China’s ruling Communists are sticking to their trademark secrecy by keeping mum on the dates of a major party congress this fall that will install a new set of leaders.
Chinese Communist Party officials insisted at a news conference yesterday that they were committed to increased transparency, and said they were introducing greater democracy in selecting the 2,270 delegates to attend the 18th national party congress.
However, when questioned about when the congress would start, the deputy head of the party’s Organization Department, Wang Jingqing (王京清), repeated previous statements, saying only that it was planned for the second half of the year.
Wang also said he did not know whether the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee would remain at its current size of nine seats or shrink to seven, as some analysts have speculated.
“Not even I know,” Wang said.
The congress will mark a once-in-a-decade leadership turnover, with seven of the Standing Committee members stepping down, including Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤), who is also party leader, and a new crop of technocrats being brought in to steer the world’s second-largest economy.
Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping (習近平) is expected to succeed Hu as party leader before assuming the presidency as well next spring. Xi will head a Standing Committee packed with proxies for Hu and other outgoing leaders, and it likely will be years before he is able to set his seal on the country’s governance.
Delegates are carefully selected and vetted for political reliability and competence, although Wang said procedures for doing so had been streamlined and institutionalized to make them more efficient. With an average age of 52, almost 70 percent are drawn from among top party officials, with the rest coming from the industrial and business sectors, most representing large state-owned enterprises.
After being approved by the party, potential delegates are put before local party committees for election, with 15 percent more candidates than available places, something party officials have touted as a sign of growing intra-party democracy.
However, Wang declined to say how the roughly 200 members of the Central Committee would be selected or by what method they would then pick the 25-member Politburo and its apex Standing Committee.
Despite the lack of information, party officials continued to insist they were not hiding anything.
“It’s a very open, transparent electoral system, all out under the sunshine,” Organization Department spokesman Deng Shengming (鄧聲明) told reporters.
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