Significance
A Communist Party Congress is a significant event in Chinese politics since it nominally decides the leadership of the People's Republic of China. (The Politburo Standing Committee makes major policy decisions for the government to implement and the National People's Congress in the following March will elevate its members to top government positions.) The 17th Party Congress is estimated to attract over 1350 foreign and domestic journalists.
Although the Congress formally elects the Central Committee and Politburo, in practice these positions are negotiated before the congress, and the Congress has never functioned as a deliberative assembly. Nominees to Party positions are invariably elected by wide margins, with a tightly controlled candidate-to-position ratio. There is room for symbolic protest votes ("no" or "abstain" votes) that embarrass the party leadership. Despite its symbolic nature, it maintains an important role because it is the occasion at which the results of these deliberations are publicly announced, and in which the PRC leadership faces both domestic and foreign reporters in a press conference.
Since the mid-1980s, the Communist Party has attempted to maintain a smooth and orderly succession and avoid a cult of personality, by having a major shift in personnel every ten years in even-number party congresses, and by promoting people in preparation for this shift in odd-number party congresses. These mechanisms have been institutionalized by mandatory retirement ages, and provisions in both the Party and state constitutions that limit the term of office of officials to two five-year terms.
Read more about this topic: 17th National Congress Of The Communist Party Of China
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“History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.”
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“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)