On July 1, the Communist Party of China (CPC) marked the 105^th anniversary of its founding – a milestone that invites not only celebration but careful study. Few political organisations in modern history have exercised such a profound influence over the destiny of their own nation while simultaneously reshaping the wider international balance of forces. Founded in 1921 by a small group of Marxists determined to liberate China from imperialist domination, feudal exploitation, and social disintegration, the CPC today leads a country that has become the principal engine of world economic growth, the world’s largest industrial economy, and the longest-surviving socialist state. Such an achievement was neither inevitable nor linear. It emerged through revolution, sacrifice, experimentation, self-criticism, and an extraordinary capacity to adapt strategy without abandoning historical purpose.

The history of the CPC is best understood not as a succession of disconnected policy changes but as a continuous revolutionary process in which each generation confronted new contradictions created by the successes of the previous one. If the first great task was to destroy the old social order that had condemned China to centuries of subordination and humiliation, the second was to build the productive capacities that socialism requires (particularly for a poor, largely peasant society), while the third, which continues today, is to ensure that those productive forces increasingly serve the goal of ‘common prosperity’ and do not merely enrich an elite minority. Across these different historical stages, one feature has remained constant: the central and indispensable role of the Party itself.

MAO’S STRUGGLE

When the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed on October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong (1893–1976) declared that the Chinese people had stood up. Those words were not merely rhetorical – they expressed a profound historical transformation. China had endured more than a century of imperialist intervention, unequal treaties, foreign occupation, famine, warlordism, and civil war. Large sections of its territory had been controlled by foreign powers, while its economy had been distorted to serve external interests and domestic landlordism. The revolutionary victory therefore represented far more than a change of government. It marked the destruction of an old social order whose political, economic, and ideological foundations had prevented China’s independent development.

Under Mao’s leadership, the Party undertook the immense task of reconstructing society from the ground up. Land reform dismantled the power of the landlord class and fundamentally altered agrarian relations. The Marriage Law transformed the legal status of women and struck at deeply rooted patriarchal structures. Literacy campaigns, mass education, and public health initiatives reached millions who had previously been excluded from even the most basic social services. Public ownership was established over the commanding heights of the economy, while national planning replaced the anarchy that had characterised the preceding decades. By the time of Mao’s death, China possessed a unified state, an industrial foundation, an educated population, and a vastly improved system of public health, all of which constituted the indispensable preconditions for the transformations that followed.

No serious assessment of this period can ignore its contradictions or the mistakes that accompanied certain campaigns (such as the 1958–1962 Great Leap Forward and the 1966–1976 Cultural Revolution). Yet neither can those errors obscure the magnitude of what had been accomplished. The old hierarchies of landlordism, comprador capitalism, colonial dependency, and national humiliation had been fundamentally broken. For the first time in modern Chinese history, development could proceed based on national sovereignty rather than imperialist subordination. The Chinese Revolution should not be understood as a single event completed in 1949 but as the opening of a long revolutionary process whose successive stages have unfolded unevenly over decades. The revolution did not end with the seizure of state power – it entered a new phase.

By the late 1970s, the Party recognised that political sovereignty alone could not fulfil the aspirations of the Chinese people. A socialist society cannot be built upon persistent poverty, technological backwardness, or inadequate productive capacity (the reasons why China entered the Great Leap Forward). The contradiction confronting China had therefore changed. Having secured the political foundations of the revolution, the Party now had to develop the productive forces capable of sustaining socialist construction over the long term.

DENG’S FACTORIES

It was Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997) who provided the strategic orientation for this new period. His famous observation that development is the hard truth reflected not an abandonment of socialism but a Marxist recognition that the social relations of production cannot be sustained indefinitely without the continual development of productive forces. The reforms initiated from 1978 were therefore designed to release productive forces while preserving the leading role of the Party and the socialist orientation of the state. Markets were introduced as instruments of development, but they remained subordinate to political authority, strategic planning, and public ownership in the commanding sectors of the economy. In fact, the socialist state created and participated within the market to guide its strategic direction.

The results transformed not only China but the world. During the following decades, China experienced perhaps the most rapid industrial expansion in human history. Hundreds of millions of people were lifted out of absolute poverty. Entire new industries emerged in telecommunications, high-speed rail, renewable energy, robotics, advanced manufacturing, and digital technology. Scientific research expanded dramatically. Technological capabilities that had once been monopolised by a handful of advanced capitalist countries increasingly developed within China itself. What Chinese policymakers today describe as ‘new quality productive forces’ did not arise spontaneously from market competition but from decades of coordinated investment in education, infrastructure, science, and industrial policy under the leadership of the Party.

