“For more than a decade, Chinese politics has been defined by one man: Xi Jinping,” write Tyler Jost and Daniel Mattingly in a new essay in the forthcoming issue of Foreign Affairs. “Xi probably has years, perhaps even more than a decade, before he steps down.” But as the search begins for the country’s next leader, Chinese politics will be “defined by the question of succession.”
“The vacuum left by a strongman such as Xi” could trigger “a scramble for power and a fight over the direction of the country,” argue Jost and Mattingly. But it could also create an opening for a “more moderate and temperate leader” to emerge—as happened a few years after the death of Mao Zedong. Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s eventual successor, was convinced that the Chinese Communist Party needed to reform, Jost and Mattingly note. “Xi’s successor might come to the same conclusion.”
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