How three recent 3rd plenums have changed China
All Communist parties in the world followed the Soviet model of governing — convening national party congresses to select leadership and adopt policies. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is no exception. The CCP was established by a group of disgruntled intellectuals after the October Revolution of 1917 to overthrow imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucratic imperialism. It convened seven national congresses when it was an opposition organization whose goal was to overthrow the existing government led by the Nationalist Party (KMT). It managed to drive the KMT to Taiwan and established the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
Initially, the CCP remained a party of revolution, and the concept of modernization was not introduced until 1964. When it was introduced, it only meant modernization in industry, agriculture, defense, and science/technology. But this was interrupted by wave upon wave of political campaigns. The death of Mao in 1976 ended China’s era of radical ideological purification, and his successor, Deng Xiaoping, began to modernize China at the end of 1978. This happened at the 3rd Plenum of CCP’s 11th National Congress. We may call this hard “modernization,” i.e., making China an economic and industrial powerhouse.
Deng quickly realized for China to sustain its hard modernization, the CCP needed to introduce soft modernization, which meant separation of Party and state, rule of law, choice and accountability in governance, and enabling ordinary people to participate meaningfully in politics. However, neither Jiang Zemin nor Hu Jintao were able to implement any meaningful measures toward marching China to soft modernization after China became the second largest economy in the world.
All eyes were on Xi Jinping after he came to power in 2012 and the 3rd Plenum of the CCP’s 18th National Congress in 2013 was seen as the best bet to move China more to soft modernization. Such ambitious measures were not put into action. Xi does not believe soft modernization will sustain the effort to make China great again. In fact, he sees that as the very cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Xi managed to violate the term limit that took so long for the CCP to institutionalize. As he has successfully accumulated and consolidated power, Xi has introduced a new concept called “Chinese modernization.” It is more than hard modernization generations of Chinese leaders had worked so hard to achieve but it is not soft modernization as we know it. It is a modernization that is designed to not only sustain CCP supremacy forever but to deliver a new alternative to the so-called Western modernization. This ambitious goal was laid out at the 3rd Plenum of the CCP’s 20th National Congress in July 2024.
Through a brief review of the CCP’s rise to power and three transformational 3rd Plenums, this paper suggests that after staying in power for more than 70 years, its leaders are trying to defy historical trends and operationalize a political arrangement that can enable it to sustain perpetual rule without alienating its people or antagonizing the more advanced countries in the world.
Early Plenums
The CCP was born on July 23, 1921, when its first Congress was held in Shanghai. There were only 13 representatives that attended this meeting. The CCP has more 98 million members when it convened its 20th national congress on October 16, 2022. It took 28 years for the CCP to seize national power and found the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949. It took another 29 years before CCP was able to figure out that it had engaged in a utopian, unsustainable and brutal campaign to enter Communism. For it to survive and maintain its supremacy, the CCP had to adopt a new national policy.
The CCP’s bloody rise to power and how it was supposed to govern the nation can be seen from its national congresses and each Congress’ plenums. For example, the CCP’s early membership was decimated on April 12, 1927, when Chiang Kai-shek made the decision to wipe out this political partner and its 6th Congress was held in Moscow from June 18 to July 11, 1928 with 142 representatives. When CCP convened its 7th Congress from April 23 through June 11, 1945 in Yanan, there were 755 attendees, representing 1.21 million members nationwide.
The 2nd Plenum of the 7th Congress was held from March 5 through 13, 1949 in Pingshan, Hebei Province, on the eve of its takeover of the national power. This was one of the most important CCP meetings because 1) it adopted the decision to overthrow the Nationalist reign and establish a new China; 2) it ushered in a new era of CCP governance, changing its focus from building bases in the rural area to controlling population in urban centers and from fighting the war to building the country; and 3) it concluded that after CCP’s rise to power, the two contradictions confronting the leadership would be the struggle between the proletarian class and the capitalist class and the conflict between the Chinese people and the Western imperialist forces. Although this Plenum did adopt a resolution to prevent the development of a personality cult, Mao Zedong emerged from the meeting as the CCP’s paramount overlord demanding absolute obedience.
