Inside the leadership of President Xi Jinping
Originally published in The Saturday Paper

On a recent trip to Washington, DC, one question kept popping up at meetings with the city’s China-watching community – would China’s leader Xi Jinping appoint his wife to the Politburo, the country’s most powerful body?
The question sounded absurd, about as likely as Anthony Albanese giving his fiancée a seat in the Australian cabinet, but such is Xi’s power in China these days that intelligence officials felt compelled to take it seriously.
Xi’s wife, Peng Liyuan, is ranked as a major general in the People’s Liberation Army, from her role as a singer in the military music troupes. For many years, Peng was a more recognisable public figure than her husband.
Peng had already been appointed to an opaque military body that checks generals rising through the ranks for their loyalty to the ruling Communist Party and, by extension, to Xi himself – an exceptionally unusual appointment for the spouse of a top leader.
In the end, the rumours about Peng and the Politburo didn’t come to pass. Still, the fact it was discussed at all was a reminder that in China today, all roads lead to Xi.
When Australian leaders meet Premier Li Qiang on his visit here in mid-June, they will be intently focused on what he has to say, especially as this is the first time a Chinese leader of his seniority has visited since 2017.
Ultimately, ministers and the bureaucracy will be listening to Li for any messages he is conveying from the very top. They have good reason to be paying attention.
“Xi has an agenda he wants to push forward but also has a theory about the party’s weaknesses that he has posed himself as the solution to,” says Jacob Stokes, of the Center for a New American Security in Washington. “So the prescription [to China’s problems], whatever way you frame it, tends to be – give Xi Jinping more power.”
Every speech of Xi’s, every statement, public appearance and overseas visit is carefully parsed by Chinese and foreigners alike in efforts to divine the direction of his administration. Some of Xi’s political life takes place in public, in his travels around the country and his interactions with foreign leaders. Often, however, key policymaking speeches are delivered internally and not released until months later, and even then sometimes in redacted form.
As premier, Li is ranked No. 2 in the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee, the country’s top political body. He also leads the government apparatus, headed by the State Council, the closest equivalent in China to a cabinet. He is a considerable figure in his own right, formerly serving as party secretary of Shanghai, a position that made him more powerful than the mayor of China’s commercial capital and gave him a seat on the larger 24-member Politburo years before he moved to Beijing.
However, though Li is formally ranked just behind Xi in the Politburo’s inner-circle and is considered loyal to his leader, he is not regarded as the second most powerful person in the country. China analysts generally pinpoint the fifth-ranked man – and they are all men – on the standing committee, Cai Qi, as the most powerful person after Xi.
That is not because Cai, a former party chief of Beijing, has any independent political personality of his own, nor any achievements in office to match those of Li, but because he has the role of Xi’s enforcer.
Cai is usually at Xi’s side on domestic trips and, according to intelligence analysts in Washington, had been subjecting senior leaders to loyalty tests to make sure they are not straying from Xi’s diktats.
Xi was singled out as the heir apparent in 2007 and then appointed to the top job in 2012 at the party congress that takes place every five years. At the time, Xi was considered a compromise candidate, as he belonged to none of the factional networks that had dominated elite politics since the early 1990s.
Jiang Zemin, who was party secretary from 1989 to 2002, was the titular boss of the so-called Shanghai Gang and promoted many colleagues from that city, where he had served as mayor.
Hu Jintao, his bland and unremarkable successor, in office from 2002 to 2012, came out of the Communist Youth League, which was the dominant political network when he was in power.
Xi’s power bases are more diverse: Zhejiang, an entrepreneurial centre near Shanghai – he was the party boss in both places – and Shaanxi, in the hard scrabble north-west where he spent time in political exile as a young man.
His networks, along with his deep and longstanding connections in the military, are sometimes collectively dubbed the “Xi family army”.
Xi arrived in office in 2012 with something of a mandate from the council of elders, who had consecrated him as the compromise leader, to stem the rising tide of corruption that was threatening to engulf the ruling party and sap its legitimacy.
“Of course, Xi cares about growth – you can’t pay for guns and butter without growth – he just cares about it in a different way ... Now, national security is the prerequisite for growth whereas before, growth was the prerequisite for national security.”
He seized the position and leveraged the extraordinary executive powers available to a party leader to far exceed his mandate. His rivals in the party were caught completely off guard.
Far from running a simple anti-corruption campaign, Xi rapidly took the party back to a darker era of ruthless purges, ideological education, loyalty tests and personality cults. The council of elders, made up of retired Politburo members and well-connected Beijing families, were sidelined as well.
Xi’s most important, and self-serving, reform was the abolition of the informal system of term limits for the top leader. Both Jiang and Hu stepped down after they had served two complete five-year terms.
Throughout history, communist states have struggled to manage an orderly and peaceful succession process. Most Soviet leaders died in office. It was a point of pride for reformers within the system in China that they managed to introduce term limits from the early 1980s onwards.
