It had been a long time since we last met and although the traffic was bad and Qiang was going to be almost two hours late, we were determined to meet for dinner regardless. But before he arrived he told me there was something I should know.
“I’m very angry and sad,” he said.
Qiang worked at a forest park outside Beijing where he led a team of 12 people who spent their days planting, pruning and trimming. He enjoyed the work and loved being outdoors but on the day of our dinner, his boss had told him this idyll was about to end.
“I’m being transferred to the Party headquarters,” he said.
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“I’m a Party member.”
The move was a promotion but it would mean working at a desk in an office every day, dealing with administrative processes. His boss had tried to persuade him to make the same move a couple of years ago but Qiang resisted and the plan was dropped.
“He’s a kind man and he wants to help me but I don’t want to move,” he said.
Qiang’s best years in the forest park were during the coronavirus pandemic, when staff were put on half time and he worked one week and was off the next. On his weeks off, he would drive to an unfamiliar province, staying in cheap hotels as he explored the countryside.
“When I retire, I’m going to buy a camper van and drive all over China,” he told me,
The half-time working arrangement continued for a year after the end of zero-Covid restrictions but with one unwelcome modification. If Qiang wanted to leave the Beijing area during his week off, he would have to inform his superiors in advance of where he was going.
“I stopped going away. I didn’t want to have to talk to them about it,” he said.
A couple of years earlier, Qiang and his colleagues were invited to hand in their passports to their superiors for safekeeping. If they wanted to travel outside the country, they only had to ask and the passport would be returned.
“Nobody does,” he said.
Such restrictions are among the drawbacks of Communist Party membership, which also carries advantages such as access to better jobs, housing and government benefits. Many of the Party’s 98 million members joined with an eye on their career, although one of those who did so told me recently that he later became interested in the ideology and embraced it.
“It’s like a religion. You have to believe in socialism and all of that,” my friend Song said.
Song is not a Party member but many of his friends are, most of them working in the arts and related fields. Bookish and bohemian, these people are nothing like the stereotype of a blank-faced communist bureaucrat but although they are not zealots, they don’t seem too cynical about the Party and its purposes either.
The rewards of Party membership are most obvious in the public service and state-owned enterprises, where it is a prerequisite for holding positions above a certain level. Party members can help one another to make connections too, in private business as well as in universities, the professions and the broader state sector.
But they are also expected to volunteer for everything from disaster relief to organising neighbourhood clean-ups. And obligatory study groups for Xi Jinping Thought and self-criticism sessions mean that Party membership shares the qualities of LinkedIn and the Legion of Mary.
Over dinner, Qiang persuaded himself that he would once again escape his redeployment to Party headquarters and that his boss would intervene on his behalf. But over the next few days, his mood appeared to darken as he sent me pictures of empty McDonald’s wrappers and told me he was drinking beer at noon on his days off.
When I heard from him again a few weeks later, he told me that the move had gone ahead and he had started his new job. I asked him how he was feeling about it.
“I’m not happy. I feel very sad,” he said.
“This weekend I’m going to buy some flowering plants. I can’t change my job so I must change my mood.”
