Fewsmith in Bloomberg on China’s Party Congress
Joseph Fewsmith, Professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, was recently interviewed on the twice-a-decade National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party that will be held next fall.
Fewsmith was quoted in an Oct. 20, 2016 article in Bloomberg entitled “The Prospect of the Party Congress in Fall 2017 is Already Roiling Politics.”
From the text of the article:
Either Hu Chunhua or Sun Zhengcai, Guangdong and Chongqing party secretaries, respectively, were once considered potential successors to Mr Xi and Mr Li, but that’s no longer clear. “They just don’t seem to be people favoured by Xi,” says Joseph Fewsmith, a political scientist at Boston University. “And if it’s not them, then you would assume Xi would need to appoint other young people in their stead for a new leader to be ready.” If Mr Xi proves powerful enough at the 19th Congress, he could sideline the two and opt for cadres who worked under him when he was party secretary of Zhejiang province from 2002 to 2007.
Should Mr Xi stay on as party secretary beyond 2022 he’ll have broken the Deng-instituted restriction on serving more than two terms. But Mr Xi has shown little respect for what were seen as inviolate rules. In his anticorruption drive, he’s taken down a former Standing Committee member, previously a taboo. He clipped the wings of the military, with dozens of generals detained or convicted in the past three years. He dissolved the army’s once-powerful four departments of staff, politics, armaments, and logistics and spread their functions across 15 new bodies that are directly controlled by the Central Military Commission. If Mr Xi doesn’t appoint an obvious successor next year, he “will set up a lot of speculation,” says Mr Fewsmith of Boston University.
You can read the entire article here.
Fewsmith is Professor of International Relations and Political Science at Boston University. He is the author or editor of eight books, including, most recently, The Logic and Limits of Political Reform in China (January 2013). Fewsmith travels to China regularly and is active in the Association for Asian Studies and the American Political Science Association. Learn more about him here.