Chinese Communist Party

The Chinese Communist Party is the founding and sole governing political body of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The CCP lead eight other legally permitted subordinate minor parties together as the United Front. The CCP was founded in 1921, with the help of the Far Eastern Bureau of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Far Eastern Secretariat of the Communist International under Lenin. The party grew quickly, and by 1949 it had driven the Kuomintang (KMT)'s Nationalist Government from mainland China to Taiwan after the Chinese Civil War, leading to the establishment of People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949. It controls the country's armed forces, the People's Liberation Army. It is also one of the two major historical contemporary parties in Chinese history, the other being the Kuomintang.

The CCP is officially organized on the basis of democratic centralism, a principle conceived by Russian Marxist theoretician Vladimir Lenin which entails a democratic and open discussion on policy on the condition of unity in upholding agreed-upon policies. Theoretically, the highest body of the CCP is the Natiobal Congress, convened every fifth year. When the National Congress is not in session, the Central Committee is the highest body, but since the body meets normally only once a year most duties and responsibilities are vested in the Politburo and its Standing Committee, members of the latter seen as the top leadership of the Party and the State. The party's leader recently holds the offices of General Secretary (responsible for civilian party duties), Chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC) (responsible for military affairs) and State President (a largely ceremonial position). Through these posts, the party leader is the country's paramount leader. The current leader is general secretary Xi Jinping, elected at the 18th Central Committee held on November 15, 2012.

Officially, the CCP is committed to communism and continues to participate in the International Meeting of Communist and Labor Parties each year. According to the party constitution, the CCP adheres to Marxist-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, socialism with Chinese characteristics, Deng Xiaoping Theory, the Three Represents, the Scientific Outlook on Development, and recently Xi Jinping Thought. The official explanation for China's economic reforms is that the country is in the primary stage of socialism, a developmental stage similar to the capitalist mode of production. The command economy established under Mao Zedong was replaced by the socialist market economy by Deng Xiaoping, the current economic system, on the basis that "Practice is the Sole Criterion for the Truth."

Since the collapse of the Eastern European communist governments in 1989-1990 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the CCP has emphasized its party-to-party relations with non-ruling communist parties around the world, since the 1980s it has established relations with several communist parties, most notably with ruling parties of one-party states (whatever their ideology), dominant parties in democracies (whatever their ideology) and social democratic parties. With more than 91 million members, the CCP is the second largest political party in the world after India's Bharatiya Janata Party.

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