As China moves towards the twice-a-decade National Congress of the Communist Party next fall, cadres are already trying to figure out what will happen at the gathering, the 19th of these. About 2,300 delegates from ministries, provinces, the military, and state-owned and private companies will assemble in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People. At the Congress’s close, a new Central Committee, numbering about 370 members—elected by the Congress delegates—will be announced, as well as the 25-person Politburo and, at the apex, a new Standing Committee.
All but 63-year-old President Xi Jinping and 61-year-old Premier Li Keqiang, the only two members who won’t have reached the mandatory retirement age of 68, are expected to step down from the Standing Committee. Although the Central Committee votes formally for the Standing Committee and chooses the next general secretary of the party, in reality the selections are made in advance by a handful of top party elders. The role Mr Xi will play after his two terms end in 2022 will be made more clear by those choices.
Many China watchers are wondering whether Mr Xi will lay the groundwork at the Congress for remaining for a third term as general secretary of the party while hanging on to the top military role, which is crucial to his exerting significant power. Although the military answers to the party, it’s always been a major power broker. As Mao Zedong once said, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Mr Xi once served as an assistant to a former defense secretary and has long kept a close relationship with the military. He’s more recently built his influence by shuffling the ranks of the military’s top brass, using his anticorruption campaign to fell once-powerful generals. If Mr Xi continues to hold the chairmanship of the Central Military Commission, even after he gives up his role as general secretary of the party and president, he will be following Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin, who kept their military positions. Hu Jintao was an exception. He relinquished all three posts at party, state, and military simultaneously, thus giving Mr Xi full reins from the beginning.
The power of the party secretary is magnified exponentially when combined with the top military role. According to a practice put in place by former paramount leader Mr Deng, the party secretary job can last only two terms to prevent a recurrence of a tragedy like the Cultural Revolution, which likely wouldn’t have happened if Mr Mao hadn’t spent decades accumulating power as party chairman.
Either Hu Chunhua or Sun Zhengcai, Guangdong and Chongqing party secretaries, respectively, were once considered potential successors to Mr Xi and Mr Li, but that’s no longer clear. “They just don’t seem to be people favoured by Xi,” says Joseph Fewsmith, a political scientist at Boston University. “And if it’s not them, then you would assume Xi would need to appoint other young people in their stead for a new leader to be ready.” If Mr Xi proves powerful enough at the 19th Congress, he could sideline the two and opt for cadres who worked under him when he was party secretary of Zhejiang province from 2002 to 2007.
The prospects for the Zhejiang alliance got a boost when Mr Xi moved to curb the power of the Communist Youth League earlier this year. The CYL has long been a training ground for talented young cadres. Its former bosses include Hu Jintao and Hu Chunhua. The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the corruption watchdog headed by Xi ally Wang Qishan, criticised the body’s ideological laxness, and the Central Committee announced a reorganisation and reduction of its ranks. “There has been a worry that the CYL has lost its connection with young people and formed undesirable work styles, including formalism, bureaucratism, elitism, and a focus on entertainment,” opined the Xinhua News Agency on Aug. 3.
Should Mr Xi stay on as party secretary beyond 2022 he’ll have broken the Deng-instituted restriction on serving more than two terms. But Mr Xi has shown little respect for what were seen as inviolate rules. In his anticorruption drive, he’s taken down a former Standing Committee member, previously a taboo. He clipped the wings of the military, with dozens of generals detained or convicted in the past three years. He dissolved the army’s once-powerful four departments of staff, politics, armaments, and logistics and spread their functions across 15 new bodies that are directly controlled by the Central Military Commission. If Mr Xi doesn’t appoint an obvious successor next year, he “will set up a lot of speculation,” says Mr Fewsmith of Boston University.
Rumours spread earlier this year that Mr Li, a former head of the youth league and protégé of Hu Jintao, could lose his job at the upcoming Congress for mismanagement of the economy. That followed two commentaries in the People’s Daily—believed to be backed by Mr Xi—that indirectly blamed slow reforms and surging debt burdens on Mr Li, says Barry Naughton, an economist at the University of California at San Diego.
But the state press recently trumpeted Mr Li’s trip to the United Nations in New York as the first-ever visit by a Chinese premier. Mr Xi on Sept. 29 made a show of loyalty to his predecessors, publicly praising the writings of Hu Jintao and urging party members to study his speeches. Like works by former CPC leaders Messrs Mao, Deng, and Jiang, writings by Mr Hu offer “a set of important teaching materials” that summarise Chinese successes under the CPC, the Xinhua News Agency quoted Mr Xi as saying.
Recent appointments of new party bosses in the city of Tianjin and the region of Xinjiang have promoted officials linked to Hu Jintao, rather than from Mr Xi’s power base, points out Cheng Li, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Similarly, Wang Yang, a former head of the youth league, may be a candidate for the Standing Committee who would counterbalance any of Mr Xi’s appointments, says Thornton’s Mr Li: “When you are strong, other elites naturally come together to compete with you. This is a very healthy dynamic, just like in the U.S. with two parties. This is Chinese-style checks and balances.”
To contact the author of this story: Dexter Roberts in Beijing at droberts34@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Christopher Power at cpower3@bloomberg.net.
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