# Chinese Communist Party

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), officially the Communist Party of China (CPC), is the founding and sole ruling party of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Its current leader is General Secretary Xi Jinping. The CCP was founded in 1921 by Chen Duxiu and Li Dazaho. Mao Zedong was a founding member of the party and rose through its ranks to become its leader and chairman in 1943. The CCP under his leadership emerged victorious in the Chinese Civil War against the Kuomintang, and in 1949 Mao proclaimed the establishment of the People's Republic of China. Since then, the CCP has governed China as the leader of the United Front coalition with eight other parties, and has sole control over the People's Liberation Army (PLA). Each successive leader of the CCP has added their own theories to the party's constitution, which outlines the ideological beliefs of the party, collectively referred to as socialism with Chinese characteristics. As of 2021, the CCP has more than 95 million members, making it the second largest political party by party membership in the world after the Bharatiya Janata Party based in India.

## Quotes

* We have to thank Japan, without Japan's invasion of China, we would not have been able to achieve the cooperation between the Communist Party of China, we would not have been able to develop and eventually gain power.
** Mao Zedong's meeting with Kakuei Tanaka (27 September 1972) quoted by South China Morning Post (21 May 2020)
* In the sphere of theory, destroy the roots of ultra-democracy. First, it should be pointed out that the danger of ultrademocracy lies in the fact that it damages or even completely wrecks the Party organization and weakens or even completely undermines the Party's fighting capacity, rendering the Party incapable of fulfilling its fighting tasks and thereby causing the defeat of the revolution. Next, it should be pointed out that the source of ultra-democracy consists in the petty bourgeoisie's individualistic aversion to discipline. When this characteristic is brought into the Party, it develops into ultra-democratic ideas politically and organizationally. These ideas are utterly incompatible with the fighting tasks of the proletariat.
** Mao Zedong, "On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party" (December 1929), Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 108.
* For the [Chinese Communist Party] it is better to have a bureaucrat who is not very bright but is fanatically loyal to the Party than a very intelligent bureaucrat who thinks independently.
** Massimo Introvigne, "The Resolution on CCP History. 6. Enter Xi Jinping", Bitter Winter (March 15, 2022)
* Beginning in the late 1970s, China overcame centuries of stagnation precisely because Mao’s successors understood that they had to decentralise the People’s Republic, giving economic if not political power to the people. If western commentators are right, Xi Jinping wants to go in the opposite direction. If the Chinese are lucky, he will turn out to be an enlightened absolutist, like Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew. If they are unlucky, he will be just another emperor who fondly dreamt of controlling a fifth of humanity.
** Niall Ferguson, "Xi whiz", Boston Globe, October 30, 2017.
* Document Number Nine is thought to have been either directly written by, or under the auspices of, CCP general secretary Xi Jinping. It marked a new turn in the history of China, and quite possibly the history of the world: the moment at which a powerful nation-state looked at the entire internet’s direction of travel – towards openness, interconnection, globalisation, the free flow of information – and decided to reverse it.
** John Lanchester, Document Number Nine (10 October 2019), London Review of Books
* The CCP’s goal is not silence but isolation: you can say things, but you can’t organise.
** John Lanchester, Document Number Nine (10 October 2019), London Review of Books
* Since the 1990s, the CCP has shown a technocratic capacity to respond to the developmental stresses brought on by China’s dizzying economic rise. Today, the party has harnessed the rewards of globalization and economic development, lifting tens of millions of people out of poverty. The CCP has reimagined itself as a driver of change, guiding the country’s path to wealth and fueling a sentiment of national pride.
* To counter threats to its control, the CCP has sought to further embed itself across layers of Chinese society and the economy.
** Eleanor Albert, Lindsay Maizland, and Beina Xu, "Backgrounder - The Chinese Communist Party" in Council on Foreign Relations (23 June 2021)
* Authoritarian regimes also find a judicious use of the past a useful means of social control. In the 1990s, when the Chinese Communist Party grew concerned about the waning of communist ideology and the demands for greater democracy, which had led to the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989, they called in Chinese history In 1994, a member of the Politburo, the central body of the Party, attended a memorial for the Yellow Emperor, a probably mythical figure from five thousand years ago who was said to be the father of all ethnic Chinese. It looked suspiciously like ancestor worship, one of the many traditional practices the Communists had condemned. The following year the authorities allowed a major conference on Confucius. Twenty years earlier under the approving eyes of Mao, Red Guards had burned the great Confucian classics and done their best to destroy the sages tomb. The Party also sponsored a major campaign for Patriotic Education, which emphasized, as the official