Communist Party, Chinese

Communist Party, Chinese (CCP) Founded in Shanghai on 1 July 1921 by Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu, it was a response partly to international developments, most notably the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917, and partly to domestic events. Most important of these were the spread of Communist and left-wing ideas during the May Fourth Movement (1919), and the current political anarchy in a country dominated by local warlords. In 1922 it accepted the direction of Comintern, and followed its orders to cooperate with the Guomindang (KMT) of Sun Yat-sen. Initially, the party was slow to take off, with around 1,000 members in 1925, but its effective membership drives based on trade union organization and nationalism meant there were around 50,000 members by 1927, to the concern of the KMT leader, Chiang Kai-shek, who came to identify the Communists as his biggest rival. Chiang thus set out to destroy the CCP, by means of brutal massacres in Shanghai and elsewhere in April 1927.

On the run from the KMT in the cities, the CCP sought refuge in the countryside, and established its base in Jianxi in 1931. Here, it grew into a mass party with around 300,000 members, while it gained vital experience in government and party organization. It also developed an effective army, hardened by five attacks from Chiang's National Revolutionary Army in an effort to exterminate the Jianxi Soviet. In 1934, around 100,000 Communist Red Army soldiers embarked upon the epic Long March of 6,000 miles, during which Mao Zedong finally asserted his leadership, aided by his lieutenant, Zhou Enlai. Mao arrived with around 8,000 soldiers at Yan'an. Whereas the time at Jianxi and the Long March transformed the party from a fledgling urban movement to a party with a mass peasant base, the time at Yan'an was not only one of regeneration and growth. It was also a pivotal time for the party's ideology and mythology. It was here that the roots of Mao's leadership cult developed, while a leadership elite formed which continued to lead the party into the 1990s. An idea of revolutionary dynamism and change, as well as strict party discipline, developed among this elite which was at the root of later purges, most notably the Cultural Revolution. At the end of the United Front in 1945, the party could claim a membership of around one million. This number had tripled by the end of the Chinese Civil War, when the People's Republic of China was established.

From 1949, party primacy was established throughout the country. Despite a series of purges, most notably in the Hundred Flowers campaign, and the Great Leap Forward, the party grew to seventeen million in the 1960s. This made it more cumbersome and bureaucratic, while the number of committees and subcommittees also reduced Mao's scope for control of the party. As a result, millions of party members were purged in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, though even greater numbers were admitted to the party.

The CCP managed to overcome the shock of the death of Mao and Zhou Enlai with relative ease, mainly because power remained in the hands of the gerontocracy. While under Hua Guofeng and then Deng Xiaoping the leadership displayed a considerable sense of economic pragmatism, their commitment to stern party rule remained unchanged, as was displayed most brutally at the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989. Nevertheless, among the 57 million members making up the rank and file of the party, there remained considerable disagreement over the party's ideal role in politics, economy, and society, which became increasingly dominated by capitalism. The liberalization of the economy, coupled with heavy-handed administration and low salaries of party officials, predisposed much of the party hierarchy to corruption. A number of scandals came to light, the worst of which involved the discovery in late 1999 of a smuggling ring in Xiamen involving goods worth $20 bn., which implicated hundreds of party and local government officials.