The End of China’s Old Guard: Why Party Elders Can’t Save the Country From Xi

[SS from essay by Deng Yuwen, Deputy Senior Editor at the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Party School from 2002 to 2013 and worked as a political affairs consultant at Eurasia Group from 2023 to 2025.]

For the past year, an increasing number of rumors about Chinese leader Xi Jinping have been swirling around Beijing. Some sources privately claim that Xi has lost real power and been sidelined. Others whisper that Xi’s health has deteriorated; the politician appearing in public, they say, is merely a lookalike, while a group of the party’s most venerable elder statesmen are actually calling the shots. Still other stories even imagine an alliance of unlikely bedfellows—once powerful liberal political reformers and conservative generals from the People’s Liberation Army, for instance—who are teaming up to admonish Xi or to replace him.

Such fanciful rumors are common in authoritarian systems, especially in the lead-up to major political events—such as the Chinese Communist Party’s fourth plenum, which took place in October, and whose outcomes are expected to set the country’s developmental direction for the next five years. With few clear signals about who has influence and how decisions are made, the halls of power in Beijing are fertile ground for political conjectures. The shared thread in all these rumors is the idea that a powerful group of party elders with access to insider information—leaders and high-level cadres who have usually stepped back from active political roles but remain influential behind the scenes—still hold enough clout to overrule Xi and shape China’s political course.