 Hi, everybody. My name is Kristen Looney. I'm an assistant professor at Georgetown University. This panel, the 1115 to 1230 panel, is about contentious elite politics. I have been instructed to keep strict time, but fortunately, it looks like we're going to have plenty of time for Q&A in this session, and also to keep the bio short, since I think most of you have copies of who these speakers are. I'll just do very brief introductions and then turn it over to them. So to my right, we have Christopher Johnson. He holds the Freeman Chair in China Studies at CSIS. He spent nearly two decades in the US government working in various agencies. He was a senior China analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. He is a graduate of UCSD and has a Master's in Security Studies from George Washington University. So he has a long history in DC. And then we have Richard McGregor, an accomplished journalist who served as Washington Bureau Chief for the Financial Times, leading the newspaper's coverage of American politics and managing its DC-based team of reporters from 2011 to 2014. He is author of the book The Party, The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers, which was described by the economist as a masterful depiction of the Chinese political system. Since February of last year, he has been a public policy fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington DC. Mr. McGregor is originally from Australia and graduated from Sydney University. And then finally, last but not least, we have Professor David Shambaugh, a faculty member at George Washington University, a very accomplished scholar on contemporary China and international relations of Asia. He has many accomplishments. Among them, he has published more than 30 books and over 300 articles. He is a frequent contributor to the international media, serves on a number of editorial boards, and is truly one of the leading experts in the field of Chinese politics. So it's a pleasure to have all three of these speakers here today. And I look forward to hearing their comments and your reactions. So without further ado, I'm going to turn it over to Chris. Great. Thank you so much, Chris, and it's a great pleasure to be here. Try to keep my remarks focused. I think I'll have my remarks focus on the notion of how contentious are the elite politics. I found it interesting that in the arranging of this panel, that was the term that was used. So there seems to be a built-in assessment that they are indeed contentious or extremely contentious, which is something that I think has been a running theme, especially in the last couple of weeks. I think it was last Tuesday we had front page articles in The Washington Post and in The New York Times discussing with bold headlines about Xi Jinping losing his grip on power and articles that didn't deliver on those titles. But that's OK. And so just to give a sense of how contentious are these politics and how does that impact foreign policy, my own sense is obviously there's a lot of pushback going on inside the system right now to what the agenda that Xi Jinping is pushing. But I think what's very important is to look at where this resistance is coming from. And most importantly, does it represent some sort of serious elite-level conflict among the top leaders over Xi Jinping's agenda? Or are these resistance voices mainly from elsewhere? And I think when we analyze the most recent pieces of evidence that this is happening, these letters, for example, one calling for Xi Jinping to step down from office, a very interesting article, which to me has more significance found on the website of the Central Discipline Inspection Commission, talking about the leader's willingness to receive wise counsel. There's obviously some sort of tremors. But the sense that I get is that Xi Jinping remains very much in charge of the system that he has created, that he is still in a position where he is not simply first among equals within the leadership, but simply just first, and is continuing to press forward an agenda based on that set of circumstances. And how is he able to do that? I think several basic foundational points. The first is that coming into power, Xi Jinping was able to take advantage of what you might call this sort of born-to-rule personality and sense of entitlement that he has from his status as one of these princelings, the children of the founders of the regime. And as such, that gave him a built-in political and other network that he was able to activate from the moment he arrived on the scene. In sharp contrast to his two predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, who started very much at a deficit in terms of their positions in that regard, Xi came in fully empowered with all three of the major titles. And again, especially in the military, had a strong network of supporters that he could rely on to get a sense of how to look at things. Secondly, he has developed this sort of kitchen cabinet style of advisory, where he has tended to emphasize less the formal mechanisms of decision-making and information flow within the system, especially to the detriment of the state council ministries. It's very clear to me that they're far less influential in terms of policy formulation and in some cases even execution than they were under Hu Jintao. And it's all sort of drifted over to either the party through its sort of formal entities, including a couple of these new leading groups that have been set up during Xi Jinping's tenure, most obviously the National Security Commission on the security, military, and foreign affairs side, and the comprehensively deepening reform leading group on the economic side. And a lot more emphasis in economic policy also on the party's financial and economic leading group, which in the past was a much smaller entity, now has nearly tripled in size in terms of its staff in the last three years. And as most recently evidenced by the drafting of the 13 five-year plan, is playing a much more direct role in actual policy formulation and implementation. And then an even less formal layer of these advisors, people like Liu He, people like Fang Xinghai on the economic side, they have their counterparts on the security side, who are giving him sort of day-to-day advice. So a very small universe of people who actually know what's going on. And I think that makes all of our jobs as external analysts extremely challenging. And I worry that in a lot of the commentary of late, there's a desire far too quickly in my assessment to take small incidents and blow them up into signs of some sort of deep elite conflict within the system. But we will see. I mean, you know, it's very clear that Xi Jinping this year has decided that now is the time to begin to focus on the 19th Party Congress next fall. And I would expect he will be devoting 90% of his political energy and capital toward that enterprise. And the sense I get is that if he gets his way next fall, we will see a very disruptive process and that we will see a lot of changes to what we have seen in past Congresses with regard to how they deal with things like age requirements for retirement, what you might call sort of step-by-step elevation of promotions, and even just basic criteria for how cadre are being evaluated and promoted turnover in the Central Committee, which I suspect will be quite massive if he gets his way. So a sort of very disruptive agenda. I would also suspect that he would not signal the succession as we have seen at the mid-Congress in the last several. So a real departure, I think, from a lot of what we've seen in the past. And this will be not greeted very warmly by a lot of the people who feel that, you know, look, we've had a process, we've had these norms that we've been abiding by, and that includes your successor is sort of technically already settled and he's making very clear that those arrangements are being undone. So I think we will continue to see that kind of froth, but I see no sign that Xi Jinping is really struggling to maintain influence at this point. And the second big argument out there that I think sort of speaks to this contentious politics is that he's provoking a crisis with this behavior, right? Whether it's turning back the clock in terms of political tightening, ideological tightening, media tightening, the anti-corruption campaign, all these sort of things, he's sort of provoking some sort of crisis. My own assessment is that it's far too early to judge that at this stage. He may indeed be provoking a crisis, but I think it's too early to tell. What I think we can say with absolute certainty is that he managed to suppress an existential crisis to the party in the form of these tigers that have been arrested during