Editing Communist Party of Kampuchea (section)

===Early years===
The party was founded in 1951, when the [[Indochinese Communist Party]] (ICP) was divided into separate Cambodian, Lao, and Vietnamese communist parties. The decision to form a separate Cambodian communist party had been taken at the ICP Congress in February the same year. Different sources claim different dates for the exact founding and the first congress of the party. 

Son Ngoc Minh was appointed as Acting Chairman of the party. The party congress did not elect a full Central Committee but instead appointed a Party Propagation and Formation Committee. At the time of its formation, the Cambodian party was called Khmer People's Revolutionary Party (KPRP). The ICP had been heavily dominated by Vietnamese and the KPRP was actively supported by the [[Communist Party of Vietnam]] during its initial phase of existence. Due to the reliance on Vietnamese support in the joint struggle against French colonial rule, the history of the party would later be rewritten, stating 1960 as the year of the foundation of the party.

In July 1963, Pol Pot and most of the central committee left Phnom Penh to establish an insurgent base in Ratanakiri Province in the northeast. Pol Pot had shortly before been put on a list of thirty-four leftists who were summoned by Norodom Sihanouk to join the government and sign statements saying Sihanouk was the only possible leader for the country. Pol Pot and Chou Chet were the only people on the list who escaped. All the others agreed to cooperate with the government and were afterward under 24-hour watch by the police.

In the mid-1960s, the United States Department of State estimated the party membership to be approximately 100.

The region Pol Pot and the others moved to was inhabited by tribal minorities, the Khmer Loeu, whose rough treatment (including resettlement and forced assimilation) at the hands of the central government made them willing recruits for a guerrilla struggle. 

In 1965, Pol Pot made a visit of several months to North Vietnam and China. He probably received some training in China, which must have enhanced his prestige when he returned to the WPK's liberated areas. Despite friendly relations between Sihanouk and the Chinese, the latter kept Pol Pot's visit a secret from Sihanouk. In 1971, the party changed its name to the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK). The party statutes, published in the mid-1970s, claiming that the name change was approved by the party congress in 1971. The change in the name of the party was a closely guarded secret. Lower-ranking members of the party and even the Vietnamese were not told of it and neither was the membership until many years later. 

The party leadership endorsed armed struggle against the government, then led by Sihanouk. In 1967, several small-scale attempts at insurgency were made by the CPK but they met with little success.