Top Leadership

Supreme political power in China lies with Xi Jinping, who won a precedent-defying third five-year term as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) after the 20th Party Congress in October 2022. Xi packed the CCP’s top leadership with allies, ejected the remaining representatives of rival political networks, and established extraordinary control over the party and the country. He also exempted himself and several of his associates from the 20-year norm of Politburo members aged 68 or older retiring (Xi was 69 at the time of the Congress), while forcing leaders with other patrons to retire early, achieving a dominance of Chinese politics not seen since Deng Xiaoping or even Mao Zedong.

Xi’s incredible political maneuvering over the past decade enabled him to take greater advantage of a hierarchical government system that already concentrated a significant degree of decision-making power in the paramount leader. Xi leads the party, the state, and the military, serving concurrently as CCP General Secretary, President of the People’s Republic of China, and Chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC). A critical dimension of his consolidation of power is his ability to install loyal supporters in the lower-level leadership positions to which he must delegate tasks in these institutions.

Of the three institutions that Xi leads, the CCP by far the most important. Put simply, the party decides policy, the state implements policy, and the military defends the party and the country. The party boasts 96.7 million members, but its top decision-making body is the seven-person Politburo Standing Committee (PSC). These leaders of top party and state institutions meet about weekly to address domestic and foreign issues of national concern. Past meetings have focused on COVID-19, Five-Year Plans, natural disasters, economic policy, and Xinjiang. Xi chairs these meetings and sets their agendas.

The current PSC comprises Xi and, in rank order, six other national-level party leaders: Li Qiang, Premier of the State Council, China’s state cabinet; Zhao Leji, Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s state legislature; Wang Huning, Chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the party’s advisory body; Cai Qi, First Secretary of the CCP Central Secretariat, the party’s organizational nerve center; Ding Xuexiang, Executive Vice Premier of the State Council; and Li Xi, Secretary of the CCP Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), the party’s internal watchdog. Zhao previously served as the CCDI Secretary and Wang Huning was the outgoing head of the Central Secretariat; the other four members are newcomers to the PSC.

This lineup embodies the “Maximum Xi” outcome of the 20th Party Congress, as all the PSC members have ties to Xi — having worked under Xi, worked under a close Xi ally, or having other personal or familial connections — while senior officials associated with former leaders had to retire. Outgoing Premier Li Keqiang and former CPPCC Chairman Wang Yang retired from the PSC even though they were young enough to stay, while rising star and former Vice Premier Hu Chunhua lost his seat on the Politburo. These three were the last senior leaders associated with the Communist Youth League, which nurtured Xi’s predecessor Hu Jintao. Many analysts in China and abroad believed their rich experience and political norms of power sharing would lead Xi to include at least one of them on the new PSC.

A rung below the PSC are the other 17 members of the 24-person Politburo, who occupy positions at the deputy national level in the administrative hierarchy of the party-state. The Politburo meets monthly to discuss domestic and foreign issues of national importance and to hold a study session on an emerging policy priority. At the 20th Party Congress, Xi promoted several political associates, especially from the ranks of provincial leaders, and increased his effective majority on the body from about 60 percent to well over 80 percent of Politburo seats, with the remaining seats held mostly by technocrats. The lines between people on the wheel above illuminate these personal and professional connections.

The remainder of the Politburo is constituted by directors of CCP departments such as United Front chief Shi Taifeng, personnel chief Li Ganjie, propaganda chief Li Shulei, and law enforcement chief Chen Wenqing; State Council vice premiers He Lifeng, Zhang Guoqing, and Liu Guozhong; CMC Vice Chairmen Zhang Youxia and He Weidong; top provincial-level party secretaries Ma Xingrui, Yin Li, Chen Jining, Chen Min’er, Yuan Jiajun, and Huang Kunming; CCP Central Foreign Affairs Commission Office Director Wang Yi; and NPC Standing Committee First Vice Chairman Li Hongzhong. The retention of Zhang Youxia and the promotion of Wang Yi came as particular surprises because both were well over the previous retirement age. The current Politburo is the first since 1992 without a single female member.

The Politburo shows how Xi emerged from the 20th Party Congress with an unprecedented grip on the CCP. No paramount leader since Mao has achieved a PSC or Politburo with a greater proportion of their personal allies than Xi has now. His political grip on the top party bodies flows from his control of the selection process. Before the 19th Party Congress in October 2017, Xi introduced an interview-based process of “conversation and investigation” to evaluate leadership candidates and discontinued the variable practice of taking a straw poll of senior cadres. In 2022, Xi included new requirements to “put political standards first” and promote officials who were “firm supporters” of his leadership. Xi reportedly spoke with only 30 leaders in 2022, compared to 57 in 2017; this time, he did not consult with retired party elders or with national government leaders who did not hold top party positions. These apparent snubs suggest the political impotency of the State Council compared with party leadership bodies and the weakness of old political networks tied to former leaders Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao.

Xi’s consolidation of power shows that he prioritizes political trust over governance experience and past norms such as age, power sharing, and collective leadership. An amendment to the CCP constitution at the 20th Party Congress strengthened Xi’s personal rule by obliging party members to implement the “two upholds”: “uphold Comrade Xi Jinping’s core position on the Party Central Committee and in the Party as a whole and uphold the Central Committee’s authority and its centralized and unified leadership.” But the composition of these top bodies also shows that Xi increasingly values technocratic expertise. The new Politburo includes eight technocrats, defined as leaders with an educational and professional background in STEM, compared to five in the previous lineup. The eight include all seven provincial leaders promoted to the Politburo. This increase likely reflects Xi's focus on technological expertise as a critical policy input for China to innovate itself out of the middle-income trap and out of the Western chokehold on core technologies. Xi may also see technocrats as more capable administrators and more dependable political subordinates.

In Xi’s view, tighter political control is a good thing, because it enables a clearer policy agenda and better policy implementation. Surrounding himself with trusted allies could give Xi the political breathing room necessary to adopt more pragmatic policies or unpopular but necessary reforms. However, the stronger likelihood is that “Maximum Xi” increases political risk. Other leaders are less likely to push back against Xi’s views, as their careers depend more than ever on supporting Xi’s agenda. Major policy decisions will likely become increasingly defined as expressions of Xi’s personal leadership, creating a sticky political dynamic in which correcting errors becomes more difficult as criticism of policy is tantamount to criticism of Xi. And when Xi does decide on a new direction, his power renders policymaking susceptible to volatile shifts, as demonstrated by the sudden about-face on zero-COVID. Xi’s leadership team also have less experience in national or even provincial leadership roles than their predecessors, especially his top economic team of Li Qiang, Ding Xuexiang, and He Lifeng.

However, the change relative to expectations for Chinese politics after Xi's power consolidation at the 20th Party Congress is one of degree rather than direction; firms and investors should not expect radical policy shifts as much as an accelerated continuity of strategies laid out in Xi’s 14th Five-Year Plan, third “history resolution,” and report to the 20th Party Congress.

Ties to Xi

Xi has promoted mostly officials whom he knows, and who sometimes know each other, from various parts of his career. This pattern partly reflects the personal ties and policy aptitudes of individual leaders, but given that it is those closest to an authoritarian leader who can end up posing the greatest threat, elevating officials from different backgrounds may reflect an effort by Xi to ensure his team are not too close to each other, so as to guard against the formation of political groups outside of Xi.

Groups of officials who know Xi from a particular place, or who have worked or studied together, are often referred to as “factions” or “sub-factions” under Xi’s leadership. Such terminology, which is sometimes used in this product, offers a helpful way to track the relative fortunes of different types of leaders, but the concept of factions in Chinese politics should be treated with caution. These groups are typically not as united in action or intention as the term may suggest.

The opaqueness of Chinese politics means the fact that officials have studied together, spent time together, or share other personal ties can be a powerful clue as to the strength of their political relationship, but such a connection is not sufficient to establish them as friends or allies. The academic literature suggests the most powerful “factional” indicator is a direct professional relationship where a factional “client” works for and is then promoted by a factional “patron.”

Xi’s power is the decisive factor in personnel and policy decisions that casts doubt on the strength or existence of factions below Xi, at least at present. The only relative certainty is that Xi leads a dominant faction in the CCP. His unusually strong influence on personnel decisions over the last decade has allowed him to elevate loyal allies, personal associates, and many others into leadership positions, all of whom now owe some degree of political fealty to Xi’s leadership and policy preferences.

Xi has promoted several officials who worked under him in Fujian Province, where he served as a local official from 1985 to 2002, including as Deputy Party Secretary from 1995 to 2002 and as Governor from 1999-2002. This group includes Cai Qi, He Lifeng, He Weidong, Huang Kunming, and Wang Xiaohong, all of whom also grew up in Fujian. Chen Wenqing worked with several Xi loyalists in Fujian after Xi left.

Xi also promoted officials who worked for him in Zhejiang Province, where he was Party Secretary from 2002-2007, most notably Chen Min’er and Li Qiang, both of whom also grew up in Zhejiang. Cai Qi, He Weidong, and Huang Kunming also worked under Xi's leadership again in Zhejiang.

Xi was then Party Secretary of Shanghai from March to October 2007, where he met Ding Xuexiang, who worked as his top political secretary. Xi’s number-two in Shanghai was Han Zheng, who belonged to the “Shanghai Gang” of former paramount leader Jiang Zemin, but later got behind Xi’s leadership. Chief ideologue Wang Huning is also a Shanghai native who started as a Jiang acolyte, but he has served as a loyal advisor to three paramount leaders, and especially on “Xi Jinping Thought.”

Xi has known some top leaders for a long time because of family connections through his father Xi Zhongxun and his ancestral province of Shaanxi, including Shaanxi native Zhang Youxia and onetime Shaanxi official Li Xi, and, to a lesser extent, Shaanxi native Zhao Leji and former Party Secretary of Shaanxi Liu Guozhong.

Other top leaders built their careers around Xi’s alma mater Tsinghua University in Beijing, most notably Chen Jining, a Tsinghua graduate who found favor with top leaders, including Xi, as he rose through the university administration. Xi’s previous personnel chief Chen Xi, who was his college roommate at Tsinghua in the late 1970s, also helped promote Tsinghua graduates, possibly including Li Ganjie.

The “Military-Industrial Gang” is a loose group of technocratic experts with extensive experience managing complex state-owned technology projects who were put into contention for top leadership positions earlier in Xi’s tenure through promotions to provincial leadership roles. It includes Li Ganjie, Ma Xingrui, Yuan Jiajun, and Zhang Guoqing. They were trained as aerospace, nuclear, or weapons engineers before rising through the military-industrial sector to leadership positions in major state-owned enterprises or technical ministries. Their elevation reflects Xi’s focus on technology but also his desire to promote politically dependable officials without strong connections to former leaders.

Other top officials have looser connections with Xi. Li Shulei and Shi Taifeng worked as deputies to Xi while he was President of the Central Party School from 2007 to 2012. Public health expert Yin Li is purported to have helped Xi’s wife Peng Liyuan become a World Health Organization Goodwill Ambassador for Tuberculosis and HIV in 2011. Liu Guozhong worked under retired Xi confidant Li Zhanshu in Heilongjiang in the 2000s. Li Hongzhong was a follower of Jiang Zemin before becoming a vocal Xi supporter during his first term. Wang Yi is a career diplomat and trusted foreign policy expert.

Policy Trends

The political report to the 20th Party Congress, a truncated version of which Xi delivered in a speech at the conclave, represents the most authoritative statement of the party’s current worldview and policy priorities. Changes in the language used by party leaders in these reports, or tweaks to the rigid format that the reports typically follow, can evince meaningful policy shifts. These policy shifts are both reflected in and driven by the type of officials whom Xi has promoted to the top party bodies.

Political reports do not go into detail about specific policies, but their high-level messages inform policymaking for the next five years and beyond. Xi said that the most recent report constitutes a “grand blueprint” for governing China. Its content signaled continuity rather than change in Xi’s personal leadership and policy agenda, drawing heavily from the most recent Five-Year Plan and the third history resolution, both issued in 2021. Overall, it suggests that Xi will keep pushing China in a more authoritarian, statist, and nationalist direction in the coming years and even decades.

This includes the Chinese economy, where the party plans to play a stronger role—for example, by taking board seats in major firms and guiding capital toward favored sectors. The political report introduced “systems thinking” as part of Xi’s ideology. According to Xi, “all things are interconnected and interdependent,” as economic, political, and social reforms involve adjusting the balance of interests such that “pulling one hair moves the whole body.” The increasingly complex policy issues facing China, therefore, require enhanced party oversight and more government “systems” to manage all aspects of the country’s development. This more centralized leadership is reflected in Xi’s appointment of Cai Qi as the first PSC member to lead the powerful CCP General Office since the Mao era, of chief ideologue Wang Huning to lead the party’s influence efforts in Chinese society and beyond, and of Shi Taifeng as the first incoming Politburo member since 1977 to serve as director of the United Front Work Department.

Xi justifies this increase in party control as necessary to counter rising threats. The party previously presented China as in a “period of strategic opportunity,” in which favorable domestic and international environments enabled a focus on economic development. Xi’s latest report shows that he believes China has now entered a period in which “strategic opportunity co-exists with risks and challenges, and uncertain and unpredictable factors are increasing.” Moreover, the report continues, “various ‘black swan’ and ‘gray rhino’ events may occur at any time,” highlighting the party’s rising concern with preparing for both unexpected crises and foreseeable threats, respectively. The promotion of Wang Yi to the Politburo, despite his age, signals Xi’s desire for continuity in his more assertive diplomacy.

Xi wants to balance economic growth with national security. The 2022 political report contained a new section devoted to national security, which should “permeate every aspect and the whole process” of governance. To prepare for “high winds, choppy waves, and even dangerous storms,” Xi’s report called for stronger party leadership, people-centered policymaking, and a spirit of struggle. The report also added a section on science, education, and human capital, priority areas to bolster indigenous innovation and address the political risks of lagging productivity growth and the Western chokehold on key technologies. Xi’s fixation on security is evidenced by the promotion of Chen Wenqing as the first intelligence chief to lead the party’s top law enforcement body, and the elevation of Chen, public security chief Wang Xiaohong, and top CCDI Deputy Liu Jinguo to serve on the Central Secretariat.

Even high-single-digit GDP growth targets now seem beyond reach. Development remains the party’s “top priority,” but its “primary task” is now “high-quality development.” This includes elevating Xi’s “new development pattern,” a strategy that unites development and security goals by boosting domestic demand and homegrown technology while increasing global reliance on Chinese supply chains. Xi’s political report identified new growth drivers—AI, IT, biotech, green industries, high-end manufacturing, renewable energy, and new industrial materials (such as those engineered with nanotechnology)—but it was notably less enthusiastic about markets, openness, and supply-side structural reform than even his previous report in 2017. The report’s vision of strategic economic management also requires the party to expand oversight of the private sector by “strengthening Party building” in nonstate firms and “improving corporate governance” of financial firms, and of private wealth, by “regulating the mechanism of wealth accumulation.” While growth remains an important goal for Xi, and new premier Li Qiang is known for his business-friendly policies as a provincial leader, Li is an inexperienced economic policymaker and won promotion for his political closeness to Xi. Other personnel movements also suggest Xi’s continued move away from market reforms, with Western-trained technocrat Liu He replaced as Vice Premier by former local party boss He Lifeng, and former Xi chief of staff Ding Xuexiang becoming Li’s number two on the State Council.

The report suggested that Xi is preparing China for long-term strategic competition with the United States. It defined the party’s overarching goal for China as “building a socialist modern great power” by the centenary of the People’s Republic in 2049 and “us[ing] Chinese-style modernization to comprehensively advance the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” The party has long wanted to achieve “modernization” by midcentury, but this report stated in the clearest terms yet that Xi wants China to “lead the world in comprehensive national power and international influence.” The new link between “Chinese-style modernization” and “national rejuvenation” emphasizes Xi’s determination to steer China on the party’s own course, one that rejects democratic politics, individual freedoms, and US leadership in global governance. That includes efforts to “actively participate” in global human rights governance and the formulation of global security rules. Xi’s report did not change Taiwan policy, but a new phrase—“resolving the Taiwan question is for the Chinese people themselves to decide”—portends stronger pushback against U.S. and allied efforts to upgrade their interactions with Taiwan.

The Future of Xi

What the 20th Party Congress did not do was provide any indication of how long Xi would remain as leader. But Xi’s third term, the new history resolution, no apparent political heir, and Xi’s personalization of party ideology suggest that he plans to rule indefinitely.

Shortly after his reappointment, Xi led the new PSC on a visit to Yangjialing in Yan’an, where Mao cemented his absolute authority at the Seventh Party Congress in 1945. Xi said that Party Congress “marked the Party’s political, ideological, and organizational maturity,” which included “forming a group of well-tested politicians who held high the banner of Mao Zedong.” Xi drew a parallel between Mao in 1945 and his own consolidation of power in 2022, implying that he plans to lead the party for decades to come.

But Xi’s succession remains a “gray rhino” political risk for China: we know it will happen, but we do not know when, we do not know how, and we do not know what comes next. The longer Xi rules, and the older he gets, the more other officials will eye a post-Xi future. Political competition could start to emerge between different leaders, or between groups of officials with different ties to Xi. A contested succession could bring policy confusion, economic stasis, or even political chaos.

Economy and Trade

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China’s economic trajectory is arguably the most vexing issue facing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its leader, General Secretary Xi Jinping. China has recorded economic growth averaging over 9 percent per year since former paramount leaders Hua Guofeng and then Deng Xiaoping inaugurated an era of economic “reform and opening” following the death of Chairman Mao in 1976. Market-oriented policies and a favorable geo-economic environment enabled 800 million people to lift themselves out of poverty, transforming China into an upper-middle-income country and the world’s second-largest economy. However, growth is now slowing to the mid-single digits, partly for structural reasons as China becomes richer, and partly for policy reasons as Xi’s more statist agenda contributes to slower productivity growth and rising political risk. The transition from an old and now largely exhausted economic model centered on investment, manufacturing, and exports to a higher value-added model focused on consumption, services, and innovation will be crucial for China to become a high-income country. Xi has shifted the party’s official focus from quantity of growth to quality of growth. Still, his efforts to reform China’s economic structure have progressed slowly because of poor policy choices and the weight of vested interests. China’s economy is likely to continue growing but not as fast as once thought, making distributional issues more important in Chinese politics, leading to an increase in social tensions and instability, and creating political headaches for Xi’s administration. China’s economic trajectory impacts not only Beijing but the global economy. China is the world’s largest manufacturer, the largest trader, the largest exporter, the second-largest importer, the largest holder of foreign exchange reserves, one of the largest sources and recipients of foreign direct investment, and an important source of global growth.

• Institutions
• People
• Policy

Institutions

The CCP Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission (CFEAC) under the CCP Central Committee has traditionally been the core decision-making and coordination body on economic policy and public finance, meeting about twice per year to discuss the overall direction of Chinese economic policy. For example, Xi used a CFEAC meeting in August 2021 to launch his “common prosperity” agenda on economic inequality. Founded as a leading group in 1980, it was upgraded to a commission by Xi as part of the party-state institutional reforms of March 2018, a move designed to strengthen Xi’s personal and the party’s central leadership over the economy and the financial system compared with the State Council. The ministerial-level CFEAC General Office is at the core of coordinating high-level policymaking in these areas. During the Xi era, the CFEAC has had to compete with the more active CCP Central Comprehensively Deepening Reforms Commission.

The CCP Central Comprehensively Deepening Reforms Commission (CCDRC) is arguably the most influential policymaking, coordination, and implementation body under the CCP Central Committee and its elite 24-member Politburo and top 7-member Politburo Standing Committee (PSC). The party announced the establishment of the Central Comprehensively Deepening Reforms Leading Group at the Third Plenum of the 18th Central Committee in November 2013, and Xi chaired its first meeting in January 2014. The party upgraded this leading group to a formal commission in the party-state reforms of March 2018. Xi has used the CCDRC more than any other institution to implement “top-level design” and centralize policy decision-making across dozens of lower-level party agencies and state ministries. It meets about seven times annually to discuss reforms in six policy areas: the economic system and ecological civilization, democracy and the legal system, the cultural system, the social system, the party-building system, and the discipline and inspection system. A CCDRC “special group,” headed by a ministerial-level official, leads the commission’s detailed policy work in each area. The CCDRC focuses on far more than just economic policy, but it has played a key role in Xi’s efforts to reform the Chinese economic system with respect to markets, state-owned enterprises, technological innovation, high-end manufacturing, and environmental sustainability. Xi is the CCDRC Director, and the Premier, the Chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), and the CCP Secretariat First Secretary have served as Deputy Directors. The CCDRC’s current membership is unclear, but it is thought to include around 20 deputy national-level leaders from the Politburo, State Council, and CPPCC.

The State Council is the top administrative body of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the state founded and ruled by the CCP, and it effectively functions as the national cabinet of the central government. The main difference with other countries is that the State Council oversees the implementation of policies decided by the CCP, rather than formulating its own national policy agenda. However, the State Council has oversight of key economic agencies, and its implementation role can enable meaningful policy influence through interpreting central directives, drafting laws and regulations, issuing administrative regulations, and formulating development plans and government budgets. The State Council is led by the Premier, who is assisted by four Vice Premiers and five State Councilors (including the State Council Secretary-General), who together form the State Council executive, which meets two to three times a month to discuss major government work and draft laws and regulations. The Premier and an Executive Vice Premier sit on the PSC, and the three other Vice Premiers hold Politburo seats. A plenary meeting of the full State Council is held every six months. It includes the leaders of all its constituent departments, which currently comprise 24 ministries and commissions, the People’s Bank of China, and the National Audit Office. The PRC President nominates the Premier, who is then approved by the National People’s Congress (NPC) at the Two Sessions following a Party Congress, for a maximum of two five-year terms. The Premier then nominates the rest of the State Council, whose members are appointed by the President following NPC approval. Despite such procedures, these appointments are decided by top leaders in secret negotiations. A major political project of Xi’s rule has been to erode the institutional influence of the Premier and the State Council, which had traditionally played a leading role in economic policymaking, especially under Premiers Zhu Rongji (1998–2003) and Wen Jiabao (2003–2013).

The State Council also oversees economic research organizations. The State Council Development Research Center (DRC) is a ministerial-level public institution that researches a wide range of domestic and international economic issues and advises both the State Council and CCP Central Committee on economic policies. Its influence has declined, however, in line with Xi’s steady marginalization of the broader State Council. The State Council Counselors’ Office is a deputy ministerial-level agency that provides research and feedback on government policies, including but not limited to the economy, although it has less influence than the DRC.

The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) is the most important constituent department of the State Council in China’s economic policymaking. Formerly the State Planning Commission, the NDRC oversees China’s planning system, which produces the national Five-Year Plan for Economic and Social Development that all central government agencies and local governments use as a blueprint for their own more detailed policy planning processes. The NDRC is China’s main macroeconomic control institution. It has responsibility for formulating a broad range of economic and social policies, often in conjunction with other line ministries, including Xi’s “common prosperity” agenda. These responsibilities include economic targets, price policies, market policies, supply-side structural reform, overseas investment, domestic investment policy, regional development strategies, industrial development strategies, major infrastructure projects, consumption policy, innovation-driven development, scientific and technological infrastructure, high-tech industries, social development, basic public services, sustainable development, and the social credit system. The NDRC works with the Ministry of Commerce to draft negative lists for foreign investment at the national level and for various special economic zones, and with the National Health Commission to research demographic trends and formulate population policies. The NDRC also manages the General Offices of many leading groups that coordinate policymaking on specific priority issues, giving it added bureaucratic leverage in these areas. These groups include the National Defense Mobilization Committee, State Council Leading Group for Western Development, and State Council Leading Group for the Revitalization of Old Industrial Bases in Northeast China — which are led by the Premier — and the State Council Leading Group for Promoting the Belt and Road Initiative, Leading Group for Coordinated Development of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Region, Leading Group for Promoting the Development of the Yangtze River Economic Belt, Leading Group for Promoting the Development of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, and Leading Group for Promoting Comprehensive Deepening of Reform and Opening in Hainan—which are led by the Executive Vice Premier, usually with the NDRC Chairman as Office Director. The NDRC administers three deputy ministerial-level agencies: the National Food and Strategic Reserves Administration, the National Energy Administration, and the National Data Administration.

The Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) is a constituent department of the State Council that has primary responsibility for policy regarding domestic trade, foreign trade, export and import regulations, foreign direct investment, market competition, commodity market operations, consumer protection, industrial damage investigations, anti-dumping and countervailing measures, international economic cooperation, relations with the World Bank, and economic cooperation with Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan. It works with the NDRC to draw up negative lists for foreign investment. The ministry lost its powers in the areas of anti-monopoly, intellectual property, counterfeit goods, foreign aid, and some financial products in the party-state reforms of March 2018. A ministerial-level MOFCOM Deputy Minister serves as China’s International Trade Representative, who leads China’s negotiations for bilateral and multilateral trade agreements.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs (MARA) is a constituent department of the State Council that plays an important role in economic policymaking for China’s rural areas, where almost 35 percent of the Chinese population still lives. Formed as an expansion of the old Ministry of Agriculture in March 2018, MARA is responsible for policies related to the “three rural issues” of China’s development—agriculture (especially agricultural industrialization), rural areas (especially urban-rural economic disparities), and farmers (especially urban-rural income disparities). It manages farming, fisheries, animal husbandry, farmland resources, irrigation projects, land reclamation, agricultural mechanization, agricultural product quality and safety, and agricultural investments. It gained responsibility for policies related to rural science and technology from the Ministry of Science and Technology in March 2023 and absorbed the deputy ministerial-level National Rural Revitalization Administration. Greater attention to rural development reflects Xi’s mission in his second term to end absolute poverty in rural areas and his goal in his third term to narrow the urban-rural divide under his “common prosperity” agenda. MARA also houses the General Office of the CCP Central Rural Work Leading Group (CRWLG), which is led by a Vice Premier, with the MARA Minister as Director and representatives from the ministries and agencies in charge of agriculture, water, forestry, poverty alleviation, and development and reform.

The State Council also oversees the ministerial-level All-China Federation of Supply and Marketing Cooperatives, which oversees a national network of over 35,000 state-run commercial cooperatives that coordinate the buying and selling of agricultural inputs, agricultural produce, and consumer goods in rural areas. A legacy of the planned-economy era, the cooperative system has been significantly revived and modernized by Xi’s administration to help lower prices, create markets, and improve livelihoods for Chinese farmers.

The State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council (SASAC) is a ministerial-level special organization under the State Council responsible for overseeing almost 100 of the most important central state-owned enterprises (SOEs). SASAC does not run the day-to-day business of these SOEs, but it performs the duties of a corporate funder and supervises company profits, capital management, executive salaries, corporate governance, compliance, and mergers. These SOEs collectively control tens of trillions of dollars in assets and several trillion dollars of revenue and hold commanding positions in strategic industries such as aerospace, defense, energy, resources, technology, telecoms, and transportation (but not finance; those SOEs are managed by the Ministry of Finance). Roughly half these central SOEs are equivalent to deputy ministerial-level government agencies, as the CCP Organization Department selects their top operational leaders. SASAC also houses the General Office of the State Council Leading Group for State-owned Enterprise Reform, founded by Xi in 2014, which is led by a Vice Premier with the SASAC Director as the Office Director.

The State Council manages several other agencies that play important roles in economic and trade policy. The General Administration of Customs (GAC) is a ministerial-level agency responsible for export and import supervision, customs inspections, port management, and collecting various taxes such as customs duties, excise duties, and air passenger duties. The State Taxation Administration (STA) is a ministerial-level agency responsible for collecting other national taxes and for formulating and implementing tax policies (with the Ministry of Finance). The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) is a deputy ministerial-level agency responsible for collecting, researching, and publishing national economic and social statistics and for national economic accounting.

The State Council oversees several bodies that are significant actors in the Chinese economy through their work on public finance and financial regulation, including constituent departments like the Ministry of Finance (MOF) and the People’s Bank of China (PBoC), as well as ministerial-level agencies such as the National Financial Regulatory Administration (NFRA) and the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC). These institutions are discussed in the “Finance” section. Many other State Council constituent departments play a role in aspects of China’s economic policymaking, such as the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), and the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR), which are discussed in the “Technology” section; the Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE) and the Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR), which are discussed in the “Energy and Environment” section; plus many others like the Ministry of Transport (MOT), the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development (MHURD), the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security (MHRSS), the Ministry of Culture and Tourism (MCT), and the Ministry of Education (MoE).

The All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce (ACFIC) is a nominally nongovernmental chamber of commerce for China’s private entrepreneurs, industrialists, and other business leaders, comprising over 4.5 million members. It functions as an institutional structure for the CCP to contact, consult, and control the private sector. ACFIC is part of the party’s United Front architecture under the CPPCC, which aims to mobilize nonparty personnel and social groups to support the party’s objectives. The federation is a permanent constituent of the CPPCC and is allocated seats in the CPPCC National Committee and the NPC. ACFIC has a ministerial-level Party Secretary and a Chairman, often a member of the China National Democratic Construction Association satellite party, who also serves as deputy national-level CPPCC Vice Chair. A ministerial-level CPPCC Economics Affairs Committee manages political advisory and community consultation work on economic policies. Legislative work on the economy is supervised by the ministerial-level NPC Financial and Economic Affairs Committee, although the most substantive input on new laws comes from party bodies and State Council agencies.

People

Xi Jinping is the most influential economic policymaker in China by virtue of his position as CCP General Secretary and head of the Politburo and its PSC. He has centralized decision-making power on economic issues through his creation and leadership of the CCDRC and CFEAC. However, Xi’s limited personal knowledge and experience of economic policymaking, which he prefers to view through the lens of broader political and strategic issues, means that he has had to effectively delegate economic policymaking to others to a greater degree than in many other policy areas.

The next most powerful actor is Li Qiang (born July 1959), Premier of the State Council and the second-ranked PSC member. Li is one of Xi’s closest allies, having worked as Xi’s top political secretary in Zhejiang Province in the mid-2000s, and he is ultimately responsible for the decisions of the State Council, including the work of its economic agencies. Just as important as the premiership, if not more so, are Li’s roles as CFEAC Deputy Director and as CCDRC Deputy Director, which give him an influential voice in party decision-making about economic issues. Li’s elevation was unusual because, unlike every other Premier since 1976, he had never served as a Vice Premier—or even in any State Council role. He also oversaw the harsh and unpopular Shanghai lockdown of early to mid-2022, which alienated many Chinese elites and significantly disrupted growth that year. Li Qiang was well known for having a business-friendly approach as a provincial leader, and he has spearheaded China’s post-COVID economic recovery, but his track record is typical of provincial leaders who were incentivized to prioritize growth, including Xi himself. Xi certainly trusts Li Qiang more than Li’s predecessor and Xi’s erstwhile rival Li Keqiang. The outgoing Li belonged to the Communist Youth League faction of Xi’s predecessor Hu Jintao and did not always align his political speeches and actions with Xi’s stances. The new Li may have greater latitude to emphasize pro-growth positions in party meetings, but he is ultimately a Xi appointee who is dependent on his favor. (See the “Top Leadership” section for more details on Li and other PSC members.)

Aside from Li Qiang, the other CCDRC Deputy Directors are fellow PSC newcomer Cai Qi (December 1955), the First Secretary of the CCP Central Secretariat, and Wang Huning (October 1955), Cai’s predecessor, who retains his CCDRC position despite now serving as CPPCC Chairman, a position not associated with the CCDRC before the 20th Party Congress. Wang also remains the Director of the CCDRC General Office, a position he has held since 2014, which gives him significant bureaucratic power to oversee the execution of Xi’s economic, political, and social reform agendas. Wang has been Xi’s top idealogue and a key crafter of “Xi Jinping Thought,” largely remaining in the background compared with other top leaders. The renewal of Wang’s position on the CCDRC suggests that he will continue to influence Xi’s thinking, pushing the paramount leader to maintain his strong focus on ideological discipline and national security. Wang’s ministerial-level Executive Deputy Director in the CCDRC General Office since 2014 has been Mu Hong (December 1956), an economic technocrat who previously worked in the state planning bureaucracy for over 20 years (with a specialty in fixed-asset investment and foreign investment utilization), did a stint as an Assistant Governor and then Deputy Governor of Guangxi, and then became an NDRC Deputy Chairman in 2007 (a title he held until March 2023). Mu became a CPPCC Vice Chairman in March 2023, a deputy national-level position that allows him to remain in his position past the ministerial-level retirement age of 65 and therefore to stay close to Wang.

Ding Xuexiang (September 1962) is the Executive Vice Premier of the State Council and the sixth-ranked PSC member. Like his predecessor, Han Zheng, Ding has oversight of key economic portfolios such as development and reform, public finance, taxation, and the environment. Ding’s appointment was also unusual because he had no experience leading a province, let alone in central State Council leadership. Ding rose to the top echelon of Chinese politics by serving as a top political secretary of Xi in Shanghai and then for most of his time as paramount leader in Beijing. Rumors exist that Ding Xuexiang may have been positioned to replace Li Qiang as Premier at the 21st Party Congress in 2027, given that Li will have reached the traditional Politburo retirement age of 68 by then; however, Xi could still exempt Li from this norm, as he did several leaders at the 20th Party Congress. Moreover, while Ding has spent a lot of time with Xi and is undoubtedly a talented political aide, he has yet to prove himself as a statesman or an economic leader. Another sign that Ding and the State Council may play less of a role in economic policy is that he did not inherit Han Zheng’s position as a CCDRC Deputy Director.

