Oct 23 (Reuters) – China’s Xi Jinping secured a precedent-breaking third leadership term on Sunday and introduced a new Politburo Standing Committee stacked with loyalists, cementing his place as the country’s most powerful ruler since Mao Zedong.
Here are initial reactions from analysts and experts:
ALVIN TAN, HEAD OF ASIA FX STRATEGY, RBC CAPITAL MARKETS, SINGAPORE
“It does look like it’s dominated by Xi’s allies.”
“In terms of policymaking, it does mean that there is likely to be more deference to Xi Jinping’s own views about how to move the country and the economy forward… I can imagine that zero-COVID policy is likely more entrenched and there’s going to be further push on this issue of common prosperity and the like.”
CHRIS MILLER, PROFESSOR AT TUFTS UNIVERSITY, MASSACHUSETTS
“The party congress has reaffirmed Xi’s decisive role in ruling the Communist Party, marking a continued shift away from collective leadership of party elites toward a personalized dictatorship. It also appears to have confirmed the downgrading of economic growth as a key party goal, relative to other agenda items such as zero-COVID and the party’s political and ideological control. On tech, the key theme was self-sufficiency in science and technology, which is to be expected given the increasing decoupling of the U.S. and Chinese tech sectors.”
GARY NG, SENIOR ECONOMIST, ASIA PACIFIC, NATIXIS, HONG KONG
“The new inner circle will extend and heighten the current policy stance, and generally it seems that most of the newly appointed officials seem to be Xi’s key allies. So I guess this is also a move of the further consolidation of power, or maybe in the future, of course, performance is important, but also loyalty is increasingly a key concern when picking officials.”
(Reporting by Rae Wee in Singapore and Xie Yu in Hong Kong; Editing by William Mallard)