Xi Jinping's Once-Promising Successor Has Vanished From View. Why? I China Insights
Hu Chunhua was once widely regarded as a possible future leader of China. Today, the former rising star of the Chinese Communist Party is once again at the center of speculation after an unusual absence from a major political event.
Was he sidelined, placed under investigation, or simply absent for health reasons?
Hu's political journey tells a much bigger story about power and succession in Beijing.
Once associated with former Chinese leader Hu Jintao, Hu Chunhua rose rapidly through the Communist Party's ranks before suffering a dramatic setback at the 2022 Party Congress. But in recent years, his public appearances, official assignments, and periods of absence have repeatedly fueled speculation about his political future.
In this episode, we examine his rise and fall, the political significance of his recent appearances, and the rumors surrounding his latest absence.
Could Hu Chunhua still have a role in China's next leadership transition? And what does his uncertain political future reveal about Xi Jinping's grip on power?
**Note:** Claims that Hu Chunhua has been detained, placed under investigation, or secretly protected remain unverified. An absence from a public event does not, by itself, establish a political purge.
#HuChunhua #XiJinping #ChinaPolitics #CCP #Beijing #ChinaNews #ChinesePolitics #PowerStruggle #HuJintao #ChinaLeadership #ChineseCommunistParty #ChinaInsights
There is one person in Zhongnanhai who, whenever there is any movement,
can trigger endless speculation
from the outside world about the CCP's secretive political
maneuvers. Every time he appears or disappears,
it corresponds to the turbulence in Xi Jinping's
power structure. This person is the deposed Crown Prince He Junhua,
who was long ago demoted to the
CPPC. Just a couple of days ago,
he was notably absent from the Long March commemoration meeting,
and immediately rumors spread overseas that he
and his entire family had lost contact.
However, insiders also revealed that he was simply on sick leave.
And this isn't the first time Hu Chunhua has disappeared.
This April, he also mysteriously missed an important meeting.
At the time, the rumors were overwhelming,
but the very next day, the plot took a turn.
A month ago, he also suddenly appeared
at an event where he had no business being in attendance.
What does Hu Chunhua's appearance
and disappearance reflect about Zhongnanhai?
Today, we will piece together the undercurrents of power in Zhongnanhai
that correspond to the rise
and fall of Hu Chunhua's political image over the past two years.
By the end, you'll be able to judge for yourself.
Is he being protected or has he been taken down?
You will have your own conclusion.
Hu Chunhua was Xi Jinping's successor,
but not the successor chosen by Xi Jinping.
He is the child of farmers from the mountains of Hubei.
After graduating from Peking University,
he voluntarily went to Tibet and stayed there for over a decade.
It was there that he met the then Party Secretary of Tibet, Hu Jintao.
From then on, he was promoted all the way by Hu Jintao,
and with every step up the ladder, he was the youngest in his cohort.
In Beijing circles, they called him Little Hu Jintao.
In 2012, at the 18th National Congress of the CCP,
Xi Jinping took power.
In that same session, two individuals born
in the 1960s entered the Politburo simultaneously.
One was Hu Chunhua, and the other was Sun Zhengcai.
Both were born in 1963 and were only 49 years old at the time.
These two were the successors Hu Jintao had prepared for Xi Jinping,
one to take over the party and the other to take over the government.
There is an unwritten rule within
the CCP called intergenerational designation,
which means the previous leader selects
the successors for the leader after the next one.
So was Xi Jinping satisfied with this arrangement?
Well, one incident can tell us.
At the 18th National Congress, just before Xi Jinping took power,
the CCP leadership held an internal consultative meeting
where hundreds of high-ranking officials sat together
to vote on candidates for the next Politburo.
To put it plainly, it was an internal straw poll.
At the time, Lin Jinhua was in charge
of the general office of the Central Committee
and was known as Hu Jintao's chief steward.
Later, rumors circulated that, in that vote, Hu Chunhua, Wang Yang,
and other members of the Youth League faction ranked at the top,
which caused dissatisfaction among certain people.
As a result, some questioned whether
Lin Jinhua had manipulated the process.
So, five years later, who were these dissatisfied people?
There is an official account.
After the 19th National Congress in 2017, Xinhua News Agency published
a long article explaining how the new leadership team was selected.
It noted that conference recommendations during the 17th
and 18th Congresses overemphasized vote counts, leading to favoritism.
It specifically named Zhou Yongkang, Sun Zhengcai,
and Lin Jinhua for using these to solicit votes and bribe.
Consequently, starting with the 19th Congress,
this was replaced by individual talks with
Xi Jinping and top leaders.
