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Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping’s US visit this week shows he is all but certain to take over as China’s next leader, but back home the competition is rough for the other top slots to run the country with him.

One contender, Bo Xilai, has been enveloped in a scandal involving unconfirmed reports of malfeasance by his former police chief. That has raised talk of a conspiracy to humiliate the flamboyant Bo and push the Chongqing city Communist Party boss out of contention.

Heavy turnover this year on the party’s leading bodies and the lack of a strong leader are fueling battles for places that defy the Chinese preference for quiet backroom deals and public consensus, China experts say. Bo isn’t the first, and may not be the last, to suffer attacks whose origins remain obscure even to insiders, they say.

“Sometimes in power struggles, you can’t attack the person directly, so you try to undermine the person by attacking associates and family members. It’s never quite clear where the attacks come from,” said Bo Zhiyue, an expert on the Chinese leadership at the National University of Singapore.

The Communist Party’s rules on succession have never been clearly stated, a reflection of its secretive, top-down nature.

What is known is that the party will designate a new group of elite leaders this fall as part of a transition that began five years ago with the tacit designation of Xi as future party chairman and national president by his appointment to a top spot on the Politburo Standing Committee. He became the highest-ranking member who would still be short of retirement age during the next leadership turnover.

Over several days in October, the party’s 300 Central Committee members will discuss policy and select a Politburo — which now stands at 25 members — along with its all-powerful Standing Committee, seven of whose nine members are due to stand down because of an unstated retirement of about 67.

Whether the top leadership is selected by internal vote, direct appointment or mutual agreement isn’t known. While age and experience are strongly valued, raw power and forcefulness are as important as technical competence.

No strongman has emerged with enough influence to force through positions in the manner of Mao Zedong or Deng Xiaoping, who tipped Hu to take over as eventual leader back in 2003, over the head of then-president Jiang Zemin. Hu will retire this fall.

“In the past, someone strong would have stepped in to settle matters,” said Ding Xueliang, a China politics expert at Hong Kong’s University of Science and Technology. “That’s all changed now.”

The 80 million-member party needs to seek a balance between rival interests, said Ding and others. Presently, the leadership is dominated by hard-liners led by Hu and parliamentary boss Wu Bangguo.

They tend to favor the economy’s state sector, strong suppression of dissent and alliances with other authoritarian regimes, said China expert Feng Chongyi of Australia’s University of Technology in Sydney.

The scale of the leadership turnover and intensity of the competition make this year’s succession especially challenging, China watcher Cheng Li of the Brookings Institution in Washington wrote in a recent study.

Xi and the others who take over the party later this year will have to deal with severe challenges such as discontented migrant workers, rapid urbanization, pollution, corruption and ethnic unrest.

There is a risk that divisions over personnel and policy could paralyze the new leadership’s decision-making, Li said. 

AP