He Lifeng (February 1955) is the Vice Premier in charge of commerce, including trade and foreign investment, as well as the financial sector (see the “Finance” section for more details). He is a key operator in the coordination and implementation of economic and financial policy as Director of the CFEAC General Office. He has been close to Xi since they met in the city of Xiamen in the 1980s, when Xi was a Deputy Mayor and He was a leader in the municipal finance bureau. He continued to rise through the local government ranks in Fujian during Xi’s almost two decades in the province, where he eventually served as Deputy Party Secretary and Governor. He reached the provincial party standing committee as Mayor of Fujian and later Mayor of Xiamen, then worked as a Deputy Party Secretary of Tianjin, before Xi brought him to Beijing as a ministerial-level NDRC Deputy Chairman in 2014, then promoted him to NDRC Chairman in 2017 and a deputy national-level CPPCC Vice Chair in 2018. He is a strong advocate of Xi’s economic policies, writing in a fawning article in June 2022 that Xi’s thought should be integrated into “the entire process of economic work in all fields.” He is also known for his attachment to infrastructure-driven growth, having so revamped the urban landscape of Fujian that he earned the nickname “Demolition He.” His appointment could increase the chances of China implementing greater stimulus spending to alleviate slowing growth.

He Lifeng’s current role is especially important because he assumed many portfolios from the retiring Liu He, a US-trained policy economist, key advisor, and friend of Xi’s who served as Director of the CFEAC General Office from 2013 to 2023, on the Politburo from 2017 to 2022, and as Vice Premier from 2018 to 2023. During this time, he was a central figure in U.S.-China trade talks and China’s economic diplomacy with foreign investors and multinational corporations. Domestically, Liu He was the key figure in advancing “supply-side structural reform,” which aimed to upgrade China’s economic structure through cutting excess capacity, reducing financial leverage, shrinking property inventories, lowering business costs, and promoting innovation. Liu He’s strategy achieved gradual progress on significant structural issues but narrowed Beijing’s scope to focus policy support on consumption and growth. He Lifeng, who is not an economic technocrat but a career local leader, is understood to be relatively pro-growth and could focus more than Liu He on demand-side policies, including hukou (household registration) reform, rural revitalization, employment promotion, and social spending. Supply-side policies are likely to focus more narrowly on Xi’s “dual circulation” policies of technological innovation, supply chain resilience, and economic security.

Han Wenxiu (September 1963) is the ministerial-level Executive Deputy Director of the CFEAC General Office. Han is a protégé of Liu He, having worked directly under Liu in the CFEAC General Office from 2005 to 2011 and then again from 2018 onward (after a spell at the State Council Research Office), as well as overlapping with him at the former State Planning Commission for most of the 1990s. Han also appears to be close to former PBoC Party Secretary Guo Shuqing (see the “Finance” section), as the two coauthored a 1991 book about China’s gross national product. Han studied and worked at Peking University for most of the 1980s, where campus party activities likely saw him cross paths with Xi loyalists such as Shi Taifeng and Li Shulei and with Communist Youth League stalwarts like Li Keqiang and Hu Chunhua. Han was prominent at official news conferences about Xi’s “common prosperity” agenda, where he attempted to calm market fears and emphasize that Xi’s agenda was a more long-term and technocratic exercise than initial policies had suggested. Han’s next step is uncertain, but he entered the CCP Central Committee for the first time at the 20th Party Congress, suggesting that he is on track for further promotion.

The CFEAC General Office has at least three Deputy Directors. Yan Pengchang (December 1972) is a political economist and longtime Party media journalist who worked at the State Council General Office before serving as a top lieutenant for He Lifeng in the NDRC for several years. Zhu Weidong (July 1968) is an agricultural economist who spent most of his career working on agricultural issues in the CFEAC General Office or the General Office of the CCP Central Rural Work Leading Group that CFEAC absorbed in 2023. Yang Yinkai (April 1970) is an NDRC veteran with a specialty in regional economic development and industrial rejuvenation who won major internal promotions during He Lifeng’s tenure as NDRC Chairman, eventually serving as his personnel chief.

Zhang Guoqing (August 1964) is the Vice Premier in charge of industrial policy after assuming Liu He’s responsibility for industry and information technology and former State Councilor Wang Yong’s portfolios of SOEs and (nonfinancial) market regulation. The elevated status of the last two policy areas suggests that Xi’s focus on upgrading SOEs and regulatory expansion will intensify. Liu Guozhong (July 1962) is the fourth-ranked Vice Premier and oversees a combination of less heavy-hitting portfolios that were previously held by Hu Chunhua and former Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, including health, water, and agriculture and rural affairs. Zhang’s more prominent jobs will include protecting against a COVID-19 resurgence, overseeing Xi’s rising focus on food security, and Xi’s “common prosperity” efforts to close the urban-rural divide.

The State Council executive is completed by five State Councilors, who are less powerful than Vice Premiers because, while they hold deputy national-level rank, they do not sit on the Politburo. The most important State Councilor for economic policy is Wu Zhenglong (November 1964), who serves as State Council Secretary-General. The others are Wang Xiaohong (July 1957), the Minister of Public Security; and Shen Yiqin (December 1959), a full-time State Councilor who oversees civil affairs, veteran affairs, sports, and human resources and social security. Beijing appointed five State Councilors in March 2023 but in October 2023 it stripped the position from both Li Shangfu (February 1958), the former Minister of National Defense, and Qin Gang (March 1966), the former Minister of Foreign Affairs, reportedly due to disciplinary investigations. Beijing has yet to announce their replacements on the State Council

Zheng Shanjie (November 1961) is the Chairman of the NDRC. Hailing from Fujian Province, he studied chemical equipment corrosion at Nanjing Tech University. Zheng spent the first 15 years of his career at the Xiamen Cod Liver Oil Factory, where between 1982 and 1997 he rose from working in equipment maintenance to become a successful factory manager. He won promotion to district leadership roles in the city of Xiamen before serving as a top political secretary to the city leadership and as Director of the Xiamen municipal and then the Fujian provincial development and reform commission (DRC). Zheng was a factory employee in Xiamen while Xi was Deputy Mayor from 1985 to 1988 and a district-level official in Xiamen for most of Xi’s tenure as Deputy Party Secretary of Fujian from 1995 to 2002. Zheng’s most important political connection is likely as a protégé of Xi confidant He Lifeng, who was his predecessor at the NDRC and is now a Vice Premier. Zheng’s achievements at the Xiamen Cod Liver Oil Factory in the mid-1990s would have caught the attention of local authorities, and He was a city official from 1984 to 1995 and a deputy mayor from 1992 to 1995. His return to Xiamen as Party Secretary from 2005 to 2009 made him Zheng’s superior when the latter was Xiamen DRC director. He may also have used his position on the provincial party standing committee to help Zheng win promotion to the provincial DRC in 2008. Zheng enjoyed a rapid series of promotions after Xi came to power, winning a relatively late promotion to the deputy ministerial level as a Deputy Governor of Fujian in 2015 before becoming Director of the National Energy Administration, Deputy Director of the State Council Taiwan Affairs Office, Governor of Zhejiang, and Party Secretary of Anhui. He did all this without a seat on the CCP Central Committee, which he finally won at the 20th Party Congress. Zheng was named NDRC Director as one of the very few new State Council ministers appointed at the Two Sessions in March 2023.

Wang Wentao (May 1964) is the Minister of Commerce. Wang studied philosophy at Fudan University in Shanghai before he was assigned a teaching role at Shanghai Aerospace Staff University (under the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology), where he rose to become Vice President and General Manager of the Photocopier Sales Department. He then worked in district-level governments in Shanghai, with a brief interlude in Yunnan Province, before he was brought back to the city during Xi’s leadership in 2007 to lead the central district of Huangpu. After working with Xi and several of his top allies in Shanghai, Wang was promoted to the provincial party standing committees in Jiangxi and Shandong, then became Governor of Heilongjiang in 2018 and Head of MOFCOM in 2020. Xi has promoted many technocrats to senior positions in the economic and trade bureaucracy, but Wang is a Xi ally and a more political appointment, reflecting the sensitive task of balancing growth with assertive diplomacy and economic coercion.

Wang Shouwen (March 1966) is the ministerial-level MOFCOM Deputy Minister who serves as China’s International Trade Representative. He is a trade expert who, aside from two years in Tibet between 2001 and 2003 and year in Jiangsu from 2009 to 2010, has only worked for MOFCOM and one of its predecessors, the former Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation (MFTEC), where he often worked alongside GAC Director Yu Jianhua. Wang specialized in trade management, fair trade, and textiles. He became a MOFCOM Deputy Minister in 2013, a Deputy International Trade Representative in 2015, and took on his current role in 2022.

Han Jun (December 1963) is the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Affairs. Han is a renowned expert on rural economics and development, and one of former economic czar Liu He's key assistants who were promoted quickly during Xi's first two terms. Han spent his entire career in the State Council Development Research Center before becoming a Deputy Director of the General Office of the CFEAC in 2014. He was then made Governor of Jilin Province in 2020 and Party Secretary of Anhui Province in 2023. He became Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development in 2024 after his predecessor Tang Renjian was sacked and investigated for corruption. Han Liping (January 1960) is the Party Secretary of the All-China Federation of Supply and Marketing Cooperatives. Previously, he worked in the powerful CCP General Office for several decades, including under Hu Jintao, before serving as its Deputy Director from 2017 until 2019. The federation’s Director position is currently vacant.

Zhang Yuzhuo (January 1962) is the Director of SASAC. Zhang is a coal mining engineer who won national awards for his innovations in new types of coal-related chemical engineering and for his role in the construction of the world’s first direct liquefaction coal plant. He holds a doctorate in mining engineering from the University of Science and Technology Beijing and was a researcher at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom and at Southern Illinois University in the United States. Since 2011, he has been an academician in the elite Chinese Academy of Engineering. Zhang spent most of his career in the state-owned coal industry, at the China Coal Research Institute (1985–2002), where he rose to become President and Deputy Party Secretary, and at the energy and mining giant Shenhua Group (2002–2017), where he was General Manager and then Party Secretary. Zhang then served as leader of the Binhai New Area and Pilot Free Trade Zone in Tianjin from 2017 to 2020 (under Politburo members Li Hongzhong and Zhang Guoqing), of the oil and gas firm Sinopec from 2020 to 2021, and then of the China Association for Science and Technology from 2021 until his move to SASAC in 2022, as the ministerial-level Party Secretary of the United Front body for scientists, engineers, and technologists. Zhang’s appointment to SASAC fits with Xi’s recent pattern of promoting technocrats and likely also reflects Xi’s rising concern about China’s energy security and the continued importance of coal in the green energy transition, both to avoid compromising energy supply and to manage the country’s powerful coal sector.

Yu Jianhua (December 1961) is the Director of the General Administration of Customs. Yu is a trade expert who trained as an economic diplomat and worked for MFTEC from 1991 to 2003, where he specialized in Europe and did a posting in Brussels. That ministry was folded into the new MOFCOM in 2003, where Yu worked on the World Trade Organization (WTO) and international trade relations, eventually serving as China’s deputy ministerial-level ambassador to the WTO from 2013 to 2017 and then to the United Nations in Geneva from 2017 to 2019. He was Deputy International Trade Representative from 2019 to 2021 and International Trade Representative from 2021 to 2022, when he became GAC Director.

Hu Jinglin (June 1964) is the Director of the State Taxation Administration. He is an expert in state asset management who holds a doctorate in economics. He spent the first decade of his career at the predecessor agency to the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission and the next two decades in the Ministry of Finance, where his roles included Deputy Director of the Asset Valuation Department, Director of the Economic Construction Department, Director of the General Office (2007-2009), Assistant Minister (2009-2014), and then Deputy Minister (2014-2018). From 2018 to 2023 he served as the inaugural Director of the National Healthcare Security Administration, before being appointed to his current role in late 2023.

Kang Yi (August 1966) is the Director of the National Bureau of Statistics. After studying economics at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Kang joined the China Construction Bank (CCB), working in the Hubei provincial office before leading the branches focused on the Three Gorges project, leading the provincial branches in Gansu and Fujian during former PBoC Party Secretary Guo Shuqing’s tenure as CCB Party Secretary, and then working in the Beijing headquarters. Kang assumed his current role in March 2022 after stints as Vice President of the Agricultural Branch of China and Deputy Mayor of Tianjin under Xi loyalist Li Hongzhong from 2018 to 2022. An alternate member of the 20th Central Committee, Kang is young enough to keep rising to more senior economic leadership positions.

Gao Yunlong (December 1958) is the Chairman of ACFIC. Gao studied chemical engineering at Xi’s alma mater, Tsinghua University, from 1986 to 1989, worked in engineering and resource management roles at a state bureau and the Chinse Development Bank, pivoted to local government positions in Guangxi and Qinghai Provinces, and then served as General Manager of state-owned financial company China Everbright Group. In the provinces, he began to hold leadership roles in the China National Democratic Construction Association, one of the eight legally sanctioned satellite parties in the CCP’s United Front. He became a rare non-CCP member to hold a senior provincial leadership role when he served as a Deputy Governor of Qinghai from 2007 to 2013. He then became General Manager of China Everbright Group and took on his current role in 2017. In 2018, he became a CPPCC Vice Chairman, a role that was renewed for another five-year term in 2023, meaning that he is a deputy national-level leader. Gao’s high rank reflects the importance to Xi of managing the private sector, which is both a target of regulatory rectification and an essential driver of economic growth.

Shen Ying (May 1965) is the Party Secretary of ACFIC and a ministerial-level Deputy Director of the CCP United Front Work Department. She studied economics at the elite Peking University, alongside Han Wenxiu and State Council Development Research Center director Lu Hao, and then earned a doctorate in public finance from the Central Academy of Fiscal Sciences. Her first job was as an editor at the Economic Science Press, but she spent most of her career, aside from a stint at the Ministry of Finance from 1999-2003, at the State Council State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) and its predecessor agency, where she held roles in the Research Institute, Editorial Department, Foreign Research Department, and Statistics and Evaluation Bureau (Office of Asset Recovery). She served as SASAC Chief Accountant from 2015-2018 and a SASAC Deputy Director from 2017-2018. She was then moved to local government work, serving as Deputy Governor of Heilongjiang Province from 2018-2021, Director of the Heilongjiang Provincial CCP Organization Department from 2021-2022, Director of the Jiangsu Provincial CCP Organization Department from 2022-2023, and Deputy Party Secretary of Jiangsu Province from 2023-2024.

Wang Guosheng (May 1956) is the Director of the CPPCC Economic Affairs Committee. Wang was a career local leader who spent his early career in his native Shandong, then a decade in Jiangsu, before posts as Governor of Hubei (under Xi loyalist Li Hongzhong), Party Secretary of Qinghai, and Party Secretary of Henan before hitting retirement age in 2021. He served on an NPC Committee before taking on his current role in March 2023.

Zhong Shan (October 1955) is the Director of the NPC Financial and Economic Affairs Committee. Zhong spent his early career in the SOE sector in his native Zhejiang, then worked in the provincial trade office, before serving as Deputy Governor of Zhejiang when Xi was Governor and Party Secretary of the province in the mid-2000s. In 2008, Zhong was transferred to MOFCOM in Beijing, where he served as a Deputy Minister, then International Trade Representative for most of Xi’s first term (which brought free trade agreements with Australia and South Korea), and then Minister from 2017 to 2020, when he hit retirement age. Zhong was a Deputy Director of the CPPCC Economic Affairs Committee from 2021 until March 2023.

There is substantial overlap between China’s top macroeconomic leadership and leadership in the financial sphere, although greater separation and important differences emerge at the ministry level and below. Key leaders in financial policy include Pan Gongsheng (July 1963), Governor of the People’s Bank of China; Lan Fo'an (June 1962), Minister of Finance; Li Yunze (September 1970), Chairman of the National Financial Regulatory Administration; and Wu Qing (April 1965), Chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission. They and several other officials are discussed in the “Finance” section.

Policy

There are essentially two sides to debates about Chinese economic policy. The first can be termed “Fortress China,” led by Xi and his ideology of “Xi Jinping Economic Thought.” This side emphasizes the need to prepare China for geopolitical competition by prioritizing economic and technological “self-reliance” and the party-state’s guidance of the economy through SOEs, industrial policy, and state subsidies, as well as achieving “common prosperity” by reducing economic inequality. The other side, which can be called the “Reform and Opening” faction, feels that by rolling back market-based reforms, empowering the state sector, and limiting opening to international investment, Xi’s economic policies have damaged private sector confidence, undermined productivity gains, and, ultimately, damaged China’s economic prospects — resulting in slowing growth and threatening China’s future as a superpower. Though they are far from being free-market radicals, this side would prefer to see China turn away from strident economic nationalism and return to more market-oriented policies.

Xi’s authoritative report to the 20th Party Congress in October 2022 indicated that his “Fortress China” mentality has infused the party’s long-term economic planning, a process that has been amplified by China’s increasingly hostile geopolitical environment. Xi’s appointment of Li Qiang, Ding Xuexiang, and He Lifeng as his top economic team shows the importance of political loyalty over economic expertise. He said that the party’s “central task” is to “build a socialist modern power” by the centenary of the PRC in 2049 and to “use Chinese-style modernization to comprehensively advance the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” This focus on “Chinese-style modernization” as the pathway to “national rejuvenation” is new and underscores Xi’s determination to steer China’s economy on a non-Western course in which the state has a prominent role and party leadership is an “essential requirement.” The report introduced “systems thinking” as key aspect of “Xi Jinping Thought.” This concept holds that “everything is interconnected and interdependent,” as Xi’s economic, political, and social reforms involve adjusting the balance of interests such that “pulling one hair moves the whole body.” For Xi, the solution to increasingly complex policy problems is to enhance party oversight over the Chinese economy and Chinese society and introduce more governmental “systems” to manage the country’s development in all areas.

Consequently, Xi’s report presented a vision of a “modern socialist market economy” that is more deliberately managed by the party to shore up weaknesses in areas deemed vital to the security of China’s development. The spirit of liberal economic ideals such as market reform and openness — which was still present in the 2017 report and had its last great hurrah in the decision issued by the Third Plenum of the 18th Central Committee in November 2013, in the early years of Xi’s consolidation of power — was essentially absent. Xi instead wants to strengthen political oversight of macroeconomic policymaking and financial activity; to see SOEs play a “stronger, better, and bigger” economic role; and to “guide the development of the non-public sector.” This ideological shift reflects the stronger government action necessitated by Xi’s twin transformations in Chinese economic policymaking, from prioritizing the pace of growth to prioritizing the quality of growth, and from prioritizing economic development to balancing development and security.

The first transformation saw Xi introduce the “new development concept” at the Fifth Plenum of the 18th Central Committee in October 2015, which stated that China’s development must be driven by innovation, coordinated between regions, green in its sustainability, open to trade and investment, and shared by the Chinese people. Then, at the 19th Party Congress in October 2017, he changed the “principal contradiction,” a Marxist term for the key problem the party wants to solve, from the contradiction between “the ever-growing material and cultural needs of the people and backward social production” to that between “unbalanced and inadequate development and the people’s ever-growing needs for a better life.” The implication is that the party should prioritize creating “a better life” for Chinese people over the rampant economic expansion that enabled corruption, inequality, and pollution to get out of control. Xi’s October 2022 report leaned further into the new development concept by clarifying that while development remains the party’s “top priority” for governing, its “primary task” for building a modern socialist economy is now “high-quality development.”

The second transformation is a more recent development in the Chinese political economy. It reflects Xi’s concern, especially as US policy toward China shifted from economic engagement to economic containment under the administrations of Donald Trump and Joe Biden, that the country must reduce its economic and technological exposure to the US-led alliance in a time of rising geopolitical competition. In October 2020, at the Fifth Plenum of the 19th CCP Central Committee, which issued recommendations for formulating the China’s 14th Five-Year Plan, Xi introduced the “new development paradigm.” Xi defined this paradigm as accelerating the construction of a development pattern “with domestic circulation as the main body and with the dual domestic and international circulations promoting each other.” Put simply, the so-called dual circulation strategy aims to boost domestic demand and technology as growth drivers while making the world more reliant on Chinese supply chains. Food security (along with energy security) is also part of the greater focus on domestic circulation, with Xi’s “rural revitalization” agenda now intersecting with the goal of "achieving food security on all fronts.”

Part of Xi’s focus on economic security has been greater political scrutiny of private business. A key event in the development of Xi’s more skeptical attitude toward business was the Chinese stock market turmoil of 2015–2016, which effectively rang the death knell for the already-faltering market reforms proposed at the Third Plenum of 2013. Xi has already begun boosting policy and funding support for SOEs relative to nonstate counterparts, but this episode reinforced the notion that free markets lead to economic crises and that the private sector was out of regulatory control and becoming a potentially independent force that could challenge party rule. No longer could capitalists do what they wanted as long as they contributed to economic growth and did not openly oppose Beijing. To enhance compliance with party directives, Xi reinvigorated the role of party committees in private firms (which are subject to political discipline), encouraging party members to form committees in more firms and to play a larger role in their corporate governance. In July 2020, Xi convened a forum of business leaders, telling them they needed to be “patriotic entrepreneurs.” That September, the party issued new regulations that strengthened United Front work in private firms and the “ideological and political education” of entrepreneurs. The aim is to cultivate a “backbone team” of business executives who “unswervingly follow the party” and cooperate in “major national strategies.”

Xi’s 20th Party Congress report signaled his desire to “strengthen party building” in nonstate firms and signaled overall that private firms in China would likely face a more restrictive political environment, mounting compliance challenges, and heavy-handed government interventions. The report also flagged new laws in “important, emerging, and foreign-related areas” and stronger “mechanisms for countering foreign sanctions, interference, and long-arm jurisdiction.” While the party has deployed such instruments sparingly in response to US sanctions and export controls, the possibility of rising enforcement and new laws will present growing compliance dilemmas for multinational corporations.

However, Xi cannot achieve national rejuvenation without economic growth. China will not be the world’s leading power by midcentury if its economy does not continue to expand at a healthy rate. Delivering growth is a pragmatic constraint on Xi’s political agenda that has limited the pace and scope of his ideological policymaking and regulatory agendas. Between mid-2020 and mid-2021, when the zero-COVID policy still made China’s economy the envy of the world, boosting Beijing’s confidence in the superiority of the Chinese system, Xi elevated his focus on “common prosperity” and launched the most ambitious regulatory interventions of his leadership, including an overnight ban on for-profit academic tutoring and plans for a sizeable property tax trial (see the “Technology” and “Finance” sections for more details). But these campaigns rattled markets and undermined confidence in China’s economic trajectory. In 2022, when growth began to suffer, primarily because of COVID lockdowns, Xi slowed or paused many of these initiatives to revive growth, which became the clear priority of his early third term, as signaled at the annual Central Economic Work Conference in December 2022.

Xi recognizes the importance of economic growth. His 20th Party Congress report updated the party’s 2035 goals for “basically realizing socialist modernization,” which he first set at the 19th Party Congress in 2017, to explicitly link the number-one goal to “greatly increase comprehensive national power” to reaching the per capita gross domestic product of “mid-level developed countries” (approximately US$20,000). He further prioritized goals to increase per capita disposable income, significantly enlarge the proportion of middle-income earners, equalize basic public services, and make more visible and substantial progress on common prosperity. He also introduced key economic policy objectives to achieve by the 21st Party Congress in 2027, including synchronizing household income growth with economic growth and synchronizing growth in labor compensation with growth in labor productivity. Xi’s efforts to square his ambitions for economic growth with political control with his regulatory ambitions — he promises more “visible” and “substantial” progress on “common prosperity” by making income distribution more equal — will likely lead to continued regulatory uncertainty and policy inconsistency in his third term.

Since the end of 2022, Xi’s administration took significant steps to try to mitigate investors' apprehensions by lifting the bulk of Covid-related restrictions, highlighting the priority of economic recovery, and unfurling a series of regulatory rollbacks for the beleaguered property sector. This flurry of actions ignited a spirited rally in Chinese equities. However, as 2023 progressed, it became evident that the return of foreign capital to China may be a slower process than initially expected. Investors have yanked over $100 billion from China's bond market and drastically curtailed their stakes in the country's stock market. The reasons for this are manifold: concerns over Beijing's cozy relationship with Moscow, a yuan that has progressively lost ground against the U.S. dollar, and the perception of a more hostile investment environment due to escalating geopolitical tensions and the tightening of national security laws. The absence of a substantial yield spread between Chinese and U.S. bonds is also discouraging potential investors who are looking for more lucrative opportunities.

Amidst economic headwinds and waning business confidence, Li Qiang, China's newly appointed Premier, has extended a robust invitation to foreign corporations. During the China Development Forum in Beijing in March 2023, Li engaged with global CEOs, assuring them of China's unwavering commitment to widening its gates to international investment. He encouraged these businesses to not just invest in China but to plant deep roots there. Underscoring the resilience of China's commitment to global openness, Li asserted that irrespective of the shifting global landscape, China's dedication to expanding its integration with the world economy remains steadfast. This, he clarified, is largely due to the deep-seated role China's economy plays in the global division of labor. He pledged China's alignment with international economic and trade regulations, its commitment to ensuring foreign investments are treated equitably, and its intent to streamline trade and investment by eliminating superfluous government controls. However, overall sentiment remains mixed. Xi’s perceived suspicion of foreign capital, sharpened by geopolitical tensions, has cast a long shadow over the Chinese market’s potential.

Heightened concerns over supply chain security have prompted China to adopt a more vigilant stance, particularly due to escalating tensions with the United States. U.S. attempts to limit China's access to advanced chip technology have amplified these concerns. China is expected to unveil measures aimed at bolstering supply chain security, which could involve manufacturing subsidies and adjustments to education policies to promote domestic technological advancements. Business can expect increased credit support and government subsidies for manufacturing upgrades and innovation. Beijing is also likely to keep attempting to strengthen trade ties with other economies, though less so with the United States, to enhance long-term productivity and competitiveness.

Most concerning for China’s economic outlook, and for the outlook of Xi’s nation-building project, is that his 20th Party Congress report suggests a limited appetite for the market-oriented structural reforms needed to deliver long-term sustainable growth. Reforms are needed to boost slowing productivity growth, ameliorate negative demographic trends, increase stagnant household consumption, alleviate rising debt burdens, address high youth unemployment, and reduce the economy’s overreliance on real estate. Such changes include reforming SOEs, improving financing for private firms, raising the retirement age, introducing modern taxes on activities such as real estate and capital gains, strengthening social insurance and redistribution, and providing more equitable access to public services through hukou reform. The challenge for Xi is that it is difficult to address these structural issues without significant economic pain in the shorter term, which could create social instability and political problems for himself and the party.

Finance

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Finance refers to the sector of the Chinese economy that involves companies and other institutions that provide financial services such as banking, investing, investment banking, insurance, mortgages, and other loans to individuals, enterprises, and governments. A healthy financial sector is critical to a strong economy, but China’s financial sector poses several risks to the country’s growth trajectory, including high corporate debt levels, hidden local government debt, and an enormous property sector that is dependent on unsustainable housing price increases. The defining theme of financial policy since Xi Jinping became General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in November 2012 has been the assertion of greater central control to enforce regulations that address financial risks, to steer more private capital toward his policy priorities, and to check the political influence of top financiers. Still, progress on much-needed financial reforms has been patchy, as Xi must strike a delicate balance between curbing risky lending and sustaining China’s credit-driven growth. Xi has continued China’s gradual opening of its relatively closed financial system to foreigners, including opening the stock connects linking Hong Kong with both the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets, the bond connect linking China’s interbank and exchange bond markets, and the swap connect linking to the onshore rates derivative markets, helping to attract record inflows.

• Institutions
• People
• Policy

Institutions

The CCP Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission (CFEAC) under the CCP Central Committee has traditionally been the core decision-making and coordination body on economic and financial policy. Founded as a leading group in 1980 and usually led by the CCP General Secretary, it was upgraded to a commission by Xi in the party-state institutional reforms of March 2018, a move designed to strengthen Xi’s personal and the party’s central leadership over the economy and the financial system compared with the State Council. The ministerial-level CFEAC General Office is at the core of coordinating high-level policymaking in these areas.

The CCP Central Finance Commission (CFC) was announced as part of the 2023 party-state reforms. Commencing operations in September 2023, it is a policy decision-making, coordination, and implementation body under the CCP Central Committee. The CFEAC outranks the CFC. The CFC is intended to strengthen party leadership over financial work and will be responsible for the top-level design, coordination, promotion, supervision, and implementation of financial stability and development, as well as research and discussion related to financial sector issues and policies. The CFC absorbed the responsibilities of the former State Council Financial Stability and Development Committee (FSDC), which was set up after China’s 2015 financial crisis with the authority and mandate to take whatever steps necessary to regulate systemic stability, led by Xi’s former economy and finance czar, Liu He. The CFC has a ministerial-level General Office, which is likely to serve as a powerbroker between the competing interests of different financial agencies and institutions during Xi’s third term.

The CCP Central Financial Work Committee (CFWC) is another body under the CCP Central Committee that was announced as part of the 2023 party-state reforms. It was formed to lead party work in the financial sector, and especially to guide the construction of its political, ideological, organizational, and discipline work in the sector. The CFC outranks the CFWC. The CFWC is co-located with the CFC General Office, an arrangement that signals the synergy in Xi’s mind between financial policymaking and greater party oversight; however, it could lead to significant tensions between more technocratic and more ideological officials. The creation of the CFWC reflects Xi’s elevated emphasis on strengthening the party's presence in the financial system. Domestic financial firms, more so than foreign ones, can expect the party to seek a more visible presence and possibly a more influential role in their businesses, which could further damage business confidence and elicit Western political blowback.

The People’s Bank of China (PBoC) is a ministerial-level constituent department of the State Council that serves as China’s central bank. Unlike central banks in many other countries, the PBoC is not an independent institution; it can be directed to implement government policy on key functions like interest rates. Its duties include monetary policy, exchange rate policy, renminbi issuance, macro-prudential management, financial risk prevention, inter-bank markets, lender-of-last-resort responsibilities, financial infrastructure, national payments systems, online finance, renminbi internationalization, credit reporting industry management, anti–money laundering and anti-terrorist financing work, financial statistics, national treasury management, and strategic plans for the development and reform of the financial sector. The 2023 party-state reforms changed the PBoC’s internal governance by abolishing its handful of U.S.-style regional branches (which each typically covered multiple provinces), establishing branches in every province (to enhance the transmission mechanism for monetary policy), and absorbing the simple functions of county-level branches into city branches. The State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) is a deputy ministerial-level State Council bureau that is managed by the PBoC and oversees the balance of payments, foreign exchange markets, cross-border capital flows, and foreign exchange reserves and advises on exchange rate policies. The PBoC Monetary Policy Committee is an advisory body chaired by the PBoC Governor that typically includes the directors or deputy directors of other financial agencies and a few influential academic economists.

The National Financial Regulatory Administration (NFRA) is a ministerial-level agency directly under the State Council, unveiled in the March 2023 party-state reforms, that will be responsible for the regulatory supervision of all parts of the financial industry except securities, which are regulated by the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC). The NFRA is meant to strengthen the government’s supervision of financial institutions, behavior, and functions, as well as risk management and prevention in the financial sector. The NFRA will oversee the enforcement of financial sector laws and regulations. It was built on the foundations of the former China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission, which operated from 2018 to 2023 following the merger of the China Banking Regulatory Commission, founded in 1998, and the China Insurance Regulatory Commission, founded in 2003. The NFRA also acquired the duties of investor protection from the CSRC and financial consumer protection and routine supervision of financial holding companies from the People’s Bank of China.

The China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC), founded in its current form in 1998, is a ministerial-level agency directly under the State Council that is responsible for the regulatory supervision of securities and futures in China, including exchanges, disclosure, management companies, and the issuance, trading, and clearing of securities. The CSRC was upgraded from a public institution to a government agency directly under the State Council as part of the 2023 party-state reforms, with a mandate from the party to strengthen the supervision of capital markets. It also gained responsibility from the National Development and Reform Commission for auditing corporate bond issuances. It is now responsible for auditing the bond issuances of all kinds of enterprises.

The Ministry of Finance (MOF) is a constituent department of the State Council that is responsible for public finance, including fiscal policies, taxation policies, tariff policies, the central budget, central revenues and expenditures, national accounting work, central and local government debt management systems, state-owned financial capital management, and representing the Chinese government in international financial organizations and finance-related negotiations. The National Council for Social Security Fund (NCSSF) is a deputy ministerial-level public institution under the State Council managed by the MOF that is responsible for the operations and investments of the National Social Security Fund.

The MOF is a major shareholder in several state-owned central financial enterprises that play foundational roles in China’s financial system; 26 are currently named on the MOF website. This list includes approximately 15 that are equivalent to deputy ministerial-level agencies, with their two top leaders—a Party Secretary who serves as Chairman of the Board and a General Manager or President—appointed by the central leadership through the CCP Organization Department.

The most important is the China Investment Corporation (CIC), founded in September 2007, which is China’s largest sovereign wealth fund, with well over US$1 trillion under management. CIC is also the parent company of Central Huijin Investment, which was founded in 2003 for the state to deploy foreign exchange reserves to make equity investments and act as a major shareholder in China’s “big four” commercial banks (not including the Bank of Communications) and several other financial state-owned enterprises (SOEs). CIC and Huijin do not direct the day-to-day operations of these entities but anchor the CCP’s control of the financial system, as their boards of directors are appointed and managed by the State Council.

Another is the China International Trust Investment Corporation (CITIC), founded by “red capitalist” and future Vice President Rong Yiren with the approval of Deng Xiaoping in 1979. It is the country’s largest state-owned commercial conglomerate, with annual revenues approaching US$100 billion. CITIC controls a plethora of subsidiaries and interests in the financial, manufacturing, energy, consumer, and construction sectors, including in banking, insurance, investment, equipment manufacturing, defense contracting, automotives, metals, minerals, oil, coal, iron, steel, telecommunications, satellites, publishing, agriculture, airlines, infrastructure, and real estate.

