Decoding China's Two Sessions: Politics, Purges, and a New Five Year Plan

China is one of the 21st century's most consequential nations. It has never been more important to understand how the country is governed and what its leaders and its people actually want and believe. Welcome to Pekingology, the podcast that unpecks China's evolving political system and the trajectory of China's domestic and foreign policy. I'm your host, Henrietta Levin, Senior Fellow with the Freeman Chair in China Studies at CSIS. This is Pekingology. I am very pleased to be joined today by Neil Thomas, Fellow on Chinese Politics with the Asia Society Policy Institute's Centre for China Analysis. Neil is one of the world's foremost experts on Chinese politics. He co-leads the Decoding Chinese Politics Platform, and he is going to help us understand the significance and some of the nuance in this year's two sessions, which is, as most of you will surely know, the back-to-back plenaries of the National People's Congress and the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. And these meetings often serve as a venue for the rollout of new policies. This year was particularly exciting in my parochial perspective because the 15th five-year plan was unveiled. So with all that to come, Neil, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks so much for having me. So we'd like to start all of our episodes with a question about how our guests developed their China expertise and interests. So what did that look like for you? So I grew up in Perth, Western Australia in the 90s and 2000s, and Western Australia is the world's biggest producer of iron ore. And so at the time, China's economy was booming. They were building all these skyscrapers and urbanizing like crazy. And so, you know, to build skyscrapers, you use a lot of steel. And to build steel, you need a lot of iron ore. So there's literally huge chunks of my home state in China, like Western Australia built China's economic miracle in many ways. So have they thanked you for this? And paid me not as much as they should have, but they also did pay us a huge amount of money for all that iron ore. So Australia's economy has done very well for many years out of that. And that economic relationship is very present in Western Australia. And so that kind of led me to be interested in what China's rise meant for international politics and geopolitics. And from there, I studied in Hangzhou and Beijing under first Chinese government scholarships and then much more generous Australian government scholarships. So canceled out all the soft power benefits that Beijing was hoping to get. And then I was fortunate to study under some fantastic scientists at the Australian National University and over in the United States at Harvard. And from there was working at Macropolo, may it rest in peace. Then came to DC with Eurasia Group a few years ago and have been very happily at the Center for China Analysis at Asia Society for three years now. And thrilled to have you as a neighbor as well, just down the street from CSIS. So diving into the two sessions, what is it? What is the point, especially in the Xi era with all the personalization and consolidation of power that we've seen in recent years? How should we look at these institutions of CCP rule? It's a great question because the two sessions is most well known for being the venue of the annual government work report, which the premier delivers to the NPC, National People's Congress on the first day. But the major announcements there, like economic targets and policy directions, are mostly determined about three months earlier by the Communist Party at its annual Central Economic Work Conference, which usually occurs in mid-December. So it's something of a political pageant. It's a bit of a media spectacle. There's a lot of journalist visas issued for people to come and cover it from all over the world. You get thousands of delegates from all over China descending on Beijing to participate in these two sessions. They are there for the media. They give a lot of interviews. It's kind of a way for Beijing to create a platform to kind of share its policy priorities with the world, but also with the people of China, also with the millions of officials who staff the party state in China. So it's a showcase, basically, of the Chinese government's priorities for that year. It's not where the decisions actually get made, but it is where we find out about a lot of these key targets. And I think you've actually written somewhat recently about the growing role that Li Chang, the premier, seems to be playing in important governance issues, which is interesting because it kind of plays into these assumptions about whether and in what ways the government processes matter in an environment where, obviously, the party is making the real political decisions. Does the premier resuming some of his traditional authorities, does that change how we should see the role or the importance of the two sessions at all? I don't think it changes the role of the two sessions too much because still the really important decision making, even amongst Xi's lieutenants and the state council is generally happening behind closed doors, not in these more open settings or with thousands of people in the room kind of having their inputs. The rise of Li Chang is something that I picked up through some firsthand observations of people who've been in the room with him at various diplomatic gatherings, at the China Development Forum, but