Dictator’s Shadow

Abstract

President Xi Jinping is arguably the most powerful Chinese leader since Chairman Mao. Recent constitutional revisions and a midterm leadership reshuffle has only substantiated the fear that Xi, like Mao, has no intention of handing over power to a future successor. Does Xi's rise signal an end to collective leadership and does a stronger president translate into a weaker party? In this article, I review the methods by which Xi has come to consolidate power as well as the implications for Chinese elite politics in the future. Drawing insights from the comparative literature, I question the zero-sum relationship between executive and institutional strength. Although Xi has certainly amassed unprecedented personal power, it has not necessarily come at the expense of the Party. Instead, the dangers of Xi Jinping's power grab are more likely to result from a chilling effect on dissenting opinions and thinning out of the leadership pipeline, each of which is likely to undermine governing capacity over the medium to long-term.

Elite bargains and policy priorities in authoritarian regimes: Agenda setting in China under Xi Jinping and Hu Jintao

“…Why elite bargains under Xi broke away from the effortfully preserved model of elite co‐optation is still under debate. Like other general accounts of Xi's “power grab” (e.g., Economy, 2014; Minzner, 2018), our comparison of Hu and Xi underlines the arbitrariness of the events leading to this outcome, such as Hu's unprecedented decision to hand over all key political offices in one transfer (Gueorguiev, 2018). Even though the more specific reasons for Hu to create favorable conditions for Xi to expand personal control and for the party elite to tolerate greater concentration of power are largely speculative and in themselves less relevant to our theoretical focus, it can be more clearly stated that events leading to these high‐stake decisions are not directly linked to how bureaucrats and cadres, scattered across the wider political system and individually tending to often domain‐specific concerns, manage policy priorities.…”

Probability of Development of Nuclear Weapons by Ukraine

“…This collapse has resulted in the concentration of power in the hands of Xi Jinping (Gueorguiev, 2018; Shirk, 2018). 52 The latter's passion for the development of socialism and a thinly concealed hatred of capitalism, combined with the suspicion of the leaders of the most economically developed areas of insufficient loyalty, costs China dearly. The Communist Party of China's grip on power is strengthening currently (Gore, Yongnian, 2019), 53 thus, political trends do not leave much space for the investors' optimism.…”

State–society relations under a new model of control in China: Graduated control 2.0

“…1–2, 2018: 3–6; Dimitar D. Gueorguiev, Dictator’s shadow: Chinese elite politics under Xi Jinping, China Perspectives , nos. 1–2, 2018: 17–26.…”