On July 18, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) concluded the Third Plenum of its 20th Party Congress. Held in a secured military conference hotel on the western outskirts of Beijing, proceedings closed with a ritual appearance by top leader Xi Jinping. Third Plenums, so called because they’re the third meeting of the party’s five-year cycles, cover economic policy; outcomes are scrutinized by cadres and global businesses alike.
On July 18, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) concluded the Third Plenum of its 20th Party Congress. Held in a secured military conference hotel on the western outskirts of Beijing, proceedings closed with a ritual appearance by top leader Xi Jinping. Third Plenums, so called because they’re the third meeting of the party’s five-year cycles, cover economic policy; outcomes are scrutinized by cadres and global businesses alike.
This Third Plenum duly addressed the economy but also broke from precedent: When the conclave wasn’t scheduled during the accustomed time last fall, speculation swirled around delays due to party purges and economic headwinds. With the session finally finished, we can now parse speeches and documents for insights into Beijing’s economic thinking—and gauge how CCP institutions have fared under Xi’s norm-bending rule.
One recurring catchphrase this session has been “reform and opening up”—a term with a rich history but invoked today in circumstances starkly different from the time of its original coinage. In 1978, paramount leader Deng Xiaoping was picking up the pieces after Mao Zedong’s chaotic rule. Deng sought to create stable conditions for economic growth. He sidelined Maoist cadres advocating “class struggle” and promoted reformers keen on economic experimentation. The 1978 Third Plenum keynote speech was Deng’s victory lap. In his clipped Sichuanese accent, speaking at the same military hotel, Deng called for China to open itself to foreign capitalists and overseas manufacturing firms. This new “reform and opening up” policy drove decades of growth, lifting the masses from poverty and integrating the People’s Republic with the global economy.
While official meetings were erratic under Mao, Deng sought a steadier rhythm. The terrors of the Cultural Revolution were subsiding; cadres found a certain solace in bureaucratic rituals. The headline event of the party calendar is the National Congress; in the pattern set after Mao’s death, it is held usually in October of years ending with 2 and 7. (Xi, for instance, ascended as CCP general secretary in 2012, gained a second term in 2017, and an unprecedented third in 2022.) At a full Congress, thousands of delegates convene in Beijing to ratify decisions about leadership and ideology, while 99 million party members look on.
After the Congress concludes, subsidiary plenums are called over the ensuing five-year span until the next full session. These intermediate meetings typically convene a few hundred CCP bigwigs and selected experts and have historically been held five to nine times (most commonly seven) before the following Congress half a decade later. Plenums typically cover party appointments (First Plenum), government personnel (Second), economic reform (Third), party-building activities (Fourth), fixing a new Five-Year Plan (Fifth), management of culture and history (Sixth), and a closing summation (Seventh) before the next Congress. Each meeting also disposes of sensitive party business arising in the interim. Since the Second Plenum in early 2023, several members of Xi’s top team—including ministers of defense and foreign affairs—have vanished into the CCP’s disciplinary apparatus, snared in graft and other indiscretions. At this plenum, their fates were finalized. Some offenders, stripped of party membership, now face criminal trial. Others got off more leniently: Last week, former Foreign Minister Qin Gang, who was disappeared for a year, formally lost membership of the elite Central Committee. But in an official document, he kept the appellation “comrade”—demotion without total disgrace. Such individual intrigues ultimately matter less than the overall tone: the “party line” and “main melody” of propaganda. In earlier eras, plenum themes reflected a more collective leadership. Today, that agenda closely follows the will of Xi himself.
Ever since Deng’s 1978 breakthrough set the template, observers have eagerly watched Third Plenums for portents of change. Results have always varied. Over the 1980s, one Third Plenum widened economic reforms from the countryside to the cities, but, with inflation rising, the next Third Plenum tightened statist wage controls and commodity price caps. After the Tiananmen Square crackdown in June 1989 froze political reforms, the 1993 Third Plenum signaled that economic reforms would continue: The communiqué made rhetorical room for capitalism by advocating a “socialist market economy.” This turn of phrase translated into epochal change: the dismantling of many state-owned enterprises and the end of “iron rice bowl” welfare security for more than 20 million people. The Third Plenums in 2003 and 2008 were, in hindsight, milquetoast: missed opportunities to update China’s growth model and rectify an unruly (and sometimes greedy) party apparatus.
