China's politics: a constitution that names the party in its first article

What the constitution says the party is

The constitution in force is the fourth. The first, of 20 September 1954, replaced the Common Program, an interim document drawn up by the Political Consultative Conference; the second, of 1975, cut the text to about 30 articles of party slogans, reduced the courts and abolished the presidency; the third, of 1978, still carried the language of the Cultural Revolution. The present one was adopted on 4 December 1982 and has been amended five times, most recently in 2018. Its first article defines the People's Republic as "a socialist state under the people's democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants", and adds that the leadership of the Communist Party of China is "the defining feature of socialism with Chinese characteristics". Sabotage of the socialist system by any organisation or individual is prohibited.

Article 2 says that all power belongs to the people and that they exercise it through the National People's Congress and the local people's congresses. Article 3 says the state organs apply democratic centralism. The party's own constitution goes further: it calls the party the highest force for political leadership, and states that "government, the military, society and schools, north, south, east and west, the party leads them all".

That arrangement is built into the institutions. Every government department, state-owned enterprise and public institution has a party committee, from the village level to the national one, and those committees supervise and lead the bodies they sit in. The State Council is legally required to implement party policy. Senior officials are appointed by the party and are mostly party members, and the selection and promotion of personnel is the party's most important function.

During the 1980s officials around Zhao Ziyang proposed separating party and state, removing party committees from some government departments and letting professional managers run state enterprises. The proposals were dropped after the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Since 2018 the movement has gone the other way, with several party and state bodies merged under what the system calls "one institution with two names".

Policy is often made from the bottom up before it is written down. Party documents tend to be short statements of principle framed as proposals or opinions, and the state documents that follow add the detail. New policies are commonly piloted in one locality and spread if they work, a method that dates from the Mao era; since 2012 the party has called its practice of setting priorities from the centre top-level design.

How the party is organised

The Communist Party was founded in July 1921 and has governed since 1949. It reported 101.29 million members at the end of 2025, a net increase of 1.01 million over the year. Its supreme body on paper is the National Congress, which meets every five years and elects the Central Committee and the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.

The Central Committee elects the Political Bureau and, above it, the Politburo Standing Committee, which takes decisions when the full Politburo is not sitting. The Standing Committee has historically had between five and nine members and had seven as of 2024. Its members are ranked in a strict protocol order. Since the 1990s they have included the general secretary, the premier, the chairman of the National People's Congress Standing Committee, the chairman of the People's Political Consultative Conference and the head of the discipline commission.

The general secretary is the country's leading official and has no term limit. Since 1989 that post and the chairmanship of the Central Military Commission have usually been held by one person, and since 1993 the state presidency has been held by the same person by convention.

Eight smaller parties, officially called democratic parties, also sit in the legislature. They must accept the party's primacy to exist and their members are vetted by the party's United Front Work Department; none is in opposition.

What the National People's Congress does

The Congress had 2,977 members in 2023. It meets once a year, in the spring, for 10 to 14 days in the Great Hall of the People on the west side of Tiananmen Square, at the same time as the National Committee of the People's Political Consultative Conference, a consultative body; together the two meetings are called the Two Sessions. Between sessions its Standing Committee legislates, interprets the constitution and conducts constitutional review.

Deputies are elected in tiers. Voters elect county-level congresses directly; county congresses elect the provincial ones, and provincial congresses elect the national one, with party committees at each level playing a large part in selecting candidates. Article 59 entitles every minority nationality to appropriate representation.

The Congress has a reputation for approving what the State Council sends it, and most initiatives reach its Standing Committee after the Politburo Standing Committee has endorsed them. It has occasionally resisted: the State Council and the party could not pass a fuel tax for expressway construction in 2009, and property tax proposals pursued by the finance ministry since the early 2010s have not reached the legislative agenda.

Who holds the offices of state

The president represents the state abroad and promulgates laws in pursuance of the Congress's decisions, but the office has limited powers of its own. It was created in 1954, left vacant after Liu Shaoqi's fall in the Cultural Revolution, abolished in 1975 and restored in 1982. Article 79 sets the president's term as the same as a Congress deputy's, and the two-term limit was removed in March 2018.

