Proclamation of the People's Republic of China in the context of "Republic of China (1912–1949)"

The Communist Party of China (CPC), commonly known as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is the founding and ruling party of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Founded in 1921, the CCP won the Chinese Civil War against the Kuomintang and proclaimed the establishment of the PRC under the chairmanship of Mao Zedong in October 1949. The CCP has since governed China and has had sole control over the country's armed forces and law enforcement. As of 2024, the CCP has more than 100 million members, making it the second largest political party by membership in the world.

In 1921, Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao founded the CCP with the help of the Far Eastern Bureau of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and Far Eastern Bureau of the Communist International. Although the CCP aligned with the Kuomintang (KMT) during its initial years, the rise of the KMT's right-wing under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek and subsequent massacres of tens of thousands of CCP members resulted in a split and a prolonged civil war between the CCP and KMT. During the next ten years of guerrilla warfare, Mao Zedong rose to become the most influential figure in the CCP and the party established a strong base among the rural peasantry with its land reform policies. Support for the CCP continued to grow throughout the Second Sino-Japanese War. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, the CCP emerged triumphant in the communist revolution against the Nationalist government. The CCP established the People's Republic of China on 1 October 1949 and the remnants of the Nationalist government retreated to Taiwan shortly after.

Following their defeat in the Chinese Civil War, the remnants of the Nationalist government of the Republic of China (ROC), alongside many refugees, retreated to the island of Taiwan (Formosa) beginning on December 7, 1949. The exodus is sometimes called the Great Retreat (Chinese: 大撤退) in Taiwan. The Nationalist Kuomintang party (KMT), its officers, and approximately 2 million ROC troops took part in the retreat, in addition to many civilians and refugees, fleeing the advance of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The CCP, who now effectively controlled most of mainland China, spent the subsequent years purging any remnant Nationalist agents in western and southern China, solidifying the rule of the newly established People's Republic of China (PRC).

ROC troops mostly fled to Taiwan from provinces in southern China, in particular Sichuan Province, where the last stand of the ROC's main army took place. The flight to Taiwan took place over four months after Mao Zedong had proclaimed the founding of the PRC in Beijing on October 1, 1949. The island of Taiwan remained part of Japan during the occupation until Japan severed its territorial claims in the Treaty of San Francisco, which came into effect in 1952. In addition, some of the ROC troops in Yunnan also fled to Burma, where the insurgency lasted until 1961.

Xi Jinping (born 15 June 1953) is a Chinese politician who has been the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), and thus the paramount leader of China, since 2012. Since 2013, Xi has also served as the president of China. As a member of the fifth generation of Chinese leadership, Xi is the first CCP general secretary born after the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC).

The son of Chinese communist veteran Xi Zhongxun, Xi was exiled to rural Liangjiahe Village, Yanchuan County, Shaanxi Province, as a teenager following his father's purge during the Cultural Revolution. He lived in a yaodong in the village of Liangjiahe, where he joined the CCP after several failed attempts and worked as the local party secretary. After studying chemical engineering at Tsinghua University as a worker-peasant-soldier student, Xi rose through the ranks politically in China's coastal provinces. Xi was governor of Fujian from 1999 to 2002, before becoming governor and party secretary of neighboring Zhejiang from 2002 to 2007. Following the dismissal of the party secretary of Shanghai, Chen Liangyu, Xi was transferred to replace him for a brief period in 2007. He subsequently joined the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) of the CCP the same year and was the first-ranking member of the Central Secretariat in October 2007. In 2008, he was designated as Hu Jintao's presumed successor as paramount leader. Towards this end, Xi was appointed the vice president and vice chairman of the CMC. He officially received the title of leadership core from the CCP in 2016.

