Hu Jintao Revisited: A Seven-Year-Old Sentiment Youth Who Tightens the Grip on China

It is a moment that for many observers has come to define strongman leader Xi Jinping’s tightening grip on China: his visibly frail predecessor, Hu Jintao, being escorted out of a key Communist Party meeting during a five-yearly leadership reshuffle – apparently at Xi’s behest.

Mao is considered to be a flawed patriot and a brutal dictator today in the West. Millions of Chinese died from a famine in 1962, caused by his misguided attempt at rapid industrialization. So intent were ordinary Chinese on raising steel production that they melted down hoes, plows and other iron implements in crude backyard furnaces, leaving them nothing to work the fields.

Xi, however, sees Mao as very much worthy of emulation. He uses Mao’s slogans frequently according to a professor at the University of Cambridge. He dresses like him, gestures like him. At the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China” — which was last year — “he wore a very specific type of suit, a special kind of Mao suit that only Mao wore on very specific occasions. And he gave his speech from Tiananmen Square, just like Mao did when he proclaimed the founding of the P.R.C.”

The first is in continued tension and conflict in foreign policy. Under Xi, China began projecting power beyond its borders. Under his watch, China massively built up its military presence in the South China Sea, constructed military bases in South Asia and Africa and instructed its diplomats to use very blunt, aggressive language in dealing with other countries – something known as “wolf warrior” diplomacy.

So instead of turning against the party, Xi devoted himself to it. In interviews with state media, Xi spoke of how his seven years as a “sent-down youth” toughened him up and strengthened his resolve to serve the party and the people. “I was distilled and purified, and felt like a completely different man,” he told the People’s Daily in 2004.

“A high-profile purge of Hu at a critical juncture like the 20th Party Congress shows the presence of dissent, and the notion that Xi is at least ‘challengeable,’” he said. “Neither is great for Xi’s image of invincibility.”

The nationalist mission appeals to Chinese citizens much more than the cold logic of Marxism-Leninism. Feelings of wounded anger, as well as sincere displays of patriotism, were visible during the Beijing Winter Olympics last February. Chinese who don’t like Communist Party rule still love their country.

But the past decade in China has been marked by new levels of authoritarianism — and nowhere has it been clearer than in the country’s western region of Xinjiang.

Across Tibetan villages in southwest China, Communist Party officials have been spreading the top leader Xi Jinping’s gospel of national unity: that every ethnic group must fuse into one indivisible China with a shared heritage dating back over 5,000 years.

Thousands of officials in Ganzi, a Tibetan area of Sichuan Province, have been tasked with helping families to learn more about Mr. Xi, as well as giving out gifts of rice, cooking oil, and photos of him.

“In the future I’ll be a member of your family, too,” Shen Yang, the Communist Party secretary of Ganzi, called Kardze in Tibetan, told one household, according to a local newspaper.

The party is facing some new challenges including hostile relations with the United States which have impacted some of China’s most promising technology giants. The party may survive another round. The country’s economy is crippled by constant Covid controls, its technology firms are bound by dramatic American export restrictions, and it has been overshadowed by a nationalism and a refusal that have hurt its diplomatic clout.

When Xi’s recent predecessors were in charge, party congresses were occasions to elevate younger leaders for grooming as eventual successors. Xi himself took this path to the top.

The system was meant to protect China from the turmoil of the Communists’ first decades in power. It started with the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, and ended in the death of its first leader in 1976.

The top leader had three positions at once, which made their power come from holding them all. In order of importance, they are the general secretary of the Communist Party, the chair of the Central Military Commission and the title of president of China.

Hu also relinquished both his party and military posts when he retired in 2012 after two terms in power – earning him praise from Xi for “his broad mind and noble character.”

Deng had an orderly succession plan where one leader would be replaced halfway through their term. That was meant to forge consensus and prevent wild swings in policy.

We were aware that Xi wanted another term around the time no successor was appointed. Xi’s intentions became clearer in 2018 when China’s parliament lifted term limits on the presidency.

Xi’s new hard-line approach toward Taiwan: A key part of his 2008-2009 white paper and the rest may come to an end

In some ways, this year was set in motion years ago but it is still very significant. This will play out in ways that people around the world will experience in three important ways.