The State Council, also called the Central People's Government, runs the ministries. It consists of the premier, vice premiers, state councillors, a secretary-general and the ministers. The courts are supervised by the Supreme People's Court and the prosecutors by the Supreme People's Procuratorate, both answerable to the Congress, and all courts and their staff are under the effective control of the party's Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission. There is no judicial independence and no judicial review. A National Supervisory Commission was created in 2018 to investigate corruption in the party and the state.

The People's Liberation Army was created by the party and became the state's army after 1949. The Central Military Commission commands it, and its chairman is the party's general secretary, which is the principle summed up in Mao's maxim that "the Party commands the gun".

How the country is divided

Article 30 divides the country into provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the central government, and these into prefectures, counties and townships. Britannica counts 33 units at the top level: 22 provinces, 5 autonomous regions, 4 municipalities (Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Chongqing) and 2 special administrative regions. The government also counts Taiwan as a province.

Article 4 provides for regional autonomy where minority nationalities live in compact communities, and declares every autonomous area an inalienable part of the People's Republic. Xinjiang became the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region on 1 October 1955, a year after the party set up the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps to settle soldiers on the border with the Soviet Union. The Tibet Autonomous Region was established in 1965 and covers about half of cultural Tibet; the rest lies in Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan.

Article 31 allows the state to establish special administrative regions with systems set by law. Hong Kong and Macau are governed under the principle of "one country, two systems", with their own courts: Hong Kong's follow the British common-law tradition and Macau's the Portuguese civil-law tradition.

Citizenship follows the same unitary logic. Nationality passes at birth to a child with at least one Chinese parent, naturalisation is difficult, and a Chinese national who acquires a foreign nationality automatically loses Chinese nationality; state functionaries and serving soldiers may not renounce it.

Local governments have wide economic authority under central supervision. After the fiscal reform of 1994 they came to depend on revenue from land development and use fees, and since 2015 they have been allowed to issue bonds, in amounts the central government sets, for capital spending.

Where the state's claims are disputed

The government's position on Taiwan, set out in a white paper of 10 August 2022, is that the People's Republic replaced the Republic of China in 1949 as the only legitimate government of the whole country, that Taiwan is part of China and "has never been a state", and that it will not renounce the use of force. The Mainland Affairs Council in Taipei states that the Republic of China is a sovereign state, that Taiwan has never been part of the People's Republic, and that the island's 23 million people have the right to choose their own future. The Republic of China ended martial law in 1987 and has since held its own elections. The People's Republic makes acknowledgement of its claim, and the severing of official ties with Taipei, a condition of diplomatic relations.

In Tibet the People's Liberation Army defeated the Tibetan army near Chamdo in 1950, and Tibetan representatives signed the Seventeen Point Agreement affirming the central government's sovereignty in 1951. The 14th Dalai Lama ratified the agreement in October 1951. An uprising in Lhasa on 10 March 1959 failed, and the date is still marked each year as Tibetan Uprising Day. The government opposes foreign governments meeting the 14th Dalai Lama in a political capacity, describing him as the spokesman of a separatist movement.

In Xinjiang the UN human rights office concluded on 31 August 2022 that serious human rights violations had been committed under the government's counter-terrorism and counter-extremism policies, that detention in so-called vocational education and training centres was arbitrary on a large scale at least between 2017 and 2019, and that it may constitute crimes against humanity. The government denies committing human rights violations in Xinjiang. This catalogue records the positions and the findings and adjudicates neither.

Who China stands with

China was represented at the founding of the United Nations in 1945 by the Republic of China. The People's Republic took that seat on 26 October 1971 under Resolution 2758, and with it permanent membership of the Security Council. China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. It is a founding member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation with Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and it proposed the East Asia Summit, first held in 2005.

Most of its land borders have been settled, though territorial disputes led to wars with India in 1962, with the Soviet Union in 1969 and with Vietnam in 1979. China and Russia signed a Treaty of Good-Neighbourliness and Friendly Cooperation in 2001. Disputes remain over islands in the East and South China Seas and over the borders with India, Bhutan and North Korea.

The Belt and Road Initiative, launched in 2013, has the stated aim of expanding land infrastructure and maritime routes between China and Asia, Africa and Europe.