ABSTRACT
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) remains one of the most difficult political forces in the modern world to categorize and understand. With 80 million members, it is the world’s largest political party; however, it shares very few characteristics with political parties in liberal democracies, and trying to see it simply as a political party along the same lines as those creates immediate conceptual problems. One of these is trying to define how the CCP relates to other forces of government within the People’s Republic of China, and with other constituent elements in Chinese society. This is not helped by the fact that the CCP is intrinsically secretive so that even its budget, and much of its inner decision-making processes, is poorly understood. This uniqueness has prompted some commentators to say that the CCP has more in common with a multinational business than a political party (McGregor 2010).
