The Tiger Hunt

The crackdown launched in late 2012 was not unprecedented. On the contrary, it was the latest in a series of drives against corruption dating back to the founding of the People’s Republic of China and beyond to the early days of the CCP, including the “Three Antis,” “Five Antis,” and “Four Cleans” campaigns in which hundreds of thousands of cadres and officials were subjected to “struggle sessions,” humiliated, and beaten by workers and peasants mobilized by Party work teams.¹⁵ During the post-Mao era, the leadership ordered crackdowns in 1983, 1986, 1989, and 1993. The first three focused primarily on rank-and-file corruption, or what the contemporary China media calls “flies.” The 1993 crackdown shifted the focus to mid-level officials, concentrating on those holding leadership positions at the county/department and prefecture/bureau levels, officials sometimes referred to as “rats” and “wolves” in the Chinese press. The crackdown launched in 2012 shifted the focus to the senior ranks of the Party-state, to officials known as the “tigers.” Officials at this level had not been entirely spared prosecution in the past. Prior to 2012, however, most senior officials charged with corruption had been linked to specific scandals, including the Wuxi Ponzi scheme that brought down Beijing Party secretary and Politburo member Chen Xitong in 1995 and the 2006 Shanghai pension fund scandal that toppled Shanghai Party secretary and Politburo member Chen Liangyu (no relation to Chen Xitong).

The crackdown launched in late 2012 was likely precipitated by two major scandals in 2011 and 2012, one involving Liu Zhijun, the minister of railways, and a second involving Lieutenant General Gu Junshan. Liu was at the center of a web of bribery linked to the construction of China’s sprawling high-speed rail system. Gu was accused of accepting massive kickbacks from real estate developers and being part of an extensive illegal market for promotions in the PLA. The crackdown was then triggered by a scandal involving Chongqing Party secretary Bo Xilai that erupted when Wang Lijun, the recently demoted director of the Chongqing Public Security Bureau, attempted to defect to the United States in early 2012 and accused Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, of murdering an English businessman named Neil Heywood who had been helping her launder bribes paid by businessmen seeking to curry Bo’s favor.

In December 2012, investigators from the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the Party’s internal watchdog, began investigating Li Chuncheng, the deputy secretary of the Sichuan Provincial Party Committee and an alternative member of the 18th CCP Central Committee.¹⁶ A relatively junior member of the Party leadership, Li was a protégé of Zhou Yongkang. Having started his career as a technician and then a junior manager in the state-owned Liaohe oil field, Zhou climbed up the ranks, becoming director of the Liaohe Oil Exploration Bureau in 1983. Two years later, Zhou was appointed a vice minister of the Ministry of Petroleum, which was reorganized into the Chinese National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) in 1988. After serving as the commander of the Tarim Oil Exploration Headquarters and an assistant general manager of CNPC, Zhou was named general manager of the corporation in 1996. Two years later, Zhou was named minister for state land and resources. The following year, he was transferred to Sichuan and named provincial Party secretary. In 2002, Zhou became a member of the Politburo, and the following year he returned to Beijing as minister for public security. At the 17th Party Congress in 2007, Zhou was elected a member of the Politburo Standing Committee and named secretary of the powerful Politics and Law Committee. Having reached the age of seventy in 2012, Zhou retired in the days before the 18th Party Congress.

During 2013, investigators detained an increasing number of officials who had served under Zhou. As each of these “tigers” fell, Party investigators went after their henchmen and cronies in an ever-expanding attack on Zhou’s network of subordinates. Investigators also launched inquiries into Zhou’s family in his hometown of Wuxi, Jiangsu. An investigation into the business dealings of Zhou’s son Zhou Bin quickly grew into a series of investigations of Zhou Bin’s wife and her family, as well as the managers of businesses with ties to Zhou Bin, including Liu Han, the chair of the Sichuan Hanlong Group, a conglomerate with ventures in solar energy, communications, mining, and other industries. Sichuan Hanlong was actually a front for a sprawling criminal syndicate headed by Liu Han and his brother. Zhou Yongkang was placed under investigation in July 2014. He was expelled from the Party and arrested in December 2014. In April 2015, Zhou was convicted on bribery charges and sentenced to life in prison. Because Zhou was the most senior member of the Party leadership and the first former member of the Politburo Standing Committee to be charged with corruption, many observers saw the attack on him and his cronies as politically motivated.

Zhou had been a supporter of Bo Xilai. The son of Bo Yibo, a first-generation Party leader and one of the so-called Eight Immortals who formed the core of Deng Xiaoping’s reform coalition, Bo rose rapidly through the ranks before spending a decade as mayor and then Party secretary of the major port city of Dalian in Liaoning Province. In 2000, Bo was promoted to governor of Liaoning. Four years later, he moved to Beijing as minister for commerce. In 2007, Bo became Party secretary of Chongqing, a provincial-level megacity in southwest China, and was elected to the Politburo. Once in Chongqing, Bo immediately launched a massive assault on Chongqing’s extensive underworld. The “Sweeping the Black” campaign not only netted hundreds of gangsters, it also brought down scores of officials who had provided the “protective umbrellas” under which numerous criminal syndicates operated. Bo also launched a “Singing the Red” neo-Maoist campaign aimed at reviving the traditions of what he and others saw as the “pure” essence of the socialist revolution and attacking the “degenerate” and amoral materialism that liberal reforms has spawned.¹⁷ Because Bo was sixty-three in 2012, it was said that even though he was too old to become general secretary, he was likely to be promoted to the Politburo Standing Committee at the 18th Party Congress in November and that he would become a counterweight to Xi. If so, Bo’s abrupt fall from power following the murder of Neil Heywood and the attempted defection of Wang Lijun “fortuitously” cleared away a potential obstacle to Xi’s consolidation of power after the 18th Party Congress.

