The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad.
Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm.
The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the last party congress in October 2022.
Photo: Reuters
Further deepening reforms and promoting the modernization of China will comprise the main agenda of the third plenum, Xinhua news agency said yesterday, citing the party’s politburo, during a regular meeting.
Third plenums have been typically held in the autumn since the 1990s. The party was widely expected to hold one in either October or November last year, but it did not.
“The meeting had been expected to happen late last year, but was postponed without explanation,” said Julian Evans-Pritchard, head of China economics at Capital Economics.
“We should get a better sense of the leadership’s medium-term reform priorities during the third plenum,” he said.
The plenum will open amid a subdued economy, with the massively indebted property sector, once accounting for a quarter of GDP, a major drag on household sentiment.
The economy still faces many challenges, with “effective demand” still lacking, the pressure on enterprises sizable, and risks and hazards in key areas numerous, Xinhua reported, citing the politburo meeting.
“Domestic circulation is also not smooth, and the complexity, severity and uncertainty of the external environment has obviously increased,” Xinhua reported, adding that China’s economic foundation remained stable.
China has not collapsed as predicted by the “China collapse theory,” nor will it peak as forecast by the “China peak theory,” Xi said last month.
“I have repeatedly emphasized that reform and opening up are crucial tools for contemporary China to catch up with the times. China’s reform will not pause, and its opening-up will not cease,” he said.
“We are planning and implementing a series of significant measures to comprehensively deepen reform,” he said.
Third plenums have typically focused on reforms after the end of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1970s. Some have left a long-lasting and historical impact on the economy. The third plenum in December 1978 under Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) initiated China’s economic reforms, igniting China’s transformation into a global economic powerhouse.
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
RSS