directive put it, “the Chinese peoples patriotism and brave patriotic deeds.” The Great Wall, which had in previous decades been condemned for its cost in ordinary Chinese lives, now became the symbol of the Chinese will to survive and triumph. Very little was said about the joys of socialism, but Chinas past achievements were neatly linked to Communist Party rule: “Patriotism is a historical concept, which has different specific connotations in different stages and periods of social development. In contemporary China, patriotism is in essence identical to socialism.” In other words, being loyal to China means being loyal to the Party. Chinese history was presented as the story of the centuries-old struggle of the Chinese people to unite and to progress in the face of determined interference and oppression from outside. China's failure to get the 2000 Olympic games, the Opium Wars of the early nineteenth century, foreigners condemning the brutal crackdown in Tiananmen Square, and the Japanese invasion in the twentieth century were all wrapped up into one uninterrupted imperialist design to destroy the Chinese nation.
** Margaret MacMillan, The Uses and Abuses of History (2008), pp. 70-71
* The CCP’s presence on overseas campuses subverts academic freedom, while undermining the integrity and security of the international research enterprise by enticing foreign researchers to engage in deceptive and illegal activities for the PRC’s economic, scientific, and military gains.
* Driven by Marxist-Leninist ideology and imperialist nostalgia, the CCP silences dissent and restricts the rights and freedoms of Chinese citizens, to include forced population control, arbitrary detention, censorship, forced labor, violations of religious freedom, and pervasive media and internet censorship. The CCP continues to commit abuses against Uyghurs, Christians, and other religious and ethnic minorities. It maintains an iron grip on Tibet while continuing to assert control and silence foreign critics in Hong Kong. The CCP manipulates international organizations, democratically elected governments, and companies to mask its human rights abuses at home and abroad.
** "The Chinese Communist Party: Threatening Global Peace and Security" in U.S. Department of State
* The Party is always there, but you can’t always see it. And yet, citizens always know that there is a limit to what they can do that is bound by whatever the Party is deciding at a particular time. It is obviously the core institution in China at a political level. Even though there are a number of other political parties, they’re irrelevant in any genuine sense. So if you want to understand China, you need to understand the Party and its relationships with different aspects of society and the system.
** Tony Saich, "Reconsidering the History of the Chinese Communist Party" in The New Yorker (22 July 2021)
* Yet China remained a one-party dictatorship and its labour camps – the infamous laogai – continued to hold between four and six million inmates in shocking conditions. Mao’s gigantic image was still displayed in Tiananmen Square. There was no true pluralism of intellectual and political discourse at the highest official levels. Interest groups of employers were not allowed to function. Trade unions were emasculated. The importance of military power went on being promoted. Tibet languished under China’s despotism and its levels of literacy and material provision remained low; and the construction of a railway across its territory, much vaunted in Beijing as showing its wish to share the benefits of modernisation, was seen by Tibetans as a means of reinforcing central control. Great regions such as Xinjiang in the north-west of the People’s Republic were held in a suffocating grip. There the Chinese authorities feared that Islam and Uigur nationalism might breed a separatist movement. Freedom of religious expression was only patchily respected across China. Falun Gong, an indigenous faith of massive popularity, was systematically persecuted. Communist doctrines remained an obligatory ingredient in the school curriculum and a qualification for a serious public career. Marxism-Leninism was otherwise honoured only in the breach.
** Robert Service, Comrades!: A History of World Communism (2010)
* Rural discontent was spreading. Peasants had benefited from the dissolution of the land communes under Deng Xiaoping and traded their growing harvests for profit. But they were taxed ever more heavily. Regional and local administrators illegally dispossessed them of their fields on the edges of cities. The cranes and bulldozers were kept working twenty-four hours a day in the great cities as the massive economic boom continued. Where was it going to end? There was no equivalent in the history of world communism. Ideas of ‘market socialism’ – for example, in the USSR in the 1920s, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Hungary in the 1970s – had never proposed a system with the capitalist sector outgrowing the parts of the economy owned by the state. Chinese leaders from Deng Xiaoping onwards asserted that they were developing a ‘communism with Chinese characteristics’. The red-dyed gauze no longer occluded reality. The communist order was retained only as a means of rigorous political and ideological control; its economic and social components were blown to the winds. Concepts of Mao Zedong Thought were abandoned except insofar as they promoted the goals of national identity, centralised administration and superpower status. An extraordinary hybrid was created.
