Many persons stuck in hard, boring, unremunerative, unstable jobs in China are echoing a satiric but maybe also serious appeal to be allowed to serve the people in the manner of any indolent and obnoxious Chinese Communist Party functionary (ThinkChina, November 4, 2025).
In these videos, users—often migrant workers, delivery riders, factory hands, and online content creators—face the camera and say with mock sincerity: “I don’t want to work, and I don’t want to farm either. I just want to join the party and serve the people.”…
One account named “Wang Rui,” which usually promotes traditional Chinese medicine probiotics for cattle and sheep, said: “I don’t want to feed cows anymore. I want to join the party, become a provincial governor or a minister—or if that doesn’t work, just a village head. Whether I hold office or not doesn’t matter; what matters is serving the people.”
Though the account has only a little over a thousand followers, this particular video received 38,000 likes and more than 700 comments….
Of course, joining the party does not mean one can stop working. However, for many workers outside the official system, joining the party and serving the people symbolises entering the establishment—finally “making it to shore” by securing a stable job.
Thus, these oppressed and downtrodden ones would rather be doing the oppressing and treading down themselves, a supposedly easier and more secure form of employment. But they’re just kidding. Unless they’re not kidding.
People do join the Chinese Communist Party and apply for civil service jobs in hopes of escaping other forms of the rat race. By the end of 2024, there were 100.27 million members of the Party, about a million more than tallied in the previous year. The number of persons applying for the PRC’s civil service exam has also “continued to climb, hitting a record high of 3.41 million last year.” Competition is stiff for the limited number of available posts.
Meanwhile, it may at least temporarily be getting harder to sit around reading the newspaper all day in a state job while just occasionally rousing oneself to oppress the peasantry. Last year, one state agency ordered state-owned enterprises to institute procedures for ejecting poor performers and incompetents. Bureaucracies being what they are, though, this probably isn’t the kind of reform that will make a big permanent difference.
