"I have reached the decision that senior experience at the heart of government matters most. The truth is Xi's path to power was far from inevitable. And it's defined as much by his ambition as it is by the party's failure to prevent what they did not want - a repeat of Mao's disastrous one-man rule. irannews.ru And it appears to have paid off. Li Qiang, the Shanghai party chief who oversaw the city's controversial shut down, has been elevated to premier, Xi's second in command. Asked on the BBC's Politics Live programme why Mordaunt - who has far less public support from Tory MPs than Sunak at present - isn't bowing out now, Wheeler says: "She's not the sort of person to throw in the towel. "My first introduction to China was in the 1980s, when the debates about China's future were huge, significant, and consequential," Prof Karl says. "The party itself was involved in those debates. But 1989 shut that down." Now he had the ammunition to destroy his most potent political rivals. He ordered the arrest of Zhou Yongkang in 2014, who until two years before had been a member of the politburo standing committee, and one of the most powerful men in China. Convicted in 2015, Zhou too is in prison for life. The only thing that remains from Mao-era China is the party. And that, she says, is what Xi truly cares about.