China wraps up 20th Party Congress with Xi set to become most powerful leader in decades

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, the highest-ranking Communist Party official after Xi Jinping, is not in the list of the Chinese Communist Party’s principal leadership, the 205-member Central Committee — which means Li is set to retire from the party role.

Li, 67, is one year short of the unofficial retirement age for senior Chinese Communist Party leaders.

Wang Yang, the fourth-highest ranking official and widely seen as a potential candidate for the next Premier, is not in the Central Committee either. He is also 67 years old.

The 25-member Politburo and its Standing Committee – China’s most powerful decision-making body – are drawn from the Central Committee.

Li’s retirement comes a day before Xi is expected to take on a third term and preside over the announcement of the party’s elite decision-making body — which analysts this year expect to be stacked with Xi loyalists.

Analysts had previously noted that Li’s retirement would signal a significant shift in the balance of power in favor of Xi.

“The biggest thing to watch is whether people who are closely associated with Xi Jinping himself will dominate the Politburo Standing Committee, or whether some of the old guards whose careers are not completely dependent on him will stay … people like Li Keqiang and Wang Yang,” said Victor Shih, an expert on elite Chinese politics at the University of California San Diego.

If the committee is full of Xi’s allies, “that will change the power sharing arrangement that China has seen since the late 1970s,” he added.

-Ranjith Perera-