Mark Stokes, Eric Lee, Cathy Fang, and Marek Haar
INTRODUCTION
The People’s Republic of China (PRC, China) poses unprecedented security challenges in the Indo-Pacific region and the broader international community. As such, it is now more important than ever to anticipate who will lead the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and govern China. The composition of China’s leadership—including generational and individual characteristics, as well as group dynamics and balances of power—will have significant implications for China’s policies, political and social stability, and foreign relations.
The CCP is a system characterized by both external unity and internal competition for power and influence. The Party exerts tight control over the political future of China and, despite the opacity of its internal competition, a series of patterns had emerged prior to Xi Jinping’s rule that made it possible to forecast future political leaders. Between Deng Xiaoping’s (邓小平) rise to paramount leader in the late 1970s and Xi’s ascension in 2012, leadership succession had become an increasingly institutionalized process. After the tumult of the Mao and immediate post-Mao years, the Party came to prioritize orderly and predictable successions in order to preserve social stability and, by extension, ensure Party control over political authority. Since Xi’s rise, however, it has become unclear how future paramount leader successions will play out. That said, patterns of cadre elevation at other senior ranks are possible to discern.
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