Character Art Exchange

The Chinese Communist Party

The Chinese Communist Party



The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is the founding and ruling political party of modern China, officially known as the People’s Republic of China. The CCP has maintained a political monopoly since Mao Zedong founded the People’s Republic in 1949, and it has overseen the country’s rapid economic growth and rise as a global power.To get more news about 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, you can visit shine news official website.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has consolidated control over the infamously opaque party since coming to power in 2012. Some experts have called him the most influential Chinese leader since Mao, and Xi is poised to win an unprecedented third term during China’s twentieth party congress in 2022. Championing a vision for China’s “rejuvenation,” Xi has pursued a more assertive foreign policy strategy, which has increased tensions with the United States and its allies. At home, some of his policies, such as those aimed at reining in corruption and reducing poverty, have been widely popular, while others have received some pushback. Challenges facing the party include slowed economic growth, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the climate crisis.

Xi’s Power
As general secretary of the CCP, Xi sits atop the party’s power structure. He is also China’s head of state as president and the head of the military. But most of his power stems from his role as general secretary because of how China’s political system works: Party institutions and state institutions are technically separate, but the ultimate power comes from the CCP. As CFR’s Ian Johnson writes, “Run the party and you run China.” Xi will likely be given a third five-year term as general secretary during the CCP’s twentieth party congress in October 2022, breaking a trend in recent decades in which leaders have stayed on for two terms.

The son of a CCP revolutionary, Xi has worked to restore the party’s central role in society and reclaim China’s power on the world stage. These goals are expressed in his “Xi Jinping Thought” doctrine, which is expected to be enshrined in the party’s constitution. To those ends, Xi has overseen the modernization of China’s military, the harsh repression of minority communities throughout the country, and the increase of state control over private companies, among other actions.
Xi has consolidated his control of the party by ousting rivals and promoting supporters. He launched a massive anticorruption campaign in 2012 that has targeted more than four million officials, including high-level officials, or “tigers,” senior military figures, and lower-level party cadres, or “flies.” In promoting his supporters, Xi has created a faction of loyalists in the party leadership. There is some debate about whether Xi has any formidable opposition. Victor Shih, an expert on elite Chinese politics at the University of California, San Diego, has observed that top officials Wang Yang, Li Xi, and Hu Chunhua all have sizable factions [PDF] separate from Xi. He writes that what happens to them during the twentieth party congress will determine how much of a check there is on Xi’s authority. Meanwhile, Xiaohong Xu, an Chinese history expert at the University of Michigan, writes that previously powerful factions are “dead” and power lies with Xi loyalists.
Xi’s elevation marks the first time that the CCP has moved toward strongman rule since Deng Xiaoping steered the party to consensus rule (or collective leadership) in the 1980s. Experts on modern China caution that relying on a single leader to navigate reforms could threaten the party’s survival. Former CCP insider Cai Xia has said that Xi’s consolidation of power has crushed any form of policy debate among the party’s top officials. Similarly, former CFR Senior Fellow Elizabeth C. Economy argued in Foreign Affairs that China’s economy has suffered because of Xi’s control. “Too much party control—perhaps too consolidated in Xi’s hands—has contributed to economic stagnation,” she wrote.

The CCP’s Origins and Membership
Inspired by the Russian Revolution, the CCP was founded in 1921 on the principles of Marxism-Leninism. Tensions between the Communist party and the nationalist Kuomintang, its primary rival, erupted into a civil war won by the Communists in 1949. Despite market reforms in the late 1970s, the modern Chinese state remains a Leninist system, like those of Cuba, North Korea, and Laos.

The 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 triggered a series of existential crises for the party that forced it to reconsider its mandate. The Soviet implosion in particular pushed the CCP to examine the causes of regime collapse and institute intraparty reform to avoid a similar fate. It determined that an ossified party-state with a dogmatic ideology, entrenched elites, dormant party organizations, and a stagnant economy would lead to failure, according to David Shambaugh’s 2008 book, China’s Communist Party.

Since the 1990s, the CCP has shown a technocratic capacity to respond to the developmental stresses brought on by China’s dizzying economic rise. Today, the party has harnessed the rewards of globalization and economic development, lifting tens of millions of people out of poverty. The CCP has reimagined itself as a driver of change, guiding the country’s path to wealth and fueling a sentiment of national pride.

As of 2021, the CCP has more than ninety-six million members. Over 70 percent of them are men, though the number of women in the party has grown in recent years. The number of members with college degrees has also increased, as have members younger than forty. Agricultural and blue-collar workers make up roughly 30 percent of CCP membership.

You must be logged in to comment.

Register
Log in
Username

Password:

forgot your password?

or OpenID:
or Log in with Google