Xi Jinping said it and the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) confirmed it: it’s a new era, including for the party and its process of institutionalization. Xi entered the congress as a very powerful leader, but one who still respected almost all of the traditions and precedents that guided Chinese [...]
It really is a new era. As members of China’s Politburo Standing Committee walked onto the stage to greet the press, it became clear that no successor to President Xi Jinping has been anointed. Instead, three politicians born in the 1960s – Hu Chunhua, Chen Miner and Ding Xuexiang – have become members of [...]
Until recently, Sun Zhengcai, the party secretary of the metropolis of Chongqing, “the Chicago on the Yangtze”, was seen as a possible successor to Xi Jinping. Then, in July, the Communist Party of China launched an investigation against him for corruption, leading to Sun’s dismissal from office and the precipitous end to his political [...]
After Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic Party primary and was then elected US president, he offered her the post of secretary of state. In Australia, Julia Gillard did the same once she unseated Kevin Rudd from the prime ministership in 2010: she named him foreign minister. Throughout the world, the [...]
China’s political system has two problems. The first is its secrecy. The second problem, though, is very different: the simplified, hyperbolic caricature often presented in the West, where Chinese politics is usually depicted as a totally unpredictable fight for power. In this view, political events in China are simply the result of a power [...]
Over the past three years, a narrative about Chinese President Xi Jinping’s desire to remain at China’s helm for another five or ten years after 2022 has steadily taken hold. Together with this “Xi Forever” narrative, there has been growing speculation that, in order to break a precedent that requires leaders to retire at [...]
Xi Jinping is the most powerful Chinese leader since Deng Xiaoping. No, Xi is the most powerful leader since Mao Zedong! No, Xi is as powerful as Mao! You've probably read these a million times since Xi came to power in 2012. Yet, is Xi really as powerful as the founder of Communist China, who later started the Cultural Revolution, [...]
A party strategy “If we fail to handle this issue [corruption] well, it could prove fatal to the party and even cause the collapse of the party and the fall of the state”. Thus spoke the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party at the party’s 18th National Congress, in November 2012. This ominous warning [...]
Throughout the past half-century, the driving force of globalization and the creation of a rules-based order has been the North Atlantic partnership between the United States and Europe. But in the past six months, the paths of America and Europe have diverged on everything from trade and climate change to preserving an open, multilateral [...]