This week, some 370 top officials in China’s Communist Party are meeting in Beijing to hammer out the country’s next five-year plan. They’re expected to discuss household spending, old-age care and robots, among other things. I talked to my colleague Chris Buckley, who has covered China for more than two decades, about one subject that won’t be discussed but is on many people’s minds: Who will succeed President Xi Jinping?
Mao Zedong ruled until he died at 82, badly incapacitated by illness. One change that his successor, Deng Xiaoping, put in place was a two-term limit for Chinese presidents. Deng’s own successor, Jiang Zemin, added a mandatory retirement age for top politicians. He set it at 70, and then lowered it to 68, though he made an exception for himself.
Xi Jinping has scrapped both requirements. At 72, he’s younger than President Trump (79) and Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin (73). But in the absence of any mechanism requiring Xi to leave office, the question of who might take over from him — and when — is only becoming more relevant. Chris recently wrote a story about what he called the “forbidden question.”
So Chris, will Xi be the one to see this next five-year plan to completion?
I’m pretty confident he will.
And when we look at Xi’s rhetoric and his policies, they speak to ambitions and a vision for China that covers 2035 and beyond. That’s a signal that, health permitting, he would like to stick around.
Has he talked about succession plans at all?
No. It’s one of those taboos in Chinese politics. He doesn’t talk about it. Nobody really talks about it. But people read between the lines. And we don’t see any likely successors to Xi in the central leadership at the moment.
It takes years to put people in place so they can be given the right experiences and the right assignments. And given that we don’t see younger people taking up those key positions, we can assume the process is not underway yet. Xi hasn’t even begun making those early moves on the chessboard.
Why do you think he’s so reluctant to choose a successor?
There are reasons that are simply part of the arithmetic of politics everywhere. Once you name a successor, people’s attention and perhaps even their loyalty begin to drift.
Some people may think it’s entirely cynical, but there is a strong current in Xi that believes he is a man of destiny, that he is a leader who has been appointed at a time of opportunity and danger to ensure that China and the Communist Party survive and thrive. That sense of historical mission matters if you want to understand Xi Jinping.
How different is this from what past Chinese leaders did?
In some ways, what Xi is doing has broken the pattern that was beginning to form under his most recent predecessors. Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin both stepped down after around a decade in power — a bit longer for Jiang. (Xi has been in power since late 2012.)
Hu encouraged this idea that even if China hadn’t democratized, it had modernized to become more collective, more rules-driven and more predictable. Hu was very much focused on a clean handoff of power to his successor, who happened to be Xi.
Xi came into power, and it became clear that he believed this collectivist leadership was a mistake — that it had encouraged factionalism within the party, corruption, disrespect for the central leader and ultimately for the party itself. So Xi has gone back to a kind of centralized, unconstrained leadership that we saw in different ways under Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. But that makes succession trickier.
How do you think this is affecting Chinese politics?
At the moment, Xi is so powerful, and there doesn’t seem to be any sign of him stepping down any time soon.
But say five, 10 years hence, people inside the system might start thinking more about the long-term stability of this arrangement and wondering whether by pushing off this process, Xi is sowing the seeds of potential instability. Eventually, Xi’s age will force the issue into officials’ minds, even if they can’t do anything about it. It may be that rivalries emerge between different potential successors’ camps.
The refusal of old leaders to cede power was a theme in Soviet politics, right? And it may have accelerated the end of the Soviet Union?
Xi is a very attentive student of Soviet history. And he blames the downfall of the Soviet Union essentially on selecting the wrong leader — Mikhail Gorbachev — who turned out to be a revisionist reformer.
But while it’s true that the Chinese leadership is getting older, it’s far from a complete gerontocracy. The leadership is now cultivating and promoting officials who were born in the 1970s. There are young officials in their 40s, even their 30s, emerging into powerful positions at the provincial and city level.
So there’s an awareness of the need for generational replenishment — as long as that doesn’t apply to Xi Jinping.