Such an experience sharply distinguished China from the neoliberal path imposed upon much of the developing world during the same period. While many countries were encouraged by the Bretton Woods institutions to privatise public assets, dismantle industrial policy, weaken the developmental state, and surrender economic decision-making to financial markets, China retained public control over land and finance, maintained long-term planning through successive Five-Year Plans, expanded state-ownership in strategic sectors, and treated technological development as a matter of national sovereignty rather than corporate profit. The rapid expansion of productive forces was therefore inseparable from the institutional strength of the socialist state.

XI’S SOCIALISM

The current period under Xi Jinping (born 1953) represents a further development of the revolutionary process initiated in 1921. If Mao answered the question of political liberation, and Deng confronted the challenge of economic transformation, Xi’s period has increasingly centred on the quality, direction, and social purpose of development itself. The historic eradication of extreme poverty demonstrated that rapid growth could be consciously directed toward improving the lives of ordinary people rather than simply enlarging corporate profits. At the same time, increasing emphasis has been placed on reducing regional inequalities, strengthening public services, protecting ecological systems, revitalising rural communities, regulating speculative concentrations of capital, and advancing the objective that Chinese policymakers describe as ‘common prosperity’.

This evolution reflects an important theoretical understanding. Socialism cannot be measured solely by rates of economic growth or technological achievements, however impressive those may be. The decisive question concerns the relationship between productive development and the social good or ‘common prosperity’. Economic modernisation acquires socialist significance only insofar as it expands the material, cultural, and democratic capacities of the people themselves. The continued strengthening of public education, healthcare, infrastructure, scientific research, ecological planning, and cultural renewal therefore represents an effort to ensure that the extraordinary productive advances of previous decades increasingly serve broader social objectives.

Equally significant has been China’s determination to achieve technological self-reliance at a moment when the United States and its allies have intensified attempts to contain China’s development through export controls, sanctions, restrictions on semiconductor technologies, and an expanding military presence across East Asia. These measures have only reinforced the Party’s conviction that scientific and technological sovereignty has become inseparable from national sovereignty itself. Investment in advanced manufacturing, artificial intelligence, renewable energy, aerospace, biotechnology, and quantum technologies is therefore understood not simply as economic policy but as an essential component of socialist development under conditions of intensified hyper-imperialist pressure.

Throughout all these historical transitions, the CPC has remained the decisive institution that has held together the long arc of China’s revolution. Unlike political parties that exist primarily to contest elections or administer existing institutions, the CPC has consistently understood itself as the organiser of a historical project whose horizon extends across generations. Its legitimacy has rested not upon abstract ideological declarations but upon its demonstrated capacity to identify changing historical contradictions and to formulate strategies capable of resolving them in ways that improve the lives of the majority of the population.

For those committed to anti-imperialism, the experience of the CPC carries lessons that extend far beyond China’s borders. It demonstrates that development is neither the automatic product of market forces nor the inevitable consequence of integration into global capitalism. It requires political leadership, institutional continuity, long-term planning, and a state capable of subordinating economic development to social objectives. Above all, it demonstrates that national sovereignty remains the indispensable condition for any meaningful project of social transformation.

The international significance of China’s experience is perhaps even greater today than at any point since 1949. At a time when much of the Global South seeks new paths of industrialisation, technological development, and economic sovereignty, China’s experience has reopened questions that many believed had been settled forever after the destruction of the Soviet Union. It has shown that planning remains possible, that public investment can transform societies, that technological leadership need not remain the monopoly of the Global North, and that the future need not belong exclusively to finance capital.

None of this suggests that China’s path can simply be transplanted elsewhere. Every society confronts its own history, class relations, political traditions, and material conditions. Yet the larger historical lesson remains clear. The achievements of the Chinese Revolution have not been the product of chance or individual initiative alone. They have been made possible by the sustained leadership of a revolutionary party that has repeatedly renewed itself while remaining anchored in the people and guided by the long-term objective of building socialism.

As the CPC enters its second century, it does so not as the custodian of a completed revolution but as the leader of an unfinished historical process. That process continues to evolve through new contradictions and new challenges. Yet its central achievement already stands beyond dispute. Over the course of 105 years, the Party has transformed one of the poorest and most fragmented countries on earth into a sovereign, technologically advanced, and increasingly prosperous socialist society. In doing so, it has demonstrated that history continues to progress, that development can be consciously directed, and that organised people, acting through disciplined political institutions, retain the capacity to shape their own future.