From a clandestine meeting of 53 people in a Shanghai house to 92 million members across China, the Communist Party of China has driven the longest and largest political movement the world has ever seen.

In doing so, it has survived internal revolts, foreign invasions and economic devastation to wield more than 70 years in power. It has crushed internal dissent, wiped out cultural identities and overseen the fastest economic expansion of the modern age.

“Follow the Party forever,” the banners in Beijing will declare on July 1, the date marked as the centenary of the CCP.

China is now in the midst of the world’s largest social experiment. It is attempting to harness all the benefits of a market economy while eliminating any capitalist threat to its rule. Can an authoritarian government remain in control while it liberalises its economy – but not its population? What role does the Party play? And will it stay in power?

How do you become a member of the Party?

Hassled by local police, the 53 original party members who met in a Shanghai shikumen terrace on July 23, 1921 had to travel 100 kilometres to Jiaxing and conduct their affairs on a boat before they could elect their secretaries, organisation and propaganda chiefs. Among them was Mao Zedong, the revolutionary and dictator who would go on to found the People’s Republic of China under Communist rule. It took almost 30 years of bloodshed, political manoeuvring and popular uprising for Mao and the Party to take power, but it has held it ever since.

Now, the party of the farmers is becoming the party of the middle class. Better educated, aspirational and more financially secure, it has changed as China’s own wealth has grown, but it is also increasingly trying to raise the standard of its membership base.

Open only to Chinese nationals aged 18 and over, the application process is, by Western standards, gruelling. In Australia or the United States, party members can fill out little more than a three-page form to join the Liberal, Labor, Republican or Democratic parties. In China, aspirants have to submit in writing why they should be considered. Their reasons have, historically, swayed with the direction of CCP leadership. Under Mao their reasons were heavily ideological; people joined the Party because they believed in its cause. But over time, they have become more pragmatic, with applicants echoing how they can serve the Party and the country, academically and professionally.

‘Once you’re in there, you need to continuously prove yourself.’

If they get through this first stage, the Party will conduct background checks on their parents, family and social connections. Once vetted, they move onto an initial three-day course on ideology which covers the theories of three major leaders – Mao (who headed the People’s Republic of China from its inception in 1949 until his death in 1976), Deng Xiaoping (1978 to 1989) and Xi Jinping (since 2012) on “socialism with Chinese characteristics” – before submitting papers on current events every three months. Interviews will be conducted with eight friends and family to verify the applicant is ideologically pure.

At this stage, they are allowed to officially apply – but the process is not over. Quarterly interviews track their progress during a year-long trial membership before they are admitted finally. “The vetting process has become much more difficult,” says Mercator Institute for China Studies analyst Nis Grunberg. “Once you’re in there, you need to continuously prove yourself.”

More than 90 million Party members have gone through this process. That is more than the number of Republicans and Democrats combined. It is a lot of people – but still less than 7 per cent of China’s 1.4 billion population. Of the world’s political parties, only India’s Bharatiya Janata Party has more members. Up to 80 per cent of CCP applicants are rejected and have to reapply. Figures from the Party’s Central Organisation Department, analysed by Grunberg for Mercator, show the ratio of members who are workers and farmers has fallen from almost 40 per cent in 2009 to a third in 2019. At the same time, the number of members with a university education has risen from just over a third to half.

Businesspeople were not allowed to join the Party until 2001 but the shift to more university-educated members has been tied with a drive into the private sector. Of the 15.61 million private companies in China, 73 per cent now have a party cell installed. The cells are a key part of the Party’s attempts to tread between market-driven innovation and ensuring no entity becomes more powerful than the Party.

Internally, the cells are filled with a mixture of ideologues, pragmatists and ambitious members using the Party to bulk up their resumé. “It is difficult to make sure that everyone who’s enjoying the benefits of membership really believes in his or her heart that Marxism is the best way forward,” says Grunberg. “That’s a long stretch for a person who grew up in Shanghai in the 2000s. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter if you strongly believe in the Party. If you act upon the rules and recreate them on a daily basis, they are going to stay.”

What are the obligations and benefits of membership?

