Melanie Hart on what China’s leadership transition means for the U.S.

Q: How does China’s leadership transition work?

A: China is an authoritarian regime. The Chinese Communist Party controls everything. It’s a single-party, authoritarian regime. Every ten years the Communist Party shuffles the leadership at the top. The older party cadres retire and younger cadres step up to take those positions. They do this to keep things fresh and to make people feel like the country is moving forward. That it’s not getting stagnant and concentrating too much power under those few individuals at the top. 

Q: What challenges will China’s new leaders face in the coming years?

A: One of the big challenges facing Chinese leaders over the next decade is the fact that as the country gets richer, Chinese citizens are no longer satisfied with strong economic growth. They are increasingly concerned about quality of life. They want clean air and water. They want safe food and drug supplies. And they want a good legal system that can protect them from things like local police abuse.

Providing those things will require the Chinese Communist Party to do a really delicate balancing act between maintaining top down control on the one hand, and on the other hand opening up things like media oversight and freedom for civil society organizations. These are things that the party is not used to dealing with but that they will have to deal with over the next ten years to be able to address these problems and keep people happy.

Q: How will these changes affect U.S. policy toward China?

A: We should be focusing on two things. First, since China is becoming more diverse and more balanced, that means that instead of hearing one message from the Chinese Communist Party, we’re going to increasingly hear multiple messages. And it may be hard for us to listen to those messages and accurately predict which one is going to come out on top and which way the country is going to go.

The second thing that we really have to keep in mind is, as I mentioned, China is going to be facing some major challenges. It’s going to be extremely difficult for the next generation of Chinese leaders to meet those challenges. And if they feel like they’re failing and not satisfying the Chinese people the best way to distract someone from that is to point fingers at someone else. And the biggest place they like to point fingers is at the United States. So it is possible that as China grows and as they go through this era of growing pains, that the leaders and the people might look toward the U.S. more and complain about things that the U.S. is doing. We’ll have to be very savvy about managing this foreign policy relationship and make sure that China’s growing pains do not trigger crises that we do not want.