also through a much more regular cadence of state council meetings and the initiation of a couple of new institutions that Li Chang had, so a state council study session, mimicking Xi Jinping's Politburo study session, and a new kind of a special premiers meeting that was re-established a couple of years ago after last being used by Zhu Rongji in the late 90s, early 2000s, when he was busy kind of creating his own little empire within the state council to kind of run rush out over the people below him to get a very difficult SOE reform done. So Li Chang now kind of has that power to convene within the state council, but it's not just Li Chang who I think is playing a more active role in kind of day-to-day policymaking. We have He Li Feng obviously being the point person for US China, being a sort of big part of the state council. Xi Chi is clearly playing quite a influential role in national security policy, potentially also some elements of foreign policy. He basically follows Xi wherever he goes. He's the chief of staff. So we have had this kind of outsourcing of some of the responsibilities of governance by Xi Jinping. Xi Chi, Li Chang, and also Ding Sui Xiang now actually each head a particular central commission, which is something that Xi himself centralised in one person, his own person over his first couple of terms, most notably the Central Deepening Reform Commission, which now barely ever meets. It hasn't met at least as far as we know for 18 months I think at this point. He's the central financial and economic affairs commission, also meeting very irregularly. And I think Li Chang is interesting in particular because he's I think quite consciously been managing Xi, managing upward in quite a smart way. So I think it was his call to end the annual Premier's Press Conference at the two sessions, which used to be one of the highlights and used to be something that everyone was looking at what the signals were going to be. Li Chang and Wen Jiabao, his predecessors, both said some really interesting things in those press conferences. Wen Jiabao talked about how China's economy was really unbalanced and uncoordinated. Li Chang talked about how there were hundreds of millions of Chinese living off very low incomes. And so it's a platform that had been used to maybe send some of their own messages. And Li Chang basically retreated from that and he didn't want to consciously hog the limelights. And he's also taken a he takes a slightly lower grade of airplane now compared to Xi. So it doesn't mean that Xi is becoming any less powerful, I think quite the contrary. But in terms of some of these day to day policymaking tasks, I think Xi is kind of quite happy to do the big-picture strategic stuff and to do the politics and the geopolitics. But when it comes to managing the day to day of the economy and or day to day of security, I think we are seeing a bit more outsourcing there. While we're talking about some of the key players and people in this political environment, we'd be interested in your thoughts in what we can learn about the state of elite politics from observing the two sessions. Of course, what we can also learn about the stage of elite purges, which seem to be quite frequent and high level in recent weeks and months. What tea leaves can we read from the two sessions in understanding those personnel dynamics and who's up, who's down, who's out? Unfortunately, not much from this two sessions. There's been a lot of activity in this area, as you mentioned. So, for instance, the Politburo member and former Party Secretary of Xinjiang, Ma Xingrui did not show up to the two sessions. He usually would, but he also hasn't been seen in public for many months now. I mean, it's very widely assumed, believed, known even that he's being investigated as part of Xi's anti-corruption campaign. We don't know really what for exactly, but we got further confirmation that he's in trouble. If he'd popped up and was walking around the halls and glad-handing was Xi and the other leaders, that would have been a big shock, but that didn't happen. We had a similar dynamic with the PLA delegation to the two sessions. The big news was in January when Zhang Yuxiang, the top general, and Liu Jinli, the head of the Joint Force Command, were investigated formally. So, we already knew that was happening, but we can see more broadly that the PLA delegation, it had 281 members in 2023 when it got established. It's now down to 243 members. So, of that 38 difference, 36 we know have been purged, sure, under investigation, and there were many more that didn't show up, but in terms of the people who really matter, we basically already knew who had been evicted. It seems like, I mean, the smaller size of the delegation is actually quite striking. Like, that is well enough outside the margin of error to appreciate how some of these removals have accelerated over the past few months. Yeah, it's a pretty strong reminder to anyone else in the room that there are serious consequences. You're lucky to be here. If you don't do what she tells you to do, whether that's being not corrupt, or whether that's implementing his policy agenda. He's constantly complaining that people don't get high quality development with his signature policy enough, that they have outdated views of how to grow the economy. So, I think there's certainly more to come, but no strong signals about who's next. Well, in terms of who was last, you mentioned, of course, the significant churn at the highest levels at the PLA, and