Party Congress

BEIJING -- China's president, defense minister, parliament head and five other senior leaders will retire from top-level positions within the Chinese Communist Party, a Beijing-backed newspaper in Hong Kong reported yesterday.The eight leaders currently make up a majority of the party's highest body, its 14-member Politburo. Two of them also sit on the Politburo's Standing Committee, the ultimate decision-making body in China. They range in age from 66 to 85.With the party holding its national congress this week, the eight have asked not to be considered for election to the party's Central Committee, from which Politburo seats and other top positions are filled, the Hong Kong report said.

BEIJING -- The Chinese Communist Party's national congress, which opens here today, will put out to pasture many of China's old-guard, conservative revolutionaries by abolishing a key advisory body for retired leaders.During its six-day meeting, the congress will change the party's charter in order to eliminate its Central Advisory Commission, a congress spokesman, Liu Chongde, announced yesterday.The commission -- composed of about 200 members, many well into their 80s -- was created 10 years ago by Chinese patriarch Deng Xiaoping as a way to gracefully move many other elderly party leaders out of the political limelight.

BEIJING -- The Chinese Communist Party appears ready to formally enshrine patriarch Deng Xiaoping's full-speed-ahead approach to economic reform as China's direction for the next five years.Capping months of speculation, the state-run Xinhua news service yesterday announced that the 14th national party congress will open Oct. 12 and will "take as its guide" Mr. Deng's dramatic drive this year for stepping up China's market-style economic reforms.Xinhua said that the key meeting, held every five years, will mobilize the Chinese people "to further emancipate their minds and seize the opportune moment to accelerate the pace of reform, opening to the outside world and modernization."

Speaking of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, the long-awaited Fourth Communist Party Congress of Cuba decided to legitimize the flourishing private market of plumbers and other individual tradesmen. It shuffled the Central Committee and Politburo to be somewhat younger and more moderate. It called for more exports to hard currency countries ,, and for foreign investment to lure tourists. It wants to increase participation in the one-party political monopoly somewhat. That Fidel Castro's plan to deal with the collapse of world communism and with Cuba's stunning isolation.

North Vietnam conquered South Vietnam in 1975 and now, slowly and partially, the more prosperous and less Communist South is reversing the process.The news from the Communist Party congress in Hanoi is that Prime Minister Do Muoi, a 74-year-old Communist, is taking over as party secretary-general. Seven of the 12 members of the Politboro retired, including his predecessor Nguyen Van Linh, the president, the foreign minister and the interior minister. The new 13-member body will have many in their 50s instead of 70s, and five from the South in place of three.

BEIJING -- The Chinese Communist Party, riddled with corruption and increasingly isolated in a world moving away from socialism, celebrated its 70th birthday yesterday with a good deal of fanfare aimed at buttressing its sagging legitimacy."