Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Chinese Communist Party was founded on the 23rd of July 1921, when its founding congress commenced in a house in the Shanghai French Concession. French police interrupted the meeting on the 30th of July, and the congress reconvened on a tourist boat on South Lake in Jiaxing, Zhejiang province. Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao are credited as co-founders, with help from the Far Eastern Bureau of the Communist International.
Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao founded the CCP in 1921, with organizational support from the Far Eastern Bureau of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and the Communist International. Chen Duxiu served as the party's first general secretary, elected by the 13 delegates present at the founding congress.
The CCP reached 100.27 million members at the end of 2024, a net increase of 1.09 million over the previous year. This makes it the second largest political party by membership in the world.
The CCP won the Chinese Civil War through a combination of rural peasant support, KMT political corruption and internal factional infighting, and Soviet assistance in Manchuria. By the spring of 1948, the KMT had lost 2 million of its original 3 million troops through military desertions and battlefield defeats. Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic of China on the 1st of October 1949, and the Nationalist remnants retreated to Taiwan.
The Great Chinese Famine was caused by the Great Leap Forward, the Second Five Year Plan from 1958 to 1962, which collectivized farmland, formed people's communes, and redirected agricultural labour to factories. CCP officials systematically exaggerated harvest figures, leading to severe food shortages. The famine resulted in an estimated 15 to 45 million deaths, making it the largest famine in recorded history.
Xi Jinping is the current leader of the CCP, first elected as general secretary at the 1st Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee on the 15th of November 2012. He was reelected on the 25th of October 2017 and again on the 10th of October 2022, making him the first CCP leader since Mao Zedong to hold a third term. Xi holds three offices simultaneously: general secretary, chairman of the Central Military Commission, and president of China.