** Robert Service, Comrades!: A History of World Communism (2010)
* China had become the only communist state which developed a vibrant economy by giving it over to capitalism. By the beginning of the third millennium the country was already pointed in the direction of becoming the world’s largest manufacturing nation. It was its social cohesion and political durability that remained questionable. Deng was the last supreme ruler to have taken part in the Long March; his successors lacked the aureole of legitimacy as revolutionary veterans. Measures to deal with popular discontent were either crudely punitive or merely palliative. Party officials, faced with a choice between Maoist ideology and self-enrichment, invested in apartment blocks, coal-mines and computer technology. No one was able to tell how long this situation could last. No one today can tell any better.
** Robert Service, Comrades!: A History of World Communism (2010)
* The CCP remains alert at all times to its historic mission and responsibility; it is always acutely sensitive to the political tasks that lie before it in the present transitional phase. History and politics delineate its mission. Neither permits it to relax its initiative or to share its responsibility fully with others. Both require it to devise practical working methods that ensure to it the substance of absolute control. For the present, it mouths democratic slogans and operates behind a formal fade o interparty government, considering these to correspond to the political necessities of a Marxist-Leninist revolution now in a pre-socialist stage.
** H. Arthur Steiner, "The Role of the Chinese Communist Party" in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (1 September 1951)
* The party has led the country from the era of Chairman Mao to become the economic powerhouse is it today, but along the way has tolerated no opposition and quashed dissent.
** "China anniversary: How the Communist Party runs the country" in BBC (30 September 2019)
* The Chinese Communist Party’s drive to revive public faith in its history and values goes well beyond textbooks to include film, television, museum exhibitions — and even ice cream wrappers.
** "China’s Xi Jinping Remakes the Communist Party’s History in His Image" in The New York Times (11 November 2021)
* The irony, at least for westerners, is that Chinese communism has survived and prospered because of the very thing that Marxism was meant to wipe out – a profit-hungry private sector.
** "The Chinese Communist party: 100 years that shook the world" in The Guardian (27 June 2021)
* The CPC’s longevity is due in large measure to its ability to sum up the lessons of history and change course quite drastically, if required.
* It is more important than ever to understand the nature and power of this organisation; its strengths and weaknesses; its ability to capture the imagination of the people — and interestingly, the youth. It has refuted prognostications of its demise with its capacity for reinventing, regenerating and renewing its compact with the people, strengthened, among other things, by its ability to continue learning from history. The world is dealing not merely with a nation state but with an authoritarian party-state that foregrounds its civilisational culture — and at its helm is an organisation that is steering the country towards its own tryst with destiny. It remains to be seen whether the CPC is still on the right side of history, but the party is by no means over.
** Alka Acharya, "How the Chinese Communist Party endures" in The Hindu (1 July 2021)
* The CCP is aware of the myriad challenges Beijing faces, but it believes its top-down system is capable of handling today’s complex environment. The party trusts that it can marshal the resources necessary to eradicate poverty, redress inequality, and drive innovation, as well as respond to major global trends: deglobalization, climate change, technological disruption, and shifts in the international balance of power.
** Nathaniel Sher, Sam Bresnick, "The Chinese Communist Party Still Thinks It Owns the Future" in Foreign Policy (21 November 2021)
* China is not a monarchy or a declared dictatorship. But it is ruled with dictatorial zeal by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
** Prabhash K Dutta, "Decoded - 100 years of Chinese Communist Party, power that feeds the dragon" in India Today (1 July 2021)
* Awareness of the reprehensible and ongoing actions carried out by the CCP under Xi Jinping is crucial at a time when the regime is exporting its malign activities outside mainland China. The free world must do all it can to stop the CCP from using its economic muscle to hoodwink gullible leaders into supporting its self-interested aims, which run counter to freedom and democracy. The CCP and its rogue leaders must be held accountable for their crimes against humanity over the past 100 years.
** Tsering Passang, "Don’t forget the atrocities committed by the Chinese Communist Party over the last 100 years" in The Independent (10 December 2021)
* As China grew richer and stronger, we believed, the Chinese Communist Party would liberalize to meet the rising democratic aspirations of its people. This was a bold, quintessentially American idea, born of our innate optimism and by the experience of our triumph over Soviet Communism. Unfortunately, it turned out to be very naïve.
** National Security Advisor Robert C. O’Brien, "The Chinese Communist Party’s Ideology and Global Ambitions" (26 June 2020)
* Americans must know how the Chinese Communist Party is poisoning the well of our higher education institutions for its own ends, and how those actions degrade our freedoms and American national security. If we don’t educate ourselves, if we’re not honest about what’s taking place, we’ll get schooled by Beijing.
