The Fifth Plenum Opens in Beijing as Party Inspectors Move Into 31 Universities

The Fifth Plenary Session of the Communist Party's 20th Central Committee opened Monday morning in Beijing and will run through Thursday. According to CCTV's report from the hall, Xi Jinping delivered the Politburo's work report to the party's full central body and presented a draft "Decision on Comprehensively and Strictly Governing the Party" — the document the Central Committee will debate and, by the ritual of these gatherings, almost certainly adopt when the session closes on October 29.

The agenda is the story in itself. Plenums are numbered, and the numbers carry expectations: a fifth plenum has historically been where the party sets out its five-year economic plan, the blueprint that decides how China spends and builds for half a decade. This one's central document is instead about the party itself — "comprehensively and strictly governing the party," the standing phrase for the discipline and anti-corruption machinery. The Politburo flagged the choice in July, when it announced the session would review work and take up party building rather than roll out an economic plan, and state media has spent the run-up publishing explainers such as CCTV Focus's primetime segment on how to build a "scientific system of party building in the new era."

The discipline theme reached past the conference hall the same day. Fifteen central inspection teams completed their entry into the Ministry of Education and 31 centrally administered universities — the eighth such round under the current Central Committee — with each team given around two months to audit its institutions. In the party's own framing, education is "the great plan of the nation and the great plan of the party," which is why the institutions training China's officials, engineers and academics are now themselves under inspection.

Public engagement is largely choreographed. The trending topic is carried by state media — CCTV's announcement card, a Xinhua documentary titled "Flag" about party ideology — while Baidu's search board ranks the session first and the inspection teams' deployment just behind it. The inspectable substance arrives Thursday, when the plenum closes and the text of the Decision is published.

The inspection teams, meanwhile, will keep working into December — inside the universities, where findings surface, if at all, in the party's own announcements.