They are 2,296 delegates, carefully selected from all regions of the country by the party with 97 million members of the Chinese Communist Party. They will sit during this 20th congress, the first for five years, and which will begin on Sunday, October 16. The very official People’s Daily publishes Tuesday, September 27 the complete list of these “representatives”. A third of them, underlines the newspaper, come directly from the base: they are workers, farmers, employees of the tertiary sector. Among the delegates, there are also 619 women, or 27% of the total, which is more than last time. And 264 representatives of “ethnic minority groups”, 11% of the total. Average age of these 2,297 delegates: 52 years old.
The official Chinese press sees in these varied profiles, “the expression of an exuberant vitality” and the reflection of a “open and transparent selection”. It must be said quickly: in reality, the selection of delegates is obviously only done within the all-powerful party, and is the subject of meticulous and opaque preparation for months and months. It is a question of choosing the most loyal members, and also of distributing at the same time a whole bunch of local mandates, 170,000 positions in total.
Officially, these 2,296 delegates are therefore the embodiment of the people, like great voters called upon to then choose the leaders of the party and therefore of the country. During the congress, they are supposed to appoint the 200 members of the central committee of the party, who will then appoint from among themselves the 25 members of the Political Bureau. Then we get closer again with the seven members of the Standing Committee. Finally, at the very top of this vertical and hierarchical pyramid, there is the president.
Officially, all of this is democratic and transparent. In effect, votes are formalities. Everything was settled in advance like clockwork, especially for the composition of the Politburo and the Standing Committee, the real centers of Chinese power. But nothing will appear before the congress. We only know that the current Prime Minister Li Keqiang will leave his post and that the favorite to succeed him is called Hu Chunhua. The ultimate goal for Xi Jinping is obviously to further strengthen his personal power, perhaps even to be named “leader for life”.
In reality, everything probably does not happen like a letter to the Post Office but the opacity is such that we cannot know with certainty what is happening within the power. You have to read between the lines to understand, for example, that support for Vladimir Putin is probably not unanimous within the Central Committee. The same goes for the zero Covid policy, set up as dogma by Xi Jinping and which is leading to recurring economic paralysis in several regions. However, the legitimacy of power with the population is based first and foremost on maintaining growth. But the challenge has its limits: Xi Jinping regularly has executives dismissed, most often under the guise of fighting corruption. It controls the system very centrally. It is hard to see his hegemony challenged.