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An introduction to loyal Xi acolytes on politburo standing committee who will now shape Xi’s vision for China
China’s leader, Xi Jinping, this weekend, and swept men from rival factions out of the politburo standing committee, the seven-strong nucleus of political power in China.
It is now packed with men – there has never been a woman on the PSC – who are loyal Xi acolytes, in what one analyst described as “maximum Xi”.

Xi has revealed an all male politburo for the first time since 1997. The move erases one of the few steps women had made towards real power in Communist China
Across seven decades of turmoil and change, one thing about China’s leadership has remained unchanged. It is all-male.
Men led China into the famine of the Great Leap Forward, through the convulsions of the Cultural Revolution and during the economic opening of the 1980s and 90s. In Xi Jinping’s “new era” of digital authoritarianism, men remain in charge of the country.

As the leader enters his third term, there are increasing signs that the country is turning inwards, replacing the outside world with cyber ‘reality’
In August, there was an unexpected stir in China about a scholarly article. The piece, published in a respected but specialist journal, argued that during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) and Qing dynasty (1644-1911), China had been a country relatively closed off to the outside world. Most recent scholarship has assumed that this was a bad thing and that greater openness in the modern era had led to China’s rise in global standing and growth. But the article took a contrarian position, suggesting that there were economic and social advantages to the doors being closed in large part. The argument might have stayed in the realms of the academic. But it was then sent out on the social media feed of a thinktank closely linked to the Chinese Communist party (CCP). There was plenty of social media comment, whether the CCP was hinting that today, too, China should think about whether openness was quite such a good idea.
At first glance, it might seem that the opening speech last Sunday by Xi Jinping at the 20th party congress was giving a very different message: indeed, there was a specific pledge praising the idea of openness in the next five years that will mark Xi’s third term. And attention at the end of the Congress has been on the sudden, still unexplained , and the new Politburo standing committee whose members owe their standing almost entirely to Xi. But there are other signs that the China of the 2020s may be considerably less open than the one we have known for some four decades from the 1980s to 2020. China since the 80s has been defined by the idea that “reform” and “opening” have gone together. Yet that openness created an anomaly in the first two decades of the present century. China became a society highly connected with the outside world but also deeply controlled and monitored at home: open but illiberal, a combination that many theorists of democracy thought impossible. Unlike the old Soviet bloc, there was little sense that China tried to restrict its citizens, except political dissidents, from travelling abroad. The Chinese of the reform era studied in Britain, did deals in America, and saw the sights and bought luxury goods in Italy. Nobody stopped visitors from observing democracy in all its guises in the liberal world, but they understood that open discussion of the concept stopped when they arrived back at Beijing airport.

China’s leader has been granted a precedent-breaking third term and has stacked his inner circle with loyalists. This blog is now closed
Some scenes from the party congress area over the past few days:
Across seven decades of turmoil and change, one thing about China’s leadership has remained unchanged. It is all male.

President would normally step down now after 10 years as leader, but he has abolished term limits and promoted his allies
Xi Jinping has eliminated key rivals from China’s leadership and consolidated his grip on the country on the final day of a Communist party meeting at which former . Hu’s departure was a rare moment of unscripted drama in what is usually carefully choreographed political theatre.
The closing session of the 20th congress of the Chinese Communist party (CCP) ended a weekend of triumph for Xi that makes him China’s most powerful ruler since Mao Zedong. He has swept away the last norms of a political order built since Mao’s death to prevent a return to the worst excesses of rule by a single autocrat.

Li Qiang is now China’s second-highest official after Xi Jinping. Mr. Li’s time in Shanghai had raised questions about whether he would rise to the party’s highest levels.

A health scare? A brazen political gesture? Whatever else it was, the episode was awkward.

Xinhua news agency says former Chinese president was led from political gathering to ‘rest’ amid mystery around his departure
Former Chinese president Hu Jintao was “not feeling well” when he was escorted out of the closing ceremony of a congress of the ruling Communist party on Saturday, according to state media.
China’s official news agency Xinhua said in a tweet late on Saturday: “Xinhuanet reporter Liu Jiawen has learned that Hu Jintao insisted on attending the closing session of the party’s 20th national congress, despite the fact that he has been taking time to recuperate recently.”

1. The present study characterized the prevalence of obesity across several heterogeneous Asian American subgroups to better understand cardiometabolic risk and disease. 2. There was a wide range in ...