What is the Party Congress, why is it important, and why only every 5 years?

The Party Congress is the closest thing in China to democracy. It’s a gathering of about 2,000 delegates from across the country whose main job is to vote for a new Central Committee. The new Central Committee then chooses the Politburo – usually about 20 or so members – and its all-powerful Standing Committee of nine or seven people who really run the country.

This may sound like little more than a rubber stamp and, indeed, most of the time that’s what it is. The delegates receive a list of candidates for the Central Committee – a few more candidates than seats – but they usually have received the nod from their bosses about who to vote for. They usually follow that advice – but they can ignore it. In 1987, for example, they kept a powerful hardline leftist ideologue out of the Central Committee and caused something of a furore by exercising their democratic power through a vote.

The Congress is important for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it’s a chance for the Communist Party to lay out its blueprint of policies to govern the country for the next five years. It was at one such Congress that Deng Xiaoping won the party’s buy-in for his controversial plan to introduce market reforms in China and open the country to the world. And in 1987, another party leader used the Congress to win the ideological debate over whether China should effectively allow capitalist methods – although, of course, that reform had quite another name.

But second, and more important, it’s when a new leadership comes to power.

This meeting happens only every five years because it’s China’s equivalent of electing a government. The Central Committee and its Politburo are appointed to rule for a period of five years. To hold such sessions more frequently would make it difficult to get any business done.

Do ordinary Chinese care?

Put simply, no, not really. Most Chinese feel that politics has little to do with their lives. They are relatively happy with the current unspoken deal between party and people. That is, the party will leave the people alone to get on with the business of making money and living a more comfortable life if the people leave the party to govern.

So most people think there’s little point in meddling with politics and feel it all happens very much in secret and what’s the point of bothering about it.

Isn’t it just a stage-managed old-style Communist setpiece?

Well, yes, it remains very stage-managed. The delegates turn up in their Sunday best – or in their colourful costumes if they are ethnic minority members. From Tibet, for example. They know that they pretty much just approve the speech by the party leader and rubberstamp the appointments to the new Central Committee.

But they also know that they are the people who govern China. They do on occasion voice discontent with certain policies and people. The current process is such that most of those concerns have already been taken into account by the time the party chief makes his speech on the opening day because the document has been reviewed by so many party members. The speech is increasingly a compromise document intended to satisfy pretty much everyone.

But the party leaders still need to win over members to their point of view.

How has the upcoming Olympics affected the Congress?

Hardly at all.

Although every coach ferrying delegates — and a great many official cars — must display the five colourful cuddly toy models of the Olympic mascots in the front windscreen window.

Hu has promised to tackle corruption and the wealth gap. How bad are these problems?

Corruption is an issue that enrages ordinary people. Almost everyone has a tale to tell of a local official or party cadre who is abusing his power to make money. The party has been worrying about corruption for years and has said repeatedly that this poses the greatest threat to its survival. But curbing corruption is proving to be something of a mission impossible. There are just so many opportunities for officials to make money in a system that lacks checks and balances and where there is no real accountability.

The party is in a bind: it is almost impossible to halt corruption in a one-party state and there is no way the party would contemplate any other political system.

People in the cities are becoming prosperous far more quickly than those in the countryside. Incomes nationwide are rising and there is no doubt that China has lifted more people — about 400 million — out of poverty more quickly than any other country in history. It is a huge achievement. But now the farmers are starting to fall behind as their incomes rise less rapidly than those of city dwellers. And in the cities, workers laid off from failing state-owned enterprises along with migrant workers from the countryside are beginning to form something of an underclass.

The numbers are telling. China has more dollar billionaires than any other country except the United States — up to 106 this year from 15 last year. But tens of millions of people still live on less than a dollar a day. The incomes of city dwellers are, on average, three times higher than the 700 million or so Chinese who live in the countryside.

President Hu Jintao and his colleagues worry that these people may begin to feel that they can’t benefit from economic reforms and could rise up in protest. More and more incidents of civil unrest are being reported in China. Many are very small-scale, but the party takes these seriously and as a warning of what could happen if the wealth gap becomes too wide.

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