North Dae River into sensitive political windows: from Cai Chei to the party's internal meeting in October, Xi's “informal consultation” space continues to shrink

In August, public events at the highest political level in China again signaled the North Dai River.

Reuters reported on 3 August that the visit of Cai Chei, the Secretary of the Central Secretary of the Central Political Bureau of the Communist Party, to the summer vacation expert in North Dae River was seen as an important public sign of the launch of the annual events of the High-Level North Dae Summer of the Communist Party. Unlike formal central plenary meetings and political bureau meetings, North Dahai never presented a full agenda to the Chinese public, but it has long been at the critical point of the Communist Party's power politics.

This year is of particular interest, as several political signals are meeting at the same time.

The first signal comes from the timetable. Following the events in North Da ' i, the Chinese Communist Party will hold a major intra-party conference in October, with disciplinary, cadre management and the next stage of political deployment as the agenda. The second signal was from the previous series of high-level personnel shocks. The Chinese Communist Party elite is far from entering the desired period of stability in the country, as the army, the financial oversight system and senior local officials have been removed, investigations and the Grand Representative of the People ' s Congress this year.

The third signal is more institutional: the North Dai River itself is changing.

In Hu Jintao and earlier, the North Da ' a River was seen by the outside world as an important place for current leaders to communicate informally with retired elders and even to coordinate important issues. After Xi took power, the practical role of this traditional political coordination mechanism was significantly diminished as individual power was increasingly concentrated and the influence of retired leaders diminished. Reuters cited analysts who noted that after Xi had been highly centralized, the retirement age had much less space to influence major decisions than in the past.

This year, therefore, observing the river North, continuing to look for the traditional “factional struggle” model to challenge Xi Jinping, is prone to misjudgement of real political change. More worth following up on, some informal checks and balances that existed within the CCP, left much to be done in Xi Jinping.

The Communist Party has no competitive elections, no independent parliamentary oversight and no open and supreme mechanism for the transfer of power. In such a political system, the North Dai River has long been the subject of attention, as it has been the one that has assumed a coordinating function outside the formal system. When the formal system lacks open competition and the informal consultative mechanism is weakened, the highest authority is more dependent on Xi himself and on the vertical control system that has been built around the central office, the political bureau and the Central Military Commission.

This change has already been seen in the leadership politics. The promotion of officials has been accompanied by an increasing emphasis on political loyalty, ongoing disciplinary inspections and the military and senior cadres, and major personnel changes have often been “disappeared”, absent or re-hatted before the official procedural statements were supplemented.

The North Dynasty River is therefore still important, but its importance is different from that of 20 years ago.

The question in the past was what compromises the forces would reach here; The question today is who can effectively object to major policy mistakes after the collapse of the inter-communist system, which can bind the highest leaders, and the informal mechanisms.

A regime can increase the speed of order implementation by concentrating power, but it cannot simultaneously eliminate errors in decision-making. The real danger is here: when all people have to answer to a power center, the wrong information is also filtered up along the system.

The North Dai River is still seemingly calm, and the Chinese Communist Party has really changed, but is hiding behind the power structure behind this calm.