In China, social elites are increasingly at the center of the country’s economic consolidation and the biggest group the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) co-opts. However, why does only a minority of them apply to become party member? Conventional wisdom suggests that not everyone has the highly selective requisites the CCP uses to recruit new members. I argue that controlling for highly educated, young, and wealthier citizens, some choose to not engage with the CCP as a form of low-risk political behavior. I use new data featuring 50 in-depth interviews implementing automated text analyses on 3,617 text feature. I first implement wordfish method to define political positions and then explore seven most influential topics using structural topic modelling. I find that latent topics more critical of the government are associated with individuals ideologically distant from CCP members, and I validate the argument using multiple survey waves and running several robustness tests.