China watchers speculate about tensions between President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang. Technocrats are making a return under Xi. China and Pakistan look to renew relations under team Shehbaz Sharif. China may sign a new security deal with Kiribati — Chinascope brings you stories from China, and the world, as they changed our world last week.
China over the week
Making sense of Chinese politics by reading between the lines is a craft China watchers have honed through trial and error. But the approach comes with its own pitfalls.
This past week the China watcher community was rife with speculation about Xi Jinping’s fading presence from the pages of the party newspaper, the People’s Daily. Experts argued, citing Xi’s absence from the front page of the newspaper, that his economic and Covid policies were facing backlash from the upper echelons of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Instead, Premier Li Keqiang’s 8,000-word speech at the fifth State Council’s clean government work conference on 25 April was published in full on the second page of the People’s Daily.
But China Media Project took a long-term view to contextualise Xi’s relative absence from the front page of the newspaper and forecast any coming change to the leadership structure. It’s difficult to forecast a political system designed to be opaque by default.
“Despite reports of an ‘unusual reduction’ there would be 20 front pages without Xi Jinping in 2018, the year following the 19th National Congress of...
Read Full Story: https://theprint.in/opinion/chinascope/xi-missing-from-front-pages-of-ccps-peoples-daily-experts-reading-between-the-lines/966754/
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