Zhongliu, the official monthly magazine of the Chinese Communist Party, laments that businessmen are joining the party in droves in order to improve their business connections and gain control over government industries and contracts. Articles in the magazine note that 36 of the 52 Communist Party Cells (district offices) are now controlled by businessmen and that half of new party members in coastal and rural districts owned businesses at the time they entered the party. The real complaint is not that businessmen are entering the Party, but that they are gaining control over the state industries that the Party has considered its private slush fund. The Chinese Communist Party abandoned its political ideology a decade ago and has become in effect simply a feudal system of lords collecting huge profits that would be called corruption anywhere else.--Stephen V Cole