How China is ruled: Communist Party

Communist Party

The Chinese Communist Party's more than 80m-strong membership makes it the biggest political party in the world. Its tight organisation and ruthlessness help explain why it is also still in power.

The party oversees and influences many aspects of people's lives - what they learn at school and watch on TV, even the number of children they are allowed.
It is made up largely of government officials, army officers, farmers, model workers and employees of state-owned companies.
It is unrepresentative of China as a whole. Only a quarter of its members are women, for example. It is also obsessive about control, regularly showing itself capable of great brutality in suppressing dissent or any challenge to its authority.

The party is still the guiding hand

Joining the party brings significant privileges. Members get access to better information, and many jobs are only open to members. Most significantly in China, where personal relationships are often more important than ability, members get to network with decision-makers influencing their careers, lives or businesses.
Pyramid structure To join, applicants need the backing of existing members and to undergo exhaustive checks and examination by their local party branch. They then face a year's probation, again involving assessments and training.
The party has a pyramid structure resting on millions of local-level party organisations across the country and reaching all the way up to the highest decision-making bodies in Beijing.
In theory, the top of the pyramid is the National Party Congress, which is convened once every five years and brings together more than 2,000 delegates from party organisations across the country.
The congress' main function is to "elect" a central committee of about 200 full members and 150 lower-ranking or "alternate" members", though in fact almost all of these people are approved in advance.
In turn, the central committee's main job is to elect a new politburo and its smaller, standing committee, where real decision-making powers lie.

Europe's oldest prehistoric town unearthed in Bulgaria

The prehistoric town at Provadia features two-storey houses and a defensive wall

Archaeologists in Bulgaria say that have uncovered the oldest prehistoric town found to date in Europe.

The walled fortified settlement, near the modern town of Provadia, is thought to have been an important centre for salt production.
Its discovery in north-east Bulgaria may explain the huge gold hoard found nearby 40 years ago.
Archaeologists believe that the town was home to some 350 people and dates back to between 4700 and 4200 BC.
That is about 1,500 years before the start of ancient Greek civilisation.
The residents boiled water from a local spring and used it to create salt bricks, which were traded and used to preserve meat.
Salt was a hugely valuable commodity at the time, which experts say could help to explain the huge defensive stone walls which ringed the town.
'Extremely interesting' Excavations at the site, beginning in 2005, have also uncovered the remains of two-storey houses, a series of pits used for rituals, as well as parts of a gate and bastion structures.
A small necropolis, or burial ground, was discovered at the site earlier this year and is still being studied by archaeologists.
"We are not talking about a town like the Greek city-states, ancient Rome or medieval settlements, but about what archaeologists agree constituted a town in the fifth millennium BC," Vasil Nikolov, a researcher with Bulgaria's National Institute of Archaeology, told the AFP news agency.
Archaeologist Krum Bachvarov from the institute said the latest find was "extremely interesting".
"The huge walls around the settlement, which were built very tall and with stone blocks... are also something unseen in excavations of prehistoric sites in south-east Europe so far," he told AFP.
Similar salt mines near Tuzla in Bosnia and Turda in Romania help prove the existence of a series of civilisations which also mined copper and gold in the Carpathian and Balkan mountains during the same period.
BBC Europe correspondent Nick Thorpe says this latest discovery almost certainly explains the treasure found exactly 40 years ago at a cemetery on the outskirts of Varna, 35km (21 miles) away, the oldest hoard of gold objects found anywhere in the world.