perhaps most prominently a couple months ago now, we saw Jang Yeo-shah, who is vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, rather unceremoniously purged, and even in a time when high level PLA purges are not themselves unusual, I think this one stood out to a lot of people, because at least as far as I can see, this is the first time that she has purged a member of his true inner circle, someone with whom she has had longstanding personal ties. And so even though it was already a really small group of people who might have felt a little more safe because of those personal ties, at least that small group was seen as relatively safe. And that's apparently no longer the case. So what do you make of that? I think it's a huge deal, right? This is the most senior purge in the military for several decades. And it shows, I think in my view, how serious she is about remaking the PLA, making it more loyal, less corrupt, a stronger fighting force. And there's just been this burgeoning purge over the last few years. You're starting with the Rocket Force and Li Xiangfu in mid-2023, and then kind of ripping through both the Rocket Force and the procurement bureaucracy, which Jiang Youxiao led for Xi's first term. So I think you can make a reasonable case that there is a nexus with this big anti-corruption investigation that's taken out a lot of people tied to these particular bureaucracies. So was Jiang Youxiao purged for corruption or for politics or for maybe resisting Xi's directives or leadership? We don't really know. And the difficulty of interpreting some of the PLA daily editorials that came afterwards that said Jiang Youxiao and Liu Zhenli, they were trampling on the chairman of responsibility system. She is the chairman, right? So that's a pretty dramatic charge to be levelling at someone, especially someone who you think should know better, right? And about how to read the room of Chinese politics under Xi, someone he has known for decades. But the complicated thing is that, I mean, being corrupt or facilitating graft or even tolerating there being these patronage networks that could undermine China's readiness, that is a political offense that is undermining the chairman of responsibility system. So it's pretty hard to kind of isolate what exactly was important in these many, many charges. I think they're all important. And basically the correct answer is we don't know. I'm a little skeptical of some of the theories that this is about a big disagreement on Taiwan. I mean, there's you can get kind of two literal about peakingology. Like sometimes there are variations in the wording of speeches and documents that don't actually mean that much. Like I've been in the weeds of this for many, many years. And sometimes you think, oh, wow, like, you know, she said common prosperity like a few more times, this is a huge policy shift. Or suddenly, you know, they didn't say peaceful unification with Taiwan. That means there's been, you know, a decision to escalate. And in the end, you know, a few weeks later, that phrase comes out again, or sometimes just nothing happens. So I mean, all theories are on the table, but I think it's not implausible that corruption or tolerance to corruption had a lot to do with it. But the point you raise about Jiang Youxia being in Xi's inner circle is a really interesting one. And it's one that I think we need to scrutinize. We don't actually know necessarily that much about the personal relationship between Xi and Zhang. Like we know that, you know, their fathers were close and did know each other. We know that they kind of grew up in the same elite circles in Beijing. They did go to different schools. And clearly she has promoted Zhang to, you know, the highest post in the PLA under his own leadership. So he clearly at one point trusted the guy or thought he could at least use Zhang to his own purposes. But in terms of how close they really were, the PLA and the civilian bureaucracy are very stove piped, right? So civilian leaders don't spend a huge amount of time with military leaders. Whereas, say Xi's relationship with Li Chang or Saichi or your Holy Feng, like we know that they spent a lot of time together in local leadership roles. Li Chang, for example, was Xi's chief of staff for many years in Zhejiang province. So they literally spent almost every day together for three or four years. So that kind of civilian inner circle has spent a lot more time with Xi. You know, Xi has spent a lot more time with them, right? Observing how they behave, getting a sense of them as people than he's been able to for any of the people he's promoted through the PLA. So it's a question mark to me in terms of whether the Purge of Zhang Yuxiang is this qualitative leap in the anti-corruption campaign to the true inner circle. Maybe Zhang was in the true inner circle, but I'm also not 100% convinced that we know that's true either. I'm still waiting for like one of those true civilian allies or loyalists or associates, whatever you want to call them, being taken down. Because even Wang Qishan, who has been disempowered on his top secretary, he's got purged during Xi's second term. So he's kind of had a warning and has been kind of placed on the political outer, but he hasn't personally been detained or purged or investigated. And what are his ties to Xi personally? Wang Qishan was sent down to the countryside as a rusticated youth during the Cultural Revolution at the same time that Xi was. They knew each other from hanging out in rural