The Chinese Communist Party Congress explained

The National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) will meet on October 16, during which thousands of delegates from all the provinces of the country will travel to Beijing for the most important meeting in Chinese political life. During the congress the leaders who will lead the party are selected and therefore also the country for the next 5 years.

The Twentieth Congress, that of October, promises to be at a different level compared to all those of the last 30 years since the CPC will be called upon to take historic decisions: first, the virtual certainty that Xi Jinping (Secretary of the party and president of the People’s Republic of China) for a third term, in violation of all the practices implemented in recent decades on the alternation of heads of state.

Since China is a dictatorship, in the absence of general elections, the CCP Congress is the only mechanism in place to allow for the replacement of the country’s leadership. Although it is not the only party present in China (there are others but they are reduced to satellite formations and in fact irrelevant), art. 1 of the Constitution of the People’s Republic entrusts to the CCP alone the institutional role of political guide of the country.

Thus, in practice, the highest institutional positions in the country are held by party officials. For example, in post-Maoist China, the custom of combining the functions of general secretary of the party and president of the republic in the same person has gradually become established: the one who is elected to head the CCP during the congress is therefore automatically appointed to the presidency of the People’s Republic, an office whose election every 5 years belongs to the Chinese parliament controlled by the CCP itself.

The position of general secretary occupied since 2012 by Xi Jinping (who has also been Chinese president since 2013), and in theory he should abandon it this year, because for the past thirty years conventions and political practices within the party have limited the number of terms to two for five years each. But barring sensational surprises, Xi will be reappointed for a third term, which will usher in an uncertain new phase in Chinese politics.

Il Congresso del 2017 (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

How Congress Works
As in the West with the elections, the Congress is the most important moment in the life of the party, which today counts beyond 96.71 million members all over China. Its mechanisms are not very simple and it takes a slight effort to follow the thread.

About 2,300 members will attend, selected from local CCP branches and party organizations, who will be responsible for selecting some 200 members of the Central Committee, which forms the core of the party. In turn, the Central Committee has the key role of appointing the executive leadership. The most important election is that of the Politburo, made up of 25 members from among which will then be selected the most important officials who will form the Standing Committee of the Politburo (which now has seven members), that is to say the body restricted executive to which belongs the belongs to the general secretary and through which the CCP governs China.

Obviously this is not a free election and candidacies for all these collegiate bodies are negotiated beforehand and behind closed doors between the party leaders. In essence, congress and central committee votes are limited to approve the choices already made give the new leadership grassroots political legitimacy.

The third term
The 20th Congress will not be a simple renewal of the leadership of the CCP. in fact, there is a unanimous opinion among observers that President Xi Jinping intends break with the rules and rewrite the system of government that has ruled China for decades.

Since his election as general secretary in 2012, Xi has carried out a radical centralization of power by personally assuming more and more positions in the party and the government. a clear break with the system of limitation of power which had been consolidated in post-Maoist China, whose architect Deng Xiaoping intended to restore the institutions of the People’s Republic to prevent the excesses committed by Mao Zedong from reoccurring. One of the most important limits set by Deng was the custom that no Chinese leader can govern for more than 10 years: maximum two terms as general secretary, combined with the two terms of president provided for by the Constitution.

Xi Jinping in 2017 (Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)

Already at the last Congress, in 2017, one could guess that Xi and the party had collectively decided to go beyond the custom of two terms. Usually, when a new general secretary is to be elected, he is chosen from among the officers elected at the previous convention. Therefore, the eventual successor to Xi (whose 10-year term expires in 2022) should have been admitted to the Standing Committee as early as 2017. However, none of the profiles that emerged at the last congress corresponded to the figure of a candidate for the new general secretary. , and this lack of an apparent successor has been interpreted as an early indication that Xi may have remained in office beyond 10 years.

Read also: https://www.ilpost.it/2021/11/11/xi-jinping-storia-risoluzione/

In March 2018, a new signal arrived in this direction, when the Chinese parliament amended the constitution to abolish the limit of two presidential terms.

What has happened in China in recent years suggests that Xi, the most powerful leader since Mao, will remain in power. The first thing to observe will be what title am i going to adopt in the Twentieth Congress, which may seem like an irrelevant question, but in the communist tradition, it is not.

Xi could keep the title of general secretary of the party, breaking the two-term convention but leaving the party structure intact, or he could have the CCP recognized as chairman of the party, abolished in the 1980s: this would be a substantial reform of the party. Chinese governance from the presidency of the party, as opposed to the office of the secretary general which fits into the Standing Committee, a non-collegial superior office which concentrates the maximum of decision-making power in a single person. In fact, that was the title Mao Zedong used.

A second point to observe will be the new composition of the Politburo and in particular the Standing Committee. Some of the seven current members of the Committee are over 68, the conventional limit beyond which CCP members retire and must be replaced by new leaders. The profile of the politicians who will join the Standing Committee for the first time will tell a lot about the orientation of the new leadership, particularly on the basis of their partisan experiences and personal ties. Profiles who have had close relationships with Xi in the past will be watched.

The third point concerns the possible successor. It is a very complex question. While Xi Jinping will most likely remain in power, he could theoretically also designate a potential successor who will take his place in 5 or 10 years. a very distant prospect, because with a few days before the start of the Congress, there is no concrete clue as to who this person could be. It is therefore likely that there is not yet a designated person to succeed Xi in the next decade. As Filippo Fasulo, an ISPI analyst who was interviewed in journalist Simone Pieranni’s newsletter, aptly explained, identify a possible successor this would already impose an implicit limit on Xi’s power and this seems to contradict the centralization operated by the Secretary General over the past 10 years.

Beyond the offices, however, the National Congress is the time when the party comes together, expresses its judgments on the work of the past five years and formalizes the political lines drawn by the leadership. From economic slowdown to zero COVID strategy, from internal propaganda to the issue of Taiwan unification, members of the 20th Congress led by Xi Jinping will set a new direction for China policy.

Read also: Zero COVID strategy hurt China

If, then, there is a fourth point to be observed, and it concerns the political priorities which will emerge from the report on the last 5 years issued by the Secretary General. They are expected major reform announcements and proposals.