In the months after the 18th Party Congress, signs emerged that Party investigators were also going after Ling Jihua. Ling had been director of the Central Committee’s General Office, the agency that oversees the Party leadership’s day-to-day work, including controlling access to the Party’s general secretary. Ling was said to have been Hu Jintao’s “hatchet man.” At the time, it was widely assumed that Ling would be elected to the Politburo at the 18th Party Congress so he could act as Hu’s “eyes and ears” after Hu retired.

Ling’s path into the post-Hu inner circle of power, however, had been thrown into question well before the 18th Party Congress when his son, Ling Gu, plowed a Ferrari into a Beijing bridge abutment in the early hours of March 18, 2012, killing himself and critically injuring two female passengers. At the 18th Party Congress, Ling was sidelined. Instead of being elected a member of the Politburo, he was shunted off to the Party’s United Front Department, the agency that works to forge and maintain ties with China’s eight noncommunist parties, powerful private business leaders, intellectuals, religious leaders, celebrities, and other non-Party figures. During the summer and fall of 2014, Party investigators detained Ling’s brother Ling Zhengce, an official in Ling’s native province of Shanxi, and were said to be closing in on Ling’s wife, Gu Liping, a businesswoman reputed to have her hands in all sorts of questionable ventures. They also began detaining a network of Shanxi officials. In December 2014, the month in which Zhou Yongkang was formally charged with corruption, Ling Jihua and Gu Liping were detained. Ling’s brother Ling Wancheng, meanwhile, disappeared and was said to have fled to the United States with a cache of secret Party documents stolen by Ling Jihua as an “insurance policy” against his arrest by Xi’s operatives.

Because Bo was allegedly a rival to Xi with close ties to Zhou, the attacks on these three figures at the start of the anti-corruption crackdown naturally fueled the belief that the crackdown was politically motivated and that Xi was using it to purge his factional enemies and consolidate his grip on power.

Although widely evoked in analyses of Chinese leadership politics, the meaning of faction is actually ambiguous.¹⁸ The political scientist Andrew J. Nathan defines factions as networks of clientelist relationships that can form a power base for political contestation.¹⁹ Political actors and officials in China are, however, also embedded in networks of “personalistic ties” (guanxi) based on overlapping life experiences.²⁰ Factional ties are assumed to be derived from these shared experiences—a common hometown, county, or province; childhood friends; schoolyard chums, university classmates, army buddies, or office colleagues; common acquaintances and friends; or perhaps family connections, including marriage. Ties are often assumed to be hierarchical, transitive, and instrumental, with more senior patrons mentoring “promising” protégés while also currying favor with their bosses. Subordinates are said to “swear” their loyalty and fidelity to those to whom they owe their ascent up the career ladder. Superiors are said to be able to command and mobilize their followers in pursuit of their political and personal aims. Because factions and factional maneuvering takes place behind closed doors and sometimes in hidden smoke-filled rooms, the most tangible and visible clues to factional connections are generally assumed to be found in individuals’ biographical data and hence observable in the form of shared experiences.

Life coincidences, of course, do not necessarily mean that there is a true political connection. Two individuals may have gone to school together or shared an office, but rather than bosom buddies and steadfast comrades, they might in fact be bitter enemies because one beat up the other in the second grade, stole a lover in college, or stabbed the other in the back to win a boss’s favor and a desired promotion or transfer. Two individuals from the same village/county/province may find each other intolerable or view each other as coming from the “wrong side of the tracks.” Individuals, finally, may have double-crossed and betrayed one another in past political struggles. Biographical analysis thus provides an imperfect mapping of the factional loyalties of China’s political elites.²¹

While an imperfect guide to an individual’s political loyalties, “connections” nevertheless embed individuals in “communities”—groups of individuals who are linked either professionally or personally, which may then form the basis for the construction of more tightly linked “factions.” Media reports identify various sorts of connections between the 316 civilian tigers, 90 senior military officers, and over 1,300 other individuals. In some cases, the nexus is explicitly corrupt. In other cases, the connection is coincidental and professional in that two individuals worked together, but their relationship may be suspect because both were accused of corruption. In other cases, the connections may be personal or familial. As noted, a “connection” need only signify a causal link, not a political link.

Using modularity measurements to first identify clusters of those implicated in the Tiger Hunt and then using eigenvalues to identify the individual at the core of each cluster yields nineteen clusters with ten or more “members,” sixteen of which had a senior Party cadre or state official at their core, two clusters centered on private business operators, and a seemingly loose cluster of individuals in the telecommunications sector (see table 1.1).²² These were not independent clusters. On the contrary, they were intertwined, including at the very top levels. In total, members of these clusters accounted for 90 percent of those implicated in or associated with the Tiger Hunt.

This analysis thus suggests that if Xi’s crackdown was politically driven, its initial targets were Zhou Yongkang, Ling Jihua, Bo Xilai, and the PLA. Zhou and Ling were theoretically positioned to act as factional leaders and hence rivals to Xi. Zhou was seen by many as having taken over the leadership of the “Jiang Zemin faction” after Jiang’s closest ally, Zeng Qinghong, retired at the 17th Party Congress in 2007. Although Zhou was due to retire at the 18th Party Congress, many observers assumed that he would be replaced by Bo as the Jiang faction’s front man. Ling was presumably poised to move into the lead role in Hu’s “Communist Youth League faction.”

