When I reread essays about Chinese politics published during the last few decades, I am often struck by how monumentally misguided their predictions were about the fate of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The internet, it was said, would undermine the party, which was founded in 1921 by a young Mao Zedong and twelve other young and not so young adherents of Marxism-Leninism. Consumerism and an expanding middle class, it was thought, would curtail one-party rule in China. The most recent faulty forecast held that COVID-19 would be the CCP’s Chernobyl.

In a 1991 piece titled ‘After Leninism: The New World Disorder’, Ken Jowitt asserted that the ideology itself simply couldn’t survive. A specialist in Eastern European politics, Jowitt was convinced that a ‘Leninist extinction’ had begun in 1989 and would quickly have the global result of making an entire species, the communist party-run state, a relic. He was not alone in thinking that: with dissidents rising to power from Poland to Prague and the Soviet Union imploding, Leninist parties from Hanoi to Havana seemed to be living on borrowed time. Jowitt described the one in Beijing as ‘drifting toward extinction’, certain China would be completely transformed after the ‘inevitable dying off’ of Deng Xiaoping and the other remaining ‘communist gerontocrats’, who had a special stature derived from their ties to the 1949 Revolution and Mao, who led the CCP until his death in 1976.

Each of these predictions has proved faulty. The party has proved adept at blocking digital communications it dislikes and using new media to serve old autocratic ends, from disseminating propaganda to keeping careful tabs on dissidents. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) may now be a land of megamalls and millionaires, but it is also a place where power is wielded by a tightly disciplined party whose leaders emphasise the evils of imperialism. The party made major mistakes in dealing with COVID-19 early on, but this did not lead to a disaster-related legitimacy crisis. And after Deng died, the CCP lived on.

Many have noted that, within years of Gorbachev becoming the first Soviet leader born after the 1917 Revolution, the Soviet Union was gone. A year from November, a decade will have passed since Xi Jinping, the PRC’s first leader born after 1949, took on his most important post: CCP general secretary. Despite some faulty forecasts about his potential to be China’s Gorbachev, including a January 2013 column in which Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times expressed the conviction that ‘Mao’s body will be hauled out of Tiananmen Square on his watch’, he has in many ways been the opposite kind of leader. Not only has Mao’s body stayed put, but Xi has walked back some of the criticism of the chairman made early in the post-Mao era. There’s been no political reform or breaking up of the empire. Repressive trends have accelerated, and the capital has exerted more control on the edges of its empire, as a vast network of indoctrination camps has been created in Xinjiang, and Hong Kong’s freedoms have been curtailed. Far from fading away, Xi has impressed the Davos World Economic Forum crowd by presenting himself as a forward-facing globalist, while hitting nationalist notes effectively at home. He has been celebrated by the Beijing media in ways no leader has since Mao, someone with whom Xi clearly identifies closely, even if sharing none of the chairman’s love of rowdy mass movements.

This situation brings three questions to mind. Why has one-party rule continued in China so long after so many, though not all, similar systems have changed? Is the CCP currently in as strong and secure a position as it seems? And will the term ‘authoritarian resilience’, which prominent sinologist Andrew Nathan and others have used to refer to the party’s success in adapting to changing circumstances, continue to apply for decades to come?

The fact that the CCP is turning 100 this week makes this is a good time to explore these questions. The actual birthday on 1 July is being marked with great fanfare, but Xi and company have been treating all of 2021 as a time for celebratory rituals and self-promoting publications. They are framing this centenary year as a time for the people in every part of the PRC—even Hong Kong, where centennial stamps have been issued—to reflect on all the extraordinary things the CCP has accomplished and look forward to a second centenary in 2049. The CCP is taking it for granted that it will still be around to hold a hundredth birthday party then for the ‘New China’ founded when the Red Army defeated Nationalist Party forces to win the civil war (1945-49).

When in a backward-focused mode, the official media have been encouraging people to reflect on many past events. One is the legendary Long March of 1934-1935, an arduous trek over thousands of kilometres of treacherous terrain, during which CCP members were pursued by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist soldiers. Others include the explosion of China’s first atomic weapon in the Mao era and of fireworks over Beijing’s Bird’s Nest Stadium at the start of the country’s first Olympics in 2008. Above all, though, due to ongoing efforts to bolster Xi’s stature as a leader, this year’s propaganda focus has been the so-called New Era that began in 2012. Xi’s drives to eradicate corruption, end poverty and get all of the country’s people on the same page ideologically, culturally and linguistically are being hailed as improving the quality of life domestically in remarkable ways, while international policies such as Xi’s trademark Belt and Road Initiative raise China’s global stature to unprecedented heights. Reflecting this emphasis on the recent past, a new edition of A Brief History of the Communist Party of China, a standard textbook, has been issued in which fully a quarter of the pages are devoted to the one-twelfth of the organisation’s hundred-year lifespan during which Xi has been in charge.

This brings to mind additional questions. In striving to understand the party’s present and future, does it make sense to focus, as not just Beijing propagandists but also some foreign scholars and pundits have, on the period since Xi took power? Should we instead, as some other analysts do, move forward from earlier dates: from 1989? from 1949? from 1921? At the end of this essay, I will look at four recently published books. Each is by a specialist writing for general readers who adopts a different starting point. Each also deals differently with the future prospects of the CCP—or lack thereof, as one author, former diplomat Roger Garside, insists that the long-delayed demise of the party will (not just might, mind you) take place by November 2022.

Before getting to the books, I should lay my cards on the table. I believe, for reasons I will explain in the next section, that it is important to begin in the 1920s. I also believe the CCP is eventually bound to lose power some day, as no system lasts forever, but that it is impossible to know if that will happen by 2022 or even by 2049. And in contrast to Kristof and Garside, I feel it best to use the word ‘might’ rather than ‘will’ in all speculating about the CCP.

This is the first of a three-part essay to mark the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party. Next: Why the CCP is the great survivor.

• Tags: China, Free to read, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Notebook