The personalized leadership was reflected by the fact the 8th Congress was not held until September 1956. By then, CCP membership had grown to over 10 million. For a moment in 1964, it appeared that the Party would shift the focus from revolution to modernization but the 12th Plenum in October 1968 adopted the resolution to expel one of its most important leaders, then President of the PRC Liu Shaoqi, from the CCP, and labeled him as a “traitor, spy, and scab,” Liu’s expulsion being hailed by the Plenum as the greatest victory of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that was crucial in consolidating proletarian dictatorship and preventing capitalist restoration.
Three more CCP national Congresses were held. Zhou Enlai, one of CCP’s central leaders and its first premier, re-introduced the four modernizations in January 1975, and announced that the CCP would aim to realize it by the end of the century. Zhou died a year later, and Mao died on September 9 in the same year. Barely a month later, the Gang of Four was arrested and thrown into jail. These events provided the opening requisite for a new era: “Reform and Opening Up.”
The 3rd Plenum in 1978
The CCP’s 11th Congress was held from August 12 through 18, 1977. There were 1,510 attendees representing 35 million CCP members. Although there was national yearning for a normalized way of life, the Congress still adhered to the idea that class struggle would continue to be the focus of national governance and the “Two Whatevers” (“We will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made, and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave”) remained in place. Deng Xiaoping was making moves to edge Hua Guofeng, Mao’s designated successor, out of power. By the time of the 3rd Plenum, Hua was only nominally the CCP’s leader. Deng was in complete control and determined to have a clean break with Mao’s leftist policies.
”Reform and opening up” was not adopted as the CCP’s fundamental policy until the 3rd Plenum of the CCP’s 11th National Congress, held in Beijing from December 18 to 22, 1978. On December 13, 1978, five days before the 3rd Plenum, Deng delivered a major speech entitled “Liberating Thought, Seeking Truth and Looking Forward with Unity”. On December 16, China and the U.S. issued their Joint Normalization Communique. On December 22, the 3rd Plenum was over and issued its resolution. Excerpts from the key paragraph of the resolution are as follows:
The realization of the four modernizations requires a substantial increase in the productive forces, and inevitably calls for a multifaceted change in the relations of production and the superstructure, which are not adapted to the development of the productive forces, and a change in all the unadapted modes of management, activities and ways of thinking, and is therefore a broad and profound revolution. … [As] Comrade Mao Zedong has said, the large-scale, stormy mass class struggle has basically come to an end…. The Plenum called on the whole Party, the whole army and the people of all nationalities to work with one heart and one mind to further develop the political situation of stability and unity, and to mobilize at once, go all out and make concerted efforts to carry out a new long march to build our country into a modern and powerful socialist country within this century.
This very complicated statement could be simplified as: In brief, the CCP had decided to throw the concept of class struggle out of the window and focus all its energy and resources on developing the economy. As Deng and his supporters liked to say later:
1) We do not mind if the cat is black or white; it is a good cat if it can catch mice;
2) to get rich is glorious;
3) capitalist grass is so much better than socialist weeds.
In other words, the so-called liberation of 1949 was driving out nationalists and enslaving the Chinese people with Marxist beliefs. What Deng and his supporters managed to accomplish at the 3rd Plenum of the 11th Congress was the real liberation of the Chinese mind, imagination and innovation. This was the real beginning of the meaningful rise of China that was the dream of many of the PRC’s founding fathers, a dream that had either got lost by Mao’s whims or subdued into resignation by Mao’s brutality.
