5 men, 10 months and 1 long speech: the cadres behind Xi Jinping’s marathon address
Chinese media name the specialists who took on the painstaking job of compiling the material for the president’s report to the Communist Party congress
An adviser to Xi Jinping has been named as one of the five architects of the Chinese president’s landmark speech to the Communist Party’s national congress which ended in Beijing last week.
The five ranged in expertise from industrial policy to party history and were responsible for drafting the 68-page speech forming the backbone of “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era”, the latest dogma to be added to the organisation’s constitution.
The drafting took 10 months and began on January 13 when Xi assembled a team to prepare the document, Xinhua reported on Saturday.
While Xi headed the team and three now retired Politburo Standing Committee members acted as his deputies, much of the day-to-day work was done by five others, including Qu Qingshan, head of the Central Party History Research Institute.
Before transferring to the institute in 2009, Qu spent more than a decade in the northwestern province of Qinghai at the same time as the country’s new top graft-buster Zhao Leji.