Both Zhou and Ling, however, were badly weakened prior to the congress. Zhou’s alleged protégé Bo was under arrest. Ling was under a cloud, having failed to paper over the death of his son. It is possible that Bo and Ling were “set up” by conspiracies hatched by Xi and his inner circle. Such conspiracy theories, however, seem tenuous, since the fall of Bo was brought on by a murder committed by his wife and his fight with onetime Chongqing police chief Wang Lijun, while Ling’s fall was precipitated by his son’s reckless driving. The possibility that, for instance, Ling Gu’s Ferrari had been sabotaged or that Gu Kailai was framed by Wang cannot, of course, be entirely ruled out.

If both Zhou and Ling Jihua were politically wounded before the 18th Party Congress, Xi presumably did not face a pressing need to launch a swift attack on the Jiang and Hu camps. The weakening of these two powerful camps certainly created conditions in which factional attacks were presumably less risky and hence would allow Xi to consolidate power more quickly. With Bo, Zhou, and Ling weakened, however, it is not clear that Xi had an immediate or pressing need to smash would-be rival cliques within the central leadership.

Similarly, none of the regional leaders represented an obvious or serious factional contender at the national level. For example, Bai Enpei, who had been a member of the 15th, 16th, and 17th Central Committees, had stepped down as secretary of the Yunnan Provincial Party Committee and chair of the Yunnan Provincial People’s Congress in 2011 having reached the “normal age” of retirement and was slated for retirement from the Central Committee at the 18th Party Congress. Su Rong had not reached age sixty-five in 2012 and hence had not reached retirement age. But he would turn sixty-five in 2013. Thus, while he remained Party secretary of Jiangxi and chair of the Jiangxi Provincial People’s Congress after the 18th Party Congress, he was not reelected to the Central Committee. Zhao Zhengyong, Party secretary of Shaanxi, was sixty-one in 2012 and a newly elected member of the Central Committee. But he was still a relatively junior member of the senior leadership, having assumed the governorship of Shaanxi in 2010 and been named Party secretary in 2012. More critically, the networks centered on Bai Enpei, Su Rong, Zhao Zhengyong, Pan Yiyang, Yang Weize, Zhu Mingguo, Hao Chunrong, Zhou Benshun, and Wang Sanyun were “regional networks” that were largely confined to their current provincial bases or stretched back to provinces where they had served earlier in their careers. Only Wang Lequan had held a significant leadership position at the national level. He had retired, however, in the 18th Party Congress. Moreover, his “Xinjiang cluster” had only ten identified members. As such, a factional attack by the Xi camp would likely have been more opportunistic and less a necessary component of Xi’s plan to take control over the Party leadership.

TABLE 1.1. Clustering of targets in the Tiger Hunt (2012–2023)

Source: Compiled by the author based on media reports from both Chinese- and English- language sources.

As the crackdown progressed, Xi appeared to confront two new challengers. In August 2017, Party investigators detained Sun Zhengcai, a member of the Politburo and Party secretary of Chongqing. On the surface, Sun appeared to be a potential political player. Relatively young (forty-nine in 2012) and a member of the “sixth generation” of Party leaders, Sun had been elected to the Politburo at the 18th Party Congress, having previously served as minister of agriculture (2006–9) and secretary of the Jilin Provincial Party Committee. Prior to the 19th Party Congress, Sun had been identified as Xi’s possible successor.²³ According to the political scientist Cheng Li, Sun was likely a protégé of former politburo members Jia Qinglin and Zeng Qinghong.²⁴ As such, Sun could have been a replacement for the fallen Bo Xilai. Sun had been named the Party secretary of Chongqing, the post that Bo had held prior to his political demise. Li, however, also identifies Sun as a protégé of Xi.²⁵ When Xi visited Chongqing in January 2016, he seemed to praise Sun and his work in the city, which was interpreted as a “nod” to Sun.²⁶ In July 2017, Sun vowed his “absolute loyalty” to Xi—just five days before he was pulled down—suggesting that if Sun had been part of a Jiang-led opposition faction prior to 2012, five years later he seemed to be anxiously seeking acceptance as a political ally of Xi.²⁷ If we see Sun as a stalwart of the Jiang faction, then his transfer to what some might have painted as Bo’s neo-Maoist “red soviet” in Chongqing would have presented Xi with a factional challenge. Sun was, however, an outsider deployed to the city as an agent of Beijing and was presumably then tasked with sweeping Bo’s cronies out of the city’s corridors of power, not rallying them for a new struggle with Beijing. Finally, aside from his alleged ties to retired members of the Jiang camp, Sun’s network did not include other powerful figures but was made up largely of personal connections.

Less than two years later, in the spring of 2020, Party investigators went after a different “political gang” (zhengzhi tuanhuo) putatively led by Sun Lijun, a vice minister for public security, whose members included Luo Wenjin, a retired senior official of the Jiangsu Public Security Bureau; Wang Like, secretary of the Jiangsu Provincial Party Politics and Law Committee; Deng Huilin, deputy mayor of Chongqing and a former senior official of the Central Committee’s Politics and Law Committee; and Gong Dao’an, a deputy mayor of Shanghai and director of the Shanghai Public Security Bureau. Wang Like had ties to the fallen Wang Lijun and senior members of the Liaoning public security apparatus. Fu Zhenghua, minister of justice and a former vice minister for public security, and Liu Xinyun, vice-governor of Shanxi and director of the Shanxi Public Security Bureau, were also said to be part of Sun’s gang. Sun was said to have been acting at the behest of Meng Jianzhu, secretary of the Central Politics and Law Committee. Meng, in turn, was alleged to be a front man for the Jiang Zemin–Zeng Qinghong–Zhou Yongkang camp. Sun and company had allegedly plotted to assassinate Xi when he visited Nanjing for a ceremony in 2017. For reasons never explained, the alleged plot fell through. In September 2022, just a month before the 20th Party Congress, Sun, Wang, and Fu were convicted of corruption and given suspended death sentences; Gong was sentenced to life in prison; Deng was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, and Liu was sentenced to fourteen years in prison.

