Earlier this month, at the close of the Chinese Communist Party’s 5th Plenum, the official People’s Daily noted on its website that as this...
Fourteen months after the watershed 18th Chinese Communist Party Congress, President Xi Jinping has emerged as a strongman more powerful than ex-presidents Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao.
A look at what Xi has done so far and what is on the horizon, including environmental and economic reforms. loosening media restrictions, and Xi’s formally replacing Hu Jintao as president.
In traditional Chinese religion, a fashi, or ritual master, will recite a set of phrases to turn an ordinary space into a sacred area where the gods can descend to receive prayers and rejuvenate the community. The ceremony can last days...
A doctored photo of China's top officials doing a popular South Korean dance went viral 'til Chinese censors pulled it down.
Over the past twenty years, economist Zhang Zhuoyuan has witnessed and actively participated in building the nation’s economic policy.
He participated in the drafting of reports at each of the Communist Party’s three previous national...
When it was all over this morning, and the seven men had returned once again to the secluded backstage of the Great Hall of the People, trailed by their security, and the stage where they had stood was suddenly empty. I walked up to the spot...
After years of neglect, the environment is gradually gaining more attention from China’s leaders. The most noticeable manifestation of this is in their vocabulary.
Six months ago, Hu Jintao, speaking at the opening of a study session for...
After years of parsing China's political jargon, I wasn't expecting anything dramatic from the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, which opened in Beijing last week. It was foolish, I knew, to look for bold statements on the...
Dozens of the more than 2,000 party delegates, among them Chairman Mao's grandson, are using social media to wax rhapsodic about China's rise and Party General Secretary Hu Jintao's live 90-minute reading of highlights from this year's party work...
Just a little more than a week after the American presidential election, China will choose its own leaders in its own highly secretive way entirely inside the Communist Party. What’s at stake for China—and for the rest of the world—is not just...
Jiang Zemin, the former Chinese president who was said to have fallen gravely ill in July,...
As China launched its 18th ...
My preliminary conclusion: conservative forces within the Party are still very powerful. According to the line marked out by the political report to the 18th National Congress, there is very little prospect that substantive moves will be made on...
The world's other superpower is having its own “election” this week. And if all goes according to plan, on Nov. 14 nine (or seven) men (and possibly one woman) will stride across the stage in Beijing’s massive Great Hall of the People as the new...
Capping 10 careful years at the helm of the Communist Party, China’s top leader...
Now that the U.S. election is behind us, time to turn to the next most important political transition in years: the Chinese Communist Party's 18th Congress. Seventeen congresses have gone by and hardly anyone has paid much attention, including...
If this list turns out to be true, it signals that a more meaningful generational transition is most likely to take place at the 19th congress in 2017, when more youthful officials would be elected into the Standing Committee.
It also...
As China's capital steels itself for the 18th Party Congress, the government is cracking down on balloons, homing pigeons, Ping-Pong balls and remote-control toy airplanes, anything that could potentially carry protest messages and mar the...
As Beijing enters extreme lock-down prior to the 18th National Party Congress...
With less than two weeks to go before the Eighteenth Party Congress, speculation on China’s upcoming leadership transition could not be more intense here in Beijing, where insiders are trading lists of potential Politburo Standing Committee (PBSC...
After China's Golden Week holiday, a round-up of important recent stories on economy and politics.
On the question of political reform, there is one important terminology in particular we should remain alert to if we hope to read, between the lines as it were, the larger political climate of the 18th National Congress: the “Four Basic...
The composition of the new Politburo that will take power in late 2012, including generational attributes and individual idiosyncratic characteristics, group dynamics, and the factional balance of power, will have profound implications for China’...
From a procedural perspective, the removal of Bo Xilai from Chongqing and from the party Politburo resembles the 2006 purge of Shanghai party boss Chen Liangyu and the 1995 takedown of Beijing City party chief Chen Xitong. Bo’s removal in that...
The unexpected flight of Chongqing’s Public Security head to the U.S. consulate in Chengdu in February started an unexpected sequence of events that led to the removal of Bo Xilai, the princeling head of the Chongqing party committee, and the...
The composition of the new Politburo that will take power in late 2012, including generational attributes and individual idiosyncratic characteristics, group dynamics, and the factional balance of power, will have profound implications for China’...
It may be true, as is often observed, that if all the world’s economists were laid end to end, they would never reach a conclusion. It is all the more notable, therefore, that an increasing number of observers of China’s economy are skeptical...
In September 2011, a protest in a Guangdong village threatened to embarrass the province and its party secretary, Wang Yang, who is a candidate for membership on the powerful Politburo Standing Committee when the 18th Party Congress meets later...
As China’s 18th Party Congress looms, it is clear that we are now in the thick of transition. The impending transition creates uncertainty about China’s future, but it also opens up new possibilities. Already, the discussion of economic policies...
By now, just about every China observer knows that the Chinese leadership will undergo a major generational change at the 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in the fall of 2012. Knowledge of the leadership transition’s actual...
The recent scheduling of the Chinese Communist Party’s 18th National Congress kicks off the long process of preparations for what will bring about a turnover in leadership generations next year. National party congresses are the most important...
Liu Yuan and Xi Jinping clearly share a great deal in common. Both were born to senior CCP cadres, and are members of the elite “princelings” cohort. Yet both men’s fathers were subjected to purge and mistreatment during the late Mao era, and...
