China in the Era of Xi Jinping

Domestic and Foreign Policy Challenges

Robert S. Ross, Jo Inge Bekkevold, Robert S. Ross, Jo Inge Bekkevold

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781626162990
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Internationale Beziehungen

Since becoming president of China and general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping has emerged as China's most powerful and popular leader since Deng Xiaoping. The breathtaking economic expansion and military modernization that Xi inherited has convinced him that China can transform into a twenty-first-century superpower.

In this collection, leading scholars from the United States, Asia, and Europe examine both the prospects for China's continuing rise and the emergent and unintended consequences posed by China's internal instability and international assertiveness. Contributors examine domestic challenges surrounding slowed economic growth, Xi's anti-corruption campaign, and government efforts to maintain social stability. Essays on foreign policy range from the impact of nationalist pressures on international relations to China's heavy-handed actions in the South China Sea that challenge regional stability and US-China cooperation. The result is a comprehensive analysis of current policy trends in Xi's China and the implications of these developments for his nation, the United States, and Asia-Pacific.

PART I

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Domestic Challenges for the Chinese Leadership

1
China’s Fifth-Generation Leaders

Characteristics of the New Elite and Pathways to Leadership

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BO ZHIYUE

Until 1989, the concept of “generations” within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership did not exist. The founding fathers of the People’s Republic of China had been invariably referred to as “old generation revolutionaries” (lao yi dai ge ming jia), but no further delineation was made to differentiate veteran leaders. “First-generation leadership” was posthumously reconstructed by Deng Xiaoping. According to Deng, the CCP’s leaders from 1921 to 1935 were not worth consideration because none of them had been mature enough. The first mature CCP leadership started with Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, and Zhu De.¹

Deng also dismissed Mao’s successor, Hua Guofeng, as a transitional figure since he did not have his own ideology. Hua was simply an advocate of Maoism and he adopted a policy of whateverism (seen in his statement “We will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made, and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave”). According to Deng, the “second generation” refers to the CCP leadership that initiated reforms and opening policies, that is, Deng’s own generation. Though Deng himself belonged to the first-generation leadership, he played an important role in starting new policies of reform and the country’s opening to the West.

Deng’s point of framing the CCP history in terms of generations was meant to introduce a new leadership, the post-Tiananmen group, who would take over from his generation and move forward. At the Fourteenth National Congress of the CCP in October 1992, Deng wanted to both retain the services of the third-generation leadership with Jiang Zemin at the helm and also select a candidate, Hu Jintao, as the core of the fourth-generation leadership. Ten years later, at the Sixteenth National Congress held in November 2002, the baton was passed from the third to the fourth-generation leadership. In the meantime, China was also grooming the fifth-generation leadership

The first individual to be considered a candidate for the fifth-generation leadership was Li Keqiang (born July 1955). At the age of thirty-seven in 1992, he was poised to succeed Song Defu (born February 1946) as the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Youth League (CCYL) at the forthcoming Thirteenth National Congress of the CCYL the following year.² In 1992 Li was nominated as a candidate for alternate membership in the Fourteenth Central Committee of the CCP while he was still a member of the secretariat of the Central Committee of the CCYL. However, Li failed in the election partly because deputies to the Fourteenth National Congress did not feel the need to elect an alternate member in addition to a full member (Song Defu) from the CCYL.³

Two fifth-generation candidates emerged during the Fifteenth Party Congress held in September 1997: Li Keqiang, who was elected to be a full member of the Central Committee of the CCP in his capacity as first secretary of the Central Committee of the CCYL without a glitch; and Xi Jinping (born June 1953), a young candidate who also almost failed to enter the Fifteenth Central Committee of the CCP as an alternate. As deputy secretary of Fujian province beginning in 1995, Xi’s image as a “princeling” (as the son of Xi Zhongxun) was probably a liability. Among the candidates for alternate membership, Xi was ranked number 151, one place short of the originally planned number of alternate members. Xi was eventually included as an alternate member of the Fifteenth Central Committee of the CCP through his selection as a candidate for the fifth-generation leadership.⁴

The majority of fifth-generation leaders entered the Sixteenth Central Committee of the CCP in 2002 as full members, many of whom entered the Seventeenth Politburo in 2007 and the Eighteenth Politburo Standing Committee in 2012. It will be instructive to understand these fifth-generation leaders in terms of their demographic characteristics (age, education, home province, ethnicity, and gender). We will then analyze their pathways to leadership in terms of political endowments, political origins, training grounds, and launching pads.