The Party very much focuses on unity and cohesion, says Adam Ni from the China Policy Centre, an independent, non-profit research organisation based in Canberra. “You’re demanding a lot from your members. It’s not a soccer club. It’s something that you dedicate your life to. It’s also a vehicle for upward social mobility in China. So, if you’re somebody ambitious, if you’re smart, then it’s the best way to move up the social ladder in China, because it’s the organisation that monopolises political power.”

Out of that political power come economic opportunities and access to political, business and academic networks. Jobs in the prestigious civil service or the $30-billion state-owned enterprises sector are overwhelmingly skewed towards Party members.

According to the Party’s constitution, members have a duty to attend meetings, keep up to date with political documents and participate in discussions through the Party’s journals and newspapers.

Historically, members have had limited rights to criticise the Party’s organisation but this has become more dangerous under President Xi Jinping, with control increasingly centralised around the president and closely monitored by internal surveillance networks.

The oath taken by members when they join the Party reads:

‘It is my will to join the Communist Party of China, uphold the Party’s program, observe the provisions of the Party constitution, fulfil a Party member’s duties, carry out the Party’s decisions, strictly observe Party discipline, guard Party secrets, be loyal to the Party, work hard, fight for communism throughout my life, be ready at all times to sacrifice my all for the Party and the people, and never betray the Party.’

In the private sector, Party cells can vary from zealous internal workplace surveillance units to hour-long, tick-box discussions on socialism with Chinese characteristics before everyone knocks off for drinks. Ryan Manuel, a former director of policy research at the University of Hong Kong and Australian government adviser who now runs the Official China research firm, says this achieves two things.

“The first is a traditional Chinese focus on inculcating moral values under the guidance of the Party, rather than seeking checks and balances on individual power. The second is ensuring that the Party has a voice in all private enterprises and continues to encourage large state-owned enterprises.”

Historian Xiao Gongqin recalled in an essay published in 2020 how China had learned its lessons from the fall of the Soviet Union, which had undermined its state power by decentralising its economy.

“This man looks smart but he is actually stupid,” former Chinese leader Deng remarked after meeting the last president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989.

“Gorbachev looked good,” Xiao later wrote. “But he forgot that the leadership of the Communist Party is the basis for stabilising the entire social and economic development. Abandoning the leadership of the Communist Party is actually detrimental to the political stability required for economic development.”

How does the Party work?

Above the 92 million members are five key bodies. The Party Congress selects its 2354 delegates from the membership base, and they attend the annual political gala of the National People’s Congress in Beijing to rubber-stamp key laws and leadership positions such as the party general secretary.

Next is the Central Committee, made up of 205 members and 171 alternate members, who can participate in policy plenums but can’t vote. The alternate members are a feeder club for the Central Committee: members can be voted into full committee status if full members retire or are expelled. The committee itself meets formally once a year to discuss policy and it oversees various executive national political bodies. The committee also, in theory, elects the next level of authority, the Politburo, but in reality these positions are decided by powerbrokers behind closed doors.

The 25 members of the Politburo are a mixture of representatives from the Central Military Commission, ministers for development and reform, regional leaders and discipline chiefs. Vice-Premier Sun Chunlan, who led the internal intelligence and propaganda Central United Front Work Department until 2017, is the only female member of the Politburo.

Within the Politburo, the seven-member standing committee is the key decision-making body. It includes Premier Li Keqiang, anti-corruption chief Zhao Leji and national security director Li Zhanshu. Above all of them is Xi.

“One of the features of the party structure is the concentration of power as you go up the structure,” says Ni. “It’s a Leninist organisation in the sense of its organisational discipline.”

‘If we want a green China, we have to accept a red China to enforce a goal.’

That centralisation is now becoming much more top-heavy under Xi, reaching right down to the village level. There are up to a million villages across China. “Historically, townships and villages have had nearly total autonomy, in practice, over their affairs,” says Manuel. But since 2018, the party has forced villages to report on how finances are being spent each year. This allows the party to make sure townships are using revenue to meet targets from above. “And if you don’t make them, then we’re going to send down the anti-corruption people,” says Manuel. “It is a credible threat.”

The same is true of provinces scrambling to work out how they are going to help meet Xi’s target of net-zero emissions by 2060. Many of them still have coal-fired power plants being built and some will be threatened with not meeting new Party standards if they do not mothball them. “It’s the watermelon problem,” says Manuel. “If we want a green China, we have to accept a red China to enforce a goal.”

