and workers parties and attends international communist conferences, most notably the International Meeting of Communist and Workers Parties.[112] Delegates of foreign communist parties still visit China; in 2013, for instance, the General Secretary of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP), Jeronimo de Sousa, personally met with Liu Qibao, a member of the Central Politburo.[113] In another instance, Pierre Laurent, the National Secretary of the French Communist Party (FCP), met with Liu Yunshan, a Politburo Standing Committee member.[114] In 2014 Xi Jinping, the CPC general secretary, personally met with Gennady Zyuganov, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), to discuss party-to-party relations.[115] While the CPC retains contact with major parties such as the PCP,[113] FCP,[114] the CPRF,[116] the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia,[117] the Communist Party of Brazil,[118] the Communist Party of Nepal[119] and the Communist Party of Spain,[120] the party retains relations with minor communist and workers parties, such as the Communist Party of Australia,[121] the Workers Party of Bangladesh, the Communist Party of Bangladesh (Marxist–Leninist) (Barua), the Communist Party of Sri Lanka, the Workers Party of Belgium, the Hungarian Workers Party, the Dominican Workers Party and the Party for the Transformation of Honduras, for instance.[122] In recent years, noting the self-reform of the European social democratic movement in the 1980s and 1990s, the CPC has noted the increased marginalization of West European communist parties.[123] Ruling parties of socialist states[edit] The CPC has retained close relations with the remaining socialist states still espousing communism: Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam and their respective ruling parties.[124] It spends a fair amount of time analyzing the situation in the remaining socialist states, trying to reach conclusions as to why these states survived when so many did not, fo