With many expecting China’s ruling party to kick off more intensive reforms at a key meeting this week, political analysts believe the gathering will push forward political restructuring.

The Third Plenary Session of the 18th Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, scheduled between November 9 and 12 in Beijing, is expected to study how to roll out a comprehensive reform package. The reform package will cover economic, political, cultural and social systems, as well as ecological issues, and the institutional construction of the CPC.

Calling political restructuring “an important part” of China’s comprehensive reform, Yan Shuhan, a professor with the Party School of the CPC Central Committee, said the country’s political restructuring should be advanced according to national conditions. “Only through incorporating political restructuring into economic restructuring, can political structural reform in China achieve historic success,” he said.

Since the Third Plenary Session of the 11th CPC Central Committee 35 years ago, political restructuring of China has been strengthening along with the progress of China’s economic restructuring. China has eliminated de facto life tenure for leading officials, and realized orderly succession of state leaders.

As late leader Deng Xiaoping put it, “The success of China’s reform lies in its political restructuring.”

At present, China needs further reform in difficult areas and the leadership has compared the difficulty to “storming a fortification.” Owing to the combination of complicated factors at home and abroad, the workload in resolving contradictions and problems in the fresh round of reform is unprecedented.

Over the past year since the 18th National Congress of the CPC, held last November, the CPC new leadership ushered in a new round of political reform, including the CPC leadership’s “eight-point” rules issued for bureaucratic reform late last year. The order issued in June calls for elimination of the four “evil winds,” (formalism, bureaucracy, hedonism and extravagance) transformation of government functions, and efforts to improve democracy and the legal system.

“These fall into the category of political system reform. Developments and achievements so far are impressive,” said Xu Yaotong, a professor of political science with the Chinese Academy of Governance.

Power constraint and supervision

Political analysts expect the central leadership will make important arrangements on political system reform, in such aspects as power constraint and supervision, democracy and the rule of law, streamlining administration and delegating powers to lower levels, cadre promotions and appointments, and broadening channels for people to express their interests.

Analysts also expect that Party building and reform will be the top priority of future political system reform and development of intra-Party democracy will spur progress of people’s democracy.

China is open to make use of the fruits of Western political civilizations, but it will not simply copy a political system established in Western countries, the analysts said.

President Xi Jinping told the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) CEO Summit in the Indonesian resort of Bali on October 7 that China, as a big country, should never make any subversive mistakes over fundamental issues. “In case of making such a mistake, it can’t be redeemed or made up,” Xi said.

Xin Ming, another professor with the Party School of the CPC Central Committee, said “fundamental issues” included political system reform, while “subversive mistakes” included the old and rigid closed-door policy and any attempt to abandon socialism.

The CPC has been learning lessons from the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Communist party.

At first, they had refused any reform because they believed their systems were perfect. At the end, they mistook the shortcomings of the general and concrete systems as the flaw of the socialist system itself, which they believed should be scrapped.

China’s political system reform should uphold the Party’s role as the core of leadership in directing the overall situation. Its goal is not to weaken or abandon the Party’s leadership. It should aim at improving the art of the Party’s leadership.

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