Shanxi basically during the Cultural Revolution and the cross paths in Beijing and in the party at various points after that. And then Wang Qishan was Xi's main enforcer and really most important ally, arguably, in his first term, because Wang led the Discipline Inspection Commission, which she weaponized to consolidate power by purging rival networks during those first five years. But I mean, she has a habit of kind of rotating people who are really close to him. So there's been a different Discipline Inspection Commission secretary every five years under Xi. And previously some people served for 10 years in the role. And same with Chief of Staff. She has rotated every five years through his different Chief of Staff. So there's no guarantee that Xi will be around after the next party congress either. I mean, maybe. I mean, she has relaxed all these norms about retirement and ages, but it's just increasingly hard to predict these things. I feel like Xi has become such a fixture of Xi on the international scene, even though he never says much. You know, it's almost hard to find a picture of Xi Jinping at a formal summit where the Chief of Staff isn't, you know, he just looks like loyalty, sitting to the side of the president. But even though we hear so little from him, it would feel like such a significant, like diplomatic change for his position to be changed over, which maybe is a good point to transition back to the policy itself coming out of these meetings. Most significantly, though, feel free to disagree. I would assume the new five-year plan would be at the top of that list. So tell us about the five-year plan and where do you see continuity with the prior plan continuity with what we all basically expected? And is there anything in the agenda that did surprise you? Continuity is a great word to use, because I think for me, that was really the key theme of this two sessions and the key theme of this five-year plan. So if we look to the previous five-year plans, the 13th five-year plan that began in 2016 that came on the heels of Xi's new development concept to kind of move China from high speed growth to a kind of more high quality development, as he calls it, where there's a focus on innovation and welfare and the environment and all these are non-growth priorities, comes in the back of a big kind of conceptual move by Xi. And then five years later, the 14th five-year plan published in 2021 that comes hot in the heels of the new development paradigm or dual circulation that's kind of more commonly referred to, which is basically this idea that rising geopolitical uncertainty means that China should be focusing on producing way more at home, reducing its external dependencies, while simultaneously increasing the dependencies of foreign countries on China. But this five-year plan, the 15th five-year plan, there hasn't really been a big new economic concept to accompany it. I think Xi basically got to the point where his agenda in high quality development is pretty clear and the difficulty now is in implementing it, which is also I think why we've seen a big uptick in the anti-corruption campaign, which is a much broader political discipline campaign that also focuses on policy implementation and monitoring cadre behavior. So Xi's really serious now about, OK, I've got all this power. I'm going to use it. I'm going to try and get my agenda actually done. This is Xi's implementation era. Yes, basically trying to just make things happen now that he's reached this really strong position in the party. And so in terms of what that means for policy in the next five years, we've got a good preview of this already at the fourth plenum last year, which was basically implemented in the five-year plan. So we have an intensive focus on industrial self-reliance and an incremental focus on structural rebalancing. So industrial self-reliance, the big bet that she's making is that technology and innovation will both solve a national security problem of having choke point dependencies on the US and the broader West, but also the economic problem of needing to really boost productivity to counter demographic decline and to move up the value chain. And so we see this five-year plan having a really huge focus on artificial intelligence, not just as like a technology that's listed along with many others as being an investment priority for the next few years, but really as an economy-wide catalyst for delivering other new technologies and for boosting productivity right across all different sectors. So called AI plus plan. It's like AI plus anything else equals a great thing for our economy and for our national security. It's the people who do the number crunching of keywords in different government work reports, which treat with caution, but it showed a massive increase in mentions of AI compared to previous five-year plans. And I think in this case, it is actually instructive, but there's a much broader focus on technological upgrading across the economy. There's a call to make decisive breakthroughs in things like chips and machine tools and bio manufacturing. So it's a clear sign of what the priorities are for she in terms of which industries to invest in over the next few years. But I think perhaps even more interestingly, I mean, these are already fairly well known choke points. There's a focus too on China basically do for industries of the future, what China's already done for electric vehicles and solar panels and to kind of get there early, right? Ahead of the curve. And