Lessons for African countries as Chinese Communist Party turns 100

Few political parties in Africa lived to celebrate their 10th birthday. In Kenya, this week’s news headlines seemed to predict that the two dominant political party formations – the ruling Jubilee Party and the National Super Alliance (Nasa) – may not live beyond 2022.

In contrast, this year the Chinese Communist Party of China (CPC), also commonly known as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is celebrating its 100th anniversary. With more than 92 million members, the CPC is now remaking the post-Covid global order. The million-dollar question is: what can Africa, with the highest mortality rate of parties, learn from the CCP? 

Since it was established on July 6, 1921 on the principles of Marxism-Leninism, the CPC has successfully transitioned from a liberation movement to a governing party. After defeating its main rival, the nationalist Kuomintang, the CPC under Mao Zedong established the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in Beijing on October 1, 1949. 

“This ended China’s ‘century of humiliation’ by external powers from 1840-1949,” Chinese Ambassador to Kenya Zhou Pingjian said recently.

The post-liberation CPC was forged on the anvil of two revolutionary moments. One is China’s ‘Cultural Revolution’ (1966-1976) to ‘preserve Chinese Communism’. This shifted the axis of power from entrenched party elite to a people-centered governance system. Additionally, the Tiananmen riots in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union after 1989 challenged the CCP in a public way.

This forced the party to rethink its governance and to carefully research into the causes of regime collapse to avoid the fate that befell the Soviet Communist Party. Far-reaching reforms enabled it to defeat the four mortal enemies of political parties: dogmatic ideology, dormant party organisation, fragmentation of the ruling elite and a stagnant economy. After 2012, under President Xi Jinping, the most influential Chinese leader since Mao Zedong, the CPC has reformed its structure, ideology and leadership to confront the challenges of the 21st century. 

Today, the CPC is a powerful intellectual and policy machine, presiding over the modern world’s only ‘civilisational state’. It is a hybrid party secured on socialist and Chinese values and traditions lasting over 5,000 years. Ideologically, it is organised along the Leninist principle of ‘democratic centralism’, which is anchored on the Confucian concept of ‘Great Unity’.

‘Great Unity’ is a utopian vision of the world as a place where everyone and everything is at peace. The concept is the antithesis of the dialectical thought that opposition of forces and ideas is the real driver of change. The latter0 is the lynchpin of Western liberal democracy.

After 2012, President Xi Jinping’s thoughts on ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era’, now enshrined into the constitution, set the ideological contours of China’s ‘democratic centralism’ as a people-centered policy approach.

The second revolutionary moment was the ‘Reforms and Opening Up’ that started under Deng Xiaoping from December 1978. This ushered China into the capitalist marketplace and opened a new chapter in its economic development. 

Political stability

For 72 years, CPC has united the country’s 56 ethnic nationalities and guaranteed regime safety and stability. This has enabled China to become the second-largest economy in the world with a total GDP of $15.66 trillion in 2020.

Under Xi, the scope of CPC’s anti-corruption campaign has been unprecedented, targeting some two million officials and netting both “tigers” (high ranking offenders) and “flies” (petty ones). 

The CPC adopted the concept of ‘Ecological Civilisation’ (shentai wenming) to balance China’s fast-paced development and environmental conservation. China is targeting peak carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 and carbon neutrality before 2060.

As a result of the trinity of political stability, anti-corruption and green development, China has lifted more than 850 million people out of poverty since 1978, a milestone hailed by the World Bank as “one of the great stories in human history”. By December 2020, China eradicated extreme poverty becoming the first country to achieved this feat.

China is investing in both hard and soft power. It set aside $177 billion to modernise its military in 2019. Its massive Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is the greatest instrument of globalisation and soft power. By February 2021, some 44 out of 55 African states were participating in the BRI.

It is Deng Xiaoping who once quipped that “if you open the window for fresh air, you have to expect some mosquitoes to blow in”. 

China suffers a huge income gap. A Peking University study indicated the top 1 per cent owned a third of the country’s total wealth by 2016. 

There is also the challenge of America’s efforts to contain a rising China, which has rekindled the Cold War-era geopolitical rivalries. Former US President Donald Trump’s trade wars against China further undermined its economy. 

Disparaging claims that China's expanding footprint in Africa and other parts of the world is a ‘Trojan horse’ for a ‘new form of colonialism’ and its investment under BRI is “debt diplomacy” are hurting its image.

In an article in the Foreign Affairs Journal (February 10, 2020), Elizabeth Economy observes that the Covid-19 pandemic is CPC’s “worst humanitarian and economic crisis”. 

For Africa, the most enduring lesson from CPC is that long-term stability of political parties is absolutely necessary for sustainable development. 

Prof Peter Kagwanja is the Chief Executive of the Africa Policy Institute (API). This article is an excerpt from a keynote speech made at the University of Nairobi on June 16, 2021.