A place to ask questions of Lemmygrad's best and brightest
To quote ProleWiki's article on the CPC:
The CPC is incorrectly referred to as "Chinese Communist Party" (CCP) in Western media, despite the CPC declaring "Communist Party of China" to be the official English translation of its native name. This may be used in order to promote Sinophobia, as well as for propaganda against China (due to the similarity of the acronym CCP to the Cyrillic acronym for the Soviet Union, which is СССР, thus evoking memories of the Red Scare).
Unrelated but this comment brought a t-shirt I saw someone using a couple months ago. It's had the CCCP acronym and the hammer and cutting thing, and I tough nice, then I saw that in the shoulders and arms had three white bands and was like no way and then I saw the Adidas logo, wtf?
Yes, it's basically that. In a way, the use of CCP or CPC kind of serves as a shibboleth that shows one's biases against/in favour of the PRC.
I believe the "explanation" used to justify saying "CCP" in the West is that the Chinese diminutive for "中国共产党" (Zhongguo Gongchandang, Communist Party of China (but which can also be understood as Chinese Communist Party)) is "中共" (Zhong Gong, so "Chi(na/nese) Com(munist party)"). Thus, Western media argues that, to preserve the order in which the words appear, "CCP" is a more appropriate term. Of course, it doesn't make sense to preserve Chinese word order in English because, newsflash, Chinese is a different language than English; and the CPC's official name in English is "Communist Party of China." So this is just a thinly veiled excuse to disrespect the CPC by calling them by a different name.
As for the reason why the English translation of "中国共产党" is "Communist Party of China" and not "Chinese Communist Party," this is because the Comintern required parties to follow the name of "Communist Party of (Country)." There are many exceptions to this rule (the Socialist Unity Party in the GDR comes to mind), and of course the Comintern no longer exists, but the CPC respects it to this day.
CCP is the literal translation of the parties name from Mandarin.
CPC is the official english acronym.
Basic rule of translating between languages: If a offical term in a language exists, use it. Thus not using CPC is ignorant at best.
CCP is a derogatory name the western media uses, like how I don't capitalize "zionist" or how I say ISISrael (to highlight that they are terrorists). Only when I do those things I admit that I am doing it out of petty derision where as the western media (and the boot licking libs) pretend that when they say CCP they are doing nothing wrong despite the multitude of times that the Communist Party of China has said "we are the CPC not the ccp"
In terms of imagery and associations, it doesn't hurt that it looks similar to the Cyrillic CCCP (USSR).
The west media likes to use CCP instead of CPC?
Yeah that's basically it, that's why western pro China communists sometimes insist on using the more proper translation (CPC), but also I've seen some Chinese comrades say they don't really care about the distinction.
Chinas party has been around for a while obviously and earlier it history it was customary to name your party Communist Party of , to show your party was an internationalist party. That's why its the CPUSA not the USACP, because they were an internationalist party.