China Politics Weekly No. 109- October 3, 2016

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Building a Party that promotes economic development

This week’s Politburo meeting confirmed that the 6^th Plenum will be held from October 24-27 and will focus on Party-building. At the top of the plenum agenda will be the deliberation and adoption of the Norms for Party Political Life under the New Situation and a revised version of the Chinese Communist Party Internal Supervision Regulations.

What, you may ask, is the “new situation”? Good question! Frankly, it’s not completely clear. There is no shortage of references to the new situation in speeches, articles and policies. These describe how diplomacy or employment or intellectual property should be promoted under the new situation, without ever actually discussing what the new situation is.

(Fellow China political dorks will no doubt be thinking that they know what the new situation is. But beware! The new situation we are discussing is 新形势 not 新情况, the latter being a concept that has been around since the time of Jiang Zemin and is also translated in English as the “new situation”. The two terms seem to be related and overlapping; Xi Jinping sometimes will put them together and say “we need to do X under the new situation new situation”, but I have yet to see any clear explanation of how the two relate to each other…)

The closest thing that I have found to an explanation of the new situation is a 2010 article by former vice president of the Central Party School Li Junru entitled “What is the New Situation that has been Encountered in Building a Governing Party?”. I’m not sure how much weight to give Li’s article, which was published in the Beijing Daily News, but his article does discuss an important point relevant to this year’s Plenum.

In describing the new situation, Li is quick to remind his readers that China is still in the primary stage of socialism, and that the “major contradiction” facing the Party remains that between the “rising material and cultural demands of the people” and “backwards means of production”. Put in layman’s terms, the Party’s main job is economic development.

This remains the case today, and Xi’s ongoing Party-building project should be understood in this context. The 6^th Plenum is all about strengthening Party discipline and reinvigorating the Party’s esprit de corps. But these are not ends in and of themselves, but rather efforts to make the Party better at doing its job, a main component of which remains economic development.

I bring this up to emphasize again the point that I made last week. Namely, that the Party is motivated by more that just “power”. One of its key motivations is creating a strong, prosperous country.