Communist Party of China

The Communist Party of China (CPC) is the founding and ruling political party of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The CPC is the sole governing party of China, although it coexists alongside eight other legal parties that comprise the United Front. It was founded in 1921, chiefly by Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao. The party grew quickly, and by 1949 the CPC had driven the Kuomintang (KMT) government from mainland China after a 10-year civil war, thus leading to the establishment of the People's Republic of China. The CPC is currently the world's second largest political party with a membership of 87.79 million as of 2015.

The CPC is, officially, organized on the basis of democratic centralism, a principle conceived by Russian Marxist theoretician Vladimir Lenin which entails democratic and open discussion on policy on the condition of unity in upholding the agreed upon policies. The highest body of the CPC is the National 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. The party's leader 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 party leader is Xi Jinping, elected at the 18th National Congress (held in 2012).

Communist Party (disambiguation)

Communist Party is a label adopted by several political parties. Communist Party may refer to:

All-Union

Bolsheviks

Central, Centre

India

Communist Party USA

The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) is a communist political party in the United States. It is the largest communist party in the country. Established in 1919, it has a long, complex history that is closely related to the U.S. labor movement and the histories of similar communist parties worldwide.

Overview

For the first half of the 20th century, the Communist Party was a highly influential force in various struggles for democratic rights. It played a prominent role in the U.S. labor movement from the 1920s through the 1940s, having a major hand in founding most of the country's first industrial unions (which would later use the McCarran Internal Security Act to expel their Communist members) while also becoming known for opposing racism and fighting for integration in workplaces and communities during the height of the Jim Crow period of U.S. racial segregation. Historian Ellen Schrecker concludes that decades of recent scholarship offer "a more nuanced portrayal of the party as both a Stalinist sect tied to a vicious regime and the most dynamic organization within the American Left during the 1930s and '40s".

National communism

National Communism, refers to the various forms in which communism has been adopted and/or implemented by leaders in different countries. In each independent state, empire or dependency, the relationship between class and nation had its own particularities. The Russian Bolsheviks might be considered the first "national communists" in so far as Russian Social Democracy was so markedly different from the European Social Democratic parties. The Ukrainian communists Shakhrai and Mazlakh and then Muslin Sultan Galiev considered the interests of the Bolshevik Russian state at odds with those of their countries. This was followed after 1945 by the Yugoslav communist leader Josip Broz Tito when he attempted to pursue an independent foreign policy.

Communism as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels envisioned it was meant to be very internationalist, as proletarian internationalism was expected to place class conflict well ahead of nationalism as a priority for the working class. Nationalism was seen as a tool that the bourgeoisie used to divide and rule the proletariat (bourgeois nationalism). Whereas the influence of international communism was very strong from the late 19th century through the 1920s, the decades after that, beginning with Socialism in One Country and progressing into the Cold War and the Non-Aligned Movement, made national communism a larger political reality.