so there's signals here in this plan about really investing in more speculative things like quantum technology, nuclear fusion, 6G, all of these things that aren't necessarily dominating DC policy debates right now. It's all about chips basically, but an AI, but maybe in five years time, we'll be waking up to just how far ahead China is on things that are becoming more commercially viable and industrially important. So that's kind of technology side of things on structural rebalancing, somewhat disappointing compared to expectations of some economists about a stronger move towards rebalancing from a more investment focused economy to a more consumption of focused economy. It's still a big supply side approach to this consumption problem. There's no quantitative target for consumption as a share of GDP. And there's actually a decrease in the bond issuances to fund consumer subsidy programs went down from 300 billion yuan last year to 250 this year. And there's a lot of very positive and good language about investing more in the people, which I hope the Chinese government does. That would be great. But the actual the verbiage around that is very vague to explore things rather than we are going to do this or that, which you get in some of the tech focus sectors in terms of the actual difference for the social safety net or services liberalization or central local fiscal reform. We still have to wait and see as to how this gets implemented, but no strong signals of big changes in those areas. We had an episode with Andrew Pulck from Trivium a few weeks ago that we can link in the show notes and his take on some of the dynamics you're describing is that this question of consumption is one that really she is planning to address through technology, through increasing productivity, by increasing wealth by the first part of what you're talking about industrial self-reliance. And then at some point to kind of flatten the argument, China accumulates enough wealth that resources are available to support consumption in a deeper way. And so there's a sense that it's not that they are failing to promote consumption now. The way the party might conceptualize it is that they are in fact promoting consumption by promoting production. Like, would you agree with that perspective or would you see it a different way? I think that is how policymakers in Beijing see it. And if you read the five-year plan, the government work report, a lot of what's been coming out of Beijing over the last few years, there's a huge focus on consumption. There's a lot of state council directives or new regulations about promoting consumption. But I think the really acute point that you raise that Andrew has made is that the approach to how are we going to do this is the supply side approach. We're going to create opportunities for consumption. We're going to invest in consumer-facing industries, in services industries, rather than the approach that many economists, both outside and also some inside of China, are advocating for, which is some direct consumer stimulus. You know, just give people money. Like they're suffering from falling house prices. So you just got to put it in their pockets and some of that will get spent. And that's a quicker and easier way to solve this problem. But I mean, she is very concerned about debt and the dangers of what he calls welfareism, you know, making people lazier and less willing to struggle for China's national rejuvenation. So yeah, they're very much kind of on the problem of consumption, but they're choosing to address it in this much more roundabout way. It's kind of why I say, what comes first, this intensive focus is the tech self-reliance piece. And then what comes second, as a kind of incremental consequence of that, hopefully, in their view, is this structural rebalancing. I think it will slowly progress, but it's just going to happen much slower than many people hope for. It seems like one of the structural challenges in the party, including in the new five-year plan, continuing to double down on this very comprehensive vision of industrial self-reliance, industrial production, is that inherent in that policy is the trade tensions created by China exporting waves of what the US would call overcapacity to the rest of the world in ways that cause significant labor dislocations, challenges to local industry around the world. Do you see the party perceiving that tension that like within the success of the industrial program they've described lie seeds of its limitations because if you're going to produce everything for the world, you need the world to buy it. Is that tension, do you think, built into their planning? Do they have a way of thinking about a way out of what would otherwise be a difficult contradiction? There are attempts to address this overcapacity through the campaign that she launched the middle of last year about combating Involution, which is kind of the party's buzzword for overcapacity effectively. Involution is an intensive price competition that drives down profits and hurts the firms who are producing many leading technologies. And we have seen a few policies being rolled out to tackle Involution, things like industrial self-discipline, some efforts to consolidate firms in established industries. But if you zoom out and look at the anti-involution campaign with a broader lens, the real pattern is fairly serious efforts in industries where China is already dominant on the global stage. So electric vehicles are a great example of where