Departures Podcast with Philip Bowring and Hans van de Ven

This July, the Chinese Communist Party celebrated its 100th anniversary, marking a major milestone and underlining some major questions about its future.

No other communist party has lasted this long, and certainly no other ruling authoritarian government has held its grip on power for a similar period of time in the modern era. But that’s not to there was ever inertia. The party’s history has been fraught with difficult decisions, successes, mistakes, and sweeping changes of perspective, ideology, and strategic engagement in the global environment.

To mark this important anniversary, Robert Amsterdam is joined by Hans van de Ven and Philip Bowring, who along with others respectively edited and contributed to the excellent new book, “The Chinese Communist Party: A Century in Ten Lives.”

The book takes a novel approach in presenting this complex history, with each author presenting the story of a single individual for each decade, bringing engaging and colorful personal histories to reflect on the Party’s relentless pursuit of power and extraordinary adaptability through the transformative decades since 1921.