Last week, I visited the shrine of the Chinese Community Party (CCP) in Yan an, Shaanxi Province

It is actually a museum, but I call it a shrine because of its essence to the party that has ruled China since 1949.

After passing through the mountains scarified and lacerated by the elements of weather, this thought of how tactical and brave the CCP leaders were in their Long March (Changzheng) filled my mind.

It was extraordinary tact and bravery that would have propelled them to flee the firepower of the Nationalist Party that was in power and embroiled in war with the opposition to such remote and impossible location.

Yan an is just out of this world. I got there by road from Xian, after five grueling but lovely hours through roads and bridges built in very challenging topography. We meandered in tandem with the loops and bends of the road that is like 55% of bridges and possibly another 10% of tunnels bored through mountains and got to Yan an before nightfall.

While leaving, I saw a clearer picture of the location from the sky seated by the window of the Hainan Air flight. The settlements weave along the curves of the valleys in between the spurs and folds of the mountains.

The terrain makes part of my tale here because of the uniqueness and how daring those people were to get to such place some 81 years ago.

The March of 80,000 CCP soldiers lasted a year through 10,000km and ended in Yan an in 1935, with a paltry 10% of the troops, 8,000 arriving destination alive. A great sacrifice indeed.

Yes, CCP won the one year long march, but today stands in the threshold of a far longer march of 95 years, and the years ahead. Many have died; many sank; many kept afloat. Many lost the fight, many won it. The march and wars in between changed faces, but the march endures for tomorrow. Sure, the party has taken a long road.

Prior to my visiting China, the much I knew was that the country operates a communist system but not the details of it. I know communism like many from the textbooks as my own society never practiced it.

But coming to China and studying the system gave me insight to what communism means in China and how it works.

CCP was founded in 1921, just few years after the first major communist state of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) Bolshevik Revolution took roots. So, China actually became the ideological and political outpost of USSR style of politics.

In the days of the birth of the CCP, opposition in most parts of the world was defined in fisticuffs. So, CCP and the ruling Nationalist Party of China slugged out their political trade in bloodshed. Those were the civil wars of China and when the opposition CCP was routed, it flee to a far and remote location in Yan an to re-strategize, ensconced for 13 years in the deep valleys.

When CCP efforts came to fruition in 1949, it took over the management of China possibly expecting a war of opposition soon after. But that has not happened till date. Today, opposition has taken a different shape, not that of warfare and blood but ideological tantrums and naggings.

To consolidate, maybe after the demise of a despot in USSR, Josef Stalin, who implemented unsparing and intolerant socialism in Russia that was a strong influence on China, CCP took a different route of entrenching development. That gave birth to the first Development Plan of 1953. March this year, as I reported the Two Sessions in Beijing, President Xi Jinping announced the commencement of the 13th five-year Development Plan that culminates in 2020.

No doubt, CCP has been a catalyst in the growth and evolution of China to where it is today. From the bloodshed days to the leadership days later, CCP has been on constant evolution and self reinvention over time.

Being in China now when the CCP celebrates its 95 years, I owe the party some words. I am just a journalist, not Chinese, but Nigerian. I am not a politician, I am not given to so much ideology gimmicks because they are the platitude with which the political elite confuse and convolute the system to get what it wants from the masses. I am just an observer from my profession that gives me the latitude to take on any issue. With the entire world as jurisdiction, I am an interested party in the business of the CCP for a better China and better world. I congratulate the CCP for these long years of struggle and tenacity.

In China, the political system is complex and unique. It is like something not known elsewhere. But most of all, it is workable. Many countries that operate multi-party democracy have an opposition that is never part of the government. In China, there are eight political parties that seem to operate under the same platform.

At the National Peoples Congress (NPC) and the China Peoples Political Consultative Congress (CPPCC) at the Two Sessions, all of them gather in the same auditorium and decide on what the country’s leadership and its policies should be. This also includes the parties that rule in Hong Kong and Taiwan. China prides herself with another complexity known as One Country, Two Systems.

A proof that China operates democracy by its own model and not ruled by the arbitrariness of one man is because the NCP elects the president who operates under the supervision of the electing body. In Britain, the masses don’t elect the Prime Minister. It’s the party that has majority membership in the parliament that forms the government and appoints the PM. In China, the NPC, a representative body of the leaders of the parties plays the role.