there has been a particular focus in the anti-involution campaign. But in terms of these emerging or future industries, say things like semiconductors where China is still behind the world leading technology and doesn't have a globally dominant position, there really isn't the same level of scrutiny or enforcement. Because I think when it comes to comes down to it, I mean, she's priority is to be effective rather than efficient, right? He wants to just be able to produce these high-end chips in China. And from that perspective, it's much better to have overcapacity than undercapacity. And so I think there is an awareness that this massive amount of production is being noticed overseas and is potentially a problem. But it's a secondary problem as far as top policymakers are concerned. And I think the fact that we now have a much more uncertain global economy, the US is pursuing America first rather than working in concert with allies and partners really closely. And there's just a sense that China is trying to foster. So their diplomatic response, right? Or capacity concerns is that, well, we are stable. We are secure. Like you can always trade and invest with us. Like we're pretty confident actually that economic globalization works really well for us. So we're quite happy to champion the old model that everyone's used to, that America itself was championing in the 1990s and 2000s. And in a really turbulent world, I think that message seems to be landing with many European leaders who have been visiting recently. You know, Mark Carney visited a few weeks ago and said that we'll take 50,000 Chinese EVs before we start really implementing more punitive tariffs. And I think that dynamic means that concerns in Beijing about the international reaction to overcapacity have subsided. So I don't see it as being a huge focus of economic or diplomatic policy. So we have a new GDP target, sort of, instead of 5%, we have 4.5 to 5%. What do you make of that? Yeah, it's not a huge decrease. It is the lowest the target's been since 1991. I will draw everyone's attention to a preview of the two sessions that myself and my colleague, Lobsang Tsering, published a couple of weeks before the government work report happened where we got all of the numbers right. But that just shows how consistent government policymaking's been over the last few months and really years. It's not difficult to get these things correct anymore. The difficulty is really in calling all of the political and personnel moves where it's much more unpredictable. But policy's been pretty consistent. So what does this new growth target mean? I think it really just means China is exercising caution about this new volatility that American foreign policy is introduced to the global economy. Even if the focus of US foreign policy is not China, I mean, neither the Venezuela or the Iran strike were about China. It's still creating huge ripple effects for the global economy. If economy's declining overseas, that export model, that starts to make you a bit more vulnerable because you're relying on demand from other countries. And if they're all having recessions, then you need to make sure that you give yourself some room to deploy fiscal stimulus, to deploy other kind of economic tools. If there is a big shock coming down the way. And I think there's also, you know, awareness about US-China relations. Like things are going really well right now in terms of there not being any big issues or fights as far as Beijing's concerned. There'll be probably a very successful diplomatic visit by Trump. It'll be good optics for both leaders. And the US-China relations will continue to be on the course they're on right now. But I think she's been around the block a couple of times by now. And he's been leader since 2012. So he's seen Trump one come and go. He's seen Biden come in. And now he's seen Trump come back again. So I think there's a consciousness that US-China relations could also go south as far as Beijing's concerned. And there might not be much warning for that. So, you know, if you lower the growth target a bit, you know, you're giving yourself a bit more breathing room to make sure that you hit your goals. And you're also, you're acknowledging a longer term structural decrease in the growth rate that Chinese leaders have not only known about, but, you know, in some senses even encouraged in the Xi era, right? This move from high speed growth to high quality growth. So it's not a major change, but I think it is just, you know, giving that extra strategic breathing room to Beijing. And what is high quality growth? The quality piece of that, what is that supposed to mean in kind of an everyday sort of way? It's meant to mean a growth that is different from the growth that she inherited. So China in, you know, 2012, when she came to power, it was growing like crazy. I mean, you're having regular double digit annual GDP growth, but it was a pretty difficult place to live in. I mean, air pollution was off the charts. I was in Beijing for the airpocalypse in January 2013. You couldn't see the building across the street. There was kind of pretty brazen corruption going on. There was lots of petty bribery that people would complain about and it'll be reported in some Chinese media, just a bit freer back then, slightly, or it was being surfaced on these new social media platforms like Weibo. And there was kind of a pervasive sense of moral crisis in Chinese society as growth money was the focus of most official careers, let