Chen Xi: the presidential aide who built China’s new technocracy
- As head of the Communist Party’s Organisation Department, Chen oversaw the emergence of a group of Tsinghua and tech cadres at the very top of Chinese politics
- It was a job he took on on behalf of his former university roommate Xi Jinping
It is a post that wields enormous power over party personnel changes and one that has a profound influence on how China manages its apparatchiks.
The 69-year-old stepped down from the Politburo in October, but remained head of the department.
“He remained the head of the Central Organisation Department only as an ordinary party member, not even a Central Committee member … to make proper [personnel] arrangement until the ‘two sessions’ [in March],” said Shan Wei, a senior research fellow on Chinese politics at the National University of Singapore. “It really shows how Xi is reluctant to let Chen go.”
Chen retains an important role once held by Xi when he was a vice-president – head of the Central Party School, the party’s top academy, but he will no longer wield the influence he once had.
During his time at the department, he helped Xi steer a series of personnel changes that shifted the balance at the top towards more technocratic cadres and bolstered the power of the party over the state.
It is a legacy that could be felt for years to come.
Chen and Xi were roommates at Tsinghua University in 1975, when they were both studying chemical engineering. After graduation, Chen spent three decades at Tsinghua mainly responsible for party work.
Xi also kept up links with his alma mater, studying Marxist theory and ideological education at Tsinghua from 1998 to 2002 while working in Fujian province. Chen, who served as the university’s deputy party chief, is widely believed to have helped Xi earn a doctoral degree by remote learning.
“In the 90s, there’s hot discussions of ‘virtue’ and ‘talent’ [in cadre grooming] and an emphasis on academic qualifications. So Chen has done a favour to Xi’s career,” Shan said.
The department soon issued a landmark document on cadre selection, abandoning a vote-based recommendation system citing a series of vote-rigging scandals, and adopting a new consultation and interview mechanism to stop bribery in the process.
Under Chen’s watch, the party broke norms and followed more opaque patterns in cadre selection, promotion and demotion, making it more difficult than ever for pundits to come up with prognostications about political careers.
Notably, old unwritten rules on retirement ages at various levels are no longer a decisive factor.
Victor Shih, a specialist in Chinese elite politics and finance at the University of California San Diego, said “cadres like Hu Chunhua receiving demotions even though they have not committed any serious offences” reflected some notable changes in personnel changes in the party.
Shan said the new pattern was both unpredictable and predictable.
“On one hand, it breaks all the rules – when age or academic qualifications are not important – which adds to uncertainty,” he said. “But on the other hand, the certainty has become higher” because a person is unlikely to be promoted if they lack Xi’s trust.
“[We should] not select them just because of their [young] age,” Chen said in one piece published in 2021. “The first criterion for selecting cadres is whether they are loyal to the party – if they fail to pass the loyalty test, then they fail the selection process and will not be chosen no matter how capable they are.”
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The process of cadres selection has also grown less inclusive on Chen’s watch.
A Xinhua article on the selection of the party leaders after the party congress in 2017 said Xi consulted 57 top officials face-to-face – including “current party and state leaders, members of the Central Military Commission, and veteran comrades in the party” – for the cadre selection.
Five years later, by contrast, Xi only talked to 30 such people ahead of the 20th party congress. There was also no mention of “veteran comrades”, or old party leaders, in the 2022 Xinhua report.
“[This omission shows] the big bosses in the party can no longer influence him [Xi],” Shan said. “Jiang Zemin was not far from passing away before the party congress, and Hu Jintao couldn’t even keep Hu Chunhua at the top.”
More than one-third, or 69, of the 20th Central Committee full members are STEM technocrats, a 35 per cent increase from 51 in the 19th Central Committee. Of these 69 technocrats, over half of them are from emerging tech, according to MacroPolo, a Chicago-based think tank at the Paulson Institute.
At the very top, at least six new Politburo members boast qualifications in science and technology, ranging from rocket science to nuclear power safety.
Analysts agree that Chen has played a part in the increase of technocrats to the top echelons of power.
“Chen Xi certainly played a role in evaluating technocrats to the party’s leadership positions,” said Dong Zhang, an assistant professor in the division of social science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
“Technocrats got promoted in part because compared to traditional party elites, they were not well-connected to the pre-existing power networks built by Xi’s predecessors.
“It is worth noting that in the 1980s, to undermine traditional political forces, [then paramount leader] Deng Xiaoping also rejuvenated the party leadership by promoting technocrats in order to undermine the traditional forces.”
Shan added that Tsinghua alumni accounted for a large percentage of the officials with an engineering background. Technocrats in Xi’s era have started to recover in provincial leadership after bottoming out under Hu, going back to Deng’s era of “you hong you zhuan”, meaning that cadres needed to be both communist-minded and professionally competent.
Shih said the rise “may have something to do with Tsinghua’s science orientation”.
Nevertheless, some engineers in the Politburo, including Xinjiang party chief Ma Xingrui and Chongqing party boss Yuan Jiajun, did not attend Tsinghua, but belonged to the military-industrial faction. “Their promotions may have more to do with Xi’s personal preference than with Chen Xi.”
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“To be sure, there is a clear Tsinghua group in the official circle, but it is not nearly as dominant as the Zhejiang group or the Fujian group,” Shih said, referring to Xi’s former associates from the two provinces. “Chen Xi has helped elevate some other Tsinghua academics into senior offices, including Chen Jining and Li Ganjie.”
Chen Jining majored in engineering at Tsinghua and later became its president, while Li studied industrial physics and nuclear safety at the university. New Vice-Premier Zhang Guoqing also earned a doctorate in economics from Tsinghua.
Shan said that over the past five years, about one-third of the newly promoted provincial party chiefs or governors were Tsinghua alumni.
“They are fast-tracked as if taking a plane,” Shan said, adding that their influence in the future could be profound. “Chen is a team-maker.”
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Chen was by Xi’s side in February as the president explained an institutional overhaul that rolled back efforts undertaken during Deng’s era to separate the party and the state.
“In this sense, it’s a reverse of Deng’s era,” Shan said. “The party goes up and the government goes back. The party has more power now.”
