Chinese Communist Party

• 1. Introduction

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  The Chinese Communist Party was born in a rented house in the Shanghai French Concession on the 23rd of July 1921, with just 57 members and 13 delegates gathered in secret. French police interrupted the meeting a week later, forcing the group onto a tourist boat on South Lake in Jiaxing, Zhejiang province, to finish their business. From that precarious beginning, the party would grow to more than 100 million members, making it the second largest political party by membership in the world. How did a small circle of radical intellectuals become the sole governing force of the most populous nation on earth? What ideas shaped it, what conflicts forged it, and what structures keep it in place today? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. The Founding Generation

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  Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao were already among China's most prominent intellectual voices before they became the CCP's founding figures. Both were galvanized by the October Revolution in Russia, which they regarded as the signal that a new era had arrived for countries living under imperialism. Their influence spread through study circles that, according to founding member Cai Hesen, were "the rudiments of our party". By 1920 those circles had grown restless. The May Fourth Movement had raised urgent questions about anti-imperialism, nationalism, feminism, and traditional values, but proposed answers were scattered and competing. Chen and Li concluded that Marxism-Leninism offered the organizing framework China needed. Neither man attended the founding congress they had helped create: Li was absent, and Chen sent a personal representative in his place. Chen was nonetheless elected the CCP's first general secretary by the delegates present. From the outset, the party saw itself as a branch of the Communist International, or Comintern, which provided both ideological direction and material support through advisers like Mikhail Borodin, dispatched to Guangzhou on the 6th of October 1923. Sun Yat-sen, the KMT leader whose nationalist movement the CCP initially joined as junior partners, was later claimed by the party as a proto-communist ancestor; Sun himself had stated that "our Principle of Livelihood is a form of communism". After Sun died in March 1925, CCP membership surged from 900 to 2,428 in the year following the 4th congress alone.

• 3. Civil War and the Rise of Mao

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  Chiang Kai-shek's turn against the communists in April 1927 was swift and brutal. Marching on Shanghai, a city controlled by communist militias, Chiang massacred approximately 5,000 communists with the aid of the Green Gang. In Beijing that same period, Li Dazhao and 19 other leading communists were executed by the warlord Zhang Zuolin. Tens of thousands more were killed by KMT troops across China in the weeks that followed, and the CCP lost approximately half its members. The party struck back by founding the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, ordering a battalion under General Zhu De to seize Nanchang on the 1st of August 1927 in what became the Nanchang uprising. The attempt failed within five days. Mao Zedong then led four regiments against Changsha in the Autumn Harvest Uprising, planning a three-direction attack on the 9th of September, but the Fourth Regiment defected to the KMT, turned on the Third Regiment, and Mao was left with roughly 1,000 survivors who retreated east to the Jinggang Mountains of Jiangxi. These repeated defeats reshaped the party's structure. The 1929 Gutian Congress established the principle that the party commands the military, a rule that remains central to the CCP today. Mao rose steadily within that restructured institution, reaching the Politburo Standing Committee by 1935 and the chairmanship of the Politburo in 1943. By the final stage of the civil war, lasting from September 1948 to December 1949, the KMT had lost 2 million of its 3 million troops by the spring of 1948 alone, partly through military desertion. Mao proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic of China before a massive crowd at Tiananmen Square on the 1st of October 1949.

• 4. Mao's China: Triumph and Catastrophe

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  Stalin proposed a one-party constitution when Liu Shaoqi visited the Soviet Union in 1952, and the PRC's 1954 constitution duly abolished the coalition government and entrenched single-party rule. What followed was an era of enormous ambition and devastating error. The Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957 persecuted at least 550,000 people. That campaign fed directly into the Great Leap Forward, the Second Five Year Plan running from 1958 to 1962, which collectivized farmland, formed people's communes, and diverted agricultural labour to factories in an effort to industrialize the country at speed. CCP officials systematically exaggerated harvest figures, and the resulting miscalculation produced the Great Chinese Famine, with an estimated 15 to 45 million deaths, making it the largest famine in recorded history. Defense Minister Peng Dehuai, who dared to criticize Mao for his role in the disaster, was purged in 1959. The Cultural Revolution brought further catastrophe. Mao declared that class enemies persisted even after the socialist revolution, and millions were persecuted and killed. Party leaders including Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, and He Long were purged or exiled. The Gang of Four, led by Mao's wife Jiang Qing, rose to fill the resulting power vacuum. When Mao died in 1976, CCP chairman Hua Guofeng moved quickly to remove the Gang of Four and begin rehabilitating those they had persecuted, including Deng Xiaoping, who would become China's paramount leader in 1978.

