Requiring nearly 90 million members of the Communist Party of China (CPC) to pay membership fees is an important channel to increase the Party's presence among its members, experts in CPC history said Tuesday.

They dismissed doubts over the necessity of still bothering to collect the dues when they are no longer significant for the operation of the Party that has been ruling the country for more than six decades.

"Paying membership dues serves as an important and concrete way to help CPC members reaffirm their identity by fulfilling their fundamental obligation," Zhang Dongming, a research fellow at the Party History Research Center of the CPC Central Committee, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

The CPC is preparing to celebrate its 95th anniversary on July 1. The CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) has published a series of articles on its website this month to promote the necessity of Party membership dues.

Given the 87.8 million-strong membership, the fees collected annually is a large amount.

More than 296 million yuan ($45 million) was collected countrywide in 2014, according to statistics released at the end of 2015 by the Organization Department of the CPC Central Committee. The interest generated by the department's collection of Party membership dues between 2010 and 2014 reached 52 million yuan.

According to Party regulations, members are required to pay dues that are proportional to their monthly wages after tax. Those earning less than 3,000 yuan per month need to pay 0.5 percent of their income, but those earning over 10,000 yuan monthly should pay 2 percent.

Encourage responsibility

The Party Constitution states that the dues are collected to enhance Party members' awareness of the Party's regulations and to encourage them to shoulder their responsibilities and obligations. Members who have not paid dues for six consecutive months without a proper reason will have their Party membership revoked.

The fees are mainly spent to train Party members, subscribe or purchase materials to educate them, award outstanding CPC members and grass-roots Party organizations, subsidize those who are bad-off or have suffered from natural disasters and renovate disaster-hit education facilities for grass-roots Party members, according to a report on the CCDI's website.

The CPC, founded in 1921, began this practice in its early days, after following the example of the Soviet Union which collected dues to inspire loyalty, Zhuang Deshui, deputy director of the Research Center for Government Integrity Building at Peking University, told the Global Times.

Several adjustments in the 1950s set the basic framework of the membership fee collection system. But the burgeoning system was thrown into chaos during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) - fees were unpaid by some CPC members, not supervised and managed by specific personnel, arbitrarily expended or appropriated, Zhang noted.

Further and better use

The collection of membership dues has been recently questioned as it is no longer a major financial source to support running the Party, which rules the world's second-largest economy.

Zhuang said paying the fees demonstrates Party members' loyalty to the CPC as well as their acknowledgment of the organization and its regulations by fulfilling their obligation.

Cheng Kezhong and Sheng Caixia, a retired couple in Shanghai aged 88, gave 100,000 yuan to their former employer, a bus company, as membership dues to celebrate the 95th anniversary of the CPC's founding, Jiefang Daily reported Monday.

The CCDI pointed out in a January article that some highly paid senior executives in State-owned enterprises (SOEs) who were also Party members were reluctant to pay the fees because the Party has become a distant presence for them.

The disciplinary body found that Party members in SOEs and financial institutions lacked awareness of conforming to Party discipline and rules, a problem much more acute than that in Party and government agencies, the China Discipline Inspection News, a newspaper affiliated with the CCDI, reported in February.

A total of 277 million yuan in overdue Party membership dues was paid off by over 120,000 Party members and officials from 66 SOEs in Tianjin, the Xinhua News Agency reported in April.

Transparent expenditure of the fees is another concern of the public. The latest regulation over membership fee management stated that Party committees at all levels, should publicize the collection, expenditure and management of the fees each year.