Chinese Communist Party
founding and ruling party of the People's Republic of China
The Communist Party of China (CPC), commonly known as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is the founding and sole governing party of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Founded in 1921, the CCP won the Chinese Civil War against the Kuomintang and proclaimed the establishment of the PRC under the chairmanship of Mao Zedong in October 1949. The CCP has since governed China and has had absolute control over the country's armed forces and law enforcement. As of 2025, the CCP has more than 101 million members, making it the second largest political party by membership in the world.
In 1921, Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao founded the CCP with the help of the Far Eastern Bureau of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and Far Eastern Bureau of the Communist International. Although the CCP aligned with the Kuomintang (KMT) during its initial years, the rise of the KMT's right-wing under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek and subsequent massacres of tens of thousands of CCP members resulted in a split and a prolonged civil war between the CCP and KMT. During the next ten years of guerrilla warfare, Mao Zedong rose to become the most influential figure in the CCP and the party established a strong base among the rural peasantry with its land reform policies. Support for the CCP continued to grow throughout the Second Sino-Japanese War. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, the CCP emerged triumphant in the communist revolution against the Nationalist government. The CCP established the People's Republic of China on 1 October 1949, and the remnants of the Nationalist government retreated to Taiwan shortly after.
Mao Zedong remained the most influential member of the CCP until his death in 1976.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Chinese Communist Party” as founding and ruling party of the People's Republic of China. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as founding and ruling party of the People's Republic of China. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17427. VIAF identifies the subject as 132098431. The Library of Congress control number is n79090028. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1921, 1949, 2025 and 1945.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chinese Communist Party” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.