Beijing, Nov 13: China's ruling communist party will hold crucial polls tomorrow to elect members of the powerful central committee, who are to select the next generation of top Chinese leaders to rule the nation till 2007, it was officially stated here today. The announcement of the polls was made after the third meeting of the presidium of the 16th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) here, which comes to an end tomorrow morning, state media reported.
The meeting, presided over by Chinese president and CPC general secretary Jiang Zemin, approved the lists of candidates for a new CPC central committee and a new Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), Xinhua news agency said.
The report confirmed that "marginal preliminary elections" were held during the past two days at the Congress.
Tomorrow, the delegates at the congress will vote to select the over 300 members of the new central committee of the party which has monopolised political power since the founding of the people's republic in 1949.
In theory, the 2,114 delegates at the Congress will elect the new batch of top leaders for the party, but in practice they are merely expected to endorse the decisions already made by top leaders such as President Jiang Zemin, National People's Congress chairman Li Peng and Premier Zhu Rongji. Bureau Report