CENTO ANNI DEL PARTITO COMUNISTA CINESE (1921-2021). ASPETTI E PROBLEMI STORICI E STORIOGRAFICI

When it was founded in Shanghai on 23 July 1921, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) comprised an informal network of young radical participants in local Marxist study groups: a century later, the CCP boasts over 91 million members and continues to grow in size. Generally speaking, key to the Party’s survival has been the adaptability of its institutions, the resilience of its practices and its capacity for innovation: a combination of factors which did not avoid the experience of contradictions, failures and shortcomings. From 1921 to 1949 internal and external factors both contributed to the CCP’s birth and developments, while a fundamental passage was its transformation from a revolutionary to a ruling party. This paper after introducing the first years of the CCP presents a general evaluation of its historical achievements and contradictions through the analysis of the three official Resolutions on party’s history of 1945, 1981 and 2021.