In the following article, Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez examines the Fifth Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, which adopted a resolution on persevering with full and rigorous Party self-governance.
Starting from Mao Zedong’s 1945 conversation with Huang Yanpei on how to escape the historical cycle of rise and fall, Carlos traces the problem of bureaucratism and privilege in socialist states from Lenin’s warnings to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and shows how the CPC’s commitment to self-reform – together with the people’s oversight of government and the mass line – has become a permanent feature of its governance and a profound contribution to the theory and practice of Marxist party building.
This is an expanded version of an article written for CGTN, which appeared on 31 October.
In July 1945, the educator Huang Yanpei visited Yan’an and put a question to Mao Zedong. Throughout Chinese history, he observed, dynasties had emerged only to decay over time – their rulers growing complacent, their bureaucracies bloated, their people alienated. Could the Communists escape this historical cycle? Mao replied that they had found a new path: that of people’s democracy, supervision and accountability. “Only when the people are allowed to supervise the government will the government not slacken”.
Eighty-one years later, the same question was the central theme of the Fifth Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, which closed in Beijing on 29 October. The plenum adopted a resolution on persevering with full and rigorous Party self-governance, its communiqué stating that the Party “has found two answers to the question of how to escape the historical cycle of rise and fall”: “the people’s oversight over government and the Party’s self-reform”.
A longstanding challenge
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels famously wrote in the Communist Manifesto that communists “have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole”. Maintaining that unity of interests in practice, over the course of more than a century of socialist governance, has thrown up numerous challenges. How can a ruling communist party prevent the emergence of bureaucratism, corruption and privilege; how can it stay in touch with the masses? It is noteworthy that the plenum communiqué consciously echoes the founders of scientific socialism: “The Party tolerates no corruption, as it has no special interests of its own besides the interests of the working class and the greatest possible majority of the people.”
As early as 1919, just two years after the October Revolution, Lenin was already warning that the new Soviet state faced a serious danger: that reactionary elements were “assuming the colouring of communists and, to succeed better in their careers, procuring membership cards of the Russian Communist Party”. Such people quite clearly had interests separate and apart from those of the working people, namely, increasing their personal wealth and advancing their careers. Lenin’s writings in the final years of his life return again and again to the problem of bureaucracy and to the gap opening up between the party and the masses. In a speech on 30 December 1920 – somewhat ironically, a sharp rebuttal of ideas advanced by Trotsky and Bukharin – he famously said that “ours is a workers’ state with a bureaucratic twist to it”, sometimes translated as “a workers’ state with bureaucratic deformations”.
And indeed, in the last decades of the Soviet Union’s existence, a privileged layer of officials did emerge; there was a certain fusion of wealth and power; and the masses did become alienated. Things reached a point, as Xi Jinping has observed, where the Communist Party’s 19 million members did little to resist the dissolution of their party and state in 1991.
Self-reform in theory and practice
Since the start of the new era in 2012, the CPC has placed the notion of self-reform (a more literal translation is “self-revolution”) at the centre of its work. It holds that a ruling party must subject itself to continuous scrutiny, rectification and renewal, because no external force can do the job for it.
The most prominent examples of its implementation are the eight-point decision on work conduct (improving work style and strengthening ties with the people), a substantially strengthened system of supervision, and an anti-corruption campaign of unprecedented scale.
In 2025 alone, 115 officials at provincial or ministerial level and above were placed under investigation, and 983,000 people received disciplinary punishments. Significantly, 33,000 people were investigated for offering bribes: the campaign targets those who seek to buy influence as well as those who sell it.
The Fifth Plenum builds on this foundation, reaffirming the Party’s commitment to self-reform and to the people’s oversight of government and seeking to “enhance the Party’s capacity for long-term governance”.
The communiqué places strong emphasis on primary-level Party organisations and on following “the Party’s mass line in the new era”. The mass line is among the CPC’s oldest and most important principles. In 1943, Mao described it as a method of leadership: take the scattered and unsystematic ideas of the masses, concentrate them through study into systematic ideas, then return to the masses to propagate and explain them “until the masses embrace them as their own”, testing them in action. “From the masses, to the masses” means that leadership is a continuous, two-way, dialectical relationship between Party and people.
The mass line remains a living practice. During the campaign to eliminate extreme poverty, more than 3 million officials were sent to live and work in poor villages. The drafting of the 15th Five-Year Plan drew on several million suggestions submitted online. Underpinning all of this is a party of 101 million members organised in 5.43 million grassroots organisations. Popular supervision and internal self-reform are thus not alternatives but two sides of the same commitment.
None of this means the problems have been solved once and for all; the communiqué’s call for accountability where self-supervision fails acknowledges that the work continues. The plenum’s confirmation of the expulsion of several senior figures shows that discipline applies at every level, including the very top.
The aim, in the communiqué’s words, is to ensure that “the Party always remains a vibrant Marxist governing party that stays at the forefront of the times, enjoys the wholehearted support of the people, and is able to withstand all tests”.
An article in People’s Daily published on the opening day of the plenum noted:
The General Secretary [Xi Jinping] stressed that “I have said many times that our Party’s greatness lies not in never making mistakes, but in never hiding its illnesses for fear of treatment”. Those who are selfless have nothing to fear. Our Party has no special interests of its own; this is the source of our Party’s courage to turn the blade inward, the foundation of its confidence, and the distinctive mark that sets our Party apart from other political parties in the world. “Though a thousand million people stand in my way, I shall go forth.” Our Party has never for a moment relaxed in resolving its own problems, has always kept pace with the demands of the times, of practice and of the people, and has become “a Marxist party that cannot be knocked down or crushed”. This is deeply connected to the original aspiration and true character to which it has always remained faithful. (Unofficial translation)
Here Xi Jinping echoes the stand Lenin took in “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder:
A political party’s attitude towards its own mistakes is one of the most important and surest ways of judging how earnest the party is and how it fulfils in practice its obligations towards its class and the working people. Frankly acknowledging a mistake, ascertaining the reasons for it, analysing the conditions that have led up to it, and thrashing out the means of its rectification – that is the hallmark of a serious party; that is how it should perform its duties, and how it should educate and train its class, and then the masses.
Why it matters
Early Marxist theory was largely concerned with how a party wins power; for obvious reasons, it had much less to say about how a party keeps its character once it has held power for decades, not least at the head of a socialist market economy with a large private sector, in a world still to a great extent dominated by capitalism. The market generates constant pressure: the temptation for officials to develop interests of their own, and the attempts by sections of private capital to bend public power to its will. Self-reform is the answer – not dispensing with the role of the market, but making sure that the working class and its Party, and not capital, set the direction.
The problem is not unique to China. Governing parties across the Global South face the same dangers of corruption and, increasingly, of a widening gap between leaders and base. In the Global North, meanwhile, numerous parties with a long history of representing working-class interests, at least to some degree, are sliding into political atrophy. Vietnam’s “blazing furnace” anti-corruption campaign shows that other ruling communist parties are drawing similar conclusions, and many parties in Africa, Asia and Latin America study the CPC’s experience closely.
Huang Yanpei’s question has certainly not lost its relevance. The CPC has made answering it a permanent feature of governance, and in doing so has made a profound contribution to the theory and practice of Marxist party building.
Excellent article!
Superb analysis and historical references. Thank you comrade.