Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.
The highlights this week: The Chinese Communist Party announces new rules for local officials, the Trump-Xi summit is postponed until May, and Beijing introduces a de facto drone ban.
Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.
The highlights this week: The Chinese Communist Party announces new rules for local officials, the Trump-Xi summit is postponed until May, and Beijing introduces a de facto drone ban.
Xi’s Bureaucratic Catch-22
Last Friday, the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) issued two mandates for officials. They must first “resolutely uphold the authority and centralized, unified leadership of the Central Committee [of the CCP] with Comrade Xi Jinping at the core” and second “take local conditions into account and enhance their initiative and creativity in work.”
These statements neatly capture a central contradiction for Xi, China’s president: He wants total loyalty and obedience yet also sincerity and innovation. Even as Chinese officials are urged to avoid rigid thinking, they are expected to devote themselves to studying Xi Jinping thought. As they are told to abandon outdated rules, they must follow every injunction from the top.
This tension has been a recurring theme in Xi’s campaign against “formalism” and “bureaucratism” in Chinese officialdom, which he casts as twin threats to CCP legitimacy.
In a 2019 article, Xi called these threats “deadly,” blaming them for instances of “aloofness, abuse of power, detachment from reality and the masses, a penchant for empty rhetoric and grandstanding, rigid thinking, adherence to outdated rules, bloated organizations, overstaffing, procrastination, inefficiency,” and more.
Like many CCP leaders before him, Xi seems convinced that new rules and rhetorical campaigns can solve entrenched organizational problems. In practice, however, the incentives presented to officials result in the opposite.
Critically, punishments for deviating from party authority are greater than those for rigid conformity. From 2017 to 2022, roughly 410,000 people were disciplined for formalism and bureaucratism—but this represents only a small fraction of China’s 20 million government officials. The penalties are minor compared to those for disloyalty, which are harsher and more sweeping.
Ambition and talent can be dangerous at the top. Xi has often purged potentialsuccessors—among them Ma Xingrui. Once a rising technocrat who held senior posts in Shenzhen and Guangdong, Ma was appointed party secretary of the highly sensitive Xinjiang region in 2021 only to be abruptly removed last year. Ma’s right-hand man is now under investigation for corruption.
The overriding priority for officials at the local level is protecting themselves, especially from perceived security or ideological threats. The unsurprising result is an organizational culture dominated by the very box-ticking behavior that Xi denounces.
It didn’t have to be this way. Though bureaucratic inertia has long existed, in past decades—particularly under Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s—the CCP also saw significant experimentation and flexibility. From Xi’s perspective, however, that looseness weakened central authority, fueled public anger over corruption, and allowed elements of society to drift beyond party control.
Some authoritarian systems have combined strict loyalty with internal competition, encouraging subordinates to innovate in service of the leader’s goals. But Xi’s authority rests less on personal charisma than on an institutionalized, rule-bound party apparatus.
The result is a persistent dilemma in which Xi seeks officials who are both yes-men and problem-solvers. It’s a difficult balance to strike—and one he is unlikely to achieve.
What We’re Following
Postponed summit. As the war in Iran drags on, U.S. President Donald Trump says his meeting with Xi has been rescheduled for May 14 and 15. This new timeline seems optimistic.
The White House appears eager to end a war that the United States is somehow losing, but the adversary still has a vote. As long as the crisis dominates headlines, any publicity boost Trump hopes to gain from a deal with Xi is unlikely to materialize.
The talks could also be derailed by unverified claims that China is sharing intelligence with Iran’s military to help target U.S. forces.
Iran and China have cooperated on sensitive intelligence matters before, and China has clear incentives to do so again. Beyond the potential benefit of U.S. setbacks, Tehran could return information with important insights into U.S. capabilities.
The few remaining China hawks in the Trump administration might use such reports to argue against engagement with Beijing, but the more likely outcome is that the White House simply ignores them and continues pressing for a summit.
War on pollution. China’s new environmental law, passed during the Two Sessions earlier this month, builds on its successful campaign to curb pollution over the past decade.
Driven by tighter regulations and major investments in green technology, China has made substantial improvements in water and air quality. However, serious challenges remain, such as groundwater pollution, and overall emissions continue to rise, with Beijing aiming to reach a peak before 2030.
It’s worth noting that public anger played a major role in pushing authorities to address air and water pollution, but Xi has since cracked down on the environmental activism that drove those changes.
FP’s Most Read This Week
- Three Scenarios for a Post-Trump Worldby Hal Brands
- The United States Has Become a Rogue Stateby Stephen M. Walt
- As an AI Scholar, I Am Now Putting a High Probability on an AI Doomsdayby Bhaskar Chakravorti
Tech and Business
Beijing drone ban. China has been working to develop its “low-altitude economy”—the expanding use of drones for everyday deliveries and services—with one conspicuous exception: the capital. In Beijing, new rules that take effect in May will effectively ban drone usage, even bringing drones or key components into the city.
Fears of drone-based attacks are widespread, and most countries impose strict no-fly zones around sensitive sites. But Beijing is a huge city, and government buildings make up only a small part of its urban core. The extra caution here reflects concerns about the physical safety of leadership as well as protecting information—for instance, about the size of their private villas.
Military-industrial purges. The rolling purges of China’s military have extended to the country’s vast defense-industrial complex, much of it dominated by state-owned enterprises.
Tan Ruisong, a former executive at Aviation Industry Corporation of China, was convicted and sentenced last week on corruption charges. As is often the case, the sums involved are enormous: Investigators found that Tan accumulated more than $89 million over nearly two decades.
In the coming months, we’re likely to see more executives, even retired ones like Tan, taken to court. Yet, as with the military, there is little reason to assume the successors of those purged will be any less susceptible to corruption.
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