For a political party that has governed the state for more than 75 years, this was the only plenum that mattered in ushering into a new era, a different way of making decisions for the betterment of its people. In the words of Hu Wei, a famous Chinese political scientist, “The most important significance of the 3rd Plenum of the 11th CCP National Congress is that it realized the rectification of the CCP’s political, ideological, organizational, and diplomatic policies, and initiated the reform and opening-up. This decision has enabled China to catch up with the times in a giant stride.”
For years thereafter, while there were leaders at the front, the person sitting in the back –– Deng Xiaoping — controlled the levers of power. Normalcy had slowly returned to the country that had been ravaged by foreign aggressions, civil wars, and internal rectifications for over a century. Almost a decade into this seismic transformation of the country, Chinese people took to the streets in the wake of the sudden death of Hu Yaobang, a beloved CCP leader, who was sacked because many CCP elders felt his loyal and staunch implementation of the 3rd Plenum call for reform was threatening the CCP’s supremacy. What followed was a crackdown on June 4, 1989, known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre. A new CCP leader, Jiang Zemin, was ushered in. Jiang initially misjudged Deng’s intentions and wanted to reverse policies introduced in the past 10 years. Deng only managed to put the 3rd Plenum policies back on track in the spring of 1992 with support from the Chinese military.
Thereafter, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao had ruled China from 2002 through 2012. They had largely sustained the momentum of the 1992 but did not have the vision and courage to push China further down the road of reform. Chinese people were pinning their hope on the new leader, who spent most of his time in coastal governments, which have always been the vanguards of China’s foray into the market economy and political reform experimentation. People were eagerly waiting for the 3rd Plenum of CCP’s 18th National Congress.
The 3rd Plenum in 2013
Twenty years after Deng’s Southern Tour, China had largely adhered to the 3rd Plenum policies and became the second-largest economy in the world. But there were both domestic and foreign challenges that called for deepening and expansion of reform and opening up. In November 2012, a new CCP leader, Xi Jinping, emerged at the 18th CCP National Congress.
The plenum was held from November 9-12, 2013 and adopted a reform package that was very ambitious and visionary, covering economic development, political reform, cultural rejuvenation, societal progress, and ecological civilization. Cheng Li, former director of Brookings Institution’s John Thornton China Center, said, “This is another turning point in China’s economic development. If in the previous decade we did not see the expansion of the middle class, this is the beginning of another wave of private sector development. There is no question about that. Because party leadership embraced the idea. This is already being seen as the mandate of the Xi Jinping administration.”
In the wake of the plenum, CCP created seven working groups consisting of government officials and policy advisors to submit reform proposals for the following sectors: banking and financial services, fiscal and tax systems, land use rights, production factor prices, administrative examinations and approvals, social injustice, and household registration system (hukou).
However, a decade after this 3rd Plenum, none of the lofty goals written out in the Resolution seem to have been achieved. For example, one key part of the reform package is how to better protect and promote the private sector of the economy. In the words of the plenum communique,
We must unwaveringly encourage, support and guide the non-publicly owned economy to develop, and encourage the economic vitality and creativity of the non-publicly owned economy. We must perfect asset protection systems, vigorously develop a mixed ownership economy, promote State-owned enterprises’ perfection of modern enterprise systems, and support the healthy development of the non-publicly owned economy.
Since the 1978 3rd Plenum, the private sector of China’s economy has become the engine of the national economic growth although the CCP has vigorously defended the SOEs and refuse to privatize any of it. The 2013 3rd Plenum did see the vital importance of the private sector and vowed to protect it. But in practice, the private sector continued to be treated as illegitimate bastards and was heckled and harassed by governments at all levels.
A series of CCP actions have sent big chill to China’s capitalists and pushed them to move their family and wealth outside China. These include: the campaign to regulate private capital, the movement to implement “common prosperity,” the decision to limit how money can be raised and lent and to not allow Ant Group to go IPO in Hong Kong, the crackdown on educational service and gaming industries, and the conviction of many famous private business leaders like Xiao Jianhua, Ye Jianming, and Wu Xiaohui. The fact that the CCP leaders tried three times in 2018, 2021, and 2025 respectively to reassure the private sector that it has the firm support of the government speaks volume of this sector’s dire lack of confidence that they can be treated fairly and equally by the government.
