From its founding in July 1921, the 100-year history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been awash with blood and violence as it fought to take, and later keep control of what has now become one of the world’s great superpowers.
Tens of millions of people are believed to have been killed in China over the last 100 years since the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, with its founding leader Mao Zedong responsible for the majority of them as he wrestled for control of the country until his death in 1976.
The CCP now counts around 95 million members, garnered over a century of war, famine and turmoil, and more recently a surge to superpower status.
But in its 100th year, the party has delivered a selective version of history through films, 'Red' tourism campaigns and books, which dance over the mass violence of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese Land Reform, famines and the Tiananmen Square student crackdown.
1927 – CCP expelled from the Nationalist Party, civil war ensues
Mao Zedong (pictured) declared founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, at the end of the Chinese Civil War
Three years after joining, the CCP was expelled from the then-ruling Nationalist Party. The Nationalist government then killed thousands of CCP members in Shanghai, triggering a civil war that would last until 1949.
The war is generally seen as being divided into two phases, with the hostilities put on hold as the two groups formed the Second United Front to fight back the Japanese invasion of China.
While Japan invaded in 1931 and under its brutal occupation of China that included the Nanjing Massacre (also known as the Rape of Nanjing), the hostilities were paused from 1937 to 1945.
Following the defeat of Japan, the civil war resumed, and the CCP gained the upper hand from 1945 to 1949 in what is now referred to as the Chinese Communist Revolution.
The CCP gained control of mainland China and established the People’s Republic of China in 1949, forcing the leaders of the Republic of China to retreat to the Island of Taiwan.
A political and military standoff between Taiwan and China remains to this day, with China increasingly threatening to forcibly take Taiwan.
During the second phase alone (1945 to 1949), estimates by historians have put the death toll at around 2.5 million. The death toll for the whole of the Chinese Civil War is estimated to be around six million.
1949: Chinese Land Reform
In the latter stages of the Civil War and in the early stages of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong embarked on a campaign known as the Chinese Land Reform Movement.
The campaign involved the mass killings of landlords by tenants, and a redistribution of land to the peasantry. Estimates of how many people were killed during the campaign range from the hundreds of thousands to the multiples of millions.
The CCP’s evaluation by Zhou Enlai estimates that 830,000 people were killed, but Mao Zedong estimated it was as many as 2 to 3 million.
Class-motivated mass killings continued for almost the 30 years of social and economic transformation in Maoist China, and by the end of the campaign, the landlord class was all but eradicated.
Pictured: An Execution after a 'people's tribunal' in the land reform movement in Communist China Huang, likely a landowner who paid for his 'crime' by being shot, taken in January 1953
1950: Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries
In another campaign, the People’s Republic of China launched its 'Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries', designed to eradicate opposition elements to the Republic and the CCP.
It began in March 1950 and ended in 1953, and was established in response to frequent rebellions that in the early years of the People’s Republic of China.
The people targeted in the campaign were labelled as ‘counterrevolutionaries’ and were publicly denounced in mass trials, and a significant number were arrested and executed, while many more were sentenced to labour reform.
Official estimates from the CCP in 1954 suggest as many as 2.6 million people were arrested, 1.3 million imprisoned, and 712,000 were executed. However, historians have suggested the death toll to be much higher than the official count.
1950-53: China fights US-led UN forces in the Korean war
After coming to power, the newly declared People’s Republic of China - a Marxist–Leninist single-party state controlled by the CCP - and its founding leader Mao were soon drawn into another conflict, this time in the form of the Korean War.
With the war having broken out on June
