The 2025 summer conclave will reflect Mr Xi’s stunning success in remaking the party’s top ranks: the old guard are dead, senile or sidelined and loyalists reign. China’s paramount leader appears to have no serious rivals; he guides the world’s second-biggest economy and its largest armed forces seemingly unchallenged.
For world leaders, access to him is imperative. In recent days he hosted the foreign ministers of India and Russia and held talks with Australia’s Prime Minister. And America has just insisted that “the odds are high” of a meeting between Mr Xi and US President Donald Trump later in 2025.
China’s elite politics remains a black box. If a leader were ever in trouble, outsiders might be the last to know. But analysts now whisper that Mr Xi’s governing style may be changing in subtle ways. Having originally strengthened a system of commissions in order to dominate the bureaucracy, he is dialling back.
Certain commissions, which are a kind of committee run by Mr Xi, are convening less often. In others he is allowing trusted lieutenants to implement his agenda. And he is appearing in public less frequently.
Yet far from challenging the authority of China’s party chief, these developments may only enhance it.
If a shift in style is under way, it would mark a striking change for a man who has ruthlessly centralised power since taking office in 2012. The number of officials under investigation has grown alongside Mr Xi’s own authority: a crackdown launched in April 2024 has led to 433,000 being probed.
Recent purges in the armed forces have been remarkable. Several generals who once sat on the five-man Central Military Commission, the party organ which controls the armed forces and which is chaired by Mr Xi, are under investigation or have disappeared from view. The most recent seeming example, General He Weidong, would be the highest-ranking military officer to fall since 1967.
Leading a party of allies solves some problems, but Mr Xi appears wary that it can create new ones, too. Those chosen for their loyalty may lack experience, shy away from delivering bad news or see opportunities for graft. Mr Xi told the 24-member Politburo on June 30 that “the string of self-revolution must be tightened even further”.
Black and white and red all over
After taking office, Mr Xi wielded power through a host of party commissions that permitted him to sidestep the state bureaucracy and other vested interests. A powerful institutional weapon, they also allowed him to sideline officials not of his own choosing, such as the previous prime minister Li Keqiang.
Mr Xi has set up nearly a dozen commissions of his own, overseeing different areas of governance and steering his domestic agenda. But more often now he’s sending written instructions to related meetings rather than attending, says Mr Neil Thomas of the Asia Society, an American think-tank.
The number of such meetings appears to be dropping, too. The most important commission, on economic reform, met 38 times in the first five years he was in charge. Since 2022 it has done so only six times and none has been publicly announced since August 2024. Its communiques are also shorter, which suggests it is making fewer decisions. Other commissions led by Mr Xi have similarly fallen off, notes Mr Christopher Beddor of Gavekal Dragonomics, a research firm.
In its meeting in June, the Politburo created regulations (though it did not publish them) clarifying for the first time the responsibilities of party commissions, most of which are still chaired by Mr Xi. Tellingly, they must “coordinate without overstepping and ensure implementation without overreaching”, the meeting readout said.
The new regulations are part of Mr Xi’s efforts to “rule through rules”, perhaps so that his agenda prevails even when he is not in the room, says Dr Holly Snape of the University of Glasgow. All this appears part of a drive to ensure that the country answers to the party above all else, with Mr Xi at its head, and that there is no separation of powers.
The other change in Mr Xi’s approach relates to delegation. He has begun awarding stewardship of some weighty commissions to underlings. Limiting the groups’ powers may make Mr Xi more comfortable handing over control of them, notes Dr Victor Shih of the University of California, San Diego.
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In particular, he has placed his trust in Mr Cai Qi, in effect his chief of staff, Mr Li Qiang, the prime minister, and Mr Ding Xuexiang, the deputy prime minister. Each was given a party commission to lead in early 2023. All sit at the apex of power on the Politburo’s seven-man standing committee and Mr Xi broke convention in 2022 to promote them. They have strong ties to the top leader, but weak links with each other.
Mr Cai is widely regarded by observers as Mr Xi’s most trusted adviser. He controls the scheduling, communication and security of the party leadership. Unusually, at the same time, he is in charge of the daily operations of the party centre’s hulking bureaucracy. Yet it is the often-overlooked Mr Li who seems to have gained most from the top leader’s slow shedding of duties.
Mr Li served as chief of staff to Mr Xi between 2004 and 2007, when Mr Xi was still a provincial governor on the rise. Mr Li has since regained some of the responsibilities that were stripped from his predecessor, including some say over economic policy. Mr Li also seems trusted: He went to the Brics summit in Brazil in July in Mr Xi’s place. It was the leader’s first absence from the gathering in 12 years. Mr Li also enjoys considerable clout within the state bureaucracy. New rules allow him to summon bureaucrats at will and hold study sessions on topics of his choosing. Mr Xi is the only other leader who has such latitude.
Mr Li may have also benefited from an odd event in April, when two members of the Politburo swopped jobs without explanation. The result is that one of Mr Li’s old colleagues now oversees party personnel decisions ahead of the five-year party congress, which will meet in 2027 to decide key appointments for the next term of government.
Delegating functions to loyalists, while failing to identify a successor (and hence potential rival), may be signs of a leader preparing to rule into old age. Mr Xi is 72 years old (his mother Qi Xin is 98). There are no indications that he will step aside when his third five-year term ends in 2027.
In their twilight years, both Mao and Deng Xiaoping fragmented authority to ensure that subordinates served as counterweights to prevent any one gaining too much influence. They became oracle-like, pontificating on ideology from behind a curtain. Over time Mr Xi may come to shape such a system – one where ultimate power remains his, even in absentia. © 2025 THE ECONOMIST NEWSPAPER LIMITED. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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