The list of deputy ministerial-level central financial enterprises includes the “big five” Chinese commercial banks, which are all among the largest banks in the world: Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), China Construction Bank (CCB), Agricultural Bank of China (ABC), Bank of China (BOC), and Bank of Communications (BoComm). It also features the “big four” Chinese insurance companies: China Life Insurance Group, People’s Insurance Company of China (PICC), China Taiping Insurance Holdings, and China Export & Credit Insurance Corporation (Sinosure). Another inclusion is the country’s three development-focused policy banks: China Development Bank (CDB), Export-Import Bank of China (Exim Bank), and Agricultural Development Bank of China (ADBC). The list is completed by China Everbright Group, a financial holding group that owns China Everbright Bank, which is at the same level.

The other central financial enterprises are department-level entities whose leadership is selected by the banking regulator. This includes four major asset management companies formed as “bad banks” to absorb the distressed debt of commercial banks: China Huarong, China Great Wall, China Orient, and China Cinda. Other deputy ministerial-level financial institutions include the Postal Savings Bank of China, a same-level subsidiary of China Post, the state postal service whose finances are managed by MOF and China Merchants Bank, a same-level subsidiary of the China Merchants Group, which is owned by the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) under the State Council.

The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the ministerial-level constituent department of the State Council that handles overall macroeconomic planning, plays a role in coordinating financial system reform and improved financing mechanisms. Its Department of Fiscal and Financial Affairs plays a role in financial system reform. Legislative work related to finance is supervised and evaluated in the National People’s Congress (NPC) by the ministerial-level NPC Financial and Economic Affairs Committee (NPCFEAC), which was established in 1983 (see “Economy and Trade” section).

China has three main stock exchanges, the first two of which are technically department-level public institutions managed by the CSRC. However, their administrative status is currently elevated because their Directors-General are deputy ministerial-level officials. The Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE), established in its current form in 1990, is the third largest in the world and the largest in Asia, although it remains partially closed to foreign investors. In July 2019, it launched the STAR Market, a science and technology-focused exchange that featured China’s first registration-based system for initial public offerings. The Shenzhen Stock Exchange (SZSE), opened in 1991, focuses on tech venture capital, especially through its ChiNext board. The Beijing Stock Exchange (BSE), opened in 2021, is run by a state-affiliated company and raises funds for Chinese small and medium-sized enterprises.

Provincial governments are becoming increasingly important arenas in Chinese financial policy and regulation. Under Xi’s leadership, the party has enhanced central oversight of local officials as it looks to reduce debt levels and rein in bad loans. The 2023 party-state reforms promised that Beijing would restructure local financial systems around supervision agencies dispatched by central financial regulators, presumably to strengthen the vertical bureaucratic control of central authorities. Beijing has also promoted several financial technocrats or experienced local financial administrators to top provincial leadership posts to clean up the finances of local governments.

People

Xi Jinping (born June 1953) is the most influential policy actor in the Chinese financial system, not only because he leads the Politburo and the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC), but also because he is the Director of the CCP Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission.

Li Qiang (July 1959), Xi’s handpicked Premier of the State Council, who is also the CFEAC Deputy Director, and was announced as the inaugural CFC Director in November 2023. Li’s appointment was considered unusual because Xi has previously made himself the director of major new Party commissions. Xi’s willingness to delegate financial policy suggests not only that he trusts Li, who has a reputation for being relatively friendly to business, but also that he is countenancing more pragmatic policy solutions to what he considers to be China’s major financial policy issues. Li, chairing the first publicized meeting of the CFC, signaled its aim to help China become a “major financial power” by strengthening efforts to diffuse financial risks from local government debt and the property sector, and by issuing new policies on fintech, digital finance, green finance, pension finance, and social finance.

He Lifeng (February 1955) is the Vice Premier and Politburo member on the State Council executive with responsibility for trade, foreign investment, financial regulation, and monetary policy through his oversight of the Ministry of Commerce, NFRA, CSRC, and PBoC. He plays a pivotal role in financial policy coordination and implementation as Director of the CFEAC General Office, Director of the CFC General Office, and Director of CFWC. His roles combine many of the portfolios that are most relevant to foreign business and international markets, which previously were split between Xi’s former economic czar Liu He and former rising star Hu Chunhua. He Lifeng is not an economic technocrat like Liu He, having spent most of his career climbing the ladder of local government leadership, suggesting that he has a strong familiarity with the pro-growth policymaking that characterized these positions for many decades. However, He Lifeng may be a less capable and credible market interlocuter the next time China experiences economic tremors. He is known as an advocate for Xi’s more protectionist and state-oriented financial policies, and his tenure will likely bring a deepening commitment to China’s current financial course under Xi, including tighter controls on private capital. He Lifeng is one of Xi’s closest confidants: they became friends when the two were junior officials in Xiamen during the 1980s, and they worked together in Fujian Province over the next two decades. More than anything, He Lifeng is likely to be loyal to Xi. He’s offsider in the CFC General Office is Wang Jiang (July 1963), the ministerial-level Executive Deputy Director, an academic economist who pursued a career in state banks, including a sting running the Shanghai operations of China Construction Bank while Xi allies Ding Xuexiang and Li Xi were senior officials in the city. Ding Xuexiang, Xi's longtime aide and now Executive Vice Premier, who has policy oversight of public finance on the State Council

Pan Gongsheng (July 1963) is the Governor of the People’s Bank of China. He holds a PhD in labor economics from Renmin University of China, completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, did a six-month research fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School, and undertook professional training at Standard Chartered Bank. Pan spent the first 15 years of his career at the ICBC before serving for four years as Vice President of the Agricultural Bank of China, managing the dual-listing IPOs in Hong Kong and Shanghai of both ICBC in 2006 and ABC in 2010. He was then promoted to PBoC Deputy Governor in 2012 and Director of its State Administration of Foreign Exchange in 2015, where he helped Beijing crackdown on capital flight following significant turbulence in domestic stock markets. Pan was credited with leading the “three red lines” policy to reduce leverage in the property sector, which created significant difficulties for the sector and spooked markets (see below). Pan was dropped from the 20th Central Committee after serving as an alternate on the 19th Central Committee, leading to speculation that he would soon retire due to age limits on deputy ministerial-level officials, but experienced a stunning reversal of fortune when he won promotion to ministerial level as PBoC Party Secretary in July 2023. Pan also serves as PBOC Party Secretary, unifying two roles held separately by Yi Gang and Guo Shuqing respectively from 2018 to 2023, allowing him to leverage more influence than his two predecessors, although he will remain outside the Central Committee and will have to contend with the greater policymaking authority of the new CFC and CFWC. Reporting suggests that Pan was chosen for his international connections and ability to work with foreign central bank governors. Pan is also close to Liu He, a fellow alumnus of the economics program at Renmin University of China in Beijing, who continues to operate as a behind-the-scenes economic advisor despite having retired from frontline leadership.

Li Yunze (September 1970) is the inaugural Chairman of the National Financial Regulatory Administration. Li, an engineer by training, is a veteran of the state-owned commercial banking system. He spent most of his career at the CCB, rising through the ranks in Tianjin for 15 years before moving into management roles at the company’s Beijing headquarters. He then worked as Vice President of the ICBC. He became part of Xi’s initiative to promote financial technocrats into provincial governments, serving as Deputy Governor of Sichuan from 2018 to 2023. He won early promotions when Xi ally Wang Qishan (1994–1998) and longtime PBoC head Zhou Xiaochuan (1998–2000) served as CCB President, and he worked more directly under former PBoC Party Secretary Guo Shuqing (2005–2011) when he was CCB Party Secretary and CBIRC Chairman Yi Huiman (2016–2017) when he was ICBC Party Secretary. Li’s most important connection, however, may be to Xi’s elder sister, Qi Qiaoqiao, whom a source suggests he got to know while running CCB’s equity investment department in the early 2010s. Li is one of the first rising stars to emerge during Xi’s third term, and his NFRA appointment makes him the first ministerial-level leader born in the 1970s. Like many financial leaders who rose during Xi’s second term, Li is a product of the state banking system and lacks significant experience with international finance, reflecting Xi’s increasingly inward focus on using the party-state financial apparatus to manage policy issues such as high local government debt levels. Li is an alternate member of the 20th Central Committee, but if he does well handling China’s financial issues, then his prospects for further promotion look bright.

Wu Qing (April 1965) is Chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, who was appointed to replace his predecessor Yi Huiman in February 2024 following a two-year stock market rout. He is a veteran of the securities regulatory system and has been dubbed the "brokerage butcher." Starting his career in 1991 within the central financial regulatory authorities, he became well-known for targeting illegal insider trading practices in 2008. From 2010 to 2016, Wu Qing served in leadership roles in the Hongkou District of Shanghai through Central-Local Cadre Exchange Program of Central Organization Department. In 2016, he transitioned to the role of Chairman of the Board of Directors at the Shanghai Stock Exchange. Between 2017 and 2021, he occupied senior governmental positions in Shanghai, including that of Deputy Mayor. In December 2021, Wu Qing was appointed as the Executive Deputy Mayor of Shanghai, a role in which he was actively involved in managing the COVID-19 lockdown in Shanghai during 2022 and the subsequent cleanup efforts. Prior to his new appointment at the Securities Regulatory Commission as Chairman and Secretary in February 2024, Wu Qing was the Deputy Secretary of the Shanghai Municipal Committee and Secretary of the Political and Legal Committee.

Lan Fo'an (June 1962) is the Minister of Finance. He is a technocrat who studied public finance and began his career at the Ministry of Finance before lengthy stints in the finance and audit departments of the Guangdong provincial government, interspersed with assignments as Deputy Mayor of Dongguan City and Party Secretary of Shaoguan City, also both in Guangdong. He was promoted to provincial leadership positions during the Xi era, including Deputy Governor of Guangdong from 2016 to 2017, discipline chief of Hainan from 2017 to 2021, Governor of Shanxi from 2021 to 2022, and Party Secretary of Shanxi from 2022 to 2023. He became Minister of Finance in October 2023. He worked as a deputy to Liu Kun, his now-retired predecessor as finance minister, in the Guangdong provincial finance department from 2002 to 2007. This connection was likely important to his position as Liu was an undergraduate classmate of He Lifeng at Xiamen University, and Liu was reportedly given a large say in the appointment of Lan as his successor. Lan’s experience in provincial public finance reinforces Xi’s emphasis on curbing local debt and controlling default risks from local government financing vehicles. Guangdong is one of the provinces least troubled by default risk or growth drag from local borrowing. Ding Xuedong (February 1960), a former Executive Secretary-General of the State Council and Deputy Minister of Finance, is the Party Secretary of the National Council for Social Security Fund. Liu Wei (March 1961), a veteran of the Chongqing public finance department who served under Liu Kun in the NPC, is NCSSF Director-General of the National Council for Social Security Fund.

Details of other senior financial leaders can be found in the “Economy and Trade” section. Despite some high-level factional intrigue, most finance officials are distinctly technocratic, with few visible political affiliations. One of the few distinguishing features among younger officials is that a disproportionate share are graduates of Renmin University (Liu He’s alma mater). University networks are often important within the Chinese system, so the Renmin group may bear watching as new center of influence within the financial system. Additionally, He Lifeng’s network from Xiamen University is also likely to benefit if he takes over Liu He’s position.

Policy

Finance has increasingly emerged as a policy focus of the Xi administration, starting in his first term, accelerating in his second term, and likely to continue into his third term. Xi’s underlying concern is that there is too much leverage in the Chinese financial system and that unsustainable borrowing is raising the risk of a financial crisis, which could cause an economic recession and political stress. This worry motivates Xi to enhance the party’s political oversight of the financial sector.

China’s financial sector is dominated by the party-state, which sees this control as a bulwark against the political threat of a financial crisis, especially after government interventions helped the economy survive the Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998 and the global financial crisis of 2008–2009. State-owned banks provide most of the country’s formal credit to local governments and state-owned enterprises, lending that is often based on political goals rather than market signals, contributing to a growing portfolio of nonperforming loans. Private firms, which account for over 60 percent of China’s gross domestic product, still find it more expensive and difficult to access loans than SOEs. China is also relatively cut off to the international financial system, with the government maintaining a closed capital account, which allows it to control the flow of domestic funds overseas. Many private firms, and even some state firms and local governments, turn to riskier nonstate shadow financing to raise funds, especially as domestic stock exchanges are relatively shallow pools for raising capital.

Consequently, the government had little insight into the financials of private companies, including several conglomerates that had become systemically important in key industries. For Xi, this lack of information was unacceptable because it limited the party’s ability to control both the economic risks of rising debt and the political influence of wealthy tycoons. He saw investments made overseas or on behalf of political families (especially those of his rivals) as regulatory blind spots. Xi began to crack down on the financial power of big business toward the end of his first term, following the Chinese stock market turmoil of 2015–2016, which shook his confidence in the party’s capacity to govern the private sector.

The lead-up to the 19th Party Congress saw legal or regulatory action against several billionaire financiers. In January 2017, according to media reports, Chinese agents in Hong Kong abducted Xiao Jianhua, a billionaire banker who managed the assets of several elite political families, and smuggled him to the mainland, where he was sentenced to 13 years in prison for fraud and corruption in August 2022. In June 2017, Chinese police arrested Wu Xiaohui, the CEO of Anbang Insurance Group, a politically connected private company that had embarked on a debt-fueled acquisition spree of foreign trophy assets. The same month, Beijing cut off financing for the overseas expansion of Chinese conglomerates, including Anbang, Dalian Wanda, Fosun International, and HNA Group, also curtailing their political influence.

Xi’s campaign against financial risk gathered momentum in his second term. Xi’s report to the 19th Party Congress established the prevention of major financial risks as a top priority, and Beijing explored ways to control a boom in digital finance. It was around this time that China’s nascent peer-to-peer lending industry, which had emerged in the absence of much regulation as a solution for credit-hungry individuals and private firms, began to experience a wave of defaults and embezzlement cases. These financial scandals, which wiped out the savings of many ordinary people, created social instability as those affected took to the streets to demand a government response. It became increasingly clear that China’s financial regulation required a significant upgrade and modernization to protect consumers and protect the economy against the financial risks attached to new types of financing.

Then, in October 2020, tech magnate Jack Ma, who founded the e-commerce giant Alibaba before creating the Ant Group, a gigantic online financial services company, used a speech at the Bund Forum in Shanghai to criticize China’s financial regulators as a “geriatric club,” arguing that a proposal to impose reserve requirements on micro-lenders such as Ant would be like “feeding dementia medication meant for seniors to a child suffering from polio.” This open challenge by a high-profile businessperson to a key political priority of Xi was unacceptable. A few days later, in November—following a meeting between Ant and the CSRC, CBIRC, SAFE, and PBoC—the SSE suddenly canceled Ant Group’s initial public offering on Shanghai’s STAR market, which at US$34 billion had been expected to be the largest ever.

Ma’s speech did not cause Xi to target financial risk, but it helped accelerate and perhaps amplify a regulatory agenda against financial risks and anti-competitive conduct that was already being worked on by the CBIRC, CSRC, PBoC, and other agencies (see the “Technology” section for more details). Other significant moves in the financial sector that followed included a move by the PBoC in September 2021 to ban cryptocurrency transactions in China. The anonymity of the blockchain went against Xi’s desire for financial transparency and political control, and the PBoC instead began developing the government’s own digital currency, the digital renminbi (e-RMB). Beijing’s increased focus on national security has also discouraged Chinese firms from listing on foreign stock exchanges, as shown by the cybersecurity review that forced rideshare giant Didi to delist from the New York Stock Exchange in 2021.

Another focus of Xi’s financial policies has been to reduce leverage in the property sector, which accounts for roughly one-quarter of China’s economic activity, an unusually high share. In August 2020, the PBoC and the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development introduced a set of financial regulatory guidelines for property developers that said they should observe “three red lines”: a debt-to-asset ratio not exceeding 70 percent (not including advance proceeds); a debt-to-equity ratio not exceeding 100 percent; and a short-term debt-to-cash ratio not exceeding 100 percent. The regulation overturned a leverage-heavy business model in the sector that had helped sustain rising housing prices, and many developers had to default or restructure to achieve compliance. Especially hard hit was China Evergrande Group, one of the country’s largest developers, which was highly overleveraged and went into default in December 2021, although restructuring efforts continue. The three red lines, combined with other pro-social housing policies such as mortgage lending limits and rent caps, caused a property sector slowdown that sparked fears of a broader financial crash and international contagion.

Local government debt also presents a systemic risk to the financial sector. The major problem is central-local fiscal imbalance, with the central government arrogating most tax revenues to itself, delegating most public expenditures to local government, and not fully covering the difference. This imbalance led to a proliferation of informal local government financing vehicles, which mostly depended on selling land to developers and suffered from the cooling property market. Xi’s zero-COVID policy exacerbated this problem because Beijing made local governments pay for most of the sprawling COVID testing and contact-tracing architecture that underpinned the policy. Xi has been especially concerned that the central government must gain more visibility into local government finances and supervise a rectification of debt levels and future borrowing, so he has promoted many financial technocrats to serve as finance-focused provincial deputy governors.

Xi has overseen the continuation of incremental reforms toward a more market-based approach to monetary policy in China, following decades before the mid-2000s when Beijing fixed the exchange rate to significantly undervalue the renminbi and make Chinese exports cheaper overseas. Moves included expanding the narrow band around which the value of the renminbi is allowed to float against the US dollar and more targeted domestic policy setting through banking liquidity and lending facilities. In October 2016, the International Monetary Fund included the renminbi in the special drawing rights basket that it uses as a reserve currency, a significant step for the currency’s market recognition and international status. Beijing under Xi has stepped up efforts to internationalize the renminbi, promoting its use in bilateral economic deals and through the Belt and Road Initiative, leading to a more than doubling of its still small share of global trade finance. But Beijing’s unwillingness to entertain capital account liberalization, which would remove political controls over how much money can flow in and out of China, means the renminbi is unlikely to replace the dollar as the global reserve currency anytime soon.

Xi’s report to the 20th Party Congress in October 2022 stated that the party would “deepen reform of the financial system, build a modern central banking system, strengthen and improve modern financial oversight, strengthen the financial stability protection system, bring all types of financial activities under supervision in accordance with the law, and guard the bottom line of no systemic risk.” Moreover, he introduced an aim to “advance party leadership in the course of improving corporate governance” in financial firms specifically. The report also pledged to improve the functioning of capital markets and increase the overall proportion of direct financing. Overall, the report suggested that regulatory scrutiny of financial sector firms will remain robust, with high-level political attention, especially through the new financial policymaking bodies and regulatory agencies created in the latest party-state reforms. In the month before the reforms were unveiled, Beijing reportedly detained the country’s top investment banker in the technology sector, charged a former senior executive at a state bank with insider trading, and warned that financiers must respect party leadership and not see themselves as a “financial elite.”

However, Xi’s financial policy will remain a delicate balance between regulation and growth, with a focus on post-COVID economic recovery at the beginning of his third term bringing a range of easing measures for property financing, including guaranteeing delivery of unbuilt projects, relaxing controls that suppressed demand, and improving the liquidity of real estate companies through commercial bank loans, bond guarantees, and equity financing. The real estate sector, however, will remain in structural decline absent a new development model, as continued stimulus to support growth continues to kick the can down the road on resolving this issue. A financial stability law will likely be adopted after the NPC to ensure there is emergency funding available to weak, often smaller regional banks to prevent systemic financial instability, as bank failures will occur more frequently over time.

Technology

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Technology policy has emerged as a central concern for Beijing since Xi Jinping became General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in November 2012. Technological innovation is an essential requirement for two of Xi’s foundational policy agendas. First, Xi has identified a need to escape the “middle-income trap” by transforming China from a low-cost export powerhouse into a high value-added economy, a concern that Xi has pursued since his first term, giving it more attention than his predecessors. Second, Xi seeks to increase the country’s “self-reliance” in “chokehold technologies” and reduce the geopolitical leverage of the United States and its allies, a concern that grew more pressing during Xi’s second term following the proliferation of US tariffs, sanctions, and export controls directed at China. Xi’s administration has increased funding for scientific research, reformed the institutions that govern science and technology, promoted technological experts to senior political positions, and made enormous investments in strategic high-tech industries, all with the goal of transforming China into a “science and technology superpower” by the middle of the century. Xi believes this goal demands better regulation, and his second term saw the emergence of a technology governance regime centered around the Cybersecurity Law of 2016, the Data Security Law of 2021, and the Personal Information Protection Law of 2021.

• Institutions
• People
• Policy

Institutions

The CCP Central Comprehensively Deepening Reforms Commission (CCDRC) is arguably the country’s most influential policymaking, coordination, and implementation body, as it is the institution that Party leader Xi Jinping uses more than any other to implement top-level policy changes to the economic system (see “Economy and Trade” and other sections). The CCDRC has discussed several policy documents related to the science and technology system, including reforms to research evaluation mechanisms and innovation progress indicators and programs to focus on key technologies, promote research commercialization, incentivize talent, improve talent, and reduce waste. Xi is the CCDRC Director, and the Premier, Chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, and CCP Secretariat First Secretary have served as Deputy Directors. The CCDRC’s current membership is unclear, but it is thought to include around 20 deputy national-level leaders.

The CCP Central Military-Civil Fusion Development Commission (CMCFDC) is responsible for making, coordinating, and implementing policies related to the integration of civilian technology into the Chinese military. Formed in January 2017, the body replaced several leading groups with a similar focus. At the CMCFDC’s first meeting in June 2017, Xi emphasized the importance of technological innovation in making China a “self-reliant” great power. Xi serves as the CMCFDC Director, and the Premier, CCP Secretariat First Secretary, and Executive Vice Premier serve as Deputy Directors, a leadership lineup that significantly elevated the political priority of dual-use technology compared with previous leading groups. The Executive Vice Premier also heads the CMCFDC General Office, assisted by a ministerial-level Executive Deputy Director who runs day-to-day policy operations. Important institutions in military-civil fusion include several defense-related central state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and the Central Military Commission’s Equipment Development Department (which houses the China Manned Space Agency) and Science and Technology Committee, both of which were founded following Xi’s sweeping military reforms in 2015 (see “Military” section for more details.)

The CCP Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission (CCAC) is the policy formulation, coordination, and implementation body that holds sway on censorship, propaganda, security, and technology related to the internet. Xi established the CCAC as a leading group in February 2014 and upgraded it to a commission in March 2018. He served as the CCAC Director until he reportedly handed over the reins to his right-hand man Cai Qi in 2023.

The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) is the ministerial-level General Office of CCAC. The CAC has emerged as an unusually prominent policy actor, compared with the General Offices of other central party commissions, because it simultaneously functions under both the CCP Central Committee and the State Council as the country’s chief internet regulator. Its original remit to manage online content and enforce online censorship has been expanded to include rulemaking and punishment powers over cybersecurity (including network equipment and security reviews), data security (including the export of important data), and online privacy (including the export of personal information). The CAC usually plays the leading role in Beijing’s regulatory response to emerging online technologies, such as AI chatbots, deepfakes, livestreaming, and recommendation algorithms. These changes have transformed the CAC into a super-regulator with potential jurisdiction over virtually all online activity. The most infamous display of its formidable powers came in mid-2021, when the CAC investigated the initial public offering (IPO) of rideshare giant DiDi on the New York Stock Exchange, retroactively declaring the need for a (now mandatory) cybersecurity review, during which time it blocked the app and suspended new registrations. DiDi eventually delisted. The CAC also controls the China Internet Investment Fund, which owns minority stakes, or so-called golden shares, acquired under government pressure from in top Chinese tech firms such as ByteDance and Weibo. The National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA), a ministerial-level agency directly under the State Council that is led by the CCP Propaganda Department, retains oversight of approval for new audiovisual products such as movies and television shows, but the CAC retains the authority to censor such content online.

The CAC usually plays the leading role in Beijing’s regulatory response to emerging online technologies, such as AI chatbots, deepfakes, livestreaming, and recommendation algorithms.

The top institution focused specifically on science and technology policymaking is the CCP Central Science and Technology Commission (CSTC), which was announced as part of the party-state institutional reforms of March 2023. The CSTC is intended to strengthen party leadership over science and technology policies and has responsibility for decision-making, discussion, and coordination of work in these areas. More specifically, it is charged with building the national innovation system; reforming the science and technology system; researching major policies for national science and technology development; resolving major strategic and directional issues in the science and technology sphere; determining strategic science and technology missions and major research projects for the national government; coordinating the layout of strategic science and technology forces, including national laboratories; and coordinating the development of civil-military fusion in science and technology. The CSTC General Office resides in the Ministry of Science and Technology, helping to elevate the ministry’s bureaucratic power and political influence.

The CSTC gained responsibility for the National Science and Technology Advisory Committee (NSTAC), a secretive group of experts convened by the party in 2019 to advise the top leadership on major national policies, and the National Science and Technology Ethics Committee (NSTEC), another enigmatic expert group established in 2019–2020 to strengthen professional norms, governance mechanisms, institutional supervisions, and the legal and regulatory framework related to scientific ethics. The CSTC also absorbed the former CCP Central Leading Group for the Construction of National Laboratories, National Leading Group for Science and Technology, National Leading Group for Science and Technology System Reform and Innovation System Construction, and National Leading Group for Medium-to-Long-Term Science and Technology Development Planning Work. These changes significantly weakened the State Council’s role in science and technology policy relative to the central party apparatus led by Xi.

The CSTC gained responsibility for the National Science and Technology Advisory Committee (NSTAC), a secretive group of experts convened by the party in 2019 to advise the top leadership on major national policies.

The Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) is the constituent department of the State Council that oversees science and technology in China. Its main responsibilities include national plans for science and technology, innovation-driven development, and basic research; science and technology system reform and national innovation system construction; major national basic research and applied basic research; major national science and technology projects; national laboratories; regional science and technology development; the national technology transfer system; international science and technology cooperation; and the creation of a unified mechanism for managing and evaluating national science and technology projects. MOST was empowered in the March 2023 institutional reforms to focus more on these core missions of vital national interest, shedding its responsibilities for rural science and technology, science and technology for social development, high-tech industrial development, and foreign talent management. MOST administers the deputy ministerial-level National Natural Science Foundation of China, a State Council public institution that allocates over US$5 billion annually to thousands of scientific research projects that advance Beijing’s policy goals, and the deputy ministerial-level Science and Technology Daily, a newspaper focusing on science and technology issues. MOST may not be involved in regulating the technology industry, but it is set to become a more influential player in science and technology policy because it will host the CSTC General Office.

MOST may not be involved in regulating the technology industry, but it is set to become a more influential player in science and technology policy because it will host the CSTC General Office.

The State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs (SAFEA) is a deputy ministerial-level agency absorbed by the State Council’s Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security (MHRSS) in the March 2023 reforms. SAFEA is responsible for the recruitment of foreign experts to work in Chinese institutions, including overseas Chinese and people from Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. Its activities include the long-running Thousand Talents Program that recruits foreign-trained STEM experts to advance China’s high-tech sector (now known as the National High-end Foreign Experts Recruitment Plan), which has allegedly facilitated intellectual property theft and illicit technology transfer from Western countries. The top policy coordination body dedicated to human capital is the CCP Central Coordination Group on Talent Work, which was established in 2003 and reportedly is led by the Director of the powerful CCP Organization Department.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) is a constituent department of the State Council that is a powerful force in China’s technology policy. It is responsible for industrial development; industrial policy; industrial standards; industry operations monitoring; indigenous innovation; information technology; national information security; the development of major equipment industries for manufacturing and transportation; the development of high-tech industries such as biomedicine, new materials, and aerospace; and the management of communications industries such as internet infrastructure, software, telephones, television, radio, airwaves, satellites, and the knowledge economy. In the March 2023 institutional reforms, MIIT acquired new responsibilities for high-tech industry development, local science and technology zones and industrial parks, science and technology service industries and intermediary organizations, and technology markets.

MIIT administers the deputy ministerial-level State Administration of Science, Technology, and Industry for National Defense (SASTIND), a State Council bureau that manages the national defense science and technology industries, supervises civil-to-military technology conversion efforts, organizes international cooperation in defense industries, and manages arms exports by military enterprises. It has specific responsibility for the planning and management of the nuclear, aerospace, aviation, shipping, and armament industries, as well as managing the military electronics industry, nuclear power plant construction, isotope production, and the production and circulation of civilian explosives. Many leading cadres in the technology field, including several who became provincial or even national leaders (such as Ma Xingrui and Zhang Guoqing), have worked there. MIIT administers two other deputy ministerial-level State Council bureaus: the China National Space Administration (CNSA), which manages the civilian space industry and international space cooperation, and the China Atomic Energy Authority (CAEA), which manages the nuclear energy industry and international nuclear cooperation.

MIIT houses the General Offices of several technology-related State Council policy coordination bodies: the State Leading Group for the Development of the National Integrated Circuit Industry, founded in 2014; the State Leading Group for Building a Manufacturing Power, founded in 2015 to oversee the Made in China 2025 strategy to enhance the country’s dominance of key advanced manufacturing industries; the State Leading Group for the Development of the New Materials Industry, founded in 2016 to manage issues such as nanotechnology and rare earths; and the State Council Leading Group for the Promotion of Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises, founded in 2009, which has become more relevant as Beijing increasingly focuses on smaller but more specialized technology firms. The latest public records suggest that all these leading groups are headed by the Vice Premier with the industry portfolio, who is currently Zhang Guoqing; the MIIT Minister and others serve as Deputies; and an MIIT Deputy Minister leads the General Office (although this inference is speculative for the last-named group).

MIIT oversees the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), an official think tank that is an influential player in China’s telecommunications and digital economy sectors, including with respect to standards, technical trials, and emerging technologies. It also oversees seven universities that are among China’s leading STEM institutions, including four elite institutions that produce many of China’s leading engineers, scientists, and technologists and are important enough for the CCP’s Organization Department to appoint their party secretaries and presidents: Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (“Beihang”), Beijing Institute of Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, and Northwestern Polytechnical University. Other STEM heavyweights include Tsinghua University in Beijing and the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei.

The State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) is a ministerial-level agency directly under the State Council with responsibility for registering market entities; creating social credit systems for market entities; and regulating market operations, market competition, monopolies, advertising, multilevel marketing, intellectual property, food safety, equipment safety, measurement, national standards, industrial product quality and safety, and commercial inspection and testing. Established by the merger of several regulators in March 2018, the SAMR has emerged as an influential actor in regulatory politics, especially during Xi’s rectification campaign against China’s large platform technology firms, which it leveraged to increase its bureaucratic resources and issue sizeable fines on top companies.

SAMR operates several deputy ministerial-level State Council bodies with important regulatory functions in the technology sphere. The Standardization Administration of China (SAC) oversees technical and industrial standardization work and represents China in international standardization bodies (although MIIT interfaces with the United Nations International Telecommunication Union). TC260 is a particularly influential standard-setting body under the SAC and is responsible for standards related to cybersecurity and online personal information protection under Xi’s new cyber-governance regime. The China National Certification and Accreditation Administration (CNCA) is responsible for certification and accreditation related to industrial quality, industrial safety, and public hygiene. The National Medical Products Association (NMPA) regulates, supervises, and formulates standards for medical devices, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals (including those used in Traditional Chinese Medicine).

SAMR is a pivotal actor in the implementation and enforcement of the recently amended Anti-Monopoly Law. The National Anti-Monopoly Bureau (NAMB), founded in November 2021, consists of three SAMR departments that investigate and handle administrative monopolies and unfair competition; investigate monopolistic collusion and abuse of market power; and review the concentration of business operators. The NAMB also functions as the General Office of the State Council Anti-Monopoly Commission, which was established in 2008 to coordinate state competition policies and regulatory frameworks, and the National Leading Group for Combating Intellectual Property Infringement and the Production and Sale of Counterfeit and Inferior Goods; both bodies are led by the Vice Premier in charge of market regulation, currently Zhang Guoqing. SAMR also provides guidance to the China Consumers Association, a state-affiliated “social organization” that is often used by the government as a mouthpiece to publicly target both domestic and foreign companies whose business practices create political problems.

The China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) is a deputy ministerial-level organ directly under the State Council that is responsible for protecting intellectual property rights; handling foreign intellectual property matters; and registering and adjudicating patents, trademarks, and geographical designations of origin. Before the 2023 institutional reforms, CNIPA was managed by SAMR, which still has enforcement responsibility for patent and trademark issues.

The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) is arguably the most powerful ministerial-level constituent department of the State Council and plays a pivotal role in coordinating governance matters on both energy and the environment. Formerly the State Planning Commission and the State Development Planning Commission, the NDRC oversees China’s economic development planning process, which at its highest level produces the national Five-Year Plan. The NDRC is the macro-level control department and has responsibility for formulating a broad range of economic and social policies, which often overlap with the mandates of other ministries and agencies. The main functions of the NDRC, and especially its Department of Innovation and High-Tech Development, include promoting innovation-driven development in economic planning and working with other ministries to formulate policies related to innovation, entrepreneurship, industrial upgrading, high-tech industries, strategic emerging industries, and the national layout of science and technology infrastructure. In March 2023, it acquired responsibility for formulating plans for science and technology to promote economic development from the Ministry of Science and Technology. The NDRC is part of the Inter-ministerial Joint Conference for the Digital Economy, together with the Cyberspace Administration of China and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

The NDRC manages the National Data Administration (NDA), a new deputy ministerial-level State Council bureau announced in the party-state institutional reforms of March 2023. The NDA will oversee building the data infrastructure system; coordinating the integration, sharing, development and utilization of data resources; and overall planning of Digital China, the digital economy, digital social regulation and construction, and similar policy areas. The NDA takes oversight of the economic applications of data from the security-focused Cyberspace Administration of China by acquiring its responsibilities for smart cities, the digitization of public services, cross-department government data sharing, and the development and use of nationally important information. It also takes on the NDRC’s previous responsibilities for the national big data strategy, digital economy, and digital infrastructure. Early conjectures suggest that the NDA will chiefly focus on nurturing the market for data as a “factor of production,” with the consolidation of data oversight under one agency potentially helping to rectify inefficiencies that arose from the fragmentation of regulatory jurisdictions across many agencies and ministries.

