Susan Shirk on Seniority in the Chinese Communist Party's Leadership Selection Process
Age of China’s New Leaders May Have Been Key to Their Selection
11/15/2012
Susan Shirk,
China File
Earlier this week, before the new Politburo Standing Committee (PBSC) and Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party were announced, I argued that the Party faces the difficult problem of how to allocate power in the absence of an open and legitimate leadership selection process. I speculated that if the top politicos in the smoke-filled room (who probably include the present, past, and future General Secretaries of the CCP in consultation with other present and past PBSC members) couldn’t agree on the composition of the next collective leadership in the PBSC, they might throw it to the Central Committee, the selectorate with the formal authority to choose leaders, to actually make the choices in a multi-candidate election. That obviously didn’t happen, this time.
So without an election, how did the self-interested supremos manage to agree on how power at the top would be shared?
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Susan Shirk is the chair of the 21st Century China Program and Ho Miu Lam Professor of China and Pacific Relations at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IR/PS) at UC San Diego. She also is director emeritus of the University of California system-wide Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) and chair of the IGCC International Advisory Board.
In 1993, she founded, and continues to lead, the Northeast Asia Cooperation Dialogue (NEACD), an unofficial “track-two” forum for discussions of security issues among defense and foreign ministry officials and academics from the United States, Japan, China, Russia, and the Koreas.
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