Take a moment to digest that.
That vote at the 18th National Congress
was precisely the one where Hu Chunhua and Sun
Zunzai were elected to the Politburo and designated as successors.
Xi Jinping is saying that the voting process back
then was manipulated by people like Ling
Zhihua and Sun Zhengtai.
In other words, Xi Jinping doesn't even recognize
the legitimacy of Hu Chunhua's status as
a successor.
From the very beginning, he was a thorn
in Xi Jinping's side, because who else could
stand in the way of his re-election?
So Xi Jinping decided to take action against
this pair of rising stars, Sun Zhengcai and
Hu Chunhua.
In July 2017, three months before the 19th National Congress,
Chongqing Party Secretary
Sun Zhengcai was suddenly removed from his post.
A week later, he was placed under investigation,
and later, he was sentenced to life imprisonment
and locked up in Chongqing Prison.
With Sun Zhengcai down, Hu Chunhua very shrewdly kept a low profile.
At the 19th National Congress, he missed the standing committee,
becoming third-ranked vice premier
overseeing agriculture and poverty relief,
the state council's most thankless tasks.
After Sun Zhengcai's fall,
Xi Jinping assessed Hu Chunhua with six words,
understanding the big picture, considering the overall situation.
The implication was clear. He was obedient and should remain so.
Hu Chunhua was obedient.
In June 2020, he inspected Shaanxi and visited Laijiaha,
where Xi Jinping once worked, essentially a pilgrimage.
By early 2021, the CCP declared
a comprehensive victory in its poverty alleviation campaign,
led by none other than Hu Chunhua.
Logically speaking, being so low-key,
so obedient, and having made contributions,
especially since he was originally slated to be the successor,
even at the 20th Party Congress,
which was the most dangerous time for him,
he should have at least been able to keep his seat
on the Politburo, right? We have all seen this footage.
At the closing ceremony of the 20th
Party Congress, Hu Jintao, who was sitting next to Xi Jinping,
tried to open the red folder in
front of him. Li Zhanshu, who was sitting on his other side,
reached out, held the folder down,
and took it away. In the end, staff members came up and,
in front of cameras from all over the
world, escorted Hu Jintao out of the venue from his seat.
What did Hu Jintao want to see? At the
time, no one knew, but a month later,
the Japanese weekly magazine Shukan Fuji published a report by
a senior journalist. This journalist interviewed
a U.S. official familiar with Chinese politics,
who revealed a detail.
On the morning of the meeting, Hu Jintao had just learned that the
new Politburo had been reduced from 25 members to 24,
and the one removed was Hu Chunhua.
The reason Hu Jintao wanted to open the document
at that moment was to confirm with his own eyes
whether his chosen successor was still on the list.
A political expert in Taiwan even performed
a lip-reading analysis.
What Li Zhanshu said to Hu Jintao at that moment was most likely,
don't look, it's all been decided.
Shen Mingxi, from Taiwan's Institute for National Defense and
Security Research, believes Hu Chunhua was likely on the original list,
cut at the last minute.
This appeared to be a last-minute decision by Xi Jinping.
The next day, the new standing committee
was entirely Xi's allies. Hu was not among the 24 Politburo members.
At 59, instead of advancing,
he was dropped, later becoming a vice-chairman of the CPPC.
As we all know, the CPPC is where
the CCP places high-ranking officials who have retired
or been sidelined. It has titles but no
real power. It's just a figurehead position.
For Hu Chunhua, such an arrangement is nothing
short of a political humiliation.
Since then, he has completely been reduced to a deposed crown
prince. However, just over a year after Hu Chunhua
was cast into the cold, a very strange phenomenon
emerged. Over the next year and a half,
the political image of this deposed crown prince
actually began to rise steadily,
with him appearing more and more frequently and at
increasingly higher-level events.
And this year and a half happens to be the same period during
which various rumors of trouble for Xi Jinping have been circulating.
The starting point was
the third plenary session in July 2024.
Shortly after the meeting, news immediately spread
overseas that Xi Jinping had suffered a stroke during the session
and collapsed to the ground.
Since then, Hu Chunhua has suddenly come back to life.
Two months later, in mid-September,
he led an inspection team from the CPPCC
to Inner Mongolia. You have to realize,
Inner Mongolia is where he once served as the top leader,
and he has plenty of old subordinates
there. The outside world immediately associated this with four words,
reconnecting with old
subordinates. What's interesting is that while he
was conducting high-profile inspections,
he didn't forget to pledge his loyalty to Xi Jinping.
