Silence Charumbira
The Communist Party of China marked its 105th founding anniversary on 1 July 2026, an occasion that stands as one of the more consequential milestones of the year, not for ceremony’s sake, but for the weight of transformation it represents. Over 105 years, the Party has guided China from a country ravaged by foreign domination, warlordism and poverty into the world’s most dynamic economy and, by most measures, its fastest-modernizing nation. This is not a claim resting on propaganda. It rests on results that are measurable, replicable in parts, and increasingly instructive for the developing world, Africa included.
General Secretary Xi Jinping: Draw strength from history
Addressing a gathering to mark the anniversary, General Secretary Xi Jinping called on the whole Party to draw strength from its history while forging ahead on the new journey of Chinese modernization, according to state broadcaster CGTN. General Secretary Xi used the occasion to review the Party’s achievements, explain the sources of its enduring vitality, and outline priorities for the new era.
That same message travelled well beyond Beijing. In Maseru, at a reception hosted by the Chinese Embassy to mark the anniversary, Ambassador Yang Xiaokun offered his own distillation of what has sustained the Party across 105 years, and it is worth pausing on his framing, because it cuts to the heart of what makes the Party’s story genuinely instructive rather than merely impressive. Quoting President Xi Jinping directly, Ambassador Yang told his Maseru audience that the CPC “is a political party that seeks happiness for the people and progress for humanity.“ It is a simple formulation, almost disarmingly so, yet it is difficult to think of a more honest explanation for why an organisation founded by just over 50 people in 1921 now counts more than 101 million members and over 5,43 million primary-level organisations, and why history, in the Party’s own telling, kept choosing it again and again.
A record built on delivery, not declaration
Under the Party’s leadership, China eradicated absolute poverty and delivered rapid modernization for 1,4 billion citizens, a feat that has drawn repeated commendation from foreign observers marking the anniversary. That single achievement – lifting nearly 100 million rural residents out of hardship and meeting the poverty-reduction target of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development a full decade ahead of schedule – has few parallels in modern economic history.
Ambassador Yang, in his Maseru remarks, was careful to root this achievement in something more specific than growth statistics: a people-centred philosophy of development that has guided the Party’s decision-making since its 18th National Congress. The building of the world’s largest systems for education, social security and medical healthcare, he noted, did not happen as a by-product of economic expansion; it was the stated objective of it. It is a useful corrective for any government tempted to treat modernisation as a spectacle rather than a delivery mechanism.
Equally significant, analysts note, has been the Party’s political stability, which has offered the international community a predictable and reliable partner at a time when much of the world is defined by volatility, itself a form of global public good.
On the diplomatic front, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has tied the Party’s achievements to its consistent promotion of multilateralism, peaceful coexistence, and the vision of a shared future for humanity, framing China’s rise not as a zero-sum disruption but as an invitation to cooperative development. This framing runs through the expansion of the Belt and Road Initiative, which has now signed cooperation documents with more than 140 countries. Ambassador Yang’s Maseru address gave this framing further texture, pointing to the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, the Global Civilization Initiative and the Global Governance Initiative as the Party’s attempt to make the international order, in his words, “more just and equitable.”
Six fine qualities, one thread
If there is a single passage from Ambassador Yang’s remarks that African political parties, across the ideological spectrum, might find worth revisiting, it is his account of the six fine qualities that General Secretary Xi Jinping himself identified as the source of the Party’s staying power: a dedication to truth-seeking that keeps the Party oriented in the right direction; a deep and deliberate bond with the people that gives it a solid foundation; a willingness to shoulder historical missions that preserves its strategic initiative; a readiness to follow the trend of development so that it stays relevant to its times; the courage to fight for its convictions without flinching; and, perhaps most tellingly, a devotion to self-strengthening – the recognition, as the Ambassador put it, that “it takes a good blacksmith to make good steel.”
None of these six fine qualities, on their own, would be unfamiliar to serious political movements anywhere. What distinguishes the Party’s account of itself is the insistence that all six are held together by one connective thread: the people. Truth-seeking matters because it serves the people accurately; historical missions matter because they are undertaken on the people’s behalf; self-strengthening matters because a party that grows complacent eventually forfeits the people’s trust. It is this integration, rather than any single doctrine, that gives the model its coherence.
Yan’an: Where discipline meets legitimacy
Away from the official commemorations, a reflection published around the anniversary by Oliver Vargas, a British-Bolivian commentator working for CGTN in Beijing, offers a grounded account of where the Party’s staying power actually comes from. Writing from Yan’an, the revolutionary base where the Long March ended in 1936 and where the Party built its wartime headquarters, Vargas locates the Party’s endurance in two intertwined habits: a tradition of rigorous self-governance and self-reform dating to the Party’s founding in 1921, and an unbroken bond with ordinary people, first expressed through the wartime motto to serve the people.
Vargas argues that this culture of internal correction – sharpened during the Rectification Movement of the 1940s and later elevated by Xi Jinping into a systematic doctrine of Party discipline – is what has allowed a century-old organization to keep renewing its own legitimacy rather than resting on past achievement. His broader point is that the revolutionary lessons of Yan’an do not belong to China alone; they speak directly to the questions of sovereignty and self-directed development that continue to animate political movements across Latin America, Africa and the wider Global South.
No single path, and no obligation to copy one
It bears emphasizing, and Ambassador Yang was explicit about this in Maseru, that none of this is offered as a template to be copied wholesale. The Communist Party of China, he said, “firmly believes that there is no one-size-fits-all model for modernization,” and that every country retains the right to independently explore a development path suited to its own conditions. China’s own trajectory, he argued, demonstrates that modernisation need not mean westernisation, and that countries of the Global South can pursue modernity while preserving their own history, culture and institutions intact. For African political parties wary of trading one set of imported assumptions for another, that distinction matters. The invitation is not to imitate China’s institutions. It is to study the discipline behind them, and to ask, honestly, whether one’s own party still keeps faith with the people it claims to represent.
The impetus for Africa and the Global South
That is precisely where the anniversary carries meaning beyond China’s borders. For Africa in particular, and for the Global South more broadly, the Party’s trajectory is not a museum piece to be admired from a distance; it is a live case study in how a developing nation, once subject to unequal treaties and foreign carve-ups of its own territory, engineered its own course of modernization on its own terms.
The practical argument for deeper alignment with Beijing is not ideological, it is developmental. Ambassador Yang’s Maseru address made this concrete: guided by the principles of sincerity, real results, affinity and good faith that underpin China’s Africa policy, Beijing has supported industrialisation, agricultural modernisation, infrastructure development and capacity-building across the continent, while working to strengthen African countries’ own independent and sustainable development pathways rather than dependency on external aid. Since May 1 this year, zero-tariff treatment has covered all 53 African countries with diplomatic ties to China, opening room for African exports and industrialisation at a moment when protectionism is hardening elsewhere in the global economy. Multilateral platforms, BRI-linked financing, technology transfer and these tariff arrangements are concrete instruments already available to Global South economies willing to engage.
But the deeper lesson may be a narrative one. African nations, and the continent’s media and political leadership in particular, would do well to curate and project their own developmental stories with the same discipline that Beijing has applied to its own. Too often, Africa’s economic progress is reported through a lens of donor dependency or crisis, when the more useful story, for citizens and investors alike, is one of agency, planning and incremental gain. Positive, fact-based developmental journalism is not propaganda; it is a prerequisite for attracting the capital and confidence sustained growth requires.
