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20 August 2016 – The Economist

The leadership’s annual retreat will not have been relaxing

RESPLENDENT in a pleated chef’s hat, Yang Zhibin supervises the kitchens of Kiessling’s restaurant in the resort town of Beidaihe, where he has worked since 1971 and where, every August, China’s political elite gathers for highly secretive meetings. Now head chef, Mr Yang helps ensure that little changes at the resort’s grandest restaurant. “There are over 20 dishes on the menu that we’ve been cooking for 100 years,” he says. “We wanted to keep the traditional style.” A diner who gives his name as just Houzi (meaning “monkey”) says: “I first came to Kiessling’s 30 years ago. Only the prices have changed.”

The town of Beidaihe, a beach resort 175 miles (280km) east of Beijing, feels stuck in a time warp. Hotels even have embroidered sheets. Yet as the annual political gathering ended on August 16th, Beidaihe’s staid, timeless feel was proving misleading. The country’s politics has entered a period of unusual uncertainty and tension. In the coming months President Xi Jinping will supervise sweeping changes to the party’s leadership at every level, culminating late next year in the unveiling of a new Politburo (which he will continue to lead). This five-yearly process will be overshadowed by bitter struggle between the president and rivals close to his predecessors, as well as growing concerns about the health of the country’s economy. The leaders in their seaside villas will not have been in the mood to party.

It was Mao Zedong who began the tradition of holding informal meetings at Beidaihe. The idea was to provide a forum at which current and former leaders could meet away from Beijing’s sweltering summer and daily grind. In the 1980s and 1990s the discussions were a useful way for Deng Xiaoping, who was then pulling strings behind the scenes, to convey his views to those who were nominally in charge. But Mr Xi tries to keep interfering party elders at bay (his predecessor-but-one, Jiang Zemin, turned 90 on August 17th, though still retains influence). Unlike his immediate predecessor, Hu Jintao, Mr Xi appears to have far less time for the old boys.

Power plays

In theory it should be relatively easy for Mr Xi to place henchmen in positions of power during the reshuffles. The president is far more of a strongman than Mr Hu was. He has dismantled Deng’s system of “collective” leadership, taking to himself more formal positions of authority than his predecessors did. As were Mr Hu and Mr Jiang, Mr Xi is the party’s general secretary, state president and chief of the armed forces, but he is also much more. He has expanded a system of “small leading groups” under his own chairmanship, giving them sway over areas of policy that used to be the preserve of the government and the party’s highest bodies.

Mr Xi has also been engaged in a fierce campaign against corruption, which has spread fear throughout the bureaucracy; his rivals have been among its most prominent victims (the most recent, Ling Jihua, who once served as Mr Hu’s aide, was sentenced to life imprisonment in July). In all, 177 people with deputy-ministerial rank or above have been investigated as part of the crackdown since Mr Xi took over in 2012. He has had over 50 generals arrested for graft and promoted his own men in their place, says Cheng Li of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank in Washington, DC.

Even so, Mr Xi’s authority remains hemmed in. True, his position at the highest level looks secure. But among the next layer of the elite, he has surprisingly few backers. Victor Shih of the University of California, San Diego, has tracked the various job-related and personal connections between the 205 full members of the party’s Central Committee, which embodies the broader elite. The body rubber-stamps Mr Xi’s decisions (there have been no recent rumours of open dissent within it). But the president needs enthusiastic support, as well as just a show of hands, to get his policies—such as badly needed economic reforms—implemented. According to Mr Shih, the president’s faction accounts for just 6% of the group. That does not help.

Admittedly, this number should not be taken too literally: it is difficult to assign affiliations to many of the committee’s members. Doubtless, too, many members who are not in Mr Xi’s network support the president out of ambition or fear. Still, Mr Xi can rely on remarkably few loyal supporters in the Central Committee because he did not choose its members. They were selected at the same time he was chosen as party leader in 2012, a process overseen by the dominant figures of that period, Mr Hu and the long-retired Mr Jiang.

Next year the party will appoint a new Central Committee at its regular five-yearly congress, which will probably take place in October. This time not only will Mr Xi be in charge of the process, he will also have more places than usual to fill. Normally 40-60 full members retire every five years when they reach the committee’s retirement age of 65 (the age for the Politburo is 68). Assuming the retirement ages do not change, 85 committee members will leave in 2017. Seven more have been purged for corruption, bringing to 92 the total number of places Mr Xi will have available to fill. At Beidaihe this summer, the elite is thought to have had its first look at the new line-up.

Some of the jobs will be filled by the principle of Buggins’s turn. But if Mr Xi were able to pick, say, half the new members, that would sharply increase the level of his support in the committee—though even then he could not count on a majority of loyal backers. It would extend his power but not make it absolute. That would frustrate him. His predecessor, Mr Hu, likewise inherited a Central Committee stacked with members installed by the outgoing leadership, but he was a relatively weak leader who showed limited appetite for difficult economic reforms. At least rhetorically, Mr Xi has appeared more ambitious (there are even rumours that he wants to stay on after 2022, when he would normally be expected to step down).

These personnel battles will be fought behind closed doors over the next year or so. Mr Yang, the chef, will be kept busy. Members of the elite used to come to his restaurant to eat. Now, he says, he more often gets summoned to cook for them in their beach houses. Presumably while they plot to eat each other’s lunch.