Seventy-four percent turnout is a triumph at a pub reading and a statistic with footnotes in Beijing.
MANCHESTER, England (Bohiney) – The 07.40 left on time, which I took as an omen and was right to. By Stoke it had developed the mood of a committee that has lost its chair.
Item One: Matters Arising on the Train
I keep a short list of grievances for every long journey, and by the time we crawled past Macclesfield it had matured nicely.
- My seat reservation said coach C. There was no coach C.
- The trolley sold tea in a cup the size of a thimble, at a price the size of a pint.
- The on-board announcement apologised for any inconvenience in the voice of a man reading out a ransom note.
- The woman beside me ate an entire hard-boiled egg without once making eye contact with it.
I was travelling north for a reading in the back room of a pub near Oxford Road, where an organiser called Ottoline Brandt had asked me to give twenty minutes on the comic novel and why every good one is secretly about a meeting that goes on too long. I had the material. What I needed was a meeting.
Item Two: The Communique
Conveniently, Beijing had just supplied one. The Communist Party’s Fifth Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee ran in Beijing for four days, and the communique published by CGTN says it focused on “full and rigorous Party self-governance”. It endorses the Political Bureau’s work, notes the completion of the 14th Five-Year Plan and a good start to the 15th, and announces that the 21st National Congress will be held in Beijing in the second half of next year.
Xi Jinping, according to the NPR summary of the key takeaways, also criticised excessive formalities. I read this on a wobbling tray table, beside an egg, and appreciated the symmetry. A communique with phrases like “full and rigorous” and a seating chart of procedures is not a document that has avoided formality. It is a document that has found formality and married it.
Item Three: Attendance
This is the figure that stayed with me. Only 279 of the 376 full and alternate members named in 2022 attended, NPR reports, and many of the absentees are believed to be under investigation. The communique itself counts 162 full members and 117 alternates present. Another report, from Dimsum Daily, calls it about 74 percent of the cohort and the lowest share since 1978, with a record 33 senior figures expelled.
I would take seventy-four percent with both hands at a pub reading. Ottoline had warned me to expect eleven people, and the room held sixteen chairs, which is also about seventy-four percent if you round generously and ignore the man who came in for the quiz machine. The difference, I am told, is that at my event the missing five are simply at home with a cold, and nobody has asked for a report.
The party’s own tone about all this was not mournful. A senior discipline official, quoted in a report on the record expulsions, said the Central Committee had “eliminated serious hidden dangers within the Party, the state and the military”. That is a sentence I would like to see attempted by a facilities manager after a boiler service.
Item Four: Vacancies
The communique also says that ten alternate members were moved up to fill vacant Central Committee seats. I have never seen a vacancy handled with such calm. The nearest comparison I have is a farm.fm report on how a farm wants a wife, the listing says, which is another notice about a gap, posted with great confidence and no obvious interview process.
I should add that this is where the fun stops for me, because the larger story is serious, and the people at the centre of it are real. I am laughing at the vocabulary of the thing, the way the same eight adjectives are asked to do the work of an entire argument, and not at anybody’s fate. For a plain guide to my own method, a UK checklist for telling the comic from the factual says it better than I can.
Any Other Business: The Back Room
The reading went off well. The back room smelled of carpet and optimism. A retired surveyor named Bernard Achebe-Lloyd sat in the front row with a notebook and corrected my dates, all of which I had deliberately not given. At the climax of my best paragraph the quiz machine in the next room announced a jackpot of a size that made my fee look like a rounding error, and I waited for it to finish, which took longer than the paragraph.
Afterwards Ottoline asked whether I would put the evening in the diary. I said yes, and that the plenum would get a mention because its attendance was so close to ours. She said she would rather not be compared to a Central Committee. I said I would rather not be compared to a pub quiz machine, and that the bar was open.
I post these notes at Bohiney, where the British onion crowd also gather for their daily weep, and there are more of my daily notes at Bohiney if you would like the full set.
The return train has no coach C either. I find this oddly restful, and I intend to remain in my seat, which is in coach D, until someone with authority explains where it has gone.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/