The 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party begins this Sunday (16), in the country’s capital. The event, held in the ostensible Great Hall of the People in Beijing every five years, brings together more than 2,000 members of the legend to elect their command structure and define the guidelines that will guide the next five-year period.
Coordinator of the Center for China-Brazil Studies at FGV Direito Rio, Evandro Menezes de Carvalho says that the meeting has taken place since the founding of the Communist Party in 1921, although its frequency was quite irregular until the 1980s.
Between the sixth and seventh editions, for example, more than 15 years passed: they were held in 1928 and 1945, respectively, a period marked by internal and external conflicts. See below for a list of past congresses that help to understand how China got here.
1921
The first congress took place between secret meetings in and around the city of Shanghai. According to Menezes, it gathered only 13 people. The conclave was responsible for formally establishing its objectives and drafting the founding letter of the Communist Party, which already had the young Mao Tse-tung in its ranks.
1928
Menezes says that the sixth edition of the event was the only one to be held abroad, in Moscow, in the then Soviet Union. The meeting took place the year after the expulsion of the Communists from the Kuomintang, the Nationalist Party, then in power.
[1945
The seventh meeting took place in the last year of the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), in a fortress in Yanan, an old village in the northern province of Shaanxi. It was this congress that enshrined Mao as the party’s supreme leader and his ideas as the cornerstone of its ideology. The meeting was also the longest in the legend’s history, lasting almost 50 days – today, it lasts about a week.
1969
The ninth congress took place at the height of the Cultural Revolution, promoted by Mao from 1966 onwards with the aim of strengthening his base in power. The initiative, which outlawed everything considered bourgeois, led to a decade of social chaos and narrowly missed a civil war.
Mao named military man Lin Biao as his successor, and more than 80% of the party’s Central Committee was removed. Lin died two years later, in a mysterious plane crash in Mongolia, after becoming suspected of planning Mao’s assassination.
1982
It was at the 12th conclave that the then secretary general Deng Xiaoping presented his proposal for a “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, giving rise to an approximation of the Chinese economy with the free capitalism practiced by the West.
2002
In the 16th edition of the event, the party formally allowed entrepreneurs from the private sector to evaluate themselves to the legend. With that, he made official the opening to the market that he had been promoting since the end of the 1970s, but that was frowned upon internally.
2007
The meeting saw the promotion of Xi Jinping, the party’s current secretary general, and Li Keqiang, the retiring prime minister, directly to the Politburo Standing Committee, the highest body of the Chinese CP and the regime as a whole — even they were not members of the Politburo initially. This marks the beginning of the political rise of the two among the so-called fifth generation of leaders.
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