China's new leadership: and the China watchers who will try to make sense of it all.

• Author: Nelson, Chris

The esteemed founder of The International Economy, David Smick, back on October 16, published an op-ed in the Washington Post calling attention to cracks appearing in "globalization" ("What will replace the globalization model?") which began, provocatively, with this:

"Here's a prediction: The political party that controls the White House after January could, four years later, be out of power for a generation. The economic challenges are that daunting."

Mordant, to be sure, and of course designed to get us all thinking. But what really struck us is that Smick could just as easily been talking about China.

"Excuse me!?" we can hear some readers asking. Do we expect them to believe that not only does China now have "politics" in a legitimate, useful sense, but that the domestic social and economic problems of the PRC are so vast, and often so conflicting and contradictory, that if mismanaged, it's genuinely conceivable the Communist Party could lose its political legitimacy over the next generation?

Yes, we do mean exactly that. Reinforcing the point: on the November 8 official opening of the Eighteenth Party Congress, departing President Hu Jintao made a specific reference to dealing with corruption, or risking the eventual loss of not just the Communist Party, but the cohesion of the nation.

Pending discussion further on, let's list the apparent top handful of Chinese leaders with the note that having to use "apparent" so close to the official November 8 start of the Eighteenth National People's Congress is stunning proof of an emerging politics, Chinese style.

For well over a year, the coming presidency of Xi Jinping, 59, succeeding Hu Jintao, has been as certain as human events can be, although Xi's September health scare and two week "disappearance" deeply shook international confidence, and fed a social media speculation frenzy within the PRC, apparently to the bemusement of China's still transparency-shy leaders.

It now seems clear that after months of uncertainty, punctuated by the Bo Xilai scandal which brought down a previously "can't miss" Politburo member, consensus on the top jobs has apparently been hammered out by President-to-be Xi, Hu, and the aged but still involved former President Jiang Zemin, 86, who led China's World Trade Organization accession as a domestic reform stimulus.

Xi's U.S. visit at the start of this year was seen as a basically encouraging official "audition," as he made a point of saying a lot of welcome things about the need for reform, and demonstrated his determination to continue successful management of the bilateral relationship. And as with nearly the entire top echelon of Chinese leaders, Xi has a child currently enrolled in an American university.

Hu is seen as holding back support for genuine reformers---despite the ardent rhetorical support, if often from safely overseas speeches--by Premier Wen Jiabao.

Overall, Hu's presidency has been a deep disappointment to U.S. and other key trading partners for his administration's serious backsliding on social and economic reforms, and an increasingly dysfunctional continued emphasis on massive "state-owned enterprises" that suck up development capital needed to reset the domestic economy in order to meet rising domestic dissatisfaction with economic inequality and still-rampant corruption at all levels of government.

This matters, as who gets what jobs is increasingly important for China's consensus-driven leadership. As in the United States, a successful leader has to have both the will and the way to get things done.

So who will it be? There seems no question that the next two top names will be Wang Qishan and Li Keqiang, but here's where it gets "interesting." For more than a year, it was thought that Wang, 64, a trained economist and seen by most as an advocate of serious economic reform, would be the next premier and senior economic official--to the delight of the international business and finance community.

Brookings' Cheng Li, Washington's "go-to" watcher of choice for the ins and outs of China's leadership, notes that Wang "always wants to do something, to take the initiative," and as Li of Brookings and many colleagues agree, Li Keqiang lacks both Wang's senior-level experience, and network of supporters needed to exert leverage on difficult decisions.

But to show what makes China-watching a sport often conducted at one's peril, Heritage Foundation's Derek Scissors says, "There isn't the slightest bit of evidence that Wang Qishan is an economic reformer. We have a bunch of people semi-charmed by Wang, others wanting it to be true, and his career saying nothing of the sort. There's actually more evidence that Zhang is a reformer, though some see him mainly as a profit-centered opportunist."

In any event, more recently it's been predicted that Li, 57, a "professorial" economist, will be premier instead, although both Wang and Li will be on the critically powerful Standing Committee of the Politburo. But here's where that gets interesting: many experts predict the Standing Committee may be cut from its present nine members back down to seven.

What does this mean? A former U.S. State Department official in Beijing, now a private consultant in Hong Kong, notes, "I'd be cautious about saying that cutting the standing committee to seven from nine has implications for the policy direction. Historically, the size has varied. And if the purpose is to downgrade those responsible for security and propaganda, could that be a bad thing?"

In preparation for writing this article, we circulated for comment a Chinese media...