Next year, at the biggest recurring event on China’s political calendar, a five-yearly Communist Party congress will confirm who will run the country until 2032. The dates of one such event have just been announced: a gathering from October 26th to 29th of the 370 or so leaders who form the party’s Central Committee. The supreme position of Xi Jinping is in little doubt. But hundreds of senior roles below him are up for grabs. A series of secretive meetings over the coming months will decide who gets them. Privately they will ponder a generational shift in Chinese politics.
Officially they will discuss “full and rigorous party self-governance”, meaning, in essence, obedience to Mr Xi.
Amid the wreckage of the sixth generation, the seventh is rising. Should he become the city’s party chief, he would be a shoo-in for a seat in the ruling Politburo. Some of the seventh generation have spent long periods outside mainland China. A seventh-generation official has a decent chance of eventually ruling China. At the apex of power in Beijing is the Politburo Standing Committee, which has six members in addition to Mr Xi. All but one are old enough to retire at the 21st party congress, which is likely to be held late next year. A seventh-generation official could then in theory skip some ranks and join it. But Mr Xi is unlikely to empower such a young official just yet: that man would be seen as an heir-apparent, and Mr Xi appears in no hurry to choose one (much less a woman: none has ever served in the Standing Committee). But Mr Xi would have a problem: he may have to pick someone with whom he has had relatively little chance to build up trust. This could cause turbulence.
Even if Mr Xi remains at the helm at the party’s 22nd congress in 2032, surrounded by an inner circle of gerontocrats, notably younger politicians will play big roles. In August attention turned to one possible seventh-generation star, 54-year-old Zhu Zhongming, when he was appointed as Shanghai’s acting mayor. Others worth keeping an eye on are Liu Jie, 56, who is the governor of Zhejiang, a wealthy eastern province (Mr Xi once had that job) and A Dong, 55, the first secretary of the Communist Youth League, the party’s youth wing (two predecessors in that post later became the party’s general secretary). That would suggest two-thirds of the current Central Committee will step down next year, and the proportion of seventh-generation officials will rise from 8% to over 40%. Yin Yong, the 57-year-old mayor of Beijing, has a master’s from Harvard University; Guo Ningning, 56, is a rising star (and, very unusually for a senior politician, a woman) in the eastern province of Fujian who spent several years working for a state-owned bank in Hong Kong and Singapore. (Mr Xi’s first and longest recorded trip outside China was two weeks he spent in America as part of an agricultural delegation in 1985.) Unlike their elders who typically have spent most of their careers in party, government and military jobs, these cadres are more likely to have served as business leaders, albeit in state-owned enterprises. But that might change by the 22nd congress, when Mr Xi will be 79. “If Xi is going to be in his 80s, does it make sense to pass the baton on to somebody who’s 70?
Typically, senior party officials retire if they have reached 65 by the time of a congress, while Politburo members retire at 68 (in 2022 Mr Xi became a rare exception, as did China’s highest-ranking uniformed military official, Zhang Youxia, 76, who was expelled from the party and the armed forces on September 21st for “severe violation of political discipline”). A member of the seventh-generation, who by then would be in their 50s and 60s, would still be young enough to be a credible successor, says Jonathan Czin, a former CIA analyst. “Whoever is the first person that Xi picks is not going to be the last,” reckons Mr Czin (Mao and Deng both cycled through several heirs-apparent). “I’m buckling up for a pretty tumultuous period in Chinese politics.”
