CPC Piloting Orderly Top Personnel Changes Successful

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Friday, November 22, 2002

CPC Piloting Orderly Top Personnel Changes Successful

The CPC 16th National Congress is of great historic political significance as it marks CPC moving from a revolutionary one of the past to one piloting orderly senior personnel changes of CPC top leadership. This, as things are revealed at the 16th CPC Congress, has been made true.

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The CPC 16th National Congress is of great historic political significance as it marks CPC (the Communist Party of China) moving from a revolutionary one of the past to one piloting orderly senior personnel changes of CPC top leadership. This, as things are revealed at the 16th CPC Congress, has been made true.

Young competent faces with expertise ushered in

Members and alternative members of the new CPC Central Committee (CCCPC) are at an average 55.4 in age, 98.6 percent with a college or above education background: 180 got enlisted in New China, 180 newly elected. Provincial governors, Party and deputy Party secretaries meanwhile make 30 percent, two times over the 15th CCCPC past. This shows the Chinese Party's will to bring in regional leaders especially those at a younger age and most outstanding into the leading core of a younger specialized echelon of Party leadership steering China's cause.

Among the 24 members of the new Politburo, seven had been members on last CPC Central Committee, five from the State Council, 10 from local provinces and municipalities, two from the military, and the only alternative Politburo member Wang gang is director of General Office of CCCPC. On top of the six senior members retired from the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC), seven out of the other 14 former leading members, age at 66 or above, did not enter the new CCCPC but retired from CPC's top leadership.

Personnel changes become more transparent.

Two months after Beidaihe meeting called at the end of last August, CPC made public its arrangement of top cadres before President Jiang went on his U.S. tour last month. Former Beijing Secretary Jia Qinglin and his Shanghai counterpart Huang Ju got their advancement to central posts. Since then, candidates for PSC began unveiled, marking the CPC's personnel arrangements become more transparent than before.

The 12th CPC Congress had formally ruled on construction of a "young, revolutionary" cadre contingent with expertise and decided on nurturing a "third echelon" composed of qualified young and middle-aged cadres through careful selection and helped to take over helm from senior Party leaders.

Since the 12th Party Congress, an advisory committee system (which lasted 10 years and was abolished at the 14th Party Congress) was established at the central and provincial level. Some senior cadres retired to make way for the young and middle-aged, thereby realizing a smooth handover of leadership from the old to the young. In 1982, a Resolution on the Establishment of a Pension System for Senior Cadres was issued, which set demands on the terms of posts and proposed theoretically to abolish the life tenure system of leaders and cadres. Meanwhile, relevant amendments were made to the national constitution. Up to the 15th Party Congress, CPC set the ceiling limiting tenure of the young succeeding the old. Thus, outsiders inferred the personnel replacement in the just-ended 16th Party Congress might reflect a mechanism ruling on an orderly replacement of top Party leadership.

Former CPC general secretary Hua Guofeng, ever appointed successor by Chairman Mao Zedong and a CCCPC member for four Party congresses, also retired as an octogenarian from the 16th CCCPC. "This marks the end of a past era", a Beijing-based foreign diplomat said.

Director Hu Angang with the Country Situation Office of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said during the 16th Congress "a more transparent, steady and predictable system has been established". He held that orderly leadership transition achieved at the 16th CPC National Congress was "more thorough" than expected and a "historic progress" made to the name of CPC.

By PD Online Staff Zhu Lizhen

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