[1]: 71–72 Leading Small Groups were first established in 1958 under a somewhat vague mandate, authorized by Chapter IX of the Constitution of the Chinese Communist Party.
They were categorised as decision-making consulting bodies (决策咨询机构; juece zixun jigou) of the Party's Central Committee[4] and were usually task-oriented, short-term groups.
[10] Functionally, LSGs enable the Party to use its overarching authority to facilitate decision-making and compensate for the horizontally fragmented nature of China's government system.
[14] LSGs do not formulate concrete policies (政策; zhengce), but rather issue guiding principles about the general direction in which bureaucratic activity should move (方针; fangzhen).
[4] Not only do LSG's circumvent traditional methods of policy creation within the CCP, but it spreads it out amongst multiple groups with sometimes conflicting goals who compete for influence with Xi Jinping at the top.
LSGs bring together leading party, government and military officials to discuss issues, exchange ideas and make policy recommendations to the Politburo and its Standing Committee.
[3] The Xi Jinping era has seen the creation of a number of many new LSGs to push forward key elements of his agenda and overcome obstacles within China's bureaucracy.
[13] LSGs have no permanent staff and instead rely on their General Offices (办公室; bangongshi) to manage daily operations and for research and policy recommendations.