On July 18, the Chinese Communist Party concluded the Third Plenary session, or Third Plenum, of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, which will play a key role in which direction China will take over the coming years. In this plenum, China has launched a science and technology program of an intensity not usually seen except for a country facing major threats from abroad, or in the face of the threat of imminent war.
The Third Plenary Session, which occurs every five years, deals specifically with the economic direction of the country. It was the Third Plenum of the 11th Party Congress in 1978 in which Deng Xiaoping announced China’s reform and opening up, and it was the Third Plenum of the 18th Party Congress in 2013 that determined that the market would be playing a decisive role in the Chinese economy. This year’s Third Plenum will prove to be as decisive, if not more so, than those previous plenums.
The plenum is happening at a pivotal—and disruptive—period in world history. NATO’s ongoing war in Ukraine, a possible war in the Middle East stemming from Israel’s total suppression of Palestinian nationhood, and the ongoing campaign in the West to slow down the pace of China’s development—and even to “contain” China—has created a situation which is, as China’s President Xi Jinping has repeatedly said, “unseen in a century.” It represents cataclysmic shifts in the system of international relations and in the structure of global governance.
The Plenum issued a communiqué on July 18 covering all the issues that had been discussed and decided upon. The drafting of the communiqué was conducted by a group personally headed by Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping over a period of six months. As Xi himself indicated in an unusual introductory preface to the communiqué, it represented an intense process in which comments were solicited from experts in a variety of fields in the party, in the government, and in society generally.
