The Rules and Norms of Leadership Succession in China: From Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping and Beyond

Abstract

Under Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese Communist Party started to institutionalize leadership succession in the 1980s. Peaceful and orderly succession of the top political offices, however, only started to take shape in the early 1990s. We identify three sets of rules and norms formed since then to govern elite replacement and power succession. These concern top leaders’ exit from power, selection of successors, and the transition of power between outgoing and incoming leaders. We trace the evolving process in which these rules were made and accepted by the Party elite between 1992 and 2012. Incidents, however, also showed the malleability of some of these rules and the potential rise of ambitious rule challengers. Into Xi Jinping’s era, uncertainty still threatens the revision or abandonment of some of these rules, and continuous attention is needed in order to understand the likely trajectories of the Chinese political system.