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On June 18, the Fourth Chongqing Municipal Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) started in the southwestern metropolis. In the following five days, more than 700 delegates outlined Chongqing’s development blueprint for the next five years and elected a new local Party leadership.
There are 31 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions on the Chinese mainland. Article 24 of the CPC Constitution stipulates that the Party congress of a province, autonomous region, or municipality directly under the Central Government is held once every five years. One of its functions is to elect the Party committee at the corresponding level, which is the top decision-making body of the locality. The newly elected Party committee will then hold a plenary session and elect a standing committee with a secretary as its leader, which will exercise the power of the committee when it is not in session.
The latest round of local Party leadership reshuffle in China started in October 2011 and is on track to be completed before the 18th National Congress of the CPC, which is scheduled later this year. By June 13, CPC organizations in 29 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities under the Central Government had held their congresses and elected new leaders. Chongqing and Beijing, where the Party congress started on June 21, were the last two provincial-level regions to carry out the process.
Normally, the standing committee of a provincial-level Party committee has 12 or 13 members. The 29 newly elected provinciallevel Party committees have 377 standing committee members. According to official information, 103 of them, or 27 percent, are doctorate holders.
The Party Committee of Tianjin Municipality elected a 13-member standing committee on May 26, which stood out for its academic strength. Seven standing committee members hold a doctor’s degree, with their majors ranging from management, economics, law to literature.
“Undoubtedly, the trend is that more senior-degree holders from top universities will bring their expertise into management,”said Wang Guixiu, a professor at the Party School of the Central Committee of the CPC.
Fields of current local Party leaders’ studies span a wide spectrum, from crop-planting to state-of-the-art computing and technology-intense laser physics, according to their resumes. Many of the leaders with doctorates also give lectures in universities or conduct research in institutes.
Li Xiuling, 50, a standing committee member in charge of organization and staff affairs of the CPC Hainan Provincial Committee, was an associate professor of history at Nanjing University in the 1980s and 1990s.
There are four provincial Party chiefs with a doctor’s degree. Wang Min, Party Secretary of northeastern Liaoning Province, used to be vice president of Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in east China’s Jiangsu Province, where he obtained his doctorate in mechanical engineering and taught in the 1980s and 1990s.
Yuan Chunqing, Party Secretary of Shanxi Province in north China, studied in Hunan University for a doctor’s degree in management between 1994 and 1997 and conducted post-doctoral research at the School of Economics of Peking University between 1999 and 2001.
Guo Shengkun, Party Secretary of southwestern Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, received a doctor’s degree in management from the School of Economics and Management of University of Science and Technology Beijing in 2007.
Sun Zhengcai, Party Secretary of Jilin Province in the northeast, holds a doctor’s degree in agriculture and once worked as a researcher at Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences. Sun, former Minister of Agriculture, apparently has benefited from his strong background in a province that is a major producer of grains.
Zhu Lijia, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Governance, told People’s Daily that the presence of leaders with strong and multidisciplinary education backgrounds will result in a leadership with comprehensive knowledge bases, strategic insight and more capacity to deal with social governance challenges in a modern society.
According to the Chongqing Morning Post, the average age of newly elected standing committee members of provincial-level Party committees, excluding one whose age information is unavailable, is 54.84. There are 66 people aged below 50 years, accounting for 17.55 percent of the total.
Among the 29 newly elected provinciallevel Party chiefs, 22 were born in the 1950s, four in the 1940s and three in the 1960s. Born in September 1963, Sun, the top Party official of Jilin, is the youngest.
Zhou Qiang, Party Secretary of central Hunan Province, was born in 1960 and attended Southwest University of Political Science and Law, where he received a master’s degree in civil law. He worked in the Ministry of Justice for a decade after graduation before a career at the Communist Youth League of China (CYLC) Central Committee.
Born in April 1963, Hu Chunhua, Party Secretary of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in north China, was admitted by the Chinese Department of Peking University at the age of 16. Since his graduation, Hu has spent most of his political career in Tibet Autonomous Region.
In 2006, Hu replaced Zhou as the first secretary of the Secretariat of the CYLC Central Committee, a post once held by many state leaders, including General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee Hu Jintao.
So far, Party committees of Guizhou Province as well as Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet autonomous regions, have the largest number of standing committee members who were born in the 1960s, with seven each.
The youngest standing committee member of a provincial-level CPC committee is 44-year-old Yang Yue in southeastern Fujian Province. Yang obtained his doctor’s degree in engineering from Tsinghua University at the age of 28 and worked at the Secretariat of the CYLC Central Committee from 2001 to 2008.
The only female provincial Party head is 62-year-old Sun Chunlan, who became Party secretary of Fujian in 2009 and was reelected last November.
Development agendas
“Formulating a development plan suiting local conditions and electing qualified new leaders are the two major tasks of provinciallevel Party congresses,” said Professor Zhu.
While provincial-level regions in central and western China still put economic growth high on their agendas, provinces in economically advanced eastern areas identified different priorities.
For example, the Party congress of Shaanxi, Anhui and Jiangxi provinces, as well as Xinjiang and Guangxi autonomous regions, all put forward the goal of doubling their GDP over the next five years.
The Party congress of the southwestern Guizhou Province listed the targets of eliminating absolute poverty in the economically backward province and dramatically raising people’s living standards.
By contrast, southern Guangdong Province, which has topped the country’s provincial GDP rankings for 23 consecutive years, did not mention GDP in its Party congress report. The economic part of the report instead emphasized the tasks of growth model transformation and industrial upgrading by developing energy conservation, tourism and innovation industries.
The Party congress of the southern island province Hainan highlighted the goals of developing its marine economy and building itself into a top international tourism destination.
Meanwhile, improving people’s livelihood has become the common theme of Party congresses around China.
Xinjiang, Liaoning, Anhui, Hunan, Yunnan and Jilin all shared the goal of doubling per-capita residential income over the next five years.
The Party congress report of Guangdong pledged to ensure people’s equal access to public services, including education, medical care, pension and shelter.
The Party congress of Jiangsu listed increasing the income of middle- and lowincome families, narrowing income gaps, promoting people’s full development and guaranteeing people’s dignity as major tasks over the next five years.