China’s 17th Party Congress: Change or Continuity?
HONG KONG, Oct. 26, 2007 — China's 17th Party Congress: Change or Continuity? Participants include Pei Minxin, Yang Dali and Wang Shaoguang. Victor Mallet moderates.
The Chinese Communist Party's 17th Party Congress kicks off on October 15th. Held every five years, the Congress will lay out the political vision of the country's top leaders and determine policy directions for the next five years. The Congress will also designate a successor to Hu Jintao and select members to the powerful Central Committee, Politburo, and Politburo Standing Committee. What will be the outcome of this year's party congress? What will be the core personnel changes and how will this affect domestic policy initiatives and foreign and economic strategy?
Minxin Pei is a senior associate and director of the China program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. An expert on China, Taiwan, East Asia, and democracy, he has written many articles on economic growth and political reform in China, and he also taught politics at Princeton University. His main research interests are U.S.-China relations, the development of democratic political systems, and Chinese politics. He is the author of From Reform to Revolution: The Demise of Communism in China and the Soviet Union and China's Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy. His research has been published in many journals and books, and his commentary appears in many major newspapers.
Professor Dali L. Yang is the Director of the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore. His research interests are political institutions and political economy, with special reference to China. He was previously Chairman of the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He was also a former director of the University's Committee on International Relations, one of the nation's oldest graduate programs in international affairs.
Shaoguang Wang is a chair professor in the Department of Government and Public Administration at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, a Changjiang Professor in the School of Public Policy and Management at Tsinghua University, an non-official member of HKSAR's Commission on Strategic Development, and the chief editor of The China Review, an interdisciplinary journal on greater China. He taught at Tijiao High School in Wuhan, China from 1972 to 1977 and at Yale University in the United States from 1990 to 2000. His research interests include political economy, comparative politics, fiscal politics, democratization, and economic and political development in former socialist countries and East Asian countries.
Victor Mallet is Asia editor of the Financial Times, based in Hong Kong. He writes editorials, columns and feature articles on a range of subjects concerning the Asia-Pacific, including security, politics, economics and business. He won the Society of Publishers in Asia award for opinion writing in both 2005 and 2006.