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China Briefing | Forget the trade war and Hong Kong. Beijing just showed everyone that Xi Jinping is more powerful now, not less
- Rumours ahead of the Communist Party’s Central Committee meeting about a possible shake-up of China’s top leadership have proved off the mark
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Why you can trust SCMP
Reading the tea leaves of China’s secretive and opaque politics is very much a necessary but thankless job, particularly in this age of wild speculation fuelled by social media.
The latest case in point concerns the intense rumours of major political infighting and a possible shake-up of China’s senior leadership team that emerged last week in the run-up to the Communist Party’s Central Committee meeting, an annual event that brings together 371 senior officials to discuss and approve the party’s and country’s policy agenda.
So when the four-day meeting ended on Thursday, the 5,000-word communique of the meeting, full of jargon and lacking in details, was nothing short of an anticlimax.
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At first glance, it offers nothing substantially new on most fronts except for the Hong Kong issue. It mostly reaffirms the existing policies, although it also employs stronger and ambitious language to call for more efforts to strengthen the control of the party leadership and improve its capacity for governance in the face of mounting challenges at home and abroad.
But it would be wrong to dismiss its importance because it is still significant on several levels.
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