CCP At 100: Great Success, Big Questions

China’s technocratic communists want world domination. But political, economic tensions abound

- Arunabh Ghosh

Today, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) celebrates its official centenary. Official because there is some evidence to indicate that July 1 was “picked” as the date of the Party’s founding in 1941, 20 years after the fact.

Internal party documents indicate that the handful of men who gathered in Shanghai in 1921 to establish the CCP met instead from July 23 to 31. We also know that other gatherings had taken place in several cities during the second half of 1920.

From such muddled beginnings, the CCP has grown to become the second-largest party in the world. Its nearly 92 million members are only dwarfed by the BJP’s claimed figure of 180 million. But unlike in the case of the BJP, recruitment into the CCP is an extremely competitive process. In 2014, only 2 million out of 22 million hopefuls were accepted (by contrast, the BJP’s massive recruitment drive in 2019 netted 70 million new members – so we are told).

And since 1949, when the People’s Republic of China was founded, the CCP and the Chinese state have become increasingly intertwined. As my colleague Daniel Koss has shown, the result is a massive party with a committed membership that has deep roots in the society it governs. It would not be a stretch to say that it is today the most socially entrenched party in the world.