Characteristics Of Fifth-Generation Leaders

Age and Generation Cohorts

The CCP has developed two norms for Politburo members: “age sixty-eight” and “age sixty-four.” “Age sixty-eight” refers to the norm that those who are sixty-eight or older are not eligible for election to a new Politburo term; “age sixty-four” refers to the norm that those who are sixty-four or older are not eligible for election as new Politburo members.

It is widely believed that the age sixty-eight norm began in 2002 when Li Ruihuan, a then-standing member of the Politburo and chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), was retired at the age of sixty-eight.⁵ However, another Politburo member, Li Tieying (son of Li Weihan), was also retired from the Politburo in 2002 even though he was only sixty-six years old (born in September 1936). Li Tieying had been a member of the Politburo for three consecutive terms and was retired probably because he was considered a member of the third-generation leadership. Two people who were one year older than Li Tieying were either promoted to the Politburo Standing Committee or made new members of the Politburo: Luo Gan (born in July 1935), a member of the Fifteenth Politburo, was promoted to the Sixteenth Politburo Standing Committee; and Gen. Cao Gangchuan (born in December 1935), a member of the Central Military Commission, was made a member of the Sixteenth Politburo.

The norm of age sixty-eight was enforced in 2007 when Zeng Qinghong, the vice president of China, was retired, while Jia Qinglin, the chairman of the CPPCC, was retained. Jia is only eight months younger than Zeng: Zeng was born in July 1939 and Jia in March 1940. The same norm was also enforced at the Eighteenth Party Congress in 2012: Wang Lequan (born in December 1944) was retired, while Yu Zhengsheng (born in April 1945) was promoted to the Politburo Standing Committee. Yu is merely four months younger than Wang, and in fact Wang was still only sixty-seven years old at the time of the Eighteenth Party Congress in November 2012.

China’s top political leaders can be divided into different generations according to birth year vis-à-vis age sixty-eight. Generations are usually separated by ten-year increments, and two cohorts can be identified within each generation. In this sense the third-generation cohort refers to those who were born between 1930 and 1934; third-and-a-half-generation cohort refers to those who were born between 1935 and 1939; the fourth-generation cohort refers to those who were born between 1940 and 1944; and so on (see table 1.1).⁶

Table 1.1 Generation Cohorts for Politburo Members in China

Generation Cohort	Year of Birth	Year of Retirement	Party Congress
3.0	1930–1934	2002	Sixteenth
3.5	1935–1939	2007	Seventeenth
4.0	1940–1944	2012	Eighteenth
4.5	1945–1949	2017	Nineteenth
5.0	1950–1954	2022	Twentieth
5.5	1955–1959	2027	Twenty-First
6.0	1960–1964	2032	Twenty-Second
6.5	1965–1969	2037	Twenty-Third

Apparently the norm of age sixty-four—which was introduced in 2007—was not enforced in 2012, because five new members of the Eighteenth Politburo were age sixty-five or older. These five were Fan Changlong (sixty-five), Guo Jinlong (sixty-five), Meng Jianzhu (sixty-five), Ma Kai (sixty-six), and Li Jianguo (sixty-six). In fact, the last two, who had been skipped five years earlier, were installed as new members of the Politburo at age sixty-six.

As a result, the new leadership that was produced by the Eighteenth National Party Congress is a mix of four cohorts, all of whom were born in the late 1940s through the early 1960s. It seems that the largest cohort of the Eighteenth Politburo is not the 5.0 generation cohort but rather the 4.5 generation cohort. Of the twenty-five members, eleven belong to the 4.5 generation cohort, or 44 percent of the total (see table 1.2). The second largest cohort is the 5.0 generation, equaling 32 percent of the total. Four people belong to the 5.5 generation cohort and two to the 6.0 generation cohort.

Table 1.2 Generation Cohorts of the Eighteenth Politburo

Generation Cohort	Freq.	Percent	Cumulative Percent
4.5	11	44	44
5.0	8	32	76
5.5	4	16	92
6.0	2	8	100
Total	25	100

Source: Author’s database.

In fact, of the seven members of the Eighteenth Politburo Standing Committee, only Xi Jinping can be considered a fifth-generation leader. Five other members are 4.5-generation leaders, and one is a 5.5-generation leader.

Interestingly, President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang belong to different cohorts, a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Time Line of the People’s Republic of China
• Introduction
• Part I. Domestic Challenges for the Chinese Leadership
• Part II. International Challenges to Rising China
• Conclusion
• Contributors
• Index