Most importantly, China took a new, harder-line approach toward Taiwan. In August, his administration released a white paper that carries a marked change in tone from previous white papers in 1993 and 2000.

“Reunification” is one of the goals of the agenda of the leader of the country, and is seen as a key part of that agenda. The inclusion of Taiwan in the party constitution shows its importance.

Xi also ramped up the party’s control of the economy, especially its once-vibrant private sector. His regulatory curbs brought down tycoons and wiped out trillions of dollars of market value from Chinese firms.

As Xi ages, and further tightens his grip, his circle of friends and advisors will inevitably shrink, as will his ability to process new information and new ideas.

We’ve already seen this in the Xi administration’s decision to blindly follow its “zero-Covid” policy, despite overwhelming evidence that it is now counter-productive. Will this sort of inability to correct course become the norm?

In this situation, it’s not out of the question to foresee a period of slow but steady decline setting in, with the leadership around Xi unwilling to engage in economic reforms or allow the sort of freewheeling intellectual life that in previous decades had allowed China to flourish.

Instead, repression is likely to continue, not only for parts of the country with large minority population, such as Xinjiang, but in the country’s ethnic Chinese heartland.

The congress of the party next week will signal that the government will keep doing the same things, even though the country needs a change.

CNN Observations of the Beijing Protest against Xi Jin-Mills: The No-Go Theorem, Freedom and Freedom

The protest that was held in Beijing against Chinese leader XIJI was quickly ended, just days before he is scheduled to be re-elected to a third term in power.

Photos circulating on Twitter Thursday afternoon show two banners hung on an overpass of a major thoroughfare in the northwest of the Chinese capital, protesting against Xi’s unrelenting zero-Covid policy and authoritarian rule.

“Say no to Covid test, yes to food. No, no to confinement and no to freedom at all. Yes, not to lie, not to have a dishonest disposition. No to cultural revolution, yes to reform. No to great leader, yes to vote. The banner says do not be a slave, be a citizen.

CNN cannot independently verify the images and footage, but has geolocated them to Sitong Bridge, an overpass on Beijing’s Third Ring Road in Haidian district.

Protesters and banners were not visible when CNN arrived at Sitong Bridge. However, a large number of security personnel were on the overpass and in the vicinity. CNN was spotted by security personnel patrolling every overpass on the Third Ring Road.

On Chinese social media, discussions about the protest were heavily censored. The protest under #Beijing and #Haidian received support and awe from some users. Others shared the Chinese pop hit “Lonely Warrior” in a veiled reference to the protester. Many of the posts were quickly taken down.

The 20th Party Congress: Predicting a Long-Term Rule with the Xi-Bao-Mills-Governor

At the 20th Party Congress beginning on Sunday, Xi is widely expected to break with recent norms and extend his rule for another term, potentially paving the way for lifelong rule.

The group contains people from all walks of life, a wide range of professions and China’s ethnic groups. It is designed to confer legitimacy on the outcomes of the congress.

Early in the congress, Xi will deliver a long speech akin to the State of the Union address in the United States. It will let the party leadership see how things have gone over the last five years and gives an idea of the policy priorities for the future.

These measures have proven so effective that many are worried that the policy will never be abandoned and that the system is obsessed with social stability.

The Central Committee will hold its first plenum shortly after the party congress ends to select a Politburo, which will include the top 25 officials and the Politburo Standing Committee.

In the past the norm has been for leaders to step down after two years, so that a younger generation could take over.

If — or when — he gets a third term as party chief, as expected, he will be in a prime position to drive his policy agenda even further. Making the country more self-sufficient and less dependent on the West, boosting China’s influence and power projection around the world, and working toward the annexation of Taiwan are all possibilities.

Five Years of the Reform: China’s Rise and How It Affects the World — A Conversation with Xi Jinping

By convention, potential successors should have been promoted into the Politburo Standing Committee, or at least the Politburo, at the last party congress, five years ago, but none were.

CNN put a version of the story in its newsletter about what you should know about the country’s rise and how it affects the world. You can sign up here.

China’s new leader saw a country in crisis when he visited his late father in the leadership compound where he spent time as a child.