the anti-corruption campaign, especially in its first few years. Whereby I mean Ling Ji Hua, the former head of the general office, Zhou Yongkang, the head of the security services, Xu Zihong, Guo Boxiong in the military. I mean, it's important for us, I think, as analysts to remember that when we think of China, sometimes we think of big country, large economy, emerging global power, but at core they're still a Leninist political system. And so if you have a situation where the head of the general office, the nerve center of the party, and oh by the way, which manages leadership security, the person who was in charge of military personnel for eight years building a private army inside the PLA, the head of the security services, the counterintelligence chief in the security services, all working independently, not together, but independently, but toward the same goal of unsettling Xi Jinping's succession, this is a serious challenge. And so I think everything he's done in that regard with the anti-corruption campaign is actually a totally logical response. I think his argument would be, while some commentators are emphasizing that he's destroying institutionalization of the system to the degree that ever existed with his approach, I think he would be arguing I defended institutionalization, I was the institutional choice. And this was the maneuver to come against me. And so my own sense is, we really have to pay attention to the facts, not allow our own predilections about whether we like what Xi Jinping is doing with the system or not to influence our objective analysis of what's actually happening. And so how is this all impacting foreign policy just real quickly? I think my own sense is that because of this sort of heavy emphasis on the politics and on the economics, I mean those are really the two things. I mean my view is, in Xi Jinping's day-to-day agenda these days, politics certainly treats Trump's economics and economics Trump's foreign policy by far. The sense that I get is that he set out his course on foreign policy in the foreign affairs work conference speech that he delivered in the fall of 2014, where he clearly is breaking with Deng Xiaoping's sort of longstanding guidance of keeping a low profile internationally and pushing greater activism, some would say assertiveness. And basically creating some new rules internationally. And I think again, some are too quick to judge that China's out to remake the international system, that's not my sense. The view I get is that where they can smoothly integrate into existing organizations, they will want to do so, but where they perceive that that's not happening. Take IMF loading share requirements as an example. They're going to set up parallel mechanisms that tend to advance their own interests. They're a big country with interests and they're going to protect those interests. And so I think we should expect to see more of the same from Xi Jinping, a multi-directional foreign policy, definitely one that's not as focused on the United States. He seems far less solicitous of good relations with the United States than his predecessors. I would say it's fair to say that Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin probably spent 80 to 90% of their foreign policy bandwidth managing US-China relations, whether those were good, bad, or indifferent. Xi Jinping has clearly demonstrated that he's not as interested in that. That doesn't mean he doesn't see US-China relationship as the most important, as we saw in clear display last week with the meeting between Obama and Xi. It's just that he doesn't feel that he needs to be over solicitous of that relationship. And I think that requires both sides to think very seriously about how we manage this relationship going forward. So let me stop there and turn over to Richard. Thank you, Chris. Yes, Richard. Thanks very much. It's always very difficult to follow Chris. I'm actually going to work from notes, unlike him. First of all, what's the best explanation for, you know, why is Xi Xi? Why does he behave like he does? I think the conventional explanation that whose personality and consensual style was ineffective, Hu Jintao's personality and style was ineffective and easily taken advantage of, I think that's basically true. Wenja Bao and Hu Jintao, I think, basically were the ultimate housekeepers, if you like, in terms of policy terms. They bettered down the economic reforms that their predecessors had unleashed and they sort of fed off the export and investment boom triggered by the entry into the WTO in 2000. And by and large, the watchword of their style was caution, which, of course, as we saw, saw many of their sort of ambitious and calculated underlings build, you know, massive, sprawling empires in the party, in the military and in the state-owned companies, particularly in the energy sector. And I think, as Chris referred to, and I'll come back to this, these have really only been confronted in a full-on manner by Xi since coming to power. As to Xi's style, I think he's looked backwards to earlier Chinese eras, to eras looking back to Mao and Deng. And I think he's calculated that if you really wanted to get anything done, then what works in China in the CCP system is not a consensual decision-making process, but basically a much more dictatorial one, and one held much more tightly with a smaller kitchen cabinet group of people. In some respects, such powers or such decision-making process is very, very effective. In the short term, for example, Xi's anti-corruption campaign has been very effective and efficient in targeting and rapidly bringing down corrupt officials. The same, in some respects, could be said about his restructuring in the military, both in terms of personnel and the broader reorganization of military zones. People have wondered early in this process in the first two, three years of the Xi Jinping era, where was the backlash of the single-minded corruption clean out? And how Xi could get away with cleaning out so many wealthy and powerful clans within the party? I think on this point, I agree with Chris. I think Xi himself, frankly, was very much the backlash when he came in against the machinations of Bo Xilai, Zhou Yongkang and the like, which you can see detailed in the official media these days. There doesn't seem to be too much secret about it. And after all, they were really aiming, if not to knock him off as becoming CCP party secretary, they wanted at least to novel him in the job should he have got there. And that's the existential crisis that Chris was referring to. I really think we're in a new period now as far as Xi Jinping goes. And I think that the sort of style that he does operate with really no longer yields fruits that it did in the first three years of his rule. In other words, put it another way, Xi might be a very strong leader, but I don't think that means he's necessarily an effective one. He's tough politically, but in policy terms, particularly on the domestic economy, I think we increasingly see feet of clay. You know, it's one thing to root out blatantly corrupt officials, but the converse of that is not necessarily true. In other words, the new breed of officials who are taking their place, who are in theory, armed with a much sort of clearer and cleaner sense of governance and party discipline, will be any better at their jobs, will have a more enhanced and creative sense of policymaking, and even if they do, will have the ability or power to put their ideas into practice. You saw a number of recent articles, particularly last year, talking about how Xi has basically subordinated economic reform to party reform and consolidation, but it's certainly not clear to me that party consolidation bodes well for economic reform at all, whatever the sequencing. In fact, party consolidation should have the opposite effect if we agree that liberalization of the Chinese economy is what it needs. You know, the argument in favor of party reform and a cleaner CCP is that it lays down the tracks for substantive and credible economic reform, but it could also, and in fact, would most likely, I think, have the opposite effect. The other argument that CCP, you know, the old Chinese sort of argument that Xi is turning left to turn right, I think hardly seems to ring true these days. Four years, I think, you know, we've seen a pretty consistent ideology on his part. The same in some respects, I think, applies to the military. Xi got rid of a lot of senior generals, ones considered to be untouchable. He's pushed through a substantial structural reorganization and did that and in fact had that announced just a month or two, I think, before a Taiwan election, which, you know, I think otherwise would have been considered