As explained earlier, the components of the PRC’s central political system—the Party, the government, and to a lesser extent, the military—are largely separate though sometimes redundant interlocking structures. Leading Party Members’ Groups, or “Leading Small Groups” (LSGs) as they often are translated, are supra-ministerial bodies created to facilitate consensusbuilding and coordination among these separate Party, government, and military structures in ways that the official bureaucratic structure cannot.19 In some respects, they are similar in function and design to interagency bodies in the United States. Although they date back to the
1950s, LSGs since the 1990s have become more important in policy coordination and guidance in the PRC. They operate within the Party, within the State Council and its government ministries, and within the PLA. The authority for LSGs is contained in Chapter IX of the Party’s constitution.
LSGs are the embodiment of opaqueness in China’s political system. Despite their evidently critical policy role, they never appear on public organizational charts of the current PRC leadership. They do not publicize their membership. They are rarely referred to in the media. They do not appear to have permanent staff. Only recently has the Party begun to publish lists of LSGs that have existed in the past, along with their memberships, but little still is known about the workings and membership makeup of current LSGs. Scholars only derive conclusions about the very existence and/or makeup of an LSG by combing through vast quantities of press accounts in search of the occasional reference.
According to one noted scholar on the subject, LSGs can come and go—some function more or less as task forces—but it is thought that there currently are eight “primary,” and more or less permanent, LSGs, each thought to be headed by a member of the Politburo Standing Committee.21 These include LSGs on finance and economy; politics and law; national security; foreign affairs; Hong Kong and Macau; Taiwan affairs; propaganda and ideology; and Partybuilding. An LSG’s relative importance in the hierarchy can be determined by who heads it: in recent years, the foreign affairs and the national security LSGs have been headed by the Party secretary. If the data and scholarship on LSGs are accurate, recent trends suggest that Politburo Standing Committee members who are being groomed to succeed the current party secretary or premier may first follow the same trajectory of leadership in the LSGs as did their predecessors. If true, this could provide observers with a small kernel of information about the future identities of the PRC’s top two leaders.
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