

The demands on members can be a slog – particularly now all cadres must write an essay on every speech made by Xi, the party's "chairman of everything."

But China's college students are still desperate to join.

Three decades after university students almost brought down the party with the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, college campuses are now the party's primary hunting ground for new recruits.

It is a crucial plank of what Bruce Dickson, a professor at George Washington University and one of the world's leading experts on the party's recruitment strategy, has called its "strategy for survival."

When the party was preoccupied with class struggle, recruits came from the "three revolutionary classes": peasants, workers, and soldiers.

Now the 95 million-strong party prefers a different profile – younger, better educated, and more urban.

Plus, having more college members gives the Chinese Communist Party more eyes and ears on the country's university campuses - long a hothouse of political unrest and coup d'etat ideas.

The party's leaders are determined never to be rocked by student-led unrest again.

Remember the number one prerogative of the party to stay in power.

Full stop.

Beijing Winter Games: To boycott or not?

As the Tokyo Summer Games end, attention will now turn to Beijing and the prospects of a diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Winter Games.

The opening ceremony for Beijing 2022 is scheduled to take place less than 180 days in the same Bird's Nest stadium that the Chinese capital used for the 2008 Summer Games.

The six-month gap marks the shortest turnaround between installments of the Olympics since 1992.

But it's also shaping up to be the most controversial Olympics in recent years, as calls grow for a diplomatic boycott over Beijing's alleged human rights abuses against the Uyghur Muslims in the western region of Xinjiang.

In addition, the build-up to the event will be set against the backdrop of a worsening pandemic and lingering questions over Beijing's alleged mishandling of the initial outbreak.

Any multinational company, CEO, and board member connected to sponsoring the event has been and will be called into question.

Last week, CNBC's Sara Eisen asked Nike CEO John Donahoe: Why not speak out more on China's human rights abuses when it is so out front on societal issues here in the US?

He replied that for Nike, China is an important market. The company has a long-term commitment and perspective for the country. The company is operating a responsible global supply chain.

A yeah, so what?

The type of response one would expect, but not one that will satisfy numerous stakeholders.

Sally Jenkins, a sports columnist for the Washington Post, dropped a column with the title: It's unforgivable to hold the Olympics in Beijing.

"Olympic boycotts are a highly disputed topic, only because the argument starts from the wrong end. What matters is not the behavior of the boycotted regime. What matters is the firm behavior of the boycotters. The United States' refusal to go to Moscow in 1980 after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a success in that it organized more than 60 other countries to also shun Moscow, helped lead a global hardening of sentiment against that regime, signaled a global blockade to aggression and set up the firm confrontations of the Reagan years."

That was then, and this is now.

A boycott of the Beijing Winter Games, it is unlikely.

Even Las Vegas agrees.

BetOnline: Will the USA boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics?

Yes +800 (8/1)

No -2500 (1/25)

(Odds imply an 11.1% probability the US will boycott)

Consider when the US Olympic Team boycotted the Moscow Summer Games in 1980, the Carter administration engaged in a multi-month, multilateral diplomatic effort - it wasn't a rash decision to not send US athletes.

With less than six months to go until the Beijing Games, what will the Team Biden do?

The American public seems to want action:

61% of Republicans and 50% of Democrats say China shouldn't be allowed to host the 2022 Olympics because of its human rights record, according to an Axios | Momentive survey.

However, penalizing athletes who have no choice in where to compete seems unfair, and the wrath American business would experience from Beijing would be harsh.

Plus, does Team Biden want to deal with an overly wounded China in a mid-term election year?

Once again, unlikely.

It's easy to ask black and white poll questions and for politicians to speak harshly on China - it all makes political sense - but once you decide to boycott the Beijing Winter Games, then what?

As Jenkins correctly writes, the rationale for the Carter administration for not sending US athletes to Moscow in 1980 was due to the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan.

But the Soviets ultimately didn't leave Afghanistan until 1989.

That is nine years after the games.

The boycott was hardly an action-forcing event to change the Soviet's military aggression.

Look for stern talk from the White House and a Congressional resolution listing American issues with Beijing hosting the Winter Games, but US athletes will compete in China next February.

Also, look for American businesses praying as they skate on thin ice for the next six months caught between two governments, capitalists, and shareholders.

Xi's halt on tutors - what's the real reason?

Local governments in China have been instructed to withhold business licenses for new tuition centers while existing ones must be registered as "non-profit institutions."

Besides being barred from offering courses during the school holidays, the tutoring platforms will also be banned from going public and raising further capital from listed firms or foreign funds.

Week in China reports nine major cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou – the biggest markets for Chinese edtechs except for Shenzhen – have been selected as pilot cities to implement the strict new guidelines.

The Financial Times reports that the tutoring crackdown provides a window into the mounting stresses and strains of middle-class life in China's big cities.

To outsiders, the world's second-largest economy can often seem relentless, immune to even the worst pandemic in a century and notching persistently significant increases in consumer spending as prosperity spreads rapidly across society.

But is this is the real reason for the crackdown, stress?

No.

Going back to the post on the waiting list to join the Chinese Communist Party, Beijing sees problems on the horizon.

China provides nine years of free compulsory education, covering primary school and junior middle school. Beyond that, tens of millions of students have to sit the zhongkao, the Senior High School Entrance Examination, and gaokao, a standardized college entrance exam held annually, to compete for positions in higher levels of education.

According to data from New Oriental, 17 million children were eligible for the zhongkao in 2019. About 10 million, or 60% of them, went on to take the gaokao. Private educational groups set out to help these students (and their parents) prepare for the brutal talent screening tests.

The underlying trends shaping China's tertiary education system for more than a decade are not necessarily as well suited to the staffing requirements of programs like the Made in China 2025 initiative.

As policymakers push for national self-sufficiency in key industrial supply chains such as chipmaking, the call for more skilled workers has become more pressing.

As a result, the government has been putting a much heavier emphasis on vocational training instead of the continuing expansion in tertiary education (aka the number of university places).

In April, as scrutiny of the off-campus tutoring schools increased to a new level of intensity, Xi Jinping called for efforts to speed up the development of a "modern vocational education system" to cultivate a new generation of high-quality, technical professionals.

Fewer humanities students and more STEM graduates - that is the reason for the crackdown

China Communications Intelligence is China political trend-spotting and actionable insights to help you succeed in today’s hyper-political China commercial environment.