Xi Jinping: the game changer of Chinese elite politics?

ABSTRACT

Amidst China’s emergence as a global power, Xi Jinping is pushing through a range of ambitious reform plans that are reconfiguring both Chinese domestic politics and foreign policy. A fierce anti-corruption campaign has led to the dismissal of a large number of powerful figures, while a major effort has begun to bring party, state, and military power within Xi’s control. Many observers have interpreted these moves as radically altering the rules of game of elite politics, if not creating a personalistic political system. Our analysis shows that Xi’s corruption fighting and power centralisation represent part of his state-building project, in order to enhance the party-state’s capacity for the pursuit of governance objectives. We identify three rules regarding the Party’s power succession that would provide a critical test regarding how radically Xi is prepared to alter the Party’s key norms. The outcome of the 19th party congress in late 2017 would make it clearer whether Xi is in an effort to further institutionalise Party politics or turning the regime into his one-man rule.

KEYWORDS:

• Elite politics
• Xi Jinping
• Chinese politics
• institutionalisation
• leadership transition

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. We also thank the editor Jeffrey Wilson for his dedicated work, which helped us to improve the original manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Zhengxu Wang is Professor in School of International Relations and Public Affairs at Fudan University. Previously, he worked as Associate Professor of Contemporary Chinese Studies and Politics at Nottingham University. His research focuses on Chinese political reform and democratic changes.

Jinghan Zeng is Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research focuses on the study of China’s authoritarian system, elite politics, political communication, political economy and international politics.

Notes

1. This paper is an analysis of contemporary development in China’s elite politics. We have avoided building a single bloc of literature review per se, but instead engaged academic literature wherever the literature can inform our analysis or our analysis holds implications to the literature.

2. His key protégés, loyal supporters, and allies fall into several groups: those with a Shaanxi background (his hometown), those with a Fujian, Zhejiang, and Shanghai background (provincial units he served earlier in his career), and those with a Tsinghua University background, where he went to college and obtained his Ph.D. degree (Li, 2014a, 2014b, 2014c). In the military, they mostly hail from the Nanjing Military District. This especially includes those generals who rose from the 31st Army of that military district, which is stationed in Xiamen City, where he served as a vice mayor in the 1985–1988 (Bo, 2014, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c).

3. The ranking system of Chinese government officials is complicated. A person holding a vice provincial governor rank, more often than not, is serving at one of the many posts in the provincial party-state other than serving as a vice governor. Each province, at any given time, should have 30–50 serving officials on this rank, although probably less than 15 are considered powerful (within the provincial context).