After Communist Party summer retreat, Xi Jinping is sticking to his policies

A whirlwind of high-level meetings chaired by President Xi Jinping in the past 10 days suggests there are no big policy changes ahead for China, analysts say, despite speculation he could have faced a more determined pushback from senior figures at the Communist Party’s summer gathering in Beidaihe.

Xi has held at least four high-level party meetings since August 16, when the country’s political leaders re-emerged from their two-week session at the Beidaihe beach resort in Hebei province. The annual gathering allows the leaders to break from their day-to-day work and engage with each other in a relaxed, informal setting where they can socialise and have discussions.

It has taken on an almost mystic status in Chinese politics, known as the place where major decisions are made while the country’s two dozen most powerful people are on their summer break. This year, amid an escalating trade war with the US, a slowing economy and growing discontent at home, some China watchers were expecting Xi would face more pressure to make changes.

“Some people are saying, we are getting ourselves into trouble because we have been too tough, or we have been overly ambitious, we have become too impatient in showing that we are strong enough to resist US pressure,” said Wang Zhengxu, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of Nottingham’s China campus in Ningbo.

But Wang and others agreed that signals coming out of China after the Beidaihe retreat showed that Xi had things tightly under his control.