“There is no difference between reform and anti-corruption: both must be implemented within the framework of law”.

So said Chinese leader Xi Jinping, and with the end of a high level Communist Party meeting last month, the significance of Xi’s “Rule of Law” campaign has become crystal clear. It is a key tool in his attempt to restructure the framework of Party political power and decision-making via the four new Party central leading groups which he chairs. These provide him with the mechanism to implement his “top-down design” and control the entire Party political and State economic reform process. Indeed, there is no longer any real separation between the Party and the State in major decision- and policy-making processes. This is primarily because Xi now has the chairman’s role in all of the key Party leading groups overseeing national security, overall reform, internet security and information industry and finance and economics.

Establishing a strong mercantilist and highly centralised Party leadership with Maoist characteristics is, in our view, Xi’s overriding purpose through to the 19th Party Congress in late 2017. His current priorities, therefore, are without question domestic political issues, such as continuing to consolidate his power base in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The most critical factor to achieve his ambitions is human resources. His focus will be primarily on selecting and pre-positioning his own team of loyal friends and allies to replace the largely discredited Party political elite inherited from the Hu-Wen era at the next major Party Congress.