Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.
The highlights this week: China’s leadership wraps up its summer retreat, U.S.-China tensions simmer ahead of September summit, and a low-budget Chinese film becomes a surprise blockbuster.
CCP Leadership Goes on Summer Retreat
China’s leadership appears to have wrapped up its annual two-week retreat in Beidaihe, a seaside resort town about 180 miles east of Beijing. Each year, the top leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) gather for informal meetings to discuss policy and personnel issues behind closed doors.
As far back as the Qing dynasty, leaders governed from Beidaihe in the summer for practical reasons, as the coastal location was considerably cooler than Beijing. Mao Zedong instituted the retreat as a semi-formal practice in the early 1950s, when it had become relatively easy to return to Beijing in an emergency.
The retreat is no vacation. Historically it has been the place where much of the real work of high-level CCP politics gets done ahead of the choreographed plenums and congresses in the fall. That process allows leaders to resolve contentious decisions in private and appear unified in public.
Beidaihe has also given party elders—retired leaders who nevertheless retained considerable influence over policy and personnel—a place at the table, where they can promote the careers of their protégés and sideline their rivals.
From the scattered available accounts, Beidaihe meetings strike a balance between the extreme formality and bureaucracy of official meetings and the backstabbing, gossipy palace politics of Zhongnanhai, the CCP leadership compound in Beijing. The discussions are relatively free-wheeling, and they take place in a lighter atmosphere (Mao chaired at least one in a bathrobe after swimming), but they are focused on actual policy matters.
In 2003, Hu Jintao attempted to cancel the retreat shortly after taking over as president and CCP chairman, possibly to stymie the influence of his predecessor, Jiang Zemin. It didn’t work: The meetings continued and Jiang maintained a powerful faction throughout Hu’s tenure.
The Beidaihe meetings’ greatest test may have come in 2012, when the fall of Bo Xilai—a high-flying party official and, like Chinese President Xi Jinping, the son of a former leader—disrupted the CCP’s routine political succession. Bo’s career had collapsed after his close associate attempted to defect to the United States, prompting a series of revelations about his wife’s involvement in the murder of a British national.
It’s not clear whether the meetings sealed the decision to expel Bo from the CCP, or whether the issue was so contentious that the power struggle continued for weeks afterward, but Bo was indeed purged, and his downfall gave Xi an unprecedentedly free hand to launch his own purges when he took office a few months later.
The norms that made Beidaihe so influential were developed under the post-Mao model of collective leadership, in which elders generally emphasized that no single person or faction should dominate the CCP.
Normally, Xi, whose second term was supposed to end in 2022, would be a party elder by now. Instead, he has outlived the once-powerful Jiang and Zhu Rongji and made it brutally clear that Hu, his immediate predecessor, is powerless. As Xi has purged his own potential successors, the prospect of collective leadership is well and truly dead.
Under Xi’s one-man rule, some analysts have argued that Beidaihe has become irrelevant. But I suspect the nature of the power struggles has merely changed, with lower-ranking party officials competing for face time to assure Xi of their loyalty or push their own policy agendas. Plus, there are still plenty of policy decisions to hammer out ahead of the fifth plenum in October.
One of the peculiarities of authoritarian life is that one can never quite escape one’s colleagues. (Soviet leaders, for instance, also vacationed in clusters, mostly around the Black Sea.) I feel a touch sorry for China’s leadership. Beidaihe is fine, but there are far nicer places to vacation. I’ve known of two Chinese power networks in which officials, businesspeople, and criminals all holidayed together. At least they went to the Andaman Islands.
What We’re Following
U.S.-China tensions. U.S. President Donald Trump’s China policy remains painfully confused in the run-up to his September summit with Xi. Although Trump appears keen to strike a deal, his administration last week made a series of aggressive moves on supposed tariff evasion and artificial intelligence that pressure other countries to take sides.
That’s a risky gamble, especially given the United States’ recent record of unpredictability and sometimes outright betrayal of its allies.
China, meanwhile, has been sharpening its own sanctions and export-control tools for months—and is well aware that replenishing the depleted U.S. munitions stockpile depends on Chinese supply chains. Beijing has so far refrained from turning the screws as hard as it could, wary of prompting a more concerted U.S. effort to reroute those supply chains.
But recent reports of U.S. incompetence in setting up new production lines may change Beijing’s calculus.
Japan’s diplomatic squabbles. Russian President Vladimir Putin visited the disputed Kuril Islands last week, reigniting a long-running territorial dispute with Japan. Japanese analysts interpreted the visit as an attempt to punish Japan for its strong support of Ukraine. China has consistently backed Russia’s claim to the islands, but this time, it was particularly vocal, a reflection of the already parlous state of Sino-Japanese relations.
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi did, however, avoid a further crisis by skipping her customary annual visit to the Yasukuni Shrine last Saturday. The shrine is controversial in China because it memorializes Japan’s war dead, including numerous World War II war criminals; the museum associated with the temple also pushes war crimes apologism.
FP’s Most Read This Week
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Tech and Business
Unlikely blockbuster. The animated film Niu Lai (“The Ox Arrives”), initially panned by critics, has become a surprise box-office hit in China. After earning less than 8,000 yuan in its initial release, the film went viral and began packing theaters, taking in more than 15 million yuan in a single weekend.
The film, a surreal tale about dreaming oxen, is something close to outsider art. A mother and son spent more than five years making the film, which was distributed by a former interior-design firm in Dalian. The film was so low budget that it even lacked a press kit, so theaters have been making their own posters.
Much of its appeal stems from the ironic joy of watching something that is so bad it’s good, reminiscent of the American cult classic The Room or the online frenzy over Morbius.
There’s also a countercultural element at play. However bad the film may be, viewers appreciate its authenticity in an age of AI art and state-censored entertainment. One popular comment online captures the sentiment well: “You’ll regret the 86 minutes you spend watching it, but if you don’t watch it, you’ll regret it forever!”
As usual, however, the CCP hates fun: The film is reportedly being pulled from cinemas this week.
Economic weakness. Still no sign of green shoots in much of the Chinese economy, as this year’s slowdown continues despite strong exports and a thriving tech sector.
The deflation of the property bubble, in particular, is having painful knock-on effects. Beijing worked hard to prevent a complete collapse of the real-estate sector, doing its best to stop major firms from going under and restricting how much property prices could fall. That response was understandable, but it has also dragged the crisis on for years.