And he would have been the guy to talk about the reconfiguration of the Central Military Commission coming out of the Congress. I'm grateful also to Joe Fusmith and to Jessica Batke for agreeing to do these presentations. We hope to have Barry Norton here, who's been a founding contributor writing on the Chinese economy. But Barry has back loaded his classes to the end of the week and couldn't rearrange his schedule to come. And so I regret he wasn't able to come. I'm sure everybody knows who Joe Fusmith is. Professor of International Relations and Politics at Boston University. He's a founding contributor to the China leadership monitor, retired from our roster. Oh, I don't know, a couple of years ago, we were arguing about when that was walking over here. And I'm glad he agreed to do this as a veteran stalwart contributor. He was one of the few guys who actually hit the deadline for drafts, which is, as editor, a key consideration for me. Jessica Batke writes on governance affairs, political reform, and other related issues for the China leadership monitor. She's our newest contributor. I got to know Jessica when she was a brilliant MA candidate at Stanford. And I gather from her colleagues that she was a terrific analyst at INR at the State Department and is now working as a senior editor with China File, Oval Shells project in New York City. So I'm grateful to both of them for their contributions this morning. Our order of battle will be Jessica, Joe, and then I'll try to contribute some wild thoughts at the end, myself, and then open the floor to comments and questions. Jessica, would you lead off, please? Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. I'll say first I am suffering from terrible jet lag. So if I fall asleep while talking, it's not because what I'm saying is boring. I assure you everything I'm about to say is thrilling. But I would ask that one of you guys just throw something at me to wake me back up. Unfortunately, the title of this is demystifying the Chinese leadership. And I don't know that I'm going to do much to demystify. I think I'll probably do more to mystify. So with that going in, I'll say up front, I look at governance affairs and domestic social policy in China. And it's really hard to know how any given lineup of the Politburo Standing Committee that might come out of the Party Congress is going to affect the overall trajectory of domestic social policy. And that's because we don't know a lot about the potential candidates that are going to be on the Politburo Standing Committee. The Party does a really good job of facing personal details about these people. They do a very good job of facing those details in public themselves. And I think a lot of times we fall victim to our own hopes and expectations about what we want to see in leaders just because a leader speaks confidently and fluently with Western interlocutors. We like to think that that means that they're really open and secretly want the kind of reform we would like to see. But I don't think that's usually the case, or at least it's not often the case. And a really good example of projecting our hopes and desires and anticipations onto leaders that we don't know very well is this thing with Xi Zhongshun and his watch. Xi Zhongshun's father received a watch from the Dalai Lama low many years ago and apparently wore it for many years. And that was used as evidence that Xi Zhongping was actually going to be much kinder and gentler on Tibet. That obviously has not happened. So I think that story encapsulates what I think. We just have so little information and we grab onto whatever we can and usually filter it through what we hope will happen. This isn't to say that it doesn't matter who's on the Politburo Standing Committee, as has been said many times. It absolutely does matter, people matter. It's just hard to know how it's going to matter because I don't personally feel like I have a good grasp on what any of these guys are thinking about any particular domestic policy. That said, unless something truly outlandish happens, like Guizhou decides to be a breakaway province or something or something really crazy happens, it's hard to see how there are going to be any really major swings or U-turns in domestic social policy. I think before any party congress, everybody likes to say, okay, X thing happened, this VPN ban on VPNs happened and this is tied to the 19th party congress. Maybe, or maybe it's one of a series of steps and it just happens to be time sequential to the party congress. I was recently in China and there was some rumblings that maybe exactly this, the restrictions and VPNs were related to the 19th party congress and they would be lifted afterwards. I just don't see a lot of evidence that that's happening. And the reason is because it's a question of incentives. There's not a lot of incentives to back off from the sorts of social policies that they're working on right now and specifically if we look at information control and the internet. There was a Tiosher article in September that had a really, I think, important quote that says, if our party cannot traverse the hurdle represented by the internet, it cannot traverse the hurdle of remaining in power for the long term. So, there may be slight spikes in terms of information control or internet control in China, but I think the overall trend is pretty clear. I like to think of it as like airport security in the US, except it's actually effective. There's no incentive to be the guy who says, okay, in my airport, we can stop taking off our shoes and stop going through the weird naked people scanner. That doesn't win you anything because then if something actually happens, you're on the hook for it, right? And so, I think of a lot of what's going on with social control policies and what we're talking about the internet in particular. As in that vein, the difference being, of course, that what they're doing is actually much more effective in our airport security here. It's achieving the goals they want, which is keeping most people away from most of the information that they don't want them to see. I think we're gonna continue to see codification or rule of law vacation of a lot of longstanding social policies. We saw this very recently when they issued new religious regulations. This was an update to, I believe, 2004 religious regulations. We saw this last year with the release of both the charity law, which governs domestic NGOs and the foreign NGO law, which governs foreign NGOs. And again, we're seeing this with a bevy of restrictions on online communications right now. I think you could, in general, transfer that trend line across domestic policy. I think with regard to better Xinjiang, there's even less incentive to change or reverse course. At this point, both of those areas are quasi-militarized. You have loads of PAP people out there, sorry, people's armed police. They've managed recently to tamp down on self-immolations and attacks, or at least news of self-immolations and attacks. And I think they probably think they can wait it out until either people assimilate, people leave, go elsewhere in China, or there's just so few of them, comparatively, it just doesn't really matter anymore. So I don't really see, again, it's a question of incentives. I don't really see a lot of incentives for change there if they think that they've got the situation. However unpleasant it is, more or less under control. So because I've been given permission to go a little bit beyond my brief, I think what we should be thinking about now, if this notion of domestic policy trajectory is more or less correct, we should start to be thinking about the extent to which domestic policy and internal affairs are actually playing out internationally. I think domestic Chinese policy is increasingly being practiced beyond its borders, sometimes by the Chinese, and sometimes preemptively by us. I think there's a long been, the good example of this is a longstanding example of the Dalai Lama, people not wanting to host or meet with the Dalai Lama many times because of overt Chinese pressure. But in fact, I think the Dalai Lama situation is a harbinger of what is now we're seeing more of and what is to come, right? People willing to back down under overt Chinese pressure, and I think that there's a sense in China that there's more entitlement to levy that pressure against other governments and other individuals and groups outside of China. There's a really benign example of things like Red Dawn, which was the movie that was supposed to be about US and Chinese conflagration. It was changed North Korea at the last minute, so it's not to offend China. But there's much more insidious examples of this going on. I'm sure all of you heard about the Cambridge University Press situation. Of course, this was when China sent them a letter saying they'd like you to censor these articles. They eventually reversed course after a big public outcry. But precisely because of this outcry is why we know about this incident. And I have to assume there's a lot more that are happening that we don't hear about because they are just quietly acquiesced to. Also, more recently in terms of, sorry, jet lag, another example I would say is Li Mingzhe, who is a Taiwan citizen who was recently put on trial in Hunan Province for social media and Facebook postings that he made in Taiwan. So he was taken into custody while in China, but the evidence used against him at his trial was social media postings he made in Taiwan on a non-Chinese platform, Facebook. So that's examples of China implementing its domestic policy slightly outside its borders. I think we should also be thinking about this term that I learned last year in Germany. And I'm sure professional European Affairs scholars can tell me how I've gotten this wrong. But it's a term that means preemptive obedience. And it's talking about what people who live in authoritarian states do. And that is kind of divining the will of what's happening at the top and then rushing to obey it before being asked to do so. I think everyone's heard stories of young academics in the West who, very logically for their career, decide not to work on controversial issues related to China so that they continue to get visas into China. This makes a lot of sense. But I think this is an example of this preemptive obedience. And we don't really know how often it's happening, how many things people are doing without being asked. This is a long-standing practice in authoritarian regimes, but I think we should start thinking about how it's affecting people outside China as well now. It's really hard to quantify. It's largely silent. I think there's also an increasing willingness by China to act outside its borders on internal issues. We've seen this with the Uyghurs and some Kazakhs, ethnic Uyghurs and Kazakhs, Chinese citizens who were taken from Egypt recently. China's chairmanship or heading up of Interpol has raised a lot of issues. Heather using red notices to get other countries to pick up political dissidents, as well as people being picked up in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia for political reasons. I'll leave it there. I mean, I don't have a solution to this. I just think that we should be thinking more about how Chinese domestic policy is affecting what we do outside of China. So, here. Well, thank you very much. Pleasure to be back here at the Carnegie Endowment. And I, as Doug mentioned, five years ago, Alice and I did a program here just before the 18th Party Congress. And what we said was absolutely correct. At least that's how I remember it. Actually, I hate doing these presentations just before the party Congress because there's a chance that you might actually remember what we say and say, Joe, you got that wrong again. He complained about that when I invited him this time. At any case, you know, I think the first thing that is interesting about this upcoming Party Congress is that we're paying so much attention to it. This is like China's midterm election, right? And who paid all that much attention to the 15th Party Congress, you know, Jiang Zemin's second term? The big news, of course, was that Hu Jintao was elevated to the successor position. And that was kind of it. As far as the big news of that Congress, it didn't draw that sort of attention. And if you look at the 17th Party Congress, 2007, well, that was a little bit more interesting. Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang were elevated to the standing committee. And, you know, that set the tone for that succession. This is, I think, drawing a whole lot more attention than either the 15th or the 17th Party Congresses did. And it's really because Xi Jinping seems to be something of a different animal. He has been shaking up the political system in China. I wanted to say in unprecedented ways, but Alice would say, but that happened in 1934. At any case, he has been shaking up the political system. He's been setting new tones, new themes, I think. And, you know, the anti-corruption campaign, you know, it's 150 so-called tigers, which are defined as a vice ministerial level and above. Now, there might be, what, 2,02500 people at that rank. So if you say 150, that percentage-wise, that's not all that much, but it's a lot of good percentage of active people. That includes 17 full members of the Central Committee. And I do think that that is unprecedented, at least in the reform era. It includes 17 older members of the Central Committee. By the way, of those full members of the Central Committee, I did check, only four of those 17 had to retire by age limits, which means that you've expanded the number of people who will retire normally by an additional 13 people. So that's an additional 13 slots that presumably Xi Jinping gets to fill. Also, as I said, 17 members of the alternate list. So, you know, it's been a very sweeping change, including in the military, which was referred to in the last panel. I believe when Lee Chung wrote about the military changes about a year ago, he had 56 senior military people who had been removed. And just this year, there've been an additional six or seven top-ranked military people. So these changes, I think, do warrant the title unprecedented. So, you know, we really do have some major changes. And I suppose one of the really important questions is to what extent is Xi Jinping breaking norms institutions of the party? And sometimes it's hard to tell because norms tend to be ambiguous. And, you know, this is something else and I have talked about, I guess, more or less as long as we've known each other. But in any case, you know, one of those issues, of course, is whether or not he will name a successor at this party congress. It seems to me unlikely, but party congresses may indeed have surprises like that. I think the way to view this 19th party congress is sort of as a culmination of what we've seen over the last five years. And that certainly includes the anti-corruption campaign. It also includes things that we don't pay as much attention to in the media, which is taking over of critical positions. That certainly includes the military, but of course, the first step was to take over the general office, which is sort of the, it's like the chief of staff in a secret service and it's the heartbeat of the system, right? You've also seen major changes in the ministry of state security, which is logical because that was so related to Zhou Yongkang. You've seen less movement in the ministry of public security, which I find very interesting. The head of that, this is a little inside baseball, the sorts of things that we like to watch as these party congresses happen. The minister of public security, Guo Sheng Kun, his wife's grandmother was Zhang Qinghong's mother's little sister. You got that? I'm not gonna repeat that.  Li Hongzhong clearly was promoted by Zhang Zemin for a number of times. He was secretary of the ministry of electronics when Zhang Zemin was minister, a few other related associations. But then he worked with Xi Jinping for three years in Zhejiang and he was recently appointed party secretary of Tianjin. So that should be a Politburo position. So that fits along with putting people that she knows well in Beijing, Tsai Chi, Chen Ming'er and Chongqing, well, Han Zheng is party secretary of Shanghai. So that's four Politburo positions right there that he seems to have secured for his friends. And in any case, obviously the discipline inspection commission is another vital organ which Wang Qishan has been there as comrade in arms and so forth. We've seen him promoting an unusual number of close associates. I guess we say unusual because they're easier to track because he didn't seem to have a wide ranging network of people. And so when people have worked with him in Fujian or Zhejiang and they move up the ladder like Chen Ming'er has gone up what four or five positions in the last few years, you say that's pretty obvious that he's promoting friends. So this is really quite interesting to see who came to power really with no particular visible power base which is probably why five years ago we predicted that he'd be very cautious. He's managed to in fact build that power base rather quickly and beyond at least my expectations. And I think the reason that he's been doing this, reason that he can do this is because five years ago the party really faced serious crises. That crisis was of course, Bo Xilai and the apparent alliance between him and Zhou Yongkang, Lin Jihua and Xu Caihao. And that is something that Xi Jinping himself has called a political conspiracy. That's really extraordinary to have a major civilian authority apparently in some way shape or form. And we certainly don't know the details. Conspiring with the Vice Chairman of the Military Affairs Commission that's really quite extraordinary. And so this gets you into an issue of the norms. My reconstruction of it, which is purely my own fantasy, I have no factual basis for this, but there is some circumstantial evidence. Remember those two weeks where Xi Jinping disappeared? He canceled an appointment with Hillary Clinton and disappeared. The only rumor to explanation is that he'd hurt his shoulder swimming. The water was unusually hard that day. Whatever the reason was. And then of course after that, shortly after that, well his disappearance came about three or four days after Lin Jihua was removed from the central office and moved over to the United Front Department which suggested the party really had some issues to deal with. And my guess is that Xi Jinping went and had a number of meetings and phone calls that said, look at this corruption issue or the conspiracy issue is really serious. And you need to give me a strong hand to deal with that. And my guess is that Jiang Zemin and other people said, yes, so is this following party norms or not? Seems to be following certain procedures. And when they give permission, did they really mean that 150 tigers would go down and 1.14 million other cadres being punished? So it raises questions about what we mean by norms and that's what I mean about them being ambiguous. It was just after the 18th party of Congress that the bowling pins began to fall. Li Chuncheng was the first major one. He was deputy party secretary of Sichuan and was obviously an associate of Zhou Yongkang. Raises also interesting questions about the Chinese political system. Zhou Yongkang must have seen this and said, oh boy, they're coming for me. Takes two years, whatever it is, to go up that trail, to get to Zhou Yongkang and there's nothing he can do about it. Fascinating that he just have to sit there and wait for the trail of evidence to pile up and get him. So okay, that was one major crisis. Actually, I think one of the last articles that I did for China Leadership Monitor a couple of years ago was tracing a lot of the factionalism in Shanxi Province. It's just where Ling Jihua was from. And it became very obvious that you have these tight networks of power and money, locationally based Yuncheng area, which is where Ling Jihua was from, promoted people and it was just, you had these what, stovepipes of power relations there and it became quite obvious that the central government and it was not just under Xi Jinping but previous government would send in leaders to run Shanxi and there's nothing they can do. It's so tightly controlled like Mao complained of the Beijing Party apparatus. It's so tight you can't stick an all in it. You know, Shanxi seemed to have been that way. So Xi Jinping, two years ago when I wrote that article there were over 15,000 cadres in Shanxi who had been replaced. That's trying to make the province respond. When I ask you to do something, you do it. An exertion of control that we don't see very often. And then there was the fear that Xi Jinping made I think very palpable of the CCP following the CPSU into the dustbin of history. Remember the first trip he makes out of Beijing is to Guangdong and he says, why did a great power, great political party collapse? It's because people lost their faith and their confidence in the system and I think that everything that we have seen since reflects that determination to revive the party and make it strong and responsive. So Xi as I interpret him is really all about the party. Only the party can save China and only Xi Jinping can save the party. Something like that. So what's gonna happen at the 19th party congress? Let me go out on a limb a little bit here.  My assumption is that we will continue to have a seven person Politburo standing committee but even that is subject to change. I remember being in Beijing in January of this year and the rumor then was that you'd go back to having one party chairman and two vice chairman and even at that time it struck me that that was one of those bargaining ploys. If you don't like my personnel arrangements then I won't have anybody, I'll just do it all. In any case there's been a lot of rumors about what is going to happen but I think the chances are that it will remain at seven. My guess is that Wang Qishan will retire and that everybody will say that it's growing way that made him do that although it probably won't be it'll probably be because, well for a variety of reasons including age and maybe Xi Jinping would like to run things himself. Somebody mentioned his desire for control. My guess is that Li Keqiang will stay on his premiere. My guess is that Li Keqiang will continue to have very little to do with economic policy and I think the only thing that outside observers seem to agree on is that Li Jiangshu will move up to the standing committee. He's on the Politburo, he's the head of the general office. He will certainly move up to the standing committee perhaps to replace Wang Qishan as head of the Discipline Inspection Commission. There are a couple of other positions he could go to but the interesting thing is that unlike past Congresses, there are 10 people other than Li Jiangshu on the Politburo, the full body who are age eligible to move up to the standing committee and unless you expand the standing committee to what would that be, 12, I don't think that they're all gonna be elevated to the standing committee. This gives Xi some flexibility. Now, if we do things according to past practice they'd all be moving up by age. So there are a number of people who are 67 years of age and therefore age eligible but anybody wanna take a bet on Li Jiangshu's chances of being elevated to the standing committee? I would not count on that one. Obviously Sun Chunlan cannot move up because she's a girl and as Alice would say, you don't allow girls in the boy's clubhouse. Xu Ziyang is military so he can't move. In other words, you're gonna have some moving other people up from the standing committee. I think one interesting question is who will replace Zhang Gali as executive prime minister, premier, Wang Yang seems to be a popular choice but Han Zheng is another viable choice. These personnel choices will matter a good deal. Some believe that Hu Chunhua, the young secretary of Guangdong province will make it. It just doesn't seem likely to me because one, it would