<div style="text-align: justify; "><span style="font-size: 1rem;">Vastness is a defining feature of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).</span><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It has more than 96 million members, and the party’s official list of heroes and martyrs counts two million names of those remembered for their storied lives and heroic deaths.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In the expansiveness of the CCP’s political structure, just a tiny few have completed the long march to the party’s upper echelons.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify; ">And among those who have reached the pinnacles of the party’s hierarchy, just four names have been anointed as the party’s “core” leaders: Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and the most recent addition, President Xi Jinping.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Some also argue that only Mao, Deng, and Xi deserve to be considered as truly ‘great’ leaders as Jiang’s “core” status was bequeathed rather than earned.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This week’s highly choreographed event in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing is not only about naming Xi president for an unprecedented third term, but also recognising him as the party’s strongest leader since Mao, who ruled for 27 years until his death in 1976.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">“Everybody is silent,” said Xuezhi Guo, author of The Politics of the Core Leader in China.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">“There is almost no opposition — checks and balances — in the party leadership anymore,” Guo, a professor of political science at Guilford College in the United States, told Al Jazeera.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">“The entire atmosphere in China now is anybody talks about or discusses about the negatives of Xi Jinping would have … trouble today. You see, that’s the problem,” he said.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">While the title might sound obscure, Xi’s recognition by the party as its “core” leader is testimony to his “profound” relationships with current party members, party veterans, and the powerful military, Guo said.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">“When the core leader is established it’s very hard for any kind of forces in the party leadership to contain the power of the core leader once the position has been established,” he explained.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Mao, Deng and Xi achieved their “core” leadership status through a recognition by party members that they had become central to the party’s functioning and, by extension, to the fate of China and its people, Guo explains.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Xi will undoubtedly be named president for a third term, Guo added, and this “time he’s much more stronger, much more powerful”.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">And herein lies the danger for China’s most dominant leader in decades.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">None dare challenge or criticise Xi, Guo explains, describing an atmosphere in the party that has becomes so inwardly policed in support of Xi that it could “create what we call arbitrary rule”.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As Xi moves into his third term and surrounds himself with younger, hand-picked teams of loyal officials, that silence will only deepen, he said, as none among them will dare question the man they know is responsible for their positions. Aljazeera</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify; ">bnbd24/kh</div>