Chinese Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping, who clinched the title of President for the third term in China, has picked loyalists from different phases of his career in order to assemble an entirely new Communist Party Politburo for his third term, ensuring no dominant force within leadership and practise fiery diplomacy.
The CCP Chairman chose members from different phases and unrelated to each other to ensure they not only foster loyalty to Xi but also encourage competition for limited posts at the top, Nikkei Asia reported.
Xi Jinping’s historic third term as China’s President will likely see more hardline policies out of Beijing on the economy, foreign relations and human rights, analysts told Washington-based Radio Free Asia (RFA).
After being elected to China’s third term as president, Xi has already begun to expel the party’s veteran leaders.
Xi had packed the Politburo Standing Committee with his close allies showing that he can now act as he pleases, according to Germany-based ethnic Mongolian rights activist Xi Haiming. “This is the last madness,” Xi Haiming told a recent political forum in Taiwan. He said, “Xi has emerged, naked, as Emperor Xi, as a dictator.”
Out of the 24 members which were revealed during the party congress to take their positions in Xi Jinping’s new team, 18 were either connected or owed their promotion to the president whereas the remaining five were technocrats from the health, foreign and other ministries and extremely loyal to Xi, reported Nikkei Asia.
Notably, Chongqing party chief Chen Min’er and Li Qiang, former Shanghai party chief who joined the Politburo Standing Committee at the latest congress and is expected to become the next premier, worked with Xi in Zhejiang. The Politburo Standing Committee member Cai Qi and former Chinese propaganda chief Huang Kunming overlapped with Xi in both Fujian and Zhejiang.
Moreover, Ding Xuexiang, who recently joined the Politburo Standing Committee, worked under Xi as the party secretary-general in Shanghai.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has shown at the 20th National Congress that Chairman Xi Jinping is the center of Chinese power and that no one will dare challenge him.
In order to demonstrate that he may now act whenever he pleases, Xi packed the Politburo Standing Committee with his close cronies, claims ethnic Mongolian rights campaigner Xi Haiming, who lives in Germany.
A Chinese journalist, who wished to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation, claimed that China is now firmly back in the Mao era.