a very sensitive time. Now, getting or sort of assessing the fruits of these reforms, I think it's a much longer term proposition. But once again, I think there's no guarantee that cleaner generals will be better generals, even if they are, you know, concentrating more on their day jobs and not selling commissions under the table most of the time. Nor is it clear on the second and more important point whether the new military structures will work. So in other words, in terms of achieving results, I think the restructurings that he's undertaken, which initially looked really, really tough, certainly, Hu Jintao would have never had the ability and probably nor the gumption to do that. At the end of the day, that might end up being the easy part of the equation for Hu Jintao. I mean, no amount of ruthlessness can easily turn around and refit the economy, nor change the global economy within which China has to work just like every other country. And no amount of banging heads together can really retool policymakers' minds, nor give them greater power within the bureaucracy. Now, let's go back to the other backlash or the current backlash that Chris referred to. I think it's certainly true that there's more pushback now against Xi in terms of his particular, well, his style and his ideology. It's a more widespread group of people. It's not just the rich and powerful families and clans that I referred to earlier that basically have had their lifetimes work pulled, taken away from them overnight. It's also China's small L in inverted commas liberals. In the media, in academia, whose hopes that Xi might be a new kind of leader have obviously thoroughly been buried. Now, I think that, you know, when you look at the people arraigned against him, this is hardly a stable coalition. It's much more surprising that we haven't seen much more dissent given the sort of shake-up that he's given to the party bureaucracy and the like. So in that respect, he's... I don't think he's under any threat at all. I think where Xi has been most effective and most successful, at least in Chinese terms, is...and where he faces the least dissent is foreign policy. I might say at this point, I mean, that we're obviously going to spend all of this panel talking about Xi Jinping, but there's kind of a bit of a cult of Xi Jinping in D.C., which in some respects exaggerates him as an individual. If you look at the sorts of foreign policy policies that he's pursuing at the moment, I think, you know, when Hu Jintao came into power, China was the eighth largest economy in the world, a much weaker country. There was no guarantee that the entry into the WTO would be as successful as it was. There was no guarantee that the output was going to grow at an average of about 10% for the next decade. And the like, Xi Jinping took over a completely different country. I don't think that the foreign policy aims that he's pursuing are that different. You know, the South China Sea, the Nine Dash Line, or the Old Eleven Dash Line, that's not new. The issues with Japan and the East China Sea, none of that is new. Certainly Xi Jinping drives consensus. He's certainly been much more willing to take risks than Hu Jintao was, but he's also in a much more powerful position with a much more powerful military behind him. And I think as much as one can measure public opinion in China, it seems to me, you know, one of the funny things with the South China Sea and the Nine Dash Line, this is not a scientific statement, obviously, but whenever you talk to Chinese about the Nine Dash Line, it's not even, as though this is up for debate, you know, of course it's ours. And, you know, once you go outside of China, it's the exact opposite. So in that respect, I feel that, you know, Xi Jinping has a lot of public support on a more assertive, at least in that place, foreign policy. I think more generally, he's got a quite a more intelligent mixture of policies on the foreign policy front. You know, hard at the core, flexible at the edges. The One Belt, One Road, I think, in many respects, and we've got to see how that unfolds. You know, it's a creative response to China's strengths and weaknesses. You know, China has too much cash and spare cash and overcapacity in its economy. One Belt, One Road might help with that. In the geopolitical sense, it allows China to march west while its sort of eastern seafront, I think, is a much more unstable environment. On Japan, remember when Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, that was just after the issue with the Senkaku-Diayu Islands. And I think, obviously, he had to take a tough time at that point. He's since dialed that, deliberately dialed that down. And I obviously don't think he stepped back from anything. And there's still the sort of Chinese patrols around the island. But I think he sort of put that on the back burner. And I think that has been pretty smart as well. And on the South China Sea, I guess we'll know in 20 or 30 years whether Chinese tactics there have worked. But I think, frankly, the Chinese execution of that has really caught the US and regional nations on the hop. The response is obviously being still worked out. I don't know what will be effective there. But there is the idea among some that China has set itself a trap, we'll see. But certainly, I think the execution has been pretty remarkable. So my general view to sum up, I think she is a strong and secure but ineffective leader on domestic policy, a strong and secure and pretty effective leader on foreign policy. Thank you. Thank you so much, Richard. David? Thank you, Kristen. And it's a pleasure to share the session with Richard and Chris, colleagues, both of whom I have enormous respect for and have learned a lot from over the years. So my comments are going to try and follow the instructions that have been given us, even though this session is about elite politics. But the first point I think I'd like to make is that it's more important to look at the party as an institution than simply the leadership. But since this is a session on the leadership, I want to be a good soldier and do what was asked of us. And make a number of observations. The first one is that I think we have to be rather humble and admit that there is very much that we don't know about the leadership dynamics at any time in China. And particularly at this time, the box is more opaque and black than usual. So Zhongnan High Watching has always been more of an art than a science. But it's really, really difficult these days in many ways to find divisions, if you will, and proclivities. I mean, the one thing that's abundantly clear is Xi Jinping. So my colleagues have already spoken to that. That's my second point. We do know that he has centralized power in his own persona to an extent not seen since Deng, if not Mao. But I'd make the distinction between centralization of power or personalization of power on one hand and consolidation of power on the other. This may sound odd, but I don't think he has fully consolidated his own power yet over the bureaucracies. And let me elaborate why I think that is the case. He certainly personalized it in an extraordinary way. He's demanded loyalty oaths. He's demanded what the Chinese call be outtied to declare where you stand on a rather repetitive basis. He just did it with the media a couple of weeks ago. He does it with the military. He does it with every bureaucracy that he meets with. And there have been demands or there have been pledges in the provincial media, at least, about Xi Jinping as the core of the party. So he's equating himself with the party. Last guy that did that was named Mao. So in some ways, you have to ask, if you need to demand loyalty oaths and vial ties and pledges, are you secure in your position? I would say not really. To me, that shows an insecurity. But in the Chinese political system, everybody goes along when those pledges and vial ties are demanded. And they provide them. This is what the late and famous sinologist Lucian Pai used to refer to as feigned compliance, false compliance. And there's a lot of theater, I think, always in Chinese politics, but particularly at this time. So I don't think we should, as analysts, look at these pledges and editorials and vial ties and claim, oh yes, Xi's in control. Strikes me, it's just the opposite. Well, not the opposite. He is in control. I do share Richard and Chris's views there. I don't think he's in danger. But I'm just trying to point out that there may not be as much strength in his position as many analysts believe. We know that there's a lot of foot dragging in the economic bureaucracies. Chris spoke to that already. And there's a lot of discontent and opposition in the media to the crackdown on the