At least seven branches of the Communist Party of China (CPC) have an India connection, and at least one CPC member was hired by the Indian consulate in Shanghai using the services of a Chinese state-owned recruitment agency, according to data shared by a source with an international consortium of journalists including The Indian Express.The dataset, which has been accessed by global media outlets for the first time ever, provides details of the branch and membership structure of the Chinese Communist Party. In China, the Communist Party is broken down by branches, and Party Committees exist in most big corporations.
The database received from the source, who wishes to remain anonymous, records at least 79,000 CPC branches. It lists over 1.95 million people as CPC members, which is about 2.1 per cent of the estimated total CPC membership base of 92 million. The data reveals that these CPC members are employed with multinational corporations across banking, defence, pharmaceutical and financial sectors. The companies include ANZ, HSBC, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Volkswagen and Boeing.
The dataset reveals that at least seven CPC branches have an India connection, and cumulatively these seven branches have 91 party members. Separately, a list of local Chinese professionals hired by as many as 30 foreign consulates using the services of Chinese state-owned Foreign Agency Service Department, includes one such professional employed by the Consulate General of India in Shanghai.
Earlier, in September, after a series of reports on how a Shenzhen-based private firm Zhenhua Data was monitoring high-profile individuals and organisations across the world including India, the government had set up a committee under the National Cyber Security Coordinator. The committee has recently submitted a report to the Prime Minister’s Office. The report is yet to be made public.
The data on CPC branches and memberships, first shared in private chatrooms in China in 2016, was made available to The Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) and a consortium of global media organisations recently. The IPAC is a global cross-party group of legislators working towards reform on how democratic countries should approach China. Internet 2.0, a Canberra-based cyber security firm, which had earlier verified the Zhenhua data source, made an assessment of this data too.
