Opinion
An Era of Implementation
The Communist Party of China leads the nation's development with a people-centered approach
By Kerry Brown  ·  2017-10-28  ·   Source: | NO. 44 NOVEMBER 2, 2017

The 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) has concluded in Beijing and the new CPC leadership was elected. What are the core objectives that the Party with its new leadership after this congress now focused on, and what sort of management will they need? And working out the policy narrative that flows from this congress for the next five years in China, because of the country's current global prominence, is important.

First of all, because of the policy continuity of the Party, we need to look backward to start to get the answer to this set of questions, rather than forward, to the first words that Xi Jinping said on November 15, 2012 when he was elected general secretary of the CPC Central Committee at the 18th CPC National Congress in Beijing that year. There were three specific points in his brief remarks then that need to be brought to mind. The first was the way he stressed that the Party narrative was intrinsically part of a national one, with rejuvenation at its heart.

The second was to stress the notion of service—of the Party still abiding by the ethos from the earliest era of its existence of being a servant of the Chinese people.

The sense of the Party serving the expectations of the Chinese people is now set in a new context in which China has become wealthier, also meaning expectations have climbed. In the past, as leaders often said, the main objective was to have food and clothing. But now there is a complex set of different demands, from good healthcare, to education provision, foreign travel, housing, and a clean environment.

Third, there was the issue of what the Party's function was in all of this.

In the five years since 2012, these three core themes have featured like motives under the various actions, meetings and policy initiatives that the Party has pursued.

Anyone looking at the October 18 political report (delivered by Xi at the opening session of the 19th CPC National Congress) will immediately notice three things even if they know nothing about the context of the speech and what preceded it. First, its various strands of ideas and thinking reflect the immense complexity of the situation within China and in the surrounding world. The country is facing a number of economic, ecological, governance and geopolitical challenges, and needing to deal with them in a short period of time. There is little scope for mistakes. The sheer enormity of what China is attempting should not be underestimated. The grand project to deliver modernity across the country, ongoing now for almost a century, is reaching its key moment. Achievement of some major goals is within grasp. This is a task that the government cannot fail in. That supplies the pressure and explains the scope and variety of issues Xi spoke of and the congress addressed.

The second issue is the way in which China's domestic issues are intrinsically global. Its construction of a new economic model with more services, higher consumption and an expanding urban middle class will have an impact on the world around. Chinese middle class people, emerging from this process, will be key engines of global growth through their purchasing, buying of services and investments. Their demand for modernized healthcare, public goods and a clean environment will also have a huge global impact even though they seem ostensibly to be issues only within China. Through scale and through the speed of anticipated change, domestic China is also global.

The sense of service to the needs of the Chinese people, with their diversity and complexity, is also something that is clear as one thinks of the core audiences for the speech, and the ways in which it and other parts of the congress might be received by the wider public in China. There is optimism about China's global role and the status of the country and a sense of achievement at the things that reform has delivered since 1978. While China has 24,000 km of high-speed rail, built in a little over a decade, the United States has no train that can go over 170 km an hour. This is one example of the efforts that have been made. But of course, expectations will always rise. And the congress was in many ways a moment to think of the immense pressure on the Chinese Government and the Party to deliver on these. We are entering, therefore, a period where initiation is not the key thing—implementation is. The Party needs to implement a large number of policies. In China, it is more about this congress being a prelude to an era when an immense number of things need to be reformed, changed and adapted. That is the story that the 19th CPC National Congress figures in.

The author is director of Lau China Institute at King's College London and an op-ed of Beijing Review

Comments to liuyunyun@bjreview.com

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