Lowy Institute senior fellow Richard McGregor says China is a large, diverse and unwieldy country. He recalls a Chinese colleague once saying to him: “In China, people have to fear the government, otherwise they won’t respond to it.”

Yet it has achieved what many others could not: half a century of continuous economic growth. China has in effect doubled its GDP every eight years since liberalisation in 1979­–80, lifting 800 million people out of poverty, which is like nothing history has ever seen before. From being a backward nation with poor infrastructure, China has become the world’s second-biggest economy, biggest manufacturer, biggest merchandise trader and largest holder of foreign exchange reserves. “China has some very smart policymakers who have a very good track record,” says McGregor.

‘Everyone is always competing for the favour of the people above them.’

Manuel says Xi has taken powers from local leaders and executive bodies and given them to the legislatures and internal inspectors in a sort of top-down populism that forces people to follow his orders more strictly. “They care a lot about what the next person thinks,” he says. “Everyone is always competing for the favour of the people above them. Given there are over 90 million party members across more than 30 provinces, nearly 900 municipalities and nearly 3000 counties, there exists a vast bureaucracy that is fundamental to the prosecution of the leader’s interests.”

The outcomes can be good for policies that are likely to deliver positive outcomes, such as emissions targets, but brutal for others, such as the repression of the Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang or the crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong.

“It’s influencing every walk of life in Hong Kong,” says former Hong Kong legislator Ted Hui, who left the former liberal enclave while on bail for national security charges and now lives in Australia. “The CCP is pushing it to an extreme, basically declaring that any dissent and opposition operating in Hong Kong will be harmful to national security. The new National Security Bureau has no checks and balances by the judiciary and there’s no transparency. So, basically, they can do whatever they want.”

Is the Party’s power limited?

China’s deputy ambassador to Australia, Wang Xining, took issue with the West’s references to the Chinese Communist Party in April 2021. “It’s the CPC – the Communist Party of China,” he told the National Press Club. “Not the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party. There are different linguistic connotations. There’s a very shallow understanding of the role of the Communist Party of China.”

In Wang’s formulation, the Communist Party of China belongs to China and its people first. But, as the West would have it, the past few decades have shown the Party is doing what it can to ensure China’s workers, businesses and leaders belong to it.

McGregor, who wrote The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers a decade ago, says that while historically the Party set policies and then the government, civil service and courts would execute them, this distinction has been effectively abolished under Xi. “Which just means it’s a much more controlled environment with less room to move on policy issues and policy debates,” he says. “Look at the Politburo Standing Committee and their tasks. A normal government has a minister of finance, environment, foreign policy. If you look at the Standing Committee, virtually none of them have an executive function. They are all political jobs involving ideology and anti-corruption.”

Manuel observes: “It is like having more stuff done by the Liberal Party backroom rather than done by the public service, by ministerial staff or by legislators.”

Grunberg says the Party and state are being fused tighter than before. “What used to be Party rules have been made into laws,” he says.

In the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping’s Central Committee preferred not to mention the Party in the main text of the People’s Republic of China constitution, arguing that as Party members represented only 5 per cent of the population its role was best left unsaid. But under Xi, Party leadership has now been written into Article 1 of the constitution’s main body as the “defining feature of socialism with Chinese characteristics”. At the same time, the pretence of state laws being separated from Party directions has been whittled away as the Party’s role has been written into state governance, turning internal Party ideological, organisational, and operational breaches into legal ones.

Since 2017, four key developments have demonstrated how the Party-state fusion is creating a minefield for governments and companies. In June of that year, the Chinese government implemented the Cybersecurity Law, which requires data stored within China, including by foreign companies, to be handed over for government security checks. In the same month, a new National Intelligence Law enabled the compelling, without a warrant, of any “organisation or citizen to support, assist and cooperate with the state intelligence work”. The law was identified as a key reason behind Australia’s decision to block Huawei in 2018.

In September 2020, the Central Committee outlined its plans to increase its ideological power over private companies through its United Front network by closely uniting business figures “around the party” and strengthening the ideological monitoring of workers through internal company Party committees.

