THE membership of the 98-year-old Communist Party of China (CPC) has exceeded 90 million, the Organization Department of the CPC Central Committee announced yesterday.

The CPC had 90.59 million members with 4.61 million primary-level Party organizations as of the end of 2018, the department said in a report ahead of the founding anniversary of the CPC on July 1.

The membership and Party organizations increased by 1.03 million and 39,000 from 2017, respectively, data from the report shows.

In 2018, the CPC recruited nearly 2.06 million new members, 72,000 more than 2017.

Among those new members, 44.9 percent held junior college degrees or above, 80 percent were aged 35 or younger.

In less than 100 years, the CPC has seen its membership grow from more than 50 when it was founded in 1921, and 4.49 million in 1949 when New China was founded, to more than 90 million.

Statistics show that more than 80 percent of the existing Party members joined the CPC after the third plenary session of the 11th CPC Central Committee in 1978.

More than one-third of the Party members were born in the 1980s and 1990s, and nearly half of the Party members hold junior college degrees or above. (Xinhua)