When the Communist Party took control of the mainland, only two of the party's 13 founding members, Mao Zedong and Dong Biwu, made it to the Tiananmen rostrum for a grand ceremony to mark the founding of the People's Republic on October 1, 1949.
Mao, who had led the country to the verge of collapse by the end of his 27-year reign, died at the age of 86 in September 1976, while Dong, a Mao loyalist, was among the few to escape waves of purging within the party orchestrated by Mao before dying at age 90 in 1975.
Liu Renjing, the party's youngest founding member, and Li Da, a renowned Marxist theorist, lived longer into the republic, but remained in obscurity.
Liu, who embraced Trotskyism in opposing Stalin in 1929, was allowed to work for a government publishing house after he denounced his past in the official People's Daily shortly after the founding of the republic. He was the last founding member to die - in a car accident in Beijing in August 1987.
Li, who hailed from Hunan as Mao did, quit the party over political infighting in 1923 but rejoined it in December 1949. He never entered politics, instead becoming a prominent academic in Marxism studies. However, he failed to escape political upheaval and was persecuted as a traitor by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. A dying Li, 78, wrote to Mao in July 1966 saying the persecution was unwarranted, but it was too late by the time the letter reached Mao a month later, as Li died on August 23.
Infighting also drove Li Hanjun to leave the party after its second congress in July 1922. In spite of that, he was killed for his role in communism on the orders of warlord Hu Zongduo in 1927. Mao inducted Li posthumously as a revolutionary.