The Ministry of Public Security (MPS) is a constituent department of the State Council that is mainly responsible for the country’s police force, but has several other duties, including for the security of information on public internet networks (see “Security” section for more details). It oversees and enforces a broad and complex cybersecurity standard known as the Multi-Layer Protection Scheme (MLPS), which virtually all domestic and foreign companies operating in China must comply with and get certified for. Due to the overlap between this MPS function and the purview of the CAC, Beijing may force the MPS to relinquish its cybersecurity powers or collaborate closer with CAC and MIIT, but the MPS’s significant enforcement capacity at local levels will ensure its relevance for tech regulation.

The Chinese government operates two national academies that support advanced research in science and technology, which function administratively as ministerial-level organs directly under the State Council. The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) is a national center for promoting academic research in the natural sciences and high-end technology that advances China’s modernization goals. It is the largest research institute in the world, featuring a dozen branches around the country, several dozen research institutes, and even two universities. It also invests in hundreds of companies that aim to commercialize basic academic research. The title of “academician” of the CAS is granted to the country’s top scientists; currently, there are more than 700 Chinese academicians and over 50 foreign academicians. The Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE) is like the CAS in that it is the national center for promoting research in engineering science and technology, but it is much smaller in its research operations and advises the central government and local governments on engineering-related policies and plans.

Legislative work related to science and technology issues is supervised and evaluated in the National People’s Congress (NPC) by the ministerial-level NPC Education, Science, Culture, and Public Health Committee, which has existed since 1983. United Front work related to the science and technology sphere in the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) is overseen by the ministerial-level CPPCC Education, Science, Health, and Sports Committee, founded in 1988, which liaises with the scientific community and consults on related policies.

The China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) is a purportedly nongovernmental “people’s organization” that represents China’s scientists and technologists. CAST sits atop a sprawling network of provincial associations and several dozen academic and professional associations dedicated to different branches of science and technology. CAST is part of the CCP’s United Front system for co-opting members of important social groups who are not party members; its purpose, according to its constitution, is to propagate party policies to and solicit policy suggestions from science and technology workers. CAST is led by a ministerial-level CCP Secretary and a President. It plays a role in recruiting foreign STEM talent to work in China, allegedly helping to facilitate illicit technology transfer.

The State Council’s State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) oversees several central SOEs that are major players in domestic and international telecommunications technology (see the “Military” and “Environment” sections for SOEs involved in those policy areas). The China Electronics Corporation and China Electronics Technology Group Corporation manufacture telecommunications equipment such as network infrastructure, integrated circuits, computers, displays, antennae, software, and other high-tech electronics; the latter is focused on supplying electronics to the Chinese military. China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom provide a variety of telecommunications services in China. China Hualu Group focuses on audio and video electronics and associated technology. Private firms such as Huawei, Lenovo, and HikVision are also important forces in technology development and often work closely with the government.

Various Chinese government agencies also operate “government guidance funds” that aim to stimulate growth in domestic high-tech industries through direct state investments and through signaling to private investors which sectors and firms are favored by Beijing. Perhaps the most famous is the roughly $45 billion National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, also known as the “Big Fund,” which invests in major Chinese semiconductor firms. The fund is co-managed by MIIT and the Ministry of Finance, which is also its largest investor. It was recently revived following a monthslong hiatus after several fund executives were charged with corruption in their investment decisions.

Provincial leadership is also important in China’s technology governance, especially in recent years, since Xi adopted an organizational and personnel measure mirroring the deputy provincial governor arrangement previously used for financial regulation. Many provinces now have deputy governors responsible for science and technology; this is especially true for provincial-level localities with huge research and development capabilities within their geography, such as Shanghai and Guangdong. Many of those posts are held by younger officials who could become senior leaders in the coming decades.

People

Xi Jinping (born June 1953) is the most influential person in China’s technology policy because of his position as General Secretary on the Politburo and its PSC. Li Qiang, Wang Huning, Cai Qi, and Ding Xuexiang are relatively influential PSC members in technology policy given their Deputy roles on the CCDRC and CMCFDC. Cai is the point person on Internet censorship, propaganda, security, and technology given his leadership of the CCAC. Ding is the point person on national systems for innovation, science, and technology due to his role as CSTC Director, and in his role as Executive Vice Premier he is the State Council executive member responsible for science and technology, education, intellectual property, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and the China Association for Science and Technology. In previous administrations, these assignments were held by Vice Premiers or lower-ranked State Councilors, suggesting that Beijing has elevated its focus on building an innovation ecosystem that can withstand geopolitical competition with the West. Ding is one of Xi’s most trusted aides and brings a technocratic background to these roles—he studied mechanical engineering before working for a decade and a half at the Shanghai Research Institute for Materials. (See “Top Leadership” section for more details.)

Zhang Guoqing (August 1964) is the Vice Premier and Politburo member with oversight of industrial policy (MIIT), state-owned enterprises (SASAC), and nonfinancial market regulation (SAMR). The last two policy areas were previously assigned to a State Councilor; this change indicates that they are now seen as higher priorities than in the past. Zhang is a military-industrial technocrat, having studied electrical engineering and then international trade before embarking on a 26-year career at Norinco, the state-owned arms manufacturer and exporter, including a three-year stint in its Tehran office, and a string of executive roles that culminated in his appointment as General Manager. Zhang also earned a part-time doctorate in economics from Tsinghua University in the early 2000s, when Xi’s former Tsinghua roommate and now outgoing CCP Organization Department head Chen Xi was the university’s Party Secretary.

Zhuang Rongwen (February 1961) is the Director of the Cyberspace Administration of China and serves concurrently as a ministerial-level Deputy Director of the CCP Propaganda Department. He spent most of his career in his native Fujian, working as a senior bureaucrat and Deputy Director in the provincial planning commission while Xi was a Deputy Party Secretary and then Governor of the province. Zhuang overlapped in the provincial government with top Xi allies Cai Qi, Chen Wenqing, and Zheng Shanjie, but especially with Xi confidant He Lifeng, who was the Deputy Mayor of Xiamen while Zhuang was Deputy Director of an investment zone in the city. Zhuang then worked at the State Council Overseas Chinese Affairs Office in Beijing before he was tapped to serve as CAC Deputy Director in 2015 and Director in 2018, the year he began his role at the Propaganda Department.

Jin Zhuanglong (March 1964) is the Minister of Industry and Information Technology. He studied missile design at the prestigious Beihang University in Beijing, where he overlapped with Politburo member Yuan Jiajun, then studied and worked at the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology for 15 years before serving as a senior executive at the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation. There, he worked closely with several other members of the “aerospace gang” who have won high office under Xi, including Ma Xingrui, Yuan Jiajun, and Zhang Qingwei. Following stints at the CNSA and SASTIND, he spent 2008 to 2017 as Deputy and then Head of the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC) in Shanghai, where he would have worked with top Xi allies such as Ding Xuexiang, Li Xi, and Zhong Shaojun. Most recently, Jin was the ministerial-level Executive Deputy Director of the General Office of the Xi-led CMCFDC from 2017 to 2022, where he played a leading role in China’s military-civil fusion policies. His appointment to lead MIIT suggests a rising focus on improving dual-use technology and upgrading the technological achievements of SOEs. Jin replaced Xiao Yaqing, a protégé of former security czar Guo Shengkun, who was himself a protégé of top Jiang Zemin ally Zeng Qinghong; Xiao was purged in July 2022 as part of an anti-corruption purge that Xi used to crush Zeng’s once-strong influence in the technology sphere. Zhang Kejian (July 1961), a nuclear physicist whose career focused on nuclear weapons research at the Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics, is the MIIT Deputy Minister who serves as Director of CNSA, SASTIND, CNSA, and China Atomic Energy Authority.

Zhuang Rongwen (February 1961) is the Director of the Cyberspace Administration of China and serves concurrently as a ministerial-level Deputy Director of the CCP Propaganda Department. He spent most of his career in his native Fujian, working as a senior bureaucrat and Deputy Director in the provincial planning commission while Xi was a Deputy Party Secretary and then Governor of the province. Zhuang overlapped in the provincial government with top Xi allies Cai Qi, Chen Wenqing, and Zheng Shanjie, but especially with Xi confidant He Lifeng, who was the Deputy Mayor of Xiamen while Zhuang was Deputy Director of an investment zone in the city. Zhuang then worked at the State Council Overseas Chinese Affairs Office in Beijing before he was tapped to serve as CAC Deputy Director in 2015 and Director in 2018, the year he began his role at the Propaganda Department.

Yin Hejun (January 1963) is the Minister of Science and Technology. Yin is an expert on electromagnetic field theory, microwave technology, and remote sensing who has significant experience in government aerospace projects. His appointment suggests that political attention and budgets for aerospace innovation and military modernization will continue to rise, notwithstanding recent corruption scandals in the PLA. Yin earned a doctorate in electromagnetic field and microwave technology from the Institute of Electronics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 1995, before embarking on a 20-year career at CAS. He served as Director of the CAS Institute of Electronics (2001-2006), Director of the CAS High Technology Research and Development Bureau (2006-2008), and a CAS Vice President (2008-2015). During this time, he also served as a Deputy Commander of the Shenzhou 7 manned space flight, which launched in 2008, where he worked closely with aerospace engineer turned Politburo member Ma Xingrui, and as a Deputy Commander of the Lunar Exploration Project during the Chang'e 3 mission, which launched in 2013, where he worked alongside current Politburo members including Ma, Yuan Jiajun and PLA general Zhang Youxia. Yin then moved into national politics with appointments as Deputy Minister of Science and Technology (2015-2017), Deputy Mayor of Beijing (2017-2018), Deputy Party Secretary of Tianjin (2018-2020), and ministerial-level CAS Vice President (2020-2023). Yin served in Beijing when top Xi ally Cai Qi was Party Secretary of Beijing and in Tianjin under the leadership of Xi supporter Li Hongzhong, connections that may have aided his rise to ministerial rank. Dou Xiankang (January 1966), a space physicist who headed Wuhan University, is a MOST Party Leadership Group member who serves as the Director of the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

Luo Wen (December 1964) is the Director of the State Administration for Market Regulation. He studied philosophy at Wuhan University and then taught at the Electronics Industry Management Cadre College, helped lead a couple of electronics SOEs, and worked variously as Deputy Director then Director of the MIIT-affiliated CCID Consulting Company and China Center for Information Industry Development between 2000 and 2015. He then moved to MIIT proper, winning promotions to MIIT Deputy Minister in 2017, NDRC Deputy Chairman in 2019, Deputy Party Secretary of Sichuan in 2020, and finally SAMR Director in 2022. Luo is a technocrat with deep expertise in the information and electronics industries. The position of the SAMR Deputy Director who serves as Director of the National Anti-Monopoly Bureau founded in 2018 is currently vacant. Tian Shihong (September 1964), a policy expert who spent his entire career in the central bureaucracy focused on technical standards and regulations, is the SAMR Deputy Director who serves as Director of the Standardization Administration of China. Shen Changyu (June 1963), an expert on plastic molding and former President of Zhengzhou University and Dalian University of Technology, is the Director of the China National Intellectual Property Administration and sits on the SAMR Party Leadership Group.

Zheng Shanjie (November 1961) is the Chairman of the NDRC. Hailing from Fujian Province, he studied chemical equipment corrosion at Nanjing Tech University. Zheng spent the first 15 years of his career at the Xiamen Cod Liver Oil Factory, where between 1982 and 1997 he rose from working in equipment maintenance to become a successful factory manager. He won promotion to district leadership roles in the city of Xiamen before serving as a top political secretary to the city leadership and as Director of the Xiamen municipal and then the Fujian provincial development and reform commission (DRC). Zheng was a factory employee in Xiamen when Xi was Deputy Mayor from 1985 to 1988 and a district-level official in Xiamen for most of Xi’s tenure as Deputy Party Secretary of Fujian from 1995 to 2002. Zheng’s most important political connection is likely as a protégé of Xi confidant He Lifeng, who was his predecessor at the NDRC and is now a Vice Premier. Zheng’s achievements at the Xiamen Cod Liver Oil Factory in the mid-1990s would have caught the attention of local authorities, and He was a city official from 1984 to 1995 and a Deputy Mayor from 1992 to 1995. He Lifeng’s return to Xiamen as Party Secretary from 2005 to 2009 made him Zheng’s superior when the latter was Xiamen DRC Director. He may also have used his position on the provincial party standing committee to help Zheng win promotion to the provincial DRC in 2008. Zheng enjoyed a rapid series of promotions after Xi came to power, winning a relatively late promotion to the deputy ministerial level as a Deputy Governor of Fujian in 2015, before becoming the Director of the National Energy Administration, Deputy Director of the State Council Taiwan Affairs Office, Governor of Zhejiang, and Party Secretary of Anhui. He did all this without a seat on the CCP Central Committee, which he finally won at the 20th Party Congress before becoming the NDRC Director as one of the very few new State Council ministers appointed at the Two Sessions in March 2023.

Liu Liehong (October 1968) is the inaugural Director of the National Data Administration. He trained as an electronic engineer and spent his early career working in various government-affiliated electronics technology research institutes. He then held leadership roles in several state-owned electronics technology enterprises during the 2000s and 2010s. He served as a Deputy Director of the Cyberspace Administration of China from 2018 to 2020, a Deputy Minister of Industry and Information Technology from 2020 to 2021, and Party Secretary of China Unicom from 2021 to 2023. He is a technocrat whose appointment appears to recognize the significant technical dimensions of data policymaking.

Hou Jianguo (October 1959) is the President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. An acclaimed chemist, he became a CAS academician in 2003, during an illustrious career spent mostly at the prestigious University of Science and Technology of China in Anhui, where he earned his doctorate, worked as a professor, and climbed the administrative ranks to serve as President from 2008 to 2015. He then became a MOST Deputy Minister; Deputy Party Secretary of Guangxi; Party Secretary of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine; CAS Vice President in 2018; and then CAS President in 2020.

Li Xiaohong (June 1959) is the President of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. He studied the application of water jet technology to mining engineering, earning a doctorate from Chongqing University before teaching there for several years and serving as President from 2003 to 2010. Li was the President of Wuhan University from 2010 to 2016, Deputy Minister of Education from 2016 to 2017, and then Party Secretary and President of the CAE. He has been a CAE academician since 2011.

Wan Gang (August 1952) is the Chairman of the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) and a member of the China Zhi Gong Party. Wan became the first noncommunist State Council minister of the post-Mao era when he was appointed Minister of Science and Technology in 2007, a position he held until 2018. He served as a CPPCC Vice Chairman from 2008 to 2023, making him a deputy national-level official and outranking most other ministers. Wan is a mechanical engineer who studied in Germany and became a senior engineer at Audi before returning to China to pioneer new energy automobiles in the early 2000s at Tongji University in Shanghai. He Junke (February 1969), a former head of the Communist Youth League who has extensive background in the military and aerospace industry, is the CAST Party Secretary.

Luo Shugang (May 1955) is the Director of the NPC Education, Science, Culture, and Public Health Committee. Luo does not have a background in science and technology, having studied scientific socialism. He worked at the leading ideological journal Seeking Truth and then spent over two decades in the CCP Propaganda Department, serving as its Executive Deputy Director from 2008 to 2014 before becoming Minister of Culture and then Minister of Culture and Tourism from 2014 to 2020.

Chen Baosheng (May 1956) is the Director of the CPPCC Education, Science, Health, and Sports Committee. He spent most of his career as a cadre in the provincial government of his native Gansu, where he worked in proximity to Xi’s PSC ally Li Xi for a couple of decades before working with him directly on the provincial party standing committee for several years during the 2000s. Chen left Gansu to become a Vice President of the CCP Central Party School (CPS) from 2008 to 2013, working directly under Xi when he was CPS President from 2007 to 2012. He was then Party Secretary of the National Academy of Governance and Minister of Education before retiring from frontline leadership in 2021.

Cao Shumin (July 1966) is the Director of the National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA) and a Deputy Director of the CCP Central Propaganda Department. She is the youngest female ministerial-level leader in China. A leading expert on technology and innovation, Cao earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electronic engineering from Beihang University, and then worked as a professor at the MIIT-affiliated China Academy of Telecommunications Research. She went on to serve as the academy’s Director, Director of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, and as a CAC Deputy Director, before her most recent promotion.

Policy

Xi’s third term will focus on using industrial policies and political tactics to advance technology innovation and address technological chokepoints, following a second term focused on establishing a cyber-governance regime centered around security, privacy, and competition. The high-level design of this regime is complete, but the implementation of various regulatory guidelines, plans, and standards, will continue to unfold at the working level into his third term and beyond. Digitization and the digital economy will also remain a key focus, especially in domains beyond e-commerce such as cloud computing, digital RMB, e-government, and rural digitization.

Xi’s authoritative report to the 20th Party Congress in October 2022 altered the highly formulaic structure of this authoritative policy document by adding a new section dedicated to science, education, and human capital—a strong signal of the increased political priority of these areas. He introduced “Western technology chokeholds” to the top strata of challenges facing the party; said that achieving a “visible improvement in science and technology self-reliance capabilities” was a top goal for 2027; and changed one of the party’s targets for “basically realizing socialist modernization” by 2035, first laid out in his report to the 19th Party Congress in October 2017, to “achieving high-level scientific and technological self-reliance.” Xi identified new growth drivers on which the government will focus its policy support: next-generation information technology, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, green industries, high-end equipment manufacturing, new energy, and new materials. This list of high-tech industries differs markedly from the consumer-oriented growth drivers identified in Xi’s 2017 report.

While Xi has focused on “innovation-driven development” since the start of his leadership and announced his ambition for China to become a “science and technology superpower” as early as 2016, technology did not become central to the country’s growth strategy until the publication of the 14th Five-Year Plan for Economic and Social Development (2021–2026) in March 2021. That Five-Year Plan declared that “self-reliance in science and technology” would become a “strategic pillar” of national development—stronger language than the “indigenous innovation” that China has sought to foster for many decades—with a focus on global scientific frontiers, economic battlegrounds with the West, domestic political priorities, and people’s livelihoods. It introduced a new “primary target” for the “digital economy” to contribute at least 10 percent of gross domestic product by 2026, up from 7.8 percent in 2021.

Such language reflected a judgment that China must adapt its development strategy to become more self-reliant in key technology inputs given its increasingly hostile international environment. In a March 2023 speech to the Jiangsu provincial delegation at the NPC, Xi said that “the key to whether or not we can comprehensively build ourselves into socialist modern power on schedule is self-reliance and self-improvement in science and technology” and that China must “put effort into creating industrial science and technology innovation centers with global influence.” Xi has overseen a shift in thinking about the purpose of innovation, from the economic framing of the Made in China 2025 strategy in 2015, which set targets for increasing China’s global market share in several high-tech industries, to the more security-focused resilience outlined in the Five-Year Plan, which aimed to address geopolitical weak spots by improving domestic production (and demand) for critical but import-dominated tech products. The innovation-driven development pushed by the Five-Year Plan also intertwined with Xi’s broader focus on prioritizing quality over quantity in economic growth.

Xi’s greater emphasis on science and technology complements an enhanced overall focus on achieving “high-quality development”—balancing growth with social and political aims—through a “dual circulation” strategy to build a stronger domestic market on which other countries are more dependent. Some sources of growth are now deemed more favorable than others, and this view is leading Xi to influence firms and investors more actively through industrial policy and political guidance. Xi wants to build a “modern industrial system” focused on advanced manufacturing, industrial innovation, and strategic technologies, while ensuring that this system promotes consumer rights, environmental protection, and social welfare. Technology should strengthen rather than replace the “real economy,” with the expansion of digital commerce and digital finance now decidedly secondary concerns. This context is essential to understand the “crackdown” or “rectification” against online platform firms that came to define technology policy during Xi’s second term and foreshadowed how it will evolve.

In October 2020, Jack Ma, the founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba and fintech unicorn Ant Group, gave a speech at the Bund Summit in Shanghai in which he lambasted China’s banking sector and financial authorities for not understanding technology and wanting to regulate fintech. A few days later, Beijing suspended Ant Group’s planned IPO, worth an estimated $37 billion, kicking off a two-year regulatory campaign against large consumer-facing technology firms. This campaign included major fines and punishments against most platform firms; new regulatory enforcement practices; and dozens of new guidelines and regulations aimed at anti-monopoly, fair competition, consumer protection, labor rights, personal data protection, data localization, financial security, online games, and online content. Especially significant were SAMR’s publication of the Anti-Monopoly Guidelines for the Platform Economy in February 2021 and amendments to the Anti-Monopoly Law in June 2022. Markets were shocked by what many saw as a political effort by Xi to crush the power of the private sector, which was implemented in a manner that was often haphazard, piecemeal, and unpredictable.

But much of the campaign can be explained by a decision to stop treating the consumer technology sector as a special new industry and instead to subject it to normal regulatory conditions (with notable exceptions, such as banning for-profit tutoring and enforcing “socialist values” in online content). The sector was rife with problematic practices such as over-leveraged expansion, excessive data collection, consumer price discrimination, restrictive merchant contracts, extreme interoperability limits, and bad labor conditions. Xi judged that the health of China’s economic and social development depended on preventing the “disorderly expansion of capital,” a phrase coined by the Politburo in December 2020 to describe the anti-competitive activities of big tech firms that operate in a regulatory vacuum. But authorities had been drawing up regulatory plans for the platform economy since early in Xi’s second term. Ma’s speech accelerated and toughened a normal regulatory agenda already in motion, which was narrowly focused on consumer technology and not primarily aimed at taking down tech titans.

Beijing ended the campaign against the platform economy in January 2023, when Guo Shuqing announced that it was “basically completed,” with “normalized regulation” to follow, enabling platform firms to help the government in “leading growth, creating jobs and competing globally,” a development foreshadowed at the Central Economic Work Conference in December 2022. However, as subsequent security-related regulations and investigations of prominent executives suggest, the end of this campaign does not represent a return to the past status quo. Rather, this is the beginning of a new regulatory normal. Despite reduced political uncertainty, firms are now clearly expected to prioritize party instructions and regulatory compliance, directing more of their capital to serve national strategic interests. At the Two Sessions in March 2023, Xi told a gathering of United Front business leaders that the party treats the private sector as “our people” but that “high-quality development brings higher demands for the private economy,” as they must “implement the new development concept” and “participate in the construction of major national projects and key industrial chain supply chain projects.” Xi is not anti-tech or anti-market or anti-business, he is pro-party: in his view, markets exist to support policies, not the other way round.

While Beijing is directing more resources to the high-tech sectors flagged in Xi’s Party Congress report, China’s growth rate is continuing to slow, and Xi is increasingly keen to avoid the wasteful investment that typically accompanies new central priorities, as waves of unqualified firms pour into the favored sector to cash in on government subsidies. Xi addressed this issue with emerging industries at the Two Sessions in March 2023, when he said, “What worries me is when there is a big clamor. First everyone rushes in headlong to get involved, but then everyone scatters in an uproar. To participate in international competition, we still need to do a good job of overall planning.” What is less clear is whether more top-level design can overcome problems created by government intervention in the first place.

Personnel appointments at the start of Xi’s third term show that his focus on scientific and technological expertise as a critical input for China to innovate itself out of the middle-income trap and out of Western chokeholds on core technologies. Xinhua reported that one of the criteria that central inspection teams used to assess candidates from government agencies for the new Central Committee was their ability to respond to US-led sanctions and promote innovation to overcome technology chokepoints. That helps explain why all seven of the provincial leaders promoted to the Politburo are technocrats—officials with an educational and professional background in STEM—which almost doubled the number of technocrats on the body (from five to eight). Aside from helping to formulate innovation policy, Xi may also view technocrats as more capable administrators and more politically dependable subordinates.

Beijing’s technology push has mixed consequences for foreign firms. Downsides include state subsidies, procurement bias, and regulatory preferences to promote domestic technology industries, but an upside is that helping Chinese firms move up the value chain requires stronger quality assurances, regulatory enforcement, and protections for intellectual property rights for all market participants. The government is also likely to offer additional incentives to attract foreign high-tech firms to establish production facilities and make other investments in China, especially those involved in advanced manufacturing.

Energy & Environment

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Xi Jinping has strengthened the focus of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on energy and environmental issues during his leadership, even making them a part of his personal ideological brand and the subject of deeper study by cadres across the country with the inauguration of “Xi Jinping Thought on Ecological Civilization.” Xi was concerned that rising levels of air, water, and soil pollution were causing mass public discontent, so he believed the central government had to toughen environmental targets and enhance environmental enforcement. Xi often invokes the mantra that “clear waters and green mountains are golden mountains and silver mountains,” especially on his frequent inspection trips to conservation projects across the country, to emphasize the ecological dimension of his mission to shift Beijing’s focus from the quantity to the quality of economic growth. Environmental protection and climate action are critical issues because improvements in energy efficiency can deliver stronger economic growth, renewables can strengthen China’s energy security and self-reliance, and improvements in environmental performance can preserve natural resources, enhance quality of life, and boost people’s support for the government. Xi has continued to achieve and raise binding targets for improving environmental metrics—such as air quality, water quality, forest coverage, carbon dioxide, and energy consumption per unit of gross domestic product—which have been included in China’s Five-Year Plans for economic and social development since 2006.

• Institutions
• People
• Policy

Institutions

The CCP Central Comprehensively Deepening Reforms Commission (CCDRC) is the most influential policy institution under the CCP Central Committee and its elite 24-member Politburo and top 7-member Politburo Standing Committee (PSC). The party announced the establishment of the Central Comprehensively Deepening Reforms Leading Small Group at the Third Plenum of the 18th Central Committee in November 2013, and Xi chaired its first meeting in January 2014. The party upgraded this group to a formal commission in the party-state institutional reforms of March 2018. The CCDRC is the primary institutional vehicle that Xi has used to implement “top-level design” and centralize policy decision-making across dozens of lower-level party agencies and state ministries. It exists to coordinate the formulation, implementation, and oversight of reforms in six policy areas: the economic system and ecological civilization, democracy and the legal system, the cultural system, the social system, the party-building system, and the discipline and inspection system. A “special group” within the CCDRC, led by a ministerial-level official, directs the commission’s detailed work in each area. The CCDRC’s work on the economic system and ecological civilization has been prominent in advancing Xi’s agenda to enhance environmental protection, with several convenings over the last decade focused on environmental governance, environmental inspections, environmental monitoring, environmental compensation, environmental accountability for leading cadres, green development, green finance, green technology, ecological pilot zones, natural resource management, forest conservation, and national parks. Xi is the CCDRC Director, and the Premier, Chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), and CCP Secretariat First Secretary have served as Deputy Directors. The CCDRC’s current membership is unclear, but it is thought to include around 20 deputy-national level leaders from the Politburo, State Council, and CPPCC.

The National Leading Group on Climate Change, Energy Conservation, and Emissions Reduction (NLGCC) is the main body under the State Council responsible for leading and coordinating the work of its constituent agencies on policies related to the subjects in its title. Its duties include formulating national climate change strategies and deliberating China’s positions on international climate change cooperation and negotiations. Founded in 2007, the Premier leads the NLGCC, and both the Executive Vice Premier (who is also a PSC member) and the Foreign Minister (who is also a State Councilor) serve as deputies. The typical inclusion of the Foreign Minister reflects the diplomatic importance of climate action, an area in which China hopes to be seen as a global leader and significant alignment but also potential leverage exists with the West. The group’s General Office was moved from the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) to the Ministry of Ecology and Environment’s Department of Climate Change in 2018. This move represented a bureaucratic boost for the latter ministry but, by removing the jurisdiction of the NDRC, arguably also represented a downgrading of the importance of decarbonization in China’s development planning. The NDRC’s Department of Resource Conservation and Environmental Protection still undertakes specific work related to energy conservation. Almost every State Council minister is a member of this leading small group, showing the importance of its work but also the coordination difficulties of getting it done.

The National Greening Commission (NGC) is a body under the State Council that is responsible for coordinating the promotion, organization, inspection, and commendation of the government’s long-running national volunteer tree-planting campaign and urban and rural reforestation nationwide. The Executive Vice Premier serves as the NGC Director, while several Deputy Director roles are shared by Deputy Ministers and same-level representatives from the Beijing municipal government and Central Military Commission. Its General Office is co-located with the National Forestry and Grasslands Administration’s Department of Environmental Protection and Restoration, which handles the NGC’s day-to-day work.

The National Energy Commission (NEC) is the top agency under the State Council responsible for energy policy. It was founded in 2010, two years after the National Energy Administration (NEA) (please see below), to elevate the political profile of energy strategy and energy security within the Chinese government. The NEC is responsible for formulating energy development strategies, considering major energy security issues, and coordinating both domestic energy development and international energy cooperation. The NEC is a relatively powerful State Council body, as the Premier serves as Chairman, the Executive Vice Premier serves as Vice Chairman, and roughly half of all State Council ministers are members. Its General Office sits in the powerful NDRC, with the NDRC Chairman serving as Director and the NEA Director serving as Deputy Director.

The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) is arguably the most powerful ministerial-level constituent department of the State Council and plays a pivotal role in coordinating governance matters on both energy and the environment. Formerly the State Planning Commission and the State Development Planning Commission, the NDRC oversees China’s economic development planning process, which at its highest level produces the national Five-Year Plan. The NDRC is the macro-level control department and has responsibility for formulating a broad range of economic and social policies, which often overlap with the mandates of other ministries and agencies. Most relevant to the environment is the NDRC’s Department of Resource Conservation and Environmental Protection, which oversees policies related to green development, sustainable development, ecological development, and energy conservation. The National Energy Administration gives the NDRC influence in energy policy.

The National Energy Administration (NEA) is a deputy ministerial-level bureau under the State Council that is administered by the NDRC. It reports to both the NDRC and the higher-ranking NEC and is responsible for formulating and implementing laws, regulation, industry plans, reform plans, industrial policies, and standards for the energy industry, plus developing new energy sources and promoting energy conservation. Specific responsibilities include regulating the electric power market and making industrial policy and related standards for coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear power, new energy, renewable energy, energy refining, coal-based fuels, and fuel ethanol. In 2018, the NEA lost the responsibility for everyday management of energy reserves to another NDRC-administered deputy ministerial-level State Council bureau, the newly created National Food and Strategic Reserves Administration.

The Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE) is a ministerial-level constituent department of the State Council and China’s main line agency focused on environmental protection, regulation, monitoring, and enforcement. Its responsibilities include pollution control, ecosystem conservation, environmental standards, environmental impact assessments, environmental inspections, international environmental cooperation, climate change, emissions reduction, and nuclear safety. Its remit includes air, atmosphere, water, sea, soil, noise, light, odor, chemicals, radiation, and solid waste. It has five regional centers in Chengdu, Guangzhou, Nanjing, Shenyang, and Xi’an that work on local environmental inspections and regulatory enforcement. The MEE was born in 2018 as a more powerful successor to the Ministry of Environmental Protection, which was elevated to a ministerial-level body in 2008 as the successor to the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA). The MEE acquired policy responsibilities and enforcement powers from several other ministries, including those related to climate change, emissions reduction, groundwater pollution, agricultural pollution, watershed environments, and marine environments. The MEE also provides the administrative home for China’s ministerial-level Special Envoy for Climate Change Affairs (SECCA), who represents China in international climate change negotiations. The SECCA’S work is supported by an MEE Office of Climate Change Affairs that is led by an MEE deputy minister.

The Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) is a ministerial-level constituent department of the State Council formed in March 2018 to succeed the Ministry of Land and Resources, State Oceanic Administration, and State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping. It is responsible for regulating, managing, surveying, registering, and exploiting China’s land, minerals, forests, grasslands, wetlands, water, and oceans. Its duties also include ecological restoration, arable land protection, geological exploration, permits for undersea cables and pipelines, upholding national maritime rights and interests, urban and rural planning management, and the surveying and registration of water resources. The MNR administers the National Forestry and Grasslands Administration (NFGA), which also operates as the National Park Management Bureau, a deputy ministerial-level State Council body that is responsible for managing the country’s forests, grasslands, wetlands, deserts, wildlife, ecological restoration, reforestation, and national parks.

The Ministry of Water Resources (MWR) is a ministerial-level constituent department of the State Council that is responsible for managing and regulating China’s water. Its duties include water permits and fees, irrigation and drainage, water and soil conservation, water technology, hydrology, international water issues, flood control, and drought relief. In the 2018 party-state institutional reforms, the MWR transferred responsibility for water function zoning and watershed protection to the MEE but absorbed the ministerial-level offices of the Three Gorges Project Construction Committee and the State Council South-North Water Diversion Project Construction Committee. The MWR also directs river basin authorities for six major river systems, with the Yangtze River Water Resources Commission and the Yellow River Water Resources Commission both enjoying deputy ministerial-level rank.

Legislative work related to energy and the environment is supervised and evaluated in the National People’s Congress (NPC) by the ministerial-level NPC Environmental Protection and Resources Conservation Committee (EPRCC), which has existed since 1993. United Front work related to energy and environmental issues in the CPPCC is overseen by the ministerial-level CPPCC Population, Resources and Environment Committee (PREC), which conducts studies and consultations across Chinese society related to policy proposals in these areas. In January 2023, the CPPCC announced the addition of an Environment and Resources Group, which will guide the selection and policy work of CPPCC members on energy and environmental issues, the first new group since 1993.

