100 years of China’s Communist Party

Last Updated01/07/2021

China on Thursday will mark the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) with spectacle.
In the build-up to the July 1 anniversary, Xi and the party have exhorted its members and the nation to remember the early days of struggle in the hills of the inland city of Yan’an, where Mao Zedong established himself as party leader in the 1930s.

The Communist Party of China (CCP) was founded in 1921, holding its first Congress in Shanghai, with the help of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, during a tough period after the nation had a decade earlier cast off 2,000 years of dynastic rule.

Inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, a group of Chinese revolutionaries secretly founded the CCP in the city of Shanghai on July 23, 1921. At the time, China was an impoverished country, racked by civil war.

At the initial Congress, Mao Zedong was the representative for Hunan province. He rose to become the commander of the Red Army in 1935. With the backing of a mostly rural population, in 1949, the CCP succeeded in routing the nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek, who retreated to the island of Taiwan.
On October 1 of that year, CCP Chairman Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China in Beijing.

Once in power, Mao attempted to speed up China’s industrial development with bold policies, which included the Great Leap Forward of 1958 – a campaign of agricultural collectivisation that resulted in an estimated 30 million people starving to death.
In 1966, he launched the Cultural Revolution and unleashed the fanatical Red Guards to destroy all vestiges of China’s “feudal culture”. As two million people may have lost their lives in the anarchy that engulfed the country.

After Mao died in 1976, CCP’s new leaders embarked on a series of political and economic reforms, including opening up the country to international trade and investment. In the five decades since, the CCP has overseen breakneck economic growth that has lifted tens of millions of people out of poverty and transformed China into a major global power.
At 100 years old this year, the CCP is one of the few communist parties to have maintained power into the 21st century. Under President Xi Jinping – China’s most powerful leader since Mao – the party has further embedded itself across Chinese society and ruthlessly silenced dissent, including in Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong.

The CCP's ranks have risen roughly in line with China's population, totalling 95.2 million members as of this month or 6.7 per cent of the Chinese population.

The structure of the party and the government are intertwined on certain levels. The party dominates the legislative arm of the government by holding two-thirds of the National People’s Congress, the legislative lower house of the government.

The CCP oversees the central, provincial, and local bodies of government. The smaller parties allowed into the National People’s Congress (NPC) are those who accept the CCP as the major power player.
Once every five years the National Party Congress of the CCP meets, and approximately 2,000 delegates (numbers vary from leader to leader) meet to finalise the selected members for the Central Committee, which is about 200 people.

The Central Committee meets once a year, and elects the Political Bureau (Politburo), which can include up to 25 people. The Politburo is the governing body of the CCP.
The general secretary is chosen from the Politburo, which is the sole overarching authority to the party, and who is also the president of China’s government. The armed forces, the judiciary, and all other government bodies are overseen by the president of China.