Central Party School

History

The school was established as the CCP Central Committee's Marx School of Communism () in Ruijin, Jiangxi, in 1933. It ceased operations when the Chinese Red Army left on the Long March and was revived once the CCP leadership had arrived and settled in Shaanxi, northwest China, in the winter of 1936. It was then renamed the Central Party School. The school was suspended in 1947 when the CCP retreated from Yan'an. It was re-opened in 1948 in a village in Pingshan County, Hebei, before being moved to Beijing after the CCP captured the city in 1949.

In 1955, the school was re-organized so that it came directly under the jurisdiction of the CCP Central Committee. The school was abolished in 1966 during the Cultural Revolution, before being restored in March 1977.

In 2008, a group of researchers at the school issued a blueprint for political reform, including freedom of the press. In November 2013, Liu Yunshan announced that the Central Party School would begin a training program on "General Secretary Xi Jinping's series of important remarks." Within a year, 2,300 cadres had completed the program. The program was part of the effort to begin formalizing Xi Jinping Thought.

The National Academy of Governance was merged into the Central Party School in March 2018 as part of the deepening the reform of the Party and state institutions. The name of the academy was retained by the Central Party School as a one institution with two names arrangement.

The Central Party School provided US$40 million to build and operate the Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Leadership School, which opened in February 2022 in Tanzania. The school was jointly established with the support of the six ruling parties of Tanzania, South Africa, Mozambique, Angola, Namibia, and Zimbabwe.

Functions

The Central Party School is responsible for training the cadres of the CCP. It is the highest party school among a network of approximately 2,700 party schools. It provides training courses in CCP ideology, governance, and social sciences, and also provides master's and doctoral degrees in the humanities and social sciences. It trains leading cadres at the provincial-ministerial level, department-bureau level, young and middle-aged cadres and ethnic minority cadres, leaders of top state-owned enterprises and centrally managed universities, CCP county secretaries, civil servants from Hong Kong and Macau, and to cadres who specialize in ideology, propaganda and education.

The Party School holds seminars on ideological and political issues, and also employs professors which provide research and consulting services to the central CCP leadership. It also leads and guides the operations, staff and basic text material of the Party Schools at the provincial and county level. The Central Party School publishes the Study Times, which provides an explanation of the relationships between the CCP Central Committee's directives and the underlying political theory and ideology.

Organization

The president of the school heads the Central Party School. From 1989 to 2017, the school was headed by the top-ranked member of the Secretariat, who is concurrently a member of the Politburo Standing Committee. The day-to-day affairs of the school are in practice managed by the executive vice president, who is generally regarded to have the same ranking as a cabinet minister.

Presidents

References

References

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7. Allen-Ebrahimian, Bethany. (August 20, 2023). "In Tanzania, Beijing is running a training school for authoritarianism". [[Axios (website).
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