BEIJING, June 30 (Xinhua) -- 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 Sunday.

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.

QUALITY GROWTH

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

The figures indicate vigorous vitality of the CPC with its continuously enhanced attractiveness and cohesion.

Since the 18th CPC National Congress in late 2012, an average of 3.9 million people have applied for CPC membership each year.

The CPC has implemented a recruitment rule that tightens the control of the total number and stresses the quality of members.

The number of newly-recruited Party members has been stabilized at around 2 million a year in recent years.

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 held junior college degrees or above.

The CPC also saw steady growth in the proportion of female members and those from ethnic minority groups.

As of the end of 2018, it had nearly 24.67 million female members, accounting for 27.2 percent of the total membership, compared with merely 11.9 percent in 1949. Meanwhile, the proportion of members from ethnic minority groups has grown from 2.5 percent to 7.3 percent.

Workers and peasants remain the majority, or 35.3 percent, of the CPC, data from the report shows.

Among the Party members, 14 million are professional and technical personnel and 9.8 million business and management personnel, making up 15.5 percent and 10.8 percent of the total respectively.

Almost all urban neighborhoods, communities and towns have established primary-level Party organizations.

The coverage of Party organizations in government-sponsored institutions reached 95.2 percent, and 90.9 percent in public enterprises, according to the department.

Party organizations are also in place in nearly 1.59 million non-public enterprises.