As noted, whether these plots were real or merely rumored, there seems little question that Xi’s anti-corruption crackdown struck hard at a series of sprawling networks focused on powerful figures such as Zhou Yongkang and Ling Jihua and regional networks centered on regional bosses such as Bai Enpei, Su Rong, and Zhao Zhengyong. But it is far from certain that these were “factions” in the sense that the purpose of these networks was exclusively or even largely to fight for political power. It seems rather more likely that these were networks that sought political power as a means to other ends, including, not the least, self-enrichment and power as a “protective umbrella” under which corrupt officials could feed off the state, the economy, and society.

The Politburo

The direct impact of the anti-corruption crackdown on the Politburo has been very limited. All but one of the members of the Politburo charged with corruption during the course of Xi’s crackdown either fell before Xi became general secretary (Bo) or were retired—albeit newly retired—when they were detained (Zhou Yongkang, General Xu Caihou, and General Guo Boxiong). As of 2022, Sun Zhengcai was the only sitting member of the Politburo removed for corruption while Xi was general secretary. Thus, whereas four of the twenty-five members (16 percent) of the 17th Politburo were charged with corruption, only one of the forty members (2.4 percent) of the combined 18th and 19th Politburos where charged with corruption. The factional balance within the Politburo, nevertheless, changed under Xi’s leadership.

Although a long-standing feature of studies of Chinese elite politics, factional studies are often “tea leaf reading” exercises in which the conclusions are largely shaped by how analysts characterize and categorize the data. While admittedly imperfect, a factional modeling of the composition of the Communist Party elite since 2012, using typologies developed by scholars who focus on biographical analysis, provides a way to assess claims that Xi has gained either absolute domination within the Party or something more akin to political hegemony.

Data on the factional alignments of members of the Politburo show that although Xi managed to move a substantial number of individuals seen as either his protégés or political allies into key Party positions at the 19th Party Congress, as of 2017 he had not eliminated either the Jiang faction or the Hu faction (figure 1.1). In fact, the Jiang faction formed the largest bloc in both the 17th and 18th Politburos, enjoying a fourteen-to-nine edge over Hu and his allies in the 17th Politburo and a fifteen-to-ten edge on the 18th Politburo.

The balance shifted in the 19th Politburo when Xi brought ten of his allies into the Politburo. Another member, Chen Quanguo, whose background did not include obvious ties to Xi, also appeared to have thrown his lot in with the Xi faction. The number of members seen as part of the Jiang faction fell from fifteen on the 18th Politburo to eight on the 19th Politburo. The number of members aligned with the Hu faction fell from ten on the 18th Politburo to just four on the 19th Politburo. The Xi faction thus clearly displaced both the Jiang and the Hu factions in the 19th Politburo. The number of members seen as not aligned with Xi nevertheless remained far from insignificant, with a total of twelve members seen as still allied with either the Jiang or Hu faction (one member of the 19th Politburo—Yang Jiechi—does not seem to have been identified with any faction).

The membership of the 20th Politburo stripped bare any possible ambiguity that Xi was in charge. All twenty-four members either were previously identified as Xi protégés or were said to have been handpicked by Xi.²⁸ In what some say was a direct slap in the face for former general secretary Hu Jintao, Hu Chunhua, who had been elected to the 18th Politburo and reelected to the 19th Politburo and had served as Party secretary of Guangdong, was not only not promoted to the number two slot on the Politburo Standing Committee, a position that would signal he would be promoted from vice-premier to premier when the 14th National People’s Congress met in March 2023, as had been rumored, but he was unceremoniously demoted to an ordinary member of the Central Committee. His patron Hu Jintao, meanwhile, was shown being escorted off the dais of the closing session of the congress. Officially, Hu felt ill and left to receive medical attention. Hu’s “illness,” however, appeared to have suddenly developed when he sought to peak at a red folder said to contain a list of the theretofore undisclosed membership of the Politburo.²⁹ Exactly what happened remains unknown. It seems possible that Hu believed Xi would seat Hu Chunhua on the standing committee, thus leaving Hu Jintao at least a residual stake in the Party leadership. Regardless of why Hu Chunhua was dropped from the Politburo, the lineup of the 20th Politburo left Xi and his allies in total control of the Party’s top leadership and as such might be seen as an end to factional politics and, with it, any notion of a collective leadership. Xi went on to pack the Central Secretariat and the Central Military Commission with his allies, thus gaining “absolute domination” of the leadership.³⁰

The shifting factional balance of the Politburo and the consolidation of a factional monopoly by Xi is, however, potentially misleading, as perhaps best illustrated by Xi himself. Although a “princeling” with a powerful father, Xi started his career at the grassroots level and moved upward through the ranks, starting out as a deputy Party secretary in a county in Hebei in 1982. In 1988, he transferred to Fujian, where he served as Party secretary of a prefecture; deputy mayor of Xiamen; Party secretary of Fuzhou, the provincial capital; and ultimately governor. In 2002, he moved to Zhejiang as provincial Party secretary. Five years later, in 2007, he replaced Chen Liangyu, putatively a member of Jiang’s “Shanghai gang,” as Party secretary of Shanghai after Chen fell in a corruption scandal—a development that some saw as giving Hu an opportunity to attack Jiang’s cronies and put one of his protégés in charge of China’s financial capital. After a brief stint in Shanghai, Xi moved on to Beijing, where he became a member of the 17th Politburo and president of the Central Party School. The following year, he was elected vice president of the People’s Republic of China, at which point he became seen as Hu’s likely successor. The trajectory of Xi’s rise to the top was thus perhaps best characterized by a gradual rise during the Jiang era (1989–2002) followed by an accelerating rise during the Hu era (2002–12). Given the acceleration of his rise under Hu and his selection to replace Chen Liangyu in Shanghai, it might appear that Xi was a member of Hu’s faction, even though he had not spent time working in the Communist Youth League and hence was not an obvious member of the Hu faction. Xi was, however, generally classified as a member of the Jiang faction.