** U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, "The Chinese Communist Party on the American Campus" (9 December 2020)
* But our approach can’t just be about getting tough. That’s unlikely to achieve the outcome that we desire. We must also engage and empower the Chinese people – a dynamic, freedom-loving people who are completely distinct from the Chinese Communist Party.
** U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, "Secretary Michael R. Pompeo Remarks “Communist China and the Free World’s Future”" (23 July 2020)
* A century after the Party was founded by a young Mao Zedong and other students of Marxism-Leninism, it aspires to achieve the ultimate dream of authoritarian politics: an encompassing awareness of everything in its realm; the ability to prevent threats even before they are fully realized, a force of anticipation and control powered by new technology; and economic influence that allows it to rewrite international rules to its liking.
** Evan Osnos, "After a Hundred Years, What Has China’s Communist Party Learned?" in 'The New Yorker (1 July 2021)
* Xi Jinping has done his best to dismantle Deng Xiaoping’s achievements. He brought the private companies established under Deng under the control of the CCP and undermined the dynamism that used to characterize them. Rather than letting private enterprise blossom, Xi Jinping introduced his own “China Dream” that can be summed up in two words: total control. That has had disastrous consequences. / In contrast to Deng, Xi Jinping is a true believer in Communism. Mao Zedong and Vladimir Lenin are his idols. At the celebration of the 100-year anniversary of the CCP he was dressed like Mao while the rest of the audience was wearing business suits.
** George Soros, George Soros on China: Remarks Delivered at the Hoover Institution (31 January 2022)
* The United States and other democratic nations do so much business with China that there is a tendency to turn a blind eye towards the Communist Party’s abysmal human rights record. The Chinese Communist Party’s strategy of liberalizing its national economy while harshly rejecting democracy has become the model for modern dictatorships. Hu Jintao and his party control all media in China, between 250,000 and 300,000 Chinese citizens, including political dissidents, are incarcerated in “reeducation-through-labor” camps and the conviction rate in normal criminal trials is 99.7 percent. Less than 5 percent of trials include witnesses. China executes more people than all other nations combined most of those executions are for nonviolent crimes. Amnesty International has reported that school children have been bused to public executions as field trips.
** David Wallechinsky, Tyrants: The World's 20 Worst Living Dictators (2006), p. 3
* Communism was to be China’s weapon for modernization, according to the party’s propaganda. It would make the country rich and strong. But Mao’s agenda went further than the creation of a modern, wealthy country. He wanted to transform Chinese society and people’s ways of thinking. It was “old China” that was to blame for the country’s weakness, Mao thought, more than even British, Japanese, or American imperialists. He liked to compare traditional, Confucian forms of thinking to women with bound feet, hobbling along while being disdained by others. His “new China,” on the other hand, should be youthful, progressive, and militant. Those who stood in the way were “pests” to be exterminated; landlords, priests, and capitalists were holding China back on purpose, in order to serve their own interests. They had to go, as did all those forces that blocked the new society the Communists would create. For Mao this was a millennial struggle. It was China’s last chance to redeem itself and retake its rightful position in the world.
** Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A Global History (2017)
* Westerners are never far away from [CCP ideologist Qiu Jini’s] argument [about national security, which Qiu defines as the protection of the absolute control on the country by the CCP, its Central Committee, and its General Secretary], but they are seen like a threat, a continuous conspiracy to impose on the Chinese something different from Marxism and from the control of everything by the Party, the Central Committee, and Xi Jinping. They should read more texts like Qiu’s, which would help them understand that more economic development does not mean for China less Marxism and less totalitarian control by the Party.
** Hu Zimo (pseudonym), "10 Years of Xi Jinping’s “National Security Concept”: “It’s Marxism in Practice”", Bitter Winter (June 18, 2024)
* The Chinese Communist Party turns every walk of life into a battlefield.
** Taiwan-based artist Kacey Wong (黃國才), as quoted in "Chinese artist hits back at party censorship with trashy performance", Radio Free Asia (June 17, 2024)
* Many believe that the death of Mao Anying changed the course of Chinese history. Had he survived, it is argued that Chairman Mao planned to make him his successor, inaugurating a dynastic leadership of the Communist Party similar to the system implemented in North Korea by Kim Il-Sung and his successors. There are other, probably unfounded rumors that rival CCP leaders, rather than egg-fried-rice, caused the death of Mao Anying.
** Zhou Kexin (pseudonym), "China, Promoting Egg-Fried Rice May Make You an “Enemy of the Party”", Bitter Winter (December 1, 2023)

## See also

* 1989 Tiananmen Square protests
* Yan'an Rectification Movement
* Cultural Revolution
* Communist party
* China

## External links

* Encyclopedic article on Chinese Communist Party on Wikipedia
* Media related to Chinese Communist Party on Wikimedia Commons