Chine : la succession et le successeur

Xi Jinping, China's current Vice President and vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC) of the Party, has been formally announced as the country's next leader. He will take over from Hu Jintao in 2012 as General Secretary of the Communist Party. Xi Jinping belongs to the "gang of princelings", an informal grouping of several dozen influential men who sit on the Central Committee, all offspring of veteran party leaders. As members of a social category that enjoys enormous privilege and wealth, the princelings have been key protagonists in the transformation of the regime as it shifted from military-controlled communism in the 1950s to a collective dictatorship, whose two main aims are profit and enhancing the country's power. Most of them are highly educated. Xi Jinping, whose career was spent largely in the fast-growing export powerhouse provinces on the southeast coast, has a reputation for courage and tenacity. For the West, he is expected to be a much tougher person to deal with than his predecessor