be naming a successor or at least everybody would jump to that conclusion and two, she has just gutted the communist youth league over the last five years and it seems unlikely that he would promote a product of the communist youth league to the standing committee. But anyway, it's fun to play these games. I'm sure that there will be some surprises. It's possible that she will reach down in the party system and bring up somebody who's not on the Politburo. That would be a surprise and that would be something that we would, I don't know, write a new China leadership monitor article about, give us something to do. At any case, oh, the other issue which Alice just wrote a CLM article about is whether Xi Jinping will get his name in the party charter and if so, what name, how it'll be described. I'm pretty sure that he will get his name in the party charter but whether it will be Su Xiang thought or some other thing, one as Alice points out, matters. But if it is Su Xiang, which would seem to put him on a par with Mao Zedong, to my way of thinking, that says I'm not retiring. If you are the font of all political wisdom, it seems to me pretty hard to retire. At any case, we only have to wait about two or three weeks to find out if any of these speculations are true. Okay, so if the last five years have really been about consolidating power, what happens over the next five years? And this is where I can really stick my foot in my mouth and chew vigorously. But what I really expect is to have Xi trying to set out something of a more positive agenda, to sort of define what he means by the China dream. And I don't know exactly what this will take but I think you're gonna get a clearer sense of what you mean by the post-Dong period. We're gonna try to give some definition to that. I think that, remember when we were talking what a couple of year or two ago about the two 30 year periods, Xi Jinping had this long thing about, there had been two 30 year periods, the Mao era and the Deng era. Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao did not seem to count for very much. But when you've had the two 30 year periods, I think everybody at the time thought, well what you're doing is clearing the decks for the third 30 year period. And that will be the Xi Jinping era. And I think that that's, this is my speculation, I think that that's what Xi is about, is defining that next period of what, if you, Mao era is what, building socialism or the revolution, the Deng era is about prosperity. And now the third era is gonna be something about what's China role in the world, what is its domestic policy. It'll be defining that. And I think Xi has given a lot of indication that he's gonna try to draw on China's cultural tradition to do that.   I think he's got 2,000 years of practice on this. But I would also argue that it's different. Remember when Confucius's statue showed up in Tiananmen Square? I don't think Xi Jinping liked that because that said that the revolution was perhaps not important, illegitimate, something like that. I think what he's done is try to reaffirm the revolution. That's part of the 230 year period and the Mao, what was that, 120th anniversary commemoration. So you, and then you have the socialist core values. So you affirm these very clearly and then you bring in China's cultural tradition behind that. And I think he's been pretty clear about doing something along those lines. I don't see that as anti-Western, but I do see it as trying to define something that is a distinct Chinese path, different from not necessarily hostile to, but something that should be defended against these terrible Western values. And they are terrible according to the Academy of Social Sciences. We've had several books out now on the critique of neoliberalism. I don't know what neoliberalism is, much less but in any case. The critique of Western constitutional government, the critique of civil society, and the really critical one is the critique of historical nihilism. That's a term that doesn't roll off the tongue very quickly and easily, but that means don't do good history. Do propaganda. Don't wanna go back in the archives and find out what the Chinese Communist Party was doing in various periods in the past. At any case, so that is gonna try to define a Chinese path that is distinct from Western liberalism. And I think that's what you're gonna see in sort of the ideological realm. I think I've overshot my time, but the implications of what we're seeing, I think, is a very strong tendency towards centralization of political power. And with that goes, I think one of the really difficult challenges, which is the lack of innovation at the local level. Seems to me that in past years, local party secretaries have been given a little bit greater freedom to address their problems through a variety of experiments, some which have included what was called inner party democracy, including some elections at the township level. Those have all stopped. And so local party officials now have, I think, less room to innovate. And I think that's a problem because they do face problems and the solutions seem to have to come from Beijing, not from the localities. And as Jessica mentioned, we're gonna see continued control over thought, obligation, those sorts of things. And it's sort of strange because the Chinese society is just simply more pluralized and diverse than it's ever been. And the central government seems to be more centralized and less innovative and controlling than it in recent years. And that sets up the contradiction for the 19th party Congress when I assume we'll be back. Thank you. Thanks, Joe. I guess get to wrap up things here. Let me just declare at the outset that I should be regarded as the Sarah Palin of China Leadership Analysis. That's because if you follow what's said about Chinese leadership politics by the larger China-watching community and especially in the mainstream media, I can rightly be characterized as going rogue and getting all mappericky. So my views on the Chinese leadership depart from much of the kind of conventional knowledge that you hear about, I'll suggest that I see basically two lines of interpretation, and dare I say a two line struggle over how to interpret what's going on in the Xi Jinping leadership and what it represents for the evolution of the Chinese political system. And my expectation, it might be a little misguided, is that perhaps the 19th Congress will offer us an opportunity to evaluate whether either of these two lines is valid or not. It may be a misplaced hope, as I suggested earlier, I'm still trying to find out what really happened with the Xi Jinping, with the Linbi Alifair in 1971. There are just questions out there you never get the answer to. But that's the situation. What I'm calling the predominating interpretation in this two line struggle, what I'll refer to as the bourgeois or reactionary analytical line, includes several basic points. First, Xi Jinping has consolidated power more rapidly and more thoroughly than anyone since Mao Zedong. He's been building a cult of personality, something that's been explicitly banned in party regulations since 1980. He's ended the collective leadership structure implanted by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s and followed and elaborated by Zhang Zemin and then Hu Jintao. He's asserted control over all the major policy sectors. He's the chairman of everything and dominates the old central leading small groups and created new ones, now that he's taken the helm of. There's a Maoist cast to Xi Jinping's policies, for example, the 2013 mass line campaign and other approaches, for example, to purging adversaries. He's deployed an anti-corruption campaign to weaken and eliminate factional rivalries. And the larger dynamic of politics is largely explained in terms of a power struggle driven by factionalism. And Xi's been successful in neutralizing factions associated with Hu Jintao's Communist Youth League and also with Zhang Zemin's Shanghai Gang, the Shanghai Bang. And in some, Xi Jinping is China's most powerful leader certainly since Deng Xiaoping and probably since Mao Zedong. I have a lot of reservations about this picture. In some cases, quite severe ones. First, I can't see Xi Jinping as a Maoist. I may be, maybe except for Zhou, the only person here who's read all 79 of the speeches and talks in Xi Jinping's book on governing China. But I did read them all and I've gone through it in quite detail. He does mention Mao here and there usually to say his poetry. But as you count the references and the substantial references to Deng Xiaoping, they're all over the place. And so it's very hard for me to see Xi Jinping as a Maoist. You see no reference to any of the ideological predilections of Mao. Class struggle is continuing under the dictatorship of the proletariat making leaps in development without regard to the objective economic conditions or a readiness to go outside the party to rally society to attack the party. It seems to me this is the last thing this leadership wants to do. Also Xi Jinping just isn't chairman of everything. What's cited is this leadership of leading small groups. She leads only two more groups than Hu Jintao did. Those are the super group, the leading small group for comprehensively deepening reform. That group she does preside over. I don't know who except the general secretary would do that because it covers seven areas of reform laid out in 2013. And three members of the standing committee sit as vice chairman or vice directors of the leading small groups. You've got a majority of the standing committee at those meetings. The other is the internet group. The internet and information, I can't say this word, Shinshi Hua group that was also set up. People like to point out that the state security commission or national security council or whatever the, how are you translate the, the guo-jia-an-chuan-hui-an-hui. But that's an upgrade, substantial upgrade of the national security leading small group that Hu Jintao chaired and the Xi Jinping with vice chair. So this perception that his command of everything I think doesn't stand up under closer scrutiny. And the factional approach to Chinese leadership politics I endorse. I grew up in the good old days of factional conflict in the Mao period and then the early Deng period. But factional politics these days, at least as it's practiced more generally, has not caught up with the changes in the political order. And Joe, I think did a brilliant article in the monitor that he mentioned about Shinshi that does apply this approach to understanding significant elements in leadership politics, but more broadly. Now the kind of analysis that many, many have done, Li Cheng's for example, argument of one party, two coalitions or however he describes it, he has to keep adapting it. And it doesn't stand up very well. And so while I endorse the idea of factional politics, we don't do it very well. And that's in part because the leadership is made of very concerted effort to bury the differences that used to be easy to sort out in the good old days of leadership analysis. And finally, our biggest complaint about this approach, it doesn't tell you anything about policy. It doesn't explain where policy comes from, who advocates what policy is and so forth. And so it's a sterile approach to understanding politics. And certainly in Washington DC, people want to know about policy and what its roots are and what its implications are. They don't care about who's up and what's down unless it has some connection to policy. Also, I have an impatient with this argument in part because much of the evidence that's reduced to Xi's supreme power seems to me to be invertible or reversible. For example, if he's so powerful, how come he needs so many titles? Mao didn't have many titles. Deng Xiaoping didn't either. They had the two most important ones, a member in Deng's case, membership on the Politburo Standing Committee and chairmanship of the Central Military Commission. Why does Xi Jinping need so many titles? Deng in fact resisted getting titles. In 1980 at the Fifth Plenum, Ye Jinning said he should become Party Chairman and he turned it down and they wanted the post abolished which they finally did in 1982. If he's so powerful, how come he can't get anything done? We hear all the time these days and I think there's a broader consensus that much of the reform package enunciated in 2013 hasn't gone very far.  