Communist Party the top boss of China’s state firms, Xi Jinping asserts in rare meeting
After decades of fading into the background, Communist Party’s leadership must be boosted in SOEs, president tells top officials and executives
China’s Communist Party organs must serve as the ultimate bosses of the country’s state-owned enterprises, the country’s top leader Xi Jinping said at an extraordinarily high-profile conference, sending a clear signal that the party will not loosen its grip on the state sector.
The two-day work conference concluded that the Communist Party must beef up its role, especially in terms of key decisions, ideology and personnel, in the country’s biggest industrial behemoths and financial enterprises, after gradually fading into the background of state company operation in recent decades.
The conference was also attended by three other members of China’s supreme seven-man Politburo standing committee.
Leadership by the party was the “root and soul” and “a unique advantage” of China’s state firms, or companies run by government-appointed bureaucrats, and any “weakening, fading, blurring or marginalisation” of party leadership in state firms would not be tolerated, Xinhua quoted Xi as saying at the meeting.
We must unswervingly uphold the party’s leadership in state-owned enterprises, and fully play the role of party organs in leadership and political affairs
It was the first time in history that the country’s No 1 leader had addressed a meeting specifically on the Communist Party’s leadership in state businesses. China has previously convened only two such meetings – one in 1996 attended by a then vice-premier and the other in 2009, attended by Xi who was China’s vice-president at the time.