The Chinese Communist Party’s Central Party School (中央党校) serves as both the party’s premier training institution for senior officials and a leading center for political research. When Chinese leader Xi Jinping appointed longtime associate Cai Qi to head the school earlier this month, the move carried significance beyond a routine personnel decision.
Cai’s appointment offers insight into Xi’s ideological vision for the future CCP leadership as well as the broader workings of Chinese elite politics.
Xi and Cai share longstanding political ties dating back to their careers in Fujian and Zhejiang provinces. When Xi became Zhejiang’s party secretary in 2002, Cai was serving as party secretary of Taizhou, a coastal prefecture-level city in the province. While Xi set policy direction, Cai was responsible for implementing it at the local level.
Cai later became vice governor of Zhejiang before being promoted to Beijing after the CCP’s 18th Party Congress in 2012 as deputy director of the Central National Security Commission (CNSC).
Xi established the CNSC following the Third Plenum of the 18th Party Congress. According to Hu Weixing, a professor at the University of Macau, the commission was designed to “build a strong platform to coordinate national security work and to strengthen unified leadership of national security at the central level.”
Success
You are now signed up for our newsletter
Success
Check your email to complete sign up
The commission plays a key role in coordinating issues such as intelligence, crisis management, counterespionage, cybersecurity, sanctions response, and foreign policy during periods of crisis.
Cai Qi’s role in the Xi leadership
Xi’s decision to appoint Cai as the CNSC’s first deputy director underscored the degree of trust he placed in him. In his 2016 paper, Xi Jinping’s “Big Power Diplomacy” and China’s Central National Security Commission (CNSC), published in the Journal of Contemporary China, Hu argued that the CNSC reflected Xi’s desire to strengthen China’s role as a major power while centralizing national security and foreign policy decision-making.
After Xi became Chinese leader in 2013, he transferred Cai to Beijing as a deputy mayor in 2014. It was Cai’s first appointment in the capital. He became acting mayor in 2016 and later party secretary of Beijing.
RECENT COVERAGE
- EU Accuses China of Training Russian Soldiers Who Fought in Ukraine
- US Targets Chinese Tech Giants, Adding BYD, Alibaba, Baidu to Pentagon List
- Xi-Putin Summit Underscores China-Russia Push for Multipolar World Order: Reports
In a profile published following the CCP’s 20th Party Congress in 2022, the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS) highlighted Cai’s role in overseeing one of Xi’s signature initiatives: the development of Xiong’an New Area, a state-planned city located roughly 62 miles southwest of Beijing.
Xi has described Xiong’an as a “1000-year project,” and Cai was tasked with implementing the initiative after his appointment in Beijing.
“Cai was one of the earliest senior officials to use the phrase ‘Important Thought of General Secretary Xi Jinping’ (习近平总书记重要思想) and the first to call Xi as ‘the people’s leader’ (人民领袖),” MERICS noted.
This record suggests not only that Cai enjoys Xi’s confidence, but also that he has repeatedly been entrusted with implementing major policy initiatives without emerging as a political rival.
Increasing emphasis on ideological work, ‘Xi Jinping Thought’
Xi himself, as well as his predecessor Hu Jintao, served as head of the Central Party School before assuming China’s top leadership positions. That history makes Cai’s appointment particularly noteworthy as Xi continues to strengthen the party’s ideological foundations around his own political thought.
Huang Xianghuai, a scholar at the Central Party School, addressed the importance of ideological work in an essay titled “Emphasizing and Strengthening the Party’s Ideological Work,” which was translated and published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in July 2018.
According to Huang, ideological work has received increased emphasis under Xi’s leadership.
“Since the Party’s 18th National Congress, the CCP Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core has greatly emphasized ideological work,” Huang wrote.
In the essay, Huang argued that ideology is as important to China’s development as economic and technological progress. Explaining why ideological work remains central to the party’s mission, he cited Xi directly.
“Being able to do ideological work properly concerns the future fate of the Party, the long-lasting peace and stability of the country, and the cohesion and solidarity of the nation,” Xi said, as cited by Huang.
Cai simultaneously holds several of the party’s most powerful positions. His appointment to lead the Central Party School therefore places a trusted Xi ally at the center of the party’s ideological training apparatus while consolidating multiple important functions under a single senior official.
In addition to heading the school, Cai serves as the first-ranked secretary of the CCP Central Secretariat, director of the General Office of the CCP Central Committee — effectively Xi’s chief of staff — and the fifth-ranked member of the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee, China’s highest decision-making body.
By bringing multiple positions under one of his closest allies, including now the head of the Central Party School, Xi is not only strengthening the CCP’s ideological framework and the composition of its current and future leadership, but also ensuring the continuity of “Xi Jinping thought” as a lasting component of the regime’s vision.