What we hear in the press, this complains about the opposite. How vested interests in the system are blocking success and we need more centralized power to drive these reforms forward. And then finally if she has absolute authority over the Army and support from it, why does the Army stress with such emphasis the Army's absolute loyalty to the party these days? Particular emphasis, why heading into the December 2015 organizational reform in the PLA? And I'm glad to hear Michael and Doug and Al and talk about this. The scope of these changes in military organization are really wrenching and they're really changing careers. The missions that people are responsible for and therefore affecting the prospects for the officer corps in wrenching ways. Why do they need to emphasize and convene a Gutian conference in November 2015? The eve of these reforms to stress the loyalty of the Army to the party. And why does Xi Jinping need a chairmanship, CMC chairmanship responsibility system to focus authority over the Army into the CMC and especially under his personal control? All of these things strike me not as indications of Xi Jinping's supreme power, but rather the insecurity of the broader leadership over the compliance of the Army and more broadly over the country. As Lenin said, Shtodyele, what to do with this? Fortunately, we have what I call Chairman May's Revolutionary Analytical Line. My Chinese surname is May and so it's Chairman May's Revolutionary Line. I didn't wanna say editor May's, but whatever. But this line I have set out in successive issues of the China Leadership Monitor and begins with the basic observation that the overarching policy agenda that Xi Jinping has pursued since the 18th Congress in 2012 was set down quite explicitly in some cases in the report delivered by Hu Jintao at the Congress. And so this became visible with a series of comprehensive reforms laid out in the 60 point decision endorsed at the third plenum in November of 2013. The agenda was set down there firmly which I suggest reflected a broader leadership consensus behind the new Xi leadership to push through these reforms in part because or mainly because the second Hu Jintao term was a period of relatively clear paralysis in the leadership in its ability to decide major policy departures to deal with several obvious problems. And Joe and I disagree on the overarching arc of the Hu Jintao term from 2002 to 2012. But I think we agree that at least the second term after 07 was a period when relatively little got decided and accomplished despite several clear problems that the leadership needed to deal with. And so the Congress tried to set down a consensus policy agenda and implant a new leadership authorized to pursue it. These were formulated under the overarching goal to be completed by 2020 of making China into a Xiaokang Shui. What do you call that? Pottery Prosperous Society? What it is, okay. That goal was first set down in 2002 in Jiang Zemin's report to the 16th Party Congress. It was strongly reaffirmed to the 17th Congress in 2007 and again in 2012 at the 18th Congress. And it's laid out a set of guidelines and policies that were reaffirmed across the three successive party congresses that framed the policy agenda of each of those terms of leadership under Hu Jintao and now I think under Xi Jinping. I expect the 19th Congress is gonna strongly reaffirm this 2020 goal. We'll see new push behind the reforms that were laid out in 2013. Perhaps some new reforms but certainly energy behind several of the old ones. And Xi Jinping's 26 July speech to the Central Party School was built entirely around that theme. And I think we'll renew that impetus behind this fundamental goal. It also leads to this third period in PRC history that Joe was just mentioning. And that is to say this 2020 goal will be completed under Xi Jinping's leadership. I'm assuming he'll be reappointed as general secretary. And they're already thinking about laying out the guidelines for the second goal that was enunciated in 2002. And that's the 2049 goal, the centenary of the People's Republic. And so I expect to see a strong reaffirmation of the policy agenda of this, you know, achieving a moderately prosperous society by 2020 and then initial guidelines on what to do in the period down to 2049. And I agree with the previous panel that I don't expect Xi Jinping to be general secretary in 2049. And so that we can all agree on. The Congress in 2012, at least in my view, gave the Xi leadership, not just Xi Jinping, the tools it needed to try to pursue this policy mandate. And it included first an authorization of effort to revitalize and centralize the party apparatus to make it a much more effective driver of policy than it was under the Hu leadership and to some extent under Jiang Zemin. Second, a fall-reaching campaign against corruption and on-party work style to accomplish the same goal but also to attack vested interests that are aimed at reform. Xi Jinping doesn't have 750,000 factional enemies out there that are the target of this campaign. It's much too big to be simply that. This is an effort to restore the vitality of the party and to power over resistance to the reforms that they're trying to achieve by 2020. And third, they agreed to a stronger role for the general secretary to break policy deadlocks. It seemed to plague the second Hu Jintao term and to make him the front-end for this reform effort that was authorized at the Congress. All of this, it seems to me, suggests that Xi Jinping is not a Mao-like power monger. Instead, he's working within in a thoroughly Deng Xiaoping fashion is speeches underscore this, the methods that he pursues this seem to me to be thoroughly consistent with the approach that Deng Xiaoping undertook in rebuilding the party after the Cultural Revolution in the post-Mao period and so forth. A hallmark theme, again, I've read all those speeches in the Xi governance book, has been constraining power within a cage of institutions. And so he is, in my opinion, upholding the basic norms that have developed across the reform period and pressing to enforce them. He was named core at the Six Plenum last year. But what people forget about the idea of a core leader is that when Deng Xiaoping said, when Deng Xiaoping says a collective leadership needs a core and that the idea of a core is not contradictory to the idea of a collective leadership, at least in principle. And it wasn't accidental, I think therefore, that in bestowing the title of core on Xi Jinping at the Six Plenum, the party also revised the party regulations of 1980 to strengthen the provisions for collective leadership, strongly reaffirming it. So in sum, to me, the watchword of the Xi leadership isn't confidence around the person of Xi Jinping. It's rather insecurity. I see this leadership as worried that if it can't push these reforms through, the party's in jeopardy of losing its grip on power and the entire regime's sinking. And this is the message that as Joe was suggesting of the lesson of the collapse of the CPSU and the Soviet Union. This was a party that lost its way, that did not have leadership of sufficient steel to maintain discipline and push through the kinds of policies that a party like a communist party ought to be able to do. So in sum, I think the question of whether or not Xi Jinping is the most powerful leader since Deng Xiaoping or Mao Zedong or the Kangxi emperor or Chen Xiaofangdi is misplaced. I'm inclined to think that he's certainly the most powerful leader since Hu Jintao. And he's been saddled to complete a project that the broader leadership sees as critical to the regime's survival. And so looking at the Congress, I expect to see this as an opportunity to clarify and maybe assess whether either of these two interpretations in this two line struggle makes sense or has any validity. What should we watch for? In the monitor, I write on party affairs and so let me list a few things. I think Joe's already bravely put forward his suggestions on what we should see. First, how will the party constitution be revised? It's already clear. They have already said in Chinese media that the four comprehensives and the five major development concepts will be written into the party constitution. I presume this will be in that section lower down in the preamble where they review what the current party leadership, outgoing leadership in this case the 18th leadership has done. And that may come with Hu Jintao's name attached to it. Whether they go beyond that and add to the party's guiding ideologies, Zhurgao Su Xiang, I think is a trickier question. And if I were pushed to make a guess, I'd suggest I think no. I think this will await till 22 in the 20th party Congress. Will Xi Jinping get another title? How many does he need, I guess? But there has been suggestion that he'll take the title of party chairman. No, that's not gonna happen, period. Is the party leadership structure gonna get changed? There's been suggestions that along with restoring the chairmanship, we'll see abolition of the party's Politburo Standing Committee, maybe recreation of the vice chairman. I don't see that happening. And whether it was floated as you suggest as a kind of a move in the chess match preceding the Congress or whatever, I just don't think it's gonna happen. Will there be a successor or successors appointed at the Congress to prepare successors in training to take Xi Jinping's place in 2022 and Lee Kuchang's place in 2023? I think there will be. I'm basing this simply on norms. And of course, this is one of those ones that might not work that way. For one thing, for Xi Jinping not to appoint a successor gives a clear idea that he intends to stay on formally longer. I can't imagine why we do that now to signal this already and face the accumulating political confrontations and conflicts that that's gonna invite. Already people will start to rally to try to circumvent this and prevent it. Why not wait till 2022 if that's your wish? Also, I think, and I think Joe's absolutely right in saying this at least on previous occasions that she doesn't have to remain the head of the party after he retires in 2022. He will be a powerful leader behind the scenes and can affect his influence and I totally agree with that. So I think we will. I'll go even farther out on the limb and suggest that they'll name two successors and it's gonna be Hu Chunhua and Chen Nener. And I think my instinct is, and it's really total speculation, who would be the successor for party leader and Chen would be the candidate for prime minister. Chen looks like a prime minister. He's been praised in the press for his promotion of innovation down there in Guizhou that's helped the Guizhou economy and this is the sort of thing you associate with prime ministers and who's been a party leader in a party secretary position in Guangdong, the richest province in China for a while now. And I just, that's what I expect, but I'll probably be wrong. Another thing to look for, will the Standing Committee be appointed as it has been for the past four congresses on the basis of seniority among the surviving members or not retiring members of the outgoing Polit Bureau? That's the way they've done it. They changed the age criterion in 2002 from 70 to 68 but they've maintained a 68 age norm since. And with the exception of successors in training, every new crop that's joined the Polit Bureau Standing Committee has come from that most senior cohort within the non-retiring members. I expect they'll do that this time and I think Joe's calculations are right. The group includes Liu Qi Bao, Xu Chi Liang, Sun Chunlan, Li Yanshao, Zhang Chunxian, Li Jiangshu and Han Zheng and Xu Chi Liang's