On Thursday, the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) will commemorate its centennial. But even before its 100th anniversary, the CPC has already been recognized as the most powerful and long-lived autocracy in history.
Today, as the world’s most populous country deepens its strategic competition with the United States, its authoritarianism is growing ever stronger domestically, with its foreign policy growing increasingly assertive and aggressive.
The crux of the Communist Party and China's challenge for Japan and other countries is that over the past hundred years the CPC has created the richest, freest and the most powerful China that the country has experienced in its long history. Internally — and despite its many shortcomings — its citizens support the Party.