When Xi took over in 2012, he had a mandate from his colleagues to secure the CCP’s future by taming corruption and enacting structural reforms. Xi’s first Third Plenum as leader—in November 2013—was met with high expectations. The conclave announced big changes: a plan to end the one-child policy and a determination to let market forces take a “decisive” role in the economy. Outside observers, squinting to see China’s economic modernization tracking toward convergence with the West, hailed the plenum as a masterstroke and Xi as a bold “reformer.”
The one-child policy was duly scrapped after several years. But the CCP soured on market mechanisms after Chinese stocks swooned in 2015, threatening the stability of the broader economy. The state responded with heavy-handed measures: strong-arming equity sales and detaining financial reporters. Meanwhile, party institutions grew more visible in everyday life and acted more assertively toward private businesses. Crackdowns snared rights lawyers and journalists; government regulators humbled China’s booming tech sector. Politics took priority—and command—over economics.
By 2018, Xi had decided to abolish term limits for the presidency of the People’s Republic, a post held concurrently with the more important role of CCP general secretary. Though the position is a state title—technically outside the party bureaucracy and calendar—this move seemingly disturbed the regular rhythms of party politics. The Third Plenum in 2018 fell early, landing in February rather than the fall. Unusually, that meeting focused on personnel rather than economic issues.
Today, a look back on Xi’s inaugural Third Plenum in 2013 shows the limitations of prognosticating based on that or any other party meeting. Some plans were implemented. In other cases, unexpected events may have overtaken the best intentions. But whatever the rhetoric, more than a decade later, the reality is trending toward more government intervention in the economy rather than less. A reformer Xi has been—but rarely in the direction Western observers might have hoped. Since Xi took power and held his inaugural Third Plenum at the expected time, two subsequent Third Plenums have fallen outside their usual season. Xi is now in power indefinitely, having amassed more formal titles and personal influence than any leader since Mao.
At the recently concluded Third Plenum, Xi and his comrades affirmed the expected themes with range of slogans, with some—such as “reform and opening up” and “Chinese-style modernization”—reflecting Deng’s legacy. Documents highlighted security and control while also calling for “high-quality development” in key sectors, such as green tech and semiconductors, believed to be crucial to future growth. Some perennial problems have resurfaced again after being mentioned in past Third Plenums but never faced.
In 2003 and 2013, communiqués suggested a property tax to raise local government revenue for health and welfare spending, but no comprehensive policy resulted. Now, a crumpling real estate sector threatens to tip into crises in local government debt and the economy at large. In 2024, the CCP sounds more tepid today toward market forces than in 2013, reprising the 1993 slogan of a “socialist market economy” while calling for “market order” and making scant mention of the private sector.
Even in 1978, the important politicking actually happened behind the scenes before Deng’s inaugural Third Plenum. In Deng’s keynote speech ending the session, even as he exhorted his comrades to “liberate [their] thinking” and “look forward,” he made no mention of the phrase “reform and opening up,” instead quoting from Lenin and praising Mao. Deng framed his new initiatives through Mao’s language, saying that to pursue true Marxism, cadres must “seek truth from facts.” Deng’s call for a foreign investment law came last in a list of draft legislation covering routine topics such as forestry, factories, and labor. The radical impact of Deng’s reforms only became apparent over time, through actions rather than words.
So it may have been with the Third Plenum in 2013, when Xi framed his ambitions in the language of his immediate predecessors. Whatever is said at the dais, Chinese policymaking ultimately depends as much—or more—on personalities, and the pressure of events, as on showpiece meetings of party or state.
This year’s arrhythmic Third Plenum has, so far, yielded a 5,000-word communiqué and a “decision” document, along with a profusion of records, commentary, and clarifications to elucidate the CCP’s will. These hail Xi’s “comprehensively deepening reforms” but have offered few specifics so far. Whatever the future of China’s politics and economy, Xi’s continuing central role in guiding both appears ensured.
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