The New York Times
MICHAEL FORSYTHE
Oct 23, 2015
On Monday, the grandees of China’s Communist Party, or the more than 200 members of its Central Committee, will gather in a heavily guarded hotel in Beijing for a four-day meeting. These secretive conclaves, open to only a few members of the state news media, endorse the leadership’s policy plans and make key personnel appointments.
It would be a mistake to discount these gatherings, known as plenums. The ruling Politburo and the leaders of the powerful Central Military Commission are drawn from this body and, throughout the 66-year history of Communist rule in China, plenums have been the scene of momentous decisions that changed the course of the nation’s history.
In 1959, Peng Dehuai, then the defense minister and a Korean War hero, was purged at the plenum that year, a move that signaled a surge in Chairman Mao Zedong’s personal power. Two decades later, a plenum in 1978 put China on the road to opening its economy to international trade and moving away from a planned economy to greater reliance on the market. An extraordinary plenum in June 1989 officially dismissed the party’s general secretary, Zhao Ziyang, who had broken with the paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, and other party elders on how best to handle the student protests at Tiananmen Square.
Since what happens in China increasingly affects people across the globe, this Fifth Plenum of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party is worth watching. Here’s what to look for:
What’s on the agenda?
Officials have said that the plenum this year will focus on China’s next five-year plan. It may sound archaic — a relic of Soviet-era planning — but China’s economy is still in many ways led by the state, and five-year plans set the agenda. The next plan will run from 2016 through 2020 and will be formally approved by China’s legislature, the National People’s Congress, next March. But before it reaches that stage, the party’s leaders must sign off on the main points.
The party has made it clear that the new plan will focus on continuing to shift China’s growth model away from a dependence on exports and extensive investment in infrastructure and industry toward a more sustainable growth model focused on consumption. The next five-year plan will be built around China’s “new normal” of slowing economic growth. Growth this year, forecast at 7 percent, is set to be the slowest in a quarter century. Barclay’s and Nomura expect that the floor for the next five-year plan will be set at 6.5 percent.
Expect the five-year plan to bolster spending on environmental protection, increase social welfare spending and push for further financial liberalization, including promoting the internationalization of China’s currency, the renminbi.
Ding Xueliang, a political scientist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, said he also expected the plenum to discuss shorter-term measures on how to shore up economic growth after this summer’s stock market plunge, currency devaluation and the slowest quarterly growth rate since 2009.
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A vendor arranging lettuce at a market in Beijing. The coming plenum will take up the new five-year plan, which is expected to continue shifting China’s economy away from a reliance on exports and investment in infrastructure and toward consumption.Credit Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
What about personnel changes?
Nothing has been announced, but Alice Miller, who studies China’s elite politics at Stanford University, points out that it is the plenums at the midpoint between the party congresses, which take place every five years, where almost all personnel changes happen. There are normally seven plenums between congresses, and almost all personnel changes in the years since Mao’s death in 1976 have occurred in the fourth and fifth plenums. This year’s meeting is the fifth plenum of the party’s 18th Central Committee.
“So if the Xi leadership were to make changes at this level, the upcoming plenum would be the place to make them,” Ms. Miller said.
The next party congress takes place in late 2017, and the first plenum, which will take place immediately after the congress, selects the next Politburo, the group of about 25 people who are at the apex of power in China.
Wang Qishan, secretary of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.Credit Feng Li/Getty Images
Mr. Ding is also looking for possible rule changes that would make it easier for older senior leaders to stay on past customary retirement ages. That could allow someone like Wang Qishan, 67, the party’s anticorruption enforcer, to stay on for another five-year term starting in 2017.
When will we find out what happened?
Since the beginning, Communist Party politics have been cloaked in secrecy. The communiqué for the plenum isn’t normally released to the public until after the close of the session, via the state news media. So expect some news on the plenum to begin coming out next Thursday evening.
But, in fact, the language of the communiqué is determined well before the meeting even starts. Plenums in the modern era have rarely been scenes of raucous intraparty debate. Instead, most policy disagreements are resolved among powerful officials ahead of the plenum.
“There may be tweaking here and there, but the real give and take will have been given and taken on the road to convening the plenum,” Ms. Miller said.
Paramilitary police officers marching from Tiananmen Gate for a flag-raising ceremony. The party leaders’ decisions are typically made public through the state news media only after the plenum.Credit Reuters
