In July and August of 1921 a group of young men met in Shanghai to found the Chinese Communist Party. They undoubtedly had great dreams, but even so they might have found it hard to believe that they were initiating the largest revolutionary movement of the 20th century, and that their party would thirty years later rule China.  Certainly they would have scoffed at the idea that, one hundred years after their meeting, their party’s far from doctrinaire Marxist reforms would have not only led to unprecedent economic growth, but to China becoming one of the two great world superpowers.

With me to discuss the history of the Chinese Communist Party is Anthony Saich, the director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, and Daewoo Professor of International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School. He is author most recently of From Rebel to Ruler: One Hundred Years of the Chinese Communist Party. It is not a book about Mao, Deng Xiaoping, Xi Jinping, or any one personality. Nor is it about the Chinese Civil War, or the Great Leap Forward, the Culture Revolution, the economic transformation of the late 20th century, or any one event. It is instead about all those things, as reflected in the one-hundred year life of what is arguably the most powerful and masterful institution anywhere in the world, which has achieved that mastery by being highly adaptable.