“Xi Jinping is a man with a mission. He believes that he knows the ways to take China to the promised land of national rejuvenation,” said Steve Tsang, director of the China Institute at SOAS University of London.

“Xi Jinping sits on top of the party, the party sits on top of China, and China sits on top of the world. The program is a senior fellow at the Lowy Institute in Australia.

The police chief of the mega city of Chongqing attempted to defect to the United States, accusing Bo of trying to cover up his wife’s murder of a British businessman. Party leaders feuded over how to deal with the fallout. Eventually, Bo was investigated and expelled from the party weeks before the five-yearly power reshuffle. Bo and his wife are both serving life sentences.

“Our party faces many grave challenges and there are many pressing problems within the party that need to be solved, in particular corruption,” Xi said in his first speech hours after being appointed the top leader.

Why Did the Communist Party Go Down? The Case of Xi, the Founding Father and the Fate of the Soviet Union: Its Real-Life Interpretation

In the online sphere, there was extensive censorship and real-life retaliation. Instead of serving as a catalyst for social and political reforms, it became an amplifier for party propaganda and a breeding ground for nationalism.

The policy was stressed in recent articles as being correct and sustainable by theparty’s writers, even though Xi boasted in his speech Sunday that “Zero- Covid” had been a resounding success. And state media fills its coverage with depictions of the “grim reality” in foreign countries where leaders supposedly turn a blind eye to mass fatalities and suffering caused by Covid – in contrast to China’s apparent triumph in saving lives with “minimal overall cost.”

For Xi, safeguarding the party’s primacy is a painful lesson drawn from the Cultural Revolution, when the Communist establishment was attacked by Mao’s “red guards” and lost control over society.

Hundreds of thousands died in the turmoil, including Xi’s half-sister who was persecuted to death. Xi’s father was purged and tortured. Xi himself was incarcerated, publicly humiliated and sent to hard labor in an impoverished village at age 15.

“Arguably, his emphasis on party authority, and stopping individuals who disagree with the party from criticizing (it), is a result of his phobia of chaos because of what he saw happened to himself, his mother, his father and siblings,” said Joseph Torigian, an expert on Chinese politics at American University and author of an upcoming biography on the elder Xi.

“(He) believed that to achieve political order you needed to have a powerful leader, a powerful party, not creating a system in which people had rights that went too far, because they would only abuse them and hurt other individuals,” Torigian said.

The Soviet Union lost it’s strength. Why did the communist party go down? In a speech months after he took the helm of the party, President Xi told officials that their ideals and beliefs had been messed with.

Xi and the West: Awakening the Gates of Heavenly Peace and Restoring the Confinement in the 21st Century

The United States has begun to compete with China and is working with allies and like-minded partners to counteract Beijing on a number of fronts.

It has a strong emotional appeal in China. It’s very powerful. I think Xi understands that and he intends to harness that to his own ends,” he said.

The most stark warning to the west came when he presided over a grand celebration for the party’s 100th birthday. The Chinese nation will no longer be a victim of foreign powers, was the promise made by the president on top of the Gate of Heavenly Peace. “Anyone who dares to try, will find their heads bashed bloody against a great wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people,” he said to thundering applause from the crowd.

Western values such as democracy, press freedom, and judicial independence were warned against by China’s President since he came to power. He has clamped down on foreign NGOs, churches, Western movies and textbooks – all seen as vehicles for undue foreign influence.

Xi and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin share a deep suspicion and hostility toward the US, which they believe is bent on holding China and Russia down. They both agree on the need for a new world order that is more responsive to the nations interests and less dominated by the West.

It is hard to gauge public opinion in China. You can be thrown in jail if you speak out against the Communist Party. But many people do say they genuinely like Xi and think he is doing a fine job leading the country.

That difficult international environment, along with the toll of zero-Covid and the economic headwinds, poses a big challenge for Xi in the years ahead.

Walled inchina Xi Jinping: The Great Wall closed during March 2018 National Day holiday as a global pandemic epidemic

During China’s National Day holiday in early October, several expatriate friends and I took our young children – who are of mixed races and tend to stand out in a Chinese crowd – to the Great Wall on the outskirts of Beijing.

