The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will hold the Fifth Plenum of its 20th Central Committee in Beijing in October, and the main item of business is “several major issues in persistently advancing the comprehensive and strict governance of the Party.” A Politburo meeting on July 30 fixed the month, according to Xinhua, the Party’s official wire service.
Since the 1980s the Fifth Plenum has been where the leadership signs off on the next five-year economic and social development plan. The last one convened over discipline and personnel met in February 1980, when the Party rebuilt a cadre system the Cultural Revolution had wrecked and rehabilitated the purged head of state Liu Shaoqi.
Xi Jinping, the CCP’s general secretary and China’s top leader, chaired the July meeting, and the Politburo will report its own work to the Central Committee at the plenum. The same meeting reviewed the economy and set out the second half of the year, then closed by noting it had “studied other matters,” the formula the Party uses for business it does not intend to disclose.
The readout runs the phrase “comprehensive and strict governance of the Party” seven times. It credits the years since 2012 with “great achievements” while conceding that the effort “faces many new situations and new problems.” It also calls for upholding “the centralized and unified leadership of the Party Central Committee.”
The discipline agenda points to two purged military chiefs
Zhang Youxia, the Central Military Commission vice chairman and the most senior uniformed officer under Xi, was removed on Jan. 24 together with Liu Zhenli, who headed the Joint Staff Department, the body that runs Chinese military operations. Ma Xingrui, a Politburo member and former Party secretary of Xinjiang, went under investigation on April 3 and was expelled from the Party and from public office on July 14 for what discipline investigators called large-scale family corruption.
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Li Linyi, a current-affairs commentator, told the overseas Chinese-language outlet The Epoch Times that the plenum is where the Zhang and Liu cases will be ratified, which puts it in the same class as the 1980 session. Cases like these get settled before a plenum opens, he said, so the meeting itself is a formality and the real fight runs in the months before it.
Cai Shenkun, a commentator based in the United States, said on July 16 that accounts circulating inside the Party have Zhang admitting he tried to force Xi to hand over power, with backing from some Party elders. Every faction is waiting for an opening, Cai said, and one triggering event could rearrange the leadership before the 21st Party Congress.
China’s defense minister, Dong Jun, spoke at a reception in the Great Hall of the People on July 31, marking the 99th anniversary of the army’s founding. The armed forces follow Xi Jinping Thought on strengthening the military and operate under the chairman responsibility system, he said, the rule that puts final command of the Central Military Commission and the forces beneath it in Xi’s hands alone. Dong also promised to defeat any move toward Taiwanese independence and any outside military intervention.
Sing Tao Daily in Hong Kong reported that the plenum will also fill vacant Central Committee seats and ratify expulsions like Ma’s.
Growth slid to 4.3 percent in the second quarter
Since 2013 the end-of-July Politburo meeting has doubled as the economic review that sets the agenda for the rest of the year.
China’s economy grew 4.7 percent in the first half, the National Bureau of Statistics reported on July 15. Growth came in at 5.0 percent in the first quarter, within the official target range of 4.5 to 5 percent, before slowing to 4.3 percent in the second quarter.
Industrial profits at large firms rose 15.1 percent in June from a year earlier, the statistics bureau said on July 27, the weakest monthly reading of the year and down from 21.1 percent in May. First-half industrial profits rose 18.7 percent, easing from 18.8 percent in the January-to-May period and falling short of the 19.2 percent forecast by Bloomberg Economics.
Not one Chinese province covered its own spending out of its own revenue in the first half, according to Ministry of Finance figures.
The readout tells local governments to keep paying their staff
Fourteen years into Xi’s rule, China’s property slump continues, unemployment remains elevated, and social-media platforms carry persistent complaints that his policies have damaged the economy. Faced with the risk of being blamed, many officials have responded with caution and inertia. The official readout urged the leadership to “attach great importance to the difficulties and challenges facing economic operations.”
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