military, they haven't, except Liu Huaxing, they haven't done that since 87. Sun Chunlan against a girl and they don't allow girls in the Polit Bureau Standing Committee clump house. Li Yanshao, I don't understand the objection to him. They have attacked people he worked with in Jiangxu but he's a brilliant guy. He's a mathematician, the highest human calling and why you wouldn't want somebody like that on the Standing Committee. But I go along with Joe's analysis of that. The other Zhang Chunxian, he's in a syndicure, kind of a caretaker position and I expect he'll retire. But yeah, that leaves Li Jiangshu and Han Zheng and so I assume, like Joe, that we'll see seven members, two will be successors in training and at least three, so it's Liu Qi Bao, Li Jiangshu and Han Zheng. I don't think Wang Yang, you hear that name a lot, he was brooded about back in 2012. I had a bet with Jeff Bader and Jeff was saying that Wang was gonna make it to the Standing Committee and I didn't know and I got one right and I expect he won't be this time. He's just too young, he's the next cohort and so we'll see him in 2022. So that's then the pattern and I'm gonna stick my neck out and say they'll continue that approach. The age criterion will they continue with 68? I think yes. If you move it up to 69 to accommodate Wang Qixian or whatever else that opens the door for other people to say, well, why do I have to retire? And this invites a kind of struggle that I think the leadership in its position wants to avoid and that does mean I think that Wang Qixian will retire and Li Keqiang will stay on as prime minister. And then finally, I expect a collective leadership to be as strongly reaffirmed as it was in 2012 and again at the sixth plenum with Xi Jinping as the core leader. That's my two cents for whatever they're worth and maybe I should offer you guys a chance to comment. Any, that's good, Joe, any you want? I guess I would say I probably come down on the side that I expect Wang Qixian to retire as well again because I feel like upending too many of these norms would be more destabilizing than not. One thing I wanna say about the appointing a successor issue because I feel like this is in the press a lot and it drives me a little nuts, is this notion that if a successor is appointed, then she has won a political victory. If one, no, sorry, reverse. If the successor is not appointed, she has won a political victory. If there one has been appointed, then he lost. And I feel like that just assumes way too much knowledge about what Xi Jinping himself wants. So if anybody here has talked to him and knows for sure what Xi Jinping is planning, I'm right here, we can talk afterwards. But I feel like just because a successor is appointed, doesn't mean Xi Jinping lost because we don't know that his goal this whole time was to not appoint a successor. But that seems to be a lot of the win-loss dichotomy that's been set up in a number of news articles I've seen recently. I would just comment that you set up Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping as the sort of two bottles there and you're forgetting about my hero, Liu Xiaoqi. And it's really time to bring out how to be a good communist. That's what Xi Jinping is about. I totally agree. They used to talk in the Cultural Revolution about the Liu Deng line. But Deng Xiaoping wasn't part of that. They said he was. Yes, okay, fair enough. All right, well let's open up the floor for questions, comments from anyone. And as before, wait for the mic to come around to you and tell us who you are and what your question is. We have one here. Hi, my name is Peng Gui from China Inside Carnegie. And I have a question regarding to the CMC and PLA aligned with Professor Miller's question before. I want to know about like, do you think there will be institutional changes in foreign policy making process in China, especially power distribution amount PLA, MFA and IDCPC? Because there are a lot of rumors saying like MFA is not playing an important role as used to be. And PLA and IDCPC are playing a much more important role. And do you think this kind of wild situation will continue after the 19th NPC? Thank you. Thank you for your question. It would have been a better question to ask when Michael was here and maybe we should ask Doug to answer this. But I so many questions are up in the air with regarding to the CMC and how it's organized and therefore how it will operate. It's gonna be reconfigured in ways that may reaffirm the elemental struggle or the basic struggle that we've seen it since 2004. But there are other major changes, the regional commanders, the new theater commanders being added and so forth. And what we won't know until October 25th on the first plenum of the 19th Central Committee is Bolivar and the Central Military Commissioner now. It's best for broader foreign policy structure. I mean my own view for a long time is the MFA isn't that important in policy making. It's based I think frequently at least among Americans on the idea that it plays a role comparable to the Secretary of State and the State Department of American policy. It's not as important as the basic fact that Wang Yi, the foreign minister, isn't even on the Polygera. So there's that. Whether there are broader changes, maybe Doug and Alan are better equipped to respond to this than I am. I'm sorry, Michael left. Any comments? All right, thanks for your question. Anyone else? I re-killed all the interest in leadership politics. I'll fill a sleep. Yeah, please. You mentioned Professor Miller that one of your reservations about the first thread was its lack of policy implications. So could you talk about the policy implications particularly in terms of economic reform for the second thread and what Xi Jinping as a party operative intends to do? Yeah, the implication of my own revolutionary line was simply that the policy lines and the broader outlines that were laid out at the party congress last time have guided much of what the Xi leadership has pursued. These were very broad formulations that appeared in Hu Jintao's political report and they were refined, although still in many ways ambiguous in the 60 point decision made by the third plenum. But you could attribute those policy lines directly to a consensus that was established back in 2012 as responses to longer standing issues. How those issues will be addressed this time around is anybody's guess. It's very difficult to see clear cut policy differences within the existing leadership over economic policy. I know there's lots of rumors and stories about differences between Xi Jinping and Li Qicheng and central bank people and so forth. But the validity of those differences doesn't stand up very clearly when you look closely at public leadership statements. In the good old day, and Joe wrote a very good book about this in the early 80s, it was easy to see very clear cut differences. Wasn't that easy? I worked hard. You're right, you're right. And so the leadership is much more careful about exposing those kinds of differences to public view and what we're left with are all the speculations and rumors that some of them may be quite valid and they have a kernel of truth but separating the wheat from the chaff and what's good and what's not is really hard. I don't know, Joe, what do you think? Well, I'm basing this mostly on Barry Norton's articles and CLM and I was with him in a conference in London a week ago and I'm not so sure whether it's a matter of policy difference but Xi seems to have taken over a large portion of economic decision making and basically overridden or marginalized Li Qicheng and this has had some not great effects on the economy. Jessica, Janine? Hi, I got nothing to say on economics. Okay, other questions, come right up, Bob. A question about the secretariat which is an often misunderstood, often maligned institution but it is often played a very important role. It seems to me during the Xi Jinping first five years it's been put under Liu Yunchang who isn't really good at doing much of anything and he's brought in a bunch of other people from Inner Mongolia so it's hard to see it as a power institution but it could be revived depending upon who's put in charge of it. It generally hasn't gotten a lot of attention but it can be and often is a very important way of making an otherwise rather unwieldy political process of Central Committee, Politburo, Politburo Standing Committee Chairman work a little bit more efficiently. I wonder if you could speculate a little bit about what you think might happen to that body at the 19th Congress. Well, I can offer my thoughts maybe you will have. The secretariat has had a checkered past, as you suggest and when Deng Xiaoping restored this decision making processes and the institutional components of it in the early 80s, late 70s, early 80s from what had been set forth originally at the 56th Congress, the 8th Congress. That was basically to set up the structure would be the Politburo's kind of a secondary body that ratified policy decisions made by the Standing Committee and the secretariat would be the implementing body that would push those policies through and the link between the two as was the case in 56 would be who, what's his name? Huyao Bang who was a member of both the Standing Committee as general secretary but also the leader of the secretariat. That secretariat had 11 members if I remember correctly and it got trimmed at the 87th, 13th Congress to just four and the reason was that the perception was in 86, 87 that Huyao Bang had used the secretariat to circumvent and usurp prerogatives of the Standing Committee in making decisions so they crippled that body down to four members. Under Jiang Zemin it started to grow again, grew again, had sort of up and down and the Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao period and now it's back up to what is it, six or seven people but it hasn't been as you suggest a very effective body and I find that surprising given the overall effort to try to revitalize the effectiveness of the centralized party leadership and driving policy and what compensates for it is the assumption of the leading roles of the leading small groups formally headed by secretariat members but by Standing Committee members and so unless they change that I don't see any clear, coordinating and cohesive role for the secretariat and policy implementation. So I think it has to do with the mechanics of how you push policies and who's gonna do it. Is it gonna be members of the Standing Committee or is it gonna be members of the secretariat that take their points of departure from the Standing Committee and I don't see the impetus to change that phase and so it's secretary, it looks like a little bit of a hodgepodge these days of assorted functions and it's hard to make sense of what exactly it does that they're gonna do it. So I don't know if you're a secretariat advocate and I guess I'm a pessimist, Joe, do you have any? Oh, I basically agree with what you said. Right now there are a number of institutional representatives on there as opposed to reflecting a more cohesive policy agenda and that may also reflect differences between Xi Jinping and Liu Yunshan. I've never seen Liu Yunshan as particularly close to Xi Jinping, I may be wrong on that but that he would rather implement policies through other channels. Now that may be one of the changes that we'll see at the 19th Party Congress. Yes, go ahead. I can say that the secretariat honestly never came up in any conversations I've ever had about the leadership until today so thank you. I'm Alan and then Doug. Thank you, Alan Romberg, Stimson Center. I wonder if it'd be right or not to connect some dots here, between Wang Chishan's retirement and economic policy for example. It's often said that the implementation of the anti-corruption campaign has really stifled economic initiative and whether there is any view that letting regular order to take a phrase popular in this city take effect and retire Wang Chishan will then allow the anti-corruption campaign to assume a lower profile