Chinese Communist Party

Currently, China is under the total and absolute control of the Chinese Communist Party, whose authority supersedes even that of the Constitution. The Chinese Communist Party began as a number of separate groups formed by Chinese intellectuals in Beijing and Shanghai to study Marxism after the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911. At that time, China was nominally a republic but in fact had disintegrated into a number of warring provinces led by warlords and their armies.

     In 1921, Moscow’s Comintern sent an agent to China to link China’s budding communists with its own party apparatus. He attended the first organized Chinese Communist Party Congress in the French concession of Shanghai on July 1. There were only twelve delegates, including a young library worker named Mao Zedong, representing a total of fifty-seven members nationwide. From these inauspicious beginnings would grow the world’s largest Communist Party.

    The Second Party Congress was held in June and July 1922 in Hangzhou, although official party records curiously list Shanghai as the meeting place. At this meeting, the party adopted a constitution and a manifesto. The Second Party Congress also made a formal decision to join with Moscow’s Comintern and establish a political bureau within the party. Finally, the party pledged to cooperate with the Nationalist Party’s leader, Sun Yat-sen, to work to overthrow the warlords and unify
China.

    However, after Sun died in 1925 of cancer, his successor, Chiang Kai-shek, decided to outlaw the Chinese Communist Party and ordered the killing of its members in Shanghai in April 1927. An estimated five thousand party members and union representatives were executed. By November 1930, Chiang began the first of six military campaigns to exterminate the Chinese Communist Party and its army. Mao led his followers on the famous Long March of six thousand miles to escape the
Nationalists and established a new base in a rural part of northwest Shaanxi Province known as Yan’an.

   As the threat of Japanese invasion became more obvious toward the end of 1936, Manchurian warlord Zhang Xueliang (pronounced “jahng shweh lee-ong”) kidnapped Chiang in December and refused to release him until Chiang promised to unite
with the Communists to fight Japanese aggression in what became known as the United Front.

When the United States, Great Britain, and other Western powers entered the war in the Pacific at the end of 1941, they too encouraged Chiang to cooperate with the Communists as they feared a civil war would only work to Japan’s advantage.

However, the Nationalists under Chiang never truly stopped fighting the Communists, as Chiang considered them an even greater threat to his hold on power than the Japanese, whom he felt the West would be able to defeat. Indeed, his paranoia proved correct, although it is hard to gauge if Chiang’s insistence on pursuing civil war while being attacked by the Japanese was, in fact, a main reason why so many generals defected to Mao’s side after Japan surrendered in August 1945. By this time,
party membership had increased from forty thousand in 1937 to 1.2 million.

Mao’s People’s Liberation Army ultimately won the civil war and established the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949, with Mao Zedong as its chairman. Thus the Chinese Communist Party became the single most important power in China.

By 2013, the Communist Party had 3.5 million organizations throughout China, with some 80 million members controlling the country’s political, social, and military affairs. As for economic affairs, the party began cooperating with private sector entrepreneurs and companies, including joint ventures with foreign-owned firms, under the guidelines of the “Open Door Policy” enacted by Deng Xiaoping in 1979 to revitalize the Chinese economy after it had been devastated by Mao’s endless political campaigns. China was admitted to the World Trade Organization in 2001.

As for international affairs, the party is obligated to adhere to all international treaties and protocols to which it has become a signatory, and it must abide by international laws as well as the charter and decisions of the United Nations and its numerous agencies.

After the death of Deng Xiaoping in 1997, the Chinese Communist Party had three different leaders: Jiang Zemin (1989–2002); Hu Jintao (2002–2012); and Xi Jinping (2012–present).

How were these leaders selected? Jiang and Hu were personally designated by Deng before his death as the so-called leaders of the third and fourth generation. Deng considered himself as the leader of the second generation of the Chinese Communist Party as Mao was the leader of the first generation of Chinese under the rule of the party. Xi is considered the leader of the fifth generation of Chinese under the CCP. He was officially selected at the party’s Eighteenth National Congress in 2012, which is held every five years. The delegates of the Congress were selected (the Chinese use the term “elected”) by local party congresses, which are established throughout local and provincial regions in China.

The selection process is secretive and not at all transparent to the Chinese people. There is a long process that proceeds the final selection, during which national and provincial leaders nominate potential leaders. They attend secret meetings where these leaders negotiate and bargain for their proposed candidates. Retired high officials also play a critical role in the selection process for new leaders. Jiang Zemin is believed to have played a central role in the selection of Xi as the new party
leader.

Currently, China is under the so-called collective rule of the twenty-five members of the Politburo of the party’s Central Committee. Within this Politburo there is a Standing Committee of seven men who together rule China on a day-to-day basis, making the final decisions on all policies governing China to be ratified by the twenty-five-member Politburo. How much individual power Xi as party chief now wields is hard to estimate. His power is most likely dependent on winning allies in the
seven-member Standing Committee.

There are several rules that party members must follow when nominating potential leaders. These rules are made by the Central Committee’s Organization Department. These rules include the following: (1) candidates must have a college education; (2) candidates must have a variety of leadership experiences, such as having worked in different areas of China and at different departments; (3) candidates must be firmly embedded in the party’s current ideology and must have graduated from a recognized party school for cadres; (4) the candidates must have passed satisfactory evaluation by the party’s Disciplinary Committee, a separate and independent branch within the party; (5) the candidates must belong to one of the major factions within the party, such as the Party Youth League or the military, for example; and (6) the candidates must be under sixty-five
years of age. Finally, while the party is an authoritarian organization, it does have rules that prevent uneducated members from becoming leaders, no matter how personally popular.