With Alice EKMAN, associate researcher, Centre for Asian studies, Ifri

On 15 November 2012, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) unveiled the composition of the permanent Comittee of its Political Bureau.The attention focused on the new Secretray General of the CCP, Xi Jinping, who will officially succeed Hu Jintao at the head of the country in March 2013 during the annual meeting of the popular national Assembly. Its nomination revived assumptions about the advent of a new impluse of economic and political reforms in the country, as it occurred 10 years earlier with the nomination of Hu Jintao, sometimes unreasonably. Is it more legitimate de formulate such hypotheses today?

A luncheon debate organised with the support of