A senior Communist Party policy official dismissed as "pure folklore" a retirement rule widely used to predict Chinese leadership changes, calling into question key assumptions about who will step down after President Xi Jinping's reshuffle next year.
Deng Maosheng, a director with the party's Central Policy Research Office, told reporters at a government-organized news briefing in Beijing on Monday that retirement rules for senior officials needed to be flexible and revised if circumstances required. He was responding to a question about "seven up, eight down," shorthand for the party's convention of retiring officials age 68 or older from the Politburo's supreme Standing Committee.
"The strict boundaries of 'seven up, eight down' don't exist," said Deng, who has participated in the drafting of all four plenum communiques issued under Xi. "This is something from folklore, and cannot be trusted."