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.

Xinhua said the Central Committee issued a notice four days later to all party organs, government departments and the military announcing the launch of an internal exercise to solicit opinions and suggestions for the work report. The invitation was also extended to the country’s non-communist political parties.

At the beginning of February 2017, the task force dispatched nine research groups to 16 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities, where they conducted 65 symposiums at various levels to frame the main themes of the report, Xinhua said.

With the main themes identified, Beijing organised them into 21 “major theoretical and practical issues”, and sent another 80 research groups from 59 departments to interview grass-roots units.

Xinhua said over 1,800 grass-roots units with more than 21,500 members took part in closed-door seminars and interviews from February to March 2017.

Party officials also mobilised researchers at universities and think tanks to commission special studies to provide references for the drafting team.

Deng Yuwen, a former deputy editor of Study Times, the Central Party School’s newspaper, said the first round of consultations would usually only involve cadres of bureau-level rank, but some lower-ranked individuals would be invited to provide input in specialised fields such as finance, economics and technology.

“I believe the work report of the 20th party congress this year will be of similar scope if not bigger,” he said.

Xinhua said a framework report was discussed by the drafting team in early May and much of the compilation of consultation materials was completed and finalised by the party’s central secretariat and its top policy think tank, the Central Policy Research Office, later that month.

With consultations completed, the drafting team produced an initial draft in late June. It was reviewed by Xi, who asked the drafters to put forward “new ideas, viewpoints and measures”, Xinhua said.

About a month later, the first draft of the report was submitted to the Politburo Standing Committee for review and comment. It was later disseminated to the full Politburo for feedback.

But those top-level meetings went unreported by state media as the report was still classified as a top party secret. Xinhua only confirmed they took place after the release of the full report.

The first glimpse of the report’s direction for lower-ranked cadres and the general population came when Xi addressed key provincial and ministerial leaders at a study session in Beijing in late July that year, telling them that all party members must uphold “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and emphasising loyalty to the party – messages later adopted as key themes of the work report.

That practice appears to have been repeated ahead of this year’s party congress, with Xi delivering a keynote speech on July 27 to a study session preparing provincial and ministerial officials for it.

After July, the drafting team was busy working on the actual content of the report. In early August, the Central Committee sent another notice to designated parties in party organs, government departments and the military for feedback on the draft of the work report. By the end of August, Xinhua said as many as 4,700 people had been consulted and 118 written proposals received, including the opinions of 33 retired party leaders.

The consultation exercise reached its zenith at about the same time. Xinhua said Xi personally chaired five seminars with senior provincial leaders, military generals, government ministers and senior cadres from key party organs to “listen to their opinions”.

“This is scientific and democratic decision-making in practice,” it said.

The exercise produced more than 1,700 suggestions for revision of the work report, with over three-quarters dealing with changes to its content and the remainder semantic.

Xinhua said the drafting team then added, revised and edited 986 parts of the work report – based on 864 suggested revisions it collected – before it was tabled to the seventh plenary meeting of the 18th Central Committee for adoption.