Embajada de China en Venezuela

Comparto mi discurso en el Hong Ting Forum sobre el Quinto Pleno del XX Comité Central del PCCh, celebrado hoy en Beijing. Honrado de haber sido el único orador latinoamericano. Understanding the Fifth Plenary Session: A View from Latin America Distinguished guests, colleagues and friends, It is an honor to speak here, at the Museum of the Communist Party of China, just days after the Fifth Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee. My thanks to the Institute of Party History and Literature and to Xinhua for the invitation to the Hong Ting Forum. I come from Argentina, a country in the south of Latin America. It is a region where political parties are the least trusted institution: only 17% of Latin Americans trust them, according to opinion polls. Many traditional parties from Latin America have disappeared or have become little more than electoral labels in recent years. That is why a plenary session devoted entirely to the governance of a party that has recently marked 105 years of existence deserves close attention from our perspective. The plenum has adopted the Decision on Some Major Issues Concerning Strengthening Full and Rigorous Party Self-Governance with Perseverance. As the Party itself has stated, full and rigorous Party self-governance in the new era has provided new experience for the rest of the world’s political parties in resolving governance problems and achieving flourishing parties and well-governed states. I would like to focus on the CPC's effective and resolute answer to one of the oldest problems of political power, which is decay from within. The CPC has responded to that issue through permanent internal revision and renewal, with political practices increasingly anchored in discipline, stable rules and strong party institutions. What President Xi Jinping has called “confining power to an institutional cage" is one of the pillars of the CPC’s governance and of its success in delivering for the Chinese people. The Fifth Plenary Session has made important progress in strengthening the Party's full and rigorous self-governance, at a time when profound changes are taking place in the world, in the country, and within the CPC. Xi Jinping’s thought on party building offers a valuable reference for political parties elsewhere. From Latin America’s viewpoint, in recent years our region has lived through very serious corruption scandals, which reached the highest political level and affected the credibility of parties across the region. We learned that corruption is not only a matter of individuals. It is also a matter of organizations that lack internal rules, internal discipline and internal accountability. Many of our parties have no structured leadership development and no written norms that bind their leaders and cadres between elections. China does not export its model, and Latin America should not import it. Our histories, political systems and institutions differ. But we can learn from the questions this Plenary Session asks. How do you make discipline the rule rather than the exception? How do you train leaders, and hold them accountable, over decades rather than brief electoral cycles? How do you keep a large organization close to the people it serves for more than a century? Every party in my region should be asking these questions. The 15th Five-Year Plan is under way, and the 21st National Congress is a year away. On the eve of that new historic stage for China, a party that governs nearly one-fifth of humanity has chosen to examine itself first. Whatever our political perspectives may be, that choice offers the world a case study in governance. It deserves serious, open-minded dialogue, the kind of dialogue this forum makes possible, among countries of the Global South that face many of the same challenges. Thank you very much. Patricio Giusto Executive Director of the Observatory of China-Argentina Relations