CHINA is well known in recent times for outstanding economic performance. She has become the second largest economy in the world, displacing Japan and is predicted to overtake the United States in 2020 to become the world’s largest economy.

China has also become the largest manufacturing nation in the world, a position America held for more than 150 years before Beijing recently overtook her.

Her economy has grown faster than any other country in the world; maintained an average of 10 per cent of the annual gross domestic product in the past 10 years or more. This growth is not just in economic statistics, but in tangible material term. China has pulled more people out of poverty than any other country in human history.

Of more than 1.3 billion Chinese, only about 20 million are still reckoned to be in poverty. China also attracts the largest foreign direct investment than any country in the world and had the world largest solid and reassuring currency reserve.

Inspite of the traditional ideological disparage of China by western media outlet; Chinese leaders are routinely fêted in Western capital, especially as Beijing mount a rescue mission of Europe ’s toxic debt. As Napoleon Bonaparte predicted nearly two centuries ago, the tide of global leadership has almost completely shifted from the Atlantic to the pacific, with China firmly driving the new paradigm of the millenium shift.

China has been singularly responsible for the dramatic rise in the price of many primary commodities, enabling most countries in the south to maintain basic balance of payment. A China boom has triggered a considerable similar effect on several corners of the world. And above all, China has been the boldest investor, especially in the most critical sectors of the economies of the developing countries.

Yet, China ’s dramatic rise and modernisation is hardly put in the social and political context that triggered and still drives it, especially in most media commentaries and even academic discourse.

However, it is difficult to contemplate, China’s contemporary trajectory without the significant event of 90 years ago when about 12 delegates from inside China, one from Japan and two Russians, representing the communist international(comitern), gathered in the city of Shanghai for the inaugural congress of the Communist Party of China on July 1, 1921.

The party’s main task then, was to provide synergy to the disparate radical tendencies that abound in the country and provide it with organisational coherence and discipline. Mao Ze-dong, the future ebullient leader of the party that would lead it to victory in 1949 was among the delegates at the inaugural congress attending on behalf of his Hunan province and served as the recording secretary of the congress.

The then party lean fortune was evident that it refused to appoint or elect executive committee, hoping to do that in future, when party membership would have risen to about 500. Only a three-man central bureau was selected to carry on party business pending the expansion of party membership in future.

The party’s trajectory encountered several twists and turns, especially after the initial phase of collaboration with the Kuomintong or the Nationalist Party that was led by General Chiang Ka-Shiek. The betrayal of the party by the nationalist, led to a determined decision for independent action, culminating in one of the significant events in the life of the party and by extension the country, the launch of the Nanchang rebellion or revolt in 1927.

The boldness and audacity of the revolt, against even the advice of the then Moscow-controlled communist international (comintern) that has played important role in the founding and direction of the party solidified it as an independent political force in China’s political life, but ultimately gave rise to another significant component of the then emerging and contemporary China; the founding of the Red Army on August 1, 1927, which metamorphosed in the current pillar of China’s national defence, the Peoples Liberation Army, PLA.

Perhaps, no event in the life of the party and in the Red Army is more significant than the “Long March and deserves a robust mentioning. There is no known parallel of similar military feat in the world. A symbol of long years of hardship and a harbinger of future triumph, the long March forms one of the great dividing lines in the history of the Chinese Communist Party.

Even more than the founding of the party in 1921, the break with the Kuomintong in 1927, the rectification movement of 1942-43, the establishment of the Peoples Republic in 1949, the 100 flowers and great leap forward campaigns of 1957-59, or the cultural revolution of the late 1960s, or even the contemporary rise of China and its much-vaunted economic miracle, the long march was the watershed of one of history’s greatest revolutionary movements.

Tens of thousands of Chinese communists did not survive to begin it and tens of thousands more did not complete it. But, of the fewer than 40,000 party and army men who did reach northern Shensi , many went on to become the leaders of the world’s most populous state.

Mr.CHARLES ONUUNAIJU,a journalist and author,wrote from Abuja.