One of China’s richest men, Jack Ma, the founder of the Alibaba online retail empire, soon fell foul of the Party’s tightening grip. After a rapid expansion into online banking platform Alipay, now used by 70 per cent of China’s population, Ma criticised the Party and China’s regulators for stifling innovation. “We shouldn’t use the way to manage a train station to regulate an airport,” he said. “We cannot regulate the future with yesterday’s means.”

Ma’s Ant group had been preparing for the world’s largest share offering but the estimated $400 billion market launch was scuttled by Chinese regulators. The Wall Street Journal reported it was on the orders of Xi himself. Ma promptly disappeared from public view for three months, his whereabouts unexplained, before resurfacing in January 2021. “My colleagues and I have been studying and thinking, and we have become more determined to devote ourselves to education and public welfare,” Ma said.

‘The arduous task of eradicating absolute poverty has been completed, and another miracle has been created in the annals of history!’

The next month, Xi gave a speech on the country’s achievement in eliminating absolute poverty. The milestone is a key marker on China’s path to rejuvenation, as outlined by the Party over the past century. Throughout his speech, Xi bound together the Party, the nation and its people. He showcased the mobilising power of nationalism and the socialism with Chinese characteristics that is increasingly becoming Xi and China’s ideological trademark.

“The arduous task of eradicating absolute poverty has been completed, and another miracle has been created in the annals of history!” he said. “This is the great glory of the Chinese people, the great glory of the Communist Party of China and the great glory of the Chinese nation!”

Willy Lam, a political analyst with the Chinese University of Hong Kong, says in China, “nationalism is one of the key pillars of legitimacy and the leadership wants to show the people that they can stand up to the pressures from the Western world.”

Xiao, the veteran scholar of the Party, said in an essay published in December that “China has gotten rid of the ultra-leftism and leftism”. “The ideology of China, on the basis of respecting common sense, respecting the diversity of social economy and culture, and respecting the historical continuity of the existing order, transcends the left and right,” he said.

“Xi’s goal is to make the whole world see China as a great power, and him as a key figure in making it great. At heart, he’s a nationalist.”

Is Xi really the Chairman of Everything?

Xi, the son of a guerrilla revolutionary, is now president for life. He was exiled with his father during Mao’s purge in the Cultural Revolution. The story goes he lived in a cave and was rejected for Party membership nine times before being accepted as a “Worker-Peasant-Soldier student”. He would go on to finish a degree in chemical engineering and a doctorate in law and ideology from Tsinghua University.

Xi moved steadily up the ranks for two decades. Critically, he replaced Chen Liangyu, the party secretary of Shanghai, in 2007 after a corruption scandal, putting him on a path to the Politburo Standing Committee.

‘The name of the game right now is raising the ideological profile of Xi Jinping himself up to something quite close to, or surpassing that of, Mao.’

By 2012 he was President. Over the next six years he would consolidate his power through more corruption purges, and increase China’s domestic and foreign ambition. Two key policies are driving this further: dual circulation, which will see state-backed domestic production among China’s 1.4 billion people become the dominant source of economic growth in the export-driven powerhouse; and the Belt and Road Initiative, a $1.5-trillion-dollar infrastructure push across more than 100 countries in Asia, Africa and the Indo-Pacific.

When it was time to nominate Xi’s successor in 2018, there were no clear challengers to his authority. He removed the limit of two five-year terms, instituted after Mao, which had been put in place to avoid a cult of personality forming around a leader.

Carl Minzner, a professor of Chinese law and politics at Fordham Law School, says there is a narrative that is marginalising China’s other former leaders Hu Jintao, Jiang Zemin and Deng together as it raises the profile of Xi.

“It starts down the path of presenting post-2012 [after Xi became President] as the culmination or solution to millennia of Chinese history,” he says. “I think that the name of the game right now is raising the ideological profile of Xi Jinping himself up to something quite close to, or surpassing that of, Mao himself.”

On one day in April 2021, all six of the front-page stories in the People’s Daily newspaper were about Xi. In new textbooks distributed throughout China for the centenary of the Party, Minzner notes that On the History of the Chinese Communist Party contained 40 speeches by Xi, or 180,000 characters, while excerpts from Mao, Deng, Jiang and Hu are worth a total 98,000 characters.