He published a signed article praising
Xi Jinping's speech as visionary and profound,
stating that he would implement it to the letter.
If he might have felt that the situation was still unclear back then,
the fog completely
lifted after that. In November, Miao Hua,
the director of the Political Work Department of
the Central Military Commission under Xi Jinping
was suspended for investigation.
In December, an international forum opened in Madrid, Spain.
Vice President Han Zheng was
supposed to read Xi Jinping's congratulatory letter,
but to everyone's surprise, it was Hu
Chunhua who went instead. Friends, pay attention.
A vice chairman of the CPPCC reading Xi Jinping's
congratulatory letter instead of the vice president
is quite unusual. As we entered 2025,
these developments became increasingly frequent.
In March, just after the two sessions concluded,
He Weidong, who had been handpicked
and promoted by Xi Jinping, disappeared.
From late March to early April,
Hu Chunhua led a CPPCC inspection delegation to Anhui.
What kind of place is Anhui?
It is the hometown of the three major leaders of the Tuan Pai faction,
Hu Jintao, Li Keqiang, and Wang Yang.
While he was in Anhui on April 2, Beijing announced a major
swap. Organization department head Li Ganjie
and United Front Work Department head Shi Taifeng
traded roles. The organization department is incredibly powerful,
controlling all party
personnel decisions. In contrast,
the United Front Work Department, which handles non-party
and regional affairs, holds significantly less real power.
Li Ganjie, a trusted Xi Jinping aide
mentored by Chen Xi, was replaced by Shi Taifeng,
who has a more complex background. Although he
served as a deputy to Xi Jinping,
he was also a vice president of the Central Party School
during the years Hu Jintao was its president.
He is also a junior alumnus of Li Keqiang
from the Peking University Law Department,
and he has deep ties to the Communist Youth
League faction. In other words,
the key to controlling personnel appointments for the
entire party has been handed over
from a Xi Jinping loyalist to someone with deep ties
to the Communist Youth League faction.
Then, a week later, just after Hu Chunhua left Anhui, the
party secretary of the provincial capital, Hefei, was replaced.
The person who took over is named
Fei Gaoyun. Some say this is a team
that was arranged right on the heels of Hu Chunhua's
inspection. Friends, take note of this name, Fei Gaoyun.
Hu Chunhua will continue to influence
his fate later on.
From April 8th to the 17th, Hu Chunhua visited three African countries,
meeting with Nigeria's Senate President
and Speaker of the House. By May, the rumors
surrounding Hu Chunhua reached a peak.
Some said that Xi Jinping was restricted from entering
Beijing, while others claimed that Hu Chunhua
was already the de facto acting general secretary.
In June, Hu Chunhua unusually presided over
the CPPCC Standing Committee opening session,
a move widely seen as a significant signal.
In August, during Tibet's 60th anniversary,
Xi Jinping visited, with Hu Chunhua as deputy head of the delegation.
He also inspected the
Yarlung Tsangpo hydropower project.
By September, state media repeatedly used the phrase
Chunhua Xi, sparking speculation that Hu was poised to take over.
Meanwhile, Xi Jinping's
close associates were facing successive troubles.
In November, He Weidong was expelled from the
party. During the fourth plenary session,
the rumors that Xi Jinping was going to step down
and that Zhang Yuxia had launched a coup, friends,
just recall they were spreading like wildfire at
the time. Over this year and a half,
while Xi Jinping's close associates were running into
trouble one after another, it was precisely
when Hu Chunhua was stepping into the spotlight,
and his pendulum swung to its highest point during this time.
The pendulum was about to swing back.
This January marked the turning point.
Over the next five months, Hu Chunhua fell rapidly from
his peak. On January 20th,
the CCP held a seminar for top provincial and ministerial officials.
Customarily, Central Military Commission leaders attend these sessions,
but Zhang Yuxia and Liu Zhenli were absent.
Four days later, the Defense Ministry
announced investigations into both
for serious disciplinary violations.
That same day, the military newspaper hit them with a serious charge,
undermining the Central Military Commission
chairman's responsibility system.
Simply put, they challenged Xi Jinping's status as supreme leader.
Before this, tracing back to the third plenary session in 2024,
when Xi Jinping had a stroke,
rumors had been circulating outside that Zhang Yuxia
and party elders like Wen Jiabao
had joined forces to seize power.
Now that Zhang Yuxia has suddenly fallen,
it means Xi Jinping has regained some power
in this internal struggle,
and the pendulum for Hu Chunhua has also started to swing downward
from this point on.