alone kind of the broader citizenry. And so, you know, she comes in and he has seen this all up close. And he wants to change that. He sees that model, frankly, as a threat to the party's long term survival. So that's one of the motivations for this big focus on anti-corruption. And we also see a big focus on cleaning up the environment, for example. And that's actually been one of the success stories of Xi's governance that often gets overlooked. Having this very centralized governance system is actually pretty effective for chasing clear, measurable targets and the environment, air pollution or water pollution, ground pollution, that's very easily measurable. It's quite hard to cover that up if you're being visited by the essential inspection team and you can't see them across the room because it's so polluted. And so, it's more of a focus on moral cultivation as well, right? She is quite a conservative guy in his view on the world, so more of a focus on family and traditional Chinese values. It's basically a growth that is a little bit slower, but which accounts for the negative externalities that used to be a big social drag on that growth. And it focuses more on national security. And so ensures that these choke points are not present or are less present. And you can't constrain Beijing's freedom of action. You mentioned that the recalibration of the growth target is at least partially a response to unpredictability in U.S. policy. And President Trump is going to China for a meeting that could be quite significant for the overall trajectory of the relationship. Is there anything else that we learned from the messaging around the two sessions about China's intentions for its relationship with the United States and for the upcoming summit? I think we learned from Foreign Minister Wang Yi's press conference in the middle of the two sessions that while China certainly doesn't like what's happening in Iran, it is putting the stability of U.S.-China relations in a really high placement list of priorities this year. It's been happy to deal with a lot of uncertainty and confusion in the actual planning of this meeting. Like there's a lot of stories coming out in recent days about how Beijing really hasn't heard much at all about what the agenda is or what the U.S. side wants. And usually it's the other way around. Usually it's the American side or the Australian side kind of begging the Chinese for details and then only getting confirmation right at the last minute that a trip is actually happening and that here's what's possible in the negotiations. And so it's kind of flipped it on its head. And given the U.S. is one of the very few countries that could, if it wanted to, do serious damage to China's economy, if we got a flip back to really aggressive export controls, wide use of sanctions authorities, even uptick in tariffs, then that in the short term is going to be something that's quite damaging to China. I don't think they think that's the base case, but she is a very cautious guy and they're very focused on making sure that they're doing what she calls bottom line thinking and being prepared for worst case scenarios. So I think that U.S.-China relations is a big priority and even potentially somewhat of a constraint on action. I don't think that she is countenancing any major escalation in across the Taiwan Strait or in the South China Sea. I think they think they're onto a good thing right now. They're enjoying the stability in ties with Washington. Unless they're really pushed, then I don't think there's an appetite there to ruin a good thing. To tie all this together, you have mentioned Xi Jinping, of course, has been around the block a few times. He is getting ready to go around the block again with the very strong expectation, if not certainty, that he will begin a fourth term following the National People's Congress in 2027. So what can we take away from the two sessions, if anything, about Xi's plans for the next party Congress, for his fourth term, for his vision of his own role going forward? I think the continuity of policy and the constant churn of personnel, to me, point to a sense of unfinished business. Xi has a lot of things he wants to get done in terms of reforming China's growth model, in terms of cleansing the party, in terms of empowering China on the global stage. So I think he'd stay on anyway. I think there's some clear reasons why he would stay on too, in terms of completing his agenda. There's still a long way to go, quite frankly. But preparations, as far as we know, have already begun for the 21st Party Congress. We're going to get a whole new Central Committee that's appointed. The way that that's been appointed while Xi's been leader is through face-to-face interviews. It used to be drawing lots, and that's kind of how Xi himself actually got to elevated above Li Keqiang, his former number two, back in 2007, to be elevated as the heir apparent. But now Xi's done loads and loads of interviews, basically, with card rays. Xi's kind of close team of secretaries have been interviewing people about their views on who should be promoted. So it's very hard to tell where that's going to lead, and what the different impression is that people are leaving. But the key watch point, as far as we can tell from the last couple of Party Congresses, about who's likely to get promoted and to make it to the next PolitPro is who are the provincial officials who are getting big promotions in the couple of years before the Party Congress. So, I mean, five