media. We've seen evidence of that in recent weeks and even months. And in the educational system, with this campaign against Western hostile values, Western textbooks, and so on, so-called think tanks. And one of those people think there is no such thing as a think tank in China. But research institutions in China are also unhappy with not being utilized under Xi Jinping. He has, anecdotally, we know all these people who work in these think tanks. And at least those that I meet with tell me that they aren't being asked or commissioned to write papers. If they write them on their own volition, they're not sure if they're read and where they go in the system. And they're, most importantly, not sure what to write because the policy process has become highly politicized. And they're afraid to write about certain things and to offer views that may be at variance with Xi Jinping's. So in all three of these areas, economic bureaucracy, media, educational system, research institutions, the system has just frozen up as a result of Xi's personalization of power. And the anti-corruption campaign has further contributed to this freezing up. There's a pervasive sense of fear throughout the party, the government, the military, the educational system, and corporations in society. And so even if so, if the anti-corruption campaign is necessary, which it is, and I agree with my colleagues here, Xi had to clean house. It was quite far progressed. And but it's all I'm pointing out is it's had collateral side of unintended side effects that are damaging the system. Corruption greases the system. It makes the system work. What he's doing is making the system not work in some ways. So that's the second point. Third point, our organizers pose the question for this session, are there certain bureaucracies that are benefiting or not at present? Well, answer, yes. The coercive bureaucracies and the propaganda apparatus are definitely benefiting from Xi's repression. There's big money in repression, ladies and gentlemen, internal security, intelligence work, in the propaganda system, in the military. So if you look at those, what I call the coercive apparatus on the one hand and the propaganda apparatus on the other hand, and the military and the state-owned enterprises, these four together I call the iron quadrangle, they're all benefiting significantly from the policies under Xi. Fourth point, there are no signs of open factionalism at the top, but the silence and lack of prominence of many leaders is very telling to me. Fifth point I'll make is, gets to the personnel changes potentially at the, sorry, 19th party Congress next year that Chris has already mentioned. This could, this is going to be very interesting to watch, actually. Could make for a brokered convention with Chinese characteristics, you might say. We shall see. And Chris has also write that the horse trading and the bargaining and the battles really, this is what the Chinese system is all about, it's personnel, and battles take place before the event. So it's already starting and how it proceeds between now and the autumn of 2017 is going to be very telling. So four of the seven Politburo members must retire and 13 of the 25, sorry, four of the seven standing committee members and 13 of the 25 Politburo members must retire for age reasons if indeed the age norm is obeyed at the Congress. That will leave a number of vacancies to be filled. It will also leave a number of individuals in place. So we don't know who the vacancies to be filled will be one assumes they will be Xi Jinping men and women. But we don't know a whole lot about who Xi Jinping's men and women are. This is another peculiarity. Here's a man who is at the top of the system, has risen through the system, but there is no identifiable clique or patron client network, which is a better way to think about Chinese politics, that he has worked with and brought with him over time. Hu Jintao had that from the youth league, Jiang Zemin had that from Shanghai, this guy does not have that, save a couple of individuals, Li Jiangxiu and Ding Xiaxian, I think his name is, and perhaps a few others. So the seven positions I think that are gonna have to be, or 12 positions that will have to be filled, it's gonna be interesting to see who fills them. We don't know. Then there are those who remain and those are potentially interesting cases. Li Keqiang, Wang Huning, Li Yanqiao, Wang Yang, Liu Qibao, Sun Zhengsai, and Hu Junhua. So I won't take time to run through all of them, but with one or two of these individuals, Liu Qibao and Sun Zhengsai, their disposition is unclear to me. If you look at their records previously, Liu and the propaganda system, Guangxi and Sichuan, Sun in Ji Lin and Chongqing, where he is presently, their orientations are not terribly clear. They tend to look to be more authoritarian, hard line, if you will. But the others, Li Yanqiao, Wang Yang, Hu Junhua, Li Keqiang, I would add in this group, and potentially Wang Huning, who's a real chameleon and survivor, are what I would call reformists and soft authoritarians. So this sets up, in my mind, at the Congress, a kind of tripartite division, not a bifurcation, but a kind of trifurcation, if you will, between the three groups, well, sorry, two groups and one man, Xi Jinping, those who fill the empty positions and these potential reformers who have been sidelined under the last four years. So we'll have to watch this brokered convention with the Chinese characteristics with great interest. Finally, leaders remain important in the Chinese system and we have to pay attention to them. But it's more important, I think, to pay attention to the institutions I've always felt if you're trying to analyze Chinese politics. So here's a couple of points to end on. First is, going forward, watch the bureaucratic instruments of control and the millions of individuals who enforce repression and control in this system. Why? Because the experiences of other authoritarian states, both Leninist and non-Leninist authoritarian states, tells us that when the coercive apparatus and the propaganda apparatus become a little bit lax in their enforcement of repression, then the system is coming down. It's really beginning to crumble. I would point to the East European cases in particular and encourage you, if you haven't seen it, to watch the film, The Lives of Others, Leben den Andren, about the Stasi officer. It's a movie, yes, one of the best documentary awards at the Academy Awards, but it's very accurate about what happened inside the Stasi. So the coercive apparatus, no matter how well you're funded, if you begin to sympathize with the objects of your repression, as was the case in East Germany, you don't do your job as efficiently as you're supposed to. And then this Leninist edifice is really crumbling. So keep your eye on propaganda, internal security, state security, and so far there are no signs of cracks. I'm not suggesting there are, that's quite to the contrary, but watch for that. And as Chris, I think, noted, they're already, the purges inside the ministry of state security and the counterintelligence apparatus and the military, pretty significant. So you purge those apparatuses, what are you doing to them? Yes, you're cleaning them out, but you're also stressing the institutions. You're not producing loyalty necessarily from the institutions. Pushback, look for pushback from key sectors, businessmen, media, intellectuals, and the military. Pushback can come in several forms, I think, three forms, passive resistance, active resistance, and abandonment of the system. Which reminds me that we should all reread Albert Hirschman's exit voice and loyalty. Systems at this stage, authoritarian Leninist systems in the, what many think, the penultimate moribund stage, people in the system have three choices. You can exit, leave, and what do we see? We see Chinese elites leaving the country and putting their money abroad in ever-increasing numbers, $950 billion last year. Now we have the Panama Papers. You know, people in the system are not confident about their system and they are voting with their feet. So exit, Hirschman is right with China. Voice, well, voice means to pushback openly, active resistance. We don't see that because the hammer of the state will come down very hard. So we see what happens in all bureaucratic systems, authoritarian and otherwise, when you're disagree with the policy of the top, passive resistance, people just don't implement policy. They just drag their feet and that's a way of resisting. It's hard to see, but that's what's been happening, I think, in the last three years in China and will continue to. So we have to, in closing, I think really, if you're gonna look at the future of