Come July 1, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will be completing 100 years. Started in Shanghai in 1921, the party had grown all-powerful under Mao Tse Tung in the initial two decades and again under President Xi Jinping in the past decade. One great achievement of the CCP in the past hundred years was that it has built a society of Han nationalists by constantly harping on a kind of history that kept the Han Chinese at the centre. Till Mao was alive, his was the last word in the party and the government. When he became ill in his final years, he resorted to ‘control through slips’, sending dictates through his relatives and confidants in the form of small notes. Deng Xiaoping, who succeeded Mao, tried to separate the party and the state in an effort to build a modern Chinese state. But as the Deng era declined, the fortunes of the CCP rose again dramatically.