The Chinese Communist Party began its existence on the 30th of July 1921 on a small tourist boat drifting on South Lake in Jiaxing, Zhejiang province. The founding congress had been forced to relocate from a house in the Shanghai French Concession after French police interrupted the meeting. At that moment, the organization was a fragile collection of fifty-seven members.
The near destruction of the party's urban organizational apparatus in 1927 forced a radical institutional change that saved the movement from extinction. Following the Shanghai massacre where Chiang Kai-shek turned on the communists and killed thousands, the party founded the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army to battle the Kuomintang. By the 15th of September 1927, Mao accepted defeat and only one thousand survivors marched east to the Jinggang Mountains of Jiangxi.
The Great Leap Forward, launched in 1958, resulted in an estimated fifteen to forty-five million deaths. General mismanagement and exaggerations of harvests by party officials led to the Great Chinese Famine, the largest in recorded history. Defense Minister Peng Dehuai, who criticized Mao for his role in causing the disaster, was purged for this in 1959.
The Gang of Four, led by Mao's wife Jiang Qing, emerged to fill the power vacuum during the Cultural Revolution. Party leaders such as Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, and He Long were purged or exiled during this period. This period of chaos ended only with Mao's death in 1976, when Hua Guofeng removed the Gang of Four from power.
Xi Jinping took power of the general secretary in 2012 and initiated a wide-reaching anti-corruption campaign while centralizing powers in the office of CCP general secretary. Xi's ideology, named after himself, was added to the party constitution in 2017. In the sixth plenary session of the 19th Central Committee in November 2021, the CCP adopted a resolution on the Party's history which credited Xi as being the main innovator of Xi Jinping Thought.
The Chinese Communist Party extends its dual party-state command system to all government institutions, social organizations, and economic entities. Party committees permeate every state administrative organ, and the party committee secretary at each level is more senior than that of the leader of the state. More than half of China's private firms have such organizations, providing mechanisms that help private firms interface with government bodies and learn about policies which relate to their fields.