On September 19, 2004, the Fourth Plenary Session of the 16th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party adopted the Decision of the CCP Central Committee on Strengthening the Building of the Party’s Governing Capacity — the official doctrine that made “governing capacity” the Party’s self-reform program for the Hu Jintao era. The same plenum completed the Jiang-to-Hu leadership transition when Jiang Zemin resigned as chairman of the Central Military Commission and Hu Jintao succeeded him. Whether the plenum’s historical significance lies in that succession or in the doctrine is itself one of the debates the record preserves.
Background: from the 16th Party Congress to the Fourth Plenum
The term “governing capacity” (执政能力) entered authoritative Party language at the 16th Party Congress in November 2002, where the Party report first raised it as a central concept and declared that “inner-party democracy is the life of the party” (党内民主是党的生命) — as characterized in the contemporaneous analysis of Joseph Fewsmith (China Leadership Monitor No. 9). The 2004 Decision was the codification of that concept: where 2002 introduced it, 2004 made it doctrine. Two years of leadership transition followed the Congress, with Jiang Zemin retaining the military chairmanship after handing the Party and state posts to Hu Jintao — the backdrop against which the September 2004 plenum completed the handover.
The plenum of September 16–19, 2004
The Fourth Plenary Session met September 16–19, 2004, at the Jingxi Hotel in Beijing. A total of 194 Central Committee members and 152 alternate members attended; members of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and responsible comrades sat in. The session was chaired by the Politburo; Hu Jintao delivered the Politburo’s work report on its behalf, and Zeng Qinghong explained the draft Decision to the plenum.
The companion personnel decisions, adopted at the same session, are well documented: the plenum approved Jiang Zemin’s resignation as chairman of the CCP Central Military Commission and appointed Hu Jintao as chairman; Xu Caihou was promoted to vice chairman; Chen Bingde, Qiao Qingchen, Zhang Dingfa and Jing Zhiyuan were added as commission members; alternate members Aisihaiti Kelimubai and Wang Zhengwei were promoted to full Central Committee membership; and Tian Fengshan was expelled from the Party after the plenum adopted the CCDI’s review report on him. On September 20, Jiang and Hu appeared together at a CMC handover meeting — the public closing of a planned succession.
What the Decision said
The full Chinese text of the Decision was not captured in the research underlying this article, so the provisions below rest on scholarly summaries and partial descriptions; exact official wording remains to be verified against the primary text.
As described by scholars, the Decision framed governing-capacity building as the Party’s central task for the “new century, new stage,” tying the Party’s survival to adaptation amid marketization, pluralized social interests and intensified social contradictions. It set out five capability domains: guiding and managing the socialist market economy; developing socialist democratic politics; building advanced socialist culture; building a harmonious socialist society; and handling the international situation and international affairs. Notably, the plenum communiqué is reported to be the first official mention of “building a socialist harmonious society” (构建社会主义和谐社会).
The Decision called for the Party to govern “in a scientific and democratic fashion and in accordance with the law” — the formulation as characterized in Fewsmith’s China Leadership Monitor No. 14 (the official Chinese rendering was not verified in this research). Its intra-party-democracy provisions treated developing intra-party democracy as the guarantee of the Party’s creativity and unity, with reforms to cadre selection and decision-making procedures, supervision and oversight mechanisms, and anti-corruption named as a strategic task.
Two attributed claims about the Decision deserve care. The China Media Project, in a 2012 essay, holds that the September 2004 Decision “formally introduced the Scientific View of Development,” and that from then on Jiang Zemin’s banner-term faded while Hu Jintao’s burgeoned. That is an attributed interpretive claim about the Decision as the concept’s first full doctrinal codification — not a claim that the concept was first mentioned there (its gestation is conventionally dated to 2003). Separately, the Jamestown China Brief attributes to the Decision, citing the People’s Daily of September 20, 2004, the strategic directive to “contain Taiwan independence” — attributed and based on a single secondary citation of official press; if confirmed, the Decision was not purely a party-building text.
The Decision’s own threat-framing, as paraphrased from Fewsmith’s China Leadership Monitor No. 13, held that marketization, the pluralization of interests and intensifying social contradictions threatened the Party’s ruling status, while hostile forces abroad sought to “Westernize and divide” China. One further note on provenance: an alleged undisseminated September 19, 2004 plenary speech by Hu Jintao, reported by Hong Kong’s Kaifang magazine, was described by Fewsmith himself as not independently verifiable; it is not relied on here.
