Work report to be delivered at China’s Communist Party congress a long time in the making
- Drafting process is likely to have followed a similar path to previous versions
- Reviews of ‘top secret’ document by party leadership go unreported by state media
The report – both a report card and an action plan – is the product of almost a year of laborious efforts to forge consensus and collect opinions from the party’s rank and file.
Party officials have not divulged many details of the drafting of the report but it is expected to mirror the systematic process adopted in the drafting of previous ones.
A Xinhua report about how the work report of the 18th Central Committee was drafted five years ago offered a glimpse of that process.
It began with a meeting chaired by Xi in January 2017 to assemble a drafting team, which was headed by Xi himself and supported by some of his Politburo Standing Committee colleagues. Besides appointing its core members, Xi also laid down a number of defining parameters and directions for the drafting team, which was tasked with producing a report that would guide the party forward in the next five years.