Xi briefs top communist party leaders ahead of 20th National Congress

With the 20th National Congress less than a week away, Chinese President Xi Jinping has briefed top Communist Party leaders on a draft work report, which usually summarizes the major achievements of the party, media reports said.
The plenary session of the Communist Party’s central committee was briefed by Xi on the draft work report, which will be presented to the National Congress, media reports said. The work report presented by the Central Committee general secretary to the party congress usually summarizes the major achievements of the party in the span of the past five years. It further maps the country’s development direction in the coming years, reported Caixin Global citing state media.
During the meeting of the Central Committee, of which Xi is the general secretary, Wang Huning, the Standing Committee member of the CPC, talked about a draft amendment to the Communist Party constitution. This comes as the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party is set to begin on October 16. The meeting will elect a new Central Committee, which will act as the party’s top decision-making body until 2027, the media portal added.
On October 9, the seventh plenary session of the 19th Central Committee opened, which is expected to run for around four days. The state media report on the opening of the plenary session was rather short with only four lines of text of the above-mentioned information and it is expected that there will be a longer report when the plenary session ends.
Many Twitter accounts have uploaded videos of the deserted airport in Beijing, showing that travel is severely restricted in and out of Beijing until the 20th Party congress is completed.
In the run-up to the 20th National Congress, scheduled for October 16-18, the Chinese authorities are making every effort to throttle the voice of critics of the government policies, a media report said. The posts of Lao Dongyan, a Criminal Law Professor at Tsinghua University, have been deleted from the Chinese social media platform, Weibo, The Hong Kong Post reported.