JamzNG Latest News, Gist, Entertainment in Nigeria
Since its founding 105 years ago, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has remained at the forefront of China’s transformation, leading the country through building itself into one of the world’s leading economic powers.
Now, with more than 101 million members, the CCP is leading the country on a new journey towards modernization, building on decades of development.
What has allowed the CCP to remain vibrant and resilient for more than a century? How did he mobilize the wisdom and strength of the Chinese people to achieve such remarkable progress? And what does your governance experience reveal about effective leadership in a rapidly changing world?
PEOPLE CENTERED PHILOSOPHY
The CCP has made the pursuit of happiness for the Chinese people and rejuvenation for the Chinese nation its mission since its founding. This commitment remained at the heart of its governance philosophy.
Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and Chinese president, said: “People’s aspirations to live a better life must always be at the center of our efforts.” He also urged all party members to keep in mind that “the country is the people and the people are the country”.
Poverty reduction has long been a priority for the Party. The hard-won gains in this effort have brought real changes to many people struggling with poverty.
Perched at an altitude of 1,600 meters in the mountains of Sichuan province in southwest China, the cliff-top village of Atulie’er has attracted nationwide attention for its rugged location. Until a decade ago, villagers had to climb zigzag rattan ladders and cling to steep cliffs to reach classrooms, markets and medical facilities.
As a targeted national campaign for poverty reduction progressed, a steel staircase with handrails replaced rattan stairs in 2016, significantly improving the daily lives of villagers. Many families were later moved to apartment complexes in a nearby county. Since then the country has developed tourism and cultivated agricultural specialties as new sources of income.
Atulie’er’s transformation is emblematic of China’s drive to shake off extreme poverty. After a relentless eight-year campaign, the country lifted all of its 98.99 million rural residents out of poverty by the end of 2020, eradicating the absolute poverty that had long plagued the nation.
While poverty reduction is an important achievement, it is part of a broader effort to improve people’s livelihoods. Over the years, China has built the largest education, social security and healthcare systems in the world. It has also made historic progress in ecological conservation and environmental protection.
“While all countries claim to help their people, in China the people-centered philosophy can be traced directly to specific policy initiatives,” said Robert Lawrence Kuhn, president of the Kuhn Foundation.
Dennis Munene Mwaniki, executive director of the China-Africa Center at the Africa Policy Institute of Kenya, said China’s governance focuses on designing and implementing people-centred policies to ensure everyone benefits from development.
Mwaniki said China’s governance practices – including the entire process of people’s democracy – offer an alternative to the Western development model, which he described as “capital-centered rather than people-centered.”
KEEPING UP WITH THE TIMES
Reform has been a hallmark of the CCP in its efforts to provide a better life for the Chinese people. The Party has addressed development challenges through comprehensively deepening reforms, while pursuing self-reform to improve its governance capacity.
Since the reform and opening-up of 1978, China has undergone profound transformations. Having achieved enormous success from humble beginnings, reform efforts have now entered a “deep water zone.” Xi once compared the remaining difficult reforms as “hard bones that are hard to chew.”
Since the 18th National Congress of the CPC in 2012, the push to comprehensively deepen reforms has spread to all areas of the economy, innovation, people’s livelihoods, openness and governance.
Let’s take the economy for example. To remove barriers to a unified market and stimulate market innovation, the country has implemented the negative list approach to market access. Through subsequent revisions over several years, the number of items on the list was reduced from 151 in the 2018 version to the current 106, or a decrease of approximately 30%.
In 2024, the third plenary session of the 20th CPC Central Committee adopted comprehensive plans to comprehensively deepen reforms and announced more than 300 major reform tasks to be completed by 2029.
As the reforms have advanced into more complex stages, the CCP considers the Party’s full and rigorous governance to be an essential guarantee. Under the banner of self-reform, the CCP has made persistent efforts to improve the Party’s conduct, build a clean government, and fight corruption.
Between December 2012 and May 2021, the CCP’s disciplinary inspection and supervision authorities investigated 392 officials at the provincial and ministerial levels or above, and approximately 22,000 officials at the department and bureau levels.
In the same period, sanctions were also imposed for over 626,500 violations of the Party’s rules of conduct.
Chayanant Tiyatrakarnchai, a Thai senator, said the CCP was not content with decades in power, but continued to strengthen in response to changing times and people’s evolving expectations.
Juvenal Quicassa, an international relations expert at Belas University in Angola, highlighted the CCP’s ongoing efforts to build systems and measures to ensure that officials do not dare, cannot and will not be corrupt.
“In my opinion, one of the reasons why the CCP continues to demonstrate vitality after more than a century of existence lies precisely in its ability to adapt, self-correct and maintain high levels of organizational discipline,” Quicassa said.
EXCHANGES FOR BETTER GOVERNANCE
About two weeks ago, British Ambassador to China Peter Wilson visited Yan’an, an ancient CCP revolutionary heartland in Shaanxi Province, northwest China. He described the trip as “important” in gaining a better understanding of China and the CCP.
At the Yan’an Revolution Memorial, he focused on old photographs and exhibits showing the life and struggle of the revolutionaries of the older generation.
Wilson also visited Liangjiahe, a village where Xi lived and worked as an educated young man for seven years. He heard villagers tell what life was like in the old days and how their lives have changed, and he photographed a cave dwelling bearing Chinese characters meaning “hard work” and “self-reliance” on the wall outside.
Starting from a small party with just over 50 members, the CCP was long poorly understood by the outside world. As the world has witnessed its remarkable transformation in recent decades, more and more people around the world have shown growing interest in China’s governance model.
Amid a wave of visits to China by foreign leaders this year, many have traveled beyond Beijing to explore firsthand the country’s development experience – in areas ranging from modernization and poverty alleviation to ecological protection. Their itineraries covered robotics companies, rural communities and Xiong’an New Area, dubbed China’s “city of the future.”
“China develops its own development and governance path that suits its own conditions,” differentiating itself from traditional Western-led models and offering inspiration to countries in the Global South to chart their own distinctive governance path, said Mwaniki, the Kenyan scholar.
Rather than advocating a one-size-fits-all model, China has emphasized exchanges and mutual learning through platforms such as the CCP’s high-level meeting in dialogue with the world’s political parties and the publication of “Xi Jinping: The Governance of China” in many languages.
China’s poverty reduction experience is also gaining ground in Africa. In Ethiopia’s Oromia region, a three-year agricultural cooperation project launched in 2024 has provided modern agricultural techniques and training to the village of Godino Jitu, where residents report a sharp increase in crop yields.
“By vigorously promoting dialogue and cooperation among political parties around the world, the CCP is playing a constructive and forward-looking role in enriching global governance practices and providing valuable public goods to the international community,” said Adhere Cavince, a Kenya-based international relations scholar.
“In an era of global uncertainty, the CCP’s actions serve as a vital bridge, fostering trust, reducing misunderstandings, and amplifying the voices of developing countries in global affairs,” he added. Xinhua