and therefore maybe give some more impetus even if the local officials aren't giving the leeway to do much on their own because it seems to me that unless the party is able to stimulate the economy better than it is doing they're gonna run into problems doing what you all are saying they want to do in assuming this revitalized central role and I wonder if there's a reason to connect the dots or this is coincidental or it's just wrong thinking. Well, my assumption if it's right or not is that the anti-corruption campaign is going to continue but it might be much more regularized and they're building this, what is it, a comprehensive governance organ that's supposed to take over some of the CDIC functions in the organization department and that will I think regularize some of the anti-corruption it may in some ways expand it because the CDIC is only supposed to go after party people and this new state organ could go after non-party people but I understand that the local officials were a few months ago criticized for being lazy and so they better start pumping up local investment so I think that they have been paying attention to the lack of local investment so I guess I don't see that as directly related to Wang Qishan either staying or going. Yeah, I'm inclined to agree with that I think long stepping down they're making complementary steps to institutionalize CDIC bureaucracies to perpetuate the campaign in its absence that may be an invitation to routinization and making the anti-corruption campaign more regularized and perfunctory over time but given the push to enhance the ability of the party apparatus to get effective compliance I doubt that whether it affects the ability to push innovation and risk taking and economic policy and all those good things that make a market economy go and so forth I'm inclined to agree with the contradictoryness of that and you certainly hear stories about people being afraid to make decisions that are gonna really push things ahead in a policy direction but they seem to be satisfied with that and maybe that'll doom the effort in a longer run but we'll see but institutionally I think they're beefing up the CDIC bureaucracy so that even if long isn't there things will continue. Doug, you've been waiting. Doug Paul from Carnegie Endowment. Mike, you've been describing a fairly orderly and transparent process over time since the Dung Era. How do you explain the sudden axing of Song Jun Cai?  He disappears, what's your attitude on that? I don't see why that's a violation of norms. I mean I think that is flatly the effort on Xi Jinping to raise up somebody among the two people who I'm projecting will succeed to the standing committee on charges of corruption and get rid of that guy and I want my guy but that's, I don't deny politics and goes on. Power politics is real. Factional politics are real although I think we do it badly. Real politics goes on. These are politicians and they play hardball and all that good stuff but my insistence is they do it within party processes and institutions and this is a legitimate way to do it. They asked Chen Liyang Yu and Chen Xitong using corruption charges and disciplinary charges of all sorts. Boy, she lie, you can build a nice list. I don't see it as contradictory. I don't want that guy on the list and he was powerful enough to use the campaign probably with the longest hold to get rid of him and pull up a guy at least as a member of the Politburo and maybe the standing committee ahead. So these guys are politicians. Some ways even thugs but I don't see how that changes their commitment to a set of processes that if they violate they're gonna have significant costs. Otherwise, we're returning to cronyism. For example, in selection of all of your standing committee members and I think that's a dangerous game. You could do it back in the Mao period when China was weak and poor and under tremendous security threats. You can't do it in a country that's big and powerful like China is now without huge costs pretty quickly. And so it kind of lends incentives to uphold the system and work within it rather than outside it outlook. I guess I tend to see the norms as a little bit more flexible. Remember the seventh party congress of the fourth revolutionary army, June of 1929 when Mao Zedong and Zhu Duh had their famous fight and Mao was upholding party norms which somehow coincided with its own personal interests. So I tend to see the ability of the leadership to conflate personal interests with party norms as a fairly strong and honorable party tradition. Fair enough. Any other questions? Way in the back. The woman in the back, please. Thank you reporter from Voice America. I have two questions. One is for Ms. Miller. You mentioned that Wang Qishan has to retire. So my question is, did you see any signals that he has to go? Other than the reason of age, do you see any other reason he has to go? The second question is for Professor Fieldsmith. You mentioned that Liu Shaoqi. Does that mean you see Xi Jinping as a more Liu Shaoqi than to Mao or Deng Xiaoping? Thank you. With respect to your first question, I am going on the age norm. Principally, I don't see any evidence that Wang is in any sort of political trouble. Some people notice that he didn't appear very much this past summer, but Wang never appears very much in that CCDI role. And so I'm going simply by my projection that the age 68 age norm will continue. Purely that. On the Liu Shaoqi analogy, yeah, I see a lot in what Xi Jinping has been doing, including this phrase about putting power in a cage that seems to me to resonate with Liu Shaoqi's how to be a good communist. That calls for discipline, self-cultivation, all these good communist Confucian values. And so I, you know, rather than saying he's upholding Deng Xiaoping or Mao Zedong, I think the model is really Liu Shaoqi. Liu Shaoqi was the ultimate party guy. And so I see that as sort of the precedent for what Xi is doing. Someone else had a comment or a question in the back, part of the back, yes. Let me add in a light shirt. Thank you very much, Lauren Hershey. I've been an observer since undergraduate days, 51 years ago. So I'm gonna look at this very, very broadly and not with personality specifics. Can you comment on a couple of things? One, the generational changes. There's a new younger generation that's been getting its education abroad. When will they come into their own? When will they come into power? Secondly, in a political philosophy sense, if you could speak very generally without attaching it necessarily to personalities, historical or present, is there any form of what I'll call a Jacksonian Democrat or the philosophy of Jacksonian democracy as opposed to Jefferson democracy on one end of the spectrum, being discussed in op-eds or books or by political philosophers or professors. And on the other side of that spectrum is the purest brand of modern day communism. Is this stuff being written about? Is it present in the political or philosophical dialogues that are going on in contemporary China? Thank you.  By Jacksonian Democrats, you mean a populist? By analog, only by analog. But you mean a populism combined with nationalism? I guess that was both Xi Lai or at least as close as we could get to it. Is it present today in any of the discourse? No, I don't. Or is it being suppressed? Is there thought control being exercised? There certainly is a degree of populism in China and certainly nationalism, but, you know, well, Jackson, of course, overturned the first, what was that, six presidents, the sort of elitist background of the first six presidents and brought in a very different thing. He created the spoil system, preserved slavery. He's not my hero. So, no, it seems to me that it's a very different poll. I did not mean it that way. I was trying to see if there was a reference. I didn't mean it that way. I was trying to see if there was a referential analogy that you could identify in contemporary China to persons talking about populism, democratization. Not democratization. Well, I thought that was part of the 2049 goal I heard that mentioned in the first segment. I know already has democracy, at least as they say it. And a higher level, right? That's right, thank you. And the critiques that were published, are they published in English? This was mentioned earlier. Critique against neoliberalism. I think you can find articles in English, the ones that I'm referring to. There's a set of four books that the Academy of Social Sciences put out this past summer. I may have the only four copies in the United States. In English? But they're not in English. And they're not, you only have to read the introduction. They're not very good reading. And Joe wrote an excellent book on strains of political thought, especially in the 90s, China after Tiananmen, that contains the roots of many of the strains of discourse that we continue to say. That's exactly what I'm looking for for 2017 going forward. Well, Joe, could you? I'll sit down and write that. Not personally, I mean in a professional academic sense. Well, if I get back to trying to leadership monitor, something like that. I'll try to bring in these strains of thought. Thank you. You had a question about leaders with foreign educations. And I presume by that you mean Western educations, because there's been a whole generation of leaders now gone who were educated in the Soviet Union, who came to prominence, especially in the 1990s. And in the current leadership, Jang DeJung has his advanced education in North Korea. He has a degree in economics from Kim Il-sung University. I grant that that's a peculiar economics degree, maybe. But your question about whether or not people from the US and the West, I presume, is the inspiration for your question. Then they might be inclined towards a liberalism. I think it's apparent that Western educations and American educations don't necessarily dispose students who study here towards liberal democracy, for example. And some of them go back, convince that China has its own way, needs to find its own way, and can't copy foreign models. And so a Western education doesn't necessarily cut in one direction. And so we'll see more leaders who've been educated abroad, but I wouldn't expect it necessarily to shift their political orientation dramatically. I remember talking to one of my classes a year or so ago, saying that in this country we tend to debate that issue, that they will come over here, get more liberal ideals, and then go back and change China. And others who argue that they'll go back and just fit into the system. When I mentioned that, all my Chinese students said yes. So they understand that this is sort of a reprieve, it's sabbatical, and that ultimately they do have to go and fit into a system. That's how you make a living, get by in life. And I think that's pretty widely understood. I think it's not just a matter of having to fit in. I think sometimes experiences here can kind of make you feel more patriotic or more appreciative of your system. I think there's a lot of arguments right now to be made about our system not working particularly well. And the other thing I would say is that I feel like it's, from what I've heard, it's just harder and harder, especially for mid-level government officials to kind of go abroad and have experiences abroad. And so that is also, I think, a countervailing force beyond going to school when you're younger. But as you're rising up through the ranks, you're not going just on these jaunts abroad as much, and you're not having those sort of informal interactions as much. Wang Huning is the only one I can think of who studied in the States for, I think, a year and maybe not quite that long, and then has risen to very high position on the Politburo, but I would not describe him as a liberal. We're out of time, regrettably. I want to thank my comrades for joining this presentation and their thoughts. We'll find out what the answers are, I hope, in about 18 or 19 days. And destroy all the records from this meeting. That's right. Thank you all for coming.


