Chinese Leader Gets More Sway on the Economy and Security

Lan Hongguang/Xinhua, via Associated Press

President Xi Jinping, center, and other Chinese Communist Party leaders voted on policy measures as the Central Committee met Tuesday.

HONG KONG — President Xi Jinping of China emerged from a Communist Party leadership conference on Tuesday with a mandate to give the market a "decisive role" in the world's second-largest economy and to consolidate new decision-making authority in his own hands.

After a closed-door meeting of party leaders, officials announced that Mr. Xi would establish a new national security committee — which experts said took inspiration from the National Security Council that serves American presidents — as well as a leadership group that would push through a raft of economic overhauls. The two new agencies suggest that Mr. Xi aims to circumvent the ruling party's cumbersome bureaucracies and overcome resistance that deeper economic changes are likely to bring.

Mr. Xi has signaled that he intends to overhaul a wide range of long-entrenched policies, including restrictions on land ownership in rural areas and state control of interest rates charged by banks. He and Prime Minister Li Keqiang have also vowed to wean China's economy from its dependence on highly polluting industries and extravagant government spending. A full list of overhauls discussed at the party meeting is expected to be made public in the coming days, though many are expected to be phased in only gradually.

A year since assuming party leadership, Mr. Xi is also showing that he intends to govern in a more assertive, authoritarian style than his predecessor, Hu Jintao, who presided over a decade of rapid growth but failed to push through changes that many economists argue are needed to modernize the economy.

"He's demonstrating that he's really in charge," said Christopher K. Johnson, an expert on China at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, in a telephone interview from Beijing. "It's the clearest statement we've seen so far of his power inside the system."

The new party leadership group on economic policy will oversee the introduction of market-oriented changes, and officials said there would be "decisive outcomes" in major policy areas by 2020. Yet they also emphasized that party control must remain paramount even as China embraces more market forces in the economic sphere.

"Most important is maintaining the party's leadership," said a communiqué. "We must be bold and our steps steady."

Mr. Xi, 60, has defied expectations that a new Chinese leader must tiptoe politically in his first years. Instead, he has moved quickly to reshape many policies and consolidate his control of the party's levers of power: the military forces, ideology and propaganda, the domestic security apparatus and anticorruption agency — and now economic policy making.

Many analysts say Mr. Xi's background, as the son of a Communist revolutionary who served under Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, has made him more confident than recent party leaders in wielding power.

By establishing the leadership group, Mr. Xi has wagered his credibility on his ability to push through changes that are likely to face resistance from government ministries, local governments and big state firms, said Chen Ziming, a commentator in Beijing who closely follows party affairs. Mr. Xi is almost certain to lead the group, which economists have long called for to help accelerate economic restructuring, Mr. Chen said.

"This is placing responsibility on his own shoulders," he said. "It's concentrating power in one person, so the responsibility will also be his."

At the meeting, Mr. Xi and the other leaders vowed a more determined and concerted effort to act on promises of a bigger role for markets after a decade in which state power has swollen. The 204 central and provincial officials who attended as voting members of the Central Committee endorsed broad proposals for overhauling taxation, better integrating urban and rural society, and improving government services.

China's main evening news broadcast showed delegates to the conference seated in long rows of desks, listening attentively and taking notes as Mr. Xi and other officials spoke from a dais.

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