Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.

The highlights this week: The Chinese Communist Party announces new rules for local officials, the Trump-Xi summit is postponed until May, and Beijing introduces a de facto drone ban.

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.

The highlights this week: The Chinese Communist Party announces new rules for local officials, the Trump-Xi summit is postponed until May, and Beijing introduces a de facto drone ban.

Xi’s Bureaucratic Catch-22

Last Friday, the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) issued two mandates for officials. They must first “resolutely uphold the authority and centralized, unified leadership of the Central Committee [of the CCP] with Comrade Xi Jinping at the core” and second “take local conditions into account and enhance their initiative and creativity in work.”

These statements neatly capture a central contradiction for Xi, China’s president: He wants total loyalty and obedience yet also sincerity and innovation. Even as Chinese officials are urged to avoid rigid thinking, they are expected to devote themselves to studying Xi Jinping thought. As they are told to abandon outdated rules, they must follow every injunction from the top.

This tension has been a recurring theme in Xi’s campaign against “formalism” and “bureaucratism” in Chinese officialdom, which he casts as twin threats to CCP legitimacy.

In a 2019 article, Xi called these threats “deadly,” blaming them for instances of “aloofness, abuse of power, detachment from reality and the masses, a penchant for empty rhetoric and grandstanding, rigid thinking, adherence to outdated rules, bloated organizations, overstaffing, procrastination, inefficiency,” and more.

Like many CCP leaders before him, Xi seems........

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