The composition of the 18th and 19th Politburo Standing Committees, meanwhile, does not appear to have shifted against Jiang’s presumed allies. If we treat Xi as his own political man and Wang Qishan and Yu Zhengsheng as his close political comrades in arms, then three of the four other members—Zhang Dejiang, Liu Yunshan, and Zhang Gaoli—were from the Jiang bloc. Only Premier Li Keqiang was identified as a member of the Hu faction. Of the seven members of the 19th Politburo Standing Committee, two—Li Zhanshu and Zhao Leji—were considered members of the “Shaanxi gang,” a group who had spent time in Shaanxi when Xi was living as a “sent-down youth” during the Cultural Revolution. Three—Wang Yang, Wang Huning, and Han Zheng—were identified as members of the Jiang faction, leaving Li Keqiang as the sole member of the Hu faction. Within the powerful standing committee, therefore, it did not appear that Xi made significant gains prior to 2022.

The relationship between the Jiang faction and Xi is, however, the crux of understanding the shifting factional balance within the top leadership. Some of those opposed to the regime claim that Xi is at war with the Jiang faction and that the anti-corruption crackdown is simply a smoke screen designed to disguise the political purge of the Jiang faction and, to a lesser extent, the Hu faction. As noted, specialists in factional politics, however, identify Xi as a member of the Jiang faction prior to 2012. If that is at least partially correct, then his selection as general secretary would appear to have represented a victory for the Jiang faction. If we then assume that time alone will progressively weed out the original members of the Jiang faction, one way of looking at the rise of the Xi faction at the 19th Party Congress is not as the displacement of Jiang’s allies by a rival set of Xi’s allies, but rather as the rejuvenation of the Jiang faction with a new generation of Xi’s allies.

The assertion that Xi entered the supreme leadership as an enemy of Jiang is also difficult to sustain. Even if we assume that Xi was not a member of the Jiang faction, it would seem very unlikely that he could have become general secretary without the tacit agreement of both Jiang and Hu. Indeed, if either Jiang or Hu adamantly opposed Xi’s selection, who was the “man behind the curtain” who rammed Xi down their throats? It is instead likely that Jiang and Hu reached an understanding on the leadership lineup prior to the 18th Party Congress—Xi would be named to the number one spot as general secretary and Li Keqiang, who was seen as Hu’s “candidate” for general secretary, would be named to the number two spot on the Politburo and then become premier of the State Council when the National People’s Congress met in March 2013. It does not appear, therefore, that Xi assumed office in the face of bitter factional opposition from Jiang or Hu, with the result that he had to fight tooth and nail from the very beginning to claim, retain, and consolidate his position as general secretary. It is, of course, possible that Jiang and Hu “naively” backed Xi’s candidacy based on their belief that he would abide by the collective leadership norm and remain a “first among equals,” only to have Xi double-cross them by first using the anti-corruption crackdown to attack Jiang’s stalwarts and then finally disposing of Hu’s allies at the 20th Party Congress.

It is also plausible that when he attacked corruption, Xi attacked protégés of Jiang and Hu because their protégés were corrupt. Data on those taken down during the Tiger Hunt suggest that high-level corruption swelled during the 1990s and 2000s because senior officials gave in to the temptation to use their public power to seek personal gains and, perhaps more crucially, because attacks on mid-level corruption launched by Jiang in the mid-1990s and sustained by Hu in the 2000s not only failed to control mid-level corruption but also failed to prevent corrupt mid-level officials from being promoted upward into the senior ranks.³¹

Given evidence that Xi faced a true surge in high-level corruption, one of the most vexing questions about Xi is whether his anti-corruption drive, as some contend, has been a venial quest to consolidate power in his own hands or was borne out of a sense, as Xi has argued, that corruption threatened to become an existential threat to the survival of the Party and hence socialism with Chinese characteristics. Put somewhat differently, was Xi’s anti-corruption drive a “personal” political fight with Bo, Zhou, and Ling, or was it an “institutional” fight in which Bo, Zhou, and Ling were symptoms of a spreading cancer that Xi believed demanded immediate and radical surgery? The conundrum is, of course, that these are not mutually exclusive possibilities. Xi may well believe that he alone can cleanse the Party of the rot his two predecessors allowed to metastasize and hence sees his personal political battles as synonymous with the Party fight for survival.

Regardless of Xi’s underlying motives and the factional maneuvering that has unfolded—contrary to those who have painted a picture of bitter factional infighting in which Xi and his allies have sought to politically incapacitate the elderly Jiang and his now mostly elderly lieutenants by using the anti-corruption crackdown as a disguise for a systematic political purge—the “Xi effect” on leadership politics has been more nuanced. The evidence on the shifting factional balance on the Politburo suggests that Xi and his middle-aged allies have gradually replaced the protégés of Jiang and his octogenarian allies and Hu and his septuagenarian allies.³² If the rise of the so-called Xi faction represents an evolution of the old Jiang faction, then the 19th Politburo would seem to have been dominated by members of the older Jiang faction and the younger Xi faction, with a residual bloc of members of the Hu faction. By this evolutionary logic, the 20th Politburo represented the final exit of the last remnants of the elderly second generation of the Jiang faction and the few remaining members of the Hu faction.

