Perhaps what prompted me to conduct extensive research and study the role of “small or central leadership groups” and the role of (local support groups) inside China, to help in making political decisions or setting long-term plans for the Chinese decision-maker himself, is the launch of similar foreign platforms, and I was and still am – as an internationally known Egyptian expert in Chinese political affairs – in constant contact and continuous follow-up of all their daily activities with all those platforms and similar groups that specialize in studying China. In addition, I am always keen, due to my precise academic specialization in Chinese political affairs and the policies of the ruling Communist Party in China, to send inquiring emails to those in charge of them to understand their view of China, especially since its members are from all countries of the world, to stand on their way of understanding and comprehending China from a different point of view. This can be understood as a concrete application example through the “Young China Group” .
Where this group, which includes only foreigners, works to understand China from a different point of view, and the “Young China Group” sets its sights on including and absorbing the largest number of young people in China from all cultures and nationalities. There are more young people in China than the number of young people in the United States of America, Europe and the Middle East combined, and they alone constitute more than the total population of the United States of America and Canada combined. Here, the “Young China Group” seeks to try to communicate with representatives of all their countries, to understand consumption, creativity or the direction of their countries with China. The “Young China Group” raises the slogan: (You have to understand young China: who are they, what do they want and how do they see the world)?
The “Young China Group”, led by a number of young American leaders, provides a bridge of understanding between China and the rest of the world. The term “Young China” refers to the 700 million people under the age of forty in China, in addition to the country’s evolving identity on the global stage. For this, the Young China Group was formed to understand both, and to turn knowledge into practice. Here, the Young China Group is made up of young foreign experts, especially from the United States, working with brands, companies, investors and governments to understand China from the beginning. As this leading group of foreigners strives to study, to bring empathy, research and ground-truth to your questions about China. Through continuous qualitative and quantitative research, it provides a people-first perspective to the questions that drive an evolving global dynamic. Although the Young China Group of Foreign Youth is primarily about discovering China, China preceded it by establishing the Young China Leading Group for National Security following the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade on May 7, 1999.The mission of the Young China Leading Group for National Security within China is to primarily control the work of intelligence agencies, and to connect them with each other, in addition to playing the role of intelligence agencies and various academic and non-academic think tanks within China. Local support groups also play a major leading role in assisting Chinese decision-makers in all Chinese provinces and regions, in addition to having representatives in areas where different Chinese minorities are concentrated, to understand and address all their demands and situations.
The local support groups, also sometimes known as the “central leading group” or “small leading group,” essentially serve as a CPC body tasked with making decisions on key functional issue areas. Small leading groups effectively act as executive committees between various intelligence agencies within China and, even more impressively, bypass the government, the ruling Communist Party itself, and the military. The major small leading groups cover issues such as national security, foreign affairs, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau affairs, propaganda and ideology, and financial and economic matters inside and outside China. Here, CPC General Secretary “Xi Jinping” has personally chaired more than 70 meetings of the central leading group to deepen comprehensive reform within China. Small or focused local leading groups bring together senior officials of the Chinese Party, government, and military to discuss issues, exchange ideas, and make policy recommendations to the Politburo and its Standing Committee. Influential academics and journalists may also participate in local leading groups. Not all local leadership groups operate at the ministerial level; some may work with lower-level officials. In recent years, local leadership groups have provided an important means for individual leaders to direct policy. They enable the top leadership to exercise direct control over the management of key policy areas.
In late 2000, Beijing established a new national security leadership group. China has also worked to diversify the sources of policy analysis it receives from inside and outside the government. The pivotal and highly influential role of the new advanced policy planning department of the Chinese Foreign Ministry is now a prominent source of domestic political thought in China.
The era of Chinese President “Xi Jinping” has seen the creation of a number of small new local leadership groups to push forward key elements of his agenda and overcome obstacles within the Chinese bureaucracy. Under “Xi”, eight new local leadership groups for the party and 21 new local leadership groups for the State Council were created shortly after he took power in 2012. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s personal chairmanship of nine local leadership groups – an unprecedented number – reflected his drive to centralize power in his own hands. This provided a means for “Xi” to circumvent China’s collective leadership by dominating local support groups. At the same time, a group of Chinese, including “CPC” media officials, spokespersons, and popular daily newspapers, began to hold discussions similar to the role of central leadership groups and small local leadership groups inside China, using the “roundtable method” with the explicit management of new analysts. Some newspapers, especially the Huanqi Shibao (International Times) and Nanfang Zhoumu (Southern Weekend), even published some opinions by senior roundtable analysts to discuss and study China’s conditions, calling for alternative policies and plans and recommending them to the decision-maker in China.
