Chinese Communist Party

Under the influence of the October Revolution and the May Fourth Movement, Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao were among the first to publicly support Leninism and world revolution. The founding congress opened on 23 July 1921 in a house in the Shanghai French Concession; the party then had 57 members, and 13 Chinese delegates were present. When French police interrupted the meeting on 30 July, the congress moved to a tourist boat on South Lake in Jiaxing, Zhejiang. Neither Li nor Chen attended, but the congress resolved to found a communist party as a branch of the Comintern and elected Chen as its leader. According to the Chinese-language source, the party joined the Comintern in 1922.

The Comintern and the Soviets allied with the Kuomintang, and communists joined it, forming the First United Front. Membership grew from 900 to 2,428 after the 4th Congress in 1925. In April 1927 Chiang Kai-shek massacred 5,000 communists in Shanghai, and that year the party lost about 15,000 of its 25,000 members. When the Wuhan KMT government also expelled the communists on 15 July, the party founded the Red Army and staged the Nanchang uprising on 1 August; after the failed Autumn Harvest Uprising Mao Zedong withdrew to the Jinggang Mountains. Chen Duxiu, expelled from the party, went on to lead the Chinese Trotskyist movement, and the line of Li Lisan, who controlled the party organisation in 1929–1930, ended in failure. On 7 November 1931 the party founded the Chinese Soviet Republic at Ruijin in Jiangxi, but KMT encirclement campaigns forced it onto the Long March, and at the Zunyi Conference in January 1935 Mao was elected to the Politburo Standing Committee and consolidated his position.

After the Xi'an Incident of December 1936 the Second United Front was formed. According to the English-language source, collaboration between the two parties had effectively ended by 1940, and the communists used the period to expand independent bases. Mao became Chairman of the Politburo in 1943 and Chairman of the Central Committee in 1945. After the Japanese surrender the civil war resumed; the party proclaimed the People's Republic of China on 1 October 1949, and the Nationalist government retreated to Taiwan.

In power the party carried out land reform and five-year plans, and the 1954 constitution abolished the coalition government and established one-party rule. The Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957 persecuted at least 550,000 people, and the Great Leap Forward led to a famine with an estimated 15 to 45 million deaths. In the 1960s and 1970s the party split with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and during the Cultural Revolution leaders such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were purged. After Mao's death in 1976 Hua Guofeng removed the Gang of Four, and Deng Xiaoping, paramount leader from 1978, launched reform and opening up and "socialism with Chinese characteristics". The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 were crushed by force.

Xi Jinping, who succeeded Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao as general secretary in 2012, has waged an anti-corruption campaign and centralised power in the general secretary at the expense of collective leadership. The party's highest body is the National Congress, held every five years, while real authority lies with the Politburo and its Standing Committee. According to the internal statistical bulletin cited by the Chinese-language source, the party had 101.286 million members at the end of 2025.