The Chinese Communist Party celebrates its centenary in July, a milestone that Beijing celebrates with a crescendo of fireworks, plays and a fervent campaign to honor its revolutionary past.

The party has often wavered between tragedy and triumph between its birth as an underground movement and its current dominance over the world’s most populous nation. He took power in 1949 and his first decades in government were tumultuous, with Mao Zedong launching sweeping purges and a disastrous industrial program that led to one of the deadliest famines in history.

Mao’s death in 1976 precipitated political and economic changes under Deng Xiaoping that would transform an impoverished nation into a global economic power.

Xi Jinping, who took power in late 2012, has presented himself as a visionary statesman on par with Mao and Deng. As the party nears its Soviet counterpart’s record 74 years in power, Xi renews his pledges to ensure the rejuvenation of China ahead of the Communist regime’s centenary in 2049. Here is a brief overview of the party’s past and its plans for the future.

When was the Communist Party founded?

The history of the parties traces the formation of the first communist organizations in China to 1920, when Marxist activists from all over the country formed local groups in their own towns. Just over a dozen representatives of these groups gathered in a brick house in the French concession in Shanghai on July 23, 1921, to convene the founding congress of the Chinese Communist Party.