The first sign of its toughening stance was the Party conferring on Xi Jinping China’s three top positions of General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee (CC), Chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC) and President of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), simultaneously for the first time in thirty years! The other was the installation in a now reduced 7-member Politburo Standing Committee (PBSC) of stolid, doctrinaire apparatchiks. The backdrop to this was the unprecedented domestic political scrabbling for top positions by senior CCP cadres witnessed through 2011-2012 when Politburo (PB) member Bo Xilai attempted to usurp the top position. The failed bid by Wang Lijun, Bo Xilai’s chief of public security in Chongqing Municipality a position equivalent to a central Vice Minister, to defect to the US also severely jolted the Party’s top echelons as it revealed that the CCP ‘nomenklatura’ had been penetrated by the West. [Source]