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MORE TOP NEWS
Japan’s first female prime minister
Japanese lawmakers yesterday elected Sanae Takaichi, a hard-line conservative, as the country’s first female prime minister.
Takaichi, 64, defies easy labels. She has said she is concerned about Japan’s reliance on the U.S., but also hopes to work closely with Trump. She has embraced hawkish policies on China, played down Japan’s atrocities during World War II and promised to strictly regulate immigration and tourism. Many Japanese women say they hope Takaichi will help normalize the image of strong female leaders, but she is not known as a feminist.
My colleague Javier Hernández, our Tokyo bureau chief, explains in the video above how Takaichi’s rise to power reflects a shift to the right in Japan.
No progress toward a cease-fire in Ukraine
A White House official said yesterday that Trump no longer planned to meet with Putin in “the immediate future,” after the Kremlin made clear it had no intention of making a deal to end the war in Ukraine.
The announcement punctured the rosy picture that Trump had presented just five days before, after he spoke on the telephone with Putin and said the two would meet soon in Budapest.
The day after the two leaders spoke, Trump held a contentious meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine that also seemed to produce little progress. Zelensky later told European leaders, who yesterday restated their support for an immediate cease-fire, that the U.S. president had unsuccessfully pressed him to hand over territory to end the war.
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Prosecutors in Ecuador have decided not to charge a man who survived a U.S. military attack in the Caribbean Sea last week.
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The Paris prosecutor said that jewels stolen from the Louvre had been valued at 88 million euros.
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Eric Lu, a 27-year-old American pianist, won the top prize at the International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw.
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The U.S. and Australia want to loosen China’s grip on the global supply of rare earths. Here’s how.
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As the trade war with the U.S. heats up, China’s booming factories come to flex at the world’s largest wholesale market.
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Daniel Naroditsky, an American who earned the title of chess grandmaster at 17, died. He was 29.
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Football: What is going wrong for Alexander Isak at Liverpool?
Formula 1: Red Bull was fined 50,000 euros for interfering with McLaren’s grid tape.
Baseball: The Toronto Blue Jays are going to the World Series. They play their first game against the Los Angeles Dodgers on Friday.
NUMBER OF THE DAY
45 million
— The number of people with accounts on MAX, the Kremlin’s alternative to WhatsApp and Telegram, according to the app’s parent company. That’s nearly a third of the Russian population.
MORNING READ
Italians love their national cuisine, but many now complain that Italy’s city centers are being overwhelmed by restaurants that cater mostly to tourists.
In Bologna and Rome, critics say streets are being turned into endless open-air restaurants specializing in Instagrammable carbonara. In Florence, the authorities have banned new restaurants on more than 50 streets. Officials and residents worry that too many touristy restaurants could ultimately turn Italy into a caricature of itself. Read more.
AROUND THE WORLD
What they’re admiring in … Amsterdam
The lavish dining rooms are stocked with porcelain dishes, jugs and vases made of handblown glass. But no one could ever dine here. The largest item on the table is barely a centimeter wide. The tiniest — a teacup — is no bigger than a pushpin.
This is the 17th-century dollhouse that Petronella Oortman, the wife of a wealthy silk merchant, filled with exquisite miniature furnishings. Made by specialized craftspeople, the dollhouse once cost as much as a real mansion on one of Amsterdam’s canals. It’s now a centerpiece of a new exhibition at the Rijksmuseum. Take a look.
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RECIPE
In Korean culture, people eat seaweed soup, or miyeok guk, on birthdays not just to celebrate their own birth, but also to show gratitude for their mothers. This version replaces the more common beef broth with one made from mussels, onion, garlic and anchovies. Scooped out of their shells, the mussels become little nuggets of briny joy.
WHERE IS THIS?
Can you guess where this hair salon is?
TIME TO PLAY
Here are today’s Spelling Bee, Mini Crossword, Wordle and Sudoku. Find all our games here.
You’re done for today. See you tomorrow! — Katrin
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Katrin Bennhold is the host of The World, the flagship global newsletter of The New York Times.
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