As we climbed a restored but almost deserted section of the ancient landmark, a few local families on their way down walked past us. Noticing our children, one exclaimed, “WOW foreigners!” With Covid? let’s go away from them… The adults remained quiet as the group quickened their paces.

The Great Wall, a top tourist attraction that normally draws throngs of visitors during holidays, stood nearly empty when we went thanks to Xi’s insistence – three years into the global pandemic – on a policy of zero tolerance for Covid infections while the rest of the world has mostly moved on and re-opened.

The borders have remained closed sinceMarch 2020 for most international travelers and many foreigners have left the country.

With the highly contagious Omicron variant raging through parts of the country, authorities had discouraged domestic travel ahead of National Day holiday. They are sticking to a pattern of strict sterilizing, excessive mass testing and contact tracing that can often lock down entire cities over a few cases.

Unsurprisingly, holiday travel plummeted during the so-called “Golden Week” along with tourism spending, which fell to less than half of that in 2019, the last “normal” year.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/17/china/walled-in-china-xi-jinping-global-challenges-intl-mic/index.html

Xi talked about the Great Wall and the dangers of the “blame the foreigners” sentiment at a Beijing congress on Sunday

The local child made a statement on the Great Wall. The true danger of the “blame the foreigners” sentiment comes when adults in powerful positions take advantage of it in the face of growing domestic pressure.

With China’s increasing economic and military might, coexistence with the West has given way to confrontation with the United States and its allies. The days of “hiding your strength and biding your time” are over, as Chinese diplomats are now trained to shoot anyone who dares to question their government.

At a congress of China’s ruling elite on Sunday,Xi defended his hard-line reign as the leader whose policies saved the nation from the ravages of the Pandemic and was now focused on securing China’s rise.

The nation must stand behind the party in order to cope with a world that is becoming more hostile, and his praise was accompanied by a somber warning. His distrust of the world’s other great power was an unmistakable backdrop to that, even though he did not mention it by name.

The President said to be careful in the midst of peace. The house should be in a good shape before the rain comes, and should be prepared for the major tests of high winds and waves.

Xi Jinping’s 10 Years in the Life of an Economics Professor and the Leader of China’s Second-largest Economy

They included a professor at the party’s top academy who helped train thousands of high-ranking cadres. An economist who would win China’s top economics prize for 2012. A young historian planning to teach a class about contemporary Chinese history, including sensitive periods like the Cultural Revolution.

The delayed release of economic data that had been expected to show continued lackluster performance is news from China.

BEIJING — Ten years ago, with more than 2,000 delegates in front of him, Xi Jinping smiled graciously when he took the helm of the most populous nation on the planet and the world’s second-largest economy.

One person paying attention was a professor named Ilham Tohti. He was happy to see that he had been promoted to the party’s general secretary.

He sounded very excited. He’s like, ‘I think it’s going to change now. The scholar’s daughter said that things are going to get better.

Ilham Tohti, 53 this month, is a member of the Uyghur ethnic group, which calls Xinjiang home. He was an activist for the Uyghur language and culture.

By some estimates, a million or more people would eventually be detained. The U.S. has called it genocide. The top human rights official for the United Nations said in a recently released report that abuses in Northwest China may have been crimes against humanity. China denies wrongdoing.

Ten Years of Independence: A Yoga Odyssey Through the Troubles of the Cultural Revolution – The Journey of Vis and his Father, Xi, in China

But it comes with a cost. The impact on the economy has been huge, with heightened uncertainty smothering consumer confidence and rendering business planning all but impossible.

The statement of protest was drafted by Vis and his neighbors. They played it in public because they wanted everyone to hear it.

The lock down began in the early spring. Since it was lifted in June, Vis has pieced his yoga business back together for the most part. He says it left a scar on everyone.

“It could happen again if it happened once,” Vis says. “In China there’s a saying: If you’re bitten by a snake, you’ll be afraid of coiled rope for a decade.”

During the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, Xi was sent to the northwestern Chinese countryside to work in areas not far from where he was raised. Zhang liked Xi’s style and was familiar with him.