I think it's about time to do my yearly, this is how I make lots of money just using credit cards tactically. Now if you guys have seen these videos in the past last year or whenever I did them, I'm a big fan of credit card churning.  And I just keep the cards open, I don't put money on them afterwards or sometimes a little bit of money. But that actually adds, I mean you could get lots and lots of free money because all of these credit card companies, at least in America, are desperately trying to get more customers.   And it doesn't do you any harm. In fact, over time and actually having all that credit, it looks good on your credit score if that means anything. So, but in this video, I've talked about that in the past. I'm not gonna just repeat that video. Instead, I am going to do what's in my wallet, the equivalent of that, what specific cards I actually recommend that people use if you're thinking about getting into this. Or really, at this point, I've almost churned every card on the market. I haven't actually done any duplicates. Sometimes you can get more than one of the same card. But I wanna just give, just talk about how I make money back on credit cards in general. Now, just to give you some perspective, a lot of people, last time I did this video, there were always naysayers who like literally, you tell them you can get free money from this and they just hate it for some reason. Cause I don't know, they're just people like that. But just a matter of perspective, this year I actually bought a new used car, okay? And it was a phenomenal deal. I got, this is almost unbelievable, especially in the used car market, you know, this year. But I got a used Lexus for less than $2,000, runs phenomenally, runs like it just got pulled off the lot. So my way of thinking of that is that $2,000, I made that just from credit cards in the past year, just from like using credit cards for the things that I was gonna buy anyway with the different offers they have. So basically doing this got me a free card. That's how I think of that, okay? But anyway, let's go ahead and talk about it. So firstly, I have six different cards I'm gonna talk about and why I use them. And there's actually a seventh that I don't have that I wanna talk about. But either way, the first card that I usually recommend people to get if I'm recommending someone in real life to actually start churning credit cards, get the Chase Freedom card. Or really, this has been rebranded to be the Chase Freedom Flex card. This is, in fact, when I first did my video on this a couple years ago, I didn't even have this card.  And that's for multiple reasons.  I just wanna be clear, it's easy to make money off this card. Firstly, it has an introductory offer of if you spend 500 bucks on this card in the first three months, you get 200 back. So that's 200 free dollars. But it actually has a second introductory offer. Normally, you'll have just something like that and that'll be it. But this actually comes with two introductory offers. The second one being just as useful. In fact, you could probably make even more off this depending on how much you spend. In the first year that you have this card, they will give you 5% back on all groceries you buy with it, okay? And everyone buys groceries, okay? So that is absolutely phenomenal. I only buy from grocery stores. Now it doesn't, I should say, it doesn't work at Walmart and stuff like that. But any grocery store that is just a grocery store, it will work on. So that can mean lots and lots of money just saved. An average person who doesn't even spend that much, you are gonna be buying groceries so you can benefit from this. But the main effect of this card, the main thing that it does, the main gimmick, is it is a 5% rotating category card. And that means that every quarter, so the year is divided into four quarters, every quarter Chase decides, oh, we're gonna give you 5% back for these two categories or something like that. And they're all, they're very generous categories. They could be anything, for example, anything you buy with PayPal by this card. Like if you set this up with PayPal, you can get 5% back on everything through a quarter or something like that. And that is actually phenomenal because you can buy everything on PayPal. Or it might give you for a quarter, 5% back on gas stations. I think right now they have 5% back on Walmart and PayPal. I think that's what they're doing right now. I actually haven't used this much. I haven't had the reason to use this that much, this quarter, but last year when they were doing the PayPal thing, I actually bought, I actually put $1,000 down buying an Airbnb thing for a couple of days, like a vacation. And I got 5% back on that vacation, right? Because of that. So the normal effect of this, the rotating categories thing, it's actually really good. You can get 5% back on groceries or gas. Oh, actually, they do do groceries as a category. And it is cumulative with the amount you earn in the introductory offer. So, or it ends up being like 9% back or something. So like this past a couple of months, they were doing groceries as the 5% back category and I had 5% back in the introductory offer. So I was actually getting 9% back. I don't know how that math works, but that's what showed up. I got 9% back on my groceries and I actually stocked up my freezer and stuff like that because I knew I was getting in a little cheap. So Chase Freedom renamed the Chase Freedom Flex. This is what I recommend to people, often as a first card, just because you can get so much from, oh yeah, and I didn't even say, one of the biggest ways that I can make money off of this, I mean, you can too. But there's actually just like a referral link that comes with it. You can make, if you recommend five people, like you can recommend five people to use this card and for each one, you get $100 credit, okay? So that's a lot. And this card is actually, this can save a lot of people money.   This of course doesn't. One of these cards have annual fees that I'm gonna talk about. I think they're total ripoffs if they do have that.  I just put this on my website, okay? Like on the article where I'm talking about like credit card stuff. And I will get those five clicks like within January or February. I've already gotten them for this year.  I mean, you can't click on my referral link, but I already got the money for this year, but whatever. So that is something to keep in mind too. So as far as I'm concerned, that's $500 free because this is a good, recommendable card. Card number two is Discover It. Now Discover It basically is the same thing. It works the same way. It's a rotating category card. So I'm not gonna talk that much about it because it's the same principle. I think right now they're giving you 5% back on walmart.com, target.com and Amazon. Target and Amazon, I'm never gonna use. Walmart, sometimes I use. I usually get like oil, like engine oil from Walmart. That's about it. Sometimes other things. But again, they can give gas stations like 5% back on that groceries, whatever. Same kind of things. Obviously it goes very well with this card because they're basically never doing the same thing at the same time. I guess right now this is technically doing Walmart in-store purchases and this one is doing walmart.com but those are kind of different. So having these two is actually really nice because basically every year they're gonna do things like gas stations or restaurants or something like that. So I mean, if one is doing one quarter and one is doing the other, half the year you're getting 5% back on that category. Now Discover It is also nice because the first year you have it, I only recently got this card, but the first year you have it, they actually double the cash back you get from everything. So instead of getting 5% back from walmart.com, I'm actually getting 10% back right now. Or next quarter their category is gonna be groceries. So instead of getting 5% back on groceries, I'm actually gonna get 10% back because it's my first year of having this card. And again, I only recently got this. It's a pretty common one. A lot of people will have it. But anyway, that's about it. So these go very nice together and they're worth getting. Although Discover It does not just give you a lump sum like a lot of these cards do at the beginning, but that double cash back is actually pretty useful anyway. So card number three is actually, before I should say that, before I go into the Wells Fargo Propel, I will just go and say there's one card I don't have that I want to have that would go even better with this. This card came out this year. It's called the City Custom Cash. And how it works is you can use it on anything of course. I mean, any of these you can use on anything, but how it works is every single month, whatever category you spent most on, you get 5% back of that. So you could spend it on groceries or gas stations or restaurants or whatever, and you will get 5% back on that. So it's sort of like these two, except for you get to choose how to use it and it comes with an introductory offer. I think you get 200 bucks free. That card I plan on getting after the grocery offer at the beginning of first quarter is over with this card. I will probably get City Custom Cash just to pay for my groceries on that because my introductory offer with this expired a couple months ago. But so City Custom Cash is a nice card that I'm sort of, that's sort of the last card that I really want that I don't have, but anyway. Card number three that I have is Wells Fargo Propel. I want to say this is a relatively new card too. It actually is somewhat, it's like half metallic or something. It doesn't feel that different, but it's a little more weighty. And it's one of the best no annual fee cards you can get. Now it doesn't do any of the new fangled rotating category stuff. It's actually simpler than that. Firstly, you do get an introductory offer with this. I think it was 200 bucks. But, and of course these introductory offers I should say they do change. Like it might be 200, might be 250, might be 150. A lot of times they're the same. This is pretty consistently 200. But anyway, so the effect of this card it's very nice. No rotating categories or anything, but what it does is it just gives you 3% back on restaurants. Aren't anything travel related. That can mean gas. That can mean hotels. That can mean airfare. That can mean Uber and Lyft. That can mean public transportation. 3% back on all of those categories. So this is just really nice to have for all, like I pay for restaurants and that. You know, if one of these doesn't have a rotating category for restaurants, I will use this. 3% back is still very, very good. So it is just nice to have. And there are a lot of like annual fee cards that you pay $500 a year for that get the same effects as this. I don't know why you would use that unless you have some kind of like points magic you're doing. I recommend just getting this. And I will make a comment. Notice that like I have cards from a bunch of different companies. That's partially because I'm choosing the best cards from each company that go together or whatever. But that also has another benefit. And that is every week or two when I'm bored, I will open up the sites to all of these cards.  So one example, and I have another American Express card, but, you know, this is an American Express card. American Express specifically has this really great deal. I just made $50 from this where it's called Shop Small. And it's, they're very generous. They were doing something for this Christmas season where if you spend, if you go to a local restaurant or local hardware store or just local store and spend more than $10, you will get a $10 credit. Okay, you literally, like if you spend $10 and one cent, you will get $10 in credit back. You just paid one cent for that thing. And you can do that five times. I've actually already done that five times with this and gotten the free $50. And American Express cards have been doing that a couple of times a year, basically. And that's very nice. But anyway, all of the advantage of having different cards from different companies is that they'll all have like some special deals going on. Most of them are trash, frankly.  Stuff like that where if you're already gonna buy something, you might as well make your points or whatever go even further. So that's another advantage of having all these different cards. No, one card, I will talk about this because it's in my wallet and I use it a whole lot, but this is kind of an exclusive card. This is card number four. This is a USA cashback rewards plus card. Now, USA is actually not open to everyone. It's only open to Americans who have family members in the military and it could be very distantly in the military, but that is who USA is open for. USA is great, they have great rates for insurance and everything else. But I have this card just because it is, it gives you 5% back all the time on gasoline. That is the only reason I have this card. I always keep it on my wallet.  