Do we like them?

Do we like Cai Qi?

Our score: 2 out of 10. He ran Beijing's 2017 mass clearances and now oversees the Party's ideology machine, and the sources we read show no real good to weigh against that.

Cai Qi is Xi Jinping's right-hand man and about as powerful as an official in China gets without being Xi. He worked with Xi in Fujian and Zhejiang decades ago, joined the Politburo in 2017 and the Standing Committee in 2022. Today he is ranked fifth and runs the Party's General Office, which makes him a sort of chief of staff.

His defining moment as Beijing party secretary came after a fire in Daxing killed 19 people in 2017. He launched a 40-day push to tear down buildings deemed unsafe. Thousands of migrant workers were forced out, and some buildings were made unliveable by smashing windows and walls. Even state media criticised how fast it went, and observers criticised the state-media label “low-end population” for the migrants.

In 2022 his remarks on zero-Covid in Beijing became a censorship story. Beijing Daily reported him saying the city would keep the policy for the next five years. It then removed the line as an editing error, and Weibo deleted the related hashtag. CNN reviewed the full speech and said he did discuss at length the possibility of keeping the policy in place.

On the harm check, we found no statement of his own about LGBTQ+ people, women or the climate, and we won't guess at his views. The concern is what he does. He is described as the Party's propaganda and ideology chief and a key national security decision-maker, and he shapes the climate officials work in. Running that machinery counts here as backing harm to free speech and to people with no say.

The recent news is more power piling up. Trivium China's Andrew Polk called the Central Party School job a “sheer concentration of critical Party functions”. Cai now controls operations, ideology and cadre management ahead of the 2027 Party Congress. He is cast as Xi's point-man for managing the transition and enforcing discipline.

On the good stuff, honestly, the sources we read don't have much. We found no charity work, no causes championed and no instance of him standing up for others at a cost to himself. That could reflect how closed the system is as much as who he is. But we can only score what's on the record.