That implies that China’s CCP operates a constitutional government with checks and balances.

By CCP system which I call creative, the NPC that elects the president is made of members of the opposition parties and some other interests and certainly with the CCP members in the majority. Even the CPPCC has these other members.

In a lecture by Prof. Lu Keli on the History of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to my class at the Renmin University of China, Beijing, three months ago, he noted that many observers all over the world have started doubting the socialist credentials of the current CCP and dubbing it a capitalist institution already.

Their reason for the conclusion is the constant shift in principle and paradigm of the party as against the rigid socialist, Marxist/Leninist ideology.

The excessive fantasy of a socialist world failed USSR and others. But the CCP found a way out of extinction through creativity of change.

That shift, blend and tilt has created an amalgam that stands midway between capitalism and its extremes in the West and the other extreme of the prism - socialism as practiced by USSR and East Europe countries then.

In China today, all successful citizens in every field are never outcasts in the CCP because they made it big. Instead, those that hit the limelight and highways outside the party or as non-CCP members are adopted and given high ranking places as role models.

From Jack Ma of Alibaba fame to Yao Ming, from Li Na to the richest business moguls of China, all are CCP policymaking team members. At the 2016 Two Sessions I reported, they were all present.

Prof. Lu admitted that the resilience of the CCP ideology of constant change has been its staying power as that keeps it steadily on self-diagnosis and change with the trend of the times. CCP over the years has avoided rigidity of ideas, a smart and creative way of sustaining what USSR that sold the idea to it could not.

Antagonists would sneer that China is not democratic. But China under the CCP is not in anarchy with its system? China under the CCP is not insular or retarded; not threatened by extinction or gasping for breath? Instead, China is as buoyant as the best of democracies and a good and workable system is assessed by the results it produces.

China is called a party state with a flourishing merger between the state and the party. It’s a system where many civil servants, academics, students, artisans, traders, researchers or technocrats are members of the CCP, even many journalists. Another complexity of the CCP is its collectives of leadership. As many other countries have a leader at a time, China in the past takes a team of leaders along per time. It is most interesting to find that while Deng Xiaoping was never the president of China, head of government, general secretary of the Communist Party, he overshadowed others who were in power as the supreme leader of China. That is the CCP model.

At the last week of April, I had an audience with the head of African Affairs in the International Department of the Central Committee of the CCP, Mr. Wang Heming. One of the concerns I raised with him is how communist, ideologically speaking, the party still is.

He admitted that over 40 years, arguments on this issue have been heated among the leadership and membership of the party. But at last it was settled as a matter not weighty enough to rock the boat.

He said even in the day of Mao Zedong, the most compelling objective of the party was to serve the people and attend to their needs and make a better society. Wang’s worry is only about whether the system works. He argues that CCP’s system is good for China, and since the party has been in power since 1949, and moved the country in the direction of progress, it has what it takes to remain relevant.

China has developed its form of communism with Chinese characters. Marxism came into being over 120 years ago in the West, and it’s not possible for the ideology to fit so well into the realities of today’s socio-economic system. Therefore it must need adjustment to be relevant. That is what China has done and to the CCP, the name of the ideology is none issue.

He admitted that the CCP is not a perfect system because it is operated by human beings and no human institution is.

That conclusion is my concern. It is good that the leadership of the party is going tough onthemembers that dent the image of the party.

This has to be sustained if the CCP is to remain relevant to China and the world.

The party should not take light the influence of today’s open world where the ICT has made communication and information dissemination the biggest world issue. No part of the world is any longer isolated, otherwise I would have no reason to write this as a Nigerian journalist. The world watches CCP today more than before. It needs to tap into the benefits of this rave and make itself more open and stronger. It’s tasking to run a party of over 85 million members, managing the largest polity in the world and the second largest economy. But the size of CCP’s jurisdiction is also a benefit it should put to positive use.

My interest is that since the CCP provides the world with a good alternative in political management of societies, it should remain alive and relevant in the years ahead and play its role better in adapting to the changing times for good.

Emewu, senior editor of The Sun Newspaper, Nigeria is a Fellow of the CPDA and of the CAPC, Beijing ([email protected])