A who’s who of reshuffled provincial leaders sheds light on the president’s effort to remake party leadership. The top officials of influential regions are all but guaranteed a seat on the 200-plus-member Central Committee at a twice-in-a-decade meeting next year. If they get there at a young enough age, they can aspire to the highest levels, even becoming potential Xi successors.
“The recently promoted officials have a good chance to break into higher-ranking party circles at the party congress next year,” said Huang Weiping, director of Shenzhen University’s Contemporary Chinese Politics Research Institute. Their prospects “also look promising” for 2022, he said, when China is expected to anoint its next top leader.
The president’s reshuffle effort is still ongoing ahead of an annual party meeting in October, with 17 of 31 top regional officials replaced since April. Massive changes in the party’s senior ranks are expected in the lead up to next year’s party congress. While not all promoted leaders have explicit personal connections to Xi, the maneuvering reflect his leadership style.
The June appointment of Li Qiang — Zhejiang’s former No. 2 — to lead neighboring Jiangsu province was among the most eye-catching. Li was promoted in 2004 to secretary of Zhejiang’s provincial party committee, which was headed by Xi.
Li’s efforts to develop “small-town economies,” or clusters of high-tech and innovation-focused businesses, received a personal endorsement last September from Xi’s finance-and-economic chief, Liu He. Li has a weighty gig in Jiangsu, a coastal province with an economy larger than Indonesia’s where seven high-ranking officials have fallen to corruption probes since Xi came to power.
Several officials who worked under Xi during his brief stint in the financial hub of Shanghai in 2007 were also promoted. Du Jiahao, who oversaw the Pudong district’s development as a financial and trade center, was appointed party secretary of central Hunan province. The Shanghai native rides a bicycle to work to get to know the place and has pledged to help win Xi’s battle for “supply-side” reform.
Some promotions broke with past patterns. The party secretary job in Tibet went to the Himalayan region’s relatively unknown deputy leader, Wu Yingjie. Unlike each of his nine predecessors since 1980 who were parachuted in from other regions, Wu boasts deep experience in Tibet and arrived there when Mao Zedong was still alive. At his inauguration last month, Wu pledged to fulfill Xi’s “deep hope” for Tibet.