Welcome back to What’s Happening in China, your weekly China brief.
It was with a stark rebuke of the Hu Jintao era that the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee concluded its fifth plenum this week.
“It was unanimously agreed that the Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core demonstrated tremendous political courage and a strong sense of responsibility in confronting the grave situation marked by weak, hollow, and watered-down Party leadership, lax, superficial, and ineffective self-supervision and self-governance, as well as some startling problems within the Party. Staying firmly committed to full and rigorous Party self-governance, the Central Committee introduced the most stringent measures and dedicated continuous efforts to tackle all these prominent issues. As a result, the problem of lax and weak self-supervision and self-governance has been addressed at the root, unhealthy tendencies that had long gone unchecked have been curbed, deep-seated problems that h…
