China's opaque politics and the Li Keqiang mystery

The recent death of former Premier Li Keqiang triggered the usual wild speculation about what really goes on behind the scenes in Chinese politics.

While conjecture and conspiracies appeal to our baser instincts, dampen the inclination to fill in blanks with the most titillating possibilities when uncertainty and a lack of transparency creates room for a good story. Understanding is too important and the potential consequences of misunderstanding too high to indulge in guesses, fantasies or projection.

Li died Oct. 26 after suffering a heart attack while on vacation in Shanghai. He was stricken in the early hours of Friday, swimming in a hotel pool. Xinhua, the state-run news agency, reported that he passed away “after all rescue measures failed.”

The rumor mill kicked into overdrive. Li was the youngest of China’s ruling elite to enter retirement and was reported to be in good health during one of his last public appearances at the end of August. The country’s leaders have bodyguards and access to the country’s best medical care, and most of them live to a ripe old age as a result. Where were those caretakers? Why wasn’t Li taken to a hospital in Shanghai, which offers top-notch care? As one of Japan’s noted China watchers noted, “the mystery simmers.”

Some China hands saw ominous signs in Li being forced into retirement earlier this year after 10 years as number two in the political hierarchy, while Xi Jinping, the country’s supreme leader, was given a third term. There were reports of tension between the two, with claims that Li was the face of a “people-oriented” approach to policy and politics, committed to reform and opening up that contrasted with the growing concentration of power in Xi’s hands and that of the state.

The two men were sometimes spoken of as rivals to succeed General-Secretary Hu Jintao, the former leader, and, in the most feverish imaginings in the first half of last year, Li would replace Xi as Communist Party general-secretary at the 20th-Party Congress that was held a year ago. Instead, term limits got ripped up, Xi was given a third term and Li, who had announced in March 2022 that he would retire, did so.

With China experiencing growing strain as a result of economic slowdown, Xi’s consolidation of power and the seeming unity of the West as it counters Beijing’s own forceful foreign policy, there is an inclination, if not a desire, to see splits in China’s leadership. There are inevitably divergences in views when it comes to policy — often a function of function, i.e., job responsibilities — but the notion of deep, abiding divisions in the party is most likely projection, rather than fact based.

Those who argued that there was unfinished business made much of the remark in Li’s farewell address (reportedly excluded from the official transcript) that “While people work, heaven watches. Heaven has eyes.” The Li-Xi “rivalry,” his sudden death and the efforts of the Chinese government to ensure that it has no domestic political consequences — applauding him in his Xinhua obituary as “an outstanding leader” while emphasizing that he worked under “the strong leadership” of Xi — provide the backdrop for that analysis.

A little digging fills in details that dull down the mystery. Li reportedly had bypass surgery and was taking drugs after a liver transplant, both of which would have increased the risk of a heart attack. Even the best medical care has its limits: a massive heart attack would do the trick.

I’ll spare readers the tea reading and divination that has fueled some of the speculation. I will note, however, that the reporting relies on anonymous sources invariably described as coming from or familiar with the ways of Zhongnanhai, the area where top Chinese officials live and have their offices.

There is a lot of “likely that” and “reasonable inferences” in the stories. There are speeches that cite ancient Chinese sources or spotlight meaningful silences, both of which allow just about any interpretation. Wu Guoguang, a commentator who tries to provide context to Chinese politics, warns against “fanciful speculation” that rests on such “supposedly portentous silence.”

This article isn’t intended to "dis" reporting on China. Rather, it’s to underscore the lack of knowledge about what is going on in the upper levels of the Chinese leadership. There are smart people with insight, but most convincing analysis rests on years of study rather than sources.

Wu, a senior researcher at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions, likens the inner workings of Chinese politics to “a black box” in which we can see inputs and outputs but have no clue about what’s going on inside the box itself. “Speculation and conjecture flourish.” As often as not, “it reflects the image of the observers back at them.”

This inability to see the inner workings of the party elite is deliberate and has been nurtured by Chinese leaders. Wu argues that a “bamboo curtain” has shrouded the leadership since the founding of the People’s Republic. Uncertainty has forced outsiders to rely on gossip and misleading media reports — many, Wu says, propagated by the rulers themselves, who use “wholesale and blatant rumor-mongering ... strategically to spread disinformation about the inner workings of Zhongnanhai.”

He suggests that rumors like those about the Xi-Li rivalry are intended to disarm active opposition to the regime because they imply that the party will fix its problems itself. Of course, the reality of such hopes should have been exposed after the results of the 20th Congress were in and Xi’s consolidation of power was confirmed.

Wu cites Frederick Teiwes, the U.S.-born Sinologist who made a career of studying the CCP in Australia, for the conclusion that “The dominant contemporary Western scholarly assessments” of the party and elite politics throughout the history of modern China “have been either dramatically wrong, or a very mixed bag, or in critical respects speculation that cannot be verified on existing evidence.”

And it’s getting harder to get a read on what is going on. China has no monopoly on bad statistics; many countries release “suspect” official data that demands cross checking with other indicators. But few make their misgivings as clear as Beijing did last summer when it announced that it would no longer publish the youth unemployment rate and other age-related metrics when those numbers climbed to politically dangerous levels.

China has also tried to throttle independent sources of information, telling foreign banks not to publish politically sensitive research. It has investigated and shuttered consultancies that do background work for companies seeking to invest in China like Bain, the Mintz Group and Capvision. The broadening of the anti-espionage law has many companies worried about what they can do with their own data. The atmosphere prompted Gallup, the international consultancy, to announce last week that it was closing its offices in China.

Economic experts too now refer to China as “a black box,” where the lack of information has made it increasingly difficult to make meaningful and accurate judgments about the country and its prospects.

China isn’t alone in wanting to control perceptions by both internal and international audiences. Every government seeks to control the message and present its own narrative. The Trump administration talked of “alternative facts” and pressed its own reality on its audiences, no matter how far-fetched it seemed. Few have succeeded as well as China — and there are few cases where the price of bad information or the lack of insight can have a greater, more dangerous effect.