The Future of the Xi Faction

At the 20th Party Congress in October 2022, Xi broke what many in the West thought was a norm laid down by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s: members of the Politburo would not serve beyond the age of seventy and the general secretary would be limited to two five-year terms. The “two-term rule” was never codified in the Party constitution, but it was assumed to apply because the constitution of the People’s Republic of China stipulated that the president was limited to two five-year terms and in the 1990s it had become the “norm” that the Party’s general secretary would also be president of the People’s Republic of China. As Ashley Esarey and Rongbin Han noted in their overview chapter, in March 2018 the National People’s Congress amended the state constitution and eliminated the two-term limit for the presidency, a move that most saw as clearing the way for Xi to claim a third term as general secretary at the 20th Party Congress in 2022.

Many observers interpreted Xi’s claiming of a third term as evidence that he planned to serve as general secretary for life and portrayed this as a play by Xi to become a second Mao Zedong. It is conceivable, however, that Xi understands that Mao’s failure to arrange a proper successor capable of consolidating power led to the rise of Deng Xiaoping and the subsequent displacement of Hua Guofeng and the demise of Mao’s vision of a radical socialist China. Xi may have further recognized that if he wants to ensure the longevity of his “China Dream,” he needs to find a capable successor. It is possible, therefore, that during his first two terms as general secretary he conducted a search for a successor among the “sixth generation,” but failed to identify a candidate who he felt was clean enough, capable enough, and confident enough to ensure the Party’s survival. If that was the case, then Xi’s decision to remove the two-term limit and claim a third term as general secretary may have been motivated by the need to search for a candidate among the “seventh generation” and hence the need to push the informal selection of a successor to the 20th Party Congress in 2022. The results of the 20th Party Congress seem to signal that Xi found the seventh generation wanting and believes that he must dig deeper and look to the “eighth generation” (senior Party members born in the early 1980s)—or beyond—for a political heir.

TABLE 1.2. Age of Politburo members

Sources: Wikipedia, s.v. “19th Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party,” November 13, 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19th_Politburo_of_the_Chinese_Communist_Party, and “20th Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party,” August 24 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_Politburo_of_the_Chinese_Communist_Party#All_members.

Data on the 20th Politburo members strongly suggest there are few apparent candidates for an heir. If we apply the supposed norm that members of the Politburo retire at or about age seventy, then the 20th Politburo includes twelve members who would not have reached age seventy by the 21st Party Congress in 2027 and only four who would not be seventy years old by the time of the 22nd Party Congress in 2032 (see table 1.2). None of the members of the 20th Politburo would meet what was said to be the pre-Xi norm for a two-term general secretary at either the 21st or 22nd Party Congress. All four of those who would not have turned seventy before the 22nd Party Congress would be sixty-eight, just two years shy of the alleged mandatory retirement age. Xi thus faces a “graying problem” and will need to choose whether to junk the seventy-year rule and allow the Party leadership to pass to a septuagenarian or even an octogenarian when he eventually retires—or passes—or to look beyond the current members of the Politburo and lower down within the ranks of the CCP for “fresh new faces” to “helicopter” up into the inner circle of power at the 21st Party Congress, by which time Xi will be seventy-four years old. Should Xi not pick an heir until the 22nd Party Congress in 2032, he would have to hang on to power—and his faculties—until he is seventy-nine years old.

Xi’s removal of the remnants of the Jiang and Hu factions also does not, of course, necessarily mean an end to factionalism. On the contrary, if Xi stubbornly hangs on to power, the closer he gets to a point where his aging sixth-generation lieutenants come to believe that he will elect to retire, will lose the mental and physical ability to wield power, or is likely to pass soon, factionalism is apt to increase as they vie with each other either to replace Xi or to push their protégés as potential heirs. As the political scientist Guoguang Wu points out, “Xi’s men” are united mostly in their loyalty to him. Beyond that, they are split between those who are linked to Xi from days in Fujian, those who are protégés from his days in Zhejiang, and those whom he worked with in Shanghai. Others connect to Xi through his “native” province of Shaanxi. Some appear to have personal relationships with Xi’s wife, Peng Liyuan, or Chen Xi, his former roommate at Tsinghua University who served as a member of the 19th Politburo, secretary of the Party Secretariat, and president of the Central Party School. Several lack long-standing ties with Xi and apparently only recently attracted his attention. Xi’s men are further divided, Wu argues, into a cluster drawn from China’s military industrial complex and another from the security sector. The new leadership is thus not a monolithic bloc. Wu thus predicts that as Xi reaches down into the ranks of the eighth generation, ambitious cadres will seek to form connections with members of Xi’s inner circle in hopes of catching Xi’s eye, while those within the inner circle will seek out protégés to build up their power bases and position themselves as kingmakers for the post-Xi era.³³ Xi’s “clean sweep” of the Politburo and the exit of both the old Jiang and Hu factions may, therefore, actually lead to a new period of intensifying factional battles within the new Xi camp.