The State Council’s State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) oversees dozens of state-owned enterprises that are key players in the Chinese energy industry, including the State Power Investment Corporation, China National Petroleum Corporation, China Petrochemical Corporation (Sinopec), China National Offshore Oil Corporation, State Grid Corporation of China (State Grid), China Southern Power Grid, China Huaneng Group, China Datang Group, China Huadian Corporation, China Three Gorges Corporation, China Energy Investment Corporation (China Energy), Harbin Electric Corporation, Dongfang Electric Corporation, China Resources, China Energy Conservation and Environmental Protection Group, China National Coal Group, China Coal Technology and Engineering Group, China Forestry Group, China National Administration of Coal Geology, China Energy Engineering Corporation, China General Nuclear Power Group, and China XD Group.

The environment is a policy area that is more open than most others to the participation and influence of nongovernmental organizations and public opinion. The government is also relatively open regarding information disclosure and public participation in environmental policies, such as for environmental quality, emissions data, and environmental impact assessments. Problems such as air pollution, soil pollution, and water pollution have an unusually visible and inescapable impact on the everyday quality of life enjoyed by Chinese citizens of all backgrounds. This eventually made it possible, following several major environmental disasters and protests from the 1990s to the 2010s, to unite broad social coalitions behind environmental action movements and generally rendered policy improvements a more appealing and less costly option for the government than repression. Still, the momentum of such movements has ebbed amid the more repressive political environment of the Xi era, and central policymakers have always called the shots about the pace and direction of China’s energy transition.

People

Xi Jinping (born June 1953) is the single most influential person in energy and environment policy by dint of his position as General Secretary of the Politburo and the PSC. Li Qiang, Wang Huning, and Cai Qi are also relatively influential PSC members in policymaking in these areas because of their deputy leadership positions on Xi’s CCDRC. Li will lead the government’s work to implement CCP directions on these policy areas as Director of the NEC and the SLSGACCECER. Li was a relatively pro-growth local leader, so he may be unlikely to prioritize environmental issues, especially while China’s economy remains weak.

Ding Xuexiang (September 1962) is a PSC member who serves as Executive Vice Premier and has responsibility for the environment portfolio within the State Council. However, unlike his predecessor, Han Zheng, Ding Xuexiang does not appear to be on the CCDRC, limiting his influence on structural reforms designed to balance economic development with environmental protection. However, early signals indicate that he may play a more prominent role in climate diplomacy. His main avenue of influence on environmental policy will likely be as NGC Director, NEC Deputy Director, and SLSGACCECER Deputy Director. Ding is one of Xi’s most trusted aides and a newcomer to the State Council and the more public political profile that its work entails, so he can be expected to hew closely to Xi’s thinking (see “Top Leadership”). But his background as a technocrat, and his penchant for supporting other technocrats, may lead him to advocate for stronger environmental policies.

Zheng Shanjie (November 1961) is the Chairman of the NDRC. Hailing from Fujian Province, he studied chemical equipment corrosion at Nanjing Tech University. Zheng spent the first 15 years of his career at the Xiamen Cod Liver Oil Factory, where between 1982 and 1997 he rose from working in equipment maintenance to become a successful factory manager. He won promotion to district leadership roles in the city of Xiamen before serving as a top political secretary to the city leadership and as Director of the Xiamen municipal and then the Fujian provincial development and reform commission (DRC). Zheng was a factory employee in Xiamen while Xi was Deputy Mayor from 1985 to 1988 and a district-level official in Xiamen for most of Xi’s tenure as Deputy Party Secretary of Fujian from 1995 to 2002, but Zheng’s most important political connection is likely as a protégé of Xi confidant He Lifeng, who was his predecessor at the NDRC and is now a Vice Premier. Zheng’s achievements at the Xiamen Cod Liver Oil Factory in the mid-1990s caught the attention of local authorities, and He Lifeng was a city official there from 1984 to 1995 and Deputy Mayor from 1992 to 1995. He’s return to Xiamen as Party Secretary from 2005 to 2009 made him Zheng’s superior when the latter was Xiamen DRC Director. He may also have used his position on the provincial party standing committee to help Zheng win promotion to the provincial DRC in 2008. Zheng enjoyed a rapid series of promotions after Xi came to power, winning a relatively late promotion to the deputy ministerial level as a Deputy Governor of Fujian in 2015 before becoming NEA Director, Deputy Director of the State Council Taiwan Affairs Office, Governor of Zhejiang, and Party Secretary of Anhui. He did all this without a seat on the CCP Central Committee, which he finally won at the 20th Party Congress before becoming NDRC Director as one of the few new State Council ministers appointed at the Two Sessions in March 2023. Zheng holds significant bureaucratic influence in the transformation of the party’s direction on energy and the environment into specific policies, not just through his leadership of the NDRC but also through his role as Director of the NEC General Office. Moreover, while the CCDRC has not revealed its full membership for several years, Zheng or one of his deputies would be the likeliest candidates to lead its Special Group on the Economic System and Ecological Civilization.

Zhang Jianhua (September 1964) is Director of the NEA and a member of the CCP Leadership Group in the NDRC. He is a Shanghai native and a veteran of the state petrochemical industry, having worked his way up to Deputy Manager of the Shanghai Gaoqiao Petrochemical Company, Senior Vice President of Sinopec, and General Manager of the China National Petroleum Corporation. He left the last of those jobs to take on his current roles in November 2018. Zhang, along with Lu Xinshe and Che Jun, are the only officials on this list who are not members of the CCP Central Committee, indicating their relative distance from central decision-making power. Zhang’s most influential role is as Deputy Director of the NEC General Office.

Huang Runqiu (August 1963) is the Minister of Ecology and Environment. He has the unusual distinction of not serving as Party Secretary of his ministry, because he is the only State Council minister who is not a member of the CCP (and only the third ever in the post-Mao era). Huang is a Vice Chairman of the Jiusan Society, one of eight satellite parties in the CCP’s United Front architecture. He earned a doctorate in engineering geology at what is now Chengdu University of Technology, where he rose through the academic ranks, serving as Deputy President from 2001 to 2016 and leading the State Key Laboratory of Geohazard Prevention and Geo-environment Protection. He became a Deputy Minister in 2016 and was promoted to MEE Minister in 2021. Huang has been involved in Xi’s push to make China a leader in biodiversity diplomacy, for example, by presiding over the 15th United Nations Biodiversity Conference in 2022, but his non-CCP status makes him a slightly less influential leader than he would be otherwise.

Sun Jinlong (January 1962) is the MEE Party Secretary and serves as an MEE Deputy Minister. He studied tunnel engineering in his native Hubei Province and then worked as a pit mining engineer for the mining bureau of the Liaoning provincial government, a role that won him recognition as a “national model worker” in September 1990. He then became an executive at the China Geo-Engineering Corporation before being catapulted into the senior leadership of the Communist Youth League (CYL), the factional base of Xi’s predecessor Hu Jintao and First Premier Li Keqiang, where he worked closely with sidelined ex-Politburo member Hu Chunhua. He was promoted onto the Anhui party standing committee in 2003, but his career then stalled for several years. He eventually served as Deputy Party Secretary of Anhui, Deputy Party Secretary of Hunan, and finally as the ministerial-level Party Secretary of the of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps from 2016 to 2020, when he won his current role. His party role technically makes him the most senior decision maker in the MEE bureaucracy, but his power is diluted by not also being minister, which is likely attributable to his association with the CYL.

Liu Zhenmin (August 1955) is China’s Special Envoy for Climate Change Affairs. Liu is a career diplomat with a postgraduate law degree who rose through the ranks of the MOFA Department of Treaties and Laws, in between postings to the United Nations in New York (1984-1988 and 2006-2009) and in Geneva (1992-1995 and 2011-2014 as ambassador), before serving as a Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2013-2017. Prior to becoming China's climate change envoy in January 2024, Liu served as the Under-Secretary-General for the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs in New York from 2017-2022. He replaced the retiring Xie Zhenhua (November 1949), who was the first Chinese Representative for Climate Change Negotiations from 2015-2019 and then the first Special Envoy for Climate Change Affairs from 2021-2024. Xie built a formidable network of bureaucratic allies at home and international interlocutors overseas (most notably John Kerry in the United States), and likely remains influential with the top leadership behind the scenes. Liu may struggle to exert as much influence as his predecessor on Chinese policymaking and international negotiations. Su Wei (December 1962) currently sits below Liu as the Chinese Representative for Climate Change Negotiations.

Wang Guanghua (January 1963) is the Minister of Natural Resources. A technocrat with a degree in economic geography from the prestigious Peking University, he has worked for virtually his entire career in the Ministry of Natural Resources and its predecessors, the State Land Administration and the Ministry of Land and Resources, with a focus on land management and property registration. That included a five-year stint leading the ministry’s Land Inspection Bureau in Wuhan, where he overlapped with the tenure of Xi loyalist Li Hongzhong as Party Secretary of Hubei, the province where Wuhan is the capital city. Wang became Minister in June 2022, a promotion that reflects the seriousness of Xi’s rising policy focus on conserving China’s natural resources as a matter of national security, especially on energy security and preserving agricultural land for food security.

Li Guoying (December 1963) is the Minister of Water Resources. He is a technocrat who trained as a hydroelectric engineer. Li worked in the Ministry of Water Resources for most of his career, except for two years heading the local water department in Heilongjiang in 1999–2001, when current Vice Premier Liu Guozhong was a senior cadre in the provincial party bureaucracy, and a few years as a Deputy Party Secretary and Governor of Anhui Province before his appointment as Minister in February 2021. Li’s appointment resonates with Xi’s determination to conserve China’s rivers, especially the great Yellow River, which was a frequent focus of Li’s during his career with the ministry.

Lu Xinshe (November 1956) is the Director of the NPC Environmental Protection and Resources Conservation Committee. Lu is a hydraulic engineer who worked in the land management bureaucracy for two decades before spending another decade as a Deputy Minister for Land Resources throughout the 2000s. He was then promoted to the provincial leadership ranks, serving as Deputy Party Secretary of Gansu, Governor and then Party Secretary of Jiangxi, and Party Secretary of Guangxi, before retiring from frontline leadership when he reached the ministerial-level retirement age of 65 in 2021. He served on the NPC Agriculture and Rural Affairs Committee before taking his current post after the Two Sessions in March 2023.

Che Jun (July 1955) is the Director of the CPPCC Population, Resources and Environment Committee. He does not bring any specific environmental policy experience to the role, having originally studied law and worked in local courts in his native Anhui before going into local government leadership in the province. He then served as Deputy Party Secretary of Hebei, where he took over the leadership of the provincial capital Shijiazhuang after the Sanlu Group, which was headquartered in the city, became embroiled in a fatal tainted milk scandal that received enormous domestic and international attention. Che was later promoted to Party Secretary of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, and afterwards to Governor and then Party Secretary of Zhejiang, one of Xi’s provincial power bases. He left the frontline leadership when he turned 65 in 2020 and spent three years with the NPC Supervisory and Judicial Affairs Committee before moving to his current role in March 2023.

Policy

China has become an increasingly critical player in international efforts to combat climate change. Since 2006, China has been the world’s single largest annual emitter of greenhouse gases, accounting for over a quarter of annual global emissions, although it is only slightly above the world average in per capita emissions. The country historically resisted global climate action, viewing climate change as an issue for rich countries that should not stymie the growth of poorer countries. China has long been a powerful advocate for the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” (CBDR) for developed and developing countries, and for developed countries to provide financial aid for the climate mitigation programs of developing countries. The shift by developed countries to a deal structure that effectively accommodated CBDR (without being as rigid at the old Kyoto Protocol) was an important factor in negotiating the 2015 United Nations Paris Agreement to limit global warming to well below two degrees Celsius and pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Climate action is one of few remaining areas of constructive dialogue between the China and the United States in the new era of strategic competition. The two nations’ cooperation is evidenced by the US-China Joint Glasgow Declaration on Enhancing Climate Action, which was signed at COP26 in November 2021. However, this cooperation it is still impacted by geopolitical tensions, as shown by Beijing’s suspension of high-level climate talks after former US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in August 2022, before their reinstatement after a Biden-Xi meeting that November. China has also increasingly incorporated climate diplomacy into its relations with countries in the developing world.

Xi’s second term brought several significant announcements about China’s clean energy future. In September 2020, Xi announced new overarching climate goals for China to achieve peak carbon emissions before 2030 and to achieve carbon neutrality before 2060—relatively ambitious goals for a developing country that, if achieved, could lower the global temperature rise by 0.2 to 0.3 degrees Celsius. An implementation plan for these two carbon goals, released the following year (the core document of the so-called “1+N” system), elaborated that Beijing aimed to start reducing carbon dioxide emissions between 2025 and 2030 and to begin cutting aggregate energy consumption before 2035. In April 2021, Xi said that coal consumption in China would peak by 2025 and then begin falling in 2026, and he promised in September of that year that China would not build coal-fired power projects overseas.

China is the world’s largest producer, consumer, and importer of coal, the burning of which to create electricity is a major source of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming. China still relies on coal for about 55 percent of its total energy consumption, although this figure is down from 70 percent in 2001. Xi has made some efforts to slow the pace of new coal power construction and champion the use of “clean coal,” but local governments especially continue to view coal power as essential, and production continues to reach new heights. Xi has also strengthened China’s push to become a leader in renewable energy. Massive government investments in renewables led to innovation and economies of scale that have pushed down the price of renewable energy around the world. The country is now the world’s leading investor and leading producer of renewable energy by some margin, with the largest output of wind, solar, and hydro power.

Where once local officials were primarily incentivized to deliver economic growth, Xi has strengthened a push begun by his predecessor Hu Jintao to use environmental key performance indicators in cadre evaluations and has created a new system of central environmental inspections and punishments to add teeth to compliance efforts. He has also overseen the passage of several new laws to improve environmental protection, including landmark amendments to China’s core Environmental Protection Law in 2014, which strengthened the enforcement powers of environmental regulators, introduced new incentives for local governments to balance economic development with environmental protection, improved environmental information disclosure, and gave certain NGOs standing to file environmental public interest lawsuits. Other significant legislation includes amendments to the Water Pollution and Prevention Act in 2017, to toughen punishments and boost local government accountability; two sets of amendments to the Air Pollution Prevention and Control Law in 2015 and 2018, which mandated cleaner production processes for heavy-polluting industries; a new Soil Pollution Prevention and Control Law in 2018, which established liability policies for soil pollution; a wide-ranging Yangtze River Protection Law in 2020; and an analogous Yellow River Protection Law in 2022. China also launched a national intensity-based carbon trading scheme in 2021.

However, in recent years, rising economic and geopolitical concerns about energy supply have threatened to slow China’s progress on climate action and environmental protection. Xi's nationalist politics, coupled with intensifying US-China competition, have led to the elevation of self-reliance in Chinese development planning. The 14th Five-Year Plan, published in March 2021, added a new category of key targets focused on “security guarantees,” including a binding target to maintain domestic energy production capacity of at least 4.6 billion tons of standard coal equivalent (from any source). Then, during the second half of 2021, China experienced a series of major power cuts that disrupted industrial production because of a combination of coal shortages (due largely to poor forecasting and stockpiling by end users), higher than expected manufacturing demand, rigid pricing mechanisms, and (to a lesser extent) the government’s emissions reduction mandates. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was also a major shock to global energy markets, and the West’s response with severe sanctions was surprising to the Chinese leadership. These developments fed into a noticeable cooldown in Xi’s willingness to prioritize environmental progress over energy security.

Xi’s recent authoritative statements have sent mixed messages about the relative importance of climate action and environmental protection compared with other policy priorities. On the one hand, a key characteristic of Xi’s push for “Chinese-style modernization,” an underlying theme of his report to the 20th Party Congress, is “modernization where people and nature live in harmony.” The report also enshrined China’s dual carbon goals and the accelerated construction of new energy systems. On the other hand, Xi’s report introduced “energy security,” a concept that prioritizes regular energy supplies over clean energy supplies, as one of top “major difficulties and challenges that the CCP must address,” where it had been absent from the same section of the 19th Party Congress report. Meanwhile, he downgraded “environmental protection” from near the top of this list in 2017 to near the bottom in 2022. He also slightly demoted the priority of “enhancing green production and lifestyles” in China’s overall development goals for 2035 in his 20th Party Congress report compared with the 14th Five-Year Plan that was released 18 months earlier.

Xi’s report suggests the overall balance of priorities between environmental protection and energy security has shifted toward the latter. Xi said that China would pursue an “incremental and orderly” path toward a low-carbon future, but he emphasized that the country must guarantee its energy security before replacing fossil fuels with clean energy. This more cautious approach could mean slower progress toward Xi’s ambitious goals to reduce carbon emissions and phase out coal power, which would also bring more negative consequences for China’s environmental and social stability. Xi pledged to maintain China’s “active participation in global climate change governance,” but his energy security policies could slow international climate negotiations and exacerbate US-China tensions. China will also look to pursue long-term ownership or supply contracts for foreign energy supplies more aggressively, Especially as it looks to make up for lack of domestic oil and gas reserves.

Foreign Affairs

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Xi’s political vision, China’s growing national capabilities, and Beijing’s expanding international interests have contributed to the more ambitious foreign policy agenda and greater focus on foreign affairs of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under the leadership of Xi Jinping. The dramatic shift in US policy toward China from diplomatic engagement to strategic competition during the 2010s created significant challenges for Beijing’s economic growth and diplomatic power. In response, Xi has enhanced the institutional power of China’s foreign affairs system over the last decade, reflecting the growing importance of great-power competition, the international political economy, and global governance institutions to China’s ongoing pursuit of wealth and power. Most notably, in March 2018, Xi upgraded a Central Foreign Affairs Leading Group that had operated since 1981 to a formal commission under the CCP Central Committee, enhancing the bureaucratic weight and political influence of foreign policy in the party-state system.

• Institutions
• People
• Policy

Institutions

The CCP Central Foreign Affairs Commission (CFAC) is the top party institution dedicated to foreign affairs in the Chinese party-state. The party leadership uses the CFAC to make decisions, assign responsibilities, and oversee implementation of a wide variety of foreign-related policies that include traditional diplomacy but also touch on party-to-party diplomacy, external propaganda, foreign trade, overseas intelligence, domestic counterespionage, and the international dimensions of Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan affairs. CFAC meetings are rarely publicized, but the few official readouts that exist show that its membership usually consists of national leaders, including the CCP General Secretary, the Premier, and the Vice President; the Directors of the party’s International Liaison Department and Propaganda Department; the Propaganda Department Deputy who serves as Director of the State Council Information Office; the Ministers of Foreign Affairs, National Defense, Public Security, State Security, and Commerce; and the Heads of party and state agencies responsible for Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and overseas Chinese.

The administrative agency of the CFAC is the Central Foreign Affairs Office (CFAO), which is classified at the ministerial level but is more influential than its ministerial-level rank suggests because it is led by a deputy national-level leader with a Politburo seat. The CFAO is responsible for executing CFAC decisions; coordinating the implementation of CFAC directives; conducting research and making suggestions on international affairs and foreign policy management; drafting and overseeing foreign-related laws and regulations; handling foreign-related inquiries from party, state, and local authorities; and organizing central work on maritime rights and interests. Like the CFAC, the CFAO’s activities are mostly invisible to those outside the system. Since its founding in 2018, the CFAO has been led by a Politburo member who is the country’s top-ranked professional diplomat.

The CFAC’s main potential competitor for influence in central decision-making on foreign affairs is the CCP Central National Security Commission (CNSC) that Xi announced in November 2013. Previously, the Central Leading Group for Foreign Affairs functioned simultaneously as the Central Leading Group on National Security, which helps explain the somewhat overlapping responsibilities of the CNSC and the CFAC. For Beijing, national security is a concept that encompasses both international and domestic security, and the CNSC plays a role in shaping China’s foreign policy. There is limited information available about the operation of the CNSC, but it appears that the CNSC plays a leading role in responding to problems or crises that arise in China’s foreign affairs (especially those with a security dimension), while the CFAC focuses on the overall strategy of Chinese foreign policy.

The other major foreign affairs institution is the ministerial-level CCP International Liaison Department (ILD), which handles the party’s relationships with foreign political parties and other foreign political organizations. Originally, the ILD focused on the party’s relations with foreign communist parties. After the Cold War, however, the number of ruling communist parties dwindled to those in Cambodia, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam. Xi has boosted the ILD’s profile significantly since 2017 by launching a series of high-level summits between the CCP and hundreds of foreign political parties. He wants to forge a “new type of political party relationship” that would see more foreign politicians studying and learning from China’s governance and modernization. The ILD now claims to maintain relations with more than 600 political parties from over 160 countries.

The highest state institution focused on foreign policy is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA). MOFA handles traditional diplomacy and is often at the center of overseas discussions about China’s international relations, but it is not the most important institution in Chinese foreign policymaking. Like other State Council ministries under Xi’s leadership, MOFA is more of an implementer of policy than a designer of it, especially in an era when “Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy” is the official creed. MOFA has also come under pressure from an increasingly nationalistic Chinese public and polity to assert and defend China’s interests abroad more forcefully. In September 2019, following years of hostile US policy toward China, Xi urged China’s diplomats to show “fighting spirit” and “dare to struggle.” These instructions fed into what became known as “wolf warrior” diplomacy, an assertive and unapologetic approach to defending Beijing’s narratives and criticizing foreign opponents.

Since 2018, the Foreign Minister has also served as a State Councilor, an appointment that raises the position from full ministerial rank to deputy national rank, moving from the ranks of the top few hundred leaders to the top few dozen. State Councilors also attend the frequent gatherings of the State Council Executive Meeting, which are chaired by the Premier and include the Vice Premiers, providing the foreign affairs bureaucracy with a greater voice in government decision-making. This move shifted the Foreign Minister’s status closer to its higher standing in the 1990s, when Foreign Minister Qian Qichen served concurrently as a Vice Premier on the Politburo.

The State Council does not have its own coordination body dedicated to foreign affairs, but it does run the State Leading Group for Promoting the Belt and Road Initiative (LGPBRI), Xi’s signature policy to enhance China’s international influence through expanded infrastructure connectivity. The group is likely now led by Executive Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang, who is also a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, but the group’s status as embedded in the state—rather than the party—signals that the initiative is only one of many priorities in Xi’s foreign policy. The fact that many in the group are internally focused Politburo members shows that domestic interests (such as finding external markets to accommodate overcapacity in state-owned enterprises) are significant drivers of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

The broad composition of the CFAC reflects the many government organs whose work touches on foreign affairs. For example, the Ministry of National Defense handles military-to-military diplomacy; the Ministry of State Security handles foreign intelligence (see “Security”); the Ministry of Public Security handles counterespionage and cross-border law enforcement (see “Security”); and the Ministry of Commerce handles foreign trade, foreign investment, and import-export regulations (see “Economy and Trade”). Provincial governments also have foreign affairs offices and can attempt to influence central policy by lobbying Beijing, creating facts on the ground, and distorting or stalling central directives. This is especially so for border and coastal provinces.

The China International Development Cooperation Agency (CIDCA) is a deputy ministerial-level agency directly under the State Council that was founded in March 2018 to serve as the country’s dedicated foreign aid agency. CIDCA is responsible for foreign aid policy; foreign aid reform; and the planning, negotiation, monitoring, and evaluation of foreign aid projects. The implementation of foreign aid projects remains the responsibility of the various governments departments assigned to these tasks. Its operations are supervised by the Foreign Minister in their capacity as a State Councilor.

China’s on-the-ground foreign relations are also shaped by various quasi-governmental or nongovernmental actors, especially the state-owned enterprises and private firms that operate overseas infrastructure projects and produce goods and services that are sold to foreign consumers or into international supply chains. A small number of influential intellectuals in universities, official research institutes, or even independent think tanks also influence foreign policy through their public scholarship, reports written for the leadership, or even official briefings delivered to the Politburo.

The CCP United Front Work Department is a ministerial-level agency under the Central Committee that oversees the party’s relations with non-party groups. It manages administrative affairs and political work related to Chinese and Chinese-heritage people abroad following its absorption of the ministerial-level State Council Overseas Chinese Affairs Office in March 2018. Various party-state institutions operate United Front organizations designed to foster favorable views toward China among foreign elites, such as the Chinese People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs and the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries. The deputy ministerial-level International Cooperation Bureau of the CCP Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and National Supervisory Commission is responsible for pursuing, apprehending, and recovering assets from former officials abroad who are charged with corruption under programs such as Operation Fox Hunt and Operation Sky Net.

The top policy coordination body on cross-Strait relations is the CCP Central Taiwan Affairs Leading Group (CTALG), although Beijing does not consider this part of the foreign affairs system because it sees Taiwan as part of its sovereign territory. The General Secretary chairs the group, reflecting the high importance of Taiwan affairs, but it is notable that since its founding in 1979, the body has not been upgraded to a commission like the CFAC. Other members include the Chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) as Deputy Director; the CFAO Director as Secretary-General; a Vice Premier; a Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission; the Directors of the CCP General Office, Propaganda Department, and United Front Work Department; the Ministers of Foreign Affairs, Commerce, and State Security; and the Director of the CTALG’s administrative agency.

The State Council Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO), the external name of the CCP Central Taiwan Work Office, is a ministerial-level organ that functions as the administrative agency of the CTALG. It is somewhat more outward facing than most such agencies because it also handles mail, transport, and trade links with Taiwan; preparations for meetings with Taiwanese politicians and officials; Taiwan-related propaganda and political influence work; and a wide range of cultural, economic, and scholarly exchanges between the mainland and Taiwan.

People

Xi Jinping (born June 1953) is the key decision maker in Chinese foreign policy. He serves as CFAC director and CNSC chairman, and his top national-level rank endows these institutions with its authority in the Chinese system. The Premier, currently Li Qiang, serves as Deputy Director of the CFAC. Li Qiang, Zhao Leji, and Cai Qi serve as Xi’s deputies on the CNSC. (See “Top Leadership” for more details.)

Wang Yi (October 1953) is China’s top diplomat, serving as both Director of the Central Foreign Affairs Office and Minister of Foreign Affairs. Wang succeeded former CFAO Director Yang Jiechi on the party 24-person Politburo at the 20th Party Congress in October 2022. Xi exempted Wang, who turned 69 in 2022, from the norm that leaders aged 68 or older in the year of a Party Congress are ineligible for a Politburo seat, likely because of Xi’s trust in Wang’s loyalty to his assertive vision for Chinse diplomacy and to a lack of suitably senior potential replacements. Wang is a career diplomat and fluent Japanese speaker who worked as Chain’s Ambassador to Japan and TAO Director before serving as Foreign Minister from 2013 to 2022. Wang was reappointed as minister in July 2023 after his successor Qin Gang had disappeared from public view a month earlier, although this may be a temporary arrangement while the party decides on a more permanent successor to Qin. Wang’s great talent has been adapting his diplomatic style to suit the political climate of the times: he pursued a principled but conciliatory line with Japan during his ambassadorship but proved fully capable of aggressive rhetoric to match the mood of the wolf warriors. Wang’s deputy ministerial-level deputies in the CFAO are are Guo Yezhou (February 1966), a veteran of the CCP International Department and a German-speaking Europe specialist, and Deng Hongbo (July 1965), a career diplomat focused on US affairs who is a protégé of Yang Jiechi.

Qin Gang (March 1966) served as Minister of Foreign Affairs from December 2022 until July 2023 and as a State Councilor from March 2023 to October 2023. He was selected to the CCP Central Committee for the first time at the 20th Party Congress and then promoted from Chinese Ambassador to the United States to Foreign Minister at age 56, making him one of the youngest-ever officeholders, and giving him a state councilor role. This sequence of events saw Qin complete a dizzying ascent from the deputy ministerial to the deputy national level, moving from the top few thousand party officials to the top few dozen in just six months. Qin leapfrogged several veteran deputy ministerial-level diplomats to become minister. His rise was best explained by the relationship that he built with Xi when he worked closely with the paramount leader on foreign visits as MOFA’s protocol chief from 2014 to 2017, although he may have alienated other senior diplomats in the process. Qin was last seen in public on June 25, 2023. Beijing offered no information about his whereabouts, his physical condition, or his political standing, but he is reportedly under disciplinary investigation for conducting an extramarital affair and possibly fathering a child during his posting as U.S. ambassador in Washington D.C.

Although Qin has fallen from grace, he was part of a new crop of European experts in the top ranks of MOFA, having done three tours in the United Kingdom and two stints in the MOFA Western Europe Department. Other senior diplomats with significant European experience include Executive Deputy Minister Ma Zhaoxu, Deputy Ministers Deng Li and Hua Chunying, Spokesperson Lin Jian, ILD Director Liu Jianchao, and top CNSC bureaucrat Liu Haixing. This trend aligns with Beijing’s increasing fatalism about US-China relations and shift in strategy toward Europe as a key battleground for international diplomatic, economic, and technological competition.

Qi Yu (April 1961) is the Party Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Unlike in other ministries, it is common for the CCP to appoint someone apart from the minister to serve as party secretary, likely because the minister’s busy travel schedule would make it difficult to supervise party affairs at home. However, Qi’s appointment was unprecedented in that he is a veteran of the party’s Organization Department who had no foreign policy experience, a clear sign that Xi wanted to exercise closer central control over diplomatic personnel and tie promotions to advancing his own vision.

Liu Jianchao (February 1964) is the Director of the CCP International Liaison Department. Liu is a professional diplomat whose career at MOFA overlapped considerably with that of Qin Gang—they worked together both as MOFA spokespersons in the 2000s and in the Chinese mission to the United Kingdom in the 1990s. This shared background could help foster closer integration of the ILD’s party-to-party diplomacy with MOFA’s state-to-state diplomacy. Liu, who studied international relations at Oxford University, previously served as China’s Ambassador to the Philippines and then to Indonesia, and most recently as a full-time Deputy Director under Yang Jiechi in the CFAO. He is considered the frontrunner to become China’s next foreign minister.

Song Tao (April 1955) is the Director of the Taiwan Affairs Office. Song served as ILD Director from 2015 to 2022 before he was reassigned to a CPPCC committee, a move that usually indicates imminent retirement (Song was past the retirement age of 65 for ministerial-level officials), but he was unexpectedly reassigned to lead the TAO after the 20th Party Congress (despite not being on the new Central Committee). Song worked in Fujian during the 1980s and 1990s (while Xi was rising through the ranks there) before moving into the foreign affairs system and rising to become Ambassador to Guyana, Ambassador to the Philippines, MOFA Deputy Minister, and then CFAO Deputy Director. His relative inexperience in Taiwan affairs suggests that Xi and higher-level leaders will continue to dominate policymaking.

Ding Xuexiang (September 1962) is the Executive Vice Premier and sixth-ranked member of the Politburo Standing Committee. He is likely to have taken over from his predecessor Han Zheng, who became Vice President in March 2023, as Director of the State Leading Group for Promoting the Belt and Road Initiative and oversees the climate diplomacy portfolio on the State Council (see “Energy and Environment”). Therefore, he plays a prominent role in two prominent aspects of China’s external affairs, although his likely personal impact on the roles remains something of an unknown quantity. Ding is a top Xi ally who was a senior aide for most of Xi’s leadership, but he lacks significant experience in national or even provincial leadership roles.

Liu Haixing (April 1963) is the ministerial-level Executive Deputy Director of the CNSC General Office. He is a key bureaucratic powerbroker in national security policymaking at home and abroad. Previously, he was a career diplomat in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) from 1985 until 2017, where he specialized in French and European affairs, including a stint as a Minister in the Chinese Embassy in France from 2009 to 2012. He left MOFA as an Assistant Foreign Minister, becoming a Deputy Director of the CNSC General Office in March 2017 before winning promotion to ministerial rank in July 2022. Liu, like Xi, is the “princeling” son of a senior official, which may explain how he came to win Xi’s trust to hold this especially sensitive position. His father, Liu Shuqing, was a senior diplomat who served as a Deputy Foreign Minister from 1984 to 1989 and then as Secretary-General of the CCP Central Foreign Affairs Leading Group and Director of the State Council Foreign Affairs Office from 1989 to 1991.

Lü Luhua (1970) is a career diplomat who has served as Xi's top personal political secretary focused on handling his day-to-day work related to foreign affairs since at least 2014. His administrative home is the deputy ministerial-level Office of the President of the People's Republic of China, which is thought to overlap with the Office of the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, under the CCP General Office. Information on his exact responsibilities and career history is scarce but he is thought to enjoy deputy ministerial-level rank, although he could be only a departmental-level leader. He joined MOFA in 1996 and worked mostly in the Policy Research Department and the Policy Planning Department, with overseas postings to Kenya and to the European Union in the years before Xi took office in 2012.

Policy

Xi has changed the basic orientation of Chinese foreign policy from the reticent “hide and bide” approach introduced by Deng Xiaoping after the international Tiananmen backlash to a new paradigm of “striving for achievement” through “great-power diplomacy” and a “community of common destiny.” While Beijing began to pursue a more ambitious and assertive foreign policy under his predecessor, Hu Jintao, Xi’s personal leadership has accelerated and intensified these trends beyond what might have been expected amid the structural phenomenon of China’s rising power. Significant political milestones in Xi’s foreign policy include a first-ever Neighborhood Diplomacy Work Symposium in October 2013, which coincided with the launch of the BRI; a Central Foreign Affairs Work Conference in November 2014, which established national rejuvenation as the central theme of Chinese foreign policy; and another Central Foreign Affairs Work Conference in June 2018, which determined that China should actively participate in leading reform of the global governance system.

