- Vice Premier Liu in the spotlight
- Table.Live Briefing: What went wrong at the EU-China summit?
- Shanghai pledges to improve food distribution
- Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan enrages Beijing
- Tibetan dies after setting himself on fire
- Profile: Geely designer Stefan Sielaff
If reasonable people rise up the ranks under Xi Jinping, China and its trading partners can only benefit from it. This is all the more true if they, as economic experts, favor internationalization and liberalization without wanting to set off a growth explosion at any cost. Liu He, now 70 years old, is such a type of politician. And his star is rising, analyzes Frank Sieren. Liu could even continue to play a decisive role after the Party Congress in the fall – and thus past retirement age. Premier Li Keqiang, meanwhile, remains on the sidelines.
Li’s inaction may have been one of the reasons why the EU-China summit last week achieved so little. After all, he was the summit’s main contact. But the EU Commission under Ursula von der Leyen also had a poor strategy: The summit was ill-prepared, and a focus on the Ukraine crisis left little room for China to address other issues. The fact that China was considered a good mediator at all was also a naïve assessment on Brussels’ part – this is the conclusion of the first Table.Live Briefing reviewing the summit.
Finn Mayer-Kuckuk
Feature
Is Vice Premier Liu a candidate for higher office?
Liu He gives you wings. The top economic advisor to President Xi Jinping sends China’s stocks soaring. From Shanghai to Hong Kong to New York. On March 16, a single sentence from the Vice Premier was enough to send the battered stock prices of Chinese tech companies into a rapid climb. Shanghai’s Hang Seng Index gained over nine percent, the biggest one-day increase in over a decade. The tech index even rose more than 22 percent.
Yet his statement, which wrote a significant chapter in the history of the stock market, sounded relatively unspectacular: Authorities should “actively introduce policies that benefit markets,” Liu said. But its massive impact raised the question of why Party leader Xi did not make this big political stroke himself.
Xi could have also entrusted this announcement to his prime minister. Li Keqiang, who will step down from office next spring, surely must have taken it as a slap in the face that Xi turns the political spotlight on his deputy. Especially since, while Liu is a member of the Communist Party’s Politburo, he is not part of the seven-member Standing Committee’s innermost circle, like Li.
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