New Delhi: In his first trip to India in seven years, Chinese President Xi Jinping is accompanied by his right-hand man Cai Qi, who is widely described as the de facto second-most powerful leader in China.
Though China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi is a familiar face in the ongoing BRICS summit, the tall, silver-haired Cai is garnering more attention from among the 67-member Chinese delegation, primarily for his access to Xi.
Even Wang Dongxing, Mao’s ‘great secretary,’ is said to have not wielded the breadth of power Cai now possesses. The Chinese leader ranks fifth among the seven member Politburo Standing Committee and is the first in more than four decades to concurrently head the party’s powerful General Office.
The director of the General Office is known as the “great secretary,” or dami; the job is fundamentally to serve the top leader. The dami organises logistics, drafts documents, convenes meetings, arranges security and manages the general secretary’s schedule.
The position has historically carried considerable informal authority because the director controls much of the information and access surrounding the top leader.
Last year, Cai held a meeting with Narendra Modi during the Prime Minister’s visit to Tianjin for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit.
When Donald Trump visited China in May, Cai was the first Chinese official to shake the American President’s hand—an important optic—and as The Economist noted, is a person of “substantial interest to American officials and to many other foreign governments”.
That is because the amount of duties delegated to Cai is highly unusual in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) history. Cai is responsible for Xi’s personal security as head of the Central Guard Bureau, a plain-clothes force that protects and watches current and retired leaders. A politically sensitive position, it has become even more important after Xi’s unprecedented purge of generals since 2022.
As Xi’s chief of staff, he is in control of his schedule, the people and the information that reaches him. He usually accompanies the President on trips within China or abroad and even supervise his medical care as well.
Xi’s ‘great secretary’
Cai also heads the Central Secretariat, the Communist Party’s administrative arm responsible for implementing decisions made by the leadership and overseeing the party’s day-to-day operations. The position gives him authority across a wide range of policy areas.
In addition, he oversees a party commission responsible for cyber affairs and serves on the Central National Security Commission, a highly secretive body thought to bring together senior figures from the police, intelligence services and military.
Cai first drew attention because of the speed of his political rise. In 2017, he was elevated directly to the Politburo, the Communist Party’s second-highest decision-making body. The promotion came only months after he was appointed the Communist Party chief of Beijing, the capital’s most senior official.
That elevation itself followed only a few months in office as the Beijing mayor. Under normal circumstances, such a transition would have taken at least five years.
In October 2022, he joined the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee, the highest rank of power. Before Cai Qi, only Wang Dongxing simultaneously served as director of the General Office and a member of the Politburo Standing Committee during the Cultural Revolution.
In June, the 70-year-old Cai was appointed head of the Communist Party’s Central Party School, the elite academy responsible for training officials and shaping party ideology.
Cai and Xi share a similar background. In 1996, as the deputy secretary of the Fujian Provincial Communist Party Committee, Cai was explicitly assigned to “serve Comrade Jinping”.
Early in his career, Cai was an unusually popular official on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. He used the pseudonym ‘Uncle Cai’ and openly interacted with citizens, sometimes helping resolve their complaints.
That changed after he was appointed to a key central party position in 2014. He then deleted his Weibo account. The approachable ‘Uncle Cai’persona disappeared, replaced by a tougher approach to governance.
A key figure before the 2027 Party Congress
Cai may be the most influential director of the General Office in the CCP history. Yet according to formal protocol, it is Premier Li Qiang who is the country’s “number two.” That has produced differing assessments of whether Xi is ultimately closer to Li or to Cai.
Li’s collaboration with Xi began in 2004. Xi was in charge of Zhejiang Province and the 43-year-old Li was promoted to secretary-general of the Zhejiang Provincial Party Committee.
On the other hand, Cai will turn 71 in 2027, making it unlikely, under traditional Communist Party norms, that he will remain in his current positions.
The fact that he is a loyal cadre who has already passed the customary retirement age may be precisely why Xi has felt able to entrust him with so much authority, according to Wen Hsuan Tsai of Think China, a Singapore-based China focused magazine.
If that logic holds, Cai could lose his seats on the Politburo Standing Committee and other important bodies at the 21st National Congress in late 2027. He could instead be given a largely symbolic position, such as vice president. Whether his political career comes to an end in 2027 remains to be seen but, for now, he keeps things ticking in Xi’s circles.
(Edited by Tony Rai)