the Chinese Communist Party, look at it in comparative terms as a Leninist Party state. It is very important to look at it that way, I think, not just as a Chinese Communist Party because Leninist Party states are very predictable, what I call the Leninist life cycle, six or seven phases through which every one of them pass and the Chinese Communist Party is in the last phase right now where they can either adapt and open the system and try and save themselves, which is what they were doing, I would argue, up to 2009, stop doing, or they can crack down and think they can stay in power through sheer coercion. Brzezinski wrote very presciently about this in his book, The Grand Failure. That's what China is in this stage and Xi Jinping has selected the last option. Thinks the only way to save the party is through strengthening the party and suppressing the society. Well, there's an alternative. So-called soft authoritarianism versus hard authoritarianism. So we'll see if the Congress next year produces a shift, my own guess is not. And like Chris, Richard, I can't remember, there is this view that Xi Jinping is cracking down before he opens up, sweeping the house before you invite the guests in as Mao used to put it. I don't buy it for a second. This guy is a hard authoritarian who's really drunk with his own power and that's not good for the system, it's not good for China. What's it mean for foreign policy? I tend to agree with my colleagues. I don't think it affects foreign policy. Foreign policy is on kind of autopilot for China in a lot of ways. We're not gonna see a big change in the South China Sea, U.S.-China relations, China, Japan or anything else by alteration of this collectivity of leaders at the top of their system. I think that's kind of an autonomous variable. So I'll leave it at that. Thank you. Okay, thank you very much. I'm going to use my position as moderator to raise three short questions for the panel, not addressed to any specific speaker and then we'll have time for Q&A. And I've been instructed we can, well, we have at least 30 minutes. Depending on how many questions there are, we might be a little flexible on that too. Okay, so the first question I have is why do you all think that people outside of China are so quick to jump to these conclusions that, and make wild predictions about what's going on in China? Anything ranging from Xi Jinping will never step down to he will become assassinated or even in the foreign policy realm that China is indeed a revisionist power and its foreign policies unlike anything that we have ever seen before. I'm just wondering what you think the source of these type of kind of extreme views are coming from outside of China. Another question I have is, do you think that the anti-corruption campaign has stalled very serious domestic reform, economic reform? In other words, Xi Jinping didn't realize how long this campaign was going to take and a lot of his political capital has been spent on the anti-corruption campaign as a result not having the resources to commit to serious domestic reform. Or is it as Professor Shambhal has just suggested that lower level people are engaging in passive resistance and not implementing these reforms? And then my final question is about lenses through which we can understand factional politics. Many people, I think it's interesting the idea that Xi Jinping doesn't have a clear click, right? A lot of people have interpreted the anti-corruption campaign as an attack against the youth league faction, right? The populists who were in power immediately prior to Xi Jinping's rule. And I'm wondering if this previous model of understanding factional politics as two main factions kind of serving as a checks and balances against each other, the populist and the elitist. I'm thinking of the Cheng Li model of understanding factional politics. As to whether or not this is still an accurate lens through which to interpret factional politics, whether or not the dominant factions are still equal or if what we've seen is a real decline of the populists who I'm not sure if they overlap with who David you're referring to as the soft authoritarians, but have these people really been kind of pushed out and seen a major reduction in their power? So you can take them in any order you would like. Do you want to see each chance? Sure. Okay, I'll run through them quickly. I mean, I think on the first question about where do we get these wild assessments? I just find it striking, especially since Xi Jinping has come to power, how these issues that require in my mind a great deal of careful, subtle and nuanced analysis, there seems to be a strong desire to jam these very complex issues into nice, neat, tight little boxes. So Xi Jinping is a power mad megalomaniac like Mao or he wants to introduce the rule of law or God knows what, when obviously the situation is much more complex. So I think that's one phenomenon that I don't understand. Where it might be coming through is opacity is frustrating as we've all sort of said in our comments. And I'm really struck by the fact that just in my own experience, the number of people who actually know what's going on inside the system is an incredibly small number now under Xi Jinping and getting smaller all the time. And as David suggested in his comments, that's probably not a good trend for a dynamic society, et cetera. And that makes it much more difficult. And I think that a lot of resources, sources, whatever you want to say, that people have relied upon over the years to get insight on the system, those people are not as willing to talk as they used to be or they just don't know. They've been cut out and they're frustrated. And so my own view is that they tend to then complain and project a more negative, perhaps, assessment or picture of what's happening than what might actually be happening because they were influential and now they're not. And they don't like that, just like all of us wouldn't. The other third piece is I think that there was a trend in the high politics watching community of assessing, during the mid-delayed Hu Jintao era, that the party was on some inevitable or inexorable path toward greater institutionalization. Whereas in my own sense, Hu Jintao was really or seems to have been the exception rather than the rule. And Xi Jinping is very much an inconvenient truth for the school that believed they were headed in a more institutionalized direction. And so I think when you're confronted with the facts changing, you have a choice to make. You either admit that there's something going on with the model and you shift your model appropriately or you do the intellectual gymnastics to jam the facts to fit your model. And so I just see time and again that it strikes me that this is why seemingly small evidence from my point of view is amplified into serious signs of discord within the leadership. I also think that we do have to draw this line between whether or not we like what Xi Jinping is doing with the system and how we let that influence our assessment of what's actually going on in terms of his strength, position, the survivability of the system and so on. On the anti-corruption campaign, no doubt in my mind that it's having an impact on reform. I'm not sure I would necessarily link it so much to reform. It's certainly having an impact on growth. No question there. I often think some of these anecdotes about how the provincial party chiefs are so deathly afraid they won't sign off on any deals. That's not the sense I get from businesses who seem to be doing just fine with getting deals executed. It has gummed up the system. There's no question about that. What's striking is that it's abundantly clear that Xi Jinping knows that it's having that effect, shaving off whatever you want to say, 0.5, maybe even 1% of GDP, and he doesn't seem to be bothered by that, which says something about his mentality and what he thinks are the important factors. And then to the third, I always thought that sort of by the split thing was way too simplistic. I'm not sure there ever was a princelings versus youth league grouping or faction. And my own sense is that the situation is far more complex now and will continue to be so. Reductionism on this target is bad. That's my sort of general sense. Well, I mean, I frankly don't think there's been that much discord or sensationalist reporting about Xi Jinping himself. Obviously there's pressure, particularly on journalists there, deadlines, wanting the kudos of being the first to call something or this, that and the other. And the opacity that Chris talks about is really real. Having worked there as a journalist for over a decade, you can't just go and see somebody and shoot the breeze about what's happening