The child of revolutionaries, and a man that understands the plight of the country’s poor, has been able to take action because of the experience in the Cultural Revolution. Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun, was a guerrilla fighter in the civil war and later a vice premier.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/18/1127852397/china-xi-jinping-10-years-perspectives

Why China is so proud of its country? The example of Hong Kong, the umbrella movement, and the human-power struggle in the 21st century

The situation is similar in Hong Kong. The former British colony had a vibrant pro-democracy movement, an active civil society, and the people enjoyed freedom of speech.

In 2014, street protests erupted in the city in what became known as the “Umbrella Movement” — openly calling for the right to directly elect the city’s leaders.

Five years later, a proposed extradition law sparked fresh demonstrations. Kwong — who was getting her master’s degree in Germany — flew home to join them.

A sweeping National Security Law was imposed on Hong Kong by Beijing in 2020. The Hong Kong democracy movement was decimated by the arrests.

Xi has not blinked. He went on to say that the one country, two systems model of running Hong Kong is a “great innovation” and that China has overcomegrave challenges to its national security.

When Hong Kong was returned to Britain in 1997, it was promised that it would have a high degree of control over its own affairs. Critics say China has reneged on that promise.

She said that her life has gone to pieces because of the leader. I left my home. I lost a lot of my friends. And I’ll never set foot in Hong Kong again.”

These were just four people with four very different experiences under Xi. But in a country of 1.4 billion people, it is impossible to capture the national mood.

10 years ago, the Communist Party made a bet that a harder leader would be necessary to keep power and make China stronger.

Having the ability to take Taiwan has been a driver of the modernization of the PLA, but actually doing so is a gargantuan and bloody task, and even moreso than the Russian attempt to invade it.

China now boasts the world’s largest navy, with some of the newest and most powerful warships afloat; an air force with stealth fighter jets and a stealth bomber expected soon; and a rocket force bristling with new missiles that give it a reach unmatched in Asia.

The Impact of China on the Interaction of the Ukranian Republic with the USA in the First Five Years of World War II: The Case of Taiwan

Russia has experience with doing so in Ukraine. During the war of the Russian troops lack of air cover, the proper supplies, or units in the right places have been the subject of many accounts.

Beijing’s ability to be more innovative in managing prickly challenges, like COVID-19 and the sputtering economy, is at risk because of the loyalist lineup.

Taiwan is less than one hundred miles off the coast of China. For more than 70 years the two sides have been governed separately, but that hasn’t stopped China’s ruling Communist Party from claiming the island as its own – despite having never controlled it.

Analysts say that would require hundreds of thousands of soldiers in what would be the largest amphibious operation since the Allies stormed ashore at Normandy in German-occupied France in World War II.

A new aircraft carrier being launched this year and the most powerful surface ships in the world are some of the things that have cost thePLA Navy a lot.

As Professor O’Brien of St. Andrew’s points out, Taiwan has a cheap way of defeating Russia – by investing in small, land-based anti-ship missiles.

China also faces a challenge in making sure all its various fighting forces pull in the same direction, as well as a issue that has hampered Russia in Ukranian.

It is still in the early stages of creating unified command structures in which naval, air, army and rocket units work together seamlessly to execute a coordinated battle plan.

The work report stated the need to improve the command system for joint operations, as well as enhance the PLA’s capacities for early warning and strikes.

During the days following the visit, thePLA launched missiles over the main island, and flew jets into the air defense identification zone.

The Great War of 1812-2022 and the State of the Art in China: General Secretary Xi Jinping, Director of the Center for Military Studies, Wuthnow,

Four of the top six officers of China’s Central Military Commission (CMC) have reached the normal retirement age of 68 and are being replaced as Xi heads into his third term, according to Joel Wuthnow, a senior research fellow at the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs at the US National Defense University.

What’s more, the four departing officers were in charge of the PLA’s actual fighting forces, while the two remaining ones come from the military’s political ranks, Wuthnow wrote for the Jamestown Foundation’s China Brief last month.

Analysts say that language could be a smokescreen for something worse, like how Russian President Vladimir Putin refers to his invasion of Ukraine as a special military operation.

A missile was fired by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s Eastern Theater Command in the evening of Aug. 4, 2022, in order to hit designated maritime areas to the east of Taiwan.

The Chinese state media have played down the significance of the order, stating that it would only cover actions such as providing disaster relief.

