Continued Power Struggle Likely Despite Xi’s Sway
Infighting may occur even among president’s loyalists, Harvard panel members predict
By: Toh Han Shih
Chinese President Xi Jinping has filled the new Politburo Standing Committee, the handful of the country’s most powerful leaders, entirely with members of his own faction, ensuring that at age 69, he could stay in power for at least another decade, according to participants at a wide-ranging November 8 panel discussion at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, although that is unlikely to end factional squabbles.
The latest standing committee was unveiled in Beijing on October 23, one day after the ending of the 20th Party Congress which gave Xi a long-anticipated third term, breaking the two-term limit laid down by the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping and freezing out any possible detractors from factions controlled by Xi’s predecessors Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin.
Different factions have traditionally been represented in earlier committees, which are appointed every five years.
“The 20th Party Congress effectively obliterated the collective leadership model that defined elite politics in China in the post-Mao era,” said John S. Van Oudenaren in an article of the Jamestown Foundation, a US think tank, on November 3…