Names loyal to Xi vie for power in the Communist Party without hurting the leader’s hegemony

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Xi Jinping will use March’s “lianghui” – the joint sessions of China’s parliament, which automatically approves decisions by the leader and the political advisory body – to confirm a series of nominees for critical posts at the helm of the country with the largest population. world and is a rising military superpower.

They will mostly be men Xi has known since his youth and trusted, with whom he has worked for decades throughout his career, as well as rising stars who have already pledged their loyalty to the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Tse-tung.

Appointments to government posts in March will cap off the consolidation of power in Xi’s hands as he begins an unprecedented third term as leader, as confirmed at the Communist Party Congress in October.

They will also mark the emergence of a new set of factions among Xi’s acolytes and staunch supporters elevated to more senior roles during the congress.

Wu Guoguang, who was an adviser to former Chinese premier Zhao Ziyang, wrote in a paper published by the US research group China Leadership Monitor that “a new era of factional politics is beginning”.

“It is unlikely that Xi’s status and authority as the top leader will be contested by high-ranking CCP figures, but factional disputes are already beginning to break out among the diverse groups of Xi’s supporters,” said Wu of Stanford University. and the think tank Asia Society, in the USA.

A feature of Xi’s leadership over the past ten years has been the centralization of decision-making, which has reduced the influence of other senior leaders. Xi has already disrupted once-powerful networks aligned with his predecessors Hu Jintao and the late Jiang Zemin.

While they pose no threat to Xi’s ironclad hegemony, the new factions will compete for control and influence — and, ultimately, to determine who succeeds Xi in the party.

Analysts believe that understanding the background, personalities, ideological leanings, policy preferences and personal networks of Xi’s top advisers is crucial to shedding light on the murky and often unpredictable world of Chinese politics.

“Competition between factions will be inevitable in the coming years,” Wu said. “The generational shift, in terms of the circulation of internal elites and succession in power, will also fuel power struggles between factions that are starting to take shape under Xi.”

In his article, Wu says four key groups include people who worked with Xi in Fujian, Zhejiang and Shanghai, as well as Shaanxi, the northern province where Xi’s family has deep roots.

Wu named five other groups, including some officials from the military and industrial sectors, names linked to the prestigious Tsinghua University, members linked to the Central Party School, several officials with apparent ties to Xi’s wife Peng Liyuan, and a group from the safety.

“Looking at the bigger picture, the rise of the military and industrial group appears to be indicative of Xi’s new strategy of economic and technological development, with an emphasis on the state’s ability to promote technological progress and with a reduction of private sector influence in the economy. Chinese,” said Wu.

Victor Shih of the University of California San Diego is an expert on elite Chinese politics. He identified the most important clusters as those Xi formed when he was governor of Fujian and Zhejiang, as well as the group of advisers from the north of the country who were appointed to posts in the party’s powerful anti-corruption bodies.

Xi’s protégés in Fujian include He Lifeng, who many predict will take over from Liu He as Xi’s economic czar; Cai Qi, the party’s new director of propaganda and ideology, and Public Security Minister Wang Xiaohong. All of them were present during part of Xi’s rule of the province, from 1999 to 2002.

“That’s a very powerful combination,” Shih said. “It’s worth remembering that it was the longest period in Xi’s career. He spent more than a decade in Fujian. That’s why that place marked him deeply, and he marked the place.”

The advisers hailing from Zhejiang, where Xi was party chief from 2002 to 2007, include Li Qiang, a member of the Politburo Standing Committee and the top contender to be China’s next prime minister, as well as the Guangdong party chief, Huang Kunming, and the new Minister of State Security, Chen Yixin.

Cheng Li, an expert on Chinese politics at the Brookings Institution, said analysts were only in the early stages of gaining an understanding of the new, “highly complex” landscape.

This requires restarting analyzes of the leadership’s vast web of personal networks, beyond differences in politics, ideology, and influence.

Even so, Joseph Torigian, an expert on elite Chinese politics at the American University in Washington, points out that China watchers have a poor record of predicting the results of contemporary secretive political maneuvers in Beijing. But he also draws some parallels with the Mao era, when the dictator purged leaders of his own generation and promoted younger figures.

“Certainly there was competition between the different groups promoted after the most recent ‘cleaning’, but what they mostly did was try to intuit what the top leader wanted and deliver the best to him,” said Torigian.

Any factions that take shape in the CCP’s upper echelons also risk angering Xi, who has already cracked down on political opposition and any threats to his hegemony he could discern.

In the months leading up to the Communist Party Congress in October, former Justice and Public Security officials accused of being part of a “political gang” disloyal to the Chinese leader were sentenced to lengthy prison terms.

Torigian noted that such political groupings in China “rarely come together to form something as cohesive as what we would consider to be a faction.” “People don’t want to give the impression that they are cooperating too much with each other, because that would be an immediate red flag for Xi Jinping. He would want to destroy that cohesion.”

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