On September 21, 1949, the first plenary session of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference opened in Beiping, as the city was called until the name Beijing was restored that same month. There were 662 delegates from parties, the army, mass organisations and specially invited individuals, and Mao Zedong presided. It sat until September 30 and acted as the constituent assembly the country did not have.
Elections were impossible. The civil war was still running: the People's Liberation Army had taken Nanjing in April and Shanghai in May, but fighting continued in the south and the southwest, and the Nationalist government had withdrawn to Guangzhou and then Chongqing. The Communist Party had proposed in 1948 that a consultative conference be convened, and the response from the other parties and from the democratic figures who had been in Hong Kong and in the north was enough to give the body a wider character than the party's own.
The Common Programme mattered. It was a provisional constitution of 60 articles, and it described a state in which the working class led and the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie had a place, with a people's democratic dictatorship and a coalition government. Private enterprise was to be allowed and encouraged where it was useful. It did not say socialism, and it did not mention a planned economy as an immediate programme.
The session was symbolic too. It adopted the five-star red flag, with the large star standing for the Communist Party and the four smaller ones for the classes in the Common Programme, and it made the March of the Volunteers the provisional national anthem, over objections to the line about the moment of greatest danger. It decided on the name of the state, and on the era name for the calendar rather than the reign years. On September 30 it elected Mao chairman of the Central People's Government and Zhu De, Liu Shaoqi, Soong Ching-ling, Li Jishen, Zhang Lan and Gao Gang as vice-chairmen.
The conference had met the day before its opening as a preparatory body and had decided that the state would be proclaimed on October 1. That happened in Tiananmen Square, and about 300,000 people were there. The CPPCC continued as an advisory body after 1954, when the National People's Congress took over as the legislature, and it still meets every year.