In his authoritative report to the 20th Party Congress in October 2022, Xi said that the party’s “central task” is to “build a socialist modern power” by the centenary of the People’s Republic of China in 2049 and to “use Chinese-style modernization to comprehensively advance the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” Linking “Chinese-style modernization,” a concept implying the applicability of aspects of China’s socio-economic model in other countries, to national rejuvenation is new and emphasizes Xi’s determination to steer China along a non-Western development course; it also offers an alternative development framework that prioritizes economic growth over democratic governance and individual rights. Xi’s report clarified that his vision for national rejuvenation means transforming China into a country that “leads the world in comprehensive national power and international influence.” This vision will likely intensify US-China strategic competition.

The report maintained Xi’s focus on a “new type of international relations” based on peaceful coexistence, non-interference, and economic globalization. It criticizes “protectionism,” “decoupling,” and “unilateral sanctions”—implicit yet clear criticism of US policy that Xi made explicit at the Two Sessions in March 2023 when he said, “Western countries, led by the United States, have implemented comprehensive containment, encirclement, and suppression against China, bringing unprecedentedly severe challenges for China's development.” Xi is trying to leverage the economic fallout of US-led sanctions and export controls to mobilize developing countries to pursue a more multipolar world that dilutes the influence of advanced industrial democracies. The report advocated China’s “correct” model of globalization, which focuses on prioritizing international trade, investment, and cooperation over concerns about domestic governance and individual rights.

Beijing will deepen its engagement in international affairs, wielding its growing influence both bilaterally and in international forums, where it will actively seek to “safeguard” the elements of the international order that it perceives China benefits from while trying to reshape global governance in a more China-friendly direction. This effort includes new and contentious efforts to “actively participate” in global human rights governance and setting global security rules. Xi is also rallying the developing world to support Chinese objectives through his advocacy of a Global Development Initiative, Global Security Initiative, and Global Civilization Initiative. However, Xi softened the CCP’s focus on the BRI from “pursuing the [BRI] as a priority” to “promoting the high-quality development of the [BRI]” in 2022, reflecting an evolution in the project’s development from an initial quantitative push to a qualitative refinement that addresses earlier problems and setbacks. This suggests that Beijing will remain cautious about expanded development diplomacy, which has proven costly and problematic, and focus more on building influence through norms-based initiatives and China’s own economic strength.

Xi’s report suggests that assertive diplomacy will persist, with its emphasis on “struggle” and defending China’s interests related to political control of sensitive areas like Hong Kong, Tibet, and Xinjiang and related to territorial disputes in places such as the South China Sea and the China-India border. Earlier, the party’s third “history resolution,” which Xi issued in November 2021, stated that China “must not be misguided or intimidated” by foreign opposition, as “constant concessions can only lead to bullying that wins an inch then wants a foot, and making compromises to achieve one’s aim can only lead to more humiliating circumstances.” China still sees value in maintaining good relations with the United States and Europe but does not want to do so at the expense of its autonomy, such as maintaining good relations with Russia. 

Beijing still sees the international balance of power as undergoing a “profound adjustment” in China’s favor, but it recognizes the increasing threat to China’s trajectory posed by domestic economic issues and US-led efforts to curtail its economic and technological rise. The party previously saw China in a “period of strategic opportunity” in which favorable domestic and international environments enabled the country to focus on pursuing economic development. But that period of strategic opportunity is now over. Xi’s report argued that China has entered a period in which “strategic opportunity co-exists with risks and challenges, and uncertain and unpredictable factors are increasing,” wherein “all sorts of ‘black swan’ and ‘gray rhino’ events could occur at any time.” Xi warned that the party must prepare for “high winds, heavy seas, and even terrifying storms” by strengthening party leadership, focusing on people-centered development, deepening structural reforms, and developing a spirit of struggle. This framing shows Xi’s determination to simultaneously resist Western pressure and leverage foreign threats to bolster his domestic agenda.

Foreign affairs are likely to become more important for China in the future as geopolitical competition with the United States and its allies continues to intensify. Moreover, now that Xi has virtually secured total power domestically, he is stepping out to become a global dealmaker, such as in the Iran-Saudi rapprochement and potentially in the Russia-Ukraine conflict resolution, enhancing China’s diplomatic power to accord with its status in international economic and strategic affairs more closely.

Regarding Taiwan, while Xi maintains the party’s long-standing commitment to prioritizing “peaceful unification,” he has ratcheted up assertiveness about its territorial claim to the territory, although he has not come close to invading or otherwise using force to achieve unification. While Hu Jintao told the 18th Party Congress in November 2012 that “achieving peaceful unification begins with ensuring the peaceful development of cross-Strait relations,” Xi used his report to the 19th Party Congress in October 2017 to declare that “complete unification of the motherland” is an “inevitable requirement” for achieving China’s national rejuvenation as a great power by 2049. He rattled cross-Strait tensions when he repeated this assertion in a tubthumping speech in January 2019 to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the “Letter to Taiwan Compatriots” that kickstarted Beijing’s post-Mao unification efforts. Xi also reaffirmed the Anti-Secession Law of 2005 by saying that “we do not promise to renounce the use of force” against so-called “Taiwan independence activists” and “interference by foreign forces.”

During Xi’s second term, Beijing also began to send People’s Liberation Army airplanes, drones, and warships on regular exercises in Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone and Exclusive Economic Zone. This included major exercises involving missile tests and exclusion zones on all sides of Taiwan following US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit in August 2022, after which Beijing began to routinely cross the Taiwan Strait median line, which previously had been treated as a strategic buffer. China’s Ministry of Defense has framed these exercises as efforts to deter the United States and its allies from upgrading their economic, military, and political ties with Taiwan, although they certainly also help improve China’s military readiness. At the 20th Party Congress, Xi said for the first time that “resolving the Taiwan issue is a matter for the Chinese themselves to decide,” highlighting his concern that outsiders are shifting the cross-Strait status quo farther away from what Beijing wants.

Military

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The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has a long political tradition in the development and maintenance of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule. At watershed moments — such as the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976 and the crushing of the 1989 Tiananmen protests — the PLA has played a decisive role as a party army that functions as the ultimate guarantor of CCP rule. When Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, he sensed that the CCP was facing another moment of crisis, but this time the PLA was part of the problem rather than the solution. Xi has since executed a radical reform of the political culture, organizational structure, and force posture of the PLA. In so doing, he has emerged as the most powerful civilian leader of the Chinese military since Deng Xiaoping, a bulwark of his rulership of an authoritarian state. These reforms have also helped Xi improve the PLA’s capabilities—especially in the air, sea, missile, and information domains—and coincided with stronger shows of military force in areas such as Taiwan, the South China Sea, and the China-India border, raising regional and global concerns about Xi’s military intentions.

• Institutions
• People
• Policy

Institutions

The Central Military Commission (CMC) is China’s top national-level defense leadership and military command center. It is responsible for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the People’s Armed Police (PAP), and the Militia of China. Technically, there are two CMCs: that of the CCP, which is selected by the party’s Central Committee at its First Plenum immediately following each Party Congress, and that of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which is selected by the National People’s Congress (NPC) at its first meeting in March following a Party Congress. However, the two CMCs are identical and exist in parallel simply so that the CMC can formally oversee defense matters in both the party and the state. The CMC is an extremely opaque institution, and its meetings are almost never publicized.

In 2017, Xi reduced the size of the CMC from 11 to seven members as part of his reforms aimed at centralizing power and streamlining decision-making in the military. The CCP General Secretary serves as the CMC Chairman, the top position in the military hierarchy—an essential source of power for the country’s paramount leader. Xi’s leadership of the CMC underscores a critical difference between the PLA and many Western militaries. While the US Army, for example, exists to serve the United States of America, the PLA exists not to serve the People’s Republic of China but the CCP. It is a party army, not a national army, and ultimate authority over military decisions rests with the CCP leadership.

The two CMC Vice Chairmen are PLA generals who serve as the only military representatives on the CCP’s elite 24-member Politburo. This arrangement has persisted since 1997, when Liu Huaqing ended his five-year term as the last PLA general to hold a seat on the top Politburo Standing Committee. The first-ranked Vice Chairman usually serves as Head of the CMC Leading Group for Inspection Work (CMCLGIW), which oversees political discipline inspections throughout the PLA. The top three CMC officials also lead the CMC Leading Group for National Defense and Military Reform (CLGMR), a policy coordination body that oversees ongoing military reforms. The CMC Chairman serves as Head of this group, the first-ranked Vice Chairman as Executive Deputy Head, and the second-ranked Vice Chairman as a Deputy Head, with other members of the CMC filling out the ranks.

The other CMC members are senior PLA generals who serve as Chief of Staff of the CMC Joint Staff Department (CMCJSD), Director of the CMC Political Work Department (CMCPWD), and Secretary of the CMC Commission for Discipline Inspection (CMCCDI). The inclusion of these roles on the CMC reflects Xi’s efforts to transform the PLA into a US-style “joint” force with integrated command of the different services, to ensure the military’s absolute loyalty to the CCP (and to Xi’s leadership), and to stamp out the rampant corruption that undermined China’s military readiness in the past.

Xi’s military reforms involved a significant reorganization of the CMC’s institutional structure below the seven-member top leadership, going from four general departments — General Staff, General Political, General Logistics, and General Armaments — to 15 smaller departments. The general departments had become bloated organs and hotbeds for corruption; the reforms were designed to create more focused and agile entities and to disperse bureaucratic power. The three new departments represented on the CMC—Joint Staff, Political Work, and Discipline Inspection—rank at the “theater level,” which is above seven “deputy theater-level” departments and five “army-level” departments. However, the CMC General Office (CMCGO), a deputy theater-level department that handles administrative operations and information flows, has emerged as an important center of Xi’s power in the CMC.

In 2016, Xi elevated and consolidated the existing joint command institutions to create a theater-level CMC Joint Command Center (CMCJCC), the highest combat command institution in the PLA. It is directly under the CMC and led by Xi as China’s inaugural Commander in Chief. Formally, however, under the PRC Constitution, it is Xi’s role as President that gives him the power to declare war.

The CMC oversees the PLA’s four service branches: the PLA Ground Force (PLAGF); the PLA Navy (PLAN); the PLA Air Force (PLAAF); and the PLA Rocket Force (PLARF), which controls China’s conventional and nuclear missiles; and the PLA Strategic Support Force (PLASSF), which handles operations in the space, cyber, electronic, political, and psychological domains. Xi’s 2015 reforms created the PLAGF as a separate service branch to reduce the influence of the land forces, which had traditionally dominated PLA decision-making, by putting them on the same administrative footing as the other branches. The same reforms created the PLARF out of the former Second Artillery Corps. The service branches enjoy the same theater-level rank as the top three CMC departments, but the reforms took them out of the operational chain of command and made them responsible mainly for planning, training, and equipping their respective forces. Each service branch has a split leadership structure comprising a commander, who oversees military operations, and a political commissar, who is a uniformed officer and party cadre in charge of political discipline and ideological instruction. These military commanders and political commissars usually hold a seat on the CCP Central Committee.

Xi’s 2015 reforms also led to the founding of a new service branch called the PLA Strategic Support Force (SSF), which oversaw the PLA’s operations in the space, cyber, electronic, information, and psychological domains, but this service branch was disbanded in April 2024. Specific responsibilities included hacking, influence operations, information security, intelligence gathering, manned spaceflight, network systems, and satellites. The SSF was replaced by three deputy theater-level forces that sit directly under the CMC: the PLA Information Support Force (PLAISF), the PLA Space Force (PLASF), and the PLA Cyberspace Force (PLACF). The likely motivation for this reorganization is to enhance the CMC’s control over these critical capabilities so that top leaders can exert more strategic influence over how they are allocated to and used by other parts of the military. The new forces are functional units intended to provide strategic capabilities to service branches and geographic commands. The PLASF and the PLACF were formed from deputy theater-level units in the SSF (the Space Systems Department and the Network Systems Department, respectively), but the PLAISF was formed from the SSF’s corps-level Information Communications Base. This bureaucratic upgrade suggests a rising focus in the PLA on information warfare and network capabilities.

Xi reorganized the PLA from seven military regions into five joint-operation theater commands, which report directly to the CMC and have a protocol order that corresponds to the political importance of their geographic missions: the Eastern Theater Command, headquartered in Nanjing and including the Taiwan Strait and East China Sea; the Southern Theater Command, headquartered in Guangzhou and including the South China Sea and Hong Kong; the Western Theater Command, headquartered in Chengdu and including Xinjiang, Tibet, and the China-India border; the Northern Theater Command, headquartered in Shenyang and including the borders with Russia and North Korea; and the Central Theater Command, headquartered in Beijing and focusing on capital defense and military reserve.

This shake-up was designed to transform the PLA from a “big army” military focused on ground force operations to a more “joint” military that de-prioritizes the army and integrates its capabilities with stronger naval, air, missile, and cyber forces. The CMC commands most military units of the service branches through theater commands; each command controls a deputy theater-level branch of the PLAGF, PLAN, and PLAAF (except for the Western and Central Theater Commands, which lack PLAN branches). These commands report to both their theater command and their service branch, but the theater commands lead on operational control. Theater commands are led by both a military commander and a political commissar, almost all of whom hold seats on the CCP Central Committee.

This dual command structure is replicated within theater commands in army-level provincial military districts, which serve as national defense mobilization units under the leadership of the deputy theater-level CMC Defense Mobilization Department (CMCDMD). Three politically sensitive provincial military districts are combat forces that administratively report directly to PLAGF headquarters (while still taking operational orders from their theater commands): the army-level PLA Beijing Garrison; the deputy theater-level PLA Tibet Military District; and the deputy theater-level PLA Xinjiang Military District, which includes the army-level PLA Southern Xinjiang Military District (SXMD) headquartered in Kashgar. The SXMD is also responsible for defending Ali Prefecture in Tibet, which abuts the Galwan Valley where Chinese and Indian forces fought a deadly melee in June 2020, and so SXMD commanders have been deeply involved with Sino-Indian de-escalation negotiations ever since.

The CMC has also been directly responsible for the People’s Armed Police since 2018, when a reorganization took authority away from provincial party secretaries and gave Xi direct control of all China’s armed forces. The PAP is a theater-level paramilitary force that operates nationwide, although its resources are concentrated in areas of greater social unrest in Western China. It is responsible for safeguarding internal security if civilian responses and resources prove inadequate, encompassing activities such as riot control, counterterrorism, hostage rescue, explosives removal, assisting law enforcement in especially dangerous activities, and providing security for major events, core infrastructure, and important facilities (including foreign embassies). During wartime, the CMC can mobilize the PAP, which has up to one million personnel, to support the PLA, which has about two million personnel. The China Coast Guard (CCG) — responsible for maritime security, territorial patrols, law enforcement, anti-smuggling efforts, search and rescue operation, and some gray-zone operations — operates as a service branch of the PAP.

Significant uncertainty surrounds the PLA's intelligence units, which have also been substantially restructured under Xi’s leadership since 2015. The principal military intelligence organization, formerly the Second Department of the old PLA General Staff Department, has become the Intelligence Bureau of the CMCJSD. The former signals intelligence (Third Department) and electronic warfare (Fourth Department) units, which were also under the General Staff Department, have meanwhile been reconstituted under the PLASSF as its Network Systems Department. The former General Political Department’s Liaison Department (GPDLD), responsible for outreach and intelligence-gathering among foreign and Taiwanese elites, has become the CMCPWD Liaison Bureau.

The CMC directly oversees three academic institutions. The deputy theater-level PLA Academy of Military Sciences (AMS) in Beijing is the country’s premier research institution focused on domestic and foreign military affairs. It publishes a quasi-authoritative guide to PLA doctrine known as the Science of Military Strategy, and its personnel play key roles in supplying information, drafting documents, and shaping messages for PLA leaders. The deputy theater-level PLA National Defense University (NDU) in Beijing is the premier military education and training institution in China and publishes its own version of the Science of Military Strategy. The army-level PLA National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in Changsha is a public research university that focuses on developing technology for military applications. The US government sanctioned the NUDT by putting it on the Entity List in 2015.

The top military-related state institution is the National Defense Mobilization Commission (NDMC), a policy coordination body between the State Council and the CMC that is responsible for planning, managing, and regulating the use of civilian resources for military operations. The Premier serves as Chairman and the Minister of National Defense and the State Council Secretary-General serve as Vice Chairmen. The NDMC General Office, however, is in the CMCDMD, showing that the bureaucratic muscle of the commission is firmly within the military rather than the government apparatus.

The NDMC, under the leadership of and in coordination with the CMC, oversees the Militia of China, which is a reserve force of approximately eight million troops for the PLA. The militia’s responsibilities include providing logistical support to the PLA in preparing for war, defending national borders, maintaining public order, and contributing to economic production. The Maritime Militia of China supports the operations of the PLAN and CCG, especially in gray-zone activities in the South China Sea.

The Ministry of National Defense (MND) is one of the 26 constituent department of the State Council. The MND’s main purpose is to conduct military-to-military diplomacy and hold press briefings; it has no operational authority and effectively serves as a foreign liaison body for the CMC. The Minister of National Defense is usually a PLA general who holds deputy national rank, a notch above most other ministers, through concurrent positions as a CMC member and a State Councilor, although the current minister does not hold these elevated positions.

The Ministry of Veterans Affairs (MVA) is the other constituent department of the State Council with direct relevance to China’s military. It is responsible for the management and provision of services to at least 57 million military veterans, as well as retired firefighters and search and rescue personnel. These duties include overseeing the ideological discipline of this politically sensitive group; highlighting the dedication and contributions of veterans to the CCP; managing the commemoration of official martyrs; assisting veterans with the transition to civilian life; aiding injured and disabled veterans; and administering benefits related to social welfare, medical treatment, employment training, and incentives for entrepreneurship. The MVA was created in 2018 through the amalgamation of functions previously performed by various CMC departments and other ministries. The Minister of Veterans Affairs holds standard ministerial rank.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) sponsors seven universities to foster science and technology partnerships with the PLA. These “Seven Sons of National Defense” are Beihang University and Beijing Institute of Technology in Beijing; Harbin Engineering University and Harbin Institute of Technology in Harbin; Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Nanjing University of Science and Technology in Nanjing; and Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi’an. For more details on military technology and civil-military fusion, please see the “Technology” section.

The State Council’s State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) oversees several enormous state-owned enterprises that form the backbone of China’s national defense industry, whose top leaders hold deputy minister-level rank in the party-state hierarchy. China North Industries Group Corporation (Norinco) is China’s largest manufacturer of weapons and military equipment, with a focus on tanks, armored vehicles, firearms, and ammunition. China South Industries Group Corporation (Sorinco) is a diversified military manufacturer of vehicles, firearms, and optical electronics, among other equipment. China Poly Group is a conglomerate that brokers the export and import of military equipment on behalf of Chinese defense companies and the PLA. Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) is an aerospace conglomerate that manufactures fighter jets, bombers, helicopters, drones, and other aircraft for the PLA. Aero Engine Corporation of China (AECC) is dedicated to aerospace engine technology, including that with military applications. China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) is the principal supplier of the Chinese space program and produces military-related technology such as spacecraft, satellites, launch rockets, and missile systems. China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC) is China’s largest manufacturer of missile systems and makes micro-satellites and solid-state launch vehicles. China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC) is China’s largest shipbuilder and builds PLA ships.

People

Xi Jinping (born June 1953) is CMC Chairman and Commander in Chief, as well as head of the CMC Leading Small Group for National Defense and Military Reform. He assumes overall responsibility for the CMC’s work, and his concurrent role as CCP General Secretary demonstrates the party’s absolute leadership over the PLA. Xi has established a firm grip on the seven-member CMC: four of the six other members have direct personal or professional connections with the paramount leader, and the two others appear to be loyal followers who have been rapidly promoted under Xi’s leadership. Three of these six PLA leaders are holdovers from the previous CMC, signaling continuity in Xi’s political dominance.

Zhang Youxia (July 1950) is the first-ranked CMC Vice Chairman and a Politburo member. Like Xi, Zhang is the “princeling” son of a revolutionary leader, and the two have family connections in Shaanxi Province and may have known each other growing up in elite Beijing circles during the 1960s. Zhang was a close ally of Xi on the previous Politburo, during which time he served as the second-ranked CMC Vice Chairman, following an army career that included stints as head of the CMC Equipment Development Department and the former PLA General Armaments Department. Xi chose to keep Zhang on the Politburo even though Zhang turned 72 before the 20th Party Congress in 2022—well past the retirement age norm of 68—likely reflecting the key role that Zhang has played in Xi’s sweeping post-2015 military reforms. Zhang is also a rare PLA leader with combat experience, having fought in the 1979–1991 China-Vietnam border wars, reflecting Xi’s emphasis on improving the PLA’s “ability to fight and win wars.”

He Weidong (May 1957) is the second-ranked CMC Vice Chairman and a Politburo member. Xi knows He from when the latter worked as a military leader in both Fujian and Zhejiang while Xi was a leader of those provinces from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s. Xi promoted He from outside the CCP Central Committee directly to the Politburo, a rare double-skip promotion that suggests both political closeness and policy importance. He is the first former Commander of the PLA Eastern Theater Command (or its predecessor, the Nanjing Military Region) to serve as a CMC Vice Chairman since the Mao era. This command includes responsibility for PLA operations in the Taiwan Strait, and He Weidong is thought to have planned China’s large-scale military exercises after US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in August 2022. He will bring expertise in Taiwan operations to CMC and Politburo meetings, though likely less to prepare for a near-term invasion than to build longer-term advantage through well-calibrated deterrence and gray-zone tactics. He is an army general and previously commanded the Western Theater Command Ground Force, the Shanghai Garrison, and the old Jiangsu Military District.

Li Shangfu (February 1958) was appointed the first-ranked ordinary CMC member and both a State Councilor and the Minister of National Defense following the 20th Party Congress. But he disappeared from public view in late August 2023, reportedly after being placed under investigation for corruption, was stripped of his government positions in October 2023 and lost his place on the CMC in early 2024 and was expelled from the CCP by the Politburo in June 2024. Li had no direct ties to Xi in his early career, but he was considered a member of Xi’s “Military-Industrial Gang” of rapidly elevated technocrats, having spent 10 years as a major general after 2006 before winning promotion to lieutenant general in 2016 and then general in 2019. He is an aerospace engineer who worked for more than 30 years as a rocket scientist at the PLA Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan Province, including about 10 years as its leader. Li then moved to Beijing, where he held senior roles in the PLA General Armaments Department before serving as both Director of the CMC Equipment Development Department and the China Manned Space Program from 2017 to 2022. Li was sanctioned by the U.S. in 2018 for his role in helping China buy fighter jets and missiles from Russia.

Dong Jun (1961) replaced Li Shangfu as Minister of National Defense in December 2023. Dong is the first ever PLA Navy officer to serve in the role, a sign of Beijing's rising focus on maritime power, and has led Chinese forces in hotspot areas such as the South China Sea and East China Sea. He also has experience in military diplomacy, having led joint naval exercises with Russia in 2016 and with Pakistan in 2020. He entered the PLA Dalian Naval Academy in 1978 and worked in the PLA Navy's Military Training Department, North Sea Fleet, and Unit 92269. Before his current role, he held leadership positions as Deputy Commander of the PLAN East Sea Fleet from 2013-2014, Deputy Chief of Staff of the PLA Navy from 2014-2017 (when CMC member Miao Hua served as the PLAN Political Commissar, Deputy Commander of the PLA Southern Theater Command from 2017-2021, Deputy Commander of the PLA Navy from 2021-2021, and Commander of the PLA Navy from 2021-2023. Dong remains lower-ranked than Li Shangfu was, however, as the Party has yet to appoint him to fill Li’s vacancy on the CMC, or to replace Li on the State Council as a State Councilor.

Liu Zhenli (August 1964) is now the first-ranked ordinary CMC member and the Chief of Staff of the CMC Joint Staff Department. Liu also lacks direct personal or professional ties to Xi, but, like Zhang Youxia, he is a combat veteran of the Sino-Vietnamese border conflict. Liu was most recently Commander of the PLA Ground Force, having previously served as Chief of Staff of the PLA Ground Force and of the People’s Armed Police after a long career climbing the army ranks. Liu plays a key role in joint operations, but his strong background in the ground forces suggests that other service branches such as the PLAN and PLAAF may struggle for influence in operational and administrative policymaking.

Miao Hua (November 1955) is the second-ranked ordinary CMC member and the Director of the CMC Political Work Department, retaining the same positions he held during the previous CMC from 2017 to 2022. Miao worked in proximity to Xi in Fujian for most of the 1980s and 1990s, and his continued leadership of political work in the armed forces will likely help Xi further consolidate his authority within the military. Miao wears the uniform of a PLAN admiral, having served as PLAN political commissar from 2014 to 2017; previously, he spent his entire career as a political commissar in the PLAGF.

Zhang Shengmin (February 1958) is the third-ranked ordinary CMC member and the Secretary of the CMC Commission for Discipline Inspection, as well as a Deputy Secretary of the CCP Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, retaining the same positions he held for the past five years. Zhang spent most of his career as a political commissar in what is now the PLARF, including for extended period in Xi’s ancestral province of Shaanxi. He was rapidly promoted after Xi became paramount leader, rising from lieutenant general to general is just over a year between the summer of 2016 and November 2017. His continued oversight of political discipline in the military seems designed to strengthen Xi’s claim to command the “absolute loyalty” of the PLA behind his political project to rule for life.

Zhong Shaojun (October 1968) is reportedly the Political Commissar of the PLA National Defense University (NDU) but served as the Director of the CMC General Office from 2017 to 2024 and as the Director of the CMC Chairman’s Office (CMCCO), which handles Xi’s day-to-day military business, from 2013 to 2024. In that period Zhong was Xi’s top military aide and he may still hold influence as an adviser and operator that exceeds his nominal rank. Zhong does not have a military background, but he has worked on Xi’s staff since the latter was Party Secretary of Zhejiang, following him first to Shanghai and then to Beijing, where he worked in the CCP General Office. In 2013, Zhong became a uniformed PLA officer in this role, gaining the rank of senior colonel in 2013, major general in 2016, and lieutenant general in 2019. Zhong is still relatively young and joined the CCP Central Committee for the first time at the 20th Party Congress. His reassignment to a less influential position at the NDU could show that he has lost Xi’s favor or it could represent a stepping stone on his way to rejoining the civilian leadership. Xi may move him out of the military system because he lacks the service experience to credibly serve as a top PLA leader, but he could prove a valuable political ally as a senior Party administrator or provincial leader.

Fang Yongxiang (August 1966) replaced Zhong Shaojun as Director of the CMC General Office in early 2024. His extensive ties to several political and military associates of Xi are likely what recommended him to the job of being Xi’s right-hand man in the military. He spent most of his career in the 31st Group Army, which is headquartered in his hometown of Xiamen in Fujian Province, where he rose through the political commissar ranks between 1989 and 2014. Xi was a provincial leader in Fujian during the 1990s and early 2000s and Fang was a top local military figure in Xiamen while close Xi ally He Lifeng served as the city’s Party Secretary from 2005 to 2009. Fang also worked under CMC members He Weidong and Miao Hua in the 31st Group Army. Fang later served as Director of the Political Department of the 1st Group Army in Huzhou City in Zhejiang Province (2014-2015), Deputy Director of the 2nd Department of the former PLA General Political Department (2015-2016), Deputy Director of the Political Work Department of the PLA Eastern Theater Command (2016-2017), Political Commissar of the 81st Group Army in Zhangjiakou in Hebei Province (2017-2018), concurrently as a Deputy Minister of Veterans Affairs and an Assistant Director of the CMC Political Work Department (2018-2022), and Deputy Political Commissar of the PLA Southern Theater Command (2022-2024).

Policy

While serving as a civilian CMC Vice Chairman from 2010 to 2012, Xi saw a PLA that exploited its monopolies on military expertise and processes to exert substantial autonomy and outsize policy influence. Illustrative examples include the PLA’s 2007 anti-satellite test and its 2011 test flight of a prototype J-20 stealth fighter during a visit by US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, when it seemed that Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, had little control. Even more worrying for Xi was the perception that the PLA leadership had become so corrupt that the military struggled to perform its most basic functions. Then CMC Vice Chairmen Guo Boxiong and Xu Caihou had sold so many official posts that they had effectively created a private army loyal to them within the PLA.

According to the “history resolution” that Xi passed at the Sixth Plenum of the 19th Central Committee in November 2021, “For a period, the party’s leadership over the military was obviously lacking. If this problem had not been completely solved, it would not only have diminished the military’s combat capacity, but also undermined the key political principle that the party commands the gun.” Guo and Xu also served as political instruments for former General Secretary Jiang Zemin to retain a strong hand in military affairs, limiting Hu’s ability to consolidate power and leaving Xi concerned that their remaining protégés in the high command might similarly handicap him.

Xi’s response to these looming challenges was swift. He pursued a political “shock and awe” campaign using the twin weapons of a disruptive reorganization of the PLA command structure and a withering anti-corruption purge of the PLA high command, which saw Guo and Xu arrested on charges of corruption and a massive 85 percent turnover in PLA personnel from the 18th to the 19th Central Committee selected in 2017. Xi’s predecessors had tried to initiate such reforms before, but they were thwarted by the political power of the PLA. In November 2013, the Third Plenum of the 18th Central Committee in November 2013 published a decision stating that the PLA would undergo a structural reorganization, the prelude to the sweeping changes that have since been achieved.

Xi then orchestrated an artful piece of political stagecraft in November 2014 by using the 85th anniversary of the 1929 Gutian Conference, which established the PLA’s subordination to the party, to convene a conference on the PLA as the party’s army. In his speech at the conference, Xi detailed Xu’s misdeeds, implying that most generals in attendance were at least indirectly complicit in his corruption and suggesting that he would establish a personal hold over the PLA akin to Mao’s. What followed was an unprecedented purge of corrupt generals, with a special focus on Jiang Zemin’s cronies.

Then, in 2015, Xi launched a reform program that brought perhaps the most significant shake-up of the PLA since the founding of the PRC. Shocked by the corruption and factionalism he had witnessed as a CMC Vice Chairman, Xi wanted to transform the PLA into a loyal, modern, and, ultimately, credible force that could protect the CCP regime, secure China’s borders, advance China’s position in territorial disputes, and project force regionally and, to some extent, globally. Well after the PLA formally recognized the importance of “joint operations” in 1993 and of “informatization” in 2004 — after witnessing US military might during the Gulf War and the Iraq War — it was still dominated by the ground forces and organized around a Soviet model focused on legacy missions, such as conducting land-based operations and fighting border wars.

Xi’s reforms had several dimensions. He reasserted CCP leadership by reemphasizing political work, installing his close ally Zhong Shaojun to supervise the CMC General Office, and creating a “CMC Chairman Responsibility System,” which emphasized the top civilian leader’s grip on the military, unlike the “CMC Vice Chairman Responsibility System” under Jiang and Hu, which gave de facto control to the top generals. He dismembered and downgraded the four powerful PLA General Departments and distributed their responsibilities among 15 new CMC departments, which were intentionally smaller and easier to manage, including supervisory departments focused on audit, discipline inspection, and political and legal affairs. This move reduced the potential for the emergence of powerful independent fiefdoms in the PLA that could constrain Xi’s military policy agenda, or even pose a direct threat to his power. To further reduce the possibility of cronyism, PLA personnel were rotated more regularly, and commanders and political commissars at senior levels were appointed to work with counterparts they did not know well. Xi consolidated his political victory by shrinking the CMC’s membership from 11 to 7 at the 19th Party Congress.

Xi significantly enhanced the PLA’s capacity for joint operations by transforming its seven military regions — which were ground force headquarters with no peacetime authority over navy, air force, or artillery units — into five theater commands with joint operational control of ground, navy, air, and conventional forces in their jurisdiction. Lower-level commands were streamlined from a four-tier structure to a three-tier army brigade battalion structure. He demoted the PLAGF by placing it on an equal footing with the other service branches, which were all removed from the operational chain of command. He increased personnel in the PLAN and PLAAF while reducing the PLA’s headcount by 300,000 personnel, mostly cut from the PLAGF and PLA support units. He established the PLASSF to provide intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities to operational commanders, as well as a Joint Logistics Support Force to service their logistical needs. And he boosted civil-military integration across the economy, but especially in science and technology.

The pace of political purges and structural overhauls of the military have slowed considerably with Xi’s triumphant execution of the 2015 reform agenda. Xi’s restructuring has created a more professionalized force that is focused on continuing a decades-long effort at military modernization, meaning that any internal disagreements in the PLA are likely to mirror the budgetary fights and interservice rivalries common in advanced foreign militaries. Xi’s greater emphasis on jointness and air-sea forces, while still a long-term project that is far from complete, already appears to be increasing the PLA’s abilities and confidence in conducting gray-zone operations in the Taiwan Strait and large-scale multi-force exercises around Taiwan, increasing the risk of a military accident or confrontation in the region.

Xi used his reports to the 19th and 20th Party Congresses to outline ambitious targets for the PLA’s modernization and the advancement of its operational capabilities. These political milestones specified that China should “accelerate the integrated development of mechanization, informatization, and intelligentization” by the PLA’s centenary in 2027, then “basically complete the modernization of national defense and the military” by 2035, and finally “fully transform the people’s armed forces into a world-class military” by 2049. These benchmarks do not represent an expedited timeline for a prospective invasion of Taiwan, but they do suggest that Xi is increasing his focus on military modernization, especially before the PLA centenary, which was a focus of the 20th Party Congress report.

Xi has not altered the most fundamental concepts of PLA doctrine, such as “active defense,” which holds that “we will not attack unless we are attacked, but we will surely counterattack if attacked.” In 2014, Xi oversaw an update to the PLA’s Military Strategic Guideline, a high-level document that provides a blueprint for the development and modernization of China’s military forces. That document is believed to have focused on winning “informationized local wars” through “integrated joint operations” in a “southeast and maritime” direction, with Taiwan and the United States seen as the primary opponents. None of these concepts was new to PLA doctrine, but the difference is that Xi has the political clout to force the PLA to undertake the reforms necessary to make real progress toward these objectives. Xi issued a Military Strategic Guideline for a New Era in 2019, which is thought to have simply updated the 2014 document to increase the focus on Xi’s political control of the military.