in the Politburo. Having covered US politics for four years, the US is totally over-reported. And China is totally under-reported. And generally, I think people have seen the view that Chris has put about Xi Jinping, I think is the general mainstream view of him. And obviously that's dressed up now and again. I mean, I don't think the comparison with Mao is terrific. I mean, I mentioned Mao, but in the terms of the cult of personality, I think that's over-raught. But as a different type and unexpectedly tariff, assertive leader, leading an unprecedented anti-corruption campaign, smashing all the institutional furniture and rules, I think it's accurate. So I don't think it's wrong. I think the area that is most difficult and there's most disagreement about in China now with the Chinese economy is it doesn't really have the ability to change? Have they got an entirely new model? Can it work in tandem with an enduring Leninist political system? I think that's the area which is most difficult to read. And I think that's where you, frankly, have the most extreme views is, because, you know, it's a bit of a blank slate. You know, with the Chinese economy, you can get any set of figures you like to get any sort of end results you like. And I think that is the area where the jury is really out, not on Xi Jinping. Anti-corruption, I think it, you know, it's possible it might have slowed things down a little bit. I'm not so sure. Certainly when I was living in China, it was always the, you know, corruption, grease the wheels. It was a sort of, it wasn't like Indonesia under Sahato where it bought the whole systems, you know, tumbling down. It was a way to get things done within networks and the like and make sure everybody got a cut and the like. Obviously, Xi Jinping and Wang Qishan have a very different view of that. I don't know, I mean, you know, we've gone through cycles on the anti-corruption campaign every six months. Everybody says, oh, I can't go any further. And it does. I don't know whether it will slow down in the sort of, you know, the jousting in the, before the party congress next year. But the, I think it's all already been incredible. And I think one thing about the anti-corruption campaign, these campaigns in China leave scars for years. And I think, you know, we don't really have a sense because we know so little about China about how deep those scars are. The, on the issue of, I don't know whether or not that's, it's Chengli's views, but I certainly thought it was always really a waste of time to think about Chinese politics in a binary factional sense. You know, certainly under Hu Jintao Wenjiao Bao, there was a lot more cooperation at the top than sort of day-to-day sort of fighting. Things are much more fluid. There's multiple networks besides the China Youth League and the Shanghai Gang. You know, you go into each Chinese province, particularly Guangzhou, each Chinese city. So it was never a kind of zero-sum game between those two, even though it might have worked out a little bit like that at the top. So in that respect, I think Xi Jinping maybe has been a breath of fresh air because he's released us from just that sort of cookie-cutter model. Well, I'll agree with my colleagues on your first question, Kristin. And with Richard, I don't think there's been a lot of wild speculation out there, some. But speculation occurs when there's a lack of information, opacity. So to the extent there is any, it's a direct correlation to the kind of system we're trying to understand. How valuable, if I understood your second question, how valuable is factional analysis to understanding Chinese politics if I could maybe rephrase a little? I don't think it's been terribly valuable for a very long time. And as Richard, I don't even think the Youth League, Shanghai, Faction, Prinsling, these kinds of groupings are definitive. They do exist. But coalition politics exist in Chinese politics too. And coalitions shift and change by the issue and over time. So if you're a Youth League person, you may find yourself in bed with a Shanghai gang person on one issue and in Shanghai gang, people with Prinsling's on another issue. So there's a fluidity to this, but it's a black box. We don't know exactly how these coalitions shift at the top of the system. But I don't think factional analysis and the way we used to use it during the Mao, Mao and even the Deng periods has been terribly useful for some time in the Jiang Zemin and after periods. Rather, three, there are, I have always thought, three better ways to study Chinese politics. One, bureaucratic systems. Xitong, two, patron client networks. And three, localities and provinces, geographic distinctions. That's certainly true in some systems like the military, more than other systems. You come from Shandong, or Hunan, there are certain perspectives and networks that go way, way back generations. Your third question about, if I heard you correctly, you ended up saying, are the soft authoritarians, have they really been pushed out? No, absolutely not. They're everywhere throughout the system. And they're just lying low under the current circumstances. They have no choice except, goes back to Hirschman, Exit Boys and Loyalty to leave. And we're seeing some of that, but they are feigning compliance to the extent they have to. They haven't changed their views on how wrong the direction of China is, that Xi Jinping is taking it. And their preference is, believe me, and they have a whole agenda. If they were tomorrow put into power, boom. They could go back to. If you look at the communiques of the fourth plenum of both the 16th and the 17th party congresses, these two communiques are blueprints for soft authoritarian reform. So it's not like they would first of all be doing something new. They would be going back to the period, I think, that existed from 98 to 08. And they have central committee documents to say, look comrades, this is what we agreed, and have abandoned. But they could say, you know, we have this document, nice blueprints. Just the same way Deng Xiaoping went back to the reform program of the early 1960s when he came to power in 78. So the soft authoritarians are very much in the system. The question is, how do they reassert themselves? So leaving scars for years, I noted Richard's point about the anti-corruption campaign. This is an important point. I really think the anti-corruption campaign has really broken too strong a word, it has really damaged the system. Yes, it's helping the system on one way, but it's doing at least as much damage. And we don't know, you know, the scars from the Cultural Revolution lasted for a generation or more. These people say the corruption campaign ends tomorrow. These people still have to sit next to each other in the office, live in the same neighborhood, and coexist in the same sphere, you know, despite what happened during the campaign. This is a, you know, read the book The Wounded about the Cultural Revolution. This is a very, very wounded society. And when we come out of the anti-corruption campaign, whenever that is, the wounds are going to be very, very deep. Okay, thank you very much. We have time now for audience questions. I believe there are microphones in both aisles. So please feel free to walk over to those, or just raise your hand. In the front row, yeah. Scott, Harold from Rand. Chris, Richard, David, having learned so much from you all over the years, I'm very pleased to have your views today. And to pose this question to you. You talked about the future and the unknowability of a lot of what's happening, but is it your assessment looking out to 2022 that with what Xi Jinping has done, with the riskiness now of being an ex-Chinese leader, or at least for your faction, or your clique, or your patron client network, whatever you want to call it, is there, has he, what have his actions increased the risk to him himself? Or were he to step down in 2022 as we have often thought in the past? Well, you only ever serve two, five year term. So in 2022, you could imagine Xi Jinping might think, boy, I've got to do what Yeltsin did and find a Putin, find somebody who's going to let me step down and not suffer the consequences, or would you say he has upped the incentives for himself to stay on? And just to the point of clarification, David, you talked about this massive wounds that are coming from this campaign, characterizing it as something somehow akin to the Cultural Revolution. I don't go to China anywhere near as often as you do, and I know that people are some scared in various places, but is that a really accurate comparison? Because I had the impression that the people who are scared are those really truly corrupt people who've led various bureaucracies, or