 Currently, in a bid to curtail the powers of the individual, collective leadership, the idea that decisions will be taken through consensus, has become the ideal in the CPC. The concept has its origins back to Vladimir Lenin and the Russian Bolshevik Party. At the level of the central party leadership this means that, for instance, all members of the Politburo Standing Committee are of equal standing (each member having only one vote). A member of the Politburo Standing Committee often represents a sector; during Mao's reign, he controlled the People's Liberation Army, Kang Sheng, the security apparatus, and Zhou Enlai, the State Council and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This counts as informal power. Despite this, in a paradoxical relation, members of a body are ranked hierarchically (despite the fact that members are in theory equal to each others). In spite of this, the CPC is led by an informal leader principle, each collective leadership is led by a core, that is a paramount leader; a person who holds the offices of CPC General Secretary, CMC chairman and President of the PRC. Before Jiang Zemin's tenure as paramount leader, the party core and collective leadership were indistinguishable. In practice, the core was not responsible to the collective leadership. However, by the time of Jiang, the party had begun propagating a responsibility system, referring to it in official pronouncements to the "core of the collective leadership".
