AP PHOTOS: China's Communist Party marks centenary

BEIJING -- China’s ruling Communist Party is marking its centenary with fireworks and fanfare. Since seizing power amid civil war in 1949, the party has undergone a tumultuous history, but president and party leader Xi Jinping is emphasizing the country’s rise to economic, military and diplomatic power over the past four decades since reforms were enacted. Commemorations are to continue through Thursday’s anniversary of the party’s founding as an underground political movement in 1921. Going unmentioned are the disasters brought under the founder of the Communist state, Mao Zedong, as well as the bloody military crackdown on the pro-democracy movement centered on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989.