In early 2018, Xi threw term limits out, without notice and with cursory explanation. In what he calls a “new era”, Xi has effectively made himself leader for life, with no successor in place or on the horizon.
Xi’s China is not Mao Zedong’s China. The country is far richer, more open economically, more educated and more intertwined with the world than Mao’s country ever was.
These days, China is on the cusp of becoming not only the world’s largest economy but a technology superpower as well. The country’s fast trains, airports and even highways are all dazzling feats of construction.
China now occupies the commanding heights of the new green industrial economy, dominating the production of batteries, solar panels and electric vehicles, demand for which is growing around the world.
Alongside this sparkling modernisation, however, Xi has revived and reinforced the ideological state Mao ruled over in a vastly more primitive form. Officials, even at the top level, are required to do constant political study.
“Whenever I am tangling with Chinese officials, I try to remember the system they come from, and remind myself that they have to undergo hours of political indoctrination every week,” a senior US government official tells The Saturday Paper.
The latest high-profile campaign, launched late last year, was directly overseen by Xi’s Politburo protector, Cai Qi, and focused on the “study and implementation of Xi Jinping thought on socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era”.
In Xi’s mind, the country faces two defining, and related, challenges: building China into a global and regional power and elevating the economy into a high-tech productive powerhouse. These targets require China to compete with and then match and surpass the United States in all measures of comprehensive national power, so Beijing can firewall its economy against the kinds of sanction Washington is already imposing on it.
Chinese scholars believe that whoever wins the American presidential election in November – Joe Biden or Donald Trump – the contest between the US and China will continue and even intensify.
“The question of which US president is preferred, Biden or Trump, is one that I am frequently asked,” says Yan Xuetong, one of China’s pre-eminent foreign policy scholars at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
“My response has consistently been that, regardless of who holds the position, the perception of China as a major rival will remain unchanged for the next decade.”
While internally Xi is focused on reinforcing loyalty to the party, Yan doesn’t believe ideology will be important in the new Cold War.
“Ideology is no longer the tool that helps you keep up with advancements in technology. If you cannot develop more advanced digital technology, then you cannot win the competition,” he says.
“Proxy wars were once useful for expanding ideology, as they allowed you to change the regime of a country and make it more similar to your own. Today, however, you can change a country’s regime without necessarily achieving greater technological advancements than your rivals.”
For the moment, Xi has all the tools he needs to control the party and keep his rivals at bay. All the key personnel positions that secure power in China – at the top of the party and the military and in the security apparatus – are his appointees.
The area where Xi is most exposed, and which he cannot completely control, is the economy.
A slowdown of the Chinese economy from the double-digit rates of growth of a decade ago was to be expected, just as other Asian tiger economies all tapered off after their initial spurts.
But Xi has misfired on several fronts of economic policymaking.
The government deliberately tried to take the air out of a property bubble by cutting lending to overstretched developers a few years ago. What was meant to be a controlled demolition has turned into a slow-motion collapse of the entire sector. That has cast a pall over Chinese consumers, the bulk of whose wealth is tied up in property. The real estate sector itself is estimated to account for as much as a third of growth.
On top of that is the drag from China’s declining population. Unlike north Asian market economies such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, which got rich before they got old, China is getting old before it gets rich.
Xi has also deliberately retooled incentives for local officials, telling them to put national security on par with economic growth when setting their policies. Inevitably, that means lower growth.
“Of course, Xi cares about growth – you can’t pay for guns and butter without growth – he just cares about it in a different way,” says Jude Blanchette, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
“There has been an internal rebalancing about how cadres are thinking about national security and growth. Now, national security is the prerequisite for growth, whereas before, growth was the prerequisite for national security.”
Xi has put a priority on building ties with Russia, sticking by Vladimir Putin through the ups and downs of the Ukraine war, because he sees Moscow as a useful ally against Washington.
He has also maintained military and political pressure on Taiwan. There are no signs Xi has any appetite to invade Taiwan – an immensely risky enterprise. Rather, his aim is to use the threat of an invasion to force Taiwan to negotiate over unification.
“The bulk of Xi’s time is not spent on cross-straits relations. It is spent on trying to re-engineer the Chinese economy to something he thinks can withstand and thrive in the 21st century,” says Blanchette.
“Xi is trying to build a counter-containment economy which can withstand US containment pressure.”
However, lower levels of growth mean incomes are rising at a slower pace than under any Chinese leader since the country opened its economy to the world in the late 1970s.
According to a recent Bloomberg report on the economy, a third of office workers saw their salaries fall last year. Most businesses are looking to lay off workers rather than take more on. Shares have been sliding and falling property prices are draining household wealth and confidence.
If these trends persist, the anger that many in the elite in China feel towards Xi over his authoritarian turn could spread to the masses. Even for someone as powerful as Xi, that spells danger.