Third Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China runs from Nov 9 to 12 in Beijing. It is the third such meeting since Mr Xi came to power; because the first two plenums of a party chief’s term are given over largely to housekeeping matters, including party and government appointments, third plenums are the ones to watch.
The closed-door, four-day conclave of some 370 senior party leaders as usual sums up its decisions in a gnomic communiqué full of ambiguities. Yet a parsing of the document suggests President Xi Jinping (pictured above, centre) is tightening his grip on power, and with it his ability to achieve breakthroughs in economic and social reforms.
China’s state-controlled media have hailed the meeting, known as the third plenum of the 18th Central Committee, as “a new historical starting point”. Global Times, an English-language newspaper, said it was just as important as the most famous plenum in the party’s history, which brought Deng Xiaoping to power in 1978 and ushered in profound changes that turned China into the world’s second-largest economy. There is little in the communiqué to back such bullish assertions, but the summary of the proceedings offers hope that the pace of reform will pick up.
Nevertheless, several points in this document are noteworthy and anticipated.
The closed-door, four-day conclave of some 370 senior party leaders as usual sums up its decisions in a gnomic communiqué full of ambiguities. Yet a parsing of the document suggests President Xi Jinping (pictured above, centre) is tightening his grip on power, and with it his ability to achieve breakthroughs in economic and social reforms.
China’s state-controlled media have hailed the meeting, known as the third plenum of the 18th Central Committee, as “a new historical starting point”. Global Times, an English-language newspaper, said it was just as important as the most famous plenum in the party’s history, which brought Deng Xiaoping to power in 1978 and ushered in profound changes that turned China into the world’s second-largest economy. There is little in the communiqué to back such bullish assertions, but the summary of the proceedings offers hope that the pace of reform will pick up.
Nevertheless, several points in this document are noteworthy and anticipated.
- For the first time in such a document, the role that markets play in the allocation of resources is positioned as “decisive”. This has been glossed by official media as a step up from previous party language that described the role of market forces as merely “basic”.
- It gives more property rights to farmers, and promote the equal exchange of factors of production between urban and rural areas and the balanced allocation of public resource
- Setting up a leading group for comprehensively deepening the reforms.
- The first of these is the setting up of a “state-security committee”. Details of this have not been revealed.
- Deepening financial and military reforms.
- The other notable change is the establishment of a “leading small group” to supervise reforms. Such groups count.