As Ni says, this streamlined narrative is reinforced through party messaging: “There is a straight line between Mao and Xi. Where Mao led the standing up of China, Deng Xiaoping led the development of China and now Xi is leading China to become a nation of strength.”

Strongman rule wasn’t always so popular. Former Central Party School professor Cai Xia told Radio Free Asia (RFA) in 2020 that for a while, between 2001 and 2006, there were active discussions about “intra-party democracy” to solve issues of political system reform in China and to promote the market economy.

When it was suddenly announced in 2018 that the two-term limit would be abolished for Xi, members of the Party who had thrived under his predecessor Hu Jintao were shocked. Notably, Xi did not change the retirement age limits for any other high office, effectively eliminating any direct competition.

“He forced everyone at the [Plenum] to swallow the revision like he was stuffing dogs--t down their throats,” said Cai in a leaked speech to a private group in June 2020. “So many Central Committee members were at the session, yet not one dared to raise this issue.”

Cai is now in exile in the United States. Many of her colleagues who have criticised Xi have also either left the country or been detained. “Xi Jinping is calling all the shots on major issues. I call him a gang boss because there is no transparency, and there is no decision-making mechanism. When different opinions surface, coming from people like me, they can expel you from the Party and take your pension away,” Cai told RFA in August 2020.

‘Xi Jinping likes true believers because he’s a true believer.’

“He has a tight grip on everyone. The advanced surveillance technology is not only utilised in monitoring Xinjiang and Tibet but it is also applied to monitor CCP members as well as mid- and high-level officials. Around 2013, Xi Jinping also announced a policy that forbids the formation of any alumni associations or hometown associations; additionally, gathering after work is also not allowed. He was worried that such gatherings may provide room for cliques or political factions to grow within the Party.”

Manuel says someone always loses in any political upheaval. In the rise of Xi, it’s the second-generation elite such as Cai and their families who have been either forced into silence, hiding or exile, leaving Xi unchallenged at the top of the CCP pyramid.

“These are people who have gone to Harvard or Yale, who speak excellent English, and they don’t like Xi.”

He says the combination of the Party as an ideological commitment and as a vehicle for professional promotion had left this group of potential Chinese leaders sidelined.

“These people are seeing their purpose torn up,” he says. “Xi Jinping doesn’t like that group of members, he likes true believers because he’s a true believer.

“And that really makes it harder for us to deal with China.”

What happens after Xi?

Four scenarios for a change of leadership have been outlined by McGregor and Jude Blanchette from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan Washington think tank affiliated with Georgetown University. They are as follows: an orderly transition in 2022; a succession plan to retire at the 21st Party Congress in 2027; a leadership challenge or unexpected death or incapacitation.

China is big on targets and anniversaries. In 2021, Xi claimed the nation had eliminated absolute poverty. Now at the forefront of Xi’s mind will be China’s next goal, achieving “modern socialism” by 2035, reaching the level of “moderately developed countries”. The target is more than halfway towards the middle of the century when China aims to emerge from a history of colonial oppression in the 19th century and decades of struggle in the 20th to achieve “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” in the 21st.

‘One of the ways to understand China is that it’s a massive country, not just the CCP.’

“I think he’ll be around for a long time,” says McGregor. “By 2035, which I think is a midpoint for the China dream, Xi will be 82, which is the same age as Joe Biden at the end of his first term. So, I think we should expect him to be around for at least another five, six years to 2027. And probably beyond that, if not, leading the party, then running it from behind the scenes.”

And while China is marking a century of the Communist Party, one big anniversary remains.

That date is 2049. It falls a century from the founding of the People’s Republic of China by the Communist Party after it had completed its three-decade-long transition from guerrilla fighters to rulers of the Middle Kingdom. It is also the deadline that Xi has set for China to eclipse the United States and European countries as a fully developed modern nation and unify with Taiwan.

In the middle of these grand historical benchmarks and power struggles are 1.4 billion people, each with their own stories, ambitions and failures.

“I think one of the ways to understand China is that it’s a massive country, not just the CCP,” says Ni. “The CCP is the ruling regime but it’s a living, breathing place with a lot of people. These people are living with their hopes and fears, within limitations and prejudices and history. And with all that diversity comes complexity. I think sometimes we tend to reduce China to a geopolitical context, or seeing it through the view of the Party or competition.

“But I think it is far more complex than that.”