Martin Jacques on China: The CPC and innovation

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Editor’s note:

The Communist Party of China (CPC) has innovated and reformed throughout its existence in order to remain attuned to the needs of the country. The latest example of regeneration was at the 19th CPC National Congress in 2017, when General Secretary Xi Jinping reported the progress made during the previous five years with an emphasis on reform.

In Martin Jacques on China, the academic addresses the key questions: How does the CPC manage to reinvent itself while other parties around the world struggle to remain relevant? And how can the Party continue to innovate in the future?

There are many things that impressed me about General Secretary Xi Jinping’s speech at the 19th congress. One of them is not so novel for the Chinese but I think for an international audience it’s very novel. And that is it’s a very long speech.

And it is a report of the works of the last five years since the last congress. Now I can’t think of another political party in the world of any great size which will think about giving a report, a holistic report, covering all aspects of the party’s activity of the previous five years.

Members of the newly elected Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the 19th CPC Central Committee meet the press in Beijing, October 25. /Xinhua Photo

And I think that is an interesting insight into a sense of answerability, accountability on the part of the Chinese communist party. So that was one thing that struck me.

Another thing that struck me strongly was the emphasis on reform. It was a restlessness about the importance of reform, that reform is not a sort of moment. It’s not a period on a country. It’s a continuous mode of existence of the communist party. And it therefore has to be constantly on the move, constantly questioning itself, it’s constantly revising itself.

And I think that this emphasis which was very very apparent in his speech is the key to why the Chinese communist party has managed to continue to regenerate itself and regenerate its support.

The stark contrast with the Soviet communist party which basically ossified and decayed eventually, of course, disintegrated in effect.

And the Chinese communist party is the opposite. It’s the opposite phenomenon. And it’s actually much more dynamic, to be quite frank with you, than any western major political party that I can think of at the moment.

It just keeps moving on. Innovation is very much part of this kind of emphasis that is given by the Chinese communist party.

(British journalist and academic Martin Jacques, the author of global bestseller When China Rules The World, is one of the leading Western commentators on Chinese affairs. He is a senior fellow at Cambridge University and an invited senior fellow at the China Institute, Fudan University. Martin Jacques on China is an eight-part video series discussing issues affecting China’s future.)