Imagine what it’s like to effectively organise and develop a political party with over 65 million (65m) members – that’s bigger than the total populations of many of the world’s most developed countries such as the UK (65m), France (64m), and Australia (24m).

Then imagine that, if the Communist Party of China (CPC) was a country, its population would rank as the 21st biggest in the world. In addition to developing and organising its 65m party members, it had to embed them among a population of 1.38bn people so that the party could lead and guide the world’s biggest population to develop from economic backwardness after years of war and destruction to become the 2nd largest economy in the world within nine decades.

Now, imagine what it takes to achieve that in terms of structure and organisation and you have a good grasp of the scale of the CPC’s achievement from its founding with just 50 members in 1921 until 2015 with some 65m members.

The Communist Party of China: the Past, Present and Future of Party Building gives a blow-by-blow and chapter-by-chapter account of how the CPC got from where it was in 1921 shortly after the founding of the party to where it is now.