The military will remain a critical pillar of Xi’s power, and it will be important to monitor how his relationship with the PLA evolves. Xi’s position is stronger than ever but continuing to advance his reforms in an institution in which he is the only civilian will demand sustained political attention. Progress in the PLA’s joint capabilities is another crucial yardstick for evaluating Beijing’s confidence in intimidating Taiwan, advancing its claims in other territorial disputes, and contesting regional security leadership with the United States. While the PLA has become less corrupt and more capable under Xi, it still lacks joint structures below the theater command level, its leadership is still weighted toward ground forces, and its command capabilities remain wholly untested in actual combat scenarios.

Security

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Few things are more important for an authoritarian ruler like Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), than leadership over the domestic security apparatus. Known as “the knife” in Chinese political discourse, the institutions of law enforcement, intelligence work, and political discipline form one part of an unholy trinity of political control systems—together with “the gun” of the military and “the pen” of the propaganda outlets—that a CCP leader must dominate in order to call the shots in Beijing. Xi’s major push to “integrate development and security” in his second term both elevated the importance of national security relative to economic development in Chinese policymaking and supported his consolidation of personal authority over the internal security pillar of this trinity.

• Institutions
• People
• Policy

Institutions

The CCP Central National Security Commission (CNSC) is the top institution devoted to security policy below the overall leadership of the party’s elite 24-member Politburo and the 7-member Politburo Standing Committee (PSC). Xi established the CNSC in November 2013 to centralize and coordinate policy responses to domestic threats against the CCP regime and foreign threats against the Chinese nation. This move was a political effort by Xi to wrest control of the security apparatus from his rivals, a bureaucratic reform to reduce fragmentation and stove-piping between security agencies, and a governance push to improve the party’s resilience by embracing the extreme vigilance of “comprehensive national security.” Xi has served as CNSC Chairman since its first meeting in April 2014. The Premier of the State Council and the Chairman of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee (NPCSC), the two top-ranked PSC members after Xi, serve as CNSC Vice Chairmen, and the Director of the CCP General Office, currently also a PSC member, serves as Director of the CNSC Office. The CNSC is opaque even by Beijing’s standards, but its membership is thought to include around half of the Politburo and most of the Central Military Commission (CMC), making it one of the most powerful party commissions or leading groups. Local-level NSCs also exist in provinces, cities, and counties.

The CCP Central Comprehensive Law-Based Governance Commission (CCLBGC) is the party’s top policy coordination body for the development of China’s legal and regulatory systems. “Law-based governance” is the name for Xi’s massive campaign, begun at the Fourth Plenum in October 2014, to improve the party’s governance of China by further institutionalizing the operation of its powers through more legislation, better regulation, and a more reliable legal process. This concept emphasizes the greater use of laws to delimit the powers of officials, citizens, and firms throughout the country and establish clear, consistent, and enforceable procedures for governing in all spheres. Xi established the CCLBGC as part of his March 2018 party-state institutional reforms, and he has chaired the body since its first meeting in August 2018. The same three PSC members with leadership roles on the CNSC—the Premier, the NPCSC Chairman, and the First Secretary of the CCP Central Secretariat—serve as Deputy Directors, with the Secretary of the CCP Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission serving as Director and the Minister of Justice serving as Deputy Director of the CCLBGC Office.

The CCP Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) is a national-level party institution that is responsible for maintaining political discipline within the party by monitoring policy implementation, enforcing internal rules and directives, and leading the investigation and punishment of corruption and other malfeasance by party members. The CCDI is subordinate to the central party leadership, but Xi has strengthened its authority over the rest of the party bureaucracy, especially at the local level. A new CCDI is selected every five years at the Party Congress; the CCDI then holds a First Plenum to select its Standing Committee, Deputy Secretaries, and Secretary, who are then endorsed by the new CCP Central Committee at its own First Plenum. The current 20th CCDI, selected at the 20th Party Congress in October 2022, has 133 members, including an 18-person Standing Committee, eight Deputy Secretaries, and one Secretary. The CCDI Secretary is a PSC member, the CCDI Deputy Secretary who leads the National Supervisory Commission is a deputy national-level official, and the other CCDI Deputy Secretaries are ministerial-level officials. The CCDI sits atop a national system of Commissions for Discipline Inspection (CDIs) in local governments across the country.

The CCDI Secretary serves as Head of the CCP Central Leading Group for Inspection Work (CLGIW), a policy coordination body that manages the party’s practice of sending “inspection teams” into party organs, state ministries, local governments, and state-owned enterprises to monitor political discipline. The LSGIW was founded in 2009, but under Xi’s leadership, it has become a more important body with stronger control over Central Inspection Teams, which have also expanded in number and number of targets. The Director of the CCP Organization Department and the Director of the National Supervisory Commission serve as Deputy Heads, and the CLGIW office is located within the CCDI. Each provincial-level local party committee has its own leading group for inspection work led by the provincial CDI secretary.

The National Supervisory Commission (NSC) is a deputy national-level institution of the PRC that is co-located with the CCDI. It was established as part of the March 2018 party-state institutional reforms as a government super-agency to monitor policy implementation, investigate official malfeasance, and decide administrative sanctions among public servants, regardless of whether they are CCP members. The NSC absorbed the former Ministry of Supervision and the former National Bureau of Corruption Prevention under the State Council. The NPC appoints the NSC Director for a five-year term at the Two Sessions following each Party Congress. The NSC Director then nominates seven Deputy Directors and seven members, who are appointed by the NPC. The first NSC Director, who served from 2018 to 2023, was a Politburo member, but the current Director is not a member despite holding a seat on the powerful CCP Central Secretariat. The NSC Director serves concurrently as the CCDI Executive Deputy Director, demonstrating the subservience of the NSC to the CCDI. The NSC also leads the work of supervisory commissions at all levels of local government.

The CCP Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission (CPLAC) is a ministerial-level functional department of the CCP Central Committee that coordinates the politically sensitive work of law enforcement, social stability, and security services. The CPLAC Secretary is a Politburo member but not a PSC member—which was the case from 2002 to 2012—because Xi wanted to build his own authority and curtail the power of other leaders in these crucial spheres. The last CPLAC Secretary to sit on the PSC was Zhou Yongkang, an ally of Xi’s ousted rival Bo Xilai. Zhou, the most senior target of Xi’s sweeping anti-corruption campaign, was placed under investigation in late 2013 and sentenced to life in prison in June 2015. However, the CPLAC is still more influential than its ministerial rank suggests as it is led by a deputy national-level Politburo member. The CPLAC membership reflects the organizations that it oversees, with the Minister of Public Security serving as Deputy Secretary and ordinary members including the leaders of the Supreme People’s Court, Supreme People’s Procuratorate, Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Justice, CMC Political and Legal Affairs Commission, and People’s Armed Police (which is controlled by the CMC), plus a full-time ministerial-level CPLAC Secretary-General. The CPLAC sits atop a system of local PLACs in provincial-level and then county-level party committees.

The Supreme People’s Court (SPC) is a deputy national-level state institution that is the highest court for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and for Hong Kong cases that involve the National Security Law. The SPC is not an independent judicial branch of government because it answers to the National People’s Congress (NPC) administratively and is subservient to the CCP politically; furthermore, it lacks the power of constitutional review (although it can ask the NPCSC to review the constitutionality of a regulation). The SPC is the court of first instance for a handful of national cases, but it mostly hears appeals that come up through China’s local judicial system of Higher People’s Courts, Intermediate People’s Courts, and Primary People’s Courts, plus Courts of Special Jurisdiction such as Financial Courts, Internet Courts, and Intellectual Property Courts. Cases in all provincial-level regions except for Beijing, Hebei, Inner Mongolia, Shandong, and Tianjin are now handled by one of six SPC Circuit Courts that have the same level of final jurisdiction as the SPC. China has a civil law system, and the SPC’s reply to a case is binding only for that specific case, but it also issues judicial interpretations that are legally binding on courts at all levels. The SPC is also responsible for managing administration, enforcement, and supervision in courts of all levels. At the Two Sessions following a Party Congress, the PRC President nominates a candidate to serve a five-year term as President and Chief Justice of the SPC; the NPC must approve this selection. The SPC has seven Vice Presidents and many hundreds of lower-ranked judges.

The Supreme People’s Procuratorate (SPP) is a deputy national-level state institution that serves as the chief public prosecutor of the PRC. Like the SPC, it is responsible to the NPC and subservient to the CCP. It investigates and prosecutes criminal cases, reviews lower-level prosecutions, and can appeal verdicts from lower-level courts and issue its own legal interpretations. Its clout was reduced somewhat in the party-state institutional reforms of March 2018, when Beijing reassigned the task of investigating corruption by government officials from the SPP to the new National Supervisory Commission. Like the SPC, at the Two Sessions following a Party Congress, the PRC President nominates an SPP Procurator-General for a five-year term, a selection that must then win NPC approval. The SPP has a ministerial-level Executive Deputy Procurator-General and three Deputy Procurators-General.

The Ministry of Public Security (MPS) is a constituent department of the State Council that manages most of the country’s police forces (the People’s Police). The MPS, in conjunction with local authorities, oversees provincial-level public security departments, which oversee county-level public security bureaus, which, in turn, oversee grassroots-level police stations that interface with citizens. The MPS is an unusually weighty ministry because it is the institution most directly responsible for maintaining public order and defusing social unrest on the Chinese streets, as well as duties including criminal investigations, detention centers, counterterrorism, counternarcotics, anti-smuggling, transport security, and traffic safety. It also administers the deputy ministerial-level National Immigration Administration (NIA) and has pioneered controversial policies such as smart surveillance technologies and overseas police stations to target political dissidents and absconded officials. The Minister of Public Security usually serves as a State Councilor, elevating them to the deputy national level and signaling the importance of the MPS relative to other ministries, on a par only with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of National Defense. The Minister of Public Security also serves as Director of the MPS Special Duty Bureau, which is responsible for protecting foreign VIPs, the Vice President, and deputy national-level leaders of the CPPCC, NPC, SPC, SPP, and State Council. MPS Deputy Ministers usually serve as NIA Director, Director of the Beijing Public Security Bureau, Director of the Legal System Bureau, or Director of the Political Security Bureau, which handles threats to party power, cracking down on political dissidents, combating supposed ethnic separatism and religious extremism, and MPS work related to Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan.

The Ministry of State Security (MSS) is a constituent department of the State Council that holds primary responsibility for intelligence, political security, and the secret services. Its activities include domestic intelligence, foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, geospatial intelligence, industrial espionage, the security of overseas Belt and Road Initiative projects in many countries, and the repression of dissidents in China and abroad through its own State Security Police. Increasingly, the MSS has also taken on a leading role in Chinese cyberespionage and intellectual property theft, commanding several “advanced persistent threat” hacker groups that have been indicted by the US government. It has broad powers under China’s National Intelligence Law to force cooperation from Chinese individuals, corporations, and government agencies. Like the MPS, the MSS has local branches in China’s provincial-, county-, and township-level governments. Both the Minister of State Security and the Minister of Public Security hold the top rank of Commissioner-General in the People’s Police.

The Ministry of Justice (MOJ) is a constituent department of the State Council in charge of legal affairs, including judicial administration, crime prevention, forensic teams, legal training, legal aid, regulating the legal profession, coordinating legislative work, reviewing local legislation, and overseeing administrative law enforcement as well as administrative reviews and responses. It also manages China’s national prisons, except Qincheng Prison in Beijing, a maximum-security facility administered by the MPS that holds the country’s highest-level political prisoners. The Minister of Justice is effectively China’s Attorney General. Although the MPS and MSS are powerful agencies with crucial security functions, the MOJ is a purely civilian institution that enjoys less political clout. However, its standing has increased somewhat in line with Xi’s focus on law-based governance, and since 2018, it has housed the General Office of the CCLBGC and absorbed the former State Council Legal Affairs Office.

The National Audit Office (NAO) is a ministerial-level constituent department of the State Council that is responsible for auditing the finances of the central government and of provincial governments and public institutions that receive central funds. It also conducts audits of natural resources and environmental performance. The NAO has played a key role under Xi’s anti-corruption campaign in detecting financial malpractice and official malfeasance. In the 2018 institutional reforms, the NAO acquired powers from other government agencies to inspect major projects, state-owned enterprises, central budgets, and central revenues and expenditures. The importance of a strong audit system for political discipline and effective governance was underscored by Xi’s creation that same year of a CCP Central Audit Commission (CCPCAC), of which he is Chairman and the Premier and CCDI Secretary are Vice Chairmen. The commission has its office in the NAO, and the NAO Auditor-General serves as its Director.

The CCP Central Social Work Department (CSWD) is a new ministerial-level functional department of the CCP Central Committee that was announced as part of the party-state institutional reforms of March 2023. It is the first new functional department since the CPLAC was restored to this status in 1990. The CSWD is responsible for handling citizen complaints, collecting citizen suggestions, coordinating party work in grassroots governance and capacity building, leading the party work and institutional transformation of national industry associations and chambers of commerce, and guiding party building in mixed-ownership enterprises, nonpublic enterprises, “new economic organizations” (such as private firms, foreign-invested firms, joint-stock cooperatives, and sole traders), “new social organizations” (such as community groups and nongovernmental organizations), and “new employment groups” (such as gig workers and online influencers). The CSWD will sit atop a new central-local system of social work departments in provincial-, city-, and county-level party committees. The new department will provide organizational muscle and institutional advocacy to bolster Xi’s efforts to extend the party’s presence and influence in the nonstate economy and at the most basic levels of neighborhood governance. The CSWD also exercises leadership over the National Public Complaints and Proposals Administration (NPCPA), a deputy ministerial-level organ that is technically under the State Council and handles citizen “petitions” to oppose or urge actions at any level of government. This shifts oversight of China’s citizen feedback system away from the state and to the party, giving Xi more direct control of crucial information for gauging grassroots public opinion and potentially avoiding a repeat of the zero-COVID mass protests of November 2022.

Xi’s expanding definition of national security means that many more government institutions now ostensibly have a role in security policy. One prominent example is the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) that was founded in 2014 as the country’s Internet censor and which has evolved into a powerful policymaker, regulator, and enforcer for Chinese cybersecurity (see “Technology” section).

People

Xi Jinping (June 1953) is the single most important policymaker in the security space because of his leadership of the Politburo and PSC, as well as the CNSC, CCLBGC, and CCPCAC. His hold on the security services, a key aspect of his grip on overall political power, is supplemented by having PSC allies including Li Qiang, Zhao Leji, Cai Qi, and Li Xi serve as his deputies on these central commissions.

Liu Haixing (April 1963) is the ministerial-level Executive Deputy Director of the CNSC General Office. He is a key bureaucratic powerbroker in national security policymaking at home and abroad. Previously, he was a career diplomat in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) from 1985 until 2017, where he specialized in French and European affairs, including a stint as a Minister in the Chinese Embassy in France from 2009 to 2012. He left MOFA as an Assistant Foreign Minister, becoming a Deputy Director of the CNSC General Office in March 2017 before winning promotion to ministerial rank in July 2022. Liu, like Xi, is the “princeling” son of a senior official, which may explain how he came to win Xi’s trust to hold this especially sensitive position. His father, Liu Shuqing, was a senior diplomat who served as a Deputy Foreign Minister from 1984 to 1989 and then as Secretary-General of the CCP Central Foreign Affairs Leading Group and Director of the State Council Foreign Affairs Office from 1989 to 1991.

Li Xi (October 1956) is the PSC member who serves as CCDI Director. He worked his way up the ladder of local government leadership in his native Gansu before a promotion to the Shaanxi provincial CCP standing committee in 2004. There, he served as Party Secretary of the revolutionary heartland of Yan’an from 2006 to 2011, working directly under Xi ally and then provincial leader from 2007. Li joined first joined the Central Committee as an alternate at the 17th Party Congress in 2007, and his promotion of CCP history in Yan’an reportedly impressed Xi during trips to his ancestral homeland (including special attention to the story of Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun, and that of Xi himself as a sent-down youth during the Cultural Revolution in the nearby village of Liangjiahe). Li is also thought to have deeper ties to Xi through his time in the mid-1980s working as a political secretary to Li Ziqi, then Party Secretary of Gansu, who was a friend of Xi Zhongxun from their revolutionary days. After Shaanxi, Li was Organization Head and Deputy Party Secretary in Shanghai, where he worked with several other close Xi allies from 2011 to 2014, before serving as Governor and then Party Secretary of Liaoning between 2014 and 2017 and as Party Secretary of Guangdong during his first term on the Politburo from 2017 to 2022. An unusual aspect of Li’s promotion to CCDI Director is that he ranks seventh in the PSC, right behind Executive Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang; these positions were reversed during Xi’s first two terms, suggesting that Xi now sees anti-corruption as a relatively less pressing priority for elite politics.

Liu Jinguo (April 1955) became Director of the NSC in March 2023 and a member of the CCP Central Secretariat in October 2022. From a poor family in Qinhuangdao, he worked in his native Hebei until 2005, mostly in local branches of the MPS and CCDI, reaching the provincial CCP standing committee. Liu Jinguo was a Deputy Minister of Public Security from 2005 to 2015, where he was praised by state media for his incorruptibility and his prominent role in the on-the-ground responses to the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake and the 2010 Xingang Port oil spill. He served as a CCDI Deputy Secretary from 2014 to 2022 and an NSC Deputy Director from 2018 to 2023. These roles put him in regular contact with Xi allies including Wang Qishan, Zhao Leji, Chen Wenqing, and Li Shulei. The strength of Liu’s historical ties to Xi are unclear: he was a full-time student at the Hebei Provincial Party School in Shijiazhuang from 1983 to 1985, when both Xi and his retired ally Li Zhanshu were party secretaries of two urban counties in the city. Liu is a trusted operator, but his exclusion from the Politburo suggests a renewed focus on the CCDI over the NSC.

Chen Wenqing (January 1960) is a Politburo member who serves as the CPLAC Secretary. Chen is from Sichuan Province, and after graduating from law school, he spent most of his early career in local public security bureaus before leading the provincial state security department and people’s procuratorate. Chen Wenqing was celebrated for his role in ending the run of two murderous fugitives while he was a District Police Chief in 1988. Chen was transferred to Fujian in 2006, where he worked as CCDI Secretary and then Deputy Party Secretary, serving on the provincial CCP standing committee with Xi’s confidante He Lifeng (now a Vice Premier) and close to Xi allies Wang Xiaohong (now the Minister of Public Security), Zheng Shanjie, and Zhuang Rongwen. Immediately after the 18th Party Congress in November 2012, Chen was promoted to a Deputy Secretary role in the CCDI, where he helped take out Xi’s political rivals in the early years of the anti-corruption campaign, working alongside other officials whom Xi has since promoted into senior leadership roles. Chen was promoted again to MSS Party Secretary in 2015, then concurrently appointed Minister of State Security in 2016, adding the roles of CNSC Executive Deputy Director and CPLAC member in 2018. He served in these positions until his elevation to the Politburo in October 2022. Chen is a loyal Xi supporter and convened a CPLAC meeting during the zero-COVID protests of November 2022 to affirm that the security services would “resolutely crack down” on threats to social order.

Wang Xiaohong (July 1957) is the State Councilor who serves as Minister of Public Security and CPLAC Deputy Secretary. He is the second-ranked security specialist after Chen Wenqing, and, like Chen, he has a seat on the seven-person CCP Central Secretariat. A native of the Fujianese capital, Wang worked in the Fuzhou police force for over two decades, rising from an ordinary policeman to city police chief. He was promoted repeatedly during the tenure of first Xi and then Xi’s confidante He Lifeng as Party Secretary of Fuzhou. Xi likely helped promote Wang to serve as a Deputy Director of the Fujian MPS a few months before Xi left for Zhejiang in November 2002. Wang stagnated in this role for nine years, until a horizontal transfer allowed him to gain valuable local leadership experience in Xi’s power base of Xiamen and then in the provincial-level governments of Henan and Beijing. He was made an MPS Deputy Minister and Director of the Beijing MPS in 2016, ministerial-level MPS Executive Deputy Minister in 2018, MPS Party Secretary and CPLAC member in November 2021, and finally Minister in June 2022. Wang is a trusted aide of Xi, personally leading an MPS special work group to crack down on an alleged ring of disloyal security cadres led by former MPS Deputy Minister Sun Lijun.

Zhang Jun (October 1956) is President and Chief Justice of the SPC and a CPLAC member. He is one of the most experienced legal officials in the country, having served as the top leader of the MOJ, SPP, and SPC. He earned an undergraduate law degree at Jilin University (where he likely knew Politburo member Li Hongzhong, who studied there at the same time, through the university’s CCP activities) and a master’s degree in criminal law at Renmin University of China in Beijing. He climbed the SPC system as a legal secretary and then judge for almost two decades, working as a Vice President from 2001 to 2003 and again from 2005 to 2012, with a stint as Deputy Minister for Justice in between. In the Xi era, Zhang served as a CCDI Deputy Secretary from 2012 to 2017 (with Chen Wenqing and Liu Jinguo), Minister of Justice from 2017 to 2018, and SPP Procurator-General from 2018 to March 2023. Zhang does not have political ties to Xi from earlier in his career, although he clearly provided loyal political service at the CCDI at the start of Xi’s anti-corruption campaign. His continued promotion reflects Xi’s desire to improve China’s law-based governance by elevating genuine legal experts to leadership positions.

Ying Yong (November 1957) is Procurator-General of the SPP and a CPLAC member. Ying is a native of Taizhou City in Zhejiang, where he spent the first 15-odd years of his career as a police officer and local public security official. He rose through the public security ranks in Shaoxing City and then became a deputy in the Zhejiang public security department, where he took a leading role in significant crackdowns against smuggling and organized crime. After Xi became Party Secretary of Zhejiang in 2002, by which time Ying had completed graduate studies in law, he was promoted to serve as a Deputy Secretary of the Zhejiang CCDI and then as President of Zhejiang’s top court, where he led efforts to improve access to and reduce corruption in the legal system. The month after Xi ended his brief stint as Party Secretary of Shanghai in October 2007, Ying was transferred to the lead the top court in the politically influential metropolis. In April 2013, shortly after Xi became paramount leader, Ying was promoted to the Shanghai CCP standing committee. He eventually served as Mayor of Shanghai from January 2017 to February 2020, when Xi dispatched (and promoted) him to take over as Party Secretary of the besieged province of Hubei in the middle of the first COVID-19 outbreak. Ying appeared to be a Politburo contender until he was unexpectedly sidelined from this leadership role to an NPC committee in April 2022. That move is usually a sure sign of impending retirement, but in September, Ying was made Zhang Jun’s heir-apparent, another example of Xi’s promotion of experienced (and politically loyal) legal and security experts.

Chen Yixin (September 1959) is Minister of State Security, a Deputy Director of the CCLBGC Office, and a CPLAC member. Chen is from Lishui City in Zhejiang, where he worked as a local cadre before spending a decade in the general office of the Zhejiang CCP committee, rising to become its Deputy Director from 2000 to 2003. In the latter year, Xi promoted Chen to Deputy Secretary-General of the Zhejiang CCP committee, a high-level political secretary role that he held until 2011, working directly under Secretary-General Li Qiang. Chen then gained experience as a local leader in the Zhejiang cities of Jinhua and Wenzhou, before Xi brought him to Beijing in 2015 to be the Special Deputy Director of what is now the General Office of the Central Comprehensively Deepening Reforms Commission. After serving as Deputy Party Secretary of Hubei, Chen Yixin became CPLAC Secretary-General in 2018, in which capacity he led a two-year purge for Xi that felled former Minister of Justice Fu Zhenghua and former Deputy Minister of Public Security Sun Lijun. He became Minister of State Security in October 2022. Chen can be expected to enforce a hard line against external opponents of the CCP and internal opponents of Xi’s leadership.

He Rong (October 1962) is Minister of Justice, a Deputy Director of the CCLBGC Office, and a CPLAC member. One of only two female ministers, she holds a bachelor’s, master’s (from the University of Technology Sydney), and doctorate in law. She worked in the Beijing municipal court system from 1984 to 2011 before promotion to the SPC system, where she was a Vice President from 2013 to 2017. Her upward trajectory was confirmed when she was rotated to the Shaanxi provincial CCP standing committee, serving as Deputy Party Secretary from 2018 to 2020. Before her MOJ appointment, she served as the ministerial-level SPC Executive Vice President from 2020 to 2023, winning a seat on the CCP Central Committee for the first time at the 20th Party Congress. He lacks strong ties to Xi, although she was a rising star in the local judiciary when Xi’s ally Wang Qishan was Mayor of Beijing in the 2000s. Her appointment should be seen as a sign of rising professionalization in China’s legal governance.

Yin Bai (April 1969) replaced Chen Yixin as the ministerial-level CPLAC Secretary-General in March 2023, having served as a CPLAC Deputy Secretary-General since July 2022. Unusually for a high-ranking security official, Yin is not a member of the Han ethnic majority; rather, he belongs to the Nakhi ethnic minority that hail from Yunnan, although his place of ancestry is reported as Beijing. Yin studied and worked in Yunnan as a management academic, government leader, local judge, political and legal affairs official, and provincial prosecutor until 2016. He was then in Qinghai until his CPLAC appointment, working as head of the provincial PLAC and eventually as Deputy Party Secretary as well. However, unlike Chen during the last five years, Yin is not an alternate member of the CCP Central Committee, indicating that the role is less influential now that Chen has left. Yin has significant experience in ethnic governance: he has worked in the Yi, Tibetan, and Mongolian Autonomous Regions and holds a doctorate in ethnic politics and public administration, suggesting that minority groups will remain a top internal security focus for Xi.

Two uniformed military leaders, Wang Renhua (1962), Secretary of the CMC Political and Legal Affairs Commission, and Wang Chunning (March 1963), Commander of the People’s Armed Police (PAP), are the other members of the CPLAC. Wang Renhua is an Admiral in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy who entered the CPLAC with his current position in December 2019 after serving in leadership roles in the political work and political discipline sections of the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, the PLA Ground Forces, and the East Sea Fleet. Wang Chunning is a General in the PLA Ground Forces who spent most of his career with what is now the PLA 72nd Group Army in Huzhou, Zhejiang Province, where he overlapped with Xi’s tenure as Party Secretary of Zhejiang from 2002 to 2007. In 2016, Xi appointed Wang Chunning as Commander of the PLA Beijing Garrison, which is responsible for security in the national capital, a sign of deep trust in his political loyalty. He became PAP Commander in 2020. The PAP, under the command of the CMC, is an armed force dedicated to domestic security and quelling internal unrest.

Hou Kai (April 1962) heads the NAO as its Auditor-General. He is a career auditor who started at the NAO right out of college in 1984 and worked there until 2013, when he had achieved the position of Deputy Auditor-General. He worked with several key Xi allies in the Shanghai municipal party as head of its discipline inspection commission from 2013 to 2016, then served as a Deputy Secretary working under top Xi aide Ding Xuexiang in the new CCP Central and State Organs Working Committee from 2018 to 2020, at which point he was promoted to Auditor-General. He has been a member of the CCDI Standing Committee since 2012, showing the close connection between auditing work and Xi’s control over political discipline investigations. Hou is also Chairman of the United Nations Board of Auditors.

Wu Hansheng (April 1963) is the first CSWD Director. He is a trained engineer who worked in the former Ministry of Machine-Building Industry before beginning a long association with the former CCP State Organs Work Committee, which managed party affairs in state institutions, and its successor, the CCP Central and State Organs Work Committee. However, Wu spent most of the 2000s working in local governments, including stints under Xi allies Li Xi in Liaoning Province and Lou Yangsheng in Shanxi Province. Wu is a ministerial-level official, suggesting that the CSWD will have similar bureaucratic weight as the International Liaison Department—not more influential CCP agencies like the Organization Department and Propaganda Department, which are led by Politburo members.

Policy

Xi has significantly elevated security as a core objective in all areas of Chinese policymaking (see also “Foreign Affairs”). His authoritative report to the 20th Party Congress in October 2022 specified that national security should “permeate every aspect and the whole process” of governance, introduced a top-level goal for the party to “comprehensively strengthen the national security system” by 2035, and identified several security concerns and “party members and cadres with weak commitment” as central challenges that the CCP must address in the next five years. Congress reports usually follow a rigid topical structure, but this most recent edition added a new section devoted to national security, sending a strong signal about its rising priority and the enhanced role of Xi’s personal security czars in Beijing.

Xi’s second term saw him shift his campaign to control the security bureaucracy — which began in his first term with purges of officials associated with ex-security czar Zhou Yongkang and ex-leader Jiang Zemin — into a higher gear. The campaign took off with the launch in July 2020 of a Mao-style “education and rectification” campaign within the CPLAC, led by Xi acolyte Chen Yixin. Official media accounts compared Xi’s campaign with the Yan’an Rectification Movement of 1942 to 1945, when Mao launched sweeping internal purges to establish his unquestioned authority as party leader. Xi’s purge proceeded at breakneck speed, bringing down high-ranking officials including Sun Lijun, Fu Zhenghua, and Shanghai police chief Gong Dao’an for corruption and alleged anti-CCP political plots. These arrests eliminated the last significant figures associated with Meng Jianzhu, a crony of late paramount leader Jiang Zemin, and paved the way for Xi to install allies across the security system.  

Xi’s success at reorganizing CCP institutions and appointing the leaders of China’s security, intelligence, and legal apparatuses will advance the “securitization” of policymaking that has developed during his leadership. Xi’s concept of “comprehensive national security,” introduced in 2014, has been dramatically expanded to include at least 16 domains: military, territorial, technological, ecological, societal, polar, cyber, space, cultural, political, economic, biological, deep sea, resource, nuclear, and overseas interests. Xi has also sought to weave a seamlessly integrated fabric of mutually reinforcing security, legal, and disciplinary frameworks under his comprehensive national security umbrella.

Xi’s consolidated security system is likely to oversee further tightening of social controls — in both the physical and digital realms — as well as the promotion of a political and social narrative that China is besieged by spies, saboteurs, and “hostile foreign forces” seeking to overthrow the CCP regime through a “color revolution.” That, combined with Xi’s harping on an ever-expanding list of “risks” confronting the regime from “changes unseen in a century” in both the domestic and external arenas, suggests a more paranoid and sharper CCP regime during Xi’s third term and beyond.

A critical question for the future of China’s security system is whether slowing economic growth and more repressive policies will create larger social disturbances, as the “Blank Paper Protests” against Xi’s zero-COVID policies in many cities in November 2022 show that political protests are not a thing of the past. More contentious state-society relations could present new threats to Xi’s political power and affect the political influence of his security czars, depending on how well they contain such threats.

A notable feature of Xi’s new, much broader definition of national security is the more regular transfer of officials within and between the various parts of the regime’s control bureaucracy. Particularly notable is the phenomenon of officials with experience in the CCDI being moved into security roles and vice versa. These bureaucracies were once rigidly stove-piped and isolated from each other; the move toward greater cross-fertilization between control agencies is arguably improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the CCP’s security enterprise. The rising emphasis during Xi’s tenure on the CCDI’s anti-corruption mission and its role as the guarantor of ideological orthodoxy and policy implementation — in areas such as economic policy and financial policy — also serves to enhance the natural affinity between the institution and more traditional security agencies.

The work of political discipline organs like the CCDI in improving the party’s self-governance is critical to Xi’s ambition for the party to recognize, resolve, and learn from its past errors and achieve a perpetual state of “self-revolution.” Xi believes that self-revolution is a key reason why the party overcame past challenges and survived its first hundred years. He has described the party’s fight against corruption and ill-discipline as a “forever journey.” A stronger focus on discipline and security could aid Xi’s ability to push through difficult reforms, but it could also raise the short-term risk of overly rigid policy implementation and the longer-term risk of local stasis on controversial policies that risk social instability.

Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and Tibet

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Few policies of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under the leadership of General Secretary Xi Jinping have roiled China’s relations with Western countries like those regarding the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and the Tibet Autonomous Region. Xi’s action in June 2020 to bring Hong Kong under more direct mainland control through a draconian National Security Law has undermined confidence in Beijing’s “one country, two systems” policy, which promised 50 years of autonomy for the former British colony after its reversion to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. Revelations that the CCP since 2017 has been operating extrajudicial detention centers and an alleged forced labor program in Xinjiang, violating the human rights of one to two million ethnic minority citizens (mostly Uyghurs), have sparked outrage and prompted economic sanctions. Repression of Tibetan populations and Tibetan Buddhists has attracted fewer headlines in recent years, but the CCP retains as staunch a policy approach there as it does those other regions.

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Institutions

Hong Kong

The CCP’s top policymaking institution on Hong Kong affairs is the Central Leading Group on Hong Kong and Macao Affairs (CLGHKMA). It reports to the elite 24-member Politburo and its 7-member Politburo Standing Committee (PSC), which discusses and approves top-level policy decisions regarding Hong Kong. The leader of the CLGHKMA is typically the Executive Vice Premier, who sits on the PSC; the Minister of Public Security (who is concurrently a State Councilor) and the Director of the Central Hong Kong and Macao Work Office both serve as deputy leaders. The presence of the Minister of Public Security on this body reflects Beijing’s increasing focus on political security in the territory. The CLGHKMA was founded in 1978 as the Central Group on Hong Kong and Macao. It was upgraded to the Central Coordination Group on Hong Kong and Macao Affairs in 2003 after half a million Hongkongers marched against a proposed local National Security Law, and then upgraded again to a central leading group in 2020 following record-breaking protests in Hong Kong against a bill to allow extradition to the mainland. Other CLGHKMA members usually include the Director of the CCP United Front Work Department, the Director of the Central Foreign Affairs Office, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Party Secretary and Governor of Guangdong Province (which borders Hong Kong and Macao), and the Directors of Beijing’s Liaison Offices in Hong Kong and Macao.

