And there aren’t even any secret handshakes!

When I first came to China back in 1993, I arrived with a view of China that was deeply colored by my growing up in the Cold War era, where all things “Communist” were associated with great evil empires. I brought the unspoken assumption that everyone who belongs to The Party must be some sort of Kruschev-ian thug or evil political mastermind bent on the destruction of the “free world.”

I still recall clearly the first time I realized that someone I had come to know in China was a Party Member. My first reaction, which I chuckle at now, was something like, “Red Alert! Watch what you say, Baker, or you might wake up tomorrow in the Gulag!” My second thought, though, was “Wait, this polite, meek and mild junior officer in the universtiy foreign affairs office doesn’t exact seem disposed to haul me off for interrogation.” And so my naive stereotypes began to unravel.

When I say “The Chinese Communist Party,” I’ll bet some of you reading this only picture, as I used to do, the members of the ruling government body in Beijing, the individuals making the laws and appearing on the news and supposedly pounding their fists on their desks, vowing to crush this or that political opposition at home or abroad.

But as I’ve learned over time, the rank and file membership is hardly very different from everyone else.

When I was first getting to know my Wife’s extended family, I was surprised at the number of Party Members in their ranks. Whenever there is a large family gathering (or a small one, for that matter), there is plenty of Party Representation there. But there’s no apparent difference between them and everyone else–they aren’t all wearing Chairman Mao pins or goose-stepping into the room or anything like that. So a few days ago I finally decided to ask–quite directly–just what exactly does set them apart from non-Party members.

At a recent family event, I happened to be seated with three relatives who belong to the CCP, and after a couple rounds of drinks, I asked them this question, what impact their being Party Members has on their day to day lives.

“Practically none,” two of them said right away. Those with high political aspirations must of course be Party Members first, they said, but most who join do so solely to get or improve their chances of getting a job in a government office. And that’s it.

“Do you have to attend meetings or bear other responsibilities as Party Members?” I asked.

The meetings are very infrequent, one replied. And not very interesting, added the other.

“But,” the third one finally chimed in, “We must be prepared to do anything The Party asks of us. Anything.”

This sounded grave, almost severe.

“For example,” I asked, “What has The Party instructed you to do lately?”

The speaker paused for a moment, as if to make a great pronouncement, but one of the others quickly said, “They asked him to start showing up for work on time,” and we all laughed.

There are Party “Hardliners” in Beijing and elsewhere, of course, and even some of my Wife’s more distant relatives are involved in politics, such as a mayor of a nearby town and a director over a particular bureau in Fujian Province, but for most Party Members, CCP membership amounts to about the same thing that, say, joining the “International Society of Widget Engineers” means to someone attempting to launch a career in widget design.

Just slightly more than “Looks good on the resume,” in other words.