“The outlines aim to prevent and neutralize risks and challenges, handle emergencies, protect people and property, and safeguard national sovereignty, security and development interests, and world peace and regional stability,” the Xinhua news service reported.

Xi has ramped up China’s ambitions for reducing carbon emissions and slowing global warming. He reiterated the goals in grandiose language this week. Affirmatively, we must uphold and act on the notion that the waters and mountains are valuable assets. Putin of Russia is the leader who is threatening to throw the climate fight in reverse and he has allied himself with him.

This summer, China sweltered through more than two months of record-high temperatures, the country’s most prolonged heat wave since modern records began in 1961. The river dried up. Factories halted production to reduce the burden on power grids. The extreme highs could become a new normal, according to the government’s chief forecaster.

Please accept my country’s gratitude and congratulations as you embark on your third term as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. Though it may not be obvious now, we believe your reign will one day be recognized as one of the great unexpected blessings in the history of the United States, as well as that of other free nations.

The slim volume covers the 1970s to early 1990s, a spread of time during which ideas about economic and political reform gestated. The party closed the flanks after the Tiananmen massacre to throw out those half-formed ideas. Where Dikötter’s book is a roadmap of how we got here, Gewirtz looks at the road not taken — and a tantalizing glimpse, perhaps, at the political possibilities that remain still.

The odds suggest that theparty will prevail again, though the odds look more stacked against it in the congress. The Communist Party faced a challenge of how to address longstanding structural issues of its own making without giving up its monopoly over power and means of production. It seemed very much like a dead end.”

All of the six other Politburo Standing Committee members are close to the leader of the country. They proved their loyalty by working with him in different parts of the bureaucracy.

Four members of the previous Standing Committee retired to make way for new blood. Two had reached or passed the traditional retirement age of 68. But two had not – and their exit this weekend was a surprise.

The premier and head of the Chinese advisory body both retired from the Politburo Standing Committee, despite being one year under the retirement age. Wang and Li are close to Hu’s sphere of influence.

Party ideology tsar Wang Huning, who is also 67, retained his membership in the Standing Committee. Wang is an aide toXi and he is credited with helping formulate his ruling philosophy. Wang Huning and Wang Yang aren’t related.

“If Li Qiang does become premier, which looks now certain, it clearly means that loyalty is more important than performance,” said Tony Saich, an expert on Chinese politics at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

On Sunday, it was revealed that Huchunhua, a Vice Prime Minister and one of the elder Hu’s closest advisers, had been dropped from the Politburo. Once seen as a rising star being groomed for the top leadership, Hu Chunhua’s political future has dimmed under Xi.

The “two establishes” call on party members to recognize Xi as the “core” of the party and to regard his governing philosophy as a key tenet of party rule. The “two safeguards” require party members to protect Xi’s status as the core and to safeguard the party’s leading role in politics in China.

“Even a quick glance at the Politburo … obviously doesn’t seem to indicate a person who’s there to be a successor,” Saich said. “So it’s clear Xi intends to rule. He intends to rule as the key figure. The question of succession is pushed into an unpredictable future. I think that can be destabilizing.

He extended his rule beyond the standard 10 years at the congress and stacked the leadership with allies.

The 16th Party Congress: The First Test for the Communist Party, according to An Expert in the Domain of Reconciliation and Political Instability

Analysts say that’s likely an effort to retain maximum power in order to see through an ambitious policy agenda — but it raises the political stakes, and puts China’s hard-won stability at risk.

The issue of succession creates political instability, according to an expert in the field.

After Mao died five years later, his last pick took over. Deng Xiaoping eventually succeeded in taking over from the former dictator, who only held onto power for a few years.

Deng, too, had problems with succession. The party’s reform-minded chief was ousted. Zhao Ziyang, who followed him, was ejected and spent his final years under house arrest for siding with the protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Deng managed to get buy-in from other party power brokers for an unwritten system that set somewhat flexible retirement ages, capped leaders to 10 years at the helm, and promoted and groomed would-be successors several years out.

The 16th Party Congress was the first big test for the party and it passed, says Benjamin Kang Lim, who has covered every party congress since 1997.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/25/1130949484/china-xi-jinping-succession

Xi Jinping Succession: The Birth of the First Orderly Power Transfer and the Impact on Popular Representations of the Central Military Commission

He said that the first orderly transfer of power in over sixty years took place in 2002. There was a reason to do it. There were rules about retirement.