years ago, the two vice-premiers, Zhang Guocheng and Liu Guozhong, both got promoted from governor roles to party secretary roles of provinces a couple of years before the 20th Party Congress in 2022. The leaders of Beijing and Chongqing, both on the PolitPro, got a similar promotion in that time period. People who are probably not going to stay on the PolitPro like Ma Xingrui or maybe even Li Genjie, they were elevated after similar promotions. So those are at least in the last time that she made these decisions, those were pretty strong signals. There haven't been quite as many of those provincial level promotions in the last year or two, which I think reflects perhaps that she is investing more time in selecting the next leadership group. And he obviously had some spectacular failures with people like Qin Gang and Li Xiangfu, people he promoted at the last Party Congress, ending up betraying his trust or being found to be corrupt or whatever it is, it actually prompted their purges. So if we go by that metric in the last year, there were three people who got promoted to party secretary positions in the provinces. So Chen Xiaojiang, who is the new party secretary of Xinjiang, he is the most likely to get to the next PolitPro. That Xinjiang leadership position has traditionally the last few decades been a PolitPro role. He came from the United Front Work Department and his former boss, Shi Taifeng is now the organization department director. So he is she's kind of main deputy focused on personnel matters in Inner Mongolia, Wang Weizhong became party secretary since the last two sessions, former governor of Guangdong, which is a province that's been a proving ground for many leaders across the last few decades. And in Liaoning, Xu Kunlin, former Jiangsu governor, another province that a lot of national leaders have come from. And these people are a combination of technocratic experience with recent leadership experience in the Xi era. Xu Kunlin in particular is from Fujian, which is one of Xi's power bases, rumored to be close to He Lifeng, worked on the National Development Reform Commission for a long time and then worked under Li Chang in Shanghai. So these three could be contenders, at least in the mix for being promoted. We know that Yin Yong, the Beijing mayor is very young for that position. He's been a rising star for a while. He could be in contention. Perhaps the likeliest or the biggest surprise if it didn't happen would be the party secretary of Shanghai, who's currently on the PolitPro. That's Chen Jingning. That role has with only one exception, since the late 80s, being the predecessor for a promotion to the PolitPro Standing Committee. So Chen seems like a likely candidate. But beyond these precedent-based predictions, there's very little that we have in terms of insight from recent personnel moves about who exactly might get promoted, who's going to be Xi's new chief of staff, who's going to be who's going to be premier, right? Is Li Chang going to retire because he's, you know, he's 68 and passed a normal retirement age in 2027? Maybe. A lot of people did retire on schedule five years ago in 2022, but Xi grinds a lot of exceptions. So perhaps he stays on because he is perceived as doing a good job. So it's just become much more difficult after she overturned all these personnel norms to say with any certainty. But a broader point perhaps is that does it even matter? I mean, Xi is clearly the most powerful leader in Beijing for generations. He's able to get rid of people and replace them at seeming will. And he is clearly being able to advance a pretty consistent policy agenda for many years. And it's difficult, but you could argue on his metrics, he's making some progress. I mean, China's got some genuinely impressive, high tech sectors that are causing a lot of problems for the US and Australia and other countries for our supply chains. And China is just continuing to become more powerful. So it's really a question mark as to whether the people who occupy the Standing Committee or the PolitPro really matter from a policy point of view, where I think the next party Congress, the 21st Party Congress, will be most important is in the people who kind of get promoted to the Central Committee for the first time, people who would potentially be in a good position in 10, 15, 20 years to be close to the center of power. But apart from that, I kind of feel like this could be the most boring party Congress for several decades. Well, on that inspiring note, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. Well, certainly still be analyzing it in great detail. However boring it may be. Who knows, it might be some excitement coming in the next 18 months or so. Good to set expectations. Underpromise and overdeliver. Great words to live by. And for our listeners, you can follow Neil's work again by looking at his page on the Asia Society Policy Institute website and following the decoding Chinese politics page. And as always, we would love to hear what you thought of today's conversation and what issues you'd like peckingology to unpack in future episodes. You can send your ideas to peckingology at csis.org. If you haven't already, please rate, review and subscribe to the show. And we will be back in your feed very soon. If you enjoyed this podcast, check out our larger suite of CSIS podcasts. You can listen to them all on major streaming platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Visit csis.org slash podcasts to see our full catalog.