Expert view: Xi Jinping may rewrite power transition rules

The 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party – an event that happens only every five years – begins on Wednesday (18 October). China's leadership will be selected at the five-day event, which will be attended by 2287 delegates from around China. Stephen Noakes, Lecturer of Chinese Politics at the University of Auckland, writes about the transition of power and how President Xi Jinping may continue being in power after his 10-year presidential tenure is up.

OPINION: China's Party Congresses are fundamentally about political transitions.

China's second, and especially third and fourth generations, of leadership have put in place a range of informal mechanisms designed to mitigate the potential effects of factionalism within the Party, and to ensure power passes as smoothly as possible from one generation to the next.

These mechanisms include a percentage turnover in the composition of the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) – the party's highest ruling body – as well as an observed age of retirement for PSC members, and most significantly, the norm of elder leaders ceding power after 10 years as President. 

However, these are informal norms and procedures, not iron-clad laws. So it is not altogether clear whether or how President Xi Jinping will choose to maintain or do away with them.

It is perfectly possible for Xi to remain in power beyond the 10-year limit – while the Presidency is formally limited to two terms, the positions of General Secretary of the CCP and Chairman of the military commission have no formal limits, and one could wield power after ceding the Presidency by retaining these other two positions. 

In general, I think we should expect to see turnover in five of the seven PSC seats, with only Xi and Li Keqiang remaining.

This assumes, of course, that the PSC retains its seven-seat structure, which it may not. If Xi intends to cede power in five years' time, we would expect to see his anointed successor ascend to the PSC next week. There are as yet no clear signs this will happen.

Conventional wisdom would also suggest that the President has to consider factional and regional/ethnic balance in the PSC and within the 25-member Politburo in general, but with power now more concentrated around a single leader than at any point in the last 40 years, it's not clear what the make-up of these bodies will be. 

I would, however, expect that the seniority/retirement rules will still apply – those who ascend to the PSC will be born after 1950.

In a nutshell, the politics of Party Congresses are a black box, about which outsiders can't and don't know until after the fact. In recent history, these gatherings have sought to safeguard CCP power through informal rules, but Xi may ignore these or rewrite them entirely, securing his and the Party's rule through other means.

Views expressed are personal to the author. Read other expert views by New Zealand commentators here.

– Asia Media Centre