But this is that. This is all I use for that. Now, again, USA is kind of exclusive. If you cannot get, if you can't get USA, you can just use the Wells Fargo Propel. It gives you 3% back on gas or one of these, which if they happen to have a rotating category. But this is what I use and I've actually had this card for a little bit and it's just nice 5% back on gas. It also gives you 2% back on groceries, but that is subsumed by this next card, okay? Now, when all of these cards, they have very fancy features, you know, oh, 3% back on this, 5% back on this, depending on what time it is. This is like a super simple card. This is a PayPal Mastercard. And basically, if I'm buying something that isn't, doesn't have some specialty that one of these cards is gonna give me a lot of money for, I will use the PayPal Mastercard. Why is that? The only effects of this card is it gives you 2% back on literally everything. If I'm buying something from a local hardware store, I will use this card. If I'm paying for my bills, all of my bills I pay for on this card because they're not part of any other category and I just get the 2% back. So this is a nice and simple card. It's actually easier to get than most cards. I don't think they even do a hard pull on your credit, but this is a really fantastic card just for that. It doesn't do anything fancy, but actually I even, so you guys know I have this site, lindypress.net where I sell ad-apprentment books. I actually have this card do my expenses on that site because I need to, if you buy $100 in books from that site, my expenses might be 50 bucks. I actually have this card automatically pay for those expenses, shipping and all that kind of stuff. So I'm actually getting 2% back on all my business expenses. I actually really use this card more as a business card. I don't really actually take it around that off. Actually I should say the Discover card since I'm still in my first year, gives you 5% back on rotating categories and 1% back on everything else, but since things are doubled for the first year, this actually, I should just carry around this and use it instead of that because I'm getting 2% back on everything else. But this is basically my business card. And of course, if you just want a card that gives you a good solid cashback amount, this'll work. I don't have to think about it, but I recommend thinking about it. This doesn't have any introductory offer or anything like that, but anyway. So the last card I have in my wallet, I didn't expect to ever actually use. And this is the American Express, I think blue cash, might just be cash, it just says cash on it, but I think it's actually called blue cash.  Either way, this is the one, the blue one with the guy's face on it. Who is that? I don't know, Perseus. I don't know who this is supposed to be. The American Express guy. Either way, some kind of vaguely Greek guy. I don't actually know the lore of American Express. Either way, I got this card actually earlier in this year, like all the other cards I get just to pump and dump the introductory offer. But this one has stayed in my wallet for a couple reasons. This is the first American Express card I've gotten through American Express. And I will say that the actual features of this card are pretty weak. It just gives you 100 or 1.5% back on everything, which of course is useless if I have this because I could just use this instead and make more money. But American Express cards themselves come with so many deals.  This one comes with so many different deals that it honestly makes it worth my time to keep it in my wallet. And I do, I did put this card on, this does come within a referral length, referral link like Chase. And I think I'll put it on my website. Every once in a while someone will click on it and they'll get 75 bucks or something. Actually, I wanna say Discover It has a referral link. I haven't, maybe I haven't put it up there. But every once in a while I'll get a referral link for this and I think it's 75 bucks. I forget what the maximum number of referrals is in a year. There's always a max, because if there weren't a max, I would just be here every day telling you to get credit cards and I'd get 100 bucks for each of them, which would be obscene. But, so this card I have just because American Express has a lot of extra goodies, extra benefits and things that, I check the site every week or two just to activate whatever's good. And there's always, I don't know, I'm trying to, I mentioned the shop small thing that this card had as well. But a lot of times American Express will just give stuff with these. And American Express cards are actually just good to have because American Express is pretty liberal with expanding your credit line. The word on the street is that if you have a card for three years, you can pretty much triple your credit line and they'll accept whatever you want. So American Express is nice just to have because it looks good on your credit record.  But the card itself, like American Express cards themselves, if you look them up, they're none of them are really that impressive. I will go ahead and say, if you look at just the features, but this is still on my wallet and I still use it for things. And of course, most American Express cards are annual fee cards, oh, 500 bucks a year, which is a total waste. I mean, they'll come with something like $200 credit for travel or Uber or something. But any annual fee card, I just don't think it was being worth it. So anyway, all things considered, all of these cards, this one probably makes me around 1,000 bucks a year. This one, I'm not quite sure. I wanna say this probably makes me a little less than 500 a year. I've had this for less than a year, but this is just me multiplying things in my head. I'm not really sure how much the Wells Fargo makes me, maybe a little less because I don't do travel stuff as much, but it could be maybe $100. And of course it has an introductory offer too. The USA card probably makes around 100 bucks. That's 5% back on gas. I guess I spend around 2,000 on gasoline a year. That's about what it makes me. This I don't really know because I use it as a business card now and that's been something I've started recently. So sometimes it can make me 100 bucks a month because I have, again, I have that business that's processing a bunch of transactions.  Oh, and the other nice thing about this is that you can redeem any amount. A lot of times, let's say USAA, you can only redeem points or credit or cash back if you have at least like $20, $25 or something. PayPal, you can redeem like even one cent, it works. And I should also say pretty much with all of these cards, like once if you make 100 bucks on the Chase Freedom Flex as a cash back thing, you can redeem that in different places. You can have it deposited in a checking account, even a non-Chase checking account. I know at least in Discover, I know that you can put it on account credit, but probably the most effective way of using that cash back is actually getting gift cards for things you're gonna need. I think I mentioned I got a hotels.com gift card or whatever. And the reason I do this is because gift cards, they will often give you, they will like increase the value of your points by like 10 or 20% because of that. So you're getting $100 back, but if you put that in a gift card for something you know you're gonna use, that $100 is actually $120 or something like that. So yeah, so this is a great way of just making lots of money back. I do it all the time. Again, like I bought a car recently, which is, it was cost basically less than how much I make off credit cards. And I am not a big spender. To be clear, you should know, if you know me, I do not spend a lot of money. Like if I spend, I don't know, like I try to keep everything, including bills less than 500 a month, okay? Sometimes I can't do that, but you know, either way, check these cards out. Again, I more or less recommend Chase Freedom slash Chase Freedom Flex. That's really what it is, Flex. Don't get confused with the Chase Freedom Unlimited. That is not a rotating category card, although it does come with similar introductory offers. I recommend this as a sort of a first card. Look into the city custom cash, discover it, you know, all of these cards are good. Anyway, that's it, that's it. Get free money.


The river state governor Nisamweke has declared that the people of the state would not vote for the PDP's presidential candidate, Atiku Abubaka. Over his remark about the state's Abubaka during a town hall meeting with PDP stakeholders from rivers in Abuja, said the party's presidential campaign rally in the state was cancelled in order to avoid unnecessary violence and bloodshed. Nisamweke, who reacted to Atiku's statement when he flat off the construction of the Umoha, a labana tema road in the Umoha local government area of the state, noted that it was an insult for the PDP candidate to meet rivers people outside the state ahead of the election. Those who declare that our state is unsafe and those who are seeking for a vote is unfortunate. No amount of blackmail, no amount of intimidation can change our position. Our position is we want the unity of Nigeria, we want Nigeria to be united and move forward. How far can I test what our people have suffered in this room? Kidnapping, robbing, raping, abdimensioning, all kinds of viruses. And I pray to God, God, it is one thing I will start and hand over to my successor. Let it be that I start the construction of this Umoha. Hello. Hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


Good morning folks deep roads coming to life in the shores of a mostly sunny Delray Beach, Florida. This year 11 am update and we got all the US indices that we track trading to the upside most of the sectors with inside the S&P 500. Are we ready to work off those oversold conditions? Well, that's what we'll figure out during the traders end show. Right now you got the now up 83 points S&P's up 15. NASDAQ 149. Russell's up 7. Semi-Zero 44. Gold's off 9 bucks. Silver's up 11 pennies. Light's recruiters off a buck. Natural gas's up 4 cents. Third of your treasury down 21 ticks. Printing out 112, 27. US dollar index off about 486 pips. I've got a 10 minute delay there so it's not going to be exactly accurate, but it is trading lower. Let's try to figure out what all that means by looking at that nine panel market update chart. We begin. Whoops, that's not it. Here it is. We begin to take a look at the ES mini. What do we know about it? Well, one, today we'll complete the nine, the TD9 account pattern. There's also a new profile that is tempting to form. It's fairly narrow. When I mean narrow, it's got support at 4,300 and it's got resistance at 4,416. If we take a look at the spot, Bolton, it's still above its 50-day exponents moving average that says its sellers are the ones that still have the edge. In the case of the NQ, yesterday it closed back above the B point of this A to B equal CD to the downside. There was only below that level, 14,792,75 for one session. It was on lighter volume. So that A to B equal CD pattern is not going to be in effect unless we see two closes, let's say, below 14,792,75. The NQ is also going to complete a TD9 account bottom pattern today. And that says if price can get above the bottom of its new profile, and that's at 14,771, we're at 14,773 right now, odds would favor a further rally. U.S. Dollar Index is pulling back. GZ have a bearish engulfing candle. As we speak right now, don't know what it'll be like at day Zen, but that would confirm a sell the D point top. Goldilocks yesterday confirming an A to B equal CD to the downside. First price projection, 18,6520. We take a look at Silver. Silver's made its way all the way back to its TD9 account bottom. If price were to close below 22,58, it would all of a sudden get bearish. If we take a look at LightSuite crude, even though it's pulling back a bit, it still remains above the top of its daily profile. That's a level price would have to get below to at least suggest some type of further move lower. Watch 9,180. Natural gas, we've got the, it's got an A to B equal CD to the downside. It hasn't quite hit that one to one price projection target at the 276 level. The price is trying to get back inside its profile. Other folks, this is a bullish structured profile. Countertrend moves with fine resistance at 2,969. Trade at 2.950 right now. Stay tuned for the Trader Z show folks, but if you have to start your Thursday, please have a terrific one. Thanks for joining us. We'll look forward to speaking with you again soon. Take care. The reality is that navigating