[Originally a Twitter thread.]

This front page of People’s Daily demonstrates Xi’s successful consolidation of near-absolute power within the political elite. But it’s not from the 20th Party Congress – it’s five years old! My take on the timeline of Xi’s consolidation of power:

After taking the reins in 2012, Xi spent his first several years on the attack, using mutually reinforcing campaigns to imprison rivals and undercut personal networks and institutions that he didn’t control.

Xi’s consolidation of power worked like a ratchet: every successful move to extend his influence over one part of the system made it increasingly risky to oppose him. It was a high-wire act, but he pulled it off.

There were many milestones marking Xi’s consolidation of power, but personally I count the point of no return as the 2016 plenum, which named him “core” leader. Xi’s ability to claim that prize was at once a demonstration and a guarantee of his primacy. It’s certainly reasonable to disagree with 2016 as the tipping point, but at least by the 2017 Party Congress, Xi was unassailable. He became the first leader since Mao to write his own name into the party’s charter, and made personnel moves that made clear he had a free hand.

Given all that, I think it’s sometimes more helpful to divide recent political history into two periods: one between 2007-2017, and one that begins in 2017, rather than label 2012 as the sharp break that marked the beginning of a Xi era. 2007-17 can be seen as a single period of volatility and struggle that did not stop when Xi took office, but extended through the 2012 transition as purges intensified and Xi made a play for absolute power. Starting in 2007-ish also fits better with interlinked developments that formed the backdrop to the elite struggle: tightening CCP societal control, more activist role in the economy after the GFC, and burgeoning corruption.

Having spent much of his first term as a disrupter, Xi after 2017 was free to pivot to rationalizing, consolidating, and empowering institutions that were now firmly in his control. This is of course an oversimplification, but sometimes a useful one.

We’re now five years into the era of absolute authority. Hu’s mysterious removal from this Congress will be the iconic image of Xi ushering out a previous political era, but for me the decisive moment was in 2017.