Explainer | How are China’s 20th Communist Party congress delegates chosen?
- The selection process is different from elections in the West and requires multiple rounds of recommendations and reviews
- Candidates must include ethnic minorities, farmers and ‘model workers’, but results often reflect elite preferences, according to Chinese politics scholar
They will also endorse a list of members of the Central Committee, a body of more than 300 top party members, including President Xi Jinping, who is set to secure a third term as the party’s leader during the congress.
Between November and July, the delegates were put through a five-stage “rigorous and meticulous election process”, according to state news agency Xinhua.
First, each electoral unit’s organisation department nominated a pool of candidates.
According to Xinhua, Xi issued instructions on the delegate selection process, saying it should set strict standards for candidates, carefully review their integrity, stringently enforce electoral discipline and enhance party leadership.
The nominees were then reviewed by local discipline inspection and supervision organs.
In the southwestern province of Guizhou, a blacklist was set up to disqualify candidates who had violated party discipline rules or were deemed to have poor integrity, Xinhua reported.
About six months before the national congress, members of the party committee of each electoral unit voted on a shortlist of candidates.
Delegates to Communist Party congress named as plans enter last stages
On September 26, the final delegate list was released. In addition to central political officials and regional party chiefs and governors, the delegation includes party representatives from a variety of sectors.
Frontline workers account for 33.6 per cent of this year’s delegates. According to a tally by the Post, female representation has increased 3 percentage points to 27 per cent, or 619 delegates, while ethnic minority delegates total 264, or around 12 per cent – about the same as the previous party congress.
Victor Shih, a scholar of Chinese political economy at the University of California, San Diego, noted that women, who account for nearly half of China’s population, were still under-represented among delegates.
In Chinese politics, real decisions are often made before the formal meeting, which mainly serves to legitimise and tell others about the results.
Top leaders use the congress to explain decisions to a wider circle, and the delegates in turn endorse outcomes in a formal vote. The delegates also serve as important conduits to spread the message back in their respective constituencies.
Shih said the national delegates were not elected by rank-and-file party members in most cases, except in some central government units. Instead, they were chosen as a result of step-by-step elections by lower-level party delegations.
“The preferences of rank-and-file party members are highly filtered by the elite in this process. It is electoral, but not especially democratic, according to most political science definitions of ‘democracy’,” Shih said.
He explained that most elections in China were indirect, where people or ordinary party members elected delegates who then elected local leaders. The local leaders then elected higher-level local leaders before national delegates elected national leaders, both in the party and for the state.