All the Emperor’s men

Xi Jinping is general secretary of the party central committee and chairman of the central military commission.

The highest-level political body is the standing committee. It is currently composed of seven members, but had nine as recently as 2007.

Beneath the standing committee is the 25-member politburo, the stepping stone to the top positions in the party.

Below that is the central committee of around 205 cadres composed of government ministers, provincial leaders, military officers and top regulators.

The selection process for China’s top leaders is opaque, with positions determined only after brokering behind closed doors and negotiations between incumbent and past members of the politburo.

For decades after Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in the 1990s, the leaders followed unwritten rules, such as ensuring a balance of ages and political factions across the highest echelons of the party and ceding their posts at the end of two five-year terms. This system had ensured peaceful transitions of power after 30 years of increasingly chaotic rule under Mao.

Despite being a princeling — the son of a party elder and revolutionary leader — when Xi, then 60, became China’s leader in late 2012 he was seen as lacking a clear-cut group of loyal followers among the leadership.

Jiang Zemin, general secretary from 1989 to 2002, still wielded immense power over Chinese politics after retiring to his home city of Shanghai.

Jiang’s influence flowed through the Shanghai faction — supporters and confidants who had been promoted under his watch or had connections in his local support base.

Xi’s own promotion to the standing committee five years earlier was partially down to the support of Jiang and his former vice-president Zeng Qinghong.

Jiang’s power, however, was offset by a group of technocrats loyal to his successor Hu Jintao and his premier Wen Jiabao. This faction, named after the Communist Youth League where many of them built their careers, included Xi’s future premier, Li Keqiang.

Faced with the same powerful interest groups that Hu Jintao had been either unable or unwilling to confront, Xi began to weaken the factions that had come to dominate elite Chinese politics since Deng.

An old friend, Wang Qishan, became a standing committee member the same year Xi took over as leader. Wang, a seasoned bureaucrat, was tapped to lead an unprecedented crackdown as Xi’s new anti-corruption tsar. The campaign was legitimised by rampant corruption across the party-state, but it soon became a tool for Xi to purge his political rivals.

Among the first in a series of key military and political heavyweights to fall was Zhou Yongkang, the former head of China’s internal security apparatus and a supporter of Jiang. The arrest of Zhou shattered an unwritten rule since the end of the Cultural Revolution — under Xi, even incumbent or retired standing committee members were no longer untouchable.

Within just a few years of Xi taking power, 25 of the 205-member CCP central committee, the tier of party leaders below the politburo, were removed from their posts on grounds of corruption.

By 2017, as the party elite prepared to meet for a congress it holds every five years to select its leaders, Xi was in a position to ramp up the placement of his choice of people into positions of influence.

Two of the five vacant seats in the standing committee went to Li Zhanshu, Xi’s chief of staff since 2012 and a trusted ally, and Zhao Leji, a loyal bureaucrat and head of the department responsible for handling state appointments. Also promoted to the standing committee was Wang Huning, Xi’s principal ideological guru.

Zhao became the new anti-corruption tsar, following Wang who had reached the party’s unofficial retirement age for standing committee members.

Xi was moving closer to abandoning the unwritten rule that there be a balance of factional groups at the highest levels of government.

Under a norm established during Jiang and Hu’s tenures, Xi should also have used the 19th party congress to identify the country’s next leader.

The custom was for the leading member of the next generation of officials to be appointed to the standing committee, so that he could spend a period gaining experience in positions at the highest levels of power.

The party had also developed an implicit age limit for politburo standing committee members: those who are 67 or younger can be reappointed, those 68 or older must stand down — a system known as “seven up, eight down”. But all five new members of the standing committee were too old to serve as a two-term party leader after Xi. The age-limit, however, will be ignored for Xi to stay on as leader.

For the first time in more than a quarter of a century, the CCP had failed to designate a clear potential successor to its sitting general secretary.

Then, at a key meeting to ratify the new parliament in Beijing months later, China’s constitution was amended to abolish the two-term limit for the president — paving the way for Xi to transcend the retirement age and rule for an unprecedented third term.

But Xi’s control does not just come from the failure to anoint a successor. China’s leader has consolidated power across many of the party-state’s crucial executive positions.

During Xi’s first term, Jiang’s faction controlled law enforcement and the police force, the clique loyal to Hu and Wen led the economy and propaganda departments. Xi only had his friend Wang Qishan as the head of party discipline.

On the eve of the party congress, at the end of Xi’s second term, he firmly controlled all these crucial positions, assigning his protégés to replace allies of Jiang and Hu-Wen.

These are cadres he has either known since his youth, trusted officials whom he worked with over decades earlier in his career, or loyal rising stars conspicuous for their lack of connection to the rival camps.

With control over the politburo and executive, and no natural successor in place, Xi cemented the potential to rule for life.