ministries, or companies, but that the average person is not suffering and is not going to go back and have to live next door to someone, so the people who might be damaged by this are people who are probably going to be dead by the time the campaign's over, because they'll have been put in prison or they'll have really suffered, but could you just elaborate on that? Thank you. Well, fair enough. Question, Scott, the last one, it's not like the Cultural Revolution where the entire urban society was caught up in this campaign, but it is across shi tongs, it's across parties, government, military, and the urban corporate shi tongs, so those scars are taking place on a daily basis, and the fear factor I talk about is one of those scars. People are afraid of turning, they're being called on now to report on each other, to turn people in. I've heard anecdotal stories of academic colleagues who've been called in for questioning, oh, I understand you went to a conference in such and such a place, and you made such and such a comment, did you really make that comment? This is what I meant by it. This is this kind of interrogative dimension of this campaign, plus the arbitrariness of the campaign. Look, not everybody, most people in this system are corrupt, okay? I will make that statement. So the question, therefore, is how do you enforce the campaign? Answer selectively, and that is, that gets into the whole question of political agendas, and so that's what I meant by scars. So, and then on your first question, I forgot now I had something say on it. 2022. Oh, yeah, well, she didn't think, you know, he may want to stay on that long. First of all, I'm not certain he's going to make it that long, okay? I'll be that bold enough to say, I think there is so much discontent with him in that system, some of which we've been seeing through these letters, and if they're real or not, we can debate that. I think he is really not very popular in the system. He may be popular with the public. He is not popular in the system and with the elites, so we should not assume he's going to make it. Yes, I suspect he probably is all the way to the end of his term, but Jiang Zemin tried to stay on too, and he tried to recreate the position of Zhu Xi, chairman. They didn't, the system didn't allow that. I don't think the system, and the people who are discontent with Xi would want to endorse a prolongation of his tenure in office. So that's a long way away, but I have a very different take, I think. Maybe Chris and I should debate this. I don't see Xi as all that strong in the system. I think there's a false veneer. Chinese call it waiying, nai run. Hard on the outside, soft on the inside. We as analysts should not fall analytically for the false veneer. Obviously it's unknowable about 2022. I don't know, maybe by that stage, there'll be a Shangri-La hotel on the Paracel Islands and he can retire to the penthouse suite there. But I think if Chinese institutional practices are evolving, I think people think they've evolved, but they're evolving. But if they go backwards and we don't get a clear successor nominated next year, then I guess some people within the system, as David suggests, will think kind of all bets are off. Certainly when Jiang Zemin stayed on after in 2002, people were bitterly angry at him for that. People are still bitterly angry at Jiang Zemin these days, who's still with us. So I think if Xi Jinping, that's a very obvious thing to do. I think then there could be, I think that would be poor tender, much bigger internal fight. Okay, good morning, panelists. My name is Cody Eckert, formerly of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore. I have two questions for you. First, to botch a Chinese idiom, I often liken the Chinese leadership to a swan, peaceful and serene above water with flappers flipping crazily underneath the surface. How accurate do you think this is? The Chinese leadership is notorious for having contingency plans. For contingency plans, what are their, do you feel are their blind spots, institutional or otherwise? What do they not know that they don't know? And second of all, Professor Shambhal, you're talking about your contested convention with Chinese characteristics, love it. I was wondering, I was thinking, can we liken Xi Jinping to a Donald Trump figure? Fomenting national fervor, strongman, they already have the wall. I was just, and is this part of a global right wing up swelling? Thank you. No, I wouldn't compare Xi Jinping to Donald Trump. But I like your metaphor about the swan. But even on the surface, I'm not sure things are all that stable. Under the surface, I would agree. It's a good metaphor at any time for looking at China. They spend a lot of effort, this system, to create a false veneer of stability to the outside, well, mostly to their own people. And then secondly, the outside world. Underneath, and a lot of this, you know, feigned compliance is very false in my view. And that was the case in other authoritarian systems and boom, they came down overnight. And then the postmortems are, oh gosh, we missed that signal and that signal and oh, it was really unstable there. We should have seen that. Well, I think there are some, you know, some of that in China, some of that in China today. I don't, I might say I would never compare China to a swan. It never looks calm to me. But what don't they know? I tend to think internally in China, they're extremely well informed. All the sorts of problems that we pick out, I think they know about them. I never felt like I was telling anybody in Chinese officialdom anything they didn't know. What don't they know? What is their blind spot? I guess their blind spot is their adamant belief or conviction that the current system is fit to last and can produce the kind of economic growth the system demands. I might say that level of growth is much lower. You know, China doesn't have the same pressure and will have much less pressure in coming years to create jobs. They're simply not the new number of people coming along who need jobs. So some of the pressure is off in that respect. But I think in the blind spot is the ability to open the exam and can test the core assumptions of the party system. Yeah, I would agree with that. I would just elaborate slightly by saying I think if they are underestimated, it's the issue of time that they think they have more time perhaps on some of these issues, especially reform than they do. I find it interesting that just in the short period between the third plenum where all of these suggestions were unveiled till now, definitely a sense that the urgency, if you will, has declined and that the muddling through strategy perhaps can continue on, not indefinitely, but longer than I think their assessment was two or three years ago, certainly through the party congress, which makes some sense, my own view, is that they can do so, at least through that timeframe. But the issue is how much confidence do you have that let's concede to Xi Jinping and his colleagues that indeed they are correct, that the current system can kind of stumble or bumble its way through, at least through next fall, which I think is an easy concession to make. And let's concede as well, say that Xi Jinping somehow runs the table politically at the party congress. How much confidence do you have that he will then turn the dial up, if you will, on those more economic liberalization reforms? My own assessment is I'm much less confident than I was three years ago that he'll do that. Additional questions? Hi, Daniel Nadal, Georgetown University. I just wanted to bring up one of the cleavages that you mentioned, but didn't really go into depth about the regional, the regional provincial cleavages in Chinese domestic politics as one potential avenue for looking at Chinese politics instead of the binary factional politics model. What do you think are the regional geographic dimensions of the current, you know, of Xi Jinping's power? Where does he drop power from? Who is he going against? Because in the Hu Jingtao era, we heard a lot about, you know, devolving more power to the Western regions and to the poor regions and to the rural areas. So what's going on now? What does geographic politics look like in China today? I'll kick off. I find it interesting that in the last four years, being a provincial party secretary has gone from the best job in China to arguably the worst, you know, over the course of those four years in that. In the previous period, you had power, lots of access to graft, a fair amount of autonomy, a solid sense that, you know, that social compact that they've had for 30 years, which is you accept your horrible official salary, but you have all these other opportunities. Was