There appears to have been no intra-party multiple-candidate election for the Politburo and its Standing Committee. These leaders are still selected the old-fashioned way: through behind-the-scenes deal-making, a process that retired leaders still influence heavily. Introducing intra-party multiple-candidate elections at this level would provide a new source of legitimacy and enhance elite cohesion. By not doing so this time around, China's leaders missed a big opportunity.
The biggest and potentially most consequential disappointment, however is the factional imbalance of the Standing Committee. Although the party monopolizes power in China, the party leadership is not monolithic. Two main political factions within the party leadership are currently competing for power, influence, and control over policy initiatives.
The top members of the Jiang camp are "princelings" -- leaders who come from families of veteran revolutionaries or of high-ranking officials. The other camp, headed by Hu Jintao, consists of leaders who advanced their political careers via the Chinese Communist Youth League (the group is known as the tuanpai).
This bifurcation has created something approximating a mechanism of checks and balances in the decision-making process. Leaders of these two competing factions differ in expertise, credentials, and experience. They represent different socioeconomic classes and different geographic regions, but often cooperate in order to govern effectively. If the two factions do not maintain balance, the defeated faction could become less cooperative. More worryingly, it could use its political resources and socioeconomic constituencies to engage in a vicious power struggle, potentially undermining the legitimacy of the political system and threatening the stability of the country at large.
In this latest leadership changeover, the balance in the new Standing Committee indeed seems to have been broken. Only two are tuanpai; the other five are all protégés of Jiang Zemin (and one of the tuanpai, former head of the Propaganda Department Liu Yunshan, is actually very close to Jiang). By contrast, the balance between the two camps in the Politburo and the Central Military Commission have largely stayed intact (see Table 2), and many of Hu's people made it into the 376-member Central Committee.
Additionally, the number of princelings in both top civilian and military leadership bodies is unprecedentedly high (see Table 3 and 4), including four (57 percent) of the seven Standing Committee members and four (36 percent) of the 11 members of the Central Military Commission. Both percentages are a significant increase over the previous congress. It has been widely noted that large numbers of party leaders have used their political power to convert the assets of the state into their own private wealth. The strong presence of princelings in the top leadership is likely to reinforce public perceptions of this convergence of power and wealth in the country. In his remarks Thursday, Xi claimed that his administration's top priority will be to increase fairness and equality and to crack down on corruption. Chinese will hear these words with skepticism in light of the princelings' dominance of the country's highest levels of power. As a result, the credibility of the new leadership as a whole will likely be significantly undermined.
That said, the four princeling leaders on the Standing Committee -- Xi Jinping, Zhang Dejiang, Yu Zhengsheng, and Wang Qishan -- all have decades of experience and high levels of competence in economic and financial affairs. The new Standing Committee will likely emphasize economic reform, especially promoting the private sector and accelerating financial liberalization in order to make the middle class happy. The problem is that China's next phase of economic reform needs parallel political reform.
But there are good reasons to doubt that political reform is coming soon. The exclusion of two key liberals -- Li Yuanchao and Wang Yang -- from the Standing Committee is particularly worrying. The Chinese public will likely understand why Wang Yang is out; many conservative leaders saw him as a threat. Wang's main political rival was Bo Xilai, and the two tended to balance each other in terms of power, influence and policy agenda. Now that Bo is out, the conservatives do not want Wang in. That Li Yuanchao didn't get elevated, however, was surprising. An instrumental voice for the liberal intellectuals who demand rule of law, governmental accountability, and intra-party democracy, Li has many supporters. He has also played a crucial role in attracting foreign-educated returnees and promoting the college graduates who work as village cadres.
All this means that China's much-needed political reform may be delayed. Public demand for a more competitive, more institutionalized, more transparent political system will, however, only become stronger.
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