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Do institutional legacies survive episodes of great political upheaval? Do legacies withstand creeping erosion over long stretches of political calm? To shed new light on these fundamental questions about institutional change, my paper investigates the organization at the heart of China’s resilient regime, namely the Communist Party, focusing on the historical determinants of the party’s regionally uneven power base. As it turns out, legacies from the pre-1949 era, in particular the formative period of Japanese occupation, continue to shape regional patterns of party membership – and help to explain why some provinces have become Chinese equivalents of “red states” and others “blue states”. For the empirical analysis of slow-moving change after 1949, my poster builds on economic approaches, formulates a party growth model, and estimates the rate of convergence in party membership away from initial historical patterns. The empirical analysis is possible thanks to a newly available set of internal party statistics. Depending on the specification, the half-life of history is 60 to 90 years: It takes that long for the effect of Japanese occupation on contemporary party membership patterns to be cut in half. This historical legacy decays only gradually and at a very low rate.