there therefore binding you more tightly to the system because there was opportunity, you know, to move up? That's all been taken away. I mean, if you look at the provinces, they're being told we will reduce your types of revenue, land grabs, local government financing vehicles, all of these sort of lovely black piggy banks that they had for years and years, all gone. And there's not yet a sense, we'll see. I mean, a key thing to watch here is they're supposed to deliver on a fiscal reform plan this year, which is supposed to take a real effort at rebalancing transfer payments from the center to the provinces. Since that sort of 2012-13 period, all they've been doing is taking away revenue streams from the localities out providing those. And so when they, like I found it very interesting last fall when they did their kind of standard audit of local government finances, I think everyone in Beijing expected it would show the localities were cash poor. What it showed was that they were cash rich, which was a great frustration, you know, for the central government. And I think the reason why is that, and it was interesting in my assessment the different ways different elites in Beijing interpreted that data. You know, some of them thought, well, I guess we better get busy on that fiscal reform plan to reassure these guys and let them know it's gonna be okay. Others, Xi Jinping I think included, said it's passive resistance, they're trying to stop me, they're trying to stop my agenda. Swivel that anti-corruption turret toward the provinces more directly, right? Two very different assessments of how to think about that. Yeah, I mean, I'd go look at the wonderfully named vertical fiscal imbalance and the like. I certainly never got on top of that when I lived in China, but I think it's an area that really needs a lot more study about the tax base and how it works. I mean, we had a big change in the early 90s when it was recentralized, but that system I think is coming under a lot of strain. The second point, I guess, and I don't have a grand sort of architecture of regional differences, but one of the striking things of the current economic slowdown has been what's happened in the Northeast. These areas have really been negative growth for a long part of last year. There's no obvious and easy way back. Maybe that's one reason why China's been nice to the Japanese because that had been a traditional investment area, but you only have to look at the United States. The United States can be strong if West Virginia will never be as rich as Manhattan, so you can have these differences. But I really feel that there's large parts of China now that are really being left behind without any obvious way to see that writing itself in any even symbolic fashion. I agree. Okay, I know in the back corner, oh, I apologize, I had, we can come back to you in just a second. David said formally with the Defense and State Departments and now associated with CSIS and perhaps what Chris will see as a continuation of the false search for simplicity and analysis. When you analyze elite politics in China, is this more a West Wing, to use a popular cultural reference, a West Wing kind of approach where it's politics and issues conducted within a framework or is it more a House of Cards approach where violence, personality, and unconstrained use of every lever? Hark back to Scott Harold's presentation where he had a paragraph up on his slide that said there were reports of many assassination, rumors of reports of many assassination attempts against Xi Jinping. Maybe these are the kind of speculations that Kristen was talking about. But if you have that to divide between a more West Wing approach or a more House Cards analysis of the elite politics, where would you go? I'm not sure. I'm sure I like either of those, but I guess I would say the following. I think what's striking about Xi Jinping, and I think it does speak to both Richard and David's points about the scars of the Cultural Revolution, and it's not unique to Xi Jinping. I think it's true of all of his colleagues, all of them for whom that was a formative experience. I mean, what I find striking in his biography, and I never went to delve deeply into pop psychology analysis, but my sense is that, what an interesting contrast and experiences the headiness of the Revolutionary period and moving into Zhongnanhai as a former peasant and all of that, and your father running up the flagpole and so on, and then the Cultural Revolution and being sent down yourself to be a pig farmer, watching your father get purged and so on. The sense that I get is that he developed from those experiences, this is a very Hobbesian system with very few rules, and if I'm going to play in that system, I'm going to win, and I'm going to fight in a very brass knuckles approach. So I guess if I had to choose between the false dichotomy you've set up, I would choose the House of Cardsmore. I didn't see Scott's presentation, I came a little bit late, but I might say in the 90s, there used to be lots of rumors about assassination attempts against Zhu Rongji when he was sort of going around and busting up various cartels. So maybe there's a bit more of a continuum in that respect. I too think that the House of Cards metaphor is more appropriate to the present time, and that's part of the problem. It's moved from a West Wing model that Dung started, consensual, collective, informed decision making, to much more of a personalized House of Cards, tiger eat tiger, keep your enemies off balance. These are classic Maoist tactics, by the way. Loyalty oaths, that's a classic Maoist tactic. So I think David, your second model, I think is more accurate for the present time, assassination rumors, I've heard them too. One never knows what to make of them, but you can tell that Xi Jinping has changed his personal bodyguard unit two or three times in the last 18 months, or two years, we do know that. Maybe that's normal rotation, maybe that's not normal rotation, not sure. But this is a system, let's remember, where power becomes very personal, and the physical well-being of leaders is a factor. Even if you look at this letter of dissent that was published on the internet, there is an interesting sentence or two in there that Mr. Xi, you should resign, or your physical well-being and those of your family members may have caused some difficulty, that's sort of who knows, but we don't know. But this is a very, very uncertain time at the top of the system. Kind of reminds, it does have correlations to the Maoist era, and elite politics to me, not so much cultural revolution, mass politics. But remember Mao was not popular with the bureaucrats, so what did he do? Leapfrog approach, go to the masses, get the masses support, the populist, what Xi Jinping doing? Leapfrog, populist support, and who does not support? Xi, at least some of the elites, I think a larger percentage than we know. So there are a lot of parallels there, I think. If he keeps going the way he's going, he's just breaking his own system, in my view. The same way Mao broke his own system. It is already 1230, and at least one of our panelists has to go, but since I did steal the opportunity for this gentleman down here to ask a question, I will give you the last question, so I hope you make it a good one. Thank you. My name is Ben, I'm with the Eurasian Group. I'm wondering if you have any speculation as to the makeup of the Politburo Standing Committee in 2017. Were you here for our presentation? Yeah, but specific people, or whether they like to go back to nine, whether some people will stay or leave? I have no insight into that. Well, presumably, if the model name should follow is those that are already on the Politburo will move into the Standing Committee, so that we know what the so-called selector is already. So that would include potentially Wang Yang, Hu Junhua, Sun Zhengsai, Liu Qibao, Li Yuanqiao, and Wang Huning. And the two other names I mentioned, Li Jiangxu and Ding Xuxiang, those are Xi Acolytes, who may leapfrog all the way to the Standing Committee, so that's the pool from which the Standing Committee will be chosen. I would be surprised if somebody helicoptered from outside that pool all the way onto the Standing Committee, they make it onto the Politburo, but this is still a very progressive kind of promotion system, right? So we know pretty much of those seven or eight. Some of them will move up into the vacated four slots, okay, there can be four slots, so eight will have to compete for four. All right, I truly apologize, we don't have time for more questions, but thank you very much for attending this session, and thank you to our speakers, let's give them a round of applause. Thank you.