Conclusion

Assessing the “Xi Jinping Effect” on leadership politics is, admittedly, an imprecise science. Leadership politics and factional maneuvering continues to take place within a “black box” that emits only weak and fuzzy signals. Despite this persistent “fog of politics,” several points seem clear. First, the “Tiger Hunt” has not targeted political factions seeking to challenge Xi’s position as Party leader. It has instead struck at networks of corruption centered on a number of central and regional officials. Most of the leaders of these networks had exited the formal political game before Xi took over as Party leader and hence were no longer contenders for power at the apex of the Party apparatus, even though some likely retained a degree of informal, residual influence exercised through their protégés and connections. Second, even though Xi managed to populate the 19th Politburo and its standing committee with significant numbers of his stalwarts and reduce the number of leaders linked to the Jiang and Hu factions, Xi was himself apparently a product of the Jiang-Hu period and likely owes his selection as paramount leader to an agreement between Jiang and Hu. As such, his “packing” of the 20th Politburo with his allies constitutes less of a break with the Jiang-Hu past than a replacement of the aging leaders under Jiang and Hu with younger leaders who rose up under the aegis of members of the “Jiang-Hu generation.” Third, Xi’s decision to retain the role of supreme leader and not bring an obvious successor into the 20th Politburo creates a situation in which he has likely not only denied any of his sixth- and seventh-generation lieutenants the chance to lead the Party, he has shifted that chance to his current lieutenants’ protégés in the eighth generation.

Xi has unquestionably established himself as a virtually unchallenged leader. If there is opposition to his domination of the Party, it appears to remain limited to the rumors and thirdhand accounts that routinely make the rounds of the Hong Kong and overseas China media. But, as argued herein, his dominance may prove transitory. If Xi is looking to the long term and seeks to perpetuate the Party’s grip on power and his vision of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” then he has to lay the groundwork for a post-Xi era by finding somebody to carry on his legacy, regardless of whether he retires from the front ranks and becomes a behind-the-scenes strongman like Deng or dies in office like Mao. In short, neither the anti-corruption campaign nor the putative elimination of the Jiang and Hu factions has fundamentally altered the inescapable problem of succession.

In conclusion, Xi’s anti-corruption crackdown has created “gaps” in the leadership ranks by culling hundreds of corrupt senior officials—and tens of thousands of mid-level officials—which Xi has been able to fill with more junior officials who are untainted, or perhaps at least less tainted, by corruption. His decision to extend to a third term as general secretary, moreover, created time for Xi to test and groom this new generation before moving them into the front ranks of the Party. At the same time, his decision not to select an heir apparent from among the ranks of the sixth and seventh generations has likely rendered them “dead-enders”—promoted to the top but too old to serve as supreme leader. The combination of the anti-corruption crackdown and Xi’s decision to remain in office thus paves the way for a generational transition from leaders like Xi, who came of age during the Cultural Revolution and the late Maoist period, to leaders who were born during the Deng era and hence came of age not in a revolutionary socialist society, but rather in a society that mixes capitalism, materialism, socialism, and Leninism. Paradoxically, Xi may have waged a life-and-death struggle with corrupted revolutionaries only to clear the way for their replacement by post-revolutionaries who have only known a system shaped by the forces that led their elders astray.

Notes

1. 1. Sidney Leng, “China’s Soccer-Mad President Xi Jinping’s Passion for ‘the Beautiful Game’ Sparked While a Child,” South China Morning Post, October 23, 2015, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/1871444/chinas-soccer-mad-president-xi-jinpings-passion.

2. 2. Matt Schiavenza, “Xi Jinping Eats Some Dumplings at a Restaurant,” Atlantic, December 30, 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/12/xi-jinping-eats-some-dumplings-at-a-restaurant/282719.

3. 3. “Xi Jinping ‘Most Powerful Chinese Leader since Mao Zedong,’” BBC News, October 24, 2017, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-41730948; Stein Ringen, “A Dazzling Spectacle of China’s Totalitarianism,” Washington Post, October 17, 2019.

4. 4. Jamil Anderlini, “Under Xi Jinping, China Is Turning Back to Dictatorship,” Financial Times, October 10, 2017, https://www.ft.com/content/cb2c8578-adb4-11e7-aab9-abaa44b1e130.

5. 5. Xi as “core leader”: SCMP Reporter, “The Ideal Chinese Husband: Xi Dada and the Cult of Personality Growing around China’s President,” South China Morning Post, February 26, 2016, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/1918443/ideal-chinese-husband-xi-dada-and-cult-personality; “classic fascist state”: Jonathan Manthorpe, “The Dawn of a Fascist China—and What It Means for Us,” iPolitics, October 12, 2017, https://ipolitics.ca/2017/10/12/the-dawn-of-a-fascist-china-and-what-it-means-for-us; “Xi Jinping Thought”: Xiang Bo, “Backgrounder: Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” Xinhuanet, March 17, 2018, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-03/17/c_137046261.htm; cult of personality: Chris Buckley, “Xi Jinping Is China’s ‘Core’ Leader: Here’s What It Means,” New York Times, October 30, 2016.

6. 6. Kate O’Keeffe and William Mauldin, “Mike Pompeo Urges Chinese People to Change Communist Party; Top U.S. Diplomat Urges Allied Countries, Chinese People to Work with the U.S. to Transform the Party’s Behavior,” Wall Street Journal, July 24, 2020.

7. 7. Daniel Lippman, “Trump National Security Adviser Compares Xi Jinping to Josef Stalin,” Politico, June 24, 2020, https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/24/robert-obrien-xi-jinping-china-stalin-338338.

8. 8. “Second coming”: Peter Coy, “Xi Jinping Is the Second Coming of Mao Zedong,” New York Times, October 7, 2022; “Communist monarch”: Chris Buckley, “As Party Meets, Xi Embodies Imperial Rule,” New York Times, October 15, 2022; “old emperors”: Michael Schuman, “Behold, Emperor Xi,” Atlantic, October 13, 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2022/10/xi-jinping-china-national-party-congress/671718; “one-man rule”: Kerry Brown, “Xi Jinping Is a Captive of the Communist Party Too,” New York Times, October 10, 2022; “anti-corruption purges”: “Ishaan Tharoor, “Xi’s Moment of Dominance Can’t Hide His Weakness,” Washington Post, October 17, 2022; “unrivalled”: Grace Tsoi and Sylvia Chang, “How Xi Jinping Made Himself Unchallengeable,” BBC News, October 16, 2022, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-63210545.

