What is China’s 19th Communist Party congress and why does it matter?

By J.P. | BEIJING

ON OCTOBER 18TH Xi Jinping, the leader of China’s Communist Party, will kick off a big party gathering in the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. It will look like innumerable other party meetings. There will be a huge throng, 2,300-strong, mostly men in dark suits, a few of them in tribal costumes. There will be long speeches with impenetrable verbiage. No policies will change. But this meeting matters more than most because party congresses take place just once every five years and this is the first one to be chaired by Mr Xi. Like all congresses, it will revise the party constitution and elect a new political elite—the 370 or so members of the party’s Central Committee, to which all important decision-makers belong. It will also be a coronation and a test for Mr Xi. The coronation will reveal how much authority he has accumulated over the party. The test will reveal whether he is a rule-breaker or a rule-keeper.

China’s Communist Party has held congresses since its foundation. The first was in 1921. But the practice of quinquennial gatherings dates to Deng Xiaoping’s attempts in the 1980s to introduce a sense of order and predictability after the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Deng also introduced a number of other rules, or norms, that have more or less been kept for 20 years. Among them: that the leader should retire after two terms and appoint a successor after the first (meaning, in Mr Xi’s case, now); that there should be fixed retirement ages for top leaders (68 for the Central Committee); that people should move up the party in incremental steps, not leaps and bounds; and that at the end of his term the leader should be granted a kind of ideological canonisation, with an ideology associated with him written into the party’s constitution. All these rules are up for grabs at the coming congress.