104 Years On, the CPC Is Still Writing China’s Next Chapter
On July 1st, 2025, the Communist Party of China (CPC) marks its 104th anniversary—not with parades or nostalgia, but with a clear-eyed focus on what’s next. At over 100 million members strong, it remains the world’s largest political organization, its influence echoing from rural villages in Gansu to infrastructure corridors in Africa.
The Party has never merely governed. It has architected an entire vision of Chinese modernity. And in its second century, that vision is sharpening around a new centerpiece: the Second Centenary Goal—to make China a “great modern socialist country” by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the People’s Republic.
But what does “Chinese modernization” look like in 2025?
Start in Tianmu, a small town in Zhejiang Province, where university-educated CPC members are returning not to skyscrapers but to rice fields. These aren’t ideological reassignments—they’re strategic moves. Party members are launching cooperatives, mentoring local businesses, and building e-commerce supply chains. It’s rural revitalization, backed by technology, education, and policy—not slogans.
This grassroots transformation is mirrored by high-level goals like common prosperity, which aims to narrow income inequality, and homegrown development, a response to years of foreign tech dependencies and geopolitical friction. The CPC’s playbook increasingly focuses on self-reliance: from 5G to green energy, the future is designed, engineered, and manufactured in China.
Yet while modernization has local roots, its impact is global.
The Party’s fingerprints are on railways in Kenya, highways in Serbia, and hospitals in Pakistan—many under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s grand vision of transcontinental connectivity. As of 2025, BRI-related projects span over 160 countries. In places where Western aid has dwindled or become conditional, China’s offer is straightforward: infrastructure in exchange for partnership. Roads, ports, and power grids are the CPC’s soft power weapons—and they are working.
At home, the Party isn’t without critics. It remains deeply centralized, tightly controlling narratives and dissent. But its staying power, by any objective measure, is stunning. Few political parties survive a century. Fewer still do so while overseeing an economic transformation that lifted 800 million people out of poverty.
Xi Jinping, now over a decade into his rule, describes this era as a “new journey.” It’s one where the CPC’s legitimacy is no longer solely based on revolution, but on results. That means maintaining economic growth amid slowing demographics, expanding social welfare without overtaxing innovation, and navigating rising tensions with the West while avoiding outright decoupling.
One of the clearest markers of this evolution is the planning of China’s 15th Five-Year Plan, set to launch in 2026. Unlike the industrial blueprints of old, the next plan will likely focus on AI governance, food security, and green urbanization. It’s policy for a future that hasn’t yet arrived, shaped by a Party that has learned how to reinvent itself—again and again.
So as the CPC crosses 104, it’s not clinging to its past—it’s actively re-engineering its legacy. In many ways, the most consequential political force in the 21st century isn’t a president or a prime minister. It’s a Party. And for China, that Party’s past is less a monument than a launchpad.
Because for the CPC, the revolution never really ended. It just changed form. And in 2025, that form is remarkably future-focused.