What is China’s plenum and why does it matter?

Oct 23rd 2016, 23:27 BY J.P. | BEIJING

The Economist

THE 200-odd highest-ranking members of China’s Communist Party—its central committee—meet only once a year. The closed-door gathering is called a plenum. This year’s starts today, October 24th, in Beijing and runs until the 27th. The agenda does not sound consequential. It will discuss, in the unlovely words of the official announcement, “the norms of political life within the party…and a revision to an intra-party supervision regulation.” So why does it matter?



Plenums are consequential. Last year’s abolished the one-child policy. This year’s is the last before a party congress—the five-yearly meeting of 2,000 or so members—scheduled for October 2017 approves the line-up that will govern the country for the following five years. The plenum will not discuss that line-up, nor will it talk about Xi Jinping’s successor as party leader. But those questions overshadow the gathering. The soporific bureaucratese quoted above in fact describes the battleground of the vicious political infighting between Mr Xi and his rivals.

For several years, Mr Xi has used an anti-corruption campaign to clean up the party and rid himself of opponents. At the plenum Mr Xi could take this a step further by requiring, for example, members of the central committee to declare all their and their family’s financial assets. This is what “intra-party supervision” refers to. Mr Xi has also taken to writing internal party rules and using them against rivals. He laid down, for example, that party members may not make “groundless” criticism of the leadership—and then arraigned his predecessor’s top aide for having broken the rule. At the plenum he could require new loyalty tests, or “norms of political life”. He might also change the party rule that says leaders have to retire when they turn 68. That would enable some of his closest allies, such as the 68-year-old Wang Qishan, the boss of the anti-corruption body, to stay on.

But the bigger issue with which the plenum must grapple concerns Mr Xi’s ambitions. He has accumulated enormous power at the top of the pyramid but less down the slopes. He will want the party congress to place his favoured people in positions of power. At the same time he needs to start preparing the ground for a successor of his choosing after the end of his tenure in 2022. It is widely assumed that the next president must come from the so-called “sixth generation” of leaders, born in the 1960s. The trouble is that no member of the sixth generation who is associated with Mr Xi has the track record required for the top job. Potential leaders tend to spend five years in a high-ranking job, such as party secretary of a large province, and then another five years on the party’s standing committee. It may well take ten years for them to be ready. That means Mr Xi’s choice could not take over until 2027—and he himself would probably want to serve an extra five years beyond the ten given to the party leader under existing rules. Such a move would be unprecedented and controversial, and could precipitate a political crisis. The plenum will be the first meeting to deal with the question of whether that risk is acceptable to the party as a whole.