Contemporaneous responses
Official-adjacent voices. Zeng Qinghong, who had explained the draft Decision to the plenum, followed with a programmatic article in Renmin Ribao on October 8, 2004 — “A Programmatic Document for Strengthening the Party’s Ability to Govern: Study and Implement the Spirit of the Fourth Plenum” — an official-adjacent explication of the Decision (the text itself was not retrieved in this research). Li Junru, vice president of the Central Party School and the Hu-era theorist most widely associated with consultative democracy (协商民主), stood as a contemporaneous proponent of the Decision’s intra-party-democracy line. Yu Keping developed the reformist reading from within the system: his December 2006 essay “Democracy is a Good Thing” operationalized the Decision’s intra-party-democracy opening from the reformist side, arguing in effect that intra-party democracy must come first, followed by grassroots elections and administrative reform.
Independent scholarly analysis. Fewsmith’s early-2005 China Leadership Monitor No. 14 assessed the Decision as fundamentally inward-looking:
“Although this document called for the CCP to govern in a ‘scientific and democratic fashion and in accordance with the law,’ its attention was directed at how party mechanisms — including cadre selection and decision making — could be improved, but not at how the development of extraparty social forces might be used to curtail the sort of abuses that are linked to oneparty rule.”
In No. 13, also in early 2005, he summarized the plenum resolution’s threat-framing as reflected in the January 2005 People’s Daily editorial that launched the rectification campaign:
“[The CCP] feels it is at a critical juncture, at which the ongoing marketization of the economy, the pluralization of social interests, and the intensification of social contradictions have threatened the ruling status of the party. The threat also comes from abroad, in the form of ‘hostile forces’ that continue to try to Westernize and divide (xihua fenhua) China.”
Alice Miller, in a Hoover Institution essay from the same period, read the plenum primarily as the completion of the succession:
“Hu’s orderly succession to Jiang — first as the top party leader, then as PRC president, and now as China’s commander in chief — stands as the only instance of a successfully planned retirement of a top leader in favor of a younger designated successor in the history of a major communist country.”
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported on September 20, 2004 that analysts expected no sudden shift in domestic or foreign policy but gradual economic-policy reform, and framed the plenum around the room it gave Hu to address income disparity. No contemporaneous liberal-reformist or leftist commentary directed specifically at the Decision was located in this research, and no overseas dissident or democracy-movement response specifically addressed it — both are documented gaps, not conclusions about absence.
Later analyses. The China Media Project’s 2012 essay “Pride and Positioning” (David Bandurski) put the doctrinal reading this way:
“On September 19, 2004, just as Jiang Zemin was handing his chairmanship of the powerful Central Military Commission over to Hu Jintao, a meeting of the Central Committee issued a ‘Decision’ on strengthening the Party’s ‘governing capacity.’ That decision formally introduced the Scientific View of Development. From that time on, Jiang Zemin’s qihao faded while Hu Jintao’s burgeoned.”
Gilley and Holbig, in a 2009 scholarly survey of Chinese journal debates on Party legitimacy, cited “the official recognition of the weakening of revolutionary legitimacy in 2004” as one driver of the legitimacy-strategy debate — an attributed scholarly reading of the debate, not an official admission. And the U.S. Congressional Research Service (report RS22767, December 2007) read the 2004–2007 intra-party-democracy line as producing “no major political reforms” while the Party made clear its monopoly on power would continue.
Competing viewpoints
The record preserves several distinct, unreconciled readings, presented here without ranking:
- Official-adjacent reformists (Yu Keping, Li Junru) read the Decision’s intra-party-democracy provisions as a genuine, if incremental, opening: intra-party democracy first, then grassroots elections and administrative reform — with the argument, in Yu’s line, that democracy in China is difficult to attain without intra-party democracy.
- Democratic-socialist reformists (Xie Tao, writing in 2007) read the intra-party frame as insufficient: China needed a peaceful transition to democratic socialism — a position beyond the Decision’s framework, and later officially rebutted against it.
- Contemporaneous independent scholars (Fewsmith) saw the Decision as directed at internal party mechanisms — cadre selection, decision-making, ideology, and guiding public opinion in part through media control — rather than at opening space for extra-party social forces.
- Leftist positions were not directly sourced for 2004 in this research; the Decision’s insistence on Party leadership and ideological strengthening was compatible with the leftist defense of the Party’s class character, but the 2001 leftist backlash (the Deng Liqun letter and journal closures) is a prior reference point, not a 2004 response, and the two must not be merged.