Another abject failure of the 2013 3rd Plenum is reflected in the lack of meaningful reform to the rigid and discriminatory hukou system (household registration). Large-scale urbanization requires China to abolish the hukou system so that both urban residents and rural residents are entitled to the same welfare and privileges guaranteed by the laws and regulations of the Chinese government. According to the National Development and Reform Commission, as of the end of 2022, 920 million Chinese live in the urban centers whereas 491 million still live in the countryside. There are no statistics on how many urban dwellers do not have urban hukou. If they do not have urban hukou, they do not exist in the cities where they also need access to education, health care, and other services. The 7th Census of China reports on May 11, 2021, that more than 375 million Chinese people are “migrants,” meaning they live in places where they do not have hukou. These numbers reflect a massive injustice that has existed in China since the 1950s. The effort to reform it called for by the 2013 3rd Plenum has certainly failed utterly. One verdict rendered by two U.S.-based scholars is: “Xi’s first third plenum in 2013 appeared unusually ambitious, raising hopes for economic and political liberalization, but its true significance was in enabling Xi’s centralization of power.”
The periodic but brutal assault on the private sector and the continuation of deliberate division of its citizens into two classes are only two examples of the overall fiasco of the 2013 3rd Plenum. There has been no comprehensive analysis of why this plenum failed so miserably but it is safe to say the ambitious reform measures were derailed by the mortal fear that CCP was threatened more by the epidemic corruption within its ranks, the resistance from the special interests groups, the change of priority of the leadership and the lack of will and determination to carry the proposed reform measures to fruition.
The 3rd Plenum in 2024
By convention, the CCP 19th National Congress of October 2017 and its 3rd Plenum in late February 2018 would usher in a new leadership — just as Jiang Zemin was replaced by Hu Jintao at the 16th Congress and Hu was replaced by Xi Jinping at the 18th Congress. However, Xi’s team had managed to amend the constitution in 2018, and in 2022 he launched his third term as CCP leader at the 20th National Congress with a Standing Committee whose members he handpicked himself. With such a seemingly factionless core leadership, decisions should be made quicky and decisively.
There was speculation after the Congress in October 2022 that its 3rd plenum would bring about a comprehensive reform package. However, the conventional timeline was not observed, and the plenum was not convened in 2023. China watchers began to wonder if anything unusual had happened at the top. In the early summer of 2024, there were even rumors that a coup took place and Xi had had to reduce his once unlimited and unrestricted exercise of power. At the same time, China’s economic strength continued to weaken significantly.
The 3rd Plenum was finally convened on July 15-18, 2024, and its communique spelled out a blueprint of reform as ambitious as the ones that were held in December 1978 and November 2013. It solemnly declared that:
By 2035, we will have finished building a high-standard socialist market economy in all respects, further improved the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics, generally modernized our system and capacity for governance, and basically realized socialist modernization. All of this will lay a solid foundation for building China into a great modern socialist country in all respects by the middle of this century. To steadily advance reform, we will focus on building a high-standard socialist market economy, advancing whole-process people’s democracy, developing a strong socialist culture in China, raising the people’s quality of life, building a Beautiful China, advancing the Peaceful China Initiative to a higher level, and improving the Party’s capacity for leadership and long-term governance. The reform tasks laid out in this resolution shall be completed by the time the People’s Republic of China celebrates its 80th anniversary in 2029.
It is too early to render a full evaluation of the successes or failures of this new reform initiative that was designed to accomplish full modernization of Chinese characteristics （中国式现代化）since just six months have passed after the conference. An Asia Society report calls the resolution of the 2024 plenum “a game-changing reform program” with “a notably fast start and a move to transparency,” but noted that the CCP “clearly does not intend for China’s political system to converge with Western norms.”
