Cai Qi is fifth in the Politburo Standing Committee’s formal ranking but functionally sits second only to Xi Jinping. The Economist’s profile lays out why. Cai runs the CCP General Office, which controls Xi’s daily decision flow and dispatches the Central Guard Bureau, the unit responsible for the personal security of every top Party leader. He is the ranking member of the Central Secretariat, the body that translates Politburo decisions into day-to-day operational orders across the Party. He functions as the regime’s internet surveillance czar, holding direct authority over the propaganda apparatus and the Cyberspace Administration of China. Open-source reporting now suggests his reach extends into the military as well. The Economist concluded that Cai’s portfolio has no precedent in the Party’s history.
The magazine quoted Czin, the former CIA analyst now at the Brookings Institution: when people ask who would succeed Xi if Xi died suddenly without a succession plan, Cai is the obvious candidate. The number two, Czin observed, is always the most likely person to challenge the number one.
The Economist also noted that Cai’s diplomatic role has expanded well beyond what any previous General Office director has handled. He accompanies Xi to almost every meeting with foreign leaders, and he also receives many heads of state and government on his own, including from India, Egypt, and Turkey. His political weight and visibility now command sustained attention from senior U.S. officials and from foreign governments more broadly. When U.S. President Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term, Cai Qi was the Chinese official Trump named as the desired guest at the January 20, 2025 ceremony. British officials have hinted that Cai was implicated in a suspected espionage case, a reference to the collapsed UK prosecution of researcher Christopher Berry, who was alleged to have met Cai in Hangzhou in July 2022.
Why Cai Qi may be more dangerous to Xi than to anyone else
Tang Jingyuan, a U.S.-based political commentator, argued in a recent broadcast that the core message of the Economist piece is harder than the article itself states. Cai Qi, in Tang’s reading, is not merely powerful inside the CCP. He has acquired international standing, and he has acquired so much power that the trust between him and Xi cannot match the size of the portfolio he now holds.
Tang flagged the Economist’s “what if Xi dies suddenly” framing as deliberately suggestive. A sudden death could be natural, a stroke or a heart attack, or it could be the kind of convenient death that has befallen other inconvenient figures inside the system. Tang invoked the case of former Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, who died in 2023 of a reported heart attack while swimming, a death many overseas Chinese-language commentators continue to treat as suspicious.
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Cai Qi, who runs Xi’s internal palace machinery, and Public Security Minister Wang Xiaohong, who runs Xi’s external enforcement apparatus, are the two hardest-core members of Xi’s Fujian network, the loyalist faction Xi built during his long posting in the southeastern province. Tang offered a historical analogy: if Wang Xiaohong is the Li Si standing next to this emperor, Cai Qi is his Zhao Gao. Li Si was the chief minister to Qin Shi Huang, the unifier and first emperor of China; Zhao Gao was the eunuch chief of staff who controlled access to that emperor and, after his death, forged a fake imperial decree to force the legitimate heir Fusu to commit suicide, then murdered the second emperor and most of the imperial family. Tang’s point is that Cai Qi controls the inner gate, and that everything reaching Xi passes through him. Cai and Wang are both ruthless enforcers, and aside from Xi himself, no one inside the system has the standing to manage them. Xi’s own ability to fully trust either of them is structurally limited.
If Xi designates a successor, Tang argued, that successor becomes Cai Qi’s largest threat, and Cai Qi becomes the successor’s largest threat. The Economist piece flagged the danger of a Xi who dies without a succession plan. Tang’s point is that even if Xi names a successor, Cai Qi can still take that successor down, because Cai still controls the inner machinery that decides what is communicated, what is suppressed, and who has access to the leader.
The historical parallel sharpens the point. When Qin Shi Huang died, he had named his eldest son Fusu as his heir. Fusu had the personal support of Meng Tian, the dynasty’s most senior military commander and a close personal ally. Zhao Gao still managed to forge the imperial decree, force Fusu’s suicide, and eliminate Meng Tian as well. Zhao Gao’s eventual betrayal of Qin Shi Huang’s chosen lineage came despite the fact that Qin Shi Huang had once pardoned Zhao Gao from a death sentence and had personally promoted him through the ranks. Xi’s promotion of Cai is far thinner than the life-saving favor Qin Shi Huang once extended to Zhao Gao, and if even that relationship could end in betrayal, the structural conclusion about Cai is that there is nothing in his bond with Xi strong enough to rule the same outcome out.
The conflict between Xi and Cai, Tang argued, has structural roots that go beyond personal loyalty. Xi cannot fully trust Cai given the size of Cai’s portfolio, and the system Cai operates inside cannot afford him the kind of loyalty Xi requires.
The signal Xi may have already noticed
On July 7, 2025, the eighty-eighth anniversary of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident that opened Japan’s full-scale invasion of China in 1937, Cai Qi did not accompany Xi on his inspection tour of Yangquan in Shanxi province. Instead, Cai stayed in Beijing and attended the anniversary ceremony alongside Zhang Youxia, then vice chairman of the Central Military Commission. For a Xi loyalist, peeling off from the leader on a politically loaded date to appear publicly with another senior figure carries weight. Given Xi’s known intolerance for any sign of divided loyalty, the episode is the kind of behavior Xi typically reads as the mark of a “two-faced person,” a category he has used to justify removing officials in the past. Xi has not yet moved against Cai because he still needs him.
Only one person in CCP history has previously held both a seat on the Politburo Standing Committee and the directorship of the Central General Office: Wang Dongxing, who served Mao Zedong as personal bodyguard and gatekeeper for decades. Mao trusted Wang absolutely. Yet within weeks of Mao’s death in 1976, Wang Dongxing turned around and helped Hua Guofeng and Marshal Ye Jianying arrest Mao’s widow Jiang Qing and the rest of the so-called Gang of Four.
Cai Qi’s portfolio is far larger than anything Wang Dongxing ever held. Xi has not designated a clear successor, and even if a new figure is elevated at the upcoming Fifth Plenum of the Twentieth Central Committee, that figure will not have anything close to the political standing Jiang Qing held in her time as Mao’s widow. If Cai Qi were to decide to remove a Xi-designated successor, the apparatus required to do so already sits in his hands.
The current closeness between Xi and Cai is best read as huddling for warmth, Tang argued. The anti-Xi camp inside the regime has begun an active offensive, and Cai Qi was the central operational planner of the surprise move that resulted in the seizure of Zhang Youxia. That single operation has now turned the Party elders and the so-called “red second generation,” the children of the CCP’s founding revolutionary leaders, into a unified bloc against Xi. The asymmetry is what matters: Xi can still detach himself from Cai politically, while Cai no longer has the option to detach himself from Xi.
While Xi has not yet fully recovered control of the Party, he and Cai Qi are bound to each other for survival. If Xi succeeds in retaking control, his first task will be to install a successor, and his first move to clear the runway will be to neutralize the largest threat to that successor, which means Cai Qi. Xi has already shown he does not spare even those who paid the highest price for him. Wang Qishan risked his own life to drive Xi’s first-term anti-corruption campaign, and Zhang Youxia helped engineer Xi’s third-term consolidation, and neither of those debts protected either man when the political calculation shifted. Cai Qi’s contribution does not necessarily exceed theirs.
If Xi loses the factional war, Tang continued, Xi’s instinct for self-preservation will lead him to throw Cai Qi overboard as a peace offering. If the anti-Xi camp wins, Cai Qi and Wang Xiaohong will be the first names on the list. The proximity to power that built both men’s careers has now become the mechanism most likely to end them.
By Li Deyan
