What the Sixth Plenum will come up with

The ongoing Sixth Plenum of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China is very important, because the core documents of the four previous sixth plenums of the Party Central Committee led to, respectively, the promotion of culture, building of a harmonious society, improvement in Party work style, and boosting of social morale.

The ongoing Sixth Plenum, instead of being only a political showpiece, will come up with rich, substantive contents. This observation is based on two considerations. First, the Sixth Plenum will make new political rules for the Party's rank and file and revise the rules on intra-Party supervision after taking into consideration participating CPC officials' comprehensive evaluation of the Party's work over the past four years, the anti-corruption campaign in particular. And as the crackdown on corruption enters the stage of prosecution and trial, people will begin to shift focus on long-term mechanisms.

Top leader Xi Jinping made two vital remarks at the beginning of the anti-corruption campaign. One was to "lock corruption into the cage of systems" and the other was to "make leading officials 'dare not', 'cannot' and 'do not want' to engage in corruption". On his part, Wang Qishan, who heads the CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, pledged at the time to "win time for the establishment of anti-corruption mechanisms with heavy blows".