9. 9. Katsuji Nakazawa, “Power Struggle Has Xi Leery of Coup, Assassination Attempts,” Nikkei Asian Review, May 23, 2015, https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Power-struggle-has-Xi-leery-of-coup-assassination-attempts.

10. 10. “Top Chinese Officials ‘Plotted to Overthrow Xi Jinping,’” BBC News, October 20, 2017, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-41691917.

11. 11. Lily Kuo, “Cracks Appear in ‘Invincible’ Xi Jinping’s Authority over China,” Guardian, August 4, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/04/cracks-appear-in-invincible-xi-jinpings-authority-over-china.

12. 12. The numbers were compiled by the author based on the annual “The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and the State Supervision Commission Report on the Supervision and Inspections of National Discipline Inspection and Supervision Agencies” (Zhongyang jiwei guojia jiancha tongbao quanguo jijian jiancha ji guan jiangdu jiancha, 中央纪委国家监委通报全国纪检监察机关监督检查), 2013–22, available at Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, accessed August 24, 2023, https://www.ccdi.gov.cn.

13. 13. Andrew Wedeman, database containing information on over forty-two thousand corruption cases reported between roughly 2001 and 2022 in various Chinese- and English-language media outlets, 2022.

14. 14. Andrew Wedeman, “Anticorruption Forever?,” in Fateful Decisions: Choices That Will Shape China’s Future, ed. Thomas Fingar and Jean C. Oi (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020), 82–106.

15. 15. Christopher Carothers, Corruption Control in Authoritarian Regimes: Lessons from East Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

16. 16. All biographic data in this chapter are from China Vitae, accessed August 24, 2023, http://www.chinavitae.com/index.php.

17. 17. Jude Blanchette, China’s New Red Guards: The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).

18. 18. Alice L. Miller, “The Trouble with Factions,” China Leadership Monitor, no. 46 (2015): 1–12, https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/research/docs/clm46am-2.pdf.

19. 19. Andrew J. Nathan, “A Factionalism Model for CCP Politics,” China Quarterly, no. 53 (1973): 34–66.

20. 20. Lucian W. Pye, “Factions and the Politics of Guanxi: Paradoxes in Chinese Administrative and Political Behaviour,” China Journal, no. 34 (1995): 35–53.

21. 21. David Meyer, Victor C. Shih, and Jonghyuk Lee, “Factions of Different Stripes, Gauging the Recruitment Logics of Factions in the Reform Period,” Journal of East Asian Studies 16, no. 1 (2016): 43–60; Victor C. Shih, Wei Shan, and Mingxing Liu, “Gauging the Elite Political Equilibrium in the CCP: A Quantitative Approach Using Biographical Data,” China Quarterly, no. 201 (2010): 79–103.

22. 22. The network analysis also identified a cluster with sixty-six members centered on Liu Tienan. Because Liu was a longtime Zhou lieutenant, I combined that cluster with the “Zhou Yongkang” cluster.

23. 23. Chris Buckley, “Xi Jinping May Delay Picking China’s Next Leader, Stoking Speculation,” New York Times, October 4, 2017.

24. 24. Cheng Li, “China’s Midterm Jockeying: Gearing Up for 2012 (Part 1: Provincial Chiefs),” China Leadership Monitor, no. 31 (2010): 1–24, http://media.hoover.org/sites/default/files/documents/CLM31CL.pdf.

25. 25. Cheng Li, “Xi Jinping’s Inner Circle (Part 2: Friends from Xi’s Formative Years),” China Leadership Monitor, no. 44 (2014): 1–22, https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/research/docs/clm44cl.pdf.

26. 26. “Xi Opens Year of Political Jockeying with Nod to Chongqing Boss,” Bloomberg News, January 5, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-05/xi-opens-year-of-political-jockeying-with-nod-to-chongqing-boss.

27. 27. Chris Buckley, “From Political Star to ‘a Sacrificial Object’ in China,” New York Times, July 23, 2017.

28. 28. Josephine Ma, “Chinese President Xi ‘Personally’ Vetted Selection of Top Communist Party Team, Xinhua Says,” South China Morning Post, October 24, 2022, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3196972/chinese-president-xi-personally-vetted-selection-top-communist-party-team-xinhua-says.

29. 29. Agnes Chang, Vivian Wang, Isabelle Qian, and Ang Li, “What Happened to Hu Jintao?,” New York Times, October 27, 2022.

30. 30. Guoguang Wu, “New Faces of Leaders, New Factional Dynamics: CCP Leadership Politics following the 20th Party Congress,” China Leadership Monitor, no. 74 (2022), https://www.prcleader.org/post/new-faces-new-factional-dynamics-ccp-leadership-politics-following-the-20th-party-congress.

31. 31. Andrew Wedeman, “The Dynamics and Trajectory of Corruption in Contemporary China,” China Review 22, no. 2 (May 2022): 21–48; Andrew Wedeman, “Flies into Tigers: The Dynamics of Corruption in China,” China Currents 20, no. 1 (2021), https://www.chinacenter.net/2021/china-currents/20-1/flies-into-tigers-the-dynamics-of-corruption-in-china.

32. 32. At the time of the 19th Party Congress in 2017, Jiang was ninety-one and Hu was seventy-five. Jiang died at the age of ninety-six, less than six weeks after the close of the 20th Party Congress.

33. 33. Wu, “New Faces of Leaders.”