Increasingly, the main challenge facing the SACP is its relevance as a political entity within the evolving South African socio-political and economic landscape. Contrarily, in the Chinese context, relevance to, or impact on Chinese society is the least of the challenges faced by the CPC. Rather, the challenge it faces is the image it portrays in a world where communist governance, if not ideology, is two decades out of date and still viewed negatively - for a variety of sociological and cultural reasons.

As China becomes more interdependent with the rest of the world, and its economic prowess grows ever weightier, so its image as a communist hegemon requires adaptation in order to capitalize on the political and cultural avenues its economic successes have thrown open to it.

The SACP 90-year anniversary is notable given it is practically the last "active" Communist movement on the African continent. By "active," I mean in a position of political power or influence, such as government.

Since the South African transition to democracy in 1994, the SACP has been bundled with South Africa's most senior organisation of trade unions (COSATU) and the ruling African National Congress (ANC) in a "ruling" tri-partite alliance. This alliance stems from the strong solidarity the once-banned labor unions ANC and SACP shared under apartheid, and in its post-1994 incarnation, which is meant to secure the interests of labor, and the communist element within the government of the new South Africa.

As such, and particularly given the discrediting of communism since 1991, the SACP has yet failed to benefit particularly from the arrangement, as much as COSATU and the ANC have, in terms of both their penetration into South African governance structures and their involvement in formulation of government policy.

That is not to say that the SACP is completely toothless on its 90th birthday. The current Secretary General Dr. Blade Nzimande is the incumbent minister for higher education in the South African cabinet, and the National Chairperson Gwede Mantashe is the current secretary general of the ruling ANC. On the positive side, the SACP does maintain the ability to be critical of its larger and more powerful alliance partners.

A different story belongs to the mighty CPC. In power since the late 1940s and despite some internal backlashes with high internal costs, the CPC has overseen China's emergence from political and economic obscurity in the 1970s to the economic heavyweight it is today. Currently the second largest economy in the world, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, and the G20, as well as a member of the club of BRICS countries (most recently joined by South Africa), the CPC successfully dodged the fall of communism in Europe and remains the most powerful and influential communist movement to date, and certainly among the longest lasting.

From this point of view, the challenge facing the CPC is not one of finding relevancy within the modern Chinese context, but one of capitalizing on the global and regional political and diplomatic influence that its economic rise has brought it, in order to renovate its image as the legitimate authority in China and to manage tensions in a modernizing Chinese society.

Put basically, the CPC has an image problem. This is born of the fact that the political model and ideological background it has officially maintained since the 1950s evokes negative images with the other powers in the world. The opportunity now arises to revisit the image that it, as the government of China, broadcasts to the world. Since the 1970s, and the end of the "Cultural Revolution" (1966-76), China has undertaken pragmatic adjustments of policies and made concerted efforts to become more interdependent with the rest of the world, particularly via its economic prowess. Thus, its image as a communist, authoritarian hegemon is now complemented by the second aspect of economic successes, after having embraced the market economy. President Hu Jintao has made demonstrable socio-economic progress by elevating millions of Chinese out of abject poverty through renovation of the social welfare systems and rollout of civil infrastructure projects - a central focus of the last five-year plan.

Building on this, the most recent National People's Congress emphasized in its Work Report the move toward addressing more pressing social and environmental issues afflicting the vast population of China - be that elevating the levels of consumption, addressing bureaucratic corruption, curbing inflation and addressing the environmental degradation affecting the health of many Chinese. Much like the Beijing Olympics in 2008 revealed to the world the changes that China has undergone; so the CPC must use the opportunities China's growing international influence affords it to change its image and further adjust its policies, lest the negative associations hooked to its political model further hamper China's peaceful rise into a global superpower.

(The viewpoints of the author may not necessarily represent those of ChinAfrica.)