Letters | AI has spoken: who will make Xi’s top team, as revealed by machine learning
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Many experts and scholars have attempted to predict the selection outcomes by qualitative judgment based on historical and institutional insights. Instead, I adopted machine-learning techniques to quantitatively measure the promotion prospects of incumbent Central Committee members for membership in the next Politburo.
The model was trained with over 250 features for each of the 1,185 high-ranking cadres from 2012 to 2021, including biography (such as age, gender and minority status), career (such as seniority, tenure and job diversity), context (e.g. geopolitical characteristics of work experience), faction (e.g. competing affiliations in top-level Chinese politics) and network (e.g. political connections and centrality indices). The data used was retrieved from the CCP Elites Database published by the 21st Century China Centre at the University of California San Diego.
According to the unwritten “seven up and eight down” rule that prevents cadres aged over 67 from being considered as candidates for the Politburo, there will be eight vacant positions.