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| July 23, 2021 | View in Browser
Enjoy this special preview of our subscriber-only newsletter The Backstory—a weekly guide through our archives dating back to 1922, highlighting the debates driving U.S. foreign policy and international affairs today. Save 71% on a year of unlimited access to Foreign Affairs. One hundred years ago today, the newly founded Chinese Communist Party held its first National Congress in Shanghai. Party leaders celebrated the centennial earlier this month at a ceremony in Tiananmen Square, where Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke triumphantly of the country’s progress under the CCP and issued a heated warning to any foreign power that dare bully China.
As Orville Schell points out in a recent essay, however, the past century of CCP history contains more ideological diversity, more dissent, and more reinvention than the modern party, committed to “portraying China as a monolithic powerhouse,” cares to admit. And each phase of that history—from the early years of the People’s Republic of China to the convulsion of the Cultural Revolution, the period of economic reform after Mao Zedong’s death, the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square, and the country’s rise to great-power status—has brought renewed questions about the adaptability of the CCP’s leaders and the efficacy of their rule.
Where will the party go from here? China’s reforms so far have allowed its leaders to “realize many of the benefits of democratization . . . without giving up single-party control,” Yuen Yuen Ang writes, but “the limits of this approach are beginning to loom large.” Insider turned dissident Cai Xia describes ideological rot within the party, calling the CCP’s brand of Marxism a doctrine “formed to serve a self-interested dictatorship.”
Going into its second century, the CCP is not as invincible or as unified as it tries to appear, Schell notes. “Despite nationalist bravado about China’s ‘rejuvenation’ and success at nation building,” he writes, “the party’s ongoing obsession with control reveals a lack of confidence in the system it has confected.”
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