Workings of the Party Congress

Also at this second meeting, the Presidium adopted the electoral procedure and endorsed proposed name-lists of nominees for the candidates of members and alternate members of the Central Committee, and members of the Central Discipline Commission. The name-lists were then submitted to all representative groups for consideration and primary election.

On Oct. 20, the Presidium held its third meeting gathering the primary election results from all representative groups, passing the candidate lists (draft) and submitting them to the representative groups for further deliberation.

The ballot ticket: bigger than 16k paper

At 9:00 am on October 21, 2007, a plenary session was held to pass the list of 36 so-called ballot scrutineers and 2 general scrutineers. The scrutineers then checked the ballot box and counted the total number of participants. Afterwards, they handed out the ballot tickets.

Every delegate got three colorful tickets bearing the names of the candidates for the positions of the Central Committee member, alternative member and the Central Discipline Inspection Commission member, respectively.

"The ticket is quite big, bigger than 16k paper," Representative Hu Anmei said. Every paper had names on it in order of the number of strokes in their surnames. Not marking anything stood for agreement, drawing a circle stood for disagreement and a cross stood for abstention.