• 5. Reform, Opening, and Tiananmen

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  Deng Xiaoping articulated a break with Maoist orthodoxy through a formula that sounded simple but carried enormous weight: "Practice is the Sole Criterion for the Truth." A 1978 article promoting that principle directly attacked the "Two Whatevers" policy, which had held that whatever Mao decided was correct. Deng, alongside Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, introduced what he called socialism with Chinese characteristics, the argument that a socialist state could employ market mechanisms without becoming capitalist. As he put it, "A planned economy is not the definition of socialism, because there is planning under capitalism; the market economy happens under socialism, too." The economic results were substantial, but the new ideology was contested from both directions: Maoists on the left and liberalizers on the right. Those tensions came to a head in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre. Reformist party general secretary Zhao Ziyang was placed under house arrest. Deng's economic policies resumed after the crackdown, and by the early 1990s the concept of a socialist market economy had been formally introduced. In 1997, the 14th National Congress embedded "Deng Xiaoping Theory" into the party's constitution. Jiang Zemin, who succeeded Deng as paramount leader in 1989, added his own ideological contribution: the Three Represents, adopted at the 16th National Congress. That doctrine allowed private entrepreneurs, officially called "the new social strata", to join the party on the grounds that they engaged in "honest labor and work". The Social Democratic Party of Germany had initiated party-to-party dialogue with the CCP as early as 1984, the first such relationship outside communist parties, and CCP delegates were dispatched across Europe to observe social democratic reform efforts firsthand.

• 6. Structure and Ideology

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  The National Congress is the party's formal apex, convening every five years since the 9th National Congress in 1969. Between congresses, the Central Committee holds formal authority, but that body usually meets only once a year. In practice, power flows through the Politburo Standing Committee, which convenes at least once a week. The PSC was established at the 8th National Congress in 1958 to take over policy-making from the Secretariat. At the top of that structure sits a single paramount leader holding three offices: general secretary, chairman of the Central Military Commission, and president. The current leader is Xi Jinping, elected at the 1st Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee on the 15th of November 2012 and reelected twice, most recently on the 10th of October 2022 by the 20th Central Committee, making him the first CCP leader since Mao to secure a third term. Below the central apparatus, party committees exist at every level of Chinese society, from provinces down to neighborhoods, and inside companies both private and state-owned. Any business with more than three party members is legally required to establish a committee or branch. The CCP's official ideology remains Marxism-Leninism, though what that means in practice has evolved with each leadership generation. Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era was added to the party constitution at the 19th National Congress in 2017. The flag decreed by the Central Politburo on the 28th of April 1942 bears a hammer and sickle in the upper-left corner on a red background, with no five-pointed star; according to the People's Daily, the red symbolizes revolution and the yellow of the hammer and sickle signifies brightness.

• 7. Who Joins and What It Means

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  At the end of 2024, CCP membership reached 100.27 million, a net increase of 1.09 million over the prior year. Getting in is competitive: in 2014, only 2 million applications were accepted out of some 22 million submitted. Applicants pass a background check, are vetted by established members on their political attitudes, and may have their family's loyalty to communism investigated near their parents' residence. Those accepted spend a year as probationary members who may not vote in party elections. Membership demographics have shifted visibly: by 2024-57.6% of party members held a college degree or above, and the base had become younger and less blue-collar than in earlier decades. Women make up 30.9% of the membership, with 30.99 million female members, yet no woman has ever served on the Politburo Standing Committee, and the broader Politburo currently has no female members. A 2019 Binghamton University study found that CCP members earn a 20% wage premium over non-members in the market, with the economic benefit strongest among those in lower wealth brackets. Members are required to pay between 0.5% and 2% of their monthly salary in dues; failure to pay for six consecutive months is grounds for expulsion. A 2021 analysis by Princeton University academic Rory Truex found that CCP members on average showed high levels of extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness, along with traits associated with professional success such as confidence, organization, and interpersonal skill. The Communist Youth League, the party's youth wing, had 75 million members and 4.4 million organizations throughout China by the end of 2024.