Editorial | Long-overdue third plenum to set tone for China’s development
- Meeting of Communist Party elite in July could be a watershed moment as its success may determine whether China earns the keys to the club of rich nations
At long last, China’s Communist Party leadership has scheduled the long-awaited third plenum for July. At the session, the Central Committee will meet to set the economic strategy for the coming five to 10 years.
It will be a decisive one, yielding clues to policy direction that will help decide whether China can avoid the increasingly obvious middle-income trap and transform its economy into a developed one.
The third plenum is often regarded as the most important of the seven plenums held during a Central Committee’s five-year cycle, and would usually have been held last October or November.
But term limits were ended for party chief Xi Jinping in 2018 and, now in his third term and his leadership undisputed, there is room for him to be flexible.
More likely, the work of fact finding and calibrating policy to tackle development complexity caused by domestic and external challenges required extra time.
Its timing is significant, falling during the anniversary month of the party, and ahead of the 75th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China founding in October.
