Episode Notes:

A discussion of the recently concluded 20th Party Congress and what to expect ahead in US China relations. I'm pleased to welcome back Chris Johnson, CEO of Consultancy China Strategies Group, Senior Fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute Center for China Analysis and former Senior China analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. This is the 7th Party Congress that Chris has analyzed professionally.

Links:

John Culver: How We Would Know When China Is Preparing to Invade Taiwan - Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Transcript:

Bill: Welcome back to the very occasional Sinocism podcast. Today we are going to talk about the recently concluded 20th Party Congress and what to expect ahead in US China relations. I'm pleased to welcome back Chris Johnson, CEO of Consultancy China Strategies Group, Senior Fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute Center for China Analysis and former Senior China analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. This is the 7th Party Congress that Chris has analyzed professionally. So we have a lot of experience here to help us understand what just happened. Chris, welcome back and thanks for taking the time.

Chris: My pleasure. Always fun to be with you, Bill.

Bill: Great. Well, why don't we jump right in. I'd like to talk about what you see as the most important outcomes from the Congress starting with personnel. What do you make of the leadership team from the central committee to the Politburo to the Standing Committee and what does that say about.

Chris: Yeah, well, I, think clearly Xi Jinping had a massive win, you know, with personnel. I think we see this particularly in the Politburo Standing Committee, right, where on the key portfolios that really matter to him in terms of controlling the key levers of power inside the system. So we're talking propaganda, obviously, Uh, we're talking party bureaucracy, military less so, but security services, you know, these, these sort of areas all up and down the ballot he did very well.

So that's obviously very important. And I think obviously then the dropping of the so-called Communist Youth League faction oriented people in Li Keqiang and Wang Yang and, and Hu Chunhua being kind of unceremoniously kicked off the Politburo, that tells us that. He's not in the mood to compromise with any other interest group.

I prefer to call them rather than factions. Um, so that sort of suggests to us that, you know, models that rely on that kind of an analysis are dead. It has been kind of interesting in my mind to see how quickly though that, you know, analysts who tend to follow that framework already talking about the, uh, factional elements within Xi's faction, right?

So, you know, it's gonna be the Shanghai people versus the Zhijiang Army versus the Fujian people.

On Wang Huning

Bill: people say there's a Tsinghua faction

Chris: Right. The, the infamous, non infamous Tsinghua clique and, and and so on. But I think as we look more closely, I mean this is all kidding aside, if we look more closely at the individuals, what we see is obviously these people, you know, loyalty to Xi is, is sort of like necessary, but not necessarily sufficient in explaining who these people are. Also, I just always find it interesting, you know, somehow over. Wang Huning has become a Xi Jinping loyalist. I mean, obviously he plays an interesting role for Xj Jinping, but I don't think we should kid ourselves in noting that he's been kind of shunted aside Right by being pushed into the fourth position on the standing committee, which probably tells us that he will be going to oversee the Chinese People's Consultative Congress, which is, you know, kind of a do nothing body, you know, for the most part. And, um, you know, my sense has long been, One of Xi Jinping’s, I think a couple factors there with Wang Huning.

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One is, you know, yes, he is very talented at sort of taking their very, uh, expansive, um, theoretical ideas and coming up with snappy, um, snappy sort of catchphrases, right? This is clearly his, um, his sort of claim to fame. But, you know, we had that article last year from the magazine, Palladium that kind of painted him as some sort of an éminence grise or a Rasputin like figure, you know, in terms of his role.

Uh, you know, my sense has always been, uh, as one contact, put it to me one time. You know, the issue is that such analyses tend to confuse the musician with the conductor. In other words, Xi Jinping. is pretty good at ideology, right? And party history and the other things that I think the others had relied on.

I think the second thing with Wang Huning is, um, in a way XI can't look at him I don't think, without sort of seeing here's a guy who's changed flags, as they would say, right? He served three very different leaders, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and now Xi , um, and, and continued on and I think at some level, uh, and we look at the rest of the appointments where it appears that, uh, loyalty was much more important than merit.

Um, where that's also a question mark. So there's those issues I think on the Politburo. You know, you mentioned the, the Tsinghua clique it was very interesting. You had shared with me, uh, Desmond Shum of Red Roulette fame’s Twitter stream sort of debunking, you know, this, this Tsinghua clique and saying, well, it turns out in fact that the new Shanghai Municipal Party Secretary Chen Jining can't stand Chen Xi, even though, you know, they both went to Tsinghua and were there at the same time and so on.

Um, you know, who knows with Desmond Shum, but I think he knows some things, right? And, and, and it just a reminder to us all, I think, how little we understand right, about these relationships, especially now, uh, with Xi's concentration of power. And also a situation where we've had nearly three years of covid isolation

Bill: Right. And so it's really hard to go talk to people, even the fewer and fewer numbers, people who, who know something and can talk. Back to the standing committee. I, I think certainly just from friends and contacts the biggest surprise you know, I think, uh was Li Keqiang and Wang Yang not sticking around. And as that long explainer said without naming them they were good comrades who steps aside for the good of the party in the country,

Chris: Because that happens so often,

Bill: whatever that means. Um, but really the, the bigger surprise was that, oh, Cai Qi showing up. Who I think when you look at the standing committee, I think the general sense is, okay, the, these people are all, you know, not, they're loyal, but they're also competent, like Li Qiang,

Chris: Right,

Bill: The likely new premier number two on the standing committee is pretty competent. The Shanghai lockdown, disaster aside, Cai Qi on the other hand, was just, looks more like, it's just straight up loyalty to Xi. I think he was not really on anybody's short list of who was gonna make it on there. And so, it does feel like something happened, right?

Chris: Yeah. Well, um, a couple things there. I think, um, one, let's start with the. The issue you raised about the economic team cuz I think that's actually very important. Um, you know, I, at some level, sometimes I feel like I'm sort of tiring my, of my role as official narrative buster or a windmill tilter.

Uh, whether, whether it's pushback from Li Keqiang or the myth of the savior premier as I was calling it, which, uh, we didn't see, or that these norms actually aren't very enduring and it's really about power politics. I, I think I'm kind of onto a new one now, which is, you know, Xi Jin ping's new team of incompetent sycophants.

Right? That's kind of the label that's, uh, come out in a lot of the takes, uh, since the Congress. But to your point, I mean, you know, Li Qiang has run the three most important economic powerhouses on China's east coast, either as governor or as party chief. Right. He seems to have had a, a good relationship with both.

Private sector businesses and, and foreign, you know, people forget that, you know, he got the Tesla plant built in Shanghai in a year basically. Right. And it's, uh, responsible for a very significant amount of, of Tesla's total input of vehicles. Output of vehicles. Excuse me. Um, likewise, I hear that Ding Xuexiang, even though we don't know a lot about him, uh, was rather instrumental in things.

Breaking the log jam with the US uh, over the de-listing of Chinese ADRs, uh, that he had played an important role in convincing Xi Jinping it would not be a good idea, for example, to, uh, you know, we're already seeing, uh, sort of decoupling on the technology side. It would not be a good idea to encourage the Americans to decouple financially as well. So the point is I think we need to just all kind of calm down, right? And, and see how these people perform in office. He Lifeng, I think is perhaps, you know, maybe more of a question mark, but, But here too, I think it's important for us to think about how their system works

The political report sets the frame, right? It tells us what. Okay, this is the ideological construct we're working off of, or our interpretation, our dialectical interpretation of what's going on. And that, I think the signal there was what I lik...