- Succession-focused analysts (Miller) treat the plenum’s main historical significance as the Jiang-to-Hu CMC handover — institutionalized succession — with the Decision as the doctrinal cover; policy-focused readings (Fewsmith, the China Media Project) treat the Decision as Hu’s doctrinal founding act. These are interpretive alternatives, not a factual conflict.
Implementation and aftermath
The Decision’s first implementation vehicle was the “Maintain the Advanced Nature of Party Members” campaign, launched with a People’s Daily authoritative editorial on January 5, 2005 and running in three phases over roughly a year and a half, with the 4th Plenum’s governing-capacity theme as its stated spirit.
Cadre-selection experiments proceeded in parallel. In Pingchang County, Sichuan, the “public nomination and direct election” (公推直选) method was extended in January 2004 to one-third of townships — nine townships elected nine Party secretaries, 28 deputy secretaries and 81 committee members — and Xinhua hailed it as “the first large scale innerparty direct election in the history of our Party” (as cited in Fewsmith’s China Leadership Monitor No. 24). In Chengdu’s Xindu district, on March 3, 2004, Li Zhongbin announced the method for Party secretaries of all townships under its jurisdiction, a reform approved by the central authorities. Fewsmith’s later assessment (2013) held that every such election was supervised by a leadership small group to ensure no “loss of control” (失控) — the model being “a different path by which cadres can rise within the party.”
The 17th Party Congress in October 2007 re-emphasized the intra-party-democracy line. Hu Jintao’s report declared: “Intra-Party democracy provides an important guarantee for improving the Party’s creativity and reinforcing its solidarity and unity. We will expand intra-Party democracy to develop people’s democracy and increase intra-Party harmony to promote social harmony” (official English text via the Chinese Embassy; the official Chinese rendering was not captured in this research). Xinhua reported that Hu used the word “democracy” more than 60 times in the keynote (reported via openDemocracy, October 2007). The 17th Central Committee’s Fourth Plenum in September 2009 continued the thread, vowing to enhance intra-party democracy through Party-congress and election-system reform. Beyond 2012, the “governing capacity” language persisted in official discourse, but scholars assess the Decision’s specific intra-party-democracy experimental momentum as having faded; no systematic implementation audit of the Decision was located.
No contemporaneous Free China Movement response to the 2004 Decision is on record in the sources reviewed.
Sources
- TheoryChina (CPC-history 2004 chronology, en.theorychina.org.cn): session dates, Decision adoption, Jiang resignation / Hu appointment
- Chinese Wikipedia, “中国共产党第十六届中央委员会第四次全体会议”: attendance figures (194/152), venue, Zeng Qinghong’s explanation, Tian Fengshan expulsion, first official mention of 构建社会主义和谐社会
- Chatham House paper (Breslin & Shen, 2010): Decision title; original official URL citation
- Ngeow Chow Bing, International Journal of China Studies (2011): the five capability domains
- Joseph Fewsmith, China Leadership Monitor No. 13 (early 2005): the rectification campaign and the plenum’s threat-framing
- Joseph Fewsmith, China Leadership Monitor No. 14 (early 2005): the inward-looking assessment of the Decision
- Joseph Fewsmith, China Leadership Monitor No. 24 (January 2008) and The Logic and Limits of Political Reform in China (2013): the Pingchang and Chengdu-Xindu cadre-election experiments
- Alice Miller, Hoover Institution, “With Hu in Charge, Jiang’s at Ease” (early 2005): the succession reading
- David Bandurski, China Media Project, “Pride and Positioning,” September 28, 2012: the Scientific-Development doctrinal reading
- Jamestown China Brief: the attributed “contain Taiwan independence” directive, citing the People’s Daily, September 20, 2004
- Gilley & Holbig (2009): the legitimacy-debate survey; CRS report RS22767 (December 2007): the 17th Congress assessment
- Official English full text of Hu Jintao’s 17th Congress political report, October 15, 2007 (via Chinese Embassy): the intra-party-democracy provisions
- RFE/RL, September 20, 2004; the 2004 National Defense White Paper (English-Chinese annotated): contemporaneous reporting and the plenum/CMC summary
- Zeng Qinghong, “A Programmatic Document for Strengthening the Party’s Ability to Govern,” Renmin Ribao, October 8, 2004 (cited via Fewsmith, text not retrieved)