Chinese Communist Party

   The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was constituted between 1920 and 1921, and has ruled in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since the 1949 Chinese Revolution. Between its foundation and rise to power, the CCP aligned with the Third International and waged a rural civil war against nationalist forces, with Mao Zedong and his loyalists able to take control of areas of the Chinese countryside and run them as CCP soviets. Throughout this time, the CCP grew in size and momentum, and regrouped after the Long March of 1934 ready to begin the quest for power over the entire country. This came in the form of the 1949 revolution, after which the CCP effected changes in the newly created PRC according to its Marxism–Leninism–Maoism. This often took the form of party-led initiatives such as the “Great Leap Forward” and the Cultural Revolution. The latter of these destroyed the CCP’s organizational structures entirely, and left the once proudly vanguard party in chaos. It took the succession of Mao by Deng Xiaoping to restore normality, and from 1978 he began to move the party away from its rigidly ideological position and toward an acceptance of free market-based economic reforms. While the PRC continued to pursue these reforms with zeal, however, the authoritarian rule of the CCP did not come under threat, and it remained into the 21st century a gigantic presence in Chinese life, and with a reported 66 million members the largest political party in the world.