Hu Chunhua's reaction was very quick.
he immediately kept a low profile again,
and in his speeches, he re-adopted that standard
set of rhetoric pledging loyalty to Xi,
but it was already too late. At the end of March,
Hu Chunhua did not make a public appearance for over a week,
which led to widespread speculation
from the outside world about whether something had happened to him.
In early April, Kai Jiahua,
a former Dongguan inspector
and subordinate of his from his Guangdong days, was investigated.
He was a Guangdong official sent to aid Tibet.
Years ago, Kai personally reported
to Hu during a Guangdong aid Tibet inspection.
The next day, Ma Sin-rui fell,
sparking rumors that Hu was under investigation
and that the CCDI had questioned his secretaries.
On April 8th, the CPPCC held
a bi-weekly symposium presided over by Wang Huning.
the vice chairman of the CPPCC attend in rotation,
and, well, Hu Chunhua was absent that time.
Being absent alone isn't strange, but someone kept count.
Out of the 20 symposiums held between
July 2024 and that meeting, Hu Chunhua had been absent five times.
But for the first four,
officials had explained where he was and what he
was busy with. Only that one time,
the authorities said absolutely nothing.
Once this news broke, overseas public opinion
immediately exploded, and rumors started
circulating again about whether Hu Chunhua
was actually in trouble.
As it turned out, the very next day, he actually went to Fengshan,
Beijing, to plant trees,
appearing in official footage holding a shovel. So it was a false
alarm. He hadn't run into any trouble after all.
But the undercurrents behind this didn't end
there. In mid-April, three of Hu Chunhua's former subordinates
were taken down within half a month.
First, three department-level officials
from Inner Mongolia, whom he had promoted,
were officially announced to have fallen on the same day.
It's very rare for three people to go down on the same day.
Next was Fei Gaoyun, the one we asked our friends to remember earlier.
Just after Hu Chunhua left Anhui,
the very person who succeeded him as the party secretary of Hefei
was announced to be under investigation
by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.
You see, when Hu Chunhua was on the rise, he was promoted.
When Hu Chunhua started to fall,
he became one of the first pawns to be eaten.
Du Nguyen, who lives in Europe,
says that most of the high-ranking officials who have fallen
in Inner Mongolia in recent years are related to Hu Chunhua.
He claims that he once served as a
legal advisor to Hu Chunhua in Inner Mongolia,
and later he was sentenced in connection with
a land case and served over 12 years in prison.
He said that those interrogating him were constantly
pressuring him to implicate Hu Chunhua,
demanding that he confess how Hu Chunhua made decisions at
the time. There were also people passing messages to him in prison,
saying that if he dared to talk
out of turn, he would be dead. He said he didn't say a single word.
Cutting the skirt hem targeting
associates has always been an important indicator
for us on the outside to observe changes in the
black box politics of the CCP.
By this spring, the blade had already reached Hu Chunhua's doorstep
and everyone was watching to see if the next one would
be Hu Chunhua himself. But what we got
instead was yet another reversal.
In September, the pendulum swung back and this time it swung
even higher than before. From September 8 to the 20th,
in just two short weeks, Hu Chunhua made six
public appearances. On September 8,
he and Wang Huning went to the Buddhist Academy of China for
an inspection. On the 10th,
Wang Huning met with the Speaker of the National Assembly of Angola in
Beijing, and Hu Chunhua was also present.
This was originally just a routine piece of foreign affairs
news, but when the CCTV footage showed Hu Chunhua,
those in the know were stunned. According to
protocol, such a meeting wouldn't normally involve Hu Chunhua at all.
Wang Huning is a member of the
Politburo Standing Committee
and chairman of the CPPCC National Committee. When he meets with
foreign guests, he typically only needs
to be accompanied by one CPPCC vice chair, specifically
Wang Dongfeng, who ranks last and also serves as the secretary general.
As for Hu Chunhua, he's the
second-ranking vice chair, the number two figure under Wang Huning,
so there was no need for him
to attend such a routine reception at all.
Furthermore, ever since Zhang Xiaoyue's
incident in January of this year,
Hu Chunhua has been very low-key, maintaining a very modest
profile. But this time, not only did he show up,
he was seated to the right of Wang Huning.
According to the convention where the right side
is considered the place of honor,
the host's right-hand side is the most prestigious
position among the accompanying personnel.
So Hu Chunhua shouldn't have come in the first place.
And after keeping a low profile for over
half a year, his sudden appearance at such
an event suggests that this arrangement was
intentional. The implication
is that Hu Chunhua has returned to the forefront.
