In Beijing a decade ago, the most popular game among "China-watchers" involved speculation about the leadership shuffle expected at the seventeeth congress of the Communist Party of China, due in 2007. Both inside and outside China, lists of potential new leaders began to circulate. These often differed significantly, according to the judgment of the consultants, analysts and observers who produced them. But everyone did agree on one thing: what was about to happen marked a generational change in elite politics in the People’s Republic of China. New leaders would indeed start to emerge in 2007, and most likely they would be elevated to the top positions five years later, at the eighteenth congress in 2012. All this came to pass exactly as was foreseen.
The party is now due to hold the nineteenth congress by the end of 2017, which might be a reminder to China-watchers to get out the game-board. Yet there is a striking difference from 2006. Around that time, the same few names kept cropping up for the top slots. Li Keqiang had figured in speculation since the early 2000s, when he was spoken of somewhat loosely as a protégé of Hu Jintao, the then president. Li Yuanchao emerged a little later, favoured because of his liberal reign in Jiangsu, but also because he had an elitist background of a kind then seemingly coming back into favour. Xi Jinping’s name arose only late in the day – some time around 2005. A decade ago, plenty would have put good money on the two Li’s being victorious.
Today, by contrast, it would be hard to produce a neat list of possible candidates for promotion. And this is revealing about Xi Jinping's leadership style. His predecessor Hu Jintao was clearly a man for procedure. That lay behind the fashionable talk of "intra-party democracy", whose real aim was to make the party’s governance of itself more predictable, institutionalised and stable. In the wider society, the party was no more willing to cede space to rights lawyers, dissidents and civil-society groups than it is today. What was different was the desire inside the party itself to have some of that "democracy" stuff – just as long as this didn’t involve multi-party outcomes and a challenge to the party’s monopoly of power.