A Jamestown Foundation China Brief essay declares that the 3rd Plenum resolution “does nothing to mitigate concerns about the real estate sector, weak domestic demand, subsidized export-oriented manufacturing, and plans to achieve dominance in critical technologies. The two longest ‘specific tasks’ focus on ‘deepening reform of the science and technology system’ and emphasizing the role of the state in the economy.” It also finds the CCP leadership seems to believe national security is no less important than economic growth and it also has “growing concerns about the international environment” and sees the urgent “need to actively reshape the global system.”
The Resolution of this plenum ends with this statement:
Let the whole Party, the entire military, and Chinese people of all ethnic groups rally more closely around the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core. Let us hold high the banner of reform and opening up, pool all wisdom and strength, and forge ahead with enterprise. Let us work hard toward the Second Centenary Goal of building China into a great modern socialist country in all respects and strive to advance the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation on all fronts through Chinese modernization.
Producing an action plan to realize Chinese modernization, which was declared as CCP’s ultimate aim at the 20th CCP National Congress, was the end goal of its 3rd plenum as well. This is how Xi Jinping defines Chinese modernization:
It contains elements that are common to the modernization processes of all countries, but it is more characterized by features that are unique to the Chinese context. Chinese modernization is the modernization of a huge population, of common prosperity for all, of material and cultural-ethical advancement, of harmony between humanity and nature and of peaceful development.
While Chinese modernization is not a small goal to achieve and contains, if achieved, elements that any advanced civilization needs, under Xi it has nothing to do with political reform, something many Chinese people and China watchers have hoped to be included in this plenum.
Conclusion
On August 18, 1980, Deng Xiaoping delivered a major speech on China’s political reform. He outlined four goals for this reform as the following:
1) It is not good to have an over-concentration of power.
2) It is not good to have too many people holding two or more posts concurrently or to have too many deputy posts.
3) It is time for us to distinguish between the responsibilities of the Party and those of the government and to stop substituting the former for the latter.
4) We must take the long-term interest into account and solve the problem of the succession in leadership.
It is obvious that what Deng had in mind was a two-step reform action plan: economic reform (hard modernization) first and political reform (soft modernization) second; sustained economic reform could only be secured by political reform. The first reform was put into action at the 1978 3rd Plenum, but the political reform was delayed repeatedly. 2012 was the 30th anniversary of the Southern Tour but Xi Jinping used this occasion to lament how political reform (glasnost) in Russia led the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. This mindset naturally led to the lack of political reform contents in the 2013 3rd Plenum. In fact, the formation of small leadership groups to coordinate each reform aspect evolved into the hollowing of the authority of both CCP and State power structures. It took the CCP decades to transform its governance from personal intervention to institutionalized process but it only took a couple of years since 2013 for it to return to the old unchecked and capricious mode.
The 2024 3rd Plenum seems to have negated Deng Xiaoping’s two-step reform action plan by declaring that what the CCP plans to achieve is something totally different from other countries and therefore political reform is unnecessary. Chinese modernization is the key to interpret the meaning and significance of this 3rd Plenum and it is a form of modernization that apparently requires absolute control of power by the CCP under the leadership of one person.
What remains to be seen is if the absence of political reform will enable China to continue to grow its economy or drive it to ruins. Indeed, if the CCP is able to sustain China’s economic development, make its people happy with both material abundance and spiritual satisfaction, reduce its global carbon print, and contribute to a more peaceful and prosperous world, then we have to acknowledge Chinese modernization is the new city upon the hill, not an insidious maneuver to return the running of China back to its first 30 years, from 1949 to 1979.
If the 1978 3rd Plenum gave birth to a new era of governing China, the 2024 3rd plenum found a channel to send it back to the age of political darkness. The 2013 3rd Plenum was an opportunity to make soft modernization a top priority. How this opportunity was lost requires more in-depth analysis.
