In a deviation from normal practice, CPC didn't name a successor to the overall Secretary during the second tenure of the party leadership, and therefore the Chinese president is predicted to stay as their paramount leader during the reshuffle of the party’s governing bodies at the twice-a-decade Party Congress next year.
South China Morning Post said in its report Friday that the twice-a-decade Party Congress next year will shed light on how he plans to tackle succession. consistent with the Hong Kong-based daily, the succession plan could convince be Xi’s biggest challenge and can shape the party for many years to return .
Deng Xiaoping, the moderate “paramount leader” of CPC who guided the party till 1997, invented a collective leadership structure that accommodated all groups and sections within the party. But Xi, unlike his predecessors, didn't endorse a successor at the top of his first term in 2017 and observers suggest that the emergence of a replacement leadership line-up next year remains highly unlikely.
Amid global adversity within the wake of an epidemic , Xi’s supporters project his leadership because the need of the hour for the country but, consistent with Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London, that would spell trouble for the party. “When succession finally looms, it can potentially be very destabilising if the structure and/or process isn't clear and well defined,” Tsang told the Washington Post.
Nis Gruenberg, a senior analyst at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, told SCMP that though Xi has bought longer to determine his vision of the party-state by abolishing term limits, he has also inserted “enormous uncertainty” into the leadership system, “which...could destabilise the leadership system as soon as Xi...has gone.”
Xi has solidified his own leadership position but potentially pushed the country towards a destabilising succession crisis, consistent with a joint report by the Centre for Strategic International Studies within the US and therefore the Lowy Institute in Australia. The report, published earlier in April, suggests that China’s political path is shrouded in great uncertainty.
“The global impact of a twenty-first century succession crisis would be immense,” the think-tanks said.
