China celebrates 90 years of Red (PHOTOS)

How do you celebrate the 90th birthday of the biggest political party in the world?

Why, with a gala of course!

Also patriotic films, celebratory TV shows and lots and lots of red.

A Red party with a checkered past, the Communist Party of China was founded in 1921 in Shanghai by a small group of intellectuals.

Its most famous leader, Mao Zedong, spearheaded the controversial Great Leap forward in 1958. Millions starved, as the Party pushed to increase industrial production. 

And millions more are estimated to have died during the Cultural Revolution, an effort to purify the CPC that began in 1966.

Deng Xiaoping, who succeeded Mao in 1976, introduced market reforms which helped open up the country and turn China into the world's second-largest economy.  

Check out photos of the CPC through the years:

A visitor looks at the portraits of Chinese four generations' leaders, from the left: Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao at an exhibition in Shanghai, June 26, 2003, ahead of the Communist Party's 82nd birthday. Membership of China's ruling Communist Party, the largest political organization in the world, grew to 80.27 million 2010. (Liu Jin/AFP/Getty Images)

Pupils wave Chinese Communist Party (CCP) flags at Yuanqian Primary School on June 30, 2011 in Lianyungang, Jiangsu Province of China. This year's celebrations will mark the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China. (ChinaFotoPress/AFP/Getty)

A retouched picture released by the Chinese official news agency showing the Chairman Mao Zedong proclaiming Oct. 1, 1949 at the rostrum of Tiananmen Square in Beijing the establishment of the People's Republic of China. (AFP/Getty)

Chinese national flag guards take photo in front of an emblem of the Communist Party of China (CPC) on the Tiananmen Square on June 30, 2011 in Beijing, China. (Feng Li/AFP/Getty Images)

Singers perform during a gala show to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in the Great Hall of the People on June 28, 2011 in Beijing, China. (Feng Li/AFP/Getty Images)

A group of students gathers to paint various logos and slogans for the upcoming Chinese Communist Party's 90th anniversary celebrations, on a wall along a street in Beijing on June 26, 2011. (AFP/Getty Images)

A statue of the late leader Mao Zedong and the Olympic rings at a university in Beijing on July 24, 2008. (Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty)