A few years ago I was told by a Chinese government official in Beijing that the usual precedent for handover of power from one generation of leaders to the next in China is that the leader before the last would have the say on who should be chosen. So Deng Xiaoping chose Hu Jintao, and Jiang Zemin got to chose Xi Jinping. The logic of this process dictates that Hu Jintao’s man be in pole position for 2022, when Xi Jinping is expected to step down.
Like most of these neat theories about China, this one raises more questions than it answers (for example, did Jiang really chose Xi?). But it does help to think a bit about the sort of leader that Xi Jinping is and how he compares to his predecessors. There were certainly favored people around Jiang and Hu — Zeng Qinghong in Jiang’s case, for instance, or Ling Jihua for Hu. But neither of these figures seem to have really prospered. Zeng lasted one term in the Standing Committee, and Ling has been sidelined, with rumors swirling around him being the next big target in the anti-corruption campaign. Perhaps Xi has concluded that the worst thing you can do to someone’s career in China is make it look like they are your closest confidante. So far, while Xi has said supportive things of Liu He the economist, and made use of Wang Qishan as his chief enforcer, there is no one linked to him with the sort of intimacy that Zeng had with Jiang, or Ling with Hu.
Two years into Xi’s reign, one of the intriguing issues regarding who might receive his support for future leadership bids is the fact that in 2017, if precedents are maintained, five of seven members on the current Politburo Standing Committee reach retirement age and therefore are expected to go. This means that presumably at least five, and perhaps even more (previously, the standing committee had 9 members), new faces need to appear, two of whom will immediately attract attention as possible future party secretaries or premiers.
Read Full Article HERE