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China Central Committee and Political Bureau
Political power is formally vested in the much smaller CCP
Central Committee and the other central organs answerable directly
to this committee. The Central Committee is elected by the National
Party Congress and is identified by the number of the National
Party Congress that elected it. Central Committee meetings are
known as plenums (or plenary sessions), and each plenum of a new
Central Committee is numbered sequentially. Plenums are to be held
at least annually. In addition, there are partial, informal, and
enlarged meetings of Central Committee members where often key
policies are formulated and then confirmed by a plenum. For
example, the "Communique of the Third Plenum of the Eleventh
Central Committee" (December 1978), which established the party's
commitment to economic modernization, resulted from a month-long
working meeting that preceded the Third Plenum.
The Central Committee's large size and infrequent meetings make
it necessary for the Central Committee to direct its work through
its smaller elite bodies--the Political Bureau and the even more
select Political Bureau's Standing Committee--both of which the
Central Committee elects. The Twelfth Central Committee consisted
of 210 full members and 138 alternate members. The Political Bureau
had twenty-three members and three alternate members. The Standing
Committee--the innermost circle of power--had six members who were
placed in the most important party and government posts. These six
leaders were Hu Yaobang (who was demoted from party general
secretary in January 1987), Ye Jianying (who died in October 1986,
a year after resigning his Standing Committee post), Deng Xiaoping,
Zhao Ziyang (who was named acting general secretary in January
1987), Li Xiannian, and Chen Yun.
The leadership was altered significantly at a special
conference of delegates called the National Conference of Party
Delegates, held September 18-23, 1985. The conference was convened
on the authority of Article 12 of the 1982 party constitution,
which provides for holding conferences of delegates between full
congresses. These national conferences of delegates appear to be
more authoritative than regular plenums. The conference was
attended by 992 delegates, and it elected 56 new full members and
35 new alternate members to the Central Committee, while accepting
the resignations of 65 full and alternate members, including Ye
Jianying and nine other senior Political Bureau members. The Fifth
Plenum, which immediately followed the conference, elected six new
members to the Political Bureau, dropped three from the party
Secretariat, and added five new members to the latter body. The
conference thus produced a sizable turnover in the senior party
leadership and in a direction very favorable to Deng's reform
program. Younger and better educated leaders who supported Deng's
reforms replaced aging and long-inactive leaders. The other major
accomplishment of the conference was its adoption of the "Proposal
on the Seventh Five-Year Plan" (1986-90), the framework for
developing the actual plan adopted at the Sixth National People's
Congress in 1986
(see Reform of the Economic System, Beginning in 1979
, ch. 5).
Data as of July 1987
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