When Jiang Zemin handed over the reins of the party to Hu Jintao, he held onto his position as chairman of the Central Military Commission, an example of how flexible the purported rules are on succession.

There were historical trends that China was bucking. He says autocratic regimes often fail with succession due to institutions being unable to control rulers and laws being seen to serve the regime.

“The Chinese case was then used as an example in the literature on authoritarian systems that sometimes you can actually have institutions that seem to do the job,” he said.

“In historical terms, that could be a very big problem,” Moller said. It could cause elites to lose their land. It might even cost them their lives.” Or start a war.

“Xi Jinping wants to make it very clear that he is not leaving and the people shouldn’t spend a lot of time speculating about who will come next, because he won’t be leaving,” he said.

At the party congress, Xi’s ruling ideology and policy priorities won full-throated support. Mitter says Xi has consolidated power and doesn’t want it diluted while pursuing those goals.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/25/1130949484/china-xi-jinping-succession

The incident of Hu’s “near-arm” removal in China has not been seen by the senior official or the president of the House of Representatives

“Political succession, of course, is important,” Lim said. “But I think it takes a backseat to where this leader or future leaders will take this country.”

On Saturday, footage of Hu being taken by the arm and removed from his chair was circulating.

Tuesday’s footage has fueled fervent speculation about what was in the document and why Hu was not allowed to see it – and left observers divided over what sparked his exit.

The picture shows the official in Li Zhanshu who was sitting next to Hu at the front table taking documents from Hu and putting them under a red folder. The documents are taken away by Li when Hu reaches for them.

While sitting on Hu’s side, the man who was on the other side looked at the exchanges and summoned a senior aide. A second aide gets an instruction from Xi and speaks to Hu, who seems to have no interest in listening.

None of the footage that was released on Saturday and Tuesday was aired in China. In Chinese social media, the incident has not been reported or discussed, since conversations are very restricted around senior leaders.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/28/china/china-party-congress-hu-jintao-new-video-intl-hnk/index.html

Hu’s exit from the parliamentary congress in 2013 was not a purge, but a message about his absolute power and power-law dominance

Some maintain it was likely due to Hu’s poor health or mental state – after retiring in 2013, he has been seen in public looking increasingly frail. Others think it could be a power play by Xi to show his unquestioned authority.

On Weibo, censors even restricted the search results for vague keywords such as “escorted away” or “leaving the meeting,” in an apparent effort to prevent users from making veiled references to the incident, according to Eric Liu, a censorship analyst with China Digital Times.

Meanwhile, gone with Hu are the many hallmarks that had defined his decade in power during which he presided over a period of double-digit economic growth and comparative openness.

According to Steve Tsang, the director of the China Institute at the University of London, the new footage indicates that Hu’s dramatic exit was not planned.

The new video has been interpreted by some as a sign of Hu’s supposed displeasure with the outcome of the Congress, which saw Xi consolidate his power by stacking the new leadership team with his loyal allies and proteges.

A political scientist at the Australian National University said that a planned public purge at the closing of the congress was unlikely.

If Xi had wanted to purge Hu to prevent the former leader from raising objections in public, he would have done so before foreign press were allowed into the auditorium, Sung said.

Many observers were also struck by the apparent coldness of the other leaders on the stage. Few showed any concern for Hu, and many avoided looking in his direction.

In order to rise through the party, officials try to keep their personal emotions hidden and use the party machinery to do it.

Hu hugged the shoulder of his mentor, Premier Li, who looked at Hu as he walked away. Next to Li, Wang sat upright and stared straight ahead, seemingly frozen in motion.

Further down the edge of the stage, Hu Chunhua did not even cast a glance toward the party elder as he passed by. Instead, he looked straight ahead with a notable frown and arms folded across his chest.

But even if the real reason for the elder Hu’s departure never becomes clear, the incident has nevertheless sent an unequivocal message about Xi’s absolute hold on power, analysts say.

Hu’s undignified exit showed that “Xi had reduced the once powerful (Communist) Youth League faction to insignificance,” said Tsang at the University of London.