The handover of Macau from the Portuguese Republic to the People's Republic of China (PRC) officially occurred at midnight on 20 December 1999. This event ended 442 years of Portuguese rule in the former settlement, which began in 1557. Macau was settled by Portuguese merchants that year during the Ming dynasty era and was subsequently under various degrees of Portuguese rule until 1999. Portugal's involvement in the region was formally recognised by the Qing dynasty in 1749. The Portuguese governor João Maria Ferreira do Amaral, emboldened by British actions in the First Opium War and the Treaty of Nanking, attempted to annex the territory by expelling Qing authorities in 1846, but was assassinated in 1849. After the Second Opium War, the Portuguese government, along with a British representative, signed the 1887 Sino-Portuguese Treaty of Peking that gave Portugal perpetual colonial rights to Macau on the condition that Portugal would cooperate in efforts to end the smuggling of opium.

After the Proclamation of the People's Republic of China in 1949 and the transfer of China's seat from the Republic of China (ROC) to the PRC at the United Nations (UN) in 1971, then Chinese foreign Minister Huang Hua appealed to the UN Special Committee on Decolonization to remove Macau and Hong Kong from its list of colonies, preferring to engage in direct bilateral negotiations in getting the territories returned rather than the independence of the territories as was implied by its inclusion on the list.

Mao Zedong (26 December 1893 – 9 September 1976) was a Chinese politician, communist revolutionary, and political theorist who founded the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 and led the country from its establishment until his death in 1976. Mao served as chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from 1943 until his death, and as the party's de facto leader from 1935. His theories, which he advocated as a Chinese adaptation of Marxism–Leninism, are known as Maoism.

Born to a peasant family in Shaoshan, Hunan, Mao studied in Changsha and was influenced by the 1911 Revolution and ideas of Chinese nationalism and anti-imperialism. He was introduced to Marxism while working as a librarian at Peking University, and later participated in the May Fourth Movement of 1919. In 1921, Mao became a founding member of the CCP. After the start of the Chinese Civil War between the Kuomintang (KMT) and CCP, Mao led the failed Autumn Harvest Uprising in Hunan in 1927, and in 1931 founded the Jiangxi Soviet. He helped build the Chinese Red Army, and developed a strategy of guerilla warfare. In 1935, Mao became leader of the CCP during the Long March, a military retreat to the Yan'an Soviet in Shaanxi, where the party began rebuilding its forces. The CCP allied with the KMT in the Second United Front at the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, but the civil war resumed after Japan's surrender in 1945. In 1949, Mao's forces defeated the Nationalist government, which withdrew to Taiwan.

The political status of Taiwan is a longstanding geopolitical subject focusing on the sovereignty of the island of Taiwan and its associated islands. The issue has been in dispute since the alleged retrocession of Taiwan from the Empire of Japan to the Republic of China (ROC) in 1945, and the ROC government’s retreat from mainland China to Taiwan as the result of the Chinese Civil War in 1949. The Taiwan Area since then has become the major territorial base of the ROC. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-led People’s Republic of China (PRC), despite never having control of it, claims Taiwan as an inalienable province. The PRC's claim is based on the theory of state succession, who deems itself as the regime that replaced the pre-1949 ROC, and denies the existing sovereignty of the ROC in Taiwan under its one China principle.

The ROC governed mainland China from 1912 until 1949, when it lost control of the mainland due to its defeat in the Chinese Civil War by the CCP, who established the PRC that same year, while the effective jurisdiction of the ROC has been limited to Taiwan and its associated islands. Prior to this, Japan’s surrender in 1945 ended its colonial rule over Taiwan and the Penghu Islands, which were subsequently placed under the administration of the ROC as agreed by the major Allies of World War II. However, post-war agreements did not clearly define sovereignty over these islands due to the ongoing rivalry between the Kuomintang (KMT) and the CCP. The division led to the emergence of two rival governments on opposite sides of the Taiwan Strait, each claiming to be the sole legitimate authority over both the Chinese mainland and Taiwan. The PRC and historically the ROC both officially adhere to the principle of "one China," but fundamentally disagree on who is entitled to represent it. This has resulted in what is known as the "Two Chinas" scenario, reflecting the unresolved dispute over which government is the legitimate representative of China.