In contrast, through my understanding and following of the most prominent Chinese publications and their think tanks and research centers, I found that the details of the current membership and even the number of existing local support groups or those small central leadership groups inside China are rarely disclosed. Although some historical information has been issued about what are known as “local support groups” in previous decades inside China, which are similar to the small central leadership group to discuss Chinese conditions and policies, they are not officially included in the publicly available organizational charts or descriptions of government institutions, due to their sensitivity as tools for leadership and political and economic decision-making inside and outside China. Also, the flexible nature of local support groups and small central leadership groups inside China confirms that their membership and structure can be subject to major changes and movements within the Chinese power structure.
Here we must understand that local support groups and all small leadership groups to discuss China’s conditions do not have permanent staff and instead rely on their general offices to manage daily operations and for research and policy recommendations. Thus, the effectiveness of a local support group often depends on the effectiveness of its general office.
As an expert on Chinese politics, when I analyzed the mechanism of work, study and understanding of these (small leadership groups inside China), I found that they are one of the least institutionalized and therefore the most flexible parts of the Chinese political system. A number of Chinese sources affiliated with the ruling Communist Party itself indicate that these small leadership groups were first established in 1958, under a mandate authorized by (Chapter Nine of the Constitution of the Communist Party of China).
The role of these small leadership groups and local support groups was redefined and their role was regulated inside China and abroad in December 1987, under a set of reforms approved by the Second Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. These small leadership groups were classified as advisory decision-making bodies of the Central Committee of the Party and were usually short-term, task-oriented groups. In 1997, they were confirmed as official parts of Beijing’s political system. They have become particularly important during the tenure of General Secretary “Xi Jinping”. Some work on a permanent basis, while others are there temporarily to address immediate issues.
Here, policy implementation is coordinated through local support groups and central leading groups, across key decision-making bodies, including the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, to which local support groups and smaller leading groups report, and copies of their reports are sent to the State Council, the Central Military Commission, the State Council, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Local support groups and smaller leading groups are periodically chaired by members of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau. However, China’s vertically organized government system sometimes lacks horizontal coordination among its various parts, and local support groups play an important role in overcoming this lack of horizontal coordination. Functionally, local support groups enable the Party to use its overall authority to facilitate decision-making and compensate for the horizontally fragmented nature of China’s government system.
In general, there are two types of local support groups. The CPC’s local support groups manage all policy operations of the Politburo and the CPC Secretariat, and the State Council’s local support groups, similar to the cabinet, coordinate the implementation of government policy. In China, the party’s local government groups tend to focus on political and legal affairs, as well as national security issues, while the State Council’s local government groups focus on economics and society. They’re an academic study reported in 2017, confirmed that there were 83 local government groups, 26 of which were party-affiliated and 57 were state-affiliated. This is a significant increase from the 2015 estimate of 39 local government groups. Analyzing the role of local government groups in China, they do not formulate concrete policies, but rather issue “guidelines on the general direction of policy” in which the state’s bureaucratic activity should proceed. However, the recommendations of the leading groups are likely to have a significant impact on the policymaking process, as they represent the consensus of the leading members of the government, the party, and the relevant military agencies. In some cases, the Chinese leadership adopts the “financial work groups”, which knows as “FATF recommendations” of these small local groups and small central leadership groups without making any significant changes to them.
Finally, the local resource management groups or small leaderships within China do not merely formulate policy within the CCP; they also direct many other groups with sometimes different goals. There are three future possibilities: President “Xi Jinping”, as general secretary of the “CCP”, will use the local resource management groups: return them to their original role of information coordinator; use the local resource management groups to strategically guide the party and government bureaucracy; or, as President “Xi” has done, have the local resource management groups assume a more permanent central position in the policymaking process. If the local resource management groups continue to be centralized with President “Xi” directly supervising them, this will give Comrade “Xi” even more power and access to every major policy issue in China, because in these local resource management groups, he outmaneuvers the bureaucrats at the table.