From 1978 to 2023, the General Office of the CLGHKMA and the groups that preceded it were in the ministerial-level State Council Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office (SCHKMAO), which was responsible for supervising the implementation of Beijing’s policies toward Hong Kong. However, the party-state institutional reforms announced in March 2023 established the Central Hong Kong and Macao Work Office (CHKMWO) under the CCP Central Committee; it took over the SCHKMAO’s duties as the General Office of the CLGHKMA. These duties include conducting research, coordinating between mainland and local governments, and supervising implementation regarding polices such as “one country, two systems,” Beijing’s political leadership, Beijing’s legal framework, upholding national security, safeguarding people’s livelihoods, and integrating Hong Kong and Macao into China’s overall development. CHKMWO will retain the SCHKMAO moniker, but a separate SCHKMAO will no longer exist—in effect transferring responsibility for Hong Kong policy from the state to the party.

Beijing’s main presence in Hong Kong since 2000 has been the Liaison Office of the Central People’s Government in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKLO). The HKLO is a ministerial-level institution that is usually coterminous with the party’s Central Hong Kong Work Committee (CHKWC), which leads the CCP’s work in Hong Kong. The HKLO is led by a mainland official, and its responsibilities include promoting Beijing’s interests in Hong Kong politics, encouraging exchanges with the mainland, helping liaise between mainland and Hong Kong authorities, and organizing and lobbying for pro-Beijing politicians. The HKLO also owns the media entities Ta Kung Pao, Wen Wei Po, Commercial Daily, and Sino United Publishing. There is an analogous but mainly symbolic Office of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China in Beijing (BJO).

The Hong Kong National Security Law, passed in Beijing in June 2020, led to the establishment the next month of the deputy ministerial-level Office for Safeguarding National Security of the Central People's Government of the People's Republic of China in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (OSNS). The OSNS is a mainland agency directly subordinate to the CCP Central Committee that is not subject to Hong Kong law but can make laws for the territory. It has a different leader than the HKLO but is similarly led and staffed by mainland officials. Its duties are to conduct analysis, make recommendations, supervise local authorities, collect intelligence, and handle criminal cases related to Beijing’s concept of national security in Hong Kong. Its jurisdiction is technically limited to cases that involve supposed foreign interference, that local authorities are unable to address, or that constitute a major imminent threat to national security. Beijing must approve OSNS involvement in any case.

Two other mainland institutions maintain an official presence in Hong Kong. Since the handover in 1997, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has, as stipulated in the Basic Law, supervised Hong Kong’s external relations through a deputy ministerial-level Office of the Commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (MOFACO). The handover also saw China’s military establish the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Hong Kong Garrison, which is a roughly 10,000-person force that is responsible for defending the territory and reports to the PLA Southern Theater Command, headquartered in Guangzhou. The Fourth Bureau of the Ministry of State Security handles intelligence work in Hong Kong.

Many other Chinese political institutions exert some influence in Hong Kong affairs. The 175-member Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPCSC), which is the main lawmaking body of China’s national legislature, holds the power to interpret the Basic Law of Hong Kong and to make laws for Hong Kong. Most notably, it drafted and promulgated the Hong Kong National Security Law in June 2020 and amended the Basic Law in March 2021 to introduce electoral changes designed to ensure that only pro-Beijing “patriots” could hold government posts. Founded in 1997, the NPCSC Committee on the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region is a ministerial-level working organ of the national legislature with responsibility for studying and advising on the NPCSC’s powers regarding Hong Kong legislation and the interpretation and amendment of the Hong Kong Basic Law. It comprises six mainland members and six Chinese citizens with permanent residency rights in Hong Kong. Additionally, there are 36 delegates from Hong Kong among the 2,980 members of the full NPC.

Hong Kong is one of several focal points of the party’s United Front work, which aims to mobilize nonparty personnel and social groups to support the party’s objectives. This work is led by the United Front Work Department (UFWD), a ministerial-level functional department under the CCP Central Committee that is usually empowered through the leadership of a deputy national-level Director. Xi enhanced the UFWD’s influence after the 20th Party Congress by making an incoming Politburo member its leader the first time since 1977. The UFWD Third Bureau is responsible for building and mobilizing political support for the party among locals in Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan. The outward-facing pillar of United Front work is the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), a national advisory body that expands the party’s reach to influential nonmembers and provides policy suggestions. One or two Hongkongers, usually former leaders of the territory, serve as deputy national-level CPPCC Vice Chairmen, while there are 124 seats for “specially invited” Hongkongers on the broader 2,172-person CPPCC National Committee. The Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and Overseas Chinese Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (HKMTOCC) is a ministerial-level special committee that is responsible for liaising with target groups to promote party policies, investigate important issues and make policy suggestions related to these groups, and organize political activities for relevant members of the CPPCC.

China has significant economic interests in Hong Kong and is trying to incorporate the territory into its overall national development planning, most notably through the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) plan, announced in the government work report of March 2017 and outlined by the Central Committee and the State Council in February 2019. The plan is to transform Hong Kong, Macao, and nine nearby cities in Guangdong Province into a more integrated metropolis through intercity infrastructure connectivity, commercial exchange, and policy coordination. The party’s Leading Group for Building the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (CLGGBA) was founded in 2018 includes the Executive Vice Premier as the Director; the Party Secretary of Guangdong and a Vice Premier as Deputy Directors; and the Chief Executive of Hong Kong, Chief Executive of Macao, Director of the HKLO, Director of the Macao Liaison Office, and Executive Deputy Director of the CHKMWO as ordinary members. The institutional driver of the GBA project is the NDRC, which houses the administrative office of the GBALG.

Most of the day-to-day business of governing Hong Kong is done by pro-Beijing Hongkongers in the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government (HKG), which was established after the 1997 handover and theoretically has jurisdiction over the territory’s domestic affairs. The head of government is a Chief Executive who is elected by a 1,500-member Election Committee — which is formed by elections held within 40 official special interest groups known as functional constituencies — and then appointed by the Premier of the State Council in Beijing. The Chief Executive nominates 21 “principal officials” to serve as Chief Secretary for Administration, Financial Secretary, Justice Secretary, their three deputies, and heads of other policy bureaus in the HKG, who are then appointed by the State Council. The Chief Executive presides over a consultative cabinet known as the Executive Council (ExCo), which meets weekly and includes all 21 principal officials plus 16 nonofficial members who effectively serve as ministers without portfolio. The legislature is the unicameral Legislative Council (LegCo), which consists of 90 members elected from geographical, functional, and Election Committee constituencies. Virtually all LegCo members now belong to the pro-Beijing camp, which includes several different political parties, the largest of which is currently the conservative Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB).

The Chief Executive chairs the Committee for Safeguarding National Security of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (CSNS), a group of senior local officials created under the Hong Kong National Security Law to lead the analysis, legislating, and protection of national security in the territory. The committee has extraordinary powers that are not subject to legal review, including approving prosecutions under the Hong Kong National Security Law and determining the eligibility of candidates for elections. Vetting of election candidates is conducted by the new National Security Department of the Hong Kong Police Force (HKPFNSD). The mainland official serving as HKLO Director exerts a high level of influence over the CSNS by serving as its National Security Adviser.

Beijing governs Macao with a similar set of institutions, notably the Liaison Office of the Central People’s Government in the Macao Special Administrative Region (MLO). Macao is a former colony of Portugal that Lisbon transferred to Chinese sovereignty in 1999. Macao is located just over 60 kilometers across the Zhujiang River Estuary from central Hong Kong, but it is much smaller in both land area (approximately 30 square kilometers versus 1,110 square kilometers) and population (about 690,000 versus 7.33 million). It is the only Chinese territory where gambling is legal, making it a mecca for tourists from the mainland and across the region.

Xinjiang and Tibet

Xinjiang and Tibet are both classified as autonomous regions rather than provinces of the People’s Republic of China because of their large ethnic minority populations. According to the 2020 national census, the ethnic composition of Xinjiang’s 25.9 million people is approximately 45.0 percent Uyghur, 42.2 percent Han, and 12.8 percent other ethnic groups (mostly Kazakhs and Hui). Among Tibet’s 3.65 million people, 86.0 percent are Tibetan, 12.2 percent are Han, and 1.8 percent are other ethnic minorities. Among China’s national population, 91.1 percent of people are Han and 8.9 percent are from one of 55 official ethnic minorities. There are significant differences in religious practices between the Han ethnic majority and Uyghurs and Tibetans. Uyghurs are a Turkic ethnic group for whom Islam is the dominant religion, while Tibetans are an East Asian ethnic group who practice Tibetan Buddhism.

The history of resistance to ethnic and religious repression in Xinjiang and Tibet, as well as the strategic and economic significance of these areas, means that both regions receive special attention at the highest level of national politics, in the Politburo and its PSC. For example, the Politburo discussed economic development and political security in Xinjiang at its monthly meeting in May 2014 and the same issues in Tibet at its monthly meeting in July 2015. The CPPCC Chairman, who is usually the number-four national leader on the PSC, leads both the Central Coordination Group for Xinjiang Work (CCGXW) and the Central Coordination Group for Tibet Work (CCGTW). These party bodies bring together the central party-state’s study, coordination, and decision-making on issues in Xinjiang and Tibet, respectively.

In addition to their involvement in with Hong Kong, the CPPCC and the UFWD are heavily involved in the party’s policymaking on ethnic minority populations, especially in Xinjiang and Tibet. The UFWD oversees mobilizing ethnic minority populations to support party leadership; it does the same with religious leaders and believers, with an overall aim to ensure that ethnic and religious minorities assimilate into mainstream Chinese society. The UFWD Second Bureau is responsible for general work with ethnic minorities, with the Seventh Bureau focused on Tibet and the Eighth Bureau on Xinjiang, while the Eleventh Bureau and Twelfth Bureau both focus on religion.

The ministerial-level CPPCC Ethnic and Religious Affairs Committee conducts political consultations and supervises policy proposals related to Tibet and Xinjiang, while the National Committee has 101 ethnic minority representatives and 69 representatives of religions, of which many are Tibetans and Uyghurs. In China’s legislature, the ministerial-level NPC Ethnic Affairs Committee studies, deliberates, proposes, and drafts legislation and regulations related to ethnic minorities.

The National Ethnic Affairs Commission (NEAC) is responsible for managing policies toward ethnic minorities, official research on ethnology, ethnic minority culture and education, economic development in ethnic minority areas, carrying out foreign propaganda work related to ethnic minorities, and supervising Beijing’s system of autonomous regions for ethnic minority populations. It is a ministerial-level constituent department of the State Council but was formally placed under the direct administrative leadership of the UFWD in the sweeping party-state institutional reforms of 2018, reflecting Xi’s desire to exercise greater political and social control over ethnic minority populations. The general offices of both the CCGXW and CCGTW are located within the NEAC.

The National Religious Affairs Administration (NRAA) manages China’s five government-sanctioned religious organizations: the Buddhist Association of China, the Catholic Patriotic Association, the Chinese Taoist Association, the Islamic Association of China, and the protestant Three-Self Patriotic Movement. It oversees the appointment of religious leaders, the interpretation of religious texts, and the promotion of religious practice in accordance with party policy. The NRAA is the agency responsible for selecting the reincarnations of Buddhist leaders and for suppressing underground churches. It was formerly a deputy ministerial-level bureau directly under the State Council, but it was absorbed by the UFWD in the party-state reorganization of 2018, reflecting Xi’s desire to strengthen political control over religious activity and suppress potential threats to the party’s authority from rising religious faith in the country.

Provincial-level authorities are responsible for applying central directives in their jurisdiction, which involves adapting general instructions to local conditions, formulating local implementation regulations, and disbursing official funds to realize these policy goals. Both Xinjiang and Tibet are governed by a Regional Party Committee and a Regional People’s Government, which replicate the structure of the central authorities in Beijing, with the party leading the formulation of policies that are sent to the government to implement. The number-one regional official is the Party Secretary, and the number-two official is the Governor (or Chairman) of the People’s Government, who usually serves as a Deputy Secretary of the Regional Party Committee. Both leaders are ministerial-level officials, while members of the Regional Party Committee hold deputy ministerial rank.

Xinjiang and Tibet are not provinces but rather autonomous regions. This means that their People’s Governments and People’s Congresses nominally enjoy some autonomy to govern and regulate ethnic issues, Beijing provides a larger budget for ethnic policies, and the main minority language is an official language of the region. The Governor of an autonomous region must belong to the dominant ethnic minority, so the Governor of Xinjiang is always Uyghur, and the Governor of Tibet is always Tibetan. The party also makes special efforts to recruit minority cadres. However, autonomy applies only to government organs and not to the more powerful Regional Party Committee, which remains under strict control of the CCP leadership, meaning the regions have no ability to act outside the party’s wishes.

The PLA also operates a special deputy theater-level Tibet Military District and Xinjiang Military District, which report not only to their regional PLA Western Theater Command but also to the headquarters of the PLA Ground Force in Beijing. These districts reflect the heightened levels of security that Beijing believes are required to suppress political violence and strengthen border defenses in these areas. The Xinjiang district also has an army-level Southern Xinjiang Military District, which covers the Uyghur cultural heartland and is headquartered in the historic Uyghur city of Kashgar.

Xinjiang has a unique layer of governance: the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC). The XPCC is a paramilitary organization that operates a regional business empire under its alter ego, the China New Construction Group Corporation. It is a ministerial-level body under the State Council, but it also answers to the Xinjiang regional authorities. It is led by a Primary Political Commissar, who is usually the regional Party Secretary; a full-time Political Commissar and Party Secretary, usually a ministerial-level official; and a Commander, usually at the deputy ministerial level. The XPCC has outposts around Xinjiang and directly manages the party, government, military, and enterprise governance of several county-level cities, mostly associated with XPCC agricultural projects, particularly cotton farms. Its workforce is predominately Han, and it is a significant facilitator of Han migration into Xinjiang. The United States has sanctioned the XPCC for its alleged role in mass internment and forced labor.

People

Hong Kong

Xi Jinping (born June 1953) is the most important decision maker in Chinese policies toward Hong Kong. Xi also has a special interest in Hong Kong affairs after having served as Director of the former Central Coordination Group on Hong Kong and Macao Affairs from 2007 to 2012.

Ding Xuexiang (September 1962) is the Executive Vice Premier and likely Director of both the Central Leading Group on Hong Kong and Macao Affairs and the Leading Group for Building the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. Ding, who is a close Xi ally and the party’s number-six leader on the PSC, is intimately familiar with Xi’s thinking on Hong Kong affairs, having served in the CCP General Office for the past decade and as Xi’s chief of staff for the past five years. He accompanied Xi on his visits to Hong Kong for the handover anniversary celebrations in 2017 and 2022. Ding has no specialist background in Hong Kong affairs and is likely to channel Xi’s views in his new roles.

Xia Baolong (December 1952) is Director of the State Council’s Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office, which will become the Central Hong Kong and Macao Work Office later this year, and Deputy Director of the CLGHKMA. Xia, who will turn 71 in 2023, is likely to retire, especially as he has stepped down from his role as a CPPCC Vice Chairman since 2018. That CPPCC role accorded him deputy national rank and allowed him to serve in the ministerial-level position beyond the normal retirement age. Xi tapped Xia to replace Zhang Xiaoming at SCHKMAO in February 2020, following Zhang’s demotion after months of protests in Hong Kong against Beijing’s rising political influence. He also serves as Deputy Director of the Central Leading Group on Hong Kong and Macao Affairs. Xia is a career local official who worked under Xi and with several Xi allies in Zhejiang during the 2000s and 2010s. His lack of experience in Hong Kong affairs demonstrates Xi’s emphasis on political loyalty to Beijing over any conciliation with demands for more autonomy by the local population. Xia is under US sanctions for his role in the National Security Law.

Zheng Yanxiong (August 1963) is Director of the Hong Kong Liaison Office. He was promoted to the role in January 2023 after serving as Director of Beijing’s Office for Safeguarding National Security in Hong Kong since July 2020. He spent the previous two decades rising through the local government ranks in Guangdong Province, including several years in Shanwei City, just up the coast from Hong Kong, where he worked under Wang Yang, Hu Chunhua, and on the provincial party standing committee with Xi ally Li Xi. While Zheng may be a trusted enforcer and implementer, he is both geographically and politically far from Beijing’s policymaking, and he is not even on the party’s 20th Central Committee. Zheng replaced Luo Huining, a Xi ally who worked closely under Zhao Leji in Qinghai in the mid-2000s, the first HKLO Director with no work experience in Hong Kong affairs. Luo was parachuted into Hong Kong in January 2020 to replace Wang Zhimin after his dismissal for mishandling the protests and local elections.

Dong Jingwei (November 1963) is Director of the Chinese government's Office for Safeguarding National Security in Hong Kong. He is a veteran of the security services, having worked for a decade as head of the national security department of Hebei Province and then as Deputy Minister of State Security with responsibility for counter-espionage work. Cui Jianchun (July 1964) is the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Commissioner in Hong Kong. He began his career as an accountant and manager at the state-owned China National Nuclear Corporation before passing the open selection process for senior diplomats in 2011 and later serving as China’s ambassador to Kuwait, Guyana, and then Nigeria. Peng Jingtang, a major general who once served as Chief of Staff at the Xinjiang headquarters of the People’s Armed Police, is Commander of the PLA Garrison in Hong Kong.

John Lee (also known as Lee Ka-chiu) (December 1957) was selected as Chief Executive of Hong Kong by the Beijing-controlled Election Committee in May 2022. As the only mainland-approved contender, he became the sole candidate and received 99.4 percent of the vote. Lee rose through the ranks of the Hong Kong Police Force from 1977 to 2012, before becoming Undersecretary for Security in 2012 and then Secretary for Security in 2017. In the last position, Lee played a leading role in the Hong Kong government’s crackdown against the pro-democracy movement and in the implementation of Beijing’s National Security Law. Lee’s favor in Beijing was confirmed when former Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam appointed him Chief Secretary for Administration — the second-highest public office in Hong Kong — in June 2021. Lee is the first Chief Executive who is not a business executive or a career bureaucrat, and his lack of deep ties to Hong Kong’s traditional political elite means that he is an especially loyal servant of Beijing and leans heavily on the People’s Republic of China Liaison Office for advice and support. Lee says that one of his top priorities is to enact Hong Kong’s own domestic version of Beijing’s National Security Law, as required by Article 23 of the Basic Law; this law would echo Beijing’s version but would also cover treason and state secrets. It would further erode political liberties and is likely to increase scrutiny of foreign individuals, firms, and nongovernmental organizations with connections to Hong Kong politics. Still, the direct impact would be modest relative to the political earthquake of 2019–2020.

Leung Chun-ying (also known as C. Y. Leung) (August 1954) has been a Vice Chairman of the CPPCC since 2017 and is the highest-ranking Hongkonger in Beijing’s system of political consultation and United Front work. He served one term as Hong Kong Chief Executive from 2012 to 2017. Leung’s staunchly pro-Beijing politics saw him defend unpopular constitutional and educational reforms proposed by the National People’s Congress (NPC), contributing to the Umbrella Revolution, during which hundreds of thousands of people participated in protests, and the Occupy Central sit-ins that overtook Hong Kong’s downtown in late 2014. Amid further civil unrest, and facing a bribery accusation, Leung declined to run for a second term. In his current position, he has been a vocal critic of the 2019 protest movement and an advocate for the National Security Law.

Liu Cigui (September 1955) is Director of the CPPCC Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and Overseas Chinese Committee. He led the CPPCC Foreign Affairs Committee from 2020 to 2023 but has no specific experience working on Hong Kong. He was previously Party Secretary of Hainan, and before that spent most of his career in Fujian, where he worked as a deputy to Xi confidant He Lifeng in Xiamen in the mid-2000s, as well as under Xi’s overall leadership of the province. Liu left the Central Committee last year because of his age, but his political connections likely explain why he remains in the central government.

Shen Chunyao (May 1960) is Director of the NPCSC Committee on the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. He also directs the equivalent committee for Macao and serves as a Deputy Director of the powerful NPC Constitution and Law Committee. Shen is a legal specialist with a background in international law who has worked in the NPC for the last two decades and has led the legislature’s work on Hong Kong and Macao since 2018. He played an important technical role in drafting the National Security Law and in 2022 was promoted from an alternate member of the 19th Central Committee to a full member of the 20th Central Committee.

Xinjiang and Tibet

Wang Huning (October 1955) is Chairman of the CPPCC, the fourth-ranked leader on the PSC, and the likely Director of both the Central Coordination Group for Xinjiang Work and the Central Coordination Group for Tibet Work. Wang was a leading political scientist who served as a top policy adviser to Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and then Xi, for whom he was a key architect of “Xi Jinping Thought.” Wang’s role suggests a more ideological approach to United Front work in Xi’s third term, continuing to push for closer political alignment of ethnic and religious minorities with the central leadership. Human rights and minority rights will remain contentious issues between China and the West.

Shi Taifeng (September 1956) is Director of the CCP United Front Work Department, a CPPCC Vice Chairman, and a member of both the Politburo and the CCP Central Secretariat. Shi is the first incoming Politburo member to be assigned the UFWD directorship since 1977, representing an elevation in the status and importance of United Front work under Xi. This move suggests that Xi will redouble the party’s efforts to mobilize ethnic and religious minorities to support party leadership, although using techniques of persuasion and co-optation as much as violence and repression. Shi is a legal scholar who is connected to Xi through the Central Party School, where he served as a Vice President while Xi was President from 2002 to 2007. He was later put on the fast track to higher office by promotions to provincial government, serving as Governor of Jiangsu and Party Secretary of Ningxia and then Inner Mongolia, both autonomous regions with significant ethnic minority populations.

Pan Yue (April 1960) is the ministerial-level Director of the National Ethnic Affairs Commission and a UFWD Deputy Director, as well as a member of the 20th CCP Central Committee. He is only the third member of the Han ethnic majority to lead the NEAC, after his predecessor Chen Xiaojiang (2020–2022) and inaugural leader Li Weihan (1949–1954), suggesting that Xi does not trust minority cadres to implement more assimilationist policies. Pan has had an eclectic career, working in party media, state-owned enterprise management, and the environment ministry. Although he is an award-winning poet, Pan’s speeches suggest that he is a true believer in Xi’s hardline ethnic policies and will champion them within the political system.

Chen Ruifeng (May 1966) is Director of the National Religious Affairs Administration and a UFWD Deputy Director, and last year he won alternate membership in the Central Committee. His professional background is in the party’s central propaganda bureaucracy, but he served on the provincial party committees of Hubei and Qinghai before winning his current role in March 2023. He is likely to also serve as Head of the General Office of the Central Coordination Group for Tibet Work, but this has not been publicly confirmed. His non-specialist background reinforces the essentially political nature of ethnic affairs work under Xi.

Lin Rui (August 1967) is Head of the General Office of the Central Coordination Group for Xinjiang Work and a UFWD Deputy Director. Previously, he was the youngest-ever Deputy Minister of Public Security and Deputy Secretary-General of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission under Xi ally Chen Yixin. Lin rose through the ranks of the Fujian public security office—where he would have been a relatively young cadre during Xi’s stint as a provincial leader—and eventually became Deputy Mayor of Xiamen, where he worked closely Pei Jinjia, the Mayor and then Party Secretary, who is an acolyte of He Lifeng. Li’s public security background suggests that Beijing is unlikely to soften its political scrutiny of the Uyghur population. Lin also serves as a Deputy Director of the NPC Ethnic Affairs Committee.

Other members of the UFWD leadership include Chen Xiaojiang (June 1962), ministerial-level Executive Deputy Director; Shen Ying (May 1965), ministerial-level Party Secretary of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce; Chen Xu (July 1963), ministerial-level Director of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office; and Ma Lihuai (December 1968).

Ma Xingrui (October 1959) is the Party Secretary of Xinjiang and, like every officeholder since 2002, sits on the Politburo, a sign of the importance of the region’s geopolitical location, social stability, and natural resource to the central leadership. Ma was previously Governor of Guangdong, an economic and trade powerhouse. His appointment in September 2021 coincided with a gradual shift away from mass internment of ethnic minorities to employment programs aimed at boosting economic development, although allegations of forced labor make this new phase no less troubling. Indeed, Ma promised no wavering on the region’s stability-first policies, saying he would “firmly promote continuous and long-term social stability in Xinjiang and never allow any reversal for the hard-won stability.” Ma is an aerospace engineer and spent most of his career as an academic and then as an executive at the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation. He is associated with a group of aerospace technocrats that Xi has promoted up the party ranks, seemingly because their institutions have been bright spots in achieving innovation breakthroughs and political discipline.

Erkin Tuniyaz (December 1961) is the Governor of Xinjiang. Tuniyaz, like every Governor of the region, is an ethnic Uyghur, but his identity has not influenced his cooperation with Beijing’s assimilationist politics. He has spent his career working in local government in his native Xinjiang, mostly working on personnel issues in the regional organization department, and served as Deputy Governor from 2008 to 2021. Shohrat Zakir (August 1953), who preceded Tuniyaz as Governor from 2015 to 2021, is the highest-ranking Uyghur in the political system, as he is one of 14 deputy national-level Vice Chairmen of the NPCSC, which usually reserves a spot for both a Uyghur and a Tibetan representative.

The position of Party Secretary of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps is currently vacant. Xue Bin (April 1966) is Commander of the XPCC. He is a registered urban planner who worked in Xinjiang local government since graduating from university in 1987, first as an urban planner and then as a local leader since 2002.

Wang Junzheng (May 1963) is Party Secretary of Tibet. He was promoted to the role in September 2021 after almost three years in Xinjiang, where he was Li Yifei’s predecessor as XPCC Political Commissar and Party Secretary. Wang’s role in Xinjiang at the height of the mass internment raised fears that Beijing wanted to implement the system in Tibet; this has not happened, although there are reports of forced labor programs. Most of his career has been as a local government leader, with previous stints in Yunnan, Hubei (where he worked under Xi loyalist Li Hongzhong), and Jilin. He was elevated to full membership in the 20th Central Committee after serving as an alternate member of the 19th Central Committee.

Yan Jinhai (March 1962) is Governor of Tibet. Like all officeholders, he is an ethnic Tibetan, although he is unusual in being only the third governor since 1981 to not come from the Tibet Autonomous Region. Yan hails from the adjacent province of Qinghai, where he spent the first 38 years of his local government career. During that time, he led Tibetan autonomous prefectures in Qinghai under the provincial leadership of Zhao Leji, Xi’s ally on the PSC who served as CPPCC Chairman from 2018 to 2023. Yan’s predecessor, Che Dalha, whom he replaced in October 2021, is also an ethnic Tibetan, but not from the official region of Tibet. Losang Jamcan (July 1957), who served as Governor from 2013 to 2017, is an NPCSC Vice Chairman and therefore the highest-ranking ethnic Tibetan.

Zhang Yijiong (October 1955) is Director of the CPPCC Ethnic and Religious Affairs Committee. Zhang is a Han official whose ancestry is in Shanghai, but, like Yan Jinhai, he spent most of his career in Qinghai, where he also worked under Zhao Leji. He then worked as Deputy Party Secretary of Tibet, Governor of Jiangxi, and UFWD Executive Deputy Director from 2012 to 2022.

Bayanqolu (October 1955) is Director of the NPC Ethnic Affairs Committee. He is an ethnic Mongolian who worked in Inner Mongolia for two decades, then transferred to Zhejiang, where he served on the provincial standing committee while Xi was Party Secretary. He later worked in Jilin, where at different times he held all four provincial-level leadership roles.

Policy

Hong Kong

Xi’s authoritative report to the 20th Party Congress in October 2022 suggested that the “one country, two systems” model for governing Hong Kong and Macao will increasingly resemble “one country, one system.” He called for measures to “implement the Party Central Committee’s overall power to govern,” to ensure that only “patriots rule Hong Kong,” and to implement local laws that “safeguard national security.” John Lee’s first term as Chief Executive will likely see him try to enact a local version of Beijing’s National Security Law under Article 23 of Hong Kong’s Basic Law, a measure that is likely to further erode political freedoms, rule of law, and the integrity of the civil service.

Xi is undeterred by US sanctions against several Chinese and Hong Kong officials involved in the National Security Law. In his report, he said that the party would “form a broader United Front in support of ‘one country, two systems’ at home and abroad,” suggesting more active efforts under Wang Huning and Shi Taifeng to co-opt and coerce the local and foreign population of Hong Kong to accept and advance Beijing’s rule. He also said that the party will “fight against anti-China and chaotic forces in Hong Kong” and “prevent and curb the intervention of external forces in Hong Kong affairs,” suggesting more belligerence in responding to foreign critiques of Beijing’s policies.

Xi said that Beijing was committed to deepening Hong Kong’s economic and social ties to the mainland, including through Greater Bay Area projects, and to improving Hong Kong’s position in international finance, trade, transport, innovation, and culture. But Xi’s focus on security above rule of law means that Hong Kong’s status as a global finance hub is likely to diminish, although for the foreseeable future, the territory will maintain a significant but narrower role as a capital gateway for China.

Beijing is trying to focus on improving economic development and social services in Hong Kong as important ways to consolidate support for the pro-Beijing establishment. In July 2022, Xi visited Hong Kong to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the handover and told his audience that “what the people of Hong Kong desire most is a better life, a bigger apartment, more business start-up opportunities, better education for kids, and better elderly care.” A priority of Lee’s administration is to address sky-high property prices and extreme economic inequality.

Xinjiang and Tibet

Revelations began to emerge in 2017 that the party was operating extrajudicial detention camps (euphemistically labeled “vocational training centers”) in Xinjiang, where an estimated one to two million people have been held and sometimes tortured based on notional allegations of “extremism.” The party also instituted a labor transfer program that has reportedly displaced hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs, especially in the Uyghur-dominated south, and sent them to undertake forced labor in factories elsewhere in Xinjiang or around China. In response, the United States has issued denunciations and findings of genocide, imposed economic sanctions on several Xinjiang leaders, and banned the import of Xinjiang products presumed to be made with forced labor. China responded by enacting its own reciprocal sanctions on individuals in the United States and several other sanctioning countries.

In the last couple of years, there seem to have been some changes in emphasis, if not any major shifts in policy, regarding Xinjiang. In July 2022, on an inspection tour of Xinjiang, Xi reportedly did not mention the “terrorism, extremism, and separatism” that had motivated the internment program. He also made no references to “vocational training centers” or labor transfer programs. Chen Quanguo, Ma Xingrui’s predecessor as regional Party Secretary, left the position shortly after and went into political limbo for six months before being demoted and left out of the new Politburo. Xi’s report said that “forces of ethnic division, religious extremism, and violent terrorism have been effectively curbed.” Yet, even if Beijing’s tactics have softened somewhat, the strategy of Han supremacy remains the same.

Xi’s approach to Xinjiang is emblematic of a seismic shift in the party’s attitude toward ethnic minorities, from a “first-generation ethnic policy” that supported a degree of cultural autonomy to a “second-generation ethnic policy” that emphasizes cultural assimilation with the Han majority. At the Third Central Symposium on Xinjiang Work in September 2020, Xi praised the party’s work on ethnic affairs in Xinjiang as “perfectly right,” demanded that all party members support this work in Xinjiang, and hailed the region’s move toward greater development and “long-term peace and stability.” He emphasized efforts to heighten a sense of identity with the Chinese nation, especially through the education of young people and local officials. The impetus for this change appears to be a belief among Xi and other party leaders that cultural autonomy was feeding aspirations of political independence and encouraging what they saw as terrorism, such as deadly Han-Uyghur clashes in Urumqi in July 2009, a van attack in Tiananmen Square in October 2013, and a knife massacre in Kunming Train Station in March 2014. Still, only a tiny number of extremists pursued violence, and they never seriously threatened Beijing’s rule.

Tibet

Tibet has not seen the same social unrest or internment policies as Xinjiang in recent years and has become somewhat less of a focus of international human rights activism. The CCP’s last major policy statement on Tibet came at the Seventh Central Symposium on Tibet Work in August 2020. Xi vowed then to build a “new modern socialist Tibet that is united, prosperous, culturally advanced, harmonious and beautiful,” facilitated by patriotic education reforms to “plant the seeds of loving China deep in the heart of every youth.” Xi also stirred controversy with his call for the party to “actively guide Tibetan Buddhism to adapt to the socialist society and promote the Sinicization of Tibetan Buddhism.”

Xi’s signature emphasis on the “Sinicization” of religion represents an effort to reform or mold the belief systems and doctrines of China’s permitted religious faiths into compliance with socialist values and party leadership. As early as 2015, he called for the Sinicization of five religions: Buddhism, Daoism, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Islam. Xi appears to view the Sinicization of Tibetan Buddhism as linked to his calls for opposing “splittism” and building “an impregnable fortress” of stability in the Tibet Autonomous Region and Tibetan autonomous areas in Sichuan, Yunnan, Gansu, and Qinghai. The next major flashpoint between Beijing and Tibet will likely be the selection of the next Dalai Lama, as the party will conduct its own process that will clash with that of Tibetan Buddhist authorities in India. There is no way to know when this will happen, but the current Dalai Lama turns 88 in 2023.

Provincial Leaders

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All politics is local, and China is no exception. Central authorities in Beijing make policies but it is mostly up to local authorities to implement those policies across a country of nearly 3.7 million square miles and with over 1.4 billion people. Mainland China’s 31 provincial-level governments are the most powerful local authorities and hold significant responsibility for interpreting central directives, adapting them to local conditions, and spending the money necessary to make them happen. Provincial leadership is a testing ground for national office and several current leaders could serve on the elite Politburo or even the top Politburo Standing Committee in the coming years and decades.

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