Next, he visited Shandong for several days,
opening the Marine Cooperation and Development
Forum in Qingdao. Shandong is the hometown of both Peng Liyuan
and Ma Xingrui. On September 18th,
he attended a CPPCC remote consultation,
and on the 20th, he spoke at the CPPCC Party Group
study session as deputy party secretary.
Meanwhile, what about Xi Jinping? From his
visit to India in September to his visit to the White House,
there were reports that the
medical staff accompanying him were monitoring him
the entire time. During his visit to the
White House, the Chinese side
also requested that the U.S. prepare a special room for him
in the White House to rest for five hours,
during which no one except Peng Liyuan was
allowed to enter. Rumors about his health
are spreading again. Meanwhile on, we saw
major personnel changes in September,
both the party secretary and governor were replaced.
Notably, the outgoing secretary,
a former subordinate of Xi Jinping, had not yet reached
retirement age. The outgoing governor was also
a member of Xi Jinping's Shandong faction.
The incoming acting governor
is a former subordinate of Li Keqiang, and the party
secretary is a former subordinate
of Hu Chunhua from when he governed Guangdong.
You have to realize that after the 20th National Congress,
Xi Jinping had sent the Shandong faction
into Anhui to take over the stronghold of the Youth League faction,
but now people from the
Youth League faction have been swapped back in.
By the end of September, everyone felt, hey,
the pendulum is swinging back up again.
Talk of Hu Chunhua making a comeback started to pop up
again. He attended the National Day reception on September 28th,
as usual, and this has been his
last public appearance to date.
Since then, he's disappeared from the cameras for nearly a month.
Then there was the commemorative meeting
for the Long March on October 22nd.
Among the four people absent from the podium that day,
Pagbaha Juliknamgai is already 68 years old this year
and hasn't been attending meetings.
There were two others, one in Macau and one in Hong Kong,
neither of whom were in Beijing.
So the only one whose absence was truly unusual was Hu Chunhua.
Was he actually detained or was he being protected?
Let's take a look at the arguments from both sides.
First, regarding the theory that he was detained,
reports say his entire family has lost contact,
and the other shoe has dropped.
The next day, the Politburo meeting
was held eight days earlier than usual, which is rare.
An insider close to the top leadership said
that this early meeting was specifically to
discuss the Hu Chunhua issue.
Another source familiar with the matter said that he wanted
to move up, but since he couldn't make it,
it was very easy for him to be pulled down.
Following this logic, that high-profile round in September
might have been exactly what brought danger upon Hu Chunhua.
As for the theory that he is being protected,
the same insider also said that Hu Chunhua was
only absent due to health reasons,
and the claim about his family losing contact is non-existent
because he recently saw Hu Chunhua's son at a horse racing event.
Some also say that taking
action against a remnant of the Youth League faction
who had long since submitted is meaningless
for Xi Jinping. However, Hu Chunhua will
not have reached the age for stepping into a second-tier
role by next year, so if he continues to serve
as a central committee member at the 21st National
Congress, he cannot remain in the CPPCC.
If he were then moved to the National People's Congress,
his ranking within the party would actually move up,
which would give Xi Jinping a real headache.
In short, this deposed crown prince remains
a major problem for Xi Jinping next year.
The most baffling part is two things happening simultaneously
this month. As we just mentioned,
his and Li Keqiang's former subordinates
were promoted in Anhui, yet at the same time,
he himself has disappeared from the public eye.
If he is on shaky ground, why would his people
be promoted? And who is it that is promoting his people?
If they intend to protect him,
why would they let him be absent from such an important occasion?
Friends, what do you think?
Please leave a comment and let me know
your thoughts on this. Do you think Hu Chunhua's
disappearance is the result of him being protected
or the result of him being controlled? If you
think it's the former, type protected for me.
If it's the latter, type controlled. Which one is it,
really. Trying to decipher the CCP's black box politics
from the outside, it's hard for us to
draw a definitive conclusion.
But one thing is absolutely certain, something major must be
happening within the top echelons of the CCP.
From being the little Hu Jintao back in the day,
to the sidelined deposed crown prince,
and then the ups and downs over the past two years,
the rise and fall of Hu Chunhua's political image
is a mirror of the power struggles within the
CCP's top leadership.
In this brutal meat grinder, today's protagonist could become
tomorrow's prisoner. There are no real safe zones there.
What exists is constant paranoia and every
step fraught with danger. The fifth plenary session
is just around the corner, and we will soon see
what fate holds for Hu Chunhua. All right, that's all for today.